Counter/Magic

Steel

Life brings with it certain necessities. Food. Water. Shelter. Meet the basics and the needs get more complex. Security. Company. Creativity. Somewhere on the great stairway of needs is that to be clean. To wash and wipe away the dirt, even if water alone isn’t enough to wipe away the stains that are left behind. For most it’s not a complicated matter, to find a shower and a washing machine. It’s not that simple for all. Some have to find other ways.

Health clubs are good, if you can get in. Hospitals are better. Either way, it’s a simple thing to find a shower and get clean. Find the right place and time it right and there’s no rush either. No shortage of hot water. For a while, it feel wonderful. But all good things must come to an end.

Steel doesn’t have much else to do with her day. She has her eye on somewhere to hole herself up and make her own, even if it’s not for long. She doesn’t need to lighten the heavy burden of cash that lies on the rich office workers not so far away right now. Some new clothes would be good – god only knows how old and worn these ones are now – but that’s not urgent. If anything, still looking like a down-and-out is a decent mask to keep most people away.

So she sits on the grass, leaning against the back of a bench, near some pond or other in City Park. There’s an open sandwich packet in her lap, but she’s not eating. Bits of bread are being torn off and thrown to a couple of birds that are hopping around on the grass close by. And our shadow? Black hoodie is on, hood down for now, and worn black combats top heavy boots.

Samir

[la la awareness roll]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 7, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

also awareness roll.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 2

Samir

And here comes Samir.

He's on his way from one place to the other. Impossible to tell from looking at him where he's headed or from whence he's come. If he's in a hurry or taking his time. A sharpness to him that suggests he doesn't have time for niceties.

Unlike a certain individual lounging in the grass he doesn't have to do a damned thing to escape other people's notice or fade from their memories. It helps if he's putting forth a concerted effort to do either but sometimes all he has to do is step back into a person's periphery and it's as if he never existed at all. People he has known for years can't agree on what he looks like.

He looks like a typical twenty-something westerner who's on his way to a party on a Friday night. Empty-handed but that may not last longer than anything else ever has.

Steel

[Oh, crud, nightmares. I keep forgetting the nightmares]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Steel

[Awareness too?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

Strange night, stupid fucking park, this steamy dusk-strewn Friday night. Stormclouds scattered menacing at the edges of the sky, through a handful of stars are already coming out in the east, the sun has painted the western horizon with those vivid, bruising colors that - at a certain hour, when a certain light lingers this close to the apex, the crux, the fulcrum of the fucking year - are so real and brilliant and impossible that they seem to shatter the seat and seads and threads one's heart, just for a passing second. Lovely, lovely.

No telling if her heart's shattered, no reason to notice her except: well. For the way the world bends around her and the way she bends into it. They are hardly the only folks out here tonight. This stage on a nearby lawn, this acoustic-folk-rock thing happening, people picnicking, getting stoned, getting drunk, playing frisbee, drinking wine, making out, making up, making hay while the (last threads of) the sun shines.

She has a bottle in hand too: another stranger silhouetted against the darkness, picking her way barefoot over the grass. Coming from the direction of the frisbee game toward - whatever, who knows? she doesn't. Doesn't know her name right now, not precise. But what the hell.

She may be reacting to that sharpness, might've stood up from one of those blankets to intersect that path? She also senses something else, without resonance precisely, breathes out with her, closes her mouth, bites her tongue and is wrenched into line with the stuff-of-the-universe, reaches -

(Watch the Weaving Prime 1. Practiced. Specialty Focus. Dif 3.)

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 3, 7) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

(sorry, lost my first post because I was being dumb, but! it is late for me and I am sleepy so fast-posting is good for lizes and I am kinda include to mostly ignore posting order if cool with all. so post 'em when you got 'em.)

Steel

It doesn’t take long for the woman to run out of bread to throw at the birds that are still hopping and scratching around in the hope for a late meal. With the light and the sound of the city, it’s maybe not that unusual to see creatures that should be roosting away somewhere in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect.

The box empty, there’s a short blaze while she lights up a cigarette and starts to inhale. Nothing fancy, nothing herbal or otherwise enhanced. Just a straight old death stick. A dimmer glows and fades and glows and fades...

Sam may wander by without notice, but Sera? Oh, she stands out as no mere sleeper. She sees and knows more of the world than the vast majority of the population. And... wasn’t she familiar somehow? Some club over Colfax way? Yeah, maybe.

So there’s no flight yet, but Steel does pull her hood back up. Dyed black hair hidden away with other, more noticeable features. The cigarette continues to glow in the dark.

Samir

He isn't attuned enough to the world around them to make notice of someone who doesn't want to be noticed. Not even a flickering of notice. Something sugar-spun the rain would take away.

One moment he's meandering along minding his own business looking at his phone from time to time because he is young and youth are attached to their goddamn electronic devices. The next moment here comes the young woman everyone notices whether they want to or not.

Sam remembers her. He's not a gambling man but he would be willing to wager she doesn't remember him. He's also going to double down and say he can continue on through the park without anyone accosting him.

Steel

[Awareness again, you up to something Sera?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Of course everyone notices her.

Against the shadows she is another shadow, sharp and shapely and heady and gut-wrenching and soaring and strange and compelling, and she's barefoot and she's walking through the grass with the exaggerated care that could me she is a very, very, very precise creature and cares a fucking helluva lot about where she puts her feet or that could also mean she ate some edibles and drank a bottle of 1995 Veuve Cliquot Rose all by her lonesome nevermind that she has not eaten solid food for a month and a half for reasons of ritual or what the fuck ever.

Not that anyone's noticed.

--

Samir is not getting out of here though. She's on an intercept course. Reaching out for him. Still working. Blood sluicing through her saliva just enough to give her mouth a watercolor crimson frame, but it's the pain she needs, the hammer-and-nail of it to push through.

--

"Wait, stop. Fuck - "

The path is crushed gravel, ouch her poor feet and toes, but she is so clearly talking to Samir. Has a champagne bottle in one hand but is reaching for him with the other.

" - there's something, fuck. Can you feel that? I'm trying - "

Extending (+1 for extensions, -1 for resonance)

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 5, 9) ( success x 2 )

Steel

[There's something there and it's wrapped around this woman's mind and, damn... It's like grasping at shadows. But Sera teases enough of them apart to work out that there's something wrapped around the woman's mind. Something hiding and containing what should be as brilliantly obvious as Sera's own Resonance. The magic, though? Is devoid of taste and texture.]

Steel

People move, going about their business. Eating, drinking, making some moments of merriness in their quiet little lives. Are they lucky, no have such defined and bordered existences? Or are they poor sods to be pitied, unaware of the cages that they’re not even aware of. Blinkered to their blindness.

The one, though, carrying the bottle and winding her solitary way across the grass. The one who feels more awake than the rest of the sheep in the park. The one with a target in mind? Another who slips from attention so easily that, given the blink of an eye, only the vague memory of a presence remains. Someone the world shadows even more strongly than it does with her.

Steel shifts, but she doesn’t run. She stands and sits on the bench, perched on the back with her feet on the seat. And she watches. She knows that the woman with the bottle is doing something, but is it to do with her..?

Samir

It isn't so much that Samir doesn't like other people touching him. More like he doesn't like what his brain does to the person who touches him later on when he's sitting at home alone. That's another thing you can't tell from looking at somebody. How fucked up they are or aren't.

Their paths cross as they crossed before but this time Sera is reaching for him and Sam is trying to settle an argument with himself. Does she remember him or is she just wrecked off of champagne and whatever has caused her mouth to stain itself the colour of burst summer berries.

She's Working. She's Doing Something. She reaching for him and the words and the reaching and the imploring have him stopping. Eyes wide in the dark. She is so clearly talking to him.

"Um... what? I'm sorry, I don't..."

See: he felt Sera coming. He felt the magick she had worked and the magick she was now working and he isn't an unaware creature but he's unaware of what it is she's sensing or doing and he's read enough on Ginger lately and heard enough horror stories that he's grown a bit wary.

"What're you trying?"

Serafíne

A brief cameo in the downshunted light of one of those atmospheric faux-gas lamps, haloed in the darkness reveals her outfit. Silver lame hotpants and a white Sid & Nancy t-shirt, black bra obvious beneath, right arm stacked with rubber and leather and spiked bracelets, left covered in tattoos, even the flash of her hand as she does not appear to give a fuck about Samir's wide eyes or perhaps objection to physical contact.

Sera does not hug him but she does kinda slide her left arm through his right.

"Shhh." Hushed, susserant. And this, to Samir. I mean, maybe he dances away from the way she curls herself against him, but if not here she is, a stranger taking him by the arm and leaning in to him as if she needed something physical, something real, some anchor to keep herself on this plane of existence. And she turns her profile to him, the bridge of her noise against his shoulder, as if it were no more than natural. "Shhhh."

Nothing about her to tell you where her mind goes - how far back, how far deep, how thoroughly dark the place - except for the pressure of her hand against his arm.

"I just need you to watch my ass while I do this, okay? And be ready to run if I tell you to run."

Serafíne

(Dropping the Prime effect. Rolling: 1. quick and dirty mind shield to dash off first.

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 3, 6) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Countermagick: unweaving the strange effect she has identified.

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Samir

The evening is warm but not stifling and Samir is wearing a faux-leather jacket that has soaked up what little coolness the air offers. It glides against Sera's skin as she takes his arm and he tenses with the contact but does not try to haul himself back and away from her. Especially not when she uses words like proper words and not just shushing him like he's going to give them away.

He may yet. Right now he's tense and he's looking around the park. Can't watch her ass in the literal sense because of how she's tucked against him but he can feel the pulsing of the magick come out of the contact between them and his heart is hammering away in his chest and his mouth is dry.

If she tells him to run he'll be ready to run.

He lets the knuckles of his right hand rest against her ribs but beyond that Sam does nothing to reciprocate the touch. He's ready to run right now. He has no clue what's going on.

Steel

Oh, this fucking city.

All she’d wanted was somewhere to hide away in. Time to settle and gather herself and start to work out what the fuck had gone wrong before. Where people had gone.

But, not. Apparently that was too much to ask for. This woman with the bottle does something, fights her battle and does... something. What comes next, though? That she can feel. The unwravelling of her masking, the shield between her strangeness and the world around her. The extra little help she’d given herself to blend into the background, beneath notice.

She stands. And? She runs. She isn’t one for up-front fights, especially when she doesn’t know the ground or who the hell she’s fighting again. Or, for fuck’s sake, why! Once she gets out of the open she can take to the shadows and disappear again.

Assuming she makes it that far.

[Dex+Ath - so using WP]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 3, 5, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Her eyes are closed. God she's concentrating and the world devolved into these strange trapezoidal pockets of awareness. Some piece of her mind or her body keeps her: breathing, these short, harsh little breaths and just once she remembers so physically, so viscerally, so entirely that her too-thin frame shudders and if Samir has an ounce of empathy about him, he will sense both her dread and her determination and there's this way she kinda edges her spare frame foreward rather than back like she's shielding his ass even as she holds on to him and does -

does, well, whatever.

(Unweaving. Continuing.)

