Ritual

Serafíne

After the chantry meeting: Dan tells Pen and Kalen that Sera will need some recovery time. They'll regroup in 24 to 36 hours, then? Here at the chantry.

An imprecise amount of time later, then, and what we know is that it is no longer morning full of new light, but evening. Lengthening shadows and all the strange, too-bright warmth of the early spring day all but gone.

Sera and Dan meet the others at the chantry. Sera is just-awake, sitting on the kitchen counter drinking whiskey-laced tea from a travel-mug. Slightly better than just-awake, because she has had a shower and her hair is a loose damp twist of curls swinging half-way down her back. She's wearing a metallic silver micro-mini dress beneath a cropped-and-altered tuxedo jacket, with her usual assortment of spikes and studs and safety pins bristling in her elfin ears, and a bicycle chain and intertwined with a long strand of golden south seas pearls wrapped around her neck. Earbuds in one ear wind beneath her ear to the right pocket of the tuxedo jacket and she's kinda moving a little bit with the music she hears. Mouthing the words while Dan packs a cooler and a re-useable shopping bag with supplies. Pours water from the just-boiled kettle into a thermos already prepped with a concoction of 'shrooms. The usual.

"We can take two cars, if you want?" Dan tells them. No need, really, for three. "Follow me."

---

It is a rather long drive from the chantry back towards Denver. Full night has fallen by the time the little caravan (if there is a caravan - Dan is happy to drive them all) is winding its way through a posh neighborhood in Cherry Hills. Here every house feels like it is trying to become an estate, and the it is not simply the communities that are gated, but each individual house.

Kalen has been here before. Only once.

Pen never has.

There are gates, the looming bulk of a largely dark and apparently and perhaps obviously uninhabited house. It has a century-old solidity to it, an impressive, comforting bulk, the details of which get lose entirely in the darkness. Lingering impression of wards that Sera will renew, and strongly, tonight before they start to cast.

If Pen and Kalen have followed rather than joined Sera and Dan in the third-degree of separation rental car he picked up sometime that afternoon, Dan opens the doors to the empty garage so that they, too, can park there. Out of sight-and-mind.

Inside, an impression of grandeur shrouded by shadows. High ceilings, empty corridors leading only into darkness. The lofty suggestion of an elegant stair rising rising rising. What little furniture remains is mostly covered by dust shrouds, which create odd, looming shadows all around.

Penelope

In Morrison, Pen is:

on time in a silver coat the interior of which is an interlocking pattern of green leaves because as warm as it is it is still cool enough when the wind blows for such coats. The cuffs of it are sharp, pointed: frock-coat cuffs, rolled back with glamourous nonchalance. Her trousers are fitted, some durable fabric of another gray, only a touch of embroidery on the pockets, and her boots lace up almost to her knee, gape a little there with piratical [Wizardess] swagger. The kind of boot which holds a knife. The kind of sleeves which hold a wand. Or is that vice versa? Rings on every finger, some of them Hermetic in nature [Enochian carved against the bands, pressing into her skin, kiss of other languages: and so. She likes secret rings, the lady of the lake with her clear dark eyes and her hair as red and burnished as any devotional offering to Mars (this is the trick)], one of them most certainly not.

Pen: likes Serafíne's outfit. Asks what kind of tea Serafíne is drinking. Greets Dan and Serafíne with equal warmth, and when the topic of rides is discussed (briefly), the two Flambeau take one of Kalen's cars (Pen rocked up on a motorcycle. Kalen might need a ride home, afterward).

--

Out of sight and out of mind the economy car the Flambeau rode in on is parked.

Pen: regards this place - not with awe, precisely; but surprise. "Whose is this?" Because she has been to Serafíne's home before and so a querying glance for Kalen, here; is it his? Is this the compromised Library?

Pen is also: direct, and frank, says: "I will assist if and how I am able; direct me as you see fit." Her assistance will be that of a consor's, likely: make certain the mood isn't broken; get the lights.

Her assistance will be that of a soldier's, held in reserve: watchful, observant, just in case.

Penelope

ooc: ahem. "Flambeaux rode in on." plural.

Kalen Holliday

Kalen arrives in well worn-in jeans, faded from a near-black to grey, and a thin dark red athletic hoodie with thumb-cuffs and a dandelion yellow lion rampant embroidered onto the side of one sleeve. There are magical tools on him; though, for Kalen, magical tools are things like the pack of cigarettes tucked into a pocket and the knotted hemp bracelets tucked beneath his sleeve. There are more things in the Jeep, but not things he expects to need until the day is closer to over.

He is quiet in the chantry. Quiet on the car ride. His greetings are subdued, though they are not cold. He is drawn inward enough though that he reached out to touch none of them. But then. He has always been reserved with contact with Dan. Has never really reached out for Pen.

"This," he says quietly when they arrive at the house. "This is Hawksley's." He glances over the abandoned house. "Was, perhaps. I never...." Knew what to make of Hawksley. Of the way he wanted to be close to the sense of Hawksley without the actual experience of talking to Hawksley which was never easy. "We were never close."

She puts herself at his disposal, Pen. And it makes him smile a little. "Of course. Thank you." There is a formality that echoes his training, but there is something in that thank you that is warmer than his training. A legacy of something else.

Serafíne

Kalen tells Pen that the house is Hawksley's. This perhaps: beneath the bulk, as they are winding through to the kitchen or the emptied-library, which soars, enormous, banks of windows on either side, open, open to the sky. And Kalen tells Pen that he and Hawksley were never close and maybe they are in the kitchen now, packing/unpacking items from the cooler, the 'shroom tea, all of it, and there is a studiously neutral glance from Dan and Sera gives a neat little twist of her shoulders, confirming what Kalen says. The house is Hawksley's. The house was Hawksley's, whichever the fuck it is.

She does not remark on whether they were ever close.

--

She just leads through the winding corridors, past the ballroom, maybe, or the indoor pool, the fucking theater whatever: and surely somewhere there is a corner of the abandoned library or some nook, some study or den with a fireplace and leather couch or two from which the dustcovers have been removed, where her own resonance is strongest, where some of her things are still littered, like oh hey! that pair of fuzzy cookie monster slippers tucked beneath the leather couch, whatever.

She would like a fire in the fireplace: something about the comfort, the warmth. Certainly one of the Flambeau will oblige and if not, hell. Dan has one of those easy-light logs he can lay in the grate. No she doesn't need it to cast, she just needs the 'shrooms and her own intentions, her memory and Kalen's too, and all of this will take some time. First there are wards to be cast and wards to be strengthened.

And then -

Serafíne

Mind Shield: Dif 4 -1 (using a surpassed instrument.)

Dice: 4 d10 TN3 (4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

How about an extension!

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (5, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

Correspondence 2 / Mind 2 / Prime 2 (Warding against: scrying; resonance sensing; magick detection from without) Dif: 5 -1 (surpassed instrument) +1 the dampening bits are opposed to her resonance, -1 taking time.

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (2, 2, 4, 9) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Extension:

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 4, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Extension: -1 quint.

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (1, 2, 3, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

One more extension,

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (1, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

One more time.

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (4, 4, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

(Ugh, you guys. Like an idiot I was typing my post in this window and lost it.)

Serafíne

(Ugh, you guys. Like an idiot I was typing my post in this window and lost it.)

Serafíne

It takes Sera hours to cast those wards, visceral more than enthralling, gut-wrenching, a solid fuck-you-don't-see-me to the universe or at least the Technocrats. Liminal: too. Slipping definition, finding someplace between this world and some other world, that almost refuses to be seen, and that is hard for her. There is nothing hidden about her magick, but: fuck.

