Don't look.

Táltos Federal. Federal: wide avenues, Mexican and Vietnamese, Chinese and Salvadoran laundromats and noodle-shops and chop-shops and junk-yards and yards filled with detritus and dogs chained out front and the occasional colorful lick of grafitti and the even more colorful lick of a house that is now a liquor store but still retains some peeling easter-purple paint-color and it's an ugly street and there's a chicken loose and the some of the strip malls (broad, expansive - generous) are modern but they look tired and weary and like they're about ready for evening to finally arrive, to officially arrive, something beyond the evening of heavy cloudcover, of skies troubled by tonight's threat (promise [assurance]) of storm and perhaps more flood, Denver ringed 'round with silver linings and the air finally cool, cooling, snow-cool and tacky, and it's here in this weather and here on this stretch of Federal that Táltos who speaks to spirits and has spring contained beneath the skin of his hands, warmth kindled and kindling, hunches in a dark peacoat that's a little tight around his shoulders. He hunches like a vulture, a long-limbed prey-bird, goat-man, mustache-waxed and curling up like a sly innuendo or a mischievous comment, skin translucent-pale eyes pink-rimmed and nose sharp, and where does he hunch? He hunches at a table outside a shop that sells tacos and street corn and he is working on something, braiding leather and beads and nails together, and there's a book with its paperback cover flopping whenever a wind picks up like a mouth that really wants to talk, and he looks sleepy. Even sleepy, there's a certain vitality, a certain lust-(for-life), delineating the way he interacts with the world around him. The shape Táltos makes in the world is a shape that is queer and witching, you know. Energy. Noel [[This scene open? In other words, may I? No is cool too.]] Grace [Awareness + Perception Go!] Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) Patience Mason [Per+Aware] Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 ) Serafíne Per + Awareness Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 ) Grace Federal isn't the 'good' part of town. But it's the good part of town for rice noodles, and that's really the best kind of good. Grace likes to categorize the place as 'rugged' or 'full of character' to be generous. It's a place where one needs to watch oneself. But lately, that set of locations has included nearly everywhere, so why bother worrying about regular old normal violence? She's got her feel on, the sixth sense that came with the opening of her eyes (the other eyes). It's feeble, but she pays attention to it, yes? Like a deaf person hearing for the first time, whatever noise comes through is like a symphony. She's driving down the street now, stuck at a stoplight when she feels him. There is a symphony in the air tonight, a song she hasn't heard. It's pretty, catchy almost, like the kind of resonance you might want to hang around just to be a part of, if it wasn't for the dissonant undertone. She looks around the street for the source, but there's people, and... a chicken, okay, and it's not like she knows who she's looking for. Eventually she just decides to pull in to the taqueria instead of waiting on the light. It seems likely enough. And tacos are food too. Maybe she'll find the reason behind the beguiling song. When she gets out of her (old, red) car, she's dressed in jeans, sneakers, and t-shirt covered by a grey jacket, with a laptop bag thrown over her shoulder. She looks plain. Like anyone, really. Blends in, with that kind of quality that makes your eyes just slide off. Not a threat, not a standout, this one. Patience Mason Federal was new, in the grand scheme of time and space, what lay on that long stretch of concrete heading north and south was new. With its strip malls and restaurant's with all its tin, and aluminum and dry wall that was barely up to code. Take a few more of these elements away and Federal might well have been a shanty town in the heart of the city, but it had just enough money, just enough power to keep itself afloat, above the state of detrius and floatsam....wether that would be the case years from now, one cannot know. This place is young, and the woman who makes her way down the street, appears to be...well she appears to be a number of things. Outwardly, she appears comparatively young, easily in her late twenties to early thirties with a style that spoke of pure retro vintage, her dirty blonde hair was up in a set of Victory curls, framing her head. Sky Blue eyes take in the street as she moves along at a casual gait, her long limbs supported on a pair of heeled boots making her impressive height of 6'1 all the greater tonight. She wore a ankle length dress which flared out at the bottom with a hint of ruffling, along with a white dress shirt, firm and pressed beneath a woman's vest of a dark pinstripe which lay beneath high collared jacket of victorian styling of deep brown with leather trimmings. She gave the feeing of having stepped from an old tin type portrait, or perhaps one of those most ancient film reels. Regardless, as she steps along the street, nearing the taqueria, one has to wonder what exactly someone like her, is doing in a place like this. Táltos [My turn to be aware of things?] Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Serafíne Oh, I-know-you is the hum beneath Serafíne's skin. See: I know you I know you I know you it sings beneath her tongue and in her eyes, in her blood which is warmer than you can know. She is here and looks half like she belongs here, some steetwalker. Look at the torn fishnets and denim cut-offs, the leather bustier (studded tonight except with little pink silk roses) that shows off her lean frame, the whipcord sweep of her torso, the supple and suggestive curve of her hips, in a narrow slice framed by the lapels of a leather jacket, which is a size or two too large for her and laced with leather straps and silver belts and also pierced through by a handful of round pins, one of which says ROLLER KING IS COMING and one of which has a picture not of fucking Che or even Bob Marley but of Emma Goldman and you'll have to get closer to read it because the print beneath the print of Goldman's face is TINY. But see: I know you interrupts whatever it is that brings her out here and what brings her out here is perhaps wistfulness or nostalgia or some physical instinct where her body has not quite caught up to her mind or maybe she just thinks Pan will appear again, out of the blue. Just show up and be there the way he's supposed to but: :one minutes she's walking and the next her direction is modified and she has her hands in her pockets and her head forward and there's a faint chill in the air and Sera does not yet understand just how wintry winter will soon be but for now she's still managing in fishnets and heeled boots and leather jackets and push-up bras and little else. "Táltos the táltos," from behind though he felt her coming not like Sera feels everything and everyone but maybe his mustache twitched with awareness before Sera waltzed into the scene and right up behind the Dreamspeaker. Bending to kiss his cheek and wrap the cold and creaky leather arms of her coat around his neck like they are old friends and do-this-all-the-time. She is pleased to see him, not sleepy because she hasn't been up long, warmer than she should be because she's been - drinking, and something else too, something that makes her pupils wide and hungry but he cannot see that yet. Not until she lets him go and saunters around the the table and flings herself into one of the spare metal chairs and starts investigating his paperback while giving him a lifting, lilting look, "What are you making?" A blink, a pause, and a lifting look past his shoulder. "Oh, have you met Grace?" Táltos This plain young woman gets out of an old red car in the spare and worn-out and damp-drenched parking lot beside the taco shop. Funny, how the city smells when rain's an offering, all ozone and the shifting appearance of sizzle-cheese frying restaurant-smells tossed down the street like there's nothing else out there or the sudden mouldering look-there-is-rot of newspapers and trash beginning to go to mulch and then just spaces of rain-smell. Speaking of shifting, there's something faint and shifting attached to that plain young woman with the old red car or maybe the old red car or maybe a feather tossed by the chicken as it picks at some spare grass-blades poking up through concrete. Táltos can feel the shift -- and his busy fingers still. He leans [further] forward to put his elbow on the table and hold his book in place, and it's what Kat would call a confluence, a coming-together-of-threads, a net-witchery which sometimes happens and is dangerous dangerous dangerous as those who have the Will to work (or have been called to Work, or just given gifts by birth by The Ones Who Created The Everything, that little sparkling thing of divinity within) find themselves in the same location. Táltos' lifts heavy vaguely aristicratic eyelids and looks with bright interest from old red car girl to the Victorian daguerrotype no Edwardian daguerrotype no faded 1910s image walking and - And Sera. Sera, glomping from behind. He grins, of course, even though her weight rattles a word in his chest and the back of his throat, an unh, or an oy, or an ah. This entirely natural grin that just transfigures his face and candles his eyes and his eyebrows go up and it's almost owlish it's almost manic but without that nervous edge without any adrenaline to make it too too sharp, just definitely twisted. "Hey there, love." His throat is clotted from disuse; that won't last. He clears it, and says, "Only at the bottom of a vodka glass or during the occasional dream- were you going to introduce me?" He seems to be under the misapprehension that 'Grace' isn't a name in this conversation; he takes his elbow off his paperback in order to let Sera get a better look at it, holds up the bracelet and says, throat getting thick again, "Making a gift. It's to wear around the wrist. But shh, can't say the b-word til it's done." Táltos [Crafts! How's it looking?] Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 ) Táltos [Acceptable.] Patience Mason The awakened bombard the world with their willpower, be it the will of the self, or the very nature of their awakened being blasting out waves of specialized energies, attuned specifically to each individual like a finger print. Tonight is certainly no different as a group of Magi converge upon the small taqueria and fill it with a complex mixture of positively and negatively aligned resonances. Patience is not blind to these things either, and whatever plan she had, whatever destination she was heading for is, for the moment forgotten. The heels of her boots offer a different beat as she stepped from the concrete sidewalk to the asphalt of the taqueria parking lot, and made her way to the outdoor seating, taking in the sight of those who were slowly converging upon this place. An innate curiosity is writ across her features, delight at finding such a meeting and she steps up to the table to those she has met, and the one who she has not. "A noted and indexed temporal stream derivative focal point!." She says, pleased as punch in her strange way to see these individuals. "An appropriately sociologically and culturally based verbal activation sequence to your direct and individualized personages." She says almost casually. Grace And then there's Sera, that one who is so very hard to miss, mixing her own song into the mix, and Grace just has to look for a woman wearing as little clothing as possible to find them both. She doesn't judge exactly, just she knows Sera, knows that uniform of hers, and it is cold and wet out tonight, Sera, what the heck. If Sera is friendly with this guy, he can't be too bad, right? It's strange how they seem to congregate. She'll go days without seeing anyone, despite Auraria crawling with willworkers. And now, here in the bad part of town, it's a crowd. She walks up to the two, her smile a bit awkward, suffused as she is with the excitement and fear of meeting someone new. Just, people like it when you smile at them, even if it's got to be forced at first. She's waving a little greeting, and halfway through a small "Hi" when Patience sneaks up behind, and greets everyone so enthusiastically strange. Grace does this sort of sliding look behind her, and there is a woman out of time. Well. "Hello, I don't think I've met you," she says, and as she says the 'you' she switches her attention from Patience to Taltos. Because, she hasn't met either. None of them really 'fit' together, do they? The four make an odd group out here. But it's no matter. Serafíne "Why - " Sera manages to sprawl in the rusting iron chair in the cool evening air with the promise of rain and the promise of snow and the promise of the mountains like sharp and soon to be snow-capped teeth in the west from every intersection. Dominant things, jagged and crowing but Sera - fuck them - she sits with her back to them and allows herself not-to-think and mostly to do other stuff. Manages to both sprawl and lean forward and then tilt her head aslant just so because the world is sweet and wobbly beneath her, shifting in strange and relevant ways from every direction. Sera is about to ask if the bracelet will hear its name and decide that it wants to be something else like a fish or a bicycle or a fish on a bicycle or a mermaid or a pair of jelly shoes or a nun or an incandescent star but: Grace. And the woman-who-talks-like-a-robot still talking-like-a-robot. Sera beams at Grace. The light slides around the apprentice's head like colorful snakes. Oh, hey. Beams at Grace and kicks out a chair and introduces them "Grace, this is Táltos the táltos, Táltos, this is Grace. She's new. It was a Wednesday last month. "And, both of you, this is the lady-who-talks-like-a-robot." With a small flourish and a gesture at Patience, before Sera - weaving, she is not remotely sober tonight, Sera - leans in across the table and confides, aloud, to Táltos or Grace or both. "I have no fucking idea what she just said." Táltos [Hmm. For fun. Wits! to see if Táltos can follow the words Patience says without preparation.] Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 7) ( success x 1 ) Táltos The man -- he could be young, but he could be old; indeterminate, dark circles around his eyes, which're inquiring and seem less focused than they are simply accepting, glad for society, listening eyes, yes, that's the best way to put it, listening eyes ready to be mischiefing, ready to gleam -- cocks one eyebrow way up, forehead creasing, and the other eyebrow? The other eyebrow he cocks way down like a Dali-clock, tips of his mustache tw-twitching, head up like a cat rearing back, all that for the stream of strange tech-sounding babble which comes out've Patience's mouth like she's a coin-operated thing from a Verne novel and after holding that pose for a moment, pale eyes [there's the gleam, the dredge-up of starlight] going from her to Sera to Grace to Sera then back, he laughs - a surprised-sounding laugh, just a huff-of-breath, and says, "Hello." Answer: that's what she said. And also: Hello. "That's quite the Golden Age Science Fiction verbal tick you've got there, Miss." Polite. "Pleasure to meet you both I hope. Like Sera said, the name's Táltos and that's also my work." The braid of leather-and-nails-and-scraps-of-painted-paper gets placed beneath his paperback, and he offers his right hand to Grace or Patience, whoever takes it first, and then he offers his hand to the other. His hands are warm: spring-warm, conjure-up-rebirth-warm, and the pressure of them is firm. Sera says that Grace is new, and this certainly gets Táltos's attention. He gives her a keen-curious look, says, "Did it happen suddenly?" Pause. "Shit, am I being rude -- don't let talking stop you from getting tacos. They've got good ones. Wonton taco shells." Grace Again, someone finds out when she Awakened, and acts as though this means she has suddenly grown a tail. Grace shrugs, "I guess suddenly, yeah. Or you could say I had been preparing myself. Hard to say which." The táltos mentions wonton taco shells, and suddenly she remembers the true reason she's braving Federal. "Woo, yes... I'll ah, I'll be right back," she says, "Oh, and hi, lady-who-talks-like-a-robot!" She waves at the assembled, and she goes to assemble tacos. It's not traditional, wonton shells, but different is good, no? Serafíne "I'm not eating," Sera remarks, flicks a glance at Grace and a slightly-more-skeptical glance at Patience. A glance that is liquid and moving and mediated by some rather powerful mind-altering substances opened up and rushing through her veins. Tilts her head back then as Grace goes off to purchase a plate of tacos for herself. Beaming, " - but you could get me a margarita on the rocks with two extra shots and/or a bottle of tequila I'll pay you back!" Patience Mason There are greetings for both Taltos and from Grace and Patience offers them both a nod, before a gloved hand is offered to Taltos, and then to Grace. She is friendly, but reserved, or perhaps poised is the better term as she lets her eyes settle upon the moustachioed gentlemen as he speaks of her 'verbal tick' and she offers an apologetic look. "An appropriate socio-linguistic verbalization pattern for this concurrent temporal framework is...negatively present due to a series of frotean focal points along the temporal stream. For this appropriate sociological appropriations are verbally assigned to each of your individualized bio-noospheric selves." She says in a casual tone. Her gaze turning to Serafine with a raised, and amused brow. "Serafine, I acknowledge and inquire as to your concurrent physio-noospheric-metaphysical state, it is nominal?" Táltos [...Wits again!.] Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 9) ( success x 1 ) Táltos "I recommend the sweet corn on anything," Táltos says, as Grace heads off to get a plate. And. There are: wonton shells, and teriyaki meat, and tamarind sauce, and then there is pico de gallo, guacamole, mozzarella chese, mexican sour cream, carne asada meat, peppers and beans and rice and spiced shrimp (don't try those, though), wilted looking leaves. The tacos could be good. Corn, simmering in lime-juice and butter, slathered with mayonaise and chili. It's a cornucopia of taco-fixings. "Frotean focal points? I'm not familiar with the word 'frotean,' or ..." Táltos has to think about what Patience said in order to try and parse it. "... Well, is the verbalization pattern permanently lost because of those points?" Grace Grace returns after a short trying-to-order, hard-to-decide trip to the shop, with a plate of wonton shells filled with carne asada, beans and rice, and peppers and a large glop of pico on top of each one. She got enough to share, if someone were to want to. There's also a corn cob with butter and chili on, at Táltos' urging, and a margarita for Sera (and a Mexican coke for her) It's... a little much to carry, but she's managing with a smile. "So.. ah, Sera, here's yours," she kind of gestures at the cup in her hand like, 'please relieve me of this'. "And you're also welcome to a taco if you want." "And you guys, tacos are... well, they smell decent!" Serafíne Sera hears: her name. So, that gets her attention. Sera's eyes are a rich, dark blue, the irises ringed in a midnight color that melts into something closer to twilight, flecked with hints of green and brown. Hard to see them though because her pupils are black and reflective and gleaming and three-or-so sizes too large. But, her name, the flash of her eyes, lazy up from Táltos the táltos to Patience. Hmmm? Her eyebrows are straight across her narrowset and darkringed eyes but hmmm they lilt upward in neat little arcs of inquiry. Still no damned clue what Patience is saying, but Sera gives her a thumbs-up. A double-thumbs up. Then, Sera's attention drops from Patience back to the table and to: the bracelet beneath the Dreamspeaker's book. No no, not the bracelet. Not the b-word. This little quick parsed smile as she bans herself from saying it and gets lost in a rich and pleasant looping tangle, pulls it back and reviews it, then lets it move onward. The supple thread of her resonance in the air from a minor Work. But also: the not-a-bracelet, tucked beneath the book, Sera's lean fingers, tipped in chipped and peeling nail enamel the color of a gothic fire engine, working to pull the would-be-bracelet free. Then Grace returns! with food-and-drinks and Sera tips her head back, long curling hair sweeping the spine of the chair, not-quite-focusing on Grace but reaching in her general direction from the here's yours and Sera is all "For me?" but she's thinking about the not-a-bracelet too. Greedy thing. "Thanks," lazy grin a quick, razor slash across her features, the full weight and heat bestowed on Grace like a gift. Patience Mason "Negative." Patience says with a shake of her head. "A series of active paradigmically altering anomalies intrinsic in my personages meta-field's could be negated and potentially alleviate the concurrent pattern loss, however hypothesized negatively aligned effects to this bio-physical structure and the noospheric lattice contained within the cranial cavity are, at this temporal juncture of a superior sum then the projected positively aligned effects." She shrugs at this, seemingly at peace with that fact. Grace returns, and Patience, well as the smell of the taco's reach her nostrils they flare gently, the woman nodding her approval to the very decent smell of the mexican 'cuisine'. "Affirmative." She says. Táltos To Patience, he frowns and says, "Too bad. Hopefully there's a way around the curse, a way to convince it to sleep in some other bed. One that isn't your mind. Did you give your name and I missed it?" Now. Táltos is tired. He is etched with it -- immanent with it. He is tired, and he sweeps his shaggy, kempt-but-certainly-not-kept hair back from his forehead and reaches into a coat pocket (his coat-pockets are full of things, sliver of white-wand in one, a cassette tape in another, pencil stub and charcoal, a pocket knife) to pull out a hair-band and put the whole thing back. His cheekbones get cold and so do his ears, but that's just the price one pays for vision sometimes. Táltos: a man wearing many rings, many bracelets, clink-clatter, always noisy. Táltos isn't a quite man by any means, and he may be tired, but he'll be dead before he's antisocial. So. Grace returns! And he'll help her unload, the easy air of someone with long-limbs who knows how to not knock things over with them and is usually esconced in a crowd where things get passed around, juggled, etcetera. Besides. The keen edge of interest in a new mage hasn't been abandoned, oh no, never think that, the Ascension War is 'over,' but the dreamspeaker is always curious which way those who still open their eyes and find out they've been gifted decide to jump, what they believe, truth or lies: he's a traditionalist, is Táltos, polite enough about all those wrong ways of thinking, all those perfectly logical systems made-up by sorcerers to explain what's really just perfectly simple. "I come here often," he offers. "It's a nice corner. Usually come in the morning, the sun makes a happy golden square." Táltos finally notices Sera working at the not-a-bracelet and he watches her sidelong, his eyelids lowering (they're purpled, almost bruised, you can see the veins) in order to accentuate the side-long look. He doesn't stop her, though-- won't unless she starts to unravel it or pick pieces out of the braid. Pieces like: oh, what's that? It was The Chariot. What's that? Sharp piece of blue-glass from a broken bottle, edged in rust. And that? Nail, scrapes- what's that? A coin, scratched over and out. Táltos Addendum, sociably: "So what'd everybody do today?" Grace "I went to class, worked on my thesis, had a spare minute to water my ivy, and I realized I hadn't eaten lunch," she says quickly, the words clipped. Really, she hadn't eaten breakfast either, and there wasn't anything but emergency ramen in the cupboard. Bad Grace. With that, she snarfs a taco. It's a strange mix, the wonton wrapper and taco filling, but it works. And after all, what's an egg roll but the Asian version of a taco anyway? "I've got... homework to do, but it's only two assignments, and there's the weekend left," she says, her mouth full of taco (she really does not care). Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) Grace [ignore that roll, I have nfi what I was doing] Táltos [You were succeeding with awesome success! At taco-snarfing? haha.] Grace [YES, it is my taco-snarfing successes. I should have rerolled the 10s.] Táltos [Do it now. It's not too late.] Patience Mason "My heritalogical and parentally assigned nomenclature and index reference is Patience Mason." She says with a nod to the man, looking slightly taken aback by the fact she had somehow failed to introduce herself. She then moved about to whatever seat remained lowered herself into it, smoothing out her skirt as she did so and watched the others as they began to eat. "This previous solar cycle I utilized my primary temporal allotment to design, manufacture and service several teritary systemic elements of the atmospheric lighter then air movation craft indexed as the Aurora." She said pleasantly, her smile widening as she watched Grace absolutely devastate that unprepared taco. "Secondary and tertiary temporal allotment's were utilized in standardized maintenance of this bio-structure and the physically inert domicile in which I concurrently inhabit." She then looks to grace and enquires. "What particular focal points outline and actualize your hypothetical assertions? And in what primary field of focus does it reside?" Táltos [... Wits again!] Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 ) Serafíne Sera works that bracelet free but does not work anything free-of-the-bracelet. The not-a-bracelet. She seems - absolutely fascinated by the pieces worked together, the braided bits of leather, the humming background resonance that is bright and full against her senses, and the way the night works its way back into her awareness, quiet and here and now. She feels the weight of Táltos' eyes on her, all sidelong, and lifts her sharp little chin in his direction without lifting her attention from the bracelet. Runs her thumb over the edge of the blueglass. The rim of the coin. And so on. Allows her gaze to cut away from these things only when Grace speaks up and recites the ordinary boundaries of an ordinary day into which the extraordinary must now always, perforce, intrude. Her lazy mouth, all smoldering curve, twists ever-so-briefly wider. Flicks up to Patience as she has clearly just said two words that Sera understood. Namely: her name. Is it Sera's turn to tell them all what she did today? Oh yes. Yes it is. "Shrooms." Is what she says, picking up her margarita, because Sera believes in polypharmacy. Her smile is cat-and-canary. They have no idea the way the night frames them, all the damned things she can fucking see. How the edges of the moment become unhinged and how she turns them, open and shut and back again. Back to Táltos The edge of his features. The bruising around his eyes, all things come into sudden and irreparable focus. And now her eyes do not and cannot leave him. She's just staring, Sera. Or rather: not staring, seeing a bit beyond-sight. Serafíne (Time 2: scrying Taltos' future. Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 10) ( success x 1 ) Táltos [Eh? Is somebody being magick right now?] Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 4 ) Serafíne (Extending: Time 2 / Prime 1 - that curse! Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) +1 for extending) Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 10) ( success x 1 ) Táltos (Also, I say skip Táltos's post this turn! for realistic-conversationa-flow-purposes (and also because I'm making food now).) Serafíne (Extending: Time 2 / Prime 1 - that curse! Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) +1 for extending) Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP] Serafíne (Extending one more time: Time 2 / Prime 1 - that curse! Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) +1 for extending) Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 5) ( success x 1 ) Serafíne (and skip Sera: she istripping / scrying and therefore oblivious. :) ) Grace "Ahh, my thesis, yes... It's a computational biological simulation of plant life. I was going to try to make it as chemically accurate as possible. Now... I'm not so sure that 'accurate' is possible. Or at least, they wouldn't believe what plants can do. So, I'm just kind of, you know, getting it close." Patience isn't entirely unintelligible to her. Just partially. It's probably kind of like what other people experience when she goes on about 'computational biological simulations' etc. Grace is not surprised to hear that Sera has been doing 'shrooms' today. That sounds about right. But the way the woman is now staring at Táltos... huh. Grace noms taco again, because why not. "And you make... lighter-than-air craft? That's pretty cool," Grace responds to Patience, after having untangled a few more words. Patience Mason "Negative, while the indexed material and required processes are available to my noospheric lattice at this juncture I do not concurrently manufacture lighter then oxygen movation craft. Maintenance of my current craft is more then sufficient given to its...prodigious dimension's and requirements." Patience listens intently as Grace goes on about her thesis, a direct comprehensive simulation of plant life and describes the hurtles involved in the project. She nods, considering these issues, a sympathetic mind to be certain before offering. "Have you referenced and extrapolated the potentiality of accurate simulation at a micro-biological level rather that of macro-biology?" She suggests, a hand gesturing to the woman. "The active noospherical consensus may adapt and acclimatize to the simulation of such extensive potential on the microscopic level initially, allowing for a future extrapolation into nominal sizing and structure?" Serafíne And Sera just keeps - yes - staring at Táltos, although now there is something shifting, something distant rather than simply enraptured in the frame of her rather compelling features. Sera is breathing quiet steadily, all tidal, in through the nose and out through the nose, right, cyclic, the fingers of her right hand wrapped thoughtlessly around the not-a-bracelet , her left hand braced against the edge of the metal table, though her fingers are slackening a bit. The slide of her wholly unfocused eyes is like the slide of the yolk of a smashed egg down a kitchen wall. Exquisitely slow, viscous but still moving. Grace She squints at Patience. "I'm not sure I follow. I designed it to incorporate respiratory processes -- oxygen transfers, photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation... It's rather micro-biological in nature. That's actually the problem. Current understandings of microbiology are insufficient to accurately model what's really going on... And I don't know how to explain that in my thesis -- Oh yeah, everyone who is an actual biologist, you're missing all this stuff." Táltos and Sera are likely off in their own world, while Patience and Grace live in theirs -- a world of big, sciency words. Tacos get demolished. And there is that corn, probably cool enough now, having given its heat away to the air. "What's a noosphere?" Táltos Táltos listens to Grace and Patience thus: forehead-creased with attention, languid-eyelids (tired-still) but inquiring eyes, rain-pale, and once or twice a twitch of his mouth upward, imagining just what the Verbena would say confronted with these two, especially Patience, but Grace too, because he hears computational biological simulation of plant-life and he thinks plant-computer, and then he thinks Progenitor, and then his eyes get a little grim, and they drop to the sidewalk cracks which are, at least near Táltos, thriving, because he's another one who draws flowers out've fallow. What's a noosphere? "What's a computational biological simulation of plant life?" Flash-of-a-grin, then- ... And then there's Sera. Who begins to Work, staring at Táltos, and startles his attention from the Technocrat Discussion to the Cultist-Ecstatic staring at him, and he stares back, cocking his head to the side, body drifting that-a-way as well, reflexively shoving one hand in his pocket. Uncomfortable, but resigned. Táltos she looks and omens auguries dreams oh yes dreams that is how this seer sees, yes? this is how she looks through to the truth that all time is now that all one has to do now (now [now!]) is follow the thread and it's there one-dimensional (all-dimensional) (there are no lines [erase them!]), yes, yes? so here - here. a flash first of so many possibilities of images one atop the other blooming things shedding light fast-forward this path and that branching out which is more likely (does she know? how to follow fortune, how to tip-toe down fate? but she is following the curse to its end and this is what she sees) - pain first look at it spiking, curdling there on the ring, let her see it like iron-spikes, dense-Malice given shape, reaching up and out in knotty clotted threads, let her see it like a tangling thorn-thing, let her see it curling banding through ribs, pressing against something that it rips, that's the progression of this curse and the thing that it is harrowing, that it is rending, ripping this is the future four months five no more no here's another glimpse let her see blood and a smile in the blood reflected but it's not a smile it's the curse let her see it find three seats so imagine this five thrones imagine this five pools of ichor drip-dropping drop-dripping, stifling Grace [perception+Awareness = Does Grace pick up on whatever Taltos is thinking of her right now? AKA 'I'm not a Technocrat, thanks] Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 6, 7) ( success x 2 ) Patience Mason "A tiered dissemination of data and informative simulations is the primary and most effective methodology for neutralizing the adverse and negatively charged aspects of the noospheric consensus. In addition, focusing your simulations upon a singular selective cell of a biological entity would simplify simulation and acceptance." Patience attempts to aid, or at least clarify what it is she's suggesting, but then there's an inquiry as to just what a noosphere is, and Patience smiles, tapping the side of her head. "The noosphere is an appropriately assigned index for the processes and chemical electrical functionality of the cortex of homo sapien sapien." She says it like shes a teacher, explaining a topic. "To derive the appropriate terminology from the conglomerative index is that of noo- utilizing the linguistic system of ancient greek in reference to the cortex, while sphere...well." She shrugs, as if that is fairly simple to understand. She then turns her gaze towards Taltos and raises a brow. "A digitized electrically simulated representation, not concurrent or ratified in any third dimension as a solid." Táltos here is a flash clotted threads chewed up like they're tangling or tangled in entrails pain-brown, pain-black, crusted-over rent Serafíne And see: Sera. Serafíne-call-me-Sera is unfocused and lost and intent and intense on Táltos which he accepts with an uncomfortable and resigned mien and neither Grace nor Patience affect really to notice that Sera-who-is-stoned and may be really too stoned to be wandering around a neighborhood like this by herself after dark is also more-than-stoned. Is, to put it in simple and quiet terms, Working. Is needling threads and threading needles and splitting not infinitives but warp and weave and weft and the long threads are tacky and infinitessimal and her mouth, which is painted a glossy pink, is open and that far-away look catches the light and sheens her eyes and the margarita is ignored and they can eat tacos and talk about things Sera does not cannot will not begin to understand and Sera, makes this quiet little noise, all hushed focus, like her heart is being squeezed. Her expression is darkening, is drawing in at the brow, is narrowing to a line between the brows, is kept close and closer. Another noise, sharper but also breathy, back of the throat. Tension creeps into Sera's body language, wraps itself around her and she shivers, unconsious of it but feeling the movement of it all through her body. Even the shape of the darkness around tem is altering, is becoming spiked and full of threat. When she finally comes to consciousness, back to reality, the agreed-upon present moment, she breathes out in a rush, Sera. Reaches up to scrub away a handful of tears from the corners of her eyes. Her attention slides from the man's face to his hand and she breathes out sharply again, Sera. Reaches for his hand. "I hate that thing." She means the ring: must mean it, what else could she mean? "You have to get rid of it. Soon." Grace "My stupid thesis, is what it is," she responds, giving Táltos a grin. "Patience is right. I study computer science, and my focus is simulations. It's just... writing computer code that simulates a thing, so you can predict its behavior? That's my thing. One could even say it's what helped me get... here." She's not entirely unaware of Taltos' darkened expression, the way his eyes scan the cracks in the ground. He's uncomfortable around her. So, maybe if she put it another way... She leans in all conspiratorially-like over her tacos, "So, I found out that plants think, okay? And it's amazing. And it's not something that I can just put in my thesis, because I'd have to explain how I know this." Except that Patience seems to think she can put it in her thesis. Isolate it. Chop the plant into small pieces, and then analyze. She turns her attention back to the woman. "I don't think that would work, really. It all depends on showing it holistically. If it's isolated, they'll just say the effect is due to the isolation." Big sciency words again. Táltos (Ack, skip me one more time!) Patience Mason Patience nods to Grace's objection, but refrences back to what she said. "Thus the tiered release and extrapolation from the finite model. Each model shall proof and reinforce the previously asserted digitized revelations, thus negating any coherent and anticipated resistence within the noospheric consensus." She smiled, offering that last little bit. But then her eyes swivelled over to Taltos and Sera, and she inclined her head and inquired curiously. "What must he negate from his personage?" Serafíne "That fucking ring." Sera breathes out a curse-as-a-curse and at-a-curse and her eyes are damp and intense and there's something shivering about her that she cannot quite tamp down because: she is a seers. Seers see things. Not always the things-they-want-to-see. But she is rapt on Taltos, cannot unsee not when she has gone peering through the loose little threads, pulling pulling pulling, not even when the edges of her perception and starting to turn stained and dark and mottled. Serafíne (I am going to have to sleep very soon. barely keeping it together right now.) Grace "Sera, are you okay?" Grace says, and she really is concerned. There's so much that a newbie like her misses, and she has missed Sera's Working, doesn't understand the sudden turn of emotion in her. "What's wrong? What about the ring?" Táltos Grace grins when she re-explains, and Táltos chuckles, attention wavering from staring-girl back to the Scientific Ladies: "I see. All things think, and speak too; it can be difficult to lay-out in an easy to accept way," frown, spare, "using today's language. Sounds interesting, especially if the study of it helped you get to where you are today." His hand is in his pocket. He doesn't bring it out. Fingers, long-fingers, bony-wrists, big-hands, tendons sharply delineated, shovel-fingertips, nope: clenched inside. The rings too, and the bracelets. He smiles at Sera though: something that's less a flex of the mouth and more a flex of crinkle-lines around the corners of his eyes. "Don't look," he advises her (too-late), gently. Patience Mason [Go ahead and skip me this turn.] Patience Mason [sorry that came late, site didnt refresh] Grace It seems her re-explanation worked for Taltos. He laughs, at least, and that's a start. But you see, there is a rift between the sciency ladies and the other two. There's also something that they are talking about (or around) that has Grace completely confused. "Don't look at what?" Of course, she'd have to ask. Really. She does have to ask. There's something that keeps pressuring her to ask, and it's more than mere curiosity. It's a drive, like this is what life is, asking questions. "I'm completely lost." Serafíne "I already did," and Sera flashes him a similar smile, a bracing sort that is less a movement of her mouth than it is tensing of her cheeks and a faint narrowing of her eyes. Her eyes drop from his face to his hand and it takes effort for her right now to focus outside of the immediacy both the vision and the way the vision has shifted the celebratory edges of her trip to something else, darker, twisted, remnant, iron-bound and rusted, blooded and malicious and shot through with pain. See: she sees also the smile; the gentleness of the warning. Marks it in a way that is considered but not thoughtful and then glances back to Grace. Breathes out long and slow. Picks up her fucking drink. Her hand, it's shaking a bit. But Grace, oh Grace, Sera favors her with a lilting half-smile. It is fleeting and it does not reach the Cultist's dark and darker eyes, which are being devoured by her pupils. "It's a long story, not mine to tell, and I know the outline only. Not the details. But, do you feel that edge?" Malice, she means. The thing-that-doesn't-fit Táltos the táltos. "Sharp and wrong and bad. Hungry-for-disaster. Like rust, devouring a blade, skewering skin. It's not from him. It's from something-else. "He's telling me, not-to-look into his future." A glance back at Táltos and Sera oh, she smiles. With her quick-curving mouth now, rising. "I should have asked." Sorrowing, in her way, which is whole and entire. "Tonight's going to be a bad night, I think. And I should go. But come see me soon, Táltos. I want to help you break it, if I can. "Grace," rising, Sera tosses back the rest of her margarita all at a go, because what the hell. Bends to plant a kiss on the crown of Grace's head. Sera smells like spice and alcohol and limes. " - I hope I didn't freak you out too much. Take care, okay?" Táltos Táltos grimaces. The grimace is as dramatic a contortion as any of his expressions. He's a guy with a lot of expression. He's a guy who is a lantern for his moods and they're whatever lights up inside and he grimaces. Hollow-eyed Táltos, he rubs his forehead with his other hand -- with the pads of his index and middle finger. Three bracelets there, one with a medallion made of bone, another with links of iron, and another which looks like one of those rubber bracelets you get for supporting a cause on which is stamped the word astronomical and then there's three copper beads next to teeth-keys. Then: fine, he takes his left hand out of his pocket and holds it out on the table. He has three rings on, one on the ring finger, one next to the one on the ring finger, and a thumb ring. The thumb ring is a simple band. The second ring on his ring finger is etched to look like leaves, a thick band. And the first ring on his fing finger is older-looking, a thick dull-gleaming band with catchments that look like they might open to show a secret message. "I felt you doing it; I would've stopped you, but..." But he doesn't know how to stop that kind of seeing, and see, he means it too. He grimaces again, and then taps the ring-that-might-hide-messages, and says, lightly enough, "She's talking about this ring; haven't figured out how to get it off yet. Soon, though!" He sounds optimistic. And then stands up in order to bid-Sera-an-appropriate-farewell, which appears to be a hair-scruff right now: "Sure. You be careful, Serafíne. Grab yourself a taco. You're too thin." Patience Mason Sera describes an edge, a danger somewhere in Taltos' future and Patience narrows her gaze in consideration of these facts as they are revealed, it's something to consider, something to watch. She glances to the ring set upon Taltos' finger and arches a brow, regarding that unexplained, and potentially dangerous device before looking up at Sera. "It is with internalized certainty and projected empathetic emanations that I extrapolate hope that your REM cycles are not overtly disrupted Sera." She offers the woman, evident that she was on her way out. A genial nod is given as well, a parting farewell as the Cultist departs. She then looked back to the others, to Taltos in particular and inquired. "At what particular geographical locality did you acquire that frotean device." She inquires, gesturing to the ring in question. Grace The sad-eyed, slightly (a lot?) out of it Sera is still trying to teach the young, and for that Grace can only give her mad props. But instead, it just comes out like this: "Oh..." because there is so much to that explanation. "I do feel it..." she says, and Sera kisses her on the head, and Grace's eyes open a touch more, like that was completely unexpected (but it should have been). "I'm not freaked out. I didn't get freaked out when crazy rained from the silver screen, I'm not going to get freaked out now. You be good, Sera," she says, and gives her a smile. Sera's not going to be good. Sera's going to be Fun. But you know... Táltos "It was in a box from my grandfather," Táltos tells Patience: "Part of his effects." Then, with a thought, "What tradition do you follow?" Because: maybe if she's a Son of Ether - Though his attention swings, and see, Táltos, leaning against the metal chair he stood up from, one hand on its back, he gives Grace a quizzical look: "Crazy rained from the silver screen? Is that a literal or metaphorical statement?" Grace "Both. Listen, do either of you have cell phones? Or a computer maybe? I can hook you up with the information network. It'll tell you all about the crazy," she says, and picks up the corncob. "I was going to the movies to get my mind off of the... zombies. Big mistake. The movie, it was like a Trojan Horse. It just masqueraded as a movie. I'm sure you heard about the riot? Three people..." she trails off... bites corn. "Anyway, we're trying to figure out where it is." Patience Mason "I am a active part of the socio-political-paradigmic amalgam indexed as the Sons of Ether." Patience says with a slow nod. "Your genealogical predecessor..." She consider's, her eyes flicking to the ring again. "Frotean, assuredly frotean." She rises almost in tandem with Taltos, stepping out and away from the chair before pushing it back into place, leaving the location much as she had found it. Of course, Grace had seen to it that several taco's would never be seen here again...but then wasn't that was this place was for? "It has been a memorable and index worthy temporal reference point." She says with a nod, pausing to give Grace her cell number, Taltos as well before turning to go. Serafíne "Tch," Sera mutters, a smile and a correction all at once for Táltos. Who says she is too thin which is true, objectively. That smile is unfocused; is superficial, is the sort that skims over her features and slips away, half-remembered. She glances up at him as he scruffs her hair, her gaze skewing away from him toward the shadows beyond him and, "I meant it. Mean it. We'll go see Jim. We'll do something." -- Patience, well, Patience Sera still does not understand. But Sera does seem to register well wishes and a good night or even a sleep well. Dear Patience, Sera is only beginning her trip, she will be awake for hours and hours. But see, she shoots the woman-who-talks-like-a-robot a half-smile and says, "Thanks, man. You too." And Grace finally, assuring that she is not freaked. She is not freaked now, will not be freaked, is made of different stuff than that. Sera would've freaked when crazy rained from the silver screen. Sera did freak when a fallen mage asked her to dance. Sera - - is not going to bed good. Is probably not even going to be Fun tonight, but, she flashes Grace two-thumbs up as she starts to saunter away. "Always am." Nearly-serene, reassuring, assured. Then she: stuffs her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket and walks away from the outdoor tables at the taqueria, off down Federal. Maybe toward a bus stop, maybe someplace else. God knows. Táltos Táltos does. He even has it on him, his cellphone, in one of the many pockets of his peacoat. He has to take things out to get it: half-a-feather, a pack of cigarettes, a cigar, a stone, another stone, yet another stone, a rock, the beginnings of a rubberband ball, an old coin limned in moss-green, a bandana, and then - hah. There. The cellphone: he plugs in Patience's number, and then - Grace gets a considering look; the flick of a half-frown. "That sounds interesting," he agrees, cautiously; either of silver screen craziness, or being hooked up to a network by - is she a Virtual Adept? She sounds like a Virtual Adept. Maybe that's just prejudice: computers and networks. "I'd like to talk about it," and here, he sounds grave, because peeling back the Trojan Horse Zombie lingo and there's something a dreamspeaker can be interested in: something speaking, something more. "Plug in your number or, uh," and look. He searches through his pockets again, putting things in, accidentally breaking a piece of charcoal, look, he has a little bottle of vodka, and then: a couple bent-up business cards. His full-name, underneath it: Author. An e-mail address. A phone-number. A fax-line. Grace "We'll have to meet again sometime. I'll call you, Patience. Next time we're in the same temporal geographical location, you'll have to meet Ginger," she says, mimicking the strange speech. "Son of Ether, eh? I remember reading about you guys in my notes. Nice." And that explains the way the woman schooled her on Science. Will have to talk again. Mmm yes. "And you too," she says to Taltos. It's easy to think she's talking about a person. "I'm not going to talk about it over the phone though... Just, I might, say, invite you over for tea. And it won't be tea?" She smirks, takes his card, reads... "You're an author?" she says, and her face lights up. "I was published recently, myself." and there is a bit of pride in that tone. "I'm not good, just... you know, it's a hobby," and then, the self-deprecation. She gives Patience her number, and Taltos her number, and promises that next time... next time, there will be installations going on. Táltos [And because Noel is awesome, we are allowed to fade there. *zip*]