Can't talk right now. Something nerveless and shockingly physical about her magick, the way it rips through her body. The way she pours herself into it, mouth open a bit because it feels like she is both swallowing and dissolving the effect that so unsettles her.

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Steel

It’s still holding. It’s still holding. It’s still holding.

It’s still holding, but not for much longer. She needs to get away, but it’s still too open. She can still be seen, it’s way too obvious where she is.

Well, fuckit. She’s gotta do something. Her masking isn’t going to last much longer. That woman obviously knew something about Mind magic – hell, who even know how powerful she was. Steel just wants to get away.

The run slows to a walk. It might not be obvious to Serafine, but Sam might notice her balling her hands up into fists. As if she’s about to fight someone. Or something.

[Dark Streets, Ent 2 Forces 2. TN5, -1 for practiced, -1 for resonance, WP because hell yes. Darkening the shadows between her and the edge of the park.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 4) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Sera does not notice.

Every piece of her focus is fixed on undoing that Work. On peeling it apart, on exposing it to sunlight. On something, and god it echoes in her, and god it strips her, willingly mind, so thoroughly bare that even her teeth are aching with the effort.

--

And Samir, what does he know? There's just this strange girl, once again ignoring every convention regarding personal space, tense and aching and frightened and determined, at his side.

The air around her reeking of her magick.

(Countering: continued. Still on the Mind effect that creeped her out in the first place.)

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Sera does not notice.

Every piece of her focus is fixed on undoing that Work. On peeling it apart, on exposing it to sunlight. On something, and god it echoes in her, and god it strips her, willingly mind, so thoroughly bare that even her teeth are aching with the effort.

--

And Samir, what does he know? There's just this strange girl, once again ignoring every convention regarding personal space, tense and aching and frightened and determined, at his side.

The air around her reeking of her magick.

(Countering: continued. Still on the Mind effect that creeped her out in the first place.)

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Steel

[As the last threads of the effect are burned away like smoke on a breeze, the woman's resonance appears in the light of day. The sensation of something Shadowy. Piercing.]

Samir

[And Jamie is now officially too braindead to type a proper post. I'll write something amazing about his noticing skills when we pick this up again later!]

Steel

There is goes. The last of the effect torn away, but why the fuck for? All she’d been doing was fucking feeding the fucking ducks.

Time to vanish. It wasn’t her finest work. It was rushed and unsubtle, but hopefully enough. Enough to mask her physical form for long enough to get away from that bloody woman. Enough to make herself hard to find again.

Hopefully enough.

[Dex+Stealth. +2 from Dark Streets, +3 from Arcane.]

Dice: 12 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 4 )

Steel

[Gee, thanks. Nice roll.]

Serafíne

The effect pulls away and the resonance is new and the resonance is fading and the owner of that resonance is disappearing, Running. That much she can sense.

Steel finds the shadows of the park, thickens them. Cuts past picnickers and bike-riding and drunk kids and latenight joggers, breath harsh in her throat.

No one follows.

She makes her escape, or seems to.

After Open Mic

Outside the close atmosphere disappears as the crowd disperses in strange little streams. Laughter echoes in the quiet streets. A few of the evening's rather overtly hipster crowd are still lingering, sharing the odd cigarette on the front stoop of No Man's Land.

She's a few steps ahead of him; he's a few steps behind. Catches up easily, though, those long skinny legs of his. Sparkling on an evening buzz that has not expanded much beyond that initial brightness, that opening-up of the self. Catches up easily and catches her around the shoulders, dropping his mouth to her ear though he doesn't have to drop his mouth very far, 'cos she's wearing heels tonight.

"I wasn't actually eavesdropping," he begins, and she lifts her chin up enough to give him this smirk coupled with a little roll of her eyes that has him laughing and dropping a kiss somewhere close to the crown of her golden head. "Fine. I wasn't actively trying to eavesdrop."

She laughs, then. Keeps her mouth closed so the laughter kinda shivers through her skinny shoulders, gets added richness because it is so contained in her chest. And hums her, Mmmm Hmmm around her closed mouth with a primness that he finds pretty hard to resist.

"Right so: is it my imagination,"

" - it's your fucking imagination -"

"or did you actually just tell Elijah that he's gotta spend less time partying and more time studying if he wants to make it as a Hermetic?"

The last bit is quieter, and now his eyes are on her face, her profile stark against the soft-focused darkness of the street beyond her. This flicker of the fine muscles beneath her eyes and then she's looking up at him again. Pensive in her own way, which always feels more physical than metaphysical.

"Well, you know, it's like that fucking puppet. The one from the story who wants to be a kid or whatever. With the nose."

"You know I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I mean: there's a helluva lot of work that goes into being a Real Live Boy. No one else can do it for you." Somewhere in the middle of that little speech, her eyes drop from his and she cuts her glance: away, away, away. "And if you wanna do it, you've got to fucking - "

His arm tightens around her shoulders, his voice a low rumble. "You don't have to convince me."

"Yeah, well. What the fuck do I know."

"Stop it, Sera." The quietest sort of warning embedded in his voice.

"I know. I just - I dunno. I think I'm gonna call Claire's dad. But I don't wanna think about it right now and I can't stop - "

"Shhh. Let's go back to the first part then. I'm gonna write it down. Fuck it, I'm gonna write a song about it - "

"Shut the - "

"No, seriously. I'm proud of you. That was good advice."

"I know it. I'm pretty fucking smart sometimes."

"Yeah, you are."

Open Mic

Serafíne

Another hole in the wall, designed that way, artful touches meant to evoke a history that the building might have, which the establishment lacks. None of it really matters, there's enough there to get you in the door, squeezing past the little fenced in outdoor patio where the smokers are relegated into the narrow dogleg of a bar proper. The booths lining the wall are not simply full, but spilling over, and the bar is just as crowded. Inside, with the ambient noise, the conviviality, the music, the din you would never guess that it is Wednesday night. No Man's Land.

A fucking Wednesday night, the largest group of friend cohering/adhering has taken over the largest of the booths - this old circular one that dominates the back corner, cozied up against the small stage, which is empty now but: a small sign in the window says Wednesday - Open Mic - and that's why everyone's here.

This is a break, though. So there's music and chatter and drinks all around, all of this shimmying back and forth, buying rounds, sliding from table to table, chatting up friends, rivals, exes, strangers you cannot help but be drawn to. Among the folks lounging at the round booth in the far back, closest to the stage is someone who is hard to overlook. The air around her has this quickened intensity. Everything about her is sharp, vibrant, compelling right?

Even from a distance. Especially from a distance.

Maybe it's the rock-star vibe: low-slung cut-offs denim shorts over thigh-high fishnets, paired with a black leather halter covered in silver metal studs and spikes, beneath a black hoodie, unzipped, the metal teeth framing the concave curve of her whiplean torso. And fuck it, she's not sitting on the bench seat, but rather above the seat, on the spine - slight, you know? Sharper and finer than you remember, though why and how is not precisely clear unless one pays attention to the way her body changes when she starves herself, as she is doing now. Dark ink flashing with each gesture of her animated little hands, on the left palm, framing the right, inside both wrists, covering much of her inner left forearm, and so on, and so on. She talks with those hands, quick and sure and confident, with this essentially masculine swagger that belies delicacy of her frame.

And she's laughing now. Smiling at someone. Taking a picture: maybe a selfie.

That's the way it goes.

Elijah

He liked these kinds of places. Elijah could have been doing any number of things, like talking to people or getting some studying done or trying to convince the university to let him take more than the required amount of classes because something lit a fire under his ass and all of a sudden Elijah Poirot wanted something, and if he wanted something, he would do anything and everything in his power to get said thing. He's a young, white, cisgendered male of an upper middle class family. He's been told the world is his, should he want to take it. He's probably never known hunger nor want nor any number of things (people wouldbe wrong to think he's known no suffering, that life has been easy, but his parents are paying a significant amount of money for him to fuck around at a private college. It says something.)

He didn't know what kind of open mic it was, but he wanted to find out. He was giving himself a break, because he would always give himself a break. Always catch himself at the right time, or the wrong time, give himself too much leeway because he's never really had to be pushed. Even magic came easily right until the point it didn't come easily, until he butted against something and couldn't figure out the way through until he realized that wall was all him. He was what held himself back so fuck what kind of open mic it was.

Elijah was going. That was that.

He's got jeans on, the kind with some holes that he's actually worn into them in some painfully stylish fashion from a few years back that actually came, largely, from climbing out a window and tearing himself up in a rose bush. All torn shirt and jeans and scratched cheeks and spit out rose petals and it hurt but so what? Sera's laughing, and that's what draws him in, away from a bar, away from his white tee shirt and the brunette with the eyeliner who had been talking to him. He winked, bid her goodbye, he had to meet a friend.

"You ever hear about those fuckin' stick things people use to take selfies?" was his hello. He's got about a dozen bracelets on one wrist, a necklace that he can't take off because Jenn tied it on and it hasn't worn out yet.

Serafíne

"Huh?" says she, and also - "huh?" mid-laugh. The flash of her teeth, the darting delicacy of her chin. This sharp look framing the beneficence of her smile as she looks up from selfie-taking and story-telling with the young woman with electric-blue hair who is both somehow beside her and at her feet (seated in the booth properly) and zeroes in on Elijah.

Oh, Elijah.

Sera favors him with a spreading smile that is wrapped in a half-dozen layers and reaches out - leaning forward, see, over both seat-and-people and perhaps table too - to offer him her hand, palm up. This is an invitation. Maybe to take her hand, maybe to kiss her knuckles, maybe to climb over everyone and come sit beside her and share her throne.

Or perhaps to sit at her feet, in that booth, the way the lesser gods are always doing with Zeus in the old Greek myths.

"Those things are fucking obnoxious!" Announces Our Sera, when and if Elijah has clambered over all those strangers, and perhaps even if he has not.

Elijah

She reaches out, and forward, and he takes himself in and forward. It's over people, it's around people, there's a moment where he lingers and talks to someone, cracks some joke about unintentional flirtations over awkward body positioning ("And I really rather it be intentional-" a smile, a promise "-definitely intentional.") and comes across. Over. around, and slides in.

He does take her hand, like an anchor, once he gets close enough raises in, lips briefly to her fingers and down again (like the Godfather, you see, kissing rings and favors on the day of my daughter's wedding, though Sera never seemed the type to behead horses to make a point) and it's in the booth.

His usual response is to sit on tables. Elijah st on tables and bars and put his feet in a chair and settled in. No, this time his rear end was half in the seat and half on the person on his other side and he settled in anyway because he was a thin little thing. Puts his arms where they'll fit, regardless of who might be there.

Those things are fucking obnoxious.
"Right? I thought it was just something the internet made up, but seriously, it's a thing. People buy them."

He then makes a sound that is eh! ish in nature, but it's lost to the blair of people.

Serafíne

So Elijah climbs up and over and around and in, young and athletic enough to manage it, squeezes himself right in between the girl with electric blue hair and Sera's own fishnet clad legs. Sera's feet are bare, heels kicked off and tumbled beneath the table where the neck of a guitar case sticks up the ground. They're all here (mostly) for the electric-blue-haired girl, who is not someone Elijah has met before, or seen among Sera's friends, but that hardly signifies. What the hell does he know about Sera's friends?