--

When she is done with the warding (which is boring to watch. No ritual: just urge, desire, demand, change), Sera has to go pee, and Dan insists she eat and drink something and she wants whiskey or tequila and he wants oj or gatorade so maybe instead there are cocktails and conversation in the shadows and then there are cigarettes to be smoked (she wants one: outside in the garden, the curling impression of cloves-and-spice in the air) and then she says: the scrying should be done from the garden. They should be beneath the stars. Everyone is beneath the stars, even Alexander, wherever he is right now. Time to start casting again. Sera is still hallucinating. She has surfaced from it and now she is ready to sink back into it. She reaches out a hand, to Kalen.

Penelope

Penelope provides the fire, albeit via more mundane means than otherwise; she wishes to reserve her energies, just in case there is a breach of the castle wall; just in case she needs to conjure fire later and turn some far-flung, long-distance machine-man's metal bones into salt or the oil which lubricates their system into water or, fuck, the electricity which delicately connects muscle and synapse to fire. Penelope provides the fire and is not bored and there is conversation when there is opportunity for conversation and what ifs and hopes and there is quiet consideration of what might come and hope. There is hope, because Penelope does believe in the ability of human beings to transcend (ascend) expectations and Penelope believes that it is possible to forge an alliance with erstwhile foes and Penelope believes:

oh, Penelope believes in the human spirit; that through it the Golden Age will come again. Something. Out beneath the stars, the Adept of the Order of Hermes (which is only a Disciple, elsewhere), Penelope takes a deep breath:

readied, and steadying, and ardent.

Kalen Holliday

Kalen lets Pen tend to the fire and lets Sera put up Wards around them. He stays near the fire, watches the way shadows and warm light flicker and dance against the walls. Lets his awareness of what is real slip into something more immediate and something more present. Less present, too, maybe. Though his eyes drift now and again to Serafine. The way the light plays over her cheekbones and catches itself in her hair.

There was a closeness between them once. And once a distance. Kalen has been so many people since both of those things were true. It isn't the same way he watched her once, as though she were some divine thing he had no real hope of catching hold of. There is also no sign of whatever betrayal he had perceived on her part; that wariness and that distance is gone too. Light writhes against her skin and his skin and the skin of everyone else in the room and the skin of the world and Kalen watches it with fascination and no judgment.

And then they are out in the garden and he remembers starlight, remembers one of the first times that they spoke and remembers that she remembered enough of that to have Dan read to him about a lightbulb. He remembered it enough to buy her a Christmas present that he still hasn't given her months later, but he remembers that too, glittering and celestial. He does not get it now.

There is smoke drifting here. Cloud shadows drifting across stars.

Sera reaches out a hand and Kalen does not look away from her. Not now.

Still, his next words, softly spoken, are undeniably for Pen. "You can trust Dan," he says softly. "If there is anything of which you are unsure." Because Kalen might have appreciated what Pen offered. Might have accepted it. But his magic is too immediate and too intimate to involve someone from outside it. To involve someone who needs words or instructions.

Kalen reaches out and takes Sera's hand. Slowly closes the last distance that he had left to linger between them. And the physical distance, yes. That too.

And ,as he takes a breath to reach out to something divine and holy and golden, gazing into Sera's eyes, he smiles. And this might be about finding Alexander and their situation might be entirely fucked up, but this moment is magic and echoing with power and promise and for the first time in days he means it when he smiles.

Serafíne

Correspondence 2/ Mind 2 / Time 2 / Entropy 3 - Finding: a potential ally who will help them with Alexander (if such exists) and making it an auspicious / fortunate moment to approach sometime in the near-future. Difficulty - 3+4 (Vulgar w/out Witnesses). -1 sympathetic magick. -1 oracular ability. -1 personalized instrument.

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (5, 6, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

(Threshold: 8 successes or more.)

Kalen Holliday

[D=5 (7-1 oracular ability-1 personalised instrument)]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 4) ( fail )

Penelope

[I think you get 2 suxx there for taking time?]

Kalen Holliday

[Or, D=4 for sympathetic magic. So. Less fail.]

Serafíne

Extending: +1 dif!

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (3, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Kalen Holliday

[Now D=5; WP this time because reasons (as if Sera doesn't already have it)]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (6, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Serafíne

One more time: going for extra successes to find a moment when the person they seek is most disenchanted with the idea of kidnapping and confinement and most ready to help them.

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (1, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Kalen Holliday

[d=5; still WP because now would be a bad time to break a spell]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Penelope

[Meanwhile, doo-de-doo, Prime Sight. I wanna see how this ritual is made! -1 for personal instrument, -1 for time taken.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (5, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

What happens is: they are outside and they have something from Alexander. Some scrap of memory: for Sera it is the feather of an owl that once had a broken wing, for Kalen, perhaps it is something else. They join hands and Sera closes her eyes and somehow at once she is sinking and rising, falling and straining, opening, opening, opening. She imagines herself - no, she is - losing all but the most golden kernal of her consciousness into the ineffeable vastness of lakashim and also still absolutely, entirely within her skin. But:

she feels bright, pierced through, pulled apart, shattered and remade and open, open, open. She's breathing and she's hallucinating and half-dreaming, Alexander as she last saw him, near-dawn, exhausted, frustrated, frozen. Alexander as she first saw him: shattered and newly awake and alone on an empty mountain road. Alexander as he is wherever he is, where he does not belong, where she refuses to leave him, and and and - something else, some forward push, the strange and terrifyingly numinous threads of the future, all the worming possibilities, as infinite as any others:

and,

and,

and,

exhaustively mad hours later: a single resolving impression. Blonde hair and cats-eye glasses. Professional attire with a hint of the hipster: a peter pan collared cardigan over a polka-dot blouse. The gleaming scroll, unreadable, of a laptop open in front of her in as she sips a perfectly ordinary pour-over-coffee on a perfectly lovely afternoon three-days hence in a public square beneath a strange and warm spring sun. She's looking up, she sees some thing. She -

(Sera will share the details when she comes to. But look: see. They have an option. They have a choice.)

Kalen Holliday

Kalen is easily immersed in rituals. Easily falls into magic and connection and lets his power entwine and enmesh and entangle with others. Well, let us be honest, with some others. But he has always fallen into rituals with Serafine as easily as rain falls to the earth. As easily as snow and starlight.

It is no different now.

When the ritual is over and the echoes of their magic are fading he looks up at Penelope. He does not know what Serafine saw, but he knows that she saw something. He does not rise and he does not speak; though he seems to refrain from both of those things less because he cannot do them as because he simply does not chose to. Whatever this ritual took for him to cast, he is not close to beyond doing either of those things.

Instead, he offers Penelope only this: a brief, triumphant smile.

[Sorry. I was waiting on our post order, like an idjit.]

Penelope

How interesting it is to watch other Mages Work together. Here is a Cultist of Ecstasy and here is a (?) Hermetic (with a great deal of Cultist Influence - or so the rumors have it). This is a complicated ritual with many moving parts. How does a Hermetic observe? A Hermetic observes with both eyes open; with an invocation, shaped from nothing, except the wand at ready (readied, always; be a weapon, Flambeau, hot-hearted) and a word, and: perhaps she could replicate this exact ritual later.

She will remember it; she will remember the way the bands of power fit together, anyway, the way they (unrestrainedly) reach out. Kalen's brief, triumphant smile finds a gleam in Penelope's eyes - dark under the starry sky, her red hair wild; and when Serafíne tells them what she saw, Pen is all poise and all frank directness.

How much time do they have until the auspicious moment? Pen will want to have plans; somebody who will not be there, but who will know what is happening: daring does not mean reckless. Pen will want to have plans;

but Pen is hopeful, see. And so are they all who are willing to reach out to an enemy, to find the chink in their armor, to believe beneath that armor there is something human and living and willing to give.

the murder

twilight

Rules:

- I don't have much time tonight, but you are my priority!

- ask me for difficulties before you roll. I may elide / narrate through some bits, I may ask for rolls for others.

- this scene is largely based on what your characters would do, so I'm going to ask you either for OOC direction or IC direction as to where they are starting and what their primary goals are (learn info? set up a distraction? et cetera?)