Death Polka

Serafíne

It is somewhere north of midnight but not yet two a.m. Two a.m. which is after the last call for alcohol because the city of Denver tells the 'tender at Tooey's that the place needs to fucking close down at two a.m. So: somewhere north of midnight and south of two a.m. and a band that treads the line between black metal and hard driving polka is on the small stage in the performance space in the back. The lead guitarist is wearing a tophat and the drummer sports the world's longest beard and there's something thrashingly noisy about the music they are pumping out but no one's thrashing in the open space in front of the stage where the rope lights are snaking about, all glowing.

There are photographs mounted to the interior walls, an exhibit, and the photographer is a tall, lanky girl with an unfortunate overbite who is wearing three scarfs in succession wrapped around her neck and a t-shirt with the cover of The Giving Tree on it and she is talking to a not-quite-as-tall but still tall chick with blond hair curling and sweatdamp around her shoulders who is holding a bottle of tequila loosely between thumb and forefinger of her right hand, her posture familiar, easy, louche.

The wail of the guitar over the oompah polka beat disturbs her not at all.

Whitney

One of the perks of being nineteen years old is you're technically an adult and you don't have a curfew anymore and you can do whatever you want so long as the person responsible for you in a fiduciary sense feels you're doing what you're supposed to be doing insofar as bettering yourself and your station goes.

One of the downsides comes in the form of a huge Sharpie-black X on the back of your hand when you go into a bar on a weeknight hoping to catch a show.

At least the show is all ages and she still has her passport. No driver's license but she whips out the passport and tucks it back into her patchwork messenger bag and waits for Grace to show her driver's license. The girl is wearing combat boots and a knee-length olive green denim skirt and a brown henley underneath a black vest. Her thick hair is down and her eyes are blackly made up.

They've been out for a couple hours because Whitney was bored and didn't want to go home and hey Grace let's go to a show but that show ended and then the cops showed up and she still doesn't want to go home so here they are.

"Is that POLKA?" the blonde asks and then grins like that just made her night. "That is so rad."

Grace

It's not a movie, is what she keeps having to remind herself. It's only a crowd. Only people. (Only?)

Sometimes, though, you just have to get out. Grace hadn't gone and done anything remotely resembling play since that freaking movie, and something inside just wants to break loose.

So she said yes when Whitney offered to drag her out to do something. Besides, it's nice to reward one's self when one has had a major breakthrough.

Grace does have a driver's license, shows it with a (what she hopes is) matching smile. Whitney may have dressed appropriately, but Grace lacks the desire to dress for others, really, and is in her usual uniform of jeans, sneakers, and a grey turtleneck jacket over what is probably some silly t-shirt... There is no makeup to be seen on this one.

"Haah, sounds like death polka," she replies, laughing. It's one of those great and weird juxtapositions, this music.

Serafíne

It is POLKA. It is polka / black metal and sometimes the noise fills the room and the beat moves beneath it, syncopated and familiar and niggling at the ur-brain that recognizes the polka beneath the metal and cannot quite believe that the top-hatted guy is both shredding and shrieking beneath it.

The performance space is tucked into a nook at the far-end of the bar with a projection screen over it playing old black and white movies. White-skinned women with dark eye make-up and pincurls, and jaunty little men in bowler hats. Just another layer of stimulation.

Sera is - well, unmistakeable and hard to ignore, even from a distance. Even glimpses through a crowd and across the room; even lost in the noise and the dim lights see: she is telling a joke or an elaborate story or listening to one but participating, bright and lively at the center of a knot of people far enough from the stage and the speakers that one can, occasionally, hear what a stranger says, though still likely not hear oneself think. Wearing her fucking uniform of the evening: the world's tiniest red silk wrap skirt which extends approximately 1/2 inch below her ass, torn fishnets, silver-heeled platformed boots covered in silver buckles that take her from 5'5" to oh, 5'10" or so, and a midriff-baring leather bustier covered with small silver spikes.

Midway through the conversation, though, she lifts her sharp little chin and scans through the crowd, her senses are open, see - always so damned open and she spots Grace across the bar, lifts her own bottle in toast or invitation and waves Grace over.

Whitney

[perc + awareness because yolo]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Whitney

"Omigod, it does..."

This isn't either of their scenes but it's good to hear Grace laugh and the sound of it injects laughter into Whitney's response and she's about to steer her towards the bartender and his wares when something else catches her attention.

At first it's the young woman across the room and that flash of her essence like she's the only person in the place who's dancing but then it's the woman herself. Gorgeous in a primeval dangerous way and Grace can see Whitney enthralled for a half-dozen heartbeats before she remembers where she is and shakes her head hard and realizes the dangerous-tall woman with the sidecut recognizes Grace.

"Is that one of Ginger's friends?"

We've switched from educational metaphors to harmless barely-audible euphemisms.

Grace

Sera simply cannot be missed, even in the crowd, even in the distracting music. Whitney and Grace are both staring at her, when she beckons.

"Yeah, she's a friend. Good friend. Come on, you've got to meet her," Grace says, heading over to the woman in red. Sera's surrounded herself with people, but... they're only people, right?

"Hey, Sera! I brought a friend. This is Whitney," she says, loud, necessarily so to beat out the jaunty, screaming, deathpolka.

Serafíne

By the time Whitney and Grace reach her, Sera has muttered something into the photographer's ear, shared a toast and a familiar grin with a hipster dude in skin-tight purple jeans and an ironic brown fedora with a feather in the band, and slipped out of the small crowd. They are not alone, precisely. It's a bar, late on a Thursday: not packed but there are always people ready and willing to start the weekend early, and for some of it, it never stops.

Sera: smells of spice and smoke and alcohol tonight. Clove cigarettes cling to her hair, wreath around her skin, and she's been drinking straight from that bottle like a fish. Holds it with the familiarity a gunslinger reserves for his favorite revolver, doesn't she?

So she is bright and loose and rather smeary and also: laughing and dark eyed. So very dark-eyed tonight, because her pupils are huge, unfocused, devouring.

"Grace!" arms open wide, bottle in hand, nearly ready to huge the apprentice but some underlying instinct prickles some awareness or something so the gesture is shut down and subverted. Also hugging people when your clothing can cut skin is not necessarily adviseable. Still: arms open, her mouth a wide, quick, mobile slash as it drops to Grace's ear. Loud perforce, naturally - it is fucking loud in here. "I though you were a hallucination! Not really your kinda place is it? 'Course just 'cos your talking doesn't mean you're not, but you're making fucking sense so - "

Then she turns, all swimming-abrupt, fixes her too-large eyes on Whitney and lifts the bottle in tribute. "Whitney! Cool. You must be persuasive if you dragged Grace out for death polka - "

Or no, the bottle is not lifted in tribute. It is lifted in offering. First Grace, then Whitney.

Whitney

The newcomer hangs back until the acquaintances properly greet each other. Keeps one hand wrapped around the weathered strap of her bag and nothing about her catches the light save for a small stud in her left nostril. When Sera turns her attention towards her she sees a strong brow and a strong nose and the girl is only an inch or so shorter than her wearing negligible heels.

If Whitney had to run she could run in her boots. She stops herself from looking past Sera's waist because she could catch sight of more flesh than would be considered polite in mixed company and the lingering of whatever magic she's done in the last few hours laps at her like the heat of a familiar fire and Whitney already looks somewhat awed by the time the Cultist turns her attention towards her.

"Who wouldn't want to come out for death polka?" she asks. Her voice is bell-clear and low without being fried. She takes the tequila only when it's her turn and belts it out of the bottle like a champ. This isn't her first rodeo.

Her uncle's going to be pissed when she gets home but whatever. She might not even make it home. Life is fucking short. As she hands back the bottle she also extends her hand.

"Sera?" Just for confirmation. Eyebrows raised. They relax and Whitney smiles regardless of the response. "Nice to meet you."

Grace

Sera's having Fun, more Fun than Grace will likely ever touch. Grace wants to say something about hallucinations, but... it's one of those things, right? Shouting at the top of one's lungs about the truth of perception because the music is too loud just seems wrong...

"She's very persuasive, and besides, this is a celebratory get-out-of-the-apartment night! Woo!" And why not accept a bit of nerve-reducing alcohol really? It's not like she couldn't use it. She takes a pull from the bottle, makes a horrible face (gah, it burns) and produces a weird noise. And then, it's off to Whitney.

Who of course, handles her liquor far better than the actually legal Grace. Natch.

Serafíne

"Serafíne," the Cultest amends in response to that question-seeking-confirmation. Has to shift the bottle from right hand to left to shake but she does that seamless and thoughtless and takes Whitney's hand in her own. Callouses on her hand as they make contact, rough but cool from the neck of the bottle. This quick, crawling little grin follows the correction. " - call-me-Sera."

How many times has she said that to how many strangers in how many rooms? Can't count and doesn't. Sera, takes her hand back and then her bottle back and yes, Grace, it is straight tequila, no lime and no salt so it fucking burns. Note that before Sera takes another pull she licks the back of her sweaty hand for the salt, though, and does-without the lime.

"Oh my fuck," as Grace takes that pull and actually woos, Sera tosses back her head, laughing beneath the scrawl of the guitar. To Whitney, " - you get super extra bonus points for that. Never thought I'd see Grace do a shot from a bottle of Patron."