And if he tries that flirtatiousness over awkward-body-positioning with the blue-haired girl she rolls her eyes and smirks - friendly enough, but still a deeply skeptical smirk, and when he brushes his mouth over Sera's knuckles in some strange echo of a courtly gesture (match for his watch-in-a-pocket and his ever-present vest) Sera also rolls her eyes, just a bit, and smirks.

That expression is as quick and sure and just as darting as any other that skims the edges of her mobile little mouth. Precise at the end in a way that feels quite nearly chaste or perhaps simply: chained, restrained, banked, you know?

Her fine fingers are bristling with rings-like-brass-knuckles or brass-knuckles-like-spiked-rings anyway, the tips cool and lightly damp.

"People buy anything." Returns Sera, philosophical, though in some substantial way she does not believe that that is true. "Everything. I wish they'd buy more shit, though, you know? More poetry and madness, less of this fucking ordinary shit. What the fuck are you doing out tonight, anyway?"

Wiggles her inked fingers there, for emphasis.

"Aren't you supposed to be studying or some shit? Reading half a fucking library."

Hard to tell if she means: college or that bullshit Hermetic stuff. Could be both, could be neither. You'd have to ask to find out; that doesn't mean she'd tell.

Elijah

He does not try to be flirtatious with the blue-haired girl, though he does make eye contact and grin. The tiniest bit of cad in with the remnants of antiquated manners (like the pocketwatch didn't say it all- it's survived a car wreck. The face has a hairline crack and there's the tiniest bit of blood worked into the inlay on the front. It makes him like it more.)

"I don't think you can buy madness, you just get it. Madness shows up with a fuckin' lampshade on its head or screams on your lawn at four in the morning because it loves you or the stars are falling out of the sky or blacking out-" no, not like he's cried out on her couch, convinced the world was falling apart at all "-or whatever needs to be screamed or whispered or held like some butterfly or some shit. You come up on madness and you go I need this and so, it stays with you, maybe, until it's done."

Says done like he's done, like he's effused all the poetry he has on madness in a huff and has inherited a verbose nature from Kalen, or perhaps attracted the man because there is that in common. Except in this: Elijah is not Kalen. Their tangents are not the same. (Not anymore).

"I decided that the library would be there tomorrow. Presumably. But tonight would not be here tomorrow and I wanted to see what this open mic thing was- like, singing or poetry or vaudeville? Fuck if I know," he said with a shrug, "I needed a break before Hell week."

He could have been talking about college or that bullshit Hermetic stuff. Could be both, could be neither.

"I've been trying to learn how to behave in public and learning fuck that. Do you have any idea what order the sorbet course comes in? Because I had no fucking clue that was a thing."

Serafíne

There are a solid dozen bottles littered over the round table at the center of the booth, and four martini glasses and five highballs and two wineglasses and one lone and lonely-looking frozen-martini-in-a-glass-that-looks-like a cactus and none of those drinks are hers. Not that Elijah knows that.

But she's smiling kinda-down at him, shadows dark over her face, the light behind her. These glimpses, these gleams when she cants her head aside or lifts her chin enough to catch the light. Or smiles: as she does now, reaching down to twist her fingers through his hair and something about the gesture, or maybe the gleam of his blond locks twisting through her fingers, or maybe the liquid feel of it, or the tangible hint of oil and sweat that grounds us all, makes us human, has her stilling, closing her mouth, catching her breath, present and absent all at once. This sometimes haunted edge that -

- but no. A taller form behind her pushing up the hood of the hoodie to cover the crown of her head and oh fuck, guess what? it is topped by a black-and-silver unicorn horn and this ragged mane stitched into the downcurving seam below the crown squares of black leather and silver sequins and everything in between, a mad little patchwork. Sera shakes the hood off the crown of her head though does this without objection and cranes her head back a bit and lo!

There is Dan, arms around her neck and shoulders, and she's tipping her head back, a brief, affectionate glance, a banked and almost private pleasure evident in the frame of that look.

"It's an open mic. So it's pretty much whatever the fuck you wanna do, but it's so fucking popular that you have to get on the schedule, and fuck I think they're scheduled out what - " Sera glances at Dan, who supplies -

"I think it's a couple of months at least, maybe more."

"I mean," Sera, continuing, "you could go up there with one of those fucking talking puppets - "

"Ventroliquist?"

" - whatever the fuck they are. Mostly it's singer-songwriters and poets and rappers and shit. I mean, but sometimes it's strangers complaining about their plumbing problems or their asshole neighbors or storytellers or toastmasters or exhibitionists or people trying to tackle their fear of public speaking or what the fuck ever. That's what I like best, the people who get up there to fucking ramble about learning how to behave in public." This, with another quick little smirk and an upward lilt of her chin.

"What does that even mean? Whose asshole rules are you trying to learn?"

Elijah

He doesn't have the foggiest idea that none of those glasses are hers, doesn't know that it's been awhile since he last saw her drink, that he's last seen her indulge in such a fashion but she is keen and more and he likes it but when has he ever not liked Sera? When has he ever not taken the opportunity to close his eyes and take the whole of her presence- the parts he can handle, the parts that are not too much and leave him drowning- like a flood. Like a hurricane, only now it doesn't scare him like it used to. Only now he pushes back, willing to drown in whatever is there because it's always been there- he wonders if he could really fathom Sera sometimes. She seems so much more than reality, like mundane bullshit was beyond her notice.

There's that haunted edge, the cant of the light and he's looking at her mouth and his green eyes are flicking up towards hers to take in the color of hers and there was something there he hadn't noticed before. Something he doesn't ask about because there's people all over, because it doesn't seem right, because she smiled at him and he'd rather drink in that smile right now than take in some hard truth. Sips, not tidal waves.

And like some be-horned spectre, there is Dan. Makes Elijah beam to see him, but it was back to conversation.

"Oh, I wanna do this," he says, like it's something dangled in front of him, "fuck two months, I can figure out something to say in two months." Like he didn't have enough already.

But there is a continuation and he shrugs, sighs something with not-so-mock exasperation, something dramatic to hide the actual exasperation. "I could never fuckin' figure that out? I was supposed to learn something from that Trent guy but we never got on to protocol and fuck if I know why the default assumption is that however the fuck I carry myself around people who supposedly matter is unacceptable-" he realizes he doesn't have a drink, he would have drank to that but he waves it off "-and who gets to say who's a big deal and who isn't? Shouldn't you just endeavor to not be a dick when dealing with people? Don't be a dick shall be the whole of the law? It just all seems like unnecessary crap and everyone knows it but they like jumping through the fuckin' hoops anyway because what? It makes them feel good?"

A beat.

"I'm doing that thing where I talk, and I'm not giving anyone the chance to actually interject, sorry." A genuine sorry.

Serafíne

"'Course you can." This is Dan, but his bearded mouth is against Sera's temple, the edge of it, where her pulse beats and beats and beats, pumped there by her fast little heart, and something about the natural way they twine together marks the awareness that lays between them. The magick. The care. And Sera, her mouth gives this responsive little twinge of a smile as Dan assures Elijah that he can come up with something to say in two months and Sera hooks her narrow shoulders upwards, this sublime little gesture, as she finishes her consor's thought - " - and we'll be there with bells on."

--

Then, oh, then.

They're making this fine cocoon, aren't they? The noise around them recedes or perhaps that is merely a trick of one's senses. Focus on the conversation in the foreground, and the rest becomes little more than bright, convivial white noise. No matter how open, how confident, how compelling Sera is, the strangers (to Elijah, though now Sera) all around him also somehow instinctively recognize that they Do Not Belong to the self-same flock.

"See," Sera is saying, and her tattooed fingers are still waterfalling through Elijah's slippery golden hair. "The don't be a dick shall be the whole of the law, you should've followed my path, not theirs. Right? Think about their names, all those goddamned distinctions. And it's not that it's meaningless.

"That shit is infused with meaning because they inhabit the forms and protocols and rituals, because they draw the circles and bow to the north wind and cleanse their palates between courses with a pinch of salt from a silver salver or a fucking sorbet and pick up the proper fork a the proper time.

"What is protocol but another word for ritual, high or fucking low?

"Tell me this. Why do you think people bow before a sovereign queen? Or why do you think countries care about whose flag is fucking higher?"

Elijah

There's a sameness, and a difference. No matter how close they were sitting, the tone of the conversation, the pieces and the weight and the parts of the words and sentences and what-have-you. He puts forth a lovely front but there had always been some sense of otherness. Being there but not really being all there. And the hum and general sound and buzz around them is just white noise, another layer of white noise he's accustomed to tuning out. Except this wasn't so much tuning out as tuning in

She runs her hand through his hair, fingers though golden locks and he closes his eyes for a second, takes in words and sensation at the same time and knows good and well which he feels a stronger connection to.

Why do people bow to a queen? Who cares if the flag is higher-

"It's symbolic communication- the queen isn't different than any other human being. The flag's just a scrap of fabric but people invest meaning in those things because they're symbols- a sovereign queen is the sign of the nation, at once being above the people and for the people, sovereignty makes her a mother figure. Even if, politically speaking, the queen doesn't have any power, she is still that symbol. They bow to show respect to the symbol, not to respect of the person because a really fucking tiny portion of the world is actually buds with a queen. The flag's the same way, it speaks as national identity, for good or for bad. A flag becomes a sign of the people but a sign of the values of those represented by it- it's a statement of their values and their sovereignty being more respected in an area than anything else. It's a sign of, like, a higher order. Why national flies over state, why things go at half mast- to say that for a moment even the nation bows in respect to something of importance."

Serafíne

Sera breathes out, not sharply but deeply. This quiet gusting breath lost beneath the ambient noise. The way she sits above him, looking down, emphasizes the angularity of her features. The prominence of her nose, the cut of her cheekbones, her jaw. The light behind her plays halo-ish tricks in the crown of her golden sidecut.

"That's not really what I meant." Humor there, and a kind of tenderness that feels errant without being accidental. Knight-errant, the tilting-at-wildmills sort. Her long-fingered hand settles, though, on the crown of his head, gentle, thoughtful, quixotic. "My question wasn't quite that literal. It was more metaphorical, right? People pour meaning into that; bowing to the queen means something to everyone in the royal court. So does not -bowing.

"Those rules aren't rules that you can opt-out of, at least, not until you've fucking learned them and you've decided you want to say something different to everyone watching. Not if you're a member of the royal court. Or, you know, House Gryffindor. See, if you want there to be meaning in breaking the rules, you have to know them in the first place. Music's like that too - I'm all for breaking the dominance of the western major scale but who can do that successfully without understanding its unpinnings and its fractures?

"And I'm not saying it's a bad fucking thing to say something different to everyone who is watching, but - I mean, if you are fundamentally so fucking opposed to the idea that there are some rules of protocol you need to learn, I gotta wonder if you belong there in the first place. Most of the people in that group you're gonna meet spend a helluva lot of time, probably on their knees, learning those rituals and protocols in the first place, you know?"

Elijah

"I don't get it," he admits, he sighs. And it isn't defeat it's just... a disconnect. A difficulty, "I tried to figure out the whole social implications, I tried to figure out the historical background, I tried to piece it together from a cultural context and I just... I'm missing something."