- if you ever do not understand something I have written but think your character might, feel free to ask for clarification. I may offer to let you roll to learn more.

- you can at any time ask to roll detection / knowledge rolls if you'd like based on the posts. they won't always get tons of info!

twilight

The mercury still dips below freezing at night and each and every frame and edge of the day is ccool or chilly or cold or frigid depending on one's perspective and state of dress but 'round about three p.m. basking in the warm rays of the sun, surrounded by the golden waves of prairie grasses, the low scrub trees, that sense of: space, openness, the mad, endless dome-of-the-sky that inspired some pioneers and drove others mad mad mad. Well, here is Sand Creek Park. The odd sign about construction projects through summer 2016, but otherwise greenspace naturalized enough that the grass is left to go wild, naturalized. Sand Creek proper is low and flat and undulent through the landscape, dark and cold where it runs through its rocky course, and hard to see in the flat sea of waving grasses except when one stumbles upon it, or where a pedestrian bridge arches high over.

Hard to believe a Technocratic lab is little more than a golf course away.

Kiara Woolfe

There's a fine tension here. An undercurrent of it, it rattles through them, rattles bone deep.

Being so close to them. The Verbena can almost taste it; their unyielding trudge toward so-called unification and strength. The idea that Alexander was with them, that they were working to bury their mechanics beneath his skin and twist and distort all that he was to suit their needs had, at first, nearly unwound Kiara Woolfe's carefully built armor.

It kept her safe, you see. That emotional buffer. Kept her from striding across that gently trickling creek into their turf. It was keeping a many great things at bay for the brunette right now - things she carried in those dark eyes of hers when they ticked over the parkland as they arrived; their movements seeming unnaturally loud and echoing.

There were insects singing in the wilder grasses growing by the creek. The Verbena paused only long enough to pass a flashlight to her companion and direct him a slight, brief check of her mouth upward at the corner. Still red, that mouth.

Tonight it feels brazen in a different way - a slash of bold declaration. The pendant around the female's neck glinted as she moved toward the water's edge; adjusting the strap of her backpack.

The insects quieted as they drew nearer, watching.

[Awareness!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 7, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )

Kiara Woolfe

[And, activating Mind Shield! Base Diff 4, -1 Taking her time.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Nicholas Hyde

Nicholas called in sick to work today. It is not the first time he has done this in order to pursue some Awakened agenda, nor will it be the last; and yet it seems to him as though the space between these occurrences grows nearer and nearer. Last year he went on administrative leave from his old job for nearly three months, and when he came back he was so changed and Quiet-riddled the Sleepers in his life all assumed he had cancer. It was the only explanation they had for: holy shit, man.

He is not quite so phased by being this close to a Technocratic stronghold. Nicholas works in a hospital; the risk of running into a Union operative, and the assumption that they perhaps even share some beliefs and aspects of paradigm in common, is a part of his day-to-day life.

Today when he arrives he is also carrying a backpack. Some of his more cumbersome items (the yew staff, in particular) are resting at home in his study; it's fortunate the park is nearby since he will have nearly everything he needs to assist.

Maybe he's a little nervous, today, evidenced generally by fidgeting, by sometimes plucking absently at the curls at the back of his neck. Can she see it? Nick doesn't work around other mages familiar with his preferred Sphere very often.

They arrive at the creek together. His movements are not loud and echoing; he might as well be floating over the landscape here, as though he already stands with one foot in this world and one in the next. They come to the river, and Nick draws in a deep breath that inflates his lungs down to the very bottom and expands his shoulders and chest and lungs.

[Mind shield for Nick too. Base diff 4, -1 taking time. Extending if necessary.]

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

Nicholas Hyde

[Extending.]

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

Nicholas Hyde

[Aaaaaand awareness.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

twilight

If there is some monstrous construct, some mad, consumptive, mechanistic, devouring amalgam lost somewhere in the orange glow of Aurora's ambient light pollution (on snow-bound nights, doesn't it all feel a bit nuclear? some assault, some war at the edge of the horizon: Kiara feels not a lick of it. She's open to the sky and oh there's Orion finding a way to shine through the haze and here is the murmur of the creek and the rush of the brace of interstates surrounding them quite as low and susserant as the coursing of any waterway and hum, hum, hum. Come summer the noisy chorus will be loud and lewd, the rush and need, the drive to consummate, god, something, anything, before the sun falls away from the earth again. To be remade, reborn: perpetuated.

Now though.

Now.

Not many in the park afterdark.

They cut through the popular jogging trails heading for something perhaps deeper. Somewhere where the seams between the worlds are thinning, thinning, thinner.

Night all around. Prairie grass rustling in the constant wind.

No evidence anyone knows they are here.

(Gauntlet is generally 7-8 in the park. Kiara's awareness roll is enough that they can probably hike to an area where it is 6-7 at least at night. it would be higher in daylight.)

Kiara Woolfe

In some ways the solitude feels worse. The normalcy to it; being in the open; surrounded by the soft grasses and beneath the sky. It feels like belonging and home to the pagan. She feels as much a part of the earth beneath their feed and the lush, verdant growth all around them as she does within her skin.

The essence of the brunette was twofold, here. A thrum; the pulse of nature; her perpetual, never-ending cycle. Nicholas takes the time to breathe when they reach the water's edge and the Verbena stands silently for a moment; staring out into the distance; her shoulders straight, a trace of that lingering agitation drawn into the curve of her spine.

Her fingers fall away from the quartz around her neck. "It feels wrong, doesn't it." She offers simply, quietly. Her eyes shifting to rove Nicholas's face. To search it, before she looks back over the water. "It feels like there should be something more. This close." She takes a few cautious steps off to the side and then gestures up a small crest.

There's a gentle gust of wind that sends the smell of summer-turned earth their way; traces over their skin as if to beckon them on. "I think we'll have a better chance up there, through those trees."

Kiara Woolfe

(feed = feet, I can spell, honest.)

Nicholas Hyde

They've reached the water's edge and as Kiara looks over at his face Nicholas seems to be scanning the water itself, for a moment. There is something in the Chakravanti's demeanor that could lend the impression that he is not particularly paying attention as they walk through the park: there are points at which his eyes seemed to be focused on nothing, or when they are looking at something that neither of them are talking about. They go unfocused, hazy.

Nick needs other people; they are a tether.

As Kiara speaks it draws his eyes over to her, and to her comment he only nods. "They might even have some sort of operation here that's being concealed. It's close enough, and there isn't a lot of other green space on their campus." Perhaps he might not otherwise have been so suspicious but: construction projects.

Kiara leads them on, and Nick follows, shifting the shoulder strap of his bag.

twilight

They have to hike to find it. In the dark, unfamiliar ground. The sea of grass helps. Easy to see where others have tramped then down, particularly when winter keeps them dry and dormant. What trees are here are low and scrub; lonely, scrabbling outposts, strange little copses grown up where the water table is high, where an old half-forgotten oxbow of the stream has become a boggy wetland.

Thirty minutes, forty minutes, and: here.

Kiara Woolfe

While they hike, Kiara's narrow beam of torchlight bounces across the grass. Casts a strange, feeble little yellow orb arcing out. She keeps it low, focusing on swinging it out before their feet so they can navigate around the wild grasses that have thrown themselves into re-growth everywhere their roots can reach. Straining even where they've become trodden and flattened by constant human traffic through the park.

She speaks, after a few minutes of silence. She has a melodic voice, the pagan. Somehow sweet for all the ways she clearly was anything but. There's a sense that perhaps she does it - talks, murmurs into the rustling trees and the gurgle of water - for the sake of distracting them from the task at hand as much as anything.

"There was another Node here, you know. Not here, but - out in the trees. In the wilderness. Annie - one of the Cabal at the Chantry - took me out there once. There's a clearing where the world just sort of - stops." Kiara's movements slow and she waits for Nicholas to catch up, glances at him.