While they're talking, a tall, blond, bearded guy detaches himself from the knot of people around the photographer and walks up behind Sera. Takes her shoulders in his hands, both familiar and careful of the spikes on her bustier. Grace will recognize him as Dan-he's-cool, the consor she met at Sera's house the night she came to install Ginger. To Whitney: just a tall, skinny, well-tattooed hipster.

He kisses Sera on the crown of her head then drops his mouth to her ear and murmurs something, which brings her attention swinging around, brief and full to him.

The exchange lasts just a moment before Sera's turning back to Whitney and Grace, offering both another shot from her bottle by way of apology.

"I gotta go see some folks off, you guys have a kickass night if I don't catch up with you again before it's over - !"

1-800-GINGER

Serafíne

Sometime after she first informed most of Denver's Awakened population about Ginger, Grace received a text from Sera intimating that she just didn't get it pls to show her. They exchanged a brief volley of text messages and maybe even a damned phone call on the theory that the data was harder to extract or - honestly, wtf, Sera would not understand any of that - but the upshot is: a final invitation, verbal or otherwise, and an address, and a promise of cake.

The cake is usually red velvet.

Sera did not promise Grace hashish or mushroom tea or really good tequila or Stranahan's, but she has all of these things squirreled away somewhere in the big, four-square, three-story-with-a-basement-and-a-separate-garage-and-a-bridge house Dee inherited from her great-aunt. Which Sera and her bandmates who are also her housemates share.

The neighborhood is hip, the treelined streets are crammed with cars, the dwellings a mix of older single family homes and rebuilds, condos, either retrofitted into old buildings or rebuilt, and small apartment complexes.

741 Corona Street is a blond brick house with dark green shutters and a once-loved garden. It was slowly dying from lack of water, but the recent deluge has awakened the growth again and it is green-green-green, utterly overgrown.

The grass is too-high. There is a porch swing and some old fashioned metal chairs on the front porch, and an ashtray on the bannister, and a fucking unicycle, and the sound of music from inside. The screen door is closed but the inside door is open and the porchlight is on.

There's a doorbell, but the truth is most people just walk in.

Grace

Ginger just keeps on getting Grace out of the apartment, despite her many attempts to stay inside. Sera's house doesn't seem dangerous, exactly, but neither did the theater. Neither did her life before all this started happening.

But Ginger, and the data she contains must be spread. This is a duty. Even though Sera is so clueless!

She has to remind herself that there was a time when she was so clueless, and there was Sera with open arms. It's almost enough to forgive the texts back and forth talking about the secret server in plaintext, almost certainly being watched. Grace can only hope that there is a Razor up in the sky to cut it out of whatever database their conversation ended up posted to.

And cake. There will be cake. This is also a factor in Sera's favor.

So Grace climbs up from the street in that kind of mood, the 'I'm having to deal with a user' mood. She's wearing jeans, sneakers, t-shirt (it's got lemons on it, and the text: 'When life gives you lemons, keep them. Because hey, free lemons.") and a grey turtleneck jacket that doesn't look like it 'goes'. She's also lugging around that laptop bag she brings everywhere, because therein lies the whole reason for this visit.

When she gets to the door, she doesn't know the unwritten rule of 'just walk in'. She just rings that doorbell, and stands there, contemplating.

Serafíne

Sera does not answer the door. Sera never answers the door. There are people for that even though the people in Sera's life do not necessarily think of themselves as people for that, well look. Sera is somewhere tucked away in that big house probably smoking something illicit and someone else - a tall girl with a good fifty or so pounds on the too-skinny Cultist and the curves that come from that and a certain rockabilly vibe - appears in the shadows of the hallway, gradually coming into focus as she approaches the front door.

"Hey!" the girl says through the screen, opening it with an easy click and pulling it back with her hand and then holding it open with her right hip. Dee smells... honestly delicious, even from ordinary personal distance. Yeast and cinnamon and burnt sugar and pastry and butter: she works in a bakery, and the scent of bread rising clings to her hair. " - Grace, right?"

The sparest pause for Grace to confirm her identity.

"I'm Dee, Sera said you might drop by. Said she promised you red velvet cake, but all I've got is gingerbread tonight. Hope that's good enough. Sera's in the garden, gingerbread's in the kitchen. We've got whipped cream or lemon sauce to top it?"

--

Inside, there's a gentle sort of chaos to the place. The lives of four twenty-something musician hipsters layered over the older treasures of a once-prized family home. Hardwood floors covered with fraying Persian rugs, there are a solid half-dozen pieces of original art of some sort on the walls: paintings and collages and one woven piece, some abstract, some lovely, one quite nearly fucking obscene except: no, look again. It is nothing of the sort. Pieces of pottery and weird little Jesus statues and a portrait of Amelia Earhart and a spider plant in a dust old macramed plant holder dripping spider-babies down from its sides and a neon piece that just says LOL and so on.

That's the hallway, a glimpse of the living room, past the wooden stairs and powder room, into the kitchen - which is bright and white or would be if the sky were anything other than relentlessly gray these days, if dusk were not falling to darkness, if if if -

Dee offers Grace a drink and cuts her a generous slice of gingerbread if she wants on. Offers either real whipped cream or a warm lemoncurd sauce to dribble over it, and points Grace to the sliding glass doors that lead to the back garden.

Which is where Grace will find Sera. The garden is damp and muddy from the constant rains but there's a break in the rain and anyway they mostly don't smoke - cigarettes or pot - inside. Or, sometimes they do smoke pot inside the house and the rooms are also redolent with the musky scent but they try not to smoke inside. It's bad for the art.

In the middle of the garden is a flagstone patio with a mishmash of furniture include a big cabana bed, which is where Sera can nearly always be found. Seated cross-legged near the edge, sharing a pipe of hashish with a tall, skinny blond guy covered in tattoos Whom Sera introduces to Grace as "This is Dan-He's-Cool," for all that Grace, even if she can sense Sera tonight, cannot sense any similar resonance from Dan.

And there's this moment where you just know that Sera wants to get up and hug Grace, like the possibility of a hug is clearly implicit in her body language, but in the end Sera remembers how stiff-armed Grace got when she tried to tuck up against her and just remains where she is.

Dan holds out that pipe for Grace to take or decline as she searches out a seat that is preferably not completely sodden.

Grace

[Awareness, can Grace sense Sera?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

(Oooh and also awareness. What sort of warning does Sera have? )

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Grace

Sera's the first Mage Grace ever felt. In the doorway of that bookstore, she felt that pull on her insides, drawing her in to where her eyes could barely escape the woman. Hard to miss indeed. Sera's here, and that's... well, expected.

But there is someone else at the door, and Grace makes with the introductions, smells the woman (good grief) and looks around the room a bit awestruck at all the stuff. Grace has a plant at her place. And it's not even there for decoration, really.

"Oh, thanks, I love gingerbread," she says to Dee, while looking at the neon 'LOL'. It's a sign that's just looking for a dark rainy alleyway to reflect in. All that stuff, what does she do with it?

And then, so distracted, she makes her way to the kitchen after Dee, and obtains that marvelous free food (with the whipped cream on top, if you must know) with a 'thanks' and a smile.

So arrayed, she walks back to the garden -- the very not-computer-friendly, wet garden to meet Sera. And, this is like oil and water, the two of them and her. She has no tattoos. She doesn't get stoned. She is unstylish, and uncaring about that. But that also means that to her, the others' appearances are just that.

"Hi, I'm Grace," she says to Dan, smiling again. But when the pipe is offered, it is declined. "Sorry, I don't... Shouldn't really, in case there's a problem I have to fix."

"Hey, Sera," she says, while looking for a seat. "Long time no see."

Serafíne

Dan takes Grace's refusal of the pipe with good grace, all told. Does't make the standard joke about how that means there's more for them! because there is always enough for Sera and Dan, and for Dee and Rick, and for any other guests who wander through, which guests do, with a remarkable regularity. There are ashtrays scattered out here too, a few have been turned over so they won't collect rain. Others are brimming with water-and-ashes. Sera and Dan have one with a handful of the dark blue-and-gold butts of Sera's clove cigarettes, perched on the cabana bed at Sera's knee.

"Grace, you're new, right? Sera told me about you. She was so excited, just talked about it for days."

Dan breathes out a cloud of smoke - away from Grace, though Grace may not notice the consideration - hands the pipe back to Sera who is smiling a rather endearing, goofy little grin as she takes the pipe and, oh, inhales, then closes the clever little lid meant to cover the bowl, smother the embers, and protect the bud, or in this cash the hashish, packed inside.

"You look great," Sera says to Grace as Dan pushes himself upright, stands - steadily all told - and finds Grace the dryest chair in the garden. Actually, one that looks like somebody dried it off with a towel or something after the last shower. "Awesome tee. I love free fucking lemons. Free fucking anything.

"Oh, yeah. When I said that Dan's cool I meant he's Cool. My other housemates are awesome but you know, not Cool but Dan's like a - what do you call it - consor. You know? He gets it."

"And," Dan supplies, watching Sera with a sort of affectionate exasperation that melts into the leading edge of a wry smirk. " - I'm in charge of her phone since she's hopeless."

Grace

"Yeah, I'm the new girl," Grace replies, and then looks over at Sera like, 'really?'

"You look good too," she says to Sera, and she means that... the last time she saw the woman, she'd just gotten over a juice fast and zombie attack, so she really is looking great, from Grace's limited perspective.

Dan is nice, she thinks. And he proves it by finding her a chair. "You know what I love? I love free fucking gingerbread." And to prove that, she takes a bite of the thing, and it is everything that is best about free food. Dee makes awesome things.

Sera's talking about how this one is special as she chews, and she kind of nods at that, though not understanding the term 'consor'. He gets it. That is apparently the meaning. Not quite thrumming with power, but in the know? Doesn't think Sera insane?

"Speaking of Gingery things... And phones, yes," she says, still kinda chewing on the sweet. "I did try to tell you on the phone, but there's only so much I can say. Ginger is a codename for a project I've been working on with my friend, see?"

She starts unpacking the laptop at that point, there's no point in stalling. Sera may be hopeless, but Ginger is kinda foolproof -- at least in Grace's estimation.

"From your end, it's just another number to call or text. Only whatever you say or write goes out to everybody. And it's safer. So much safer."