Distraught. Distraught was a nice word for it. There are things he doesn't tell Kalen, he puts on a good face and seems like he gets it when he learns it but there's sweeping cuts of form and function that just... don't... click. And he's trying, the sound of his voice, the insistence that he studied, the honesty in it all says that he was really trying and it just... wasn't clicking.

She might have experienced it before, or perhaps not. Elijah was a spoiled thing. She probably had hints of this, the cell phone that seems easily replaced when he breaks it. The fact that he generally fucks off at an absurdly expensive college, or even the fact that he has an apartment that he can support two people in despite having a part time job that probably pays him minimum wage. He's not accustomed to things being difficult. There are things Sera doesn't know. She doesn't know that this extended to school, that this extended to him sleeping through classes and skirting by and pulling a B out of his ass at the end of a semester because oh, I need to do this or my parents will be pissed. Or oh, I'm three points shy of an A, why not try a little?

He's not used to trying because, frankly, when one doesn't actually try one doesn't have to risk failure. One can shrug it off as not really trying, and it's a wash. If you don't try at something you're afraid of failing at, then you didn't really fail. You just gave up, lest you find out that you are wanting.

This was a problem. This was a big problem because he actually was trying and finding that something wasn't working and magic was easier than this stupid-

It wasn't stupid, though. There were reasons behind it. He could pick apart pieces but couldn't stick them into a whole. Couldn't make sense of the bigger picture and it was killing.

"I don't get it. I tried, I did the research I went through the damn process and I'm supposed to get it and it's still not there."

This is something he should tell Kalen.

This is something he isn't going to tell Kalen.

Serafíne

Perception + Empathy: specific to the stuff about Hermetics and Hermeticism.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

Well wtf? SERA LOOKS HARDER. +1 difficulty.

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 ) [WP]

Elijah

There was a statement, and it could first come by dissection. Like diagramming a sentence, like picking apart literary devices that the author chose and understanding the elements in order to understand the piece. The first outburst was understandable, textbook high school student when it comes out. It's exasperation, it's faulting the system for something he doesn't understand and because he doesn't understand it, clearly, it must be dumb. He hasn't worked inside of that system because, in Denver, the system consisted of (possibly) three people. Two out of the three people he's interacted with from the tradition he was petitioning seemed keen on an idea that rank, that accomplishment, that the structure wasn't... perhaps... completely... there.

It's him writing it off. It's him trying to dismiss a concept because he doesn't understand the concept. And not for lack of trying, either. He's beaten it to death, failed to see the forest for the trees and only came out with dirt under his nails and no idea why it was there. It was a chapter that was covered in the books, insisted upon because, someday, this would come up. Someday, this could be useful and perhaps presented in a neutral light at best.

It's test time. Shows up with a scantron and someone hands him a blue book and there is that moment of blanching, that moment of horror because he'd plugged away at this like it was multiple choice. Taught for the test for what the reviewing committees were looking for and, once it was learned, could promptly be thrown away to make room for the next test. His outburst, his dismissal, his flippancy comes from a desire to hide the fact that he really, genuinely, doesn't understand the concept. That he came up on something he'd actually tried for and found that his best wasn't good enough. It's easy to say the rules are formalities when you've boiled them down into nice, simple parts.

And he confesses, confesses that he's tried, that he's tried to put the pieces together to give meaning to words and symbols but they just aren't linking together and he's stumbling like he has two puzzles mixed together. He learned protocol and structure from a man who was on the outskirts of the Order, admittedly and openly perhaps on probation. His own mentor, the person who showed him that magic was real, covertly intent on reworking the order from within. It's difficult, because Elijah doesn't understand. He's having a hard time reconciling that the structure is important, has a hard time believing that it is integral when the sources the knowledge came from weren't so passionate on the subject.

There are holes in his education, and they're starting to show.

But he's trying to plug them in, he's trying to make things make sense but he's still sitting in an exam room staring at the bluebook trying not to panic because he knows he has the answers, somewhere in the rote memorization and the piles of books he read once upon a time when he loved the subject.

Because it's true, it's true that he did, that he does, that it doesn't quite come through in his sullen pouting (and make no mistake, he'd thrown a tantrum, quiet as it was, younger than he was and needed to grow the fuck up like he's heard half a dozen times from half the mages he knows) He loves this because it is difficult, he may be sitting there while time's running out and all he wants to do is turn in a blank paper and beg to take the class again. He didn't want to know the answer, didn't want someone to tell him because he wanted to find it.

He's turned in every test and he doesn't know his grade going into the final. Doesn't know if he's been doing it right or wrong until he find himself massively wrong and there was the assumption that he would correct himself.

There are holes in his education, and they're starting to show. Elijah can't fill them fast enough, and some were left intentionally there. Blank and gaping like some gunshot wound he was supposed to just deal with.

There are holes in his education, and he wants to fill them but he doesn't know how.

Serafíne

Sera loves a Hermetic, but that does not mean she understands their ordered world. Their names and their angels, their orders and protocols, their wands and their weapons, their altars. Their words. But her hand is tender on the crown of Elijah's head and she is watching him with such a close, quickened attention. This strange, frustrating moment where what she Sees is little more than what he Says has her seaming her mouth and blowing out a breath that stirs the strands of his fine, fine hair.

Then her hand slides down to cup the back of his skull and she is leaning-leaning-leaning forward, precariously perched on the spine of that booth, crowded in on all sides by her friends. One of the bar owners is heading back to the mic, the list of the evening's performers in hand, and the blue-haired girl (up next) is excusing herself, extricating her guitar case from beneath the table and somehow manages not to upend even a single drink.

"Elijah," she tells him, quiet, tender really. "If you wanna learn this shit. If you wanna commit yourself to Hogwarts, you gotta commit. You gotta pretend that you're fucking Hermione, and spend less of your time getting fucked up and doing whatever you want whenever you want and a helluva lot more of it in the library.

"Or, hell. Maybe you should spend more've your time building one of your own. Do you know how much time Hawksley spent in his? Or on the fucking quidditch court if the library isn't for you. I mean, I am fucking sure that there are plenty of ways to figure out how to be a Hufflepuff or a Ravenclaw, or fucking whatever, but I don't think many of them involve closing down the bars of LoDo on a regular basis while getting high as a kite and canoodling with whoever wants to canoodle.

"I mean, I'm all for canoodling and getting stoned yeah? But I'm so far from what you wanna be - "

Sera closes her mouth then; something, some string-in-her heart has her turning head head almost sharply away from Elijah. Maybe she's watching her blue-haired friend lift the guitar out of its case and start getting it back into tune, more likely she is somewhere: far away.

When she glances back at him, her eyes are shining, though this could be a trick of the light, nothing more. "I'm gonna see if I can find someone else for you to talk to, okay? I'll let you know."

Singular, eccentric, golden.

Serafíne

Eleven-thirty rounding closer to midnight and the only reason the doors are open and the crowd is streaming out now is someone turned off the singer's mic after the third encore and management turned on the harsh house lights and started playing the star-spangled banner. Three dudes in thick black beards start right in the middle of the bank of doors leading into The Palace belting out one of those misheard versions of the national anthem and it's hard to tell whether their errors are deliberate and ironic or simply the result of overindulgence in some beverage or substance or the delights of being a heavily bearded dude standing outside a stinking-hot concert venue watching the sweaty organism of your fellow-travelers spill outside. A poet might say it's like watching a galaxy being formed: the great singular mass of the audience resolving itself into small pinpoints of light: bright, moving, liquid, exultant.

She's part of that mass, Sera. The sort of girl who takes a stranger's hand in a dark and crowded club and follows him into the center of the pit and drops that hand quite as easily and simply as she took it in the first place, sliding out of his orbit, singular, eccentric, golden.

Samir

This man is not a poet. He's a drug dealer and a shut-in besides. All he has to say about the experience is many people populated it and he felt compelled to count every person who passed over the threshold but he was waiting for one person in particular and that one person wasn't even part of the concert they were just meeting someone after the concert and once he did what he needed to do he was fully intending to just leave but then the crowd came pouring out of the door and this other person wanted to stand talking for a long time and he didn't want to be rude.

So here is Sam.

And here is Sera.

Sam is speaking Spanish to a young woman named Yolanda and they are both dark of skin his mother being from India and her parents both being from the Dominican Republic but in this city nobody pays any more attention to Spanish than they do to English. Businessmen and engineers and doctors speak both languages in this city. Some of them even speak Mandarin or Vietnamese. It's a big city for one so high up.

Yolanda wants to sleep tonight. That's why she's here. Sam is Awake. That has nothing to do with the why but he is here all the same. And when Sera comes near he almost but does not quite look away. Aware, you see. He's aware.

Serafíne

(awareness - )

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

Sera is awake, and blonde (bottle) and not precisely fair but fair-er than Samir and Yolanda. The Spanish though - the rhythm of it, more liquid, more elegant than English - is as familiar to her as her blood-and-bones. Right now it is no more than one out of a half-hundred conversations hanging in the air around her. She drifts through them, a stranger dressed low-slung cut-offs and a see through black lace bra.

Has something tied loose around her hips and something else slung over her left shoulder, maybe a concert tee, and a silver chain bisecting her lean frame.

Tattoos, too, dark ink flashing on the frame of her hands, or her left flank and she first streams past and then turns. Looks - hungry right? For something or anything, following that impinging sensation (piercing) until she meets the stranger's eyes.

Holds them, too.

She's anything but fucking shy, our Sera.

Samir

[AWARENESS]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 6, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )

Samir

Sam's accent does not peg him as a native speaker. If anything it has a more Middle Eastern lilt to it being as he has more experience speaking Arabic than Spanish but he is from fucking Vancouver originally. Spanish with a Pacific Northwest English accent. It's out there.

It's out there and it's on a young man of average height who looks taller because of how lanky he is. His black hair is tied in a knot at the nape of his neck and his profile is handsome. Not classically so but he has strong features and bright warm eyes even in the dark. Even when the fingerprint of his magic is like a needle finding its way into a vein. A knife finding its way into flesh. Something piercing and unapologetic in its piercing.

And then their eyes meet. His gaze would be piercing to a Sleeper but Sera hasn't been asleep for a long fucking time. She's stronger than he is and growing stronger still. It doesn't quail him but it does catch his attention. It does make him look at her.

He is in fact handsome even out of profile. Young and still growing into his features. He will fade from memory just so soon as they part ways. The universe has a fucked-up sense of humor.

Oh shit say his eyes though he doesn't say anything yet. He has to finish up with Yolanda.

Serafíne

Okay well you know what Sera's resonance is. She also has a ring that was consecrated by Hawksley so she's like got so much resonance going on it is pretty nuts: visceral, enthralling, liminal sun-drenched, soaring.

MAYBE SHE IS AN ARCH MAGE.

(but uh the latter stuff localizes not to her being but something on it)

Serafíne

There's a current moving around them: water streaming out to the sea, and moving against the current is far harder than moving with it, but look: she catches that gaze and sparks and turns around and breathes in and then she breathes fucking out. Laughing or something, as she stops still in the middle of that current, becomes a rocky-outcropping, a sandbar, creates her own sort of undertow. Then starts swimming against the tide, cuts through a trio teenagers tottering in too-high heels, slippery as an eel. Shorter than all of them in her silver-trimmed combat boots.