The torchlight sliding along her arm, shoulder. Casting shadows into the lines of the Verbena's face. "On the other side, through time. It's just a void of nothing now. After they came and tried to take the Node. It was too wild for them, though. To powerful. It wouldn't yield." A flare of something like pride at that. A vicious sort of satisfaction that fades soon enough as she begins careful steps forward again.

"So they did what they're good at. They destroyed it. Killed more of us. Left the earth stained with blood." She stops after they've walked onwards a good way; dipping into a silence not fraught with but stained at the edges with a particular sort of grief. One not entirely hers but - felt. But understood.

"I think this is it." She turns a small circuit, the Verbena. Sets her pack down carefully. "I think we might be able to reach across here."

twilight

It is as dark a night as one will find in Sand Creek Park. The moon is absent and the clouds have cleared away. The ambient glow is ever-present on the horizon: impossible to forget the labs, the facilities, the hospital a holes of golf away: but beneath the loose sky and among the dark grasslands below: they work. They have come deep enough that they have to push through the waving grasses like ships through the sea, but so they do. The circle is drawn: physically. The landscape means that it lingers physically even as they feel it taking shape, their resonance twined, the magicks woven together like reeds.

Kiara Woolfe

It feels like a key, turning in a lock, once the circle is cast. The faint hum of energy surrounding them; rising up around them in a small diameter on all sides. Kiara presses her fingertips to the bundle of sage and snuffs out the smoking tip; moves quietly over to her pack and carefully replaces it inside.

There's a sobriety, now, to the witch's movements. As if the casting of the circle had signaled some change in her demeanor. The dark eyes that find Nicholas, twin glimmers in the twilight, are full now of a steady sort of determination. "I think we're ready now," she offers and rises to her feet, gently brushing dirt from her knees.

"Crow won't be able to cross the circle but hopefully he'll be willing to bargain information. You've dealt with him before, you can speak for us, once he's here if you like." Her mouth curls a touch, she holds her hand out to the other Awakened.

"Ready?"

Nicholas Hyde

Nicholas always has a sort of sobriety to his movements; there is no discernible difference in him once that quiet hum of energy seems to spring up around them. If anything, perhaps there is some tension that has crept into him just now: he is unused to Working with an audience, or speaking to spirits with an audience, especially not when that happens to consist of someone who is more experienced than he is.

Still, he levels a look at the Verbena as she rises to her feet and he says, "I'm still learning to summon. If you call him here, I can speak with him."

There is this glance to her hand when she offers it to him, this moment of quizzical hesitation: unsure of its purpose. But he places his hand in hers, nods, and says, "Ready."

Kiara Woolfe

[Right! Let's do this. I think ... we're gonna roll with Spirit 3 to Summon and add in Prime 2 to assist with drawing Crow over. So, we're starting at Base Diff 6, -1 for using Instruments, -1 for taking her sweet time and -1 for using a Quint. GO BIG OR GO HOME. May extend! I think they'll need a few suxx to get Crow's attention. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Kiara Woolfe

[Extending! +1 Diff and adding a WP.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 7, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Kiara Woolfe

[Once more for flavor.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

twilight

Not silence here, but the distance of human-crafted sounds give their circle a strange sense of isolation that should feel rare in an urban setting: anywhere, except - god, it is night, and it is not quite as hard as one imagines to become lost in a cityscape, after full dark has fallen, particularly this close to one of the doorways of the year.

What is that near? That noise that feels like woosh and lift, shadow-against-shadow with this fey hint of gleam, that shadow-without-shadow-without-shadow because tonight there is no moon.

Breathe in: and there. Stippling the bare limbs of the nearest scrub oak, this impression of - oh, a half-dozen dark-winged birds, roosting in the trees. Gleam-of-a-querying eye from the other side of their well-cast circle. And:

?????????

This push of query/question that embodies so many all in one. Who/when/how/why?

And, perhaps also: what do you have for me?

Kiara Woolfe

It takes time, to summon a spirit. Not - endless time, they don't quite have that to spare but - time. There is a drawing in of focus required, you understand. A need for this small, lean woman with her wild hair and eyes to pull at the very fabrics that knit their worlds together and unravel them. To part the seam between and draw out one that resided on the other side.

There was good reason why the Spirit touched Awakened often seemed so displaced - at any given moment prone to staring off into space; to gleaning things that were not quite there. For the Umbra, such as it was, was a profound spectacle to behold - hard to ignore that much wonderment, once your eyes had seen it once.

Kiara grips Nicholas' hand at one point; her eyes fixed ahead; at some point in the inky darkness. There's a thickening; a syrupy gathering of energy and then - the swoop of wings. They are, quite suddenly, not alone and being observed by a gathering of crows nesting in the tree branches.

The Verbena's fingers loosen and she turns dark eyes to her companion. Her expression seeming to read: you're up, batter.

Nicholas Hyde

Nicholas, when he has spoken with spirits, has typically engaged them in this random way: whatever happened to be in the area he was. It so happened that crow spirits and raven spirits and coyote spirits happened to find him, more often than not. He does not know how long he walked in the dead lands when he was there, but he knows they became as friends, or as close to friends as something otherworldly can really ever get.

His gaze is intent as Kiara grips his hand and focuses her eyes (unfocuses them? who can really say) on the black that surrounds them. The swoop of wings: his fingers loosen too at that moment and he looks around toward the winged birds that are roosting in that tree, from the other side of the circle.

"Hello," he says to them, and there's this way that he talks to them without pretense, as though they were people. The two of them are battered by questions, which merit answers, in their turn. And then, "Nicholas Hyde, and this is Kiara Woolfe. I've met others like you before, and I know you're clever and quick, and I know how much you know.

"We called you hoping you'd be willing to trade. Secret for secret?"

twilight

Secret for a secret?

Secret for a secret.

There is something elegant and elegaic about the dark shapes shrouded amongst the bare tree limbs. This sense of communal awareness, of communication, of chorus that ripples from one suggestion to another, dancing through murder, each to each.

At last the foremost among them rears back and opens its body up to the full width of its wingspan, and rears back and takes such soaring flight only to swoop back downward, hopping and backwinging like it intended to land just outside the circle.

And so it does. Somehow the waving grasses sink all around the creature.

Gleam, that eye. Finally:

Assent. Secret for a secret. and

Tell me what you know.

Greedy thing.

Kiara Woolfe

Kiara watches on as Nicholas speaks to the spirit(s). Her stillness could either signify tension or grave, total consideration and a look spared the Verbena's way speaks far more of the latter. The edge of her jaw in the moonlight a finecut thing; she's all hollows and dark, shining eyes.

When Crow assents, when he dives and settle-hops to the ground near the edge of the circle, then Kiara stirs and glances at her companion. Their secrets were a precious commodity and perhaps, given their nature, not to be shared without considerable caution. "We can each offer something," she says quietly, with a tinge of some unidentifiable strain in her voice.

"The more we do, the more he may be inclined to offer back." There's a beat, then Kiara walks to the edge of the circle proper and lowers herself to a crouch; observing the spirit's gleaming, bright eye. "Hello, Crow." The brunette murmurs and then leans in. Her body perched there at the edge of the circle.

She says something, the pagan and then after a beat, pulls back and rises again.

Nicholas Hyde

Greedy thing: he had expected no less. Finding something equitable, that's always the trick; bargaining ethically, without giving away secrets that aren't his to give away - that's the other.

"I will. Do you know anything about the tower back that way?" And here, a significant look over his shoulder toward the Technocratic compound. He can only imagine how it looks to them: he has never been to such a place, not in the Umbra. An infinite network of steel and glass, perhaps. "The web. We want to know everything you know about it."

He watches them with steady eyes, hair dark as one of their wings. Perhaps they, too, think he is a greedy thing. He watches as Kiara moves forward, whispers to the murder. "I'll offer more once we know what you have to tell in kind."