Serafíne

The Cultist flashes Grace a quick, brimming little smile at the compliment. Which is objectively true: Serafíne is one of those girls, and amidst the pleasures of her own rainsodden garden, with her hipster friends, with a pipe full of hashish and a pack full of cigarettes and gingerbread and tequila and whatever-the-hell else she has or will consume, she looks - great, yes, absolutely. Louch and decadent and vibrant, her hair curling from the humidity in the air, left long where it hasn't been shaved away. Her torso a pale curve beneath a bustier beneath a dark hoodie. Her usual fishnets-and-cut-offs on her shapely legs. But:

that's not necessarily what Grace means. Grace means other things, too. Which has that edgy grin of hers both softening into a smile and then fading into something else.

"Then you oughtta drop by more often. Dee works in a bakery. She's always bringing home something. Sometimes even pain chocolate, which is the best shit ever."

The Cultist bends forward and re-opens her pipe to take a peak and assure herself that the embers are out, then reseals it and sets it aside. Lifts her chin to allow her focus to return to Grace, but yeah - it is weavering. Sera is stoned enough that her limbs feel liquidy and her head feels like a lid has been lifted off her body.

"Like a party line?" Mild skepticism framed into her features. From somewhere inside her hoodie she fishes out her cell. "So I just need to add the number to my contacts? Will it work with a landline? I mean, some elders don't even text."

Grace

"Eeh, no it won't work with a landline," she says, sucking a bit of breath in between her teeth. "That's why I have to be here. It takes a bit of work on my end to set you up." She isn't going to say the words 'encryption' or 'end-to-end' or try to explain really. Instead, she just focuses on the setup, the laptop, the data cable, the necessary software.

And during all of this, she takes the occasional aside -- way away from the keyboard -- to eat some gingerbread. It really is good. Must thank Dee later.

"Well, you add the number to your contacts, and then if you call it, you get connected to Ginger. It's a voice menu, you know? Like, 'Press 2 to leave a message.'" So, it won't work on a landline. The encryption won't either, so if any unfortunate elder tries to access Ginger from a landline, they'll get the regular old 1-800-FAT-GRLS line instead, and at this thought Grace almost cracks herself up.

"Yeah, might be best for those elders you're talking about not to try to use this. They'll get phone sex instead. Might be a little confusing."

Serafíne

There is this nuanced curve to Sera's mouth. A quick, graceful twist that surfaces, rises, and then dies. The image of Pan or Katiana calling a phone sex line, maybe. And a vague and lingering - something else that limns her dark eyes with another sort of light that does not shine. Call it: banked. Complex and more than a little bit private as Sera hands over her iPhone to let Grace work her cybernetic magic.

"If Pan or Kat every resurface," the Cultist remarks quietly, "I'll make you talk them into going mobile. I don't think they'd listen to me, and fuck, I wouldn't know what to say."

Then Sera lifts her chin, indicating the laptop with a quick, darting little gesture.

" - this friend of yours, is he a VA?"

Grace

"Pan's gone?" she asks, oblivious. Being wrapped up in the prepwork, she doesn't notice the dying smile, and the darkened eyes.

"Okay, I am ready for the phone," she says, mouth half-full of gingerbread. "And yes, my friend is a Virtual Adept. He goes by Gadfly, and he's very good. Put up wards while we were hacking this thing so it... probably won't be detected."

She takes another bite of the gingerbread and chews, again away from the keyboard. "And even if it does, I put some... camouflage on the thing myself."

Serafíne

"Recovering," Sera explains, with a narrow shrug of her narrow shoulders, which is not quite herky-jerky. She's mellow from her high, drifting a bit through it and smiles this half-smile, the bracing sort that Grace does not know her well enough to understand. Dan does, though. He unfolds himself from the cabana bed and crosses to another one of the mismatched tables on the flagstone patio. Grabs Sera's clove cigarettes and a lighter and drops them in her lap, bending over to brush a kiss across her temple.

Which has her flashing him a slant-wise, upward smile - beatific. Shining.

"New priest at his church though. For the duration. Has his fucking pager, too."

How that happened -

- well.

Sera breathes out, taps out one of her clove cigarettes and slides it into her mouth without lighting it, watching as Grace works on her set-up. Listening like she has half a fucking clue about the first word Grace just said.

"Wards, listen to you. Talking about fucking magic like an old hand." This quick, illusive little grin. So well, she does have half-a-fucking clue, Sera. But only half. "This dude Gadfly, though. He's in town? I've never fucking heard of him - "

Grace

The phone does not materialize, probably because Dan is busy making Sera shine like that. So, Grace looks up over the screen at them, the tiktak of her fingers on the keyboard gone.

"Ahh yes. He didn't look so great last time," she replies, sadly. Even though he made her skin crawl in that one brief meeting, it's never good to see someone so hurt.

"Yeah, Gadfly's in town, and I'm honestly not surprised you've never heard of him. He's only in Denver because he's in hiding."

Boy does that one ever hide. From the Techs, and from everybody else...

Serafíne

And of course it is Dan who remembers that Grace was ready for the phone. Nudges Sera, who looks at him, and gestures for the iPhone. Sera hands it to Dan, who hands it to Grace. Telephone with the telephone, Dan thinks and quirks a grin.

Sera still has yet to light her cigarette, and plucks it from her mouth, tapping it thoughtfully against her knuckle to settle the aromatic, spiced tobacco back down in its paper wrapper.

"In hiding. Who the fuck's he hiding from?"

Grace

Grace sighs as she takes the phone, "Well, that's a story. The day I Awakened, there was this guy who showed up at my work. He was looking for Gadfly, and I had no idea what was going on. Let's just say that if I had opened my eyes a day sooner, I might have been snatched up by the other side."

The phone gets plugged into the laptop via a data cord, and she starts tapping away again. "We've all got to be careful. Hence Ginger."

"Well, ah... He's also really shy. I think I'm the only one of us in Denver who's actually seen him."

Serafíne

"Shit," Sera mutters around the cigarette, finally lighting it with the zippo with which Dan supplied her. She inhales all deep, just breathing in smoke and breathing out smoke with a great flaring crackle as the sugars in the spiced tobacco catch fire, and burn. "Brilliant timing, then.

That last-minute reprieve Grace received. The way the universe waited to open to her until she was safe from the otherside.

"You should bring him over here, sometime," the Cultist continues, laughing, smoking drifting from her nostrils like a sleeping dragon. " - I'm fucking brilliant with the shy ones."

Grace

"Yeah, my extremely lucky day."

The tapping continues in starts and stops, and Grace's face is slack in the reflected light from the screen, until Sera says she's brilliant with the shy ones, and then she rubs her eyes -- but there's a giant grin underneath that hand.

"Oh wow, Sera, you'd break him."

Serafíne

"That's entirely possible."

Which naturally just widens Serafíne's edgy little grin into - yeah, something wide enough to banish whatever shadows there may have been in her dark eyes, shining just as sure and clear as that look she gave Dan a moment or seventeen ago.

The creature shifts back on the bed - which is a little bit damp from the rain, but only a bit - holding her cigarette between her index and middle fingers, curling her fishnet-clad legs beneath her lean frame, bare feet tucked beneath her thighs, her heels on the flagstones in the shadows at the edge of the bed and arching her spine in a way that makes the bare skin of her abdomen and torso, the dark cut of her push-up bra, impossible to ignore.

"But fuck - everybody needs to be broken sometimes." Not precisely disagreeing, no. Just shifting idea tangentially. "How the fuck else do you get remade?

"We usually have people over on the weekends. Sometimes a full-blown party, sometimes just fifty of our closest friends. Y'all should come over. Or, fuck. We've got some more gigs coming up. Come see us play."

Grace

Grace is really not entire sure Sera won't break her as well, and she looks up over the screen. "Just fifty of your closest friends? So many people... I ah, wouldn't mind hearing you play though. That sounds good. I can't promise I can drag Gadfly anywhere, though."

"Hmm... but I might be able to convince him to watch." The typing stops, and she unplugs the phone, walks up to Sera, and hands it back.

"I took the liberty of putting the number in so you don't have to. So... try it out?"

Serafíne

"Shit, fifty's nothing," another flashing little grin as Sera shifts her cigarette from her right hand to her left and reaches up to take the phone from Grace with her right hand. Is only a little bit high so actually operating the thing doesn't seem to be a problem for her right now. Sera, well, pulls up her contacts and scrolls through the Gingers (there are two other entries for Ginger: one someone's actual name. The other, well. God knows how he got tagged as "Ginger" in Sera's phone) and finds the newest one.

"That's a slow night," Sera's - boasting? exagerrating? telling the straight and plain truth? - while calling Ginger.

On speaker phone.

"So I just call it and I leave a fucking message for everyone? Does it tell everyone the message or do they have to call in too?"

Grace

Grace says the keywords: "Hello, Ginger," and the phone begins to speak. The voice that comes from the tinny little phone speakers is sultry, seductive, and robotic all at once. Ginger, you see, has the voice of one of the operators at the phone sex line. But piecing together a menu from her voice -- well the splicing isn't perfect.

"Hello, and welcome. To listen to messages, dial 1. To view text messages, dial 2. To leave a voice message, dial 3. To leave a text message, dial 4. And remember, love is just a dial away," Ginger says, and Grace facepalms. Gadfly's been tinkering with the menu. Or something.

"They'll have to call in to listen to it. It doesn't phone out. That's one of the perks, actually. It means we can't be traced to each other," Grace says, in response to Sera.

Serafíne

"Oh Jesus fucking Christ, Grace - " Sera is swearing volubly though not venomously. There's just such delight in her voice, and even Dan, who is standing at the foot of the cabana bed now with a hand on his hip, lighting a cigarette of his own, is chuckling.

"She's so fucking brilliant." Then, raising her voice as if that might help the damned robot understand her, "Hello Ginger Will You Marry Me?" And yes, loud enough that Sera is practically speaking in all caps. "This is fucking awesome."

Sera is going to leave them so many damned messages.

Grace

Grace has to laugh at the scene. Sera's talking to Ginger like Gadfly does sometimes -- personifying the thing.

If Sera dials a 1, she'll get Ginger's voice again, stating that there are no voice messages.

A 3 or a 4 does what it says.

But a 2... Well, that delivers a list of texts, Grace's hacklog, and Shoshannah's ghul information. It's got all the current information that the Mages of Denver have seen fit to leave, should she be interested. Unfortunately, it's not fun stuff.