Two steps away while he's finishing with Yoland and not at all shy about listening in.

Waits her turn through, as if someone somehow somewhere had taught her some manners or maybe she simply knows better than to interrupt a deal going down.

"You're fucking new."

- is what she says to him, after.

She wants a cigarette. She wants so many things.

But right now, she's not giving in to anything, except curiousity.

Samir

They'd passed drugs for money and were just shooting the shit when Sera walked up. Yolanda likes Sam. This is their first time meeting but he's attractive and he's shy and she has impressions of him that may or may not be true. She is thanking him for coming out tonight and saying she hopes he'll be at the party next weekend and he is giving a noncommittal answer and she's walking away and then -

You're fucking new.

He saw her coming and he still startles like he'd heard a car backfire. Puts his hands into his pockets and shuffles them around he has plenty in his pockets but Sera is a wanting thing. He would take her for a homeless or an addict if it weren't for that fucking ring on her finger or the strength of her essence.

"Ah..." Uncomfortable breath of a laugh. His natural inclination is to make eye contact and yet he ducks away from it as quick as he'd duck away from a fist flying at his face. "Yeah. Good... good eye. Who're you?"

Serafíne

"Serafíne." Who're you? That was easy. Sera smirks, this quick, lively little movement of her mobile mouth. On the dark, spangled street in the midst of her crowd, her dark eyes have these pinpricks of reflected light that glide she flashes him that expression. "Call me Sera."

She reaches up to grab the t-shirt from her left shoulder and tosses it over her right.

"Who the fuck are you?"

--

Samir ducks away from eye contact. God, Sera seeks it. Maybe she snags his gaze again. Maybe she's just hunting it.

Samir

Young as he is Sam is not a creature that can put up a fight for long. Nothing in his psychology to make him want to escape capture nor to give chase as a means of delayed gratification. He is self-aware and Sera can sense perhaps that he is aware of how it is he's acting and the longer they are in each other's company one with a sense of Normal and Insane can label his behavior as Insane but they are beings capable of becoming gods if they keep at it long enough. They don't have time for that shit.

He can maintain eye contact for a couple of seconds at a time before something makes him uncomfortable and he looks away. Sera does not make him uncomfortable. That's not the kind of illness he has.

Who the fuck is he.

"Samir," he says. A knee-jerk twitch of a smile that doesn't reach his eyes. "Call me Sam. You mind if I smoke?"

He has a Canadian accent. God help him.

Serafíne

"You go ahead and smoke, Sam."

Though the truth is: she minds.

Or maybe she just wants, right now.

"You weren't at the show." She tells him, like maybe he needs to know. Or no, perhaps it's not that at all. "It was fucking amaze-balls. Did you really show up here just to meet that chick? Give her her shit?"

Samir

[perc + empathy: because i want to see what happens]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 2

Serafíne

First and foremost: desire. Not for any specific thing, or maybe for too many specific things, so many things all rolled together. She is hungry and she is hungry and she wants a cigarette and she wants a joint and she wants a fuck and she wants wants wants and she is: not having it. Is deliberately and decidedly not indulging. Or perhaps it is not the denial that matters, so much as the want she is cultivating, honing, sharpening until it hurts her. Until it drags her forward, upward, rising, hooks-in-skin.

So no. She actually doesn't mind, somewhere beneath all that.

Samir

Here is another way a thing can pierce: in the moment his eyes meet hers when she tells him to go ahead and smoke he looks at her without Looking at her. Looks at her like he's paying attention even if that attention only lasts so long as it would last for a flashbulb to stun her sight and then it's over. Alright. She wants to mind. If he smokes it will give her denial.

Self-aware on top of everything else and he grits his teeth so he will not sigh for sighing will show what he has seen and so he fishes out a pack of cigarettes instead. He wasn't at the show.

"I don't know what you're talking about," says the shitty liar. Out comes a coffin nail and out comes the lighter. With the cigarette held down near his hip he strikes the lighter's ignition once to make sure it works. This all seems coincidental. He's talking while he does it. "She's... she was in the area, and I was in the area, and..."

Four fucking times he strikes the lighter wheel and then he hits the cigarette with the flame and inhales deep and pockets the lighter like none of this is a Thing. Blows the smoke away from Sera. He can't stop looking at her and yet he has trouble maintaining the looking.

Sigh. Now he sighs.

"Who was playing tonight?"

Serafíne

"You're a shitty liar," so she declares, and truth it must be. She's a truth-teller, or maybe she's ust a shitty liar herself. Takes one to known one, right? Still, that crawling half-smile, the cut of her ribs beneath her skin, chin rising, eyes half-closing, inhaling even as he blows the smoke away from her because fuck, isn't that what she's looking for? The space between who she is and who She is. The space between. A kind of shimmy-shrug meets both his sigh and the question that cuts in after the sigh: who was playing?

"Glass Animals and TV on the Radio. Show opened with the reunion of this local band that apparently used to play out all the time like fifteen years ago, Odor of Pears."

Doesn't really always believe in personal space, Sera. She's showing that now, squeezing closer, grinning up at him. Blond curls damp with sweat, her spare ( - wasting - ) frame gleaming with it.

"Next time come inside okay? I promise you'll have a good time."

Samir

A normal person might have crouched into a defensive posture but Sam is an honest sort. That's what makes him a shitty liar. She calls him on it and he stands still a moment like he isn't used to being in the presence of someone who will call him on his shit and then he lets the ghost of a laugh leave his lungs. Easy to lose since he takes a drag off the cigarette a second later and then the pocketing of the lighter and the sighing and and and.

When he sighs it's not because of her but because of the shit with the lighter. Might sound like it's because of her. Either way he changes the subject.

And then she's in his space and he lets her get there because maybe he never learned what the fuck personal space was. Doesn't invade other people's but doesn't push other people out of his either. She can see he's uncomfortable though. Shitty liar. Lots of things make him uncomfortable. He's staring her in the eye the entire time she's next to him though. Proximity makes it harder to look away.

She promises he'll have a good time.

He swallows thick and tries to look like a man who has confidence in himself. Stands up a hair straighter and grits his teeth again. He looks like he could still be a teenager but for the hardness of his bones and the implication of muscle underneath his clothes.

"O--" Yeah. Nailing it. Something catches in his throat so he swallows and tries again: "Okay. Sure."

cockroach

[You guys mind a PC drive-thru?]

Serafíne

I wouldn't mind but I am going to bed! after my next post. hah. so tired.

Samir

[I'm good for about another hour or so.]

cockroach

[It's a one-post thing. Possily with meaningful eye contact.]

Serafíne

then slide on in!

Steel

[Awareness?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Steel

A shadow passes through the crowd. The shadow has been creeping through the city for the past few days, now. Searching, but not for anything concrete or specific. More of a concept. Safety. Maybe even home, although it would take a long time before anything becomes even close to being called that.

East Colfax has finally drawn her in. It’s not a nice area. Letting agents might try selling it to the unsuspecting as Edgy, Happening, and other euphemisms that skirt around the fact that this probably isn’t a place many would want to live if they could possibly help it. Who would to trip over drug addicts, gang bangers, prostitutes, turf wars, psychiatric cases and the homeless just to get to the bus stop?

But even within shitholes, there are places that attract traffic and places that rarely see people. Because they’re run down and dangerous, because they’re in a patch of territory that’s dangerous to get to. Hell, because they’re just one of those places that people avoid.

Maybe it’s one of those places she’s seeking as she works her way through the unexpected crowd. But there’s something – two somethings – in the crowd that distract and divert and get her attention. A beacon of sensation. Something sharp and piercing, not entirely unlike… Unlike someone she’s acquainted with.

So there’s a figure – most likely a woman, the bumps seem to be in the right places – looking directly at Sera and Samir as they share their quiet conversation. It’s not for long, and she doesn’t approach. She doesn’t know them, and she still doesn’t feel safe. She’d been freaked out by how she’d been uncovered a few days ago, and she’s not planning on risking that again. Not yet. The thinning sea of people is a shield and she plans to disappear back into the night before that shield vanishes.

Serafíne

"Hah." She says: both a laugh and a word, her mouth, see, opening. The flash of her teeth framed by the remnants of lipstick, chin high, head thrown back. The tangle of her hair snaking down her back. She seems intense and wanton and wanting and also: delighted.

Simply, uncomplicatedly, delighted.

Poor uncomfortable Sam.

He exhales these clouds-of-smoke and she inhales them and she doesn't really want that kind of ordinary cigarette but still she inhales like there is some kind of fine perfume threading through the air.

More strangers streaming by: couples holding hands, groups commenting volubly on the show, the setlist, the staging, taking and posting selfies, pulling old friends and half-remembered strangers in for a clasped forearm and a bro-hug or maybe even a real one.

Sera, smiling up at Sam, insinuates herself even closer, though somehow it all feels accidental. When there are this many strangers around aren't you meant to shimmy forward, to turn aslant and half-flatten your body to let them pass? Except she's doing that and lifting her bare arms and the t-shirt is sliding from her shoulder and she's reaching up to anchor it, to steady it, and then she's just reaching up, sidling, sliding her bare arms around his neck, lifting her mouth to kiss him quite openly on his, if he doesn't turn away.

Inhales the nicotine-laced breath from his lungs, if only in passing.

Lingers.
Lingers.

Lingers.

Then breaks away: "Awesome. Next time - " like a promise, a pledge in her pocket. "See you around Sam."

She steps around him, then. Joins the crowd. Drifts away.

Samir

For the record: Sam can count on one hand the number of traditionalists he has met who did not subscribe to technomancy. He cannot boast the ability to identify them by their own names but he could tell them for what they were because of their alienness. Their physicality or their wildness or what have you.

Sera does not bump that count onto his second hand. Also for the record.

She is right up in his space and his experience would tell him she is going to stay just right where she is and that is going to be the end of it. Experience doesn't mean dick to people who stay inside and learn the world through computer screens but Sam would never call himself an experienced man anyway. Smart sure but not experienced.

And Sera is a little bit older than him.

So alright they're in a crowd people are bumping into each other that's why he avoids crowds he doesn't know where their hands have been or what's riding on their breath and Sera isn't a Sleeper but she is a stranger. Something in her that he trusts enough to let her get close enough to loop her arms around his neck or maybe he's just human and hasn't learned to divorce himself from the necessity of physical contact.

Still. Her mouth on his neck and he was not expecting that. She can hear the reflexive sharp breath and the intellectual tamping down of it. The wait. The what the fuck. Then she breathes and he breathes and alright. His hand never finds her body because of the stun her mouth leaves him in. Tension coursed all up through his spine and his shoulders. She needs this.

Now he needs to go home and beat off about four times before he can go to sleep. Thank you Sera.

Sam swallows the serotonin out of his throat and says, all faux confidence, she isn't going to remember him by sight alone anyway so he doesn't believe her even if she thinks she's telling the truth, "Y... yeah. Okay. See you."

Oh hi Cigarette how are you let's get the fuck out of here.