Kiara Woolfe

This is the secret Crow receives from the Verbena: Our friend was taken hostage and when I heard he was the first thing I felt wasn't pity or fear but envy. To be that close to them, to look them in the eye and have the chance to destroy them.

I want to watch them all burn. I want to exact revenge for my friends. And for myself.

twilight

We know it.

Ruffling, rustling, the murder responds. The foremost of them bobs its head. That whole and strange and oddly human movement, the too-intelligent gaze.

An echo: rising, whistling, whispering, brightening, query after query after answer after query:

Spiderhome.

Another frission, this dark, lyrical glance from Nicholas to Kiara, Kiara to Nicholas, back again.
--

Everything we know is much and little. Ask what you will and we will answer.

Kiara Woolfe

The brunette's arms fold over her chest and for a beat she frowns into the distance, as the spirits mention the tower; call it the Spiderhome. The spirits of stagnation and the cities; spinning their webs across great divides of gleaming glass and steel.

She exchanges a look with Nicholas, then presses: "We seek someone inside the Spider's domain. He feels like Ice. Frozen things. We want to know what protections there are to reach him. Where are the dangers?"

Nicholas Hyde

Spiderhome, they say, and Nicholas, this is the first time he's heard it described as such: he had some sense of the way these places looked to spirits, from things he has heard others say. He had perhaps been unaware until now of how apt his conceptualization of the place was.

The crows rustle on their branches, and Nicholas shifts his weight from one leg to the other, folding his arms as he thinks. Perhaps he is still thinking of what to offer in return; it is not a decision made lightly. "We also want to know the best way to reach him, the most direct and with the fewest dangers. Are there any places near the web that they haven't touched - any safe places?"

twilight

There is a sense of cessation there. Kiara says that they seek someone inside who feels like ice and there is another flutter from within the murder, ths humming, humming query that comes back to them, in a ricochet:

Many frozen in spiderhome. Frozen-one-who-sought-and-changed is the friend-you-seek?

Another bristling from within the murder, which feels like a shivering sense of refusal or disagreement, some sense of disorder. They do not know the best way to him; where he is being held, except in the heart and here there is something else: an impression from the murder that has flown-over spiderhome, that sees it from above the spinning web of the grid, that sensed this person and this change, some surging change like growth growth growth (flowing and boundless) from deep inside. Later: Kiara and Nicholas will be able to transliterate this impression of space into at least a certain (still large) wing of a certain hospital south of where they stand. Another sense of being: beneath, buried, perhaps - perhaps? Belowground?

One of the murder tells them that noplace is safe but again: that bristling of disagreement, a rustling rising of a secret coming to the surface: The Greenway. Oak still lives.

Scoff. Slumbers.

Lives.

The dangers? Many: myriad. Stasis, says one. Death, says another. Devouring.

Kiara Woolfe

Frozen one who sought and changed is the friend you seek?

Kiara's mouth softens a touch, tilts up at the edge into a slip of a smile; she inclines her face. Nods, briefly. "Yes, that's our friend. He was taken and we want to bring him home." There's this tiny fleeting tremor in Kiara's voice that registers on home. As if she were uncertain of saying it aloud, as if, deep down, she knew there may well not be a home for Alexander to return to.

How did you simply pick up and resume a life after what he's been through, anyway?

Oak still lives. Slumbers. The Greenway.

The Verbena's smile fades a little. "Oak can help?" Aside, to Nicholas. "They might be referring to Greenway Park. It's not that far from here." Then, her dark eyes back on Crow. "I can awaken Oak from his slumber."

Nicholas Hyde

The Greenway.

There is this sharp glance to Kiara then, something that Nicholas tries to shadow more or less as second nature but cannot quite. It is a thing that sounds significant to him, even if he is fully unaware of the area. Fortunately, Kiara expounds, lends color and form to the sketch he is beginning to lay out in his mind.

He heard Kiara's uncertainty too. His jawline is firm: Nicholas had expected to find the man changed. If you wish to be reborn, first you have to die.

"It sounds like we're headed to Greenway next, then." And he takes a few steps closer to the edge of the circle, regards the murder in his somber way. "Thank you, Crow. You've been very helpful to us. Is there something specific you would have of me?"

Kiara Woolfe

[Enigmas + Intel]

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

Nicholas Hyde

[Enigmas + Intelligence]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

twilight

There was dissension amongst the murder because they were debating whether or not a certain oak (somewhere: perhaps close) was even alive. It sounds a bit like an old wives' tale, as much as a secret. But: if that oak is in a nearby park and if that park is threatened by the technocrats, slumbering is the only way that spirit has of surviving. Waking an oak spirit (which is tied essentially to its rooted-tree) would probably be the death of the tree and its spirit.

If anyone needed a distraction the murder might be the best way to go: they are mobile! and can fly over/away, but I am not sure that they need that right now since they aren't attacking (yet).

twilight

The murder seems to confer amongst itself and they returns to Nicholas. It wants: one shiny secret. And two tears.

ginger

ginger

Okay, so: rules!

- any questions ask me, no worries. if something I say is confusing you can always ask to roll other stats to get a better understanding of what's happening.

- please touch base w/me re: difficulties before rolling magickal / computer feats especially since we are dealing with the Techs.

- there is obviously some danger here since we are dealing with the techs.

- if I head anyplace uncomfortable for you please let me know.

- I have about three hours today!

- I will do a quick intro post.

ginger

So.

A certain chilly morning, a certain day, a certain hour. Certain news unwelcome enough that it leaves a sour-slick at the back of the throat. Here: a disparate band of disparate Traditions of differing temperments with differing levels of background and information and drive and desire. Still, for all of that, they take their leave of the chantry that morning with the roughest outline of a plan and (for some) a newfound paranoia, or (for others) a new focus for a longstanding enmity.

Grace has her own charge: more solitary than most. Perhaps the only one of those present who could really fit within her paradigm, even tangentially, is the Dr. Sepulveda, and hell, doesn't he seem a little bit mad?

Grace

Grace doesn't waste much time getting back to the Office and starting on her work. Preparations must be made. Plants must be watered, and some programs have to be written. She tries to get in contact with Atreyu, to no avail, and that is a bit concerning, but no matter. She can get her information. And she will. A nap, then. Naps are important.

Rousing herself from sleep, curled up on her couch in her office, she heads straight to the desk, currently occupied by her laptop and a sprawling, many-armed English ivy plant, whose scaffolding enclosure reads "Chloe III". The scaffolding has three small, articulated robot arms attached, with doodads at the ends. She flicks a switch. Those doodads send thin strands of green light straight to Chloe's leaves, powerful enough that the laser beams can be seen in the air.

Next, she drains the dregs of old coffee from a handy cup, because why waste caffeine?

She's not really used this planty apparatus for its intended purpose yet, and that puts a bit of a thrill through her, as she opens up her laptop and starts it, waiting for the few seconds it takes to rouse it from sleep, and then instructing it to go directly to her Special Programs.

A black screen. A little blinking cursor. And then, a chaos of activity, as she attempts to hack into the plant's photosynthesis. The lasers, with their specifically attuned light frequencies help. Because, you see, all the green things that grow on the earth owe their energy production to a bit of quantum calculation. Photons once captured must be shepherded to the right cells for processing, and they calculate the right path to take by taking all of them. To hijack that process, make it work for her -- that is Grace's goal.

[Life 2, Entropy 3, Forces 2 and Corr 3 -- Plant-Based Quantum Computing. Diff 6 - 1 (personalized instrument) - 1 (taking time)]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (5, 5, 8) ( success x 3 )

Grace

[Extend!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Grace

[Extend again!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Grace

[again!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

ginger

Must give her a sense of genuine satisfaction: nay, actual thrill when she focus, when she digs, when she reaches into the fundamentals of Chloe's cells and hijacks those native processes in which she believes, entirely, whole-heartedly, and finds them humming brightly beneath her own fingers. This strange, electric sense of a sort of sub-atomic chaos, the wild rattle of greenery, briliance sorted beneath her hands.