Maybe Sera can leave them some fun messages.

"She is brilliant. I mean, I helped make her, right?"

Serafíne

"You did." Sera, with a quick and winning grin. " - and you're a fucking miracle."

Disappearances

Pan

Anyone who's been by the Church of the Good Shepherd on West Florida lately has noticed a few things.

The name of the associate pastor is no longer Francisco Echeverría but Manuel Ruíz. Deacon Martínez announced at Mass beginning last week that Father Echeverría was taking an extended leave to convalesce from his stroke last month. Father Ruíz moved into the rectory this past weekend and has taken on all of the tasks and effects previously assigned to Father Echeverría, including his pager.

Rosa Salazar is still the office administrator but she is even more closed-lipped and unfriendly towards the Awakened than she was before.

In time the pervasive aura of godly light and wrath will fade from the rectory and the church itself but the parishioners conduct themselves like Father Echeverría is coming back. He isn't dead or gone. His fate's just in God's hands now.

Serafíne

She mean to check on him every fucking day, but. She didn't. Missed someone the transit between here and not here. Time is her plaything yes but it also slips away. They went back to Utah over fucking Labor Day to play that goddamned bowling alley again. It was madness, Sera loved it. All those poor fucking sister wives.

The tubes were out of the priest and the priest was out of the hospital and she told him to stay put and she told him that she would call her but no, no, Sera could feel the work around him and the fucking stubbornness all in him and he said no. He said, Don't bother calling her. He said, I know where she is.

And Sera trusted that: he did.

And: he would.

And: it would all be all right now.

And she was so fucking happy that the weight of those weeks and the pressure of her fears and her fucking semi-regular thoroughly rational thoroughly irrational breakdowns - which happened when she was alone, standing in the lee of the building stacked above her, pushing back against the sick and throttling panic that was like to strangle her every time she walked into that place, which she kept to herself, because because because - just melted away from her and hey,

everything seemed better.

--

So this is how she finds out that he's: gone. And who knows where. No one knows where and fucking Rosa is not going to tell her and there's a stranger - but wait, that comes later.

Four a.m. and a locked door and a tightrope trip that has her wanting to see him or be near him or feel the peculiar atomic-brilliance of his resonance against the back of her mind. Illuminating. Sometimes she needs that: lacerating brilliance without heat. Just light light light. And there was something she wanted to tell him about something she cannot remember but the words are inside her all swirled up. Yes, darlings. Swirled.

Like a soft-serve ice cream cone.

With curving lines and a tucked-over peak.

She thinks of the way they fold together - words and so fucking strange, especially when you are tripping and they feel like solid things, external, and thinking about that and about him pulls her back from some edges that she doesn't know she's traversing or rather: yes. She always knows that there's darkness and a swift deadly plunge on the other side of this. That's the awareness. That's the thrill but:

words, see. She feels them drilling down inside her and that's making her half-smile as she stumbles out of the yellow cab and shoves a generous fistful of cash at the cabbie who cannot precisely imagine what a girl dressed like that wants at the Church of the Good Shepherd at four eighteen a.m. on a Wednesday morning. She'll just let herself in and curl up on the couch and be there in the morning. Even his orange juice glows. She's thinking of that as she opens the latched gate and thinking of that as she wanders up the sidewalk and it is making her more than half-smile because this is so familiar and so necessary to her somehow. This ritual.

It feels like a ritual.

But see: one locked door.

Maybe it is because he's sick, right, and maybe it is for other reasons, and maybe it is something else entirely and maybe maybe maybe he's in there even though all she feels is the baseline nuclear-waste glow of his lingering presence. This is what she's telling herself. Sera has always been remarkably good at lying to herself. Still she knows:

things are already starting to go wrong.

--

Because the front door is locked.

And there's someone fucking new living in his goddamned house.

--

An hour or two or three later, the new pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd finds a rather striking looking creature whom the League of Mary now believe is a call girl sitting on the front stoop of the rectory, the shaved line of her head tucked against the peeling paint of one of the support beams. Thinks she's passed out maybe because she's not really moving but she's not passed out.

She's just quiet.
She's just tripping.
Dark eye makeup smeared like whoa. The world banked and bounded in shadows that feel both rising and steady, that hollow out her chest and curl up inside the cavities they make.

That drift from her skin, smoke made visible as the streets give way to morning.

Her eyes are open, pupils hugely dilated.

Sera dropped the acid hours ago. Hours and hours and hours and hours ago. Was starting to think that it was bad shit and kept bugging Dan to check her pupils are they dilated yet I think this is bad shit its all speed it's not -

- so she went out and started drinking because what the fucking hell. Making Good Choices is really something other people do.

The most intense hallucinations have faded to a sort of afterglow burn, but every light is ringed in rainbows and the tracers are like the promise fireworks in the sky, just before the blast, the rain-of-fire. And she knows, she knows, that dark things lurk just at the edges of her field of vision.

She has dreams, sometimes. She has such vivid dreams.

--

Sera takes one look at the new priest and instantly hates him. Hates him and everything about him. Hates the bulk of the church and the stupid confessional booths and the dead-eyed statues of the saints thinks of other saints saints with their eyes boiled saints with their bodies riddled with arrows and roasted over coals and torn apart.

Thinks of: a leaded glass window arch, smoke rising, the silver light of the moon cutting through at midnight and then later, the green morning, after the sun has risen, before the mist has lifted from the land. The statue of a dead god, splayed open.

They always cover him up but she knows he would've been naked when the Romans killed him.

Why the fuck can't these assholes face that?

--

And maybe he says something to her but she ignores him and will ignore him until and unless he threatens her with police and/or paramedics. She ignores him ducks her head and works through the motions of her fingers and the way they open a phone. Swipes the bar on her iPhone the wrong direction seventeen times before she gets it right and then thing wakes up all happy to see her and after three or four wrong numbers (sorry guys! just another random call from Sera at 5:30 in the morning) she gets it right and tries calling him and what the fuck this asshole's pager rings.

Which takes the breath out of her, all over again.

She wants him to be there. She wants him to always be there. Wants him to call her m'ija and give her a fucking bottle of water and sheets and a blanket and put her to bed on his stupid cheap scratchy couch. She wants to go to sleep or rather: not-sleep, that drifting not-sleep that comes in at the end of a trip where everything merges into a dreaming landscape of presence and absence that seems to radiate out from her spine in the half-light shrouded by cheap curtains both thinking and not-thinking about the stupid religious iconography on the wall. Wants to wander out of there around noon, not really having slept but having rested, all smeared sandpaper eyes and toussled hair and last-night's bruises on her body the straps of her stupid heels tucked in the curl of her index fingers and - and - and - bring him pan dulce in his office and scandalize the congregation and then drift out and wander home in the afternoon light and and maybe find someone to fuck or just curl up in the messy nest of her big bed and sleep until it is time to do this shit all over again but

this asshole's pager rings.

"What the fuck did you do with him?"

[We imagine, this does not end well.]

Serafíne

Rosa is fairly warned about her visitor, who arrives later that afternoon after a sketchy nap and with a certain blasted, rather wild-eyed look to her. Bright eyed, sand under her skin, her awareness of all things still altered though now those changes are memory more than fact, a certain halo around the edges of her vision, some immanence to the world all around: oracles and saints see the world like this, wrapped in light and mystery, truths slipping in through the skin of things and and what is she if not both, fallen sometimes, always, every time she can but both.

Rosa is fairly warned because the new pastor could not help but mention the morning visitor (he almost had to call the police, he mutters, in passing) and because Serafíne spends a solid twenty minutes in the sanctuary beforehand, sunglasses over her dark eyes, doing [i]something[/i] that the consor can perhaps feel, like the afterburn of Sera's acid hangover in the air.

Sera is: can't-take-your-eyes-off-her compelling.

Rosa is still: tight-lipped, angry beneath it perhaps, having none of this.

So, one more time and it does not end well.

--

There is this knot of raveling panic coiling beneath her left breast. Dan is waiting on the street at the wheel of the old Jeep she bought all those many months ago. It has Colorado plates now. Sera thinks they should get rid of it. What do they need except the van? Dan says no, aren't you always threatening to go rock climbing again? Do you want to waste the band-van's last few good miles in the mountains?

She says, naw. Justin left and she doesn't know anyone else to threaten to go with. Which is not true, she knows so-many-people, She says, she doesn't think she remembers how.

Dan thinks it's like a chord, it stays in your fingers. They have this conversation while the low-rise development of Federal is flying by. Vietnamese groceries and cheap taquerias. Car washes and strange little dress shops promoting matching ensembles for the attendants at quinceneras. Liquor stores and liquor stores and liquor stores and it is the world of darkness: more prostitutes out here at midday than you might imagine, wandering the weedy, broken sidewalks, the trashy parking lots, the graffiti-covered bus stops, looking like hell.

Sera is not-really-talking but her hands are shaking and even though he has work to do Dan follows her out into the garden when she goes there and everything is wet and things that are supposed to be green actually are and that dying rose bush esplanaded over the west garden wall will probably survive 'til next year may even bloom in a few weeks, this sudden blush of color but now mud and churning skies. No flooding here but sodden ground, mudmud mud mud mudlicious mud everywhere and standing water on the patio, pooled on the water resistant cushions no one bothered to think to maybe drag inside.

First she tries pacing but pacing-and-calling she can't make that work so she sits her ass down on the cabana bed and her ass gets wet and she can hardly work the phone can hardly think can hardly, hardly function except she can: beneath it all she can. And there are a half-dozen numbers that she works her way through and a half-dozen or so unhelpful answers and if she knew the magic for it if she had Jim's mad sense of space she would take another hit and down the rabbithole after a disappearing priest nevermind that she's still coming down from the last one but: she has a phone. Finally she hits on another number, which she cannot text because the texts disappear into data into nothingness. Which is a landline. Which rings to a corded handset somewhere.

And: she has an answer.

It is not quite the relief you'd imagine it to be. Some part of her feels so wrong, hollowed out and peeled back, aching but: it is an answer.

Sera calls Rafa again after that. Tells him what she learned and gives him the number, too. Then allows Dan to lead her out of the rainswamped garden, up the stairs, into her room. He doses her with Nyquil to help her sleep, and stays with her, a soothing hand in her hair, bantering quietly about lyrics, about anything, about nothing, until her breathing regulates and her eyes close and she is as peaceful and still as she ever is.