Yoga in the Park is for Weirdos

Lucas Reed

[Dex+Ath]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 2

Lucas Reed

The sky above Washington park was densely clouded, casting a blanket of grey over the surrounding landscape. People often likened that kind of weather to broody or depressed moods, but Lucas wasn't really the type to prescribe emotional weight to the clouds. The sky and the earth were as they were. They existed beyond meaning or emotion. And today, he was perfectly content to practice his craft in the park - regardless of the quality of the light. The air was on the cooler side of warm and slightly breezy. Not bad for yoga, really.

Which is what he was doing at this precise juncture. He had a grey yoga mat rolled out over the grass, and was stretching his small, agile frame into a scorpion pose, legs curved up over his head as he balanced on his elbows. He was dressed for the occasion in black athletic shorts and a white tank top. A small bead of sweat trailed its way down the side of his temple, past the corner of one eye and down the curve of his cheek. Dimly he registered it, but paid it little attention.

Kalen Holliday

[How distracted by Resonance are we?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 4, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Kalen Holliday

Kalen associates Washington Park most strongly with one spirit and one person; neither of whom are present at the moment. He misses them both, but one of them is in the Umbra and one of them...well. That's complicated.

Lucas is here though. Arranging himself into shapes. Kalen knows more about yoga in the abstract than in practice, though he has a passing familiarity with it. He did, after all, live with Kharisma.

He approaches Lucas slowly. and pauses a little distance away to wait. Only Alexander gets Kalen waiting inches from his face. When Alexander believes that he is who he is and will let him-

Here.

Now.

Kalen directs his attention off of that mess and back toward Lucas. Yoga would probably not be the worst thing to happen to Kalen right now, but he makes no attempt to join Lucas, even so. Just goes still and silent and waits for for Lucas' attention.

Serafíne

(Awareness, yada.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

Lucas Reed

[Awareness, wee]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

Lucas Reed

It was not so much that Lucas didn't notice Kalen. Indeed, he was aware of everything around him. All of the patterns - living, material, sentient or less so. They existed as part of the greater universe, like water rising up to create a wave (briefly,) before sinking back into the vast span of the ocean. One of those waves felt like Kalen.

Lucas held his pose, balancing calmly despite the quake of muscles in his arms and his core. That was part of it - the stretch, the pain (the sweat.) After a while, he uncurled carefully and settled into a lotus position, leaning back on his palms to regard Kalen.

"Evening," he said, smiling. Did he remember Kalen? Of course. He remembered everything. Luke looked around at the park, taking in the trees and the flowers and the scattered visitors. "Nice day, hmm?"

Serafíne

"That is so fucked up, what you're doing to your body right now." Kalen shows up and waits for attention; like a cat or something. Standing there. He could be whistling. Maybe he should be whistling, but the lingering, man. Someone might have something to say about that.

Instead, someone has something to say about scorpion pose and said someone is wearing denim cut-offs with fine threads dangling over the spare meat of her well-tanned thighs, a sleeveless off-white lace vest-thingie with dangling fringe over a too-small American-flag print bikini top and drinking something from a plastic cup: grotesquely green. She's not glowing but: sweating, the way people do when it is humid and summer-hot and has the most amazing Grecian sandals, leather straps wrapped all the way up her calves and thighs. She is thin enough that it is noticeable to strangers and perhaps remarkable to those who know her now, who have known her through other times and traumas, though perhaps not thin enough yet to make her appearance alarming. Just: sharper. Honed. The delicate hollows framing her clavicles deeper, the long bones of her frame all the more evident.

"I mean seriously. I'm pretty sure those bits aren't supposed to be pointing in that direction, you know?"

And what does she feel like? The edge of something, some framing thing, beyond or perhaps before definition, gut-wrenching and compelling in the same breath. And also: the sense of soaring beneath the summer sky, sun soaking you right down to the bone.

"I don't mean that thing right there," Lotus position, which Lucas has since assumed, "I mean that shit you were pulling before. Even though I'm pretty sure that your toes aren't meant to point like that either."

This after she has clambered over a park bench from behind and taken a seat on the spine rather than the seat. Because she felt like it.

Kalen Holliday

"I think that definition varies rather widely, but I'd say so," he says to Lucas. And, now that Lucas is no longer twisted into complicated poses he approaches a little.

His eyes shift to Serafine, and he dips his head in a little nod. "Serafine." He smiles faintly, as he says her name, but that is all. Tonight he makes no move toward her, not to touch her and not to offer his arm.

Kalen settles on the ground not very far from Lucas, just beyond easy reach. And leaves them to hash out how the human body should move without any interference from him.

Lucas Reed

Lucas felt like memory. Dreams. Bright, vivid colors and old, lingering recollections. Moments in time, kept safe. Treasured (akashakarma.) Sera told him that what he was doing to his body was fucked up, and Lucas just laughed quietly. His eyes - wide and dark - held an edge of some remembered secret.

"I wasn't aware there was a rule-book for the human body." After a pause he offered his name. "Lucas Reed." To she and Kalen both, he said, "Bani Akashayana." He used the true name, not the version they were likely used to hearing.

"Did you end up buying any paintings?" he asked Kalen, one brow lofted in curiosity.

Serafíne

(I just wrote a REALLY great post and lost it. So gimme a sec!)

Lucas Reed

[Awww, that is such a massive bummer when that happens. :( ]

Serafíne

"'course there's a rule book for the human body. There's a rule book for every fucking thing," the creature contends, and there is a sense of contention about the words. The deliberate sophistry of debate, the seeking-of-clash. She smirks, too: quick and sure, the mobile sweep of her elegant mouth, the spark of clear-challenge in her eyes. "Mind, I'm all for breaking the rules. Breaking the idea of them, hell, breaking the frame of reference that demands and requires rules in the first fucking place so in theory I am on your side, except that yoga shit is fucked the fuck up."

She curls one half-bare shoulder, up, down. Eloquence in the simple form of her body, the way she uses it. "I had a friend who was into it, though. He used to do it in the park in the mornings with a bunch of other weirdos. He was a pacifist. Pretty badass for a pacifist, but you know."

--

Then, see. Kalen: he says her name and she lifts her chin and returns the glance and says hello with the gesture and hello perhaps with her eyes and there is something sharp about her, this ever-present awareness, but tonight the usual penetration of her gaze is: banked, withheld, kept in check. Doesn't say anything back, and that is a choice: to keep herself for herself, by herself, and to herself. An edge of something that feels like -

- oh, hell. what would you know about it?

The edge of her smile, maybe, but only the edge.

--

She doesn't introduce herself, but Kalen said her name. Maybe she assumes she has already been introduced.

Kalen Holliday

Kalen's attention lingers on Serafine for the greeting more than anything. Beyond that, his attention wanders between the two of them as their discussion continues, and there is no real response. He is paying attention and he is present, which is, at times, less clear. But he is not part of their debate and he apparently has no desire to be.

He settles back a little, onto his elbows, and allows his attention to settle on Lucas at the introduction. There is a little nod when he gives his Tradition, though Kalen is apparently as interested in offering formal introductions as he is debates about yoga.

"Well, Grace thought they were some kind of hideous interpretations of penii." There is a quick flash of a smile. "It was apparently that kind of night. So, none for us." None for us, he says. Not none at all, perhaps.

Lucas Reed

"Mm, perhaps he and I would get along. I teach yoga. And I'm a pacifist. Sometimes I even come out here with my class in the morning, like a bunch of weirdos." Lucas grinned and winked at Sera. Whatever he thought of her assertion about rules, if in fact he thought much of anything, he didn't engage her on it. People believed what they believed.

Kalen's response to his question was carefully worded, a fact that did not entirely escape Lucas. He rolled his head a little, regarding Kalen with a curious expression, but didn't pry any further into the matter. Neither Kalen nor Serafine seemed inclined to offer proper introductions, (though Kalen had already given an informal one) which was notable, though not necessarily worrisome. Mages could be a guarded lot. There were pieces of Luke's identity that had not been offered either.

"I've seen a few paintings that involved hideous depictions of male genitalia. They were actually pretty interesting. Definitely not for everyone, though."

Serafíne

"Maybe you would, but I dunno. He also liked to get high. Tossed back tequila like a motherfucker. Like I said: he was a badass." Her smile is a curl of remembrance, quickened, slipstream, slipsliding into one of those between sort of places the human body seems meant to hover within: sorrow / joy, or bitter/sweet. Quite simply: Sera misses Jim. Misses him sometimes with her body and sometimes with her soul and sometimes with their cross-section. Her heart quickens and oh, she allows herself that ache. Allows herself to feel that ache, but there was so many others inside and within and around and beneath that one that it makes her heart stop sometimes. And there is a moment there where her face is canted away and her body is framed just so against the gray, lingering light, mouth open, eyes distant -

And the conversation continues beneath and around her and then they are both talking about hideous penii and whatever it kind of interrupts and spikes through her strange twinge of nostalgia and also grosses her out a little bit. She breathes out sharply, takes another sip of her kale smoothie, and stands.

"I gotta go."

And so: she does.

Serafíne

(sorry kiara! is my bedtime! here in a few minutes!)

Kiara

(oh its fine I'll just cry into my soup. ;) )

Picnic with the pops.

Alexander

[Before we start writing, Arete. Sensing stuff so TN4, -1 for taking time, aiming for 2 successes]

Dice: 1 d10 TN3 (5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Alexander

[And Int+Med?]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Alexander

They say that the city boasts 300 days of sun a year. Many of those days may include sun at some point, but the climate has a tendency to the wildly variable. Today? Today is not one of those days. Today has been peaceful and calm. There hasn’t been much more than a breeze to slowly push what cloud there is over the city. Maybe, to those who pay attention to such things, the hovering calm had muted the wailing horns and sirens of traffic forcing its way along crowded roads.

So the sky is mostly blue, with a few high, wispy clouds overhead. And here, in the park, the grass is green and flourishing in the warmth of the sun. The water of the lake laps gently at its shore nearby. There’s the sound of activity carrying on the air from the sports pitched not so far away and an occasional, rhythmic pounding marks a jogger running through their laps.

And Alexander? Alexander is lying on that grass, by that lake, with eyes closed and breathing slow. He almost seems immobile – frozen – until you watch him long enough to see his chest rise and fall. Next to him is a small rucksack, a discarded tshirt, and a bottle of water. Boots and socks are paired up, sitting by the rucksack. He could be asleep? Only he isn’t, quite. It started out with wanting to feel the flow of the breeze around and over him, so that’s what he pushed his will against reality to do. Then the mix of the warmth, the calmness, and the hypnotic beauty of sensing the currents of air... It’s easy to wait for thought to slow and stop and freeze in its tracks and simply be.

Lavinia

It's a beautiful eighty-one degrees fahrenheit today, and she is out running. She has a pretty easy schedule, one that doesn't demand that she actually be doing much any given day. Lavinia was running, because running felt fantastic, because the air felt fantastic, and most importantly she had recently acquired tennis shoes and she needed to actually wear them in. She now had four pairs of shoes. It was starting to get to the point of ridiculous, she had decided. Since coming to Denver she has all but doubled the number of shoes she owned after coming to Denver.