Now, the rest of the work begins.

Grace

First off, Ginger has to be 'secured'. For a given value of 'secure'. She's got to hack a small company in Denver who runs 1-800 lines of a seedy nature, which shouldn't be too hard. There's backdoors left behind after the first attempt, and having the ability to break any non-quantum encryption scheme known to man, thanks to Chloe, that will help too.

The universe-code runs in the background, while she brings up a special suite of tools, with a splash screen of a cartoon penguin holding a pirate flag. It slices through 1-800-FAT-GRLS like butter.

Once inside, she looks for traces left behind. Looks to see if Alex's number has called in lately, checks the archives to see if anyone's viewed the older files -- all hints that the Techs might be watching.

ginger

????

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 5, 7) ( success x 2 )

ginger

???+

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 2, 4) ( success x 1 )

ginger

???+

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 4, 9) ( success x 2 )

ginger

???+

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace

[Hacking a thing: Diff 9 - 3 (Chloe)]

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 5, 5, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace

[Oop, actually 4 successes, I forgot to double tens]

ginger

o_O

Dice: 8 d10 TN4 (3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 6 )

Grace

[Again with the rolls!]

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 8 ) [Doubling Tens]

ginger

There. Fucking there.

Subtle as fuck. First she does a cursory review and she can see it all in layers: Sera's post and the various views without response. Quiet before, right? Been awhile since there was anything of anything urgency shared between them and for that reason access is sometime sporadic until something: some instinct, some quiet urgency, some hint of foresight -

Little after, though it has only been a day. Nothing since the meeting at the chantry.

Back, though: one step. One quiet step. Another, another. Here, the last direct access to Ginger by Alexander weeks and weeks ago and initially even this appears benign to Grace. Ironic or maybe a little bit tragic: the day of, the day before. Nothing left behind except these miniscule suggestions of information, like the hint of perfume left in a close space when its wear-er exits. Alone; except, no.

Wait, no.

There is something that stands out; something off, something wrong, the subtlest catch in the weave and she finds herself following - following - chasing these illusory traces of information feels like trying to catch the edge of a breaking wave. But: there, there, there - the subtlest hints of a presence that she discovers to be branching in the logs: forward and backward. A command of time, perhaps: sign-ins from Alexander even during the period of his self-imposed exile from Ginger, and earlier, earlier, earlier, earlier: all from his most current point of access, before it was ever obtained.

Ginger is compromised. Is she?

Grace

Grace looks, and she finds. Alex has been a busy man, accessing Ginger when he didn't have a phone, accessing it before he Awakened even. I mean, it's a neat trick, nice try there. Still.

Gotcha, assholes.

And also, it's kind of sad, confirming this. Ginger is, for all intents and purposes, dead. It's only useful now for passing on information to the enemy, really. And she's going to have to make a lot of phone calls after this, to keep people from using it. The spare thought of "I could just let people know on Ginger" comes and goes with a sigh.

Nope, not anymore.

Now, the trick for her is obfuscation. She's got a story in mind, a program to make it look like people are discussing this new story. It had to be fake, believable, and rather a minor threat -- one the Techs might not want to look at too hard. So, for the next few weeks, there will be chatter about the discovery of a body with no blood and fang-marks. There will be talks about how to cover it up. There will be newbie Mages doing a little freaking out about vampires and their existence. Grace saying she'll check in with some contacts. I mean, that sort of thing should happen all the time, right?

Just another day in Denver. Nobody's freaking out about Alex. Who would care about an Orphan Apprentice anyway?

And in time, when it's useful to do so, this same program can be used to come up with another story to feed the Techs...

Grace

[Computers/Programming -- Making a program up! Need 10 successes, diff 8 - 3 (Chloe)]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 8 ) [Doubling Tens]

Grace

[Again!]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 2, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 7 ) [Doubling Tens]

Grace

[Corr 2, Entropy 3, Mind 2 -- Imbue with Emotional Depth -- We're trying to fake some personalities here, so that the messages seem real, and can't be easily analyzed as having originated from the same person. Diff 6 - 1 (taking time) -1 (personalized instrument)]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Grace

[Er, should have been diff 4, but it comes out the same...]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Grace

[And I, in my infinite rolling wisdom totally didn't mean to roll that, but okay -- I don't mind.]

Grace

[Extending again, spending quint to reduce diff to 4]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 5, 7) ( success x 2 )

Grace

[Again!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 3, 9) ( success x 1 )

Grace

[Last bit of quint!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 4, 7) ( success x 2 )

ginger

?

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 5, 7) ( success x 2 )

ginger

?+

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

ginger

?+

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 7, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

ginger

???

Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 7 ) [Doubling Tens] [WP]

Grace

[Perception + Alertness, Diff = 9]

Dice: 5 d10 TN9 (4, 5, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 1 )

Grace

[Intelligence + Computers, Diff 8 - 1 (Ability aptitude, Computers)]

Dice: 9 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

ginger

Grace starts this work in early afternoon, late evening. Hard to tell what the light is doing without from inside the depths of the office, and certainly somewhere in the middle of all of this frenzied work she begins to lose: first nanoseconds, then seconds, minutes, not quite hours but -

- hell.

Seventeen hours, thirty-eight minutes, twenty-three seconds later the masterpiece is finished.
The Work and the work and the richochet between them; this complex, subtle program that in the end feels rather like a living, breathing incarnation of one of her own short stories given a sort of machine-life, a complex iteration of presence and absence, ebb and flow. Her bladder is aching and her throat is raw and she has reached that point of exhaustion where she is so hungry and thirsty and wired and tired that it is difficult to decide which one to tackle first and much, much easier to linger in virtual space watching and speculating about the threads of her complex new program. Convincing enough - imbued with her own magick - that she can well believe in it herself.

--

And just as she is leaving, exiting, pulling herself back out of that server, perhaps never to return. She notices: not unlike a certain girl named by a certain author: Alice -

- a strange little door she had not seen before. And has the sense: nay, the certainty, that behind it is a language she does not yet know.

Grace

A strange little backdoor. A rootkit of surprising stealthiness, masquerading as a normal part of the server, and yet -- Grace knows servers. There's something not quite right about this.

It's enough to get her to forget her stomach and bladder and dire need for more caffeine.

What the hell is this? She's going to prod it, because why not? Server's compromised anyway and she knows it. Why not find out exactly what they did? Maybe it'll be useful. Maybe she can use this little rootkit to find out how to combat their techniques, or even...

Follow the door to where it leads.

Grace

[Stamina! Can she make it?]

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

Grace

And then, she has to sneeze. And she's pretty sure if she sneezes right now, the result would not be pleasant. She's already trying hard not to unleash her bladder all over her chair.

Okay. Breathe. Pinch the nose. Make it go away.

It's a good thing Kalen built her this office as a hermitage of sorts, with a mini bathroom and fridge and sleeping couch, no? Prescient that. Like he just knew that she would want to use it like that.

She gets up from her chair stiffly, because sitting in one spot for so long will do that to you. Wanders off to the bathroom to relieve herself and then, it's only a few efficient steps to the fridge for leftovers (miso udon) to shove in the microwave. So convenient! After that, it's not so easy to forego sleep either. It's a challenge to her tenacious nature, as she glances over at her bizarre rig. Hmm.

Mike made himself stay awake while hunting The Artist. He had a damn good reason, too. She doesn't really have such a reason, other than time. But then, they might discover her actions during the time needed for a nap...

She slinks over to the computer again, occasionally dipping back into the udon, prepping a program to mimic sleep -- just until she has done what she needs to do.