The sky was blue, with some wispy clouds overhead. She had her hair pulled back in a high ponytail, curls bouncing when she moved, choice in clothing made it abundantly clear that Lavinia Cervantes had legs that went on forever and, whilst running, she was content to just be in the zone. That is, of course, until she saw a person. It's telling that the things that come to the tall blonde's mind when she saw a person laying in the grass that she wasn't entirely certain if they were alive or not. She missed a lot of the big cues, like the sound of someone breathing and it was just a little bright for her to possibly catch the rhythmic rise and fall of someone's chest.

Now, there were things that crossed her mind- if she was wrong and this wasn't a dead body, it was for the best that she not disturb said person because saying sorry, I thought you were a recently made corpse doesn't seem to set well with most people. If she woke the person up, they wouldn't be so forgiving.

So, Lavinia started her approach. Slow and steady and cautious. There is a feeling that comes with her, and it is that feeling that signals her arrival more than anything. It is that feeling of something beyond walls, beyond definitions, something that would be and always had been. Something that was larger than the mortal frame carrying it. So, there she was, approaching Alexander to make certain he wasn't a dead body. Because that's a normal concern. Totally.

Kalen

[How distracted by Resonance are we today?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

Kalen

Kalen adores Washington Park. It has been some time since he's seen one of the friends he met there, because, at this point he considers a spirit a friend without so much as the batting of an eyelash. He senses, for the first time in a long time, something angelic in the park. He remembers Lavinia, mostly from the art gallery.

He has a green tea smoothie, because he has just discovered the glory of green tea smoothies. Through perhaps slightly distressing circumstances, but it is hardly as though his tongue did not heal.

Healing, after all, is what they do. Sometimes more quickly than others, perhaps. But. As a rule.

He approaches Lavinia and Alexander, though, really, more Alexander. Lavinia may feel like an angel, but she is hardly the first being Kalen met who has had that kind of resonance. Certainly not the first with whom he has associated divinity. Alexander gets the most of his focus for now.

Alexander

[Int+Med still?]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 8) ( success x 1 )

Alexander

He can feel it. Oh, he can feel the way the breeze drifts over his body. But he can really feel it. The way that the warmth of the sun heats the ground, creating tiny thermals as the air warms and rises. The way that the air sinks as it passes over the lake. The occasional eddy as some nearby object or other blocks and redirects the flow. The swirling currents as he inhales and exhales.

Something tugs at the edge of his awareness – or maybe his Awareness – but it’s something subtle and far distant for now. Unimportant for the moment, really. Whatever happens, happens. Much like the hopelessness of trying to stop the wind in its tracks, or the flow of water downhill; It can be done, but at the moment it’s far too much effort to try.

There’s a slightly quickening of his breathing, but otherwise Alexander lies still on the grass and lets the flow of air and time and the universe wash over him.

In another world, maybe someone could make an Ecstatic out of him in the end.

Lavinia

She finally got close enough to recognize that the person in the grass wasn't probably in need of medical attention, but rather, said person in said grass was probably having a good moment just communing with nature and, therefore, should probably be left alone, but then there's movement and then there's people and she suddenly becomes aware of the fact that, oh, shit, I'm not alone and this is now awkward. She clears her throat, carefully starts to steer herself along her way. Wiggles her fingers and gives a little half audible "Hi," to whichever of the people- either Kalen (whose name she vaguely remembered) or Alexander (whose name she had no idea of, but she had been making sure he wasn't dead because nobody can be that sort of serene without pushing up daisies).

Abort mission, abort mission!

Serafíne

(Awareness.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 4, 4, 5, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Kalen

Kalen gives Lavinia a little nod. "Hey," he says quietly. And then he drops onto the blanket to sprawl beside Alexander, not touching him him but not far from it. It is, in some ways, a thing might more expect from a cat, the intent watching and the silence and the being only inches away.

No. We lie.

It is not quite like a cat. Because Kalen is not impatiently pawing at Alexander and meowing insistently for attention. At least not yet.

Alexander

[Awareness]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )

Alexander

[Dex+Ath]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

Serafíne

"This is fucking good enough - " Rick is grumbling, though his grumble has a fond edge to it that excises the immediate meaning from the words and changes them incrementally into something ever-so-slightly else. He and Dan and Dee have the heaviest loads, Sera the lightest. A picnic blanket slung over one arm and a kale-pineapple smoothie in the other hand. The quartet tramp through the park to a small knoll with a view of the water and the soon-to-be setting sun: picnic basket and reuseable grocery bags and a pair of guitars and a giant tub of CheezBallz (TM) and there is other conversation, backwards and forwards and forwards and backwards, which we will not take long to relate as it is offscreen for most of the principals tonight. Low and laughing, familiar, sure.

They are an attractive quartet: Dee is a tall girl with deep dark hair and skin so fine and pale and clarified that strangers call it creamy. Summertime, in a mile-high city, she must be well-committed to sunscreen to keep it that way. Dee is wearing a knee-length, flouncy skirt in a fine dark navy with two rows of white brick-brack trimming the bottom hem. Dark hair piled and perfectly pin-curled atop her head. Rick and Dan have the requisite hipster-garb: skinny eans and band t-shirts, beards in varying lengths (short, dark - Rick; longer, blond - Dan) and Vans or in Dan's case schlubby Birkenstocks he picked up at Buffalo Exchange. Dan (or someone) has painted his toenails a lovely metallic teal.

When they arrive at the picnic site, he offloads his guitar case and leans it against a convenient tree, sets down: cooler and reuseable shopping bag and gives Sera a hand unfurling the picnic blanket.

Alexander

That something at the edge of being noticed, it turns out that there is more than one something. Sleepers had passed by completely unnoticed, lost as he was in... not exactly pulling the world apart and putting it back together, but figuring out how it lies. Where the edges are, the strong points and the weak ones. Maybe – with luck – where he might be able to push a little harder in the future to do more than simply sense. To change.

His breathing speeds a little more, not far from normal, when Lavinia approaches. She had been slow and unthreatening, her distance kept as she closed and watched for signs of life. Had that been the only presence, Alexander’s return to wakefulness and alertness might have been rather more gentle.

The second presence, though. The one that gets closer and closer and drops down and almost touches. Now that is rather more threatening. The resonance is new and unfamiliar and... powerful? A danger. A threat. It takes a little while for conscious thought to fire up, for the image of Kalen to register and be recognised. But even then, this doesn’t feel like Kalen. This isn’t the approaching storm. This is something else.

As the presence gets closer and lowers to the ground, Alexander rolls and kicks up. Instinct pushes his up and away from the newcomers, turning to face the threat. His breathing, calm and peaceful just a few moments before, is now faster and deeper. His bare feet dig into the soft, grassy ground. He’s up and ready to fight, turned a little and arms up ready to fend off what might physically come.

His gaze switches between Kalen and Lavinia. “Who the fuck are you?”

Kalen

Kalen tilts his head, then realizes what the fuck that is about.

"Mmmmmmmm...Grace said she thought I might be a clone. I'm relatively certain that is not true." There is a hint of a smile. "I suppose I should just be glad you didn't throw me onto the ground this time, Alce."

And he waits. Patient. Calm. If anything seems off other than the Resonance it's that calm. The lack of shadows under his eyes. Peace and Kalen were not so much things that got on.

Lavinia

She doesn't jump.

Things change very quickly and she doesn't take a step back, doesn't hesitate, doesn't seem like she is making a reach for anything because where the Hell would she keep it? She's not got a lot in the way of fabric on her personage. If she managed to hide a lethal weapon on her then she has very much created a pocket that exists outside of space and time and the last thing one has to worry about is the fact that she might be carrying a knife and more about the fact that she made a bag of fucking holding. There was no bag of holding, therefore, nothing to fear. We digress.

She takes in the tension, takes in the way that Alex rolls up, practiced and comfortable and ready for something Very Bad to happen and she puts her hands up, just enough to not be a threat. Just enough to indicate that she isn't going to snap and that this? This isn't a dangerous situation.

"Hey," she says, "just passing through, I'm Lavinia-" she then looks between the two males, "-I think there's been a misunderstanding here, let's just breathe and talk it out… okay?"

She wasn't going to walk away now, she was pretty sure that this guy could render the dude she met at the art gallery (Kalen, right? He looked like a Kalen) into a fine powder and she couldn't exactly walk away and let that happen, right? Of course right. Though she does try very hard not to wince when Kalen says something about maybe being a clone but probably not.

Serafíne

The blanket is old and worn, and plaid of course, fringed at the edges with a few strands of dried grass stuck in the nap of the flannel from the last time it was dragged outdoors for this particular purpose. Dan and Sera open it up until it covers an area of grass nearly as large as a queen-sized bed. Dan slips off his sandals to step onto the blanket and trample it down. Dee follows suit while Rick anchors one end of the blanket with the cooler and starts digging around for the bottle of Malbec and stemless red-wine glasses they brought with them for the party.

Sera is still at the edge: alert, aware, a vision in a little white sundress so fine as to be translucent, worn over crisp black lingerie. It is harder for her to slip off her combat boots, so Dee wades over to give her a hand. Takes the smoothie in her right and holds up her left while Sera balances and tries to make the laces come up almost by magic or - you know - fingertips. Some combination of the two.

Alexander

It’s not the first time that one of the Awakened in the city has surprised Alex. It’s not even the first time that Kalen has managed to do it, not so far and not so long ago from the here and now. At least this time hasn’t – yet – ended up with bruising, or worse.

Alexander takes a longer look at Lavinia when she tries to reassure him that she isn’t a threat. His gaze lingers for a moment longer before it returns to Kalen and stays there. She’s still in his peripheral vision – he’s not ignoring her – but she’s not seen at the threat right now.

Kalen – or the man who looks like Kalen, sounds like Kalen, but just feels so damned wrong for Kalen – is the one getting his the focus of his attention. He’s the unknown. Given the strange stuff that he’d seen, and the even stranger things he’d heard about, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that someone could look and sound like another person. He’d felt the change in Grace recently as she had ‘upgraded’, but that was a broadening and deepening of what was already there. This? This is different.

“No way are you Kalen. You might look and sound like him, but there’s no fucking way. So who. The fuck. Are you?”

Kalen

Kalen rolls his eyes. "Exactly who are are so very sure I am not. Which is an interesting enough situation, I admit."

He pulls out his phone and taps on a few keys. Then a few more.

"Check your messages sometime," he says, rising to his feet. "Get back to me. I'll be at home. Call and warn Grace if you must."

Lavinia

(skip me, please!)

Serafíne

(also no reason to wait for me since: my screen froze and I had no idea anyone had posted. and am not really interacting with folks!)

Alexander

Alexander’s eyes narrow a little,watchful and wary as “Kalen” stands and offers his words. There’s no attempt at explanation, but then standing in the middle of a wide-open public space possibly isn’t the best of places to discuss things that a certain group of well-dressed individuals with their towncars and mirrored glasses would just love to know about.

There are times when he wonders if he’s a little too paranoid about thing. And then there are times when he thinks he’s not paranoid enough. Having his friend possibly snagged by some kind of... B-movie baddie and cloned, or whatever? Or maybe this was a spiritual thing – it wouldn’t be the first time, and wouldn’t be the last time, that something from the other side of the Umbra had interfered with things in this world.