[Life 2, Mind 2 -- Sleep is For The Weak -- Diff 5 - 1 (taking time), -1 (personalized focus)]

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

Grace

[Hacking a back door! Diff 10 - 3 (Chloe)]

Dice: 9 d10 TN7 (3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7) ( success x 4 )

Grace

[Moar Hacking!]

Dice: 9 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace

[Forgot to double tens... Should be 4 successes.]

Grace

[And, one more time!]

Dice: 9 d10 TN7 (3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

hallux

??

Dice: 4 d10 TN3 (2, 3, 4, 9) ( success x 3 )

hallux

??+

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (2, 3, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

hallux

??+++

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 1, 2) ( botch x 2 )

hallux

! .

Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 3, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

hallux

An hour passes. Two. The defenses here are rigid, sleek, impossible (not for her, never for her)Three hours and there is something that feels ridiculously fractal and elegant and elegaic about the code through which she is spinning, a thousand neat little fractals, too many dead ends to count, the strange symmetry that would be near-impossible to shatter were she not performing her calculations on some subatomic level, piggybacking her own work on that of Chloe's photosynthesis.

Four hours and -

- something - breaks/open. She can breathe in the connection humming through the otherside. No triggers yet that she sees except something in the access point itself seems to be starting to unravel. Some heretofore unseen programming now executing, an essential, entropic erosion of the rootkit itself, coming from within.

She's inside though - right? She's inside.

But the connection is already starting to collapse and she doesn't have much time...

Grace

[Int + Research, diff 7!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (2, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

Grace

[Wits + Enigmas, diff 6! Spending WP.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

Grace

The first thing she does (after finding out that what connection exists here is about to be shut down (of course, they would have automated protocols...) is look for Alex.

Nobody's been able to beat back their wards enough to tell what happened to him. She wants to know. Wants to be able to tell anyone looking to storm the castle what his condition might be. Hell, they may have moved him somewhere else. He may be dead now. It's all possible, right?

So, she starts searching. Quickly quickly through their fractal-laden servers she trawls. Have to be fast now -- she goes for the most likely candidates first. They aren't going to store this kind of thing on the same hard drives they store the office party pictures, after all...

hallux

Grace finds a fragment of a file and an origination date and there are not NAMES as such but she can isolate his file based on the date (Sera says) he disappeared.

There: Subject 88123-123.

Standard Protocols. Primium-lined walls, bed, table, cup, sink. 2000 Cal a day diet. Library including an array of standard scientific works, from Darwin to Pasteur to Curie to Hawking and everything in between. Notations beside any that Subject 88123-123 has shown interest in. Once a day he is removed from the cell for counseling. There are records documenting one surgery: a knee reconstruction. Dry medical language describes the degree of damage done to the knee, and the Subect's recovery.

He is being kept in Ward 2, Room 7. There is, however, no map.

Grace

[Wits + Research, Diff 7!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 6, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

hallux

Interesting. While searching through the protocols regarding Subject 88123-123 Grace finds several hidden notes she deciphers as dates and times for what appear to be two separate scheduled emergency drills. Dayshift and nightshift. This is clearly interesting: she follows the thread and discovers that both day and nightshift will be subject to separate emergency preparedness drills in the next [xx] days.

hallux

??

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

hallux

??+

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace

There is precious little time. Still, when she finds Subject 88123-123, she sighs out a breath she didn't know she was holding, and reaches out to touch the pixels that prove his existence.

The library concerns her, as does the counseling. The knee reconstruction, well... Bodies heal easier than minds, sometimes. It sounds to her like they are trying to convert him, which... Well, it's Alex. Nobody's been able to convert him, even the ones not currently treating him like a lab rat.

Searching further results in hidden notes, and that is a thing to pass on to the castle-stormers, yes? A weak spot.

It's then that the first hint that someone's found her trickles into her consciousness. The connection she has is steadily disintegrating (and damn, that's a nice trick, will have to utilize it for Ginger 2.0) so there isn't much time anyway. Certainly not enough to fight this intrusion and also find more.

She pulls the wifi card out of her laptop with a swift yank, and then goes to fight them back. Nope, can't piggyback on that connection anymore, jackass.

[Arete, Diff 8! Countermagicking! Spending WPs.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (3, 6, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Grace

[Again!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (1, 3, 6) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

hallux

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 4, 7) ( success x 2 )

Grace

[One more time!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (3, 5, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Forward.

Serafíne
An old Jeep in the driveway with Colorado plates, parked next to but not inside the garage.  Mud kicked up by the tires is spattered over the flanks.  Hell, it's spring, or near to it.  Mudlucious, right?

That's the first signal that the chantry has a visitor other than its routine residents.

In the kitchen, someone's made tea.  It's cooling beneath a cozy.  The supple of alcohol has been replenished - two big bottles of Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey are set out on the counter.   These days the space is no longer precisely communal - instead, it belongs to someone so.  Harder to figure out where things go.

But Sera isn't in the kitchen or the living room or downstairs in the well-secured library, she is on the back patio, where steam from the hotspring rises in the cool (almost) spring air, densely mineral.  The Cultist has been here, soaking her calves in the warm pool of water, meditative or near to it, long enough that her Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt has gone translucent from the rising steam.  There's a cup of whiskey-spiked tea on the flagstone lip near her right thigh and no one within haling distance.  If Dan drove her (he always does), he is secreted away somewhere else in the Chantry.

Nicholas Hyde
From the driveway, there's a sound of another approaching car: these open spaces, without trees to muffle the sound, forecast approaching vehicles from farther away than the places where Nick has spent most of his recent time.  Sera can hear it come to a stop in the driveway, can hear the engine cut.  She cannot hear the footfalls of whoever emerges from the vehicle. (Ironic, perhaps, that such an Echo should leave no sound.)

Nicholas has not been here, other than the meeting in which they all gathered to talk about Alexander's abduction and likely subsequent torture and reconditioning.  He is unaware of who the chantry is owned by; it only occurs to him how very small the place is considering what he grew used to on the east coast.  The population is sparser here, and so too for their kind.

She can hear the door open and shut; still no footfalls.

It takes a while for Nick to make his way down the spring, if only because he is wandering through the dwelling to see what's there, upstairs and down and into the library and back out to where he can see steam rising past the foggy windows.  When he sees Sera there, it makes him halt, if only for a moment.  "Hello," he says, and he sounds a touch surprised.

A moment later he is sitting next to her near the pool of water, crosslegged.  "It's good to see you up and around."

Serafíne
Sera does not tend to meditate with her eyes closed.  No, she manages it with her eyes: open and she thinks that's as it should be.  Leaning back, palms on the damp stone, her arms straight, back arched,  dark eyes half-lashed, affixed to the sky above.  The scrim of pale, thready clouds in the saturated sky.  The changing light as evening is starting to fall, the trail of jet cutting purposefully through the gloaming.


He says hello and her sharp little chin drops and her dark eyes, too.  Otherwise, her posture does not change.  This spare twinge of an expression (shading wry, as response to his surprise, the source of which she does not know) on her mouth.  "Hello."

Right back at him, but not quite an echo.  He sounds surprised.  She sounds like she knows a secret, and hell - maybe she does.

And she watches him as he exits the house, circles around the patio, comes to sit near her, attention dropping only when he is seated at last.  Her profile to him, then, or an impression of it.  All planes and angles: honed rather than curved.

"I don't actually spend my whole life in a complete state of stupor."    Neat, incisive little shrug here.  "I was up all night, and coming down hard."   From magick, yes, and what she uses to fuel it.  "Quite a welcome wagon we hustled up for you and your wife, hmmm?"


Serafíne
"You never met Alexander, did you?"

Nicholas Hyde
"It was," Nick says, of the welcome wagon.  His fingers have found the knots at the neck of his boots, and he is working them through, trying to untangle them.  He has not answered her other question yet, about Alexander, and something in his expression suggests that he is processing her other words.