He pauses before replying, watching. This is going to be hard, but it’s worth a shot...

[Arete, sensing spirits. Base TN4, +3 for no focus, -1 for practiced. So very much spending the WP.]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (2) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Lavinia

[Do I notice this? Per+aware]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Kalen

Kalen sighs. "Really. I commend your vigilance." Even if it doesn't exactly please him right this moment.

But then he turns to leave. He does not run. He does not seem terribly concerned Alexander will shoot him while he isn't looking. He heads away with the same easy pace he approached with. There are conversations that could be had and there are things he might try to say, but here, with an audience...no.

Serafíne

(going to go, actually. night folks!)

Dandy Lions

Elijah

He was getting pretty accustomed to driving over here.

He liked coming to Sera's place. He liked the house, he liked the general atmosphere, but for the most part he enjoyed the smell. It was a strange thing that he had a hard time putting a finger on. Truth be told, Elijah couldn't think of what it was specifically about the smell. It was something smoky in his mind but not smoky. Something herbal without being herbal. Something comforting without having the accoutrements of the things most people thought were comforting. It wasn't apple pie- Elijah never equated pie with comfort, actually. He did not come from a pie household. He came from a Chinese takeout household, but home wasn't so much comforting as a base of operations. This didn't smell like a base of operations. This smelled like the kind of home he'd want to have if he was setting down roots.

He liked the smell, he liked the feeling of her sofa- she was off doing something. He couldn't remember what, but he remembered, once, laying on her couch with a far off look and feeling like the world was ending and Dan brought him food and Dan brought him tea- was it tea?

Elijah wasn't sure, but he remembered things. He remembered how it felt warm and how it felt like a safe place. LIke the kind of place that would be home if he was laying down roots to call things home. We digress.

he is there, pulling up to the door with a paper bag in hand and it's not the kind of bag that holds liquor. It's not the kind of baggie that holds weed or anything of the sort. There is a delicacy to the way he holds the bag, knocks on the door three times and steps in, because he's never not been invited in, because the door was always metaphorically open. He's wearing khakis. Khakis and a button down and a suspenders and too fucking many clothes because, of course, Elijah wears too fucking many clothes. A half a dozen bracelets on one wrist, a necklace tucked into his shirt for privacy.

"Dan? Sera?" he asks, voice just reaching out because he hasn't checked for them yet. May as well ask first.

Serafíne

The door is always open, not simply metaphorically, but literally. It's a nice little neighborhood, up and coming, young couples in the condos, old families in the houses, trees lining the streets there and back again, but there's not a single fucking neighborhood in Denver where people feel comfortable leaving their doors essentially permanently unlocked.

This place, though: he knocks thrice and steps in. The door opens when he reaches for the knob. Here is familiar chaos: a stranger's foyer, music somewhere, from somewhere, the muted sound of voices, a tumble of boots and rainboots and heels and hippie sandals and whatnot on a tray near the door. The redolent scent of bread breaking and the distinctive, musty scent of pot. A kettle, rattling.

He can follow the thread of voices or music, a trail that loops through entryway, past rooms for living and rooms for dining, past stairs leading up up up past Amelia Earhart and beneath a spiderplant in a macrame planter into darkness and he's headed toward the kitchen but also someone is coming back up that shelf-lined hall to meet him. She is a silhouette against the brightness behind her, frame all in shadow. Broader and taller and wider and rather more voluptuous than Sera and he knows her as Dee: all that milk-cream skin in the shadow.

"Hey. Elijah. Dan and Sera are in the backyard if you're looking for them?"

Maybe there's chitchat. Maybe not. But beyond her the kitchen and bread-baking and a bottle of wine (red) open on the counter and an upended blender with tough little kale stems stuck on its blades and an open box with pot on the table and so on. Outside: Dan and Sera sitting on the cabana bed that dominates the patio in the center of the lovely yard. Edison lights strung through the branches of the tree above. She is cross-legged and he is sprawled out and they have a book of some sort open between them.

Dan reaches up and gives Elijah a supple wave when the sliding glass doors open. Greeting and invitation, all at once. Sera turns and flashes him a ghosting half-smile over her shoulder. She is so spare. Maybe it's summer but does she seem thinner than he remembers? Sharper: honed.

They're still talking as he walks toward them but he cannot hear what they're saying. It happens like that sometimes.

Elijah

"Hey Dee," he replies, smile bright eyes alight and all sorts of other things that fall into the rhyming spectrum. Dee is all shadow but he knows she's creamy milky smooth and that the blush travels all up her features when you say the right things and he wonders, briefly, if he should. If he should linger and figure out something to say, because he is ever so interested in finding buttons- not the kind that push but the kind that fasten two pieces together. He's eager to find the corresponding space where it sticks out and gets to be itself. The notable piece that joins two concepts. Something that adds that extra something.

Elijah likes finding buttons. He'd love to find Dee's, maybe has even said as much with lingering bits of attention from time to time when the thought strikes him. He's not the keeping type, but sometimes he can appreciate a woman who is curvaceous and bakes fucking amazing bread. "Still need a cheerleader this season?"

He lingers long enough for that question before moving on, and he does move on to the back yard with a raise of his hand and it's out to the back. Doesn't bring booze, doesn't bring pot, doesn't bring his usual fare like a wise man, like a pilgrim, like something coming to appease the gods. But these are not gods, that much he knows. He knows these are mortals who breathe and live just like he does so there's no need to make a pilgrimage, no need to treat this place like a trek up the mountains and the sharp, honed woman here who is so very spare with her half-smile lingering like the ghosts he knows so well (hears in the distance, at the very edges of his senses, an argument with the self. The sound of some poor soul tearing himself apart. Being brought to his knees by his enemy, his shadow, his self- skewed by some truth because the ache in that sound he hears, that pricks across the distance, is one he's learned. The truth is sometimes worse than any lie you can tell.)

there is an invitation and he comes, sits, doesn't say anything because he can't hear what they're saying. He doesn't prod for what they're saying, doesn't try to reach in where he isn't quite ready to hear. he sits, and retrieves from the bag he'd been so careful with, a chain. It's not a metal chain, but one that is carefully woven and blue flax. and like some crown one goes to Dan and the other to Sera if they'll take them.

"They were going to get mowed over along I twenty-five," he said, "I don't know if you like flowers."

But there they were.

Serafíne

"I'd be more inclined to say yes if I thought you'd actually show up for match - " Dee laughs; open-mouthed, open-voiced, without rancor because there isn't much of that in her body but also: darling if you want to lead the cheer, do. She has keys in hand and a mission somewhere and he can sense the flash of her smile as she skims past him. Sun outside but here: all shadow. The center of the house, cocooned as if it were caged by standing ribs, warm as a beating heart.

--

Outside he comes closer. There are instruments here but set aside: an acoustic guitar on the far edge of the bed. A fucking harmonica on the plastic table between the two patio chairs fronting it. Sera is: watching him and also glancing up at Dan and responding to something he said. About something, somewhere. That glassed-in feeling you sometimes get in a familiar place that has an edge of strangeness to it.

Elijah offers them both flower-chains and Sera is sitting up and she reaches for hers and Dan leans forward and reaches for his, holds it neatly where it is braided, gives the younger man a wry look that could verge on a smirk. Sera for her part is smiling. Lifts it over her head and drapes it around her neck, reaching back to lift up her hair to settle the flower-chain beneath it. She's wearing a cropped halter beneath a loose lace vest with fringe and tiny denim cut-offs and opaque thigh-high ivory tights fringed with crocheted lace and the flower-chain fits right in.

"Who doesn't like fucking flowers. They're lovely. Thank you Elijah." so says Sera.

Dan turns his over in his left hand and sits: forward and up and loops it around and instead of draping his over his own head and neck, doubles it and sets it on Sera's curls like a crown.

"Good to see you, man. What've you been up to besides saving dandelions from the Department of Highways?"

Elijah

She smiles, Dan smirks, and he grins and is a polite, beaming little ball of chaos on their back lawn. He's pleased, of course he's fucking pleased there were flowers and he wasn't drunk when he gave them up and didn't even ask Dan if he could plait daisies into his beard because it would be fucking hard and Elijah didn't know how to braid and he had a bit too much respect for Dan's beard to do that.

"I've been learning how to swim," he says. There should be more, but he doesn't give more until he realizes he needs to clarify.

"I mean, like, literally learning how to swim. How to actually put self in water and not drown," a second, "also, I have a harp recital in a couple weeks if you want to come. I have mad skills." Kind of. He kind of had skills. "Anyway. The swimming thing is big, it's kinda something I wanted to do for awhile so I figured I'd do it because there's this fucking badass lake and I want to take people camping- you-" he gestures to them "-would be amongst those I count under "people I want to take camping." So, preemptive invite."

Serafíne

"That's so cool," this is Sera, shaking her golden head after Dan crowns her so that the little chain of plaited wildflowers slips askew on her half-shaved head. The shake is deliberate: she courts that moment where everything slides sideways, where perfection unmakes itself. Uncrosses her legs, but only to curl them up again, smiling at Elijah, quietly and - perhaps - still, though somehow as if from a great distance. Maybe that's how she feels when she's relaxing on the bed in her backyard and friends and strangers come to see her: half-way between a goddess and an oracle. That's so cool she says and she means it. Imbues that meaning into her words, warm and forward. She knows: what it means and what he is doing and she is pleased and proud of and by and for him, and finds a way to press all those thoughts and feelings into a few little words.

"And I didn't fucking know you played the harp. Like the Apollo-harp or the angel's harp or the orchestra harp or the mouth-harp? I might be out of town for the recital, but let me know and if we're around, we'll come."

Elijah

"Like, the actual legit bigassed orchestral harp," he clarifies. He's smiling like he's proud, like he's pleased, like he could soak in all that pride and he's sharing it with her because he wanted to share the moment. Because he wanted someone to share joy with, wanted to give people fucking chains of blue flax flowers and sit in the grass and effuse like an eight year old who just found some new beetle outside or an astronomer who found a star that rewrote a whole constellation. Somewhere between world altering and- no. No it is all world altering. A beetle no greater than a star, the effect profound and joy-ridden for both of them. And so it is, he's concluded water has a new definition. Concludes that water has always been there, has always been the transitioning point for him so fear it?

"It works a lot like the piano, it just has some places where it's a little different- but I'm rambling. Yes, I can play the harp- I can also play the piano, but I actually kinda like the harp more," he said. No admission there, just fact. "If you guys are in town you are definitely invited. If not, I'll… uh… figure out some way to acquire a harp. Or something."

Yeah, because that was totally a thing. He didn't seem like he was terribly sold on lugging a giant orchestral style harp around but he did seem keen on figuring it out.

Serafíne

"Mmm. You can always buy a harp, you know. I'm pretty sure they sell them in stores and shit." Sera murmurs, lifts her dark eyes up to catch Dan's on the honed line of her aw, the delicate framework of her profile. They share a glance, private. The twinge of a smile: also private and graveled with bitter / sweetness, and then Sera's looking back at Elijah, and his childlike enthusiasm. "Text Dan when you know when and where. He'll let me know."