He does say: "I only assumed you were exhausted."  Nick's profile, his straight nose and bowed mouth and high cheekbones, are framed in the dimming light of the sun.  His hair has gotten longer since she saw him last; it is beginning to curl around his ears and at the base of his neck, as though he has chosen to eschew shears along with the trappings of the east coast.  (It never fit him anyway - that's not where he's from.)

Finally he has worked the knots loose, and he pulls off his boots.  His socks follow, and are tucked into the boots, which he sets aside.  As he rolls up the cuffs of the grey chinos he is wearing (his legs are sparsely haired), there is something musing there in his expression.  "I never met Alexander," he says, "but Pen told me about him.  It sounded like she respects him."

As he scoots toward the spring on the heels of his feet and hands to drop his feet in, he finally looks over at her.  "It sounds as though everyone around here is taking what happened pretty hard."

Serafíne
Nick says that he only assumed she was exhausted and Sera gives him this queer little glance; over her shoulder.  "Yeah?"  The hint of her nose, the sharp wing of her cheekbone, a shadowed eye.  Curls gone kinkier from the damp and the heat, a little more flyaway.    Her mouth in a smirk that has some edge to it.  Somehow more and less at once than it would, in any other circumstances.  Okay: a sobriety to her that matches her meditative pose, and seems somehow - less precisely sober and more, somehow - sacred.

"I was still hallucinating.  Plus the acid hangover.   Makes you feel like you've been pried apart and put back together."

Kinda what it feels like to scry like that, for someone like her, too.

"I met Alex the day he woke up.  You know?  Shitty thing to happen to him.  Fucking assholes."

Nicholas Hyde
Nick has leaned back on the heels of his hands, his feet fully immersed in the spring, his head tilted slightly back; he is not looking at Sera just this moment.  He is breathing in steam, and letting it swell his chest and settle in his hair and in the hollow of him, drinking in the place almost.  His hair has not yet begun to kink in the heat and the damp, but it will.

"I've never used that for magick," he says, though this is less some sort of judgment and more an idle comment, perhaps an invitation to say more or less as she wishes.

Serafine, when she mentions Alex, draws the Chakravanti's gaze back to her at last.  He sways into a more upright position, his spine perfectly aligned with his base, his shoulders set: he does some sort of yoga or meditation himself.  "What do you think are the chances of us finding him, realistically?" he asks, and perhaps he wouldn't ask this if Sera didn't feel as powerful as she does to him.  He assumes experience, and he assumes wisdom.    "As he was?"

Serafíne
For the moment, she does not pick up the thread of his idle comment about the tools.  A glance sure, a certain attenuated attention: not high-strung but somehow both nuanced and livewire that slides across his features.  She is looking for judgment.  Perhaps expecting it - but -

"Realistically?"  Her eyes, dark and darker, affix on him.  This quick, sorrowful curve to her fine mouth.  An expressively dampness in her eyes.  "I don't believe in their fucking reality.  And we won't find him as he was, yeah?  Because he won't be Then, he'll be Now."  Conviction, bright, sharp, engaging, in every goddamned word.

"But we'll find him."  This more nuanced; another hint of that sobriety, that precision.  Less conviction, you know, but still a core of believe.  "And whoever he is now, we'll help him figure it out."

Nicholas Hyde
There is a breath that she can hear; this is not sharp, it's not any kind of gasp for air or fish out of water sucking gills sort of desperation.  Just this quiet drawing in and release, during which his chest swells again.

He looks at her once more and his eyes glint amber in the looming twilight.  "Good.  I expect he'll be different," Nick says, though there is perhaps something in him that was encouraged by what Sera has said.  The expressions his face carries are also nuanced things, full of secrets and whispered promises and always questions.

Of course Nick expects Alex will be different; the core of his Tradition surrounds death and rebirth.

"I appreciated Dan's contribution to the meeting, by the way.  I wish I had stuck around longer afterward to tell him so."

Serafíne
She makes a noise, Sera.  Kicks her bare calves out in the water.  Can't know that the way her power colors his impression of her.  Doesn't understand just how much the way she feels has changed to everyone around her.  Beneath and inside it all, she is now, and always has been: simply herself.  So goddamned strange to grow up.  Right?

And she moves her legs, watches the water sluice over them.  She may be a little bit something even now, but, oh.  Not much.  Mostly she's just a little bit Sera, now.

A little bit sorrowful.  A little bit introspective, and Nick appears encouraged by what she said, and she catches that.  Gives him a flickering, allusive glance.  Half-lashed but strange and steady beneath them, then looks back down at the water again.

"He's around here, somewhere."  Quick, sliding little smile.  "If you really wanna tell him.  Usually doubles as my fucking chaffeur since it hardly seems like a good idea for me to get behind the wheel most of the time.   It's not something he really needs to hear, though, you know?"

Nicholas Hyde
"I should," Nick says, of Dan.  And then, "Maybe I'll try to catch him on the way out."  Whatever glances Sera is throwing him, he has not reacted to them; perhaps he has not noticed them, or merely does not know how to interpret them, and that wouldn't be so unusual.  Most people are self-centered creatures, given to watching others mainly for the purpose of knowing how to react to them.  He adds, "Regardless of need, I think most people like to know when they're valued, even for something small."

This has no barbs; there's nothing in it to argue with Sera.  It is what it is, a simple statement of belief, perhaps a sort of affirmation.

Nick lifts one of his feet too, but only enough to let one of his toes crest through the top of the pool and into the air.  He watches the swirls and eddies in the pool, and he twists his head around to touch his chin to his breastbone, stretching out the muscles in his neck and upper back.

"Can I ask you something somewhat personal?  There's something I've been wondering about."

Serafíne
"Mmmph."   That indulgent, or perhaps simply self-indulgent noise, that sounds like assent.  If there were any doubts, she puts them to rest a moment later.  "Sure.  What is it?"

Nicholas Hyde
After she gives her assent, there is this space in which Nicholas allows silence.  This is less due to any hesitation or regret for initiating the conversation, though if she looks over at him during this time his eyes will be cast off somewhere into the sunset, or wandering somewhere just past what either of them can see.  It's not even a stare, just this sort of dreamy unfocused-ness, without any especial intent.

He gathers his thoughts, orders them to communicate them properly.  Nick is married to a Hermetic; perhaps he is particularly aware that words have weight and is not careless with his.

"I've been struggling to move forward," he says, and while this is a sort of admission it has the air of an admission only given for the purpose of context.  "I think I've noticed...a lot of unhappiness and isolation amongst the Willworkers I've known who seem to have reached a higher level of understanding.  The price of power, so to speak.  Did it ever seem that way to you, when you were where I am now?"

Serafíne
Here is Sera listening, her head tipped toward, her hair curtained around her face.  Blond yes, but the color's artificial and there is almost always a suggestion of dark roots, if only in the fringe once shaved close over her left ear, which she has allowed to grow out at least to pin-curl length.  Still, it catches the light, frames her with it.  Enhances the perhaps mythic sense of wildness she has about her now.

And with her head bent like that, her face is all in shadow.  The subtle flicker of her expression, the damned sense of determination as she concentrates, right, because thinking is hard, but once upon a time someone named Hawksley refused to accept her I don't knows and he is still: in her head, right?  So she thinks even when her native instinct is to elide.  Pushing through the feelings, picks them up and turns them over, trying to find the words.

"I was - " pause, her brow contracted, her hands curled over the lip of the stone.  Neat little fingers, that separate sense of resonance that resolves itself into the ring on her right index finger, and all those tattooes.  "I was where I think you are now, when I came to Denver.  And I didn't think about it then.  There were a couple of Disciples here then, and they were cool, they were there for me.  You know?  And everyone..

"But looking back - "    Her eyes close; she has a flash of Pan.  The old photograph of his son beneath a magnet affixed to his fridge.  Another flash, Jim.  Alone in a cheap, ragged motel room reaking of his resonance.  The sour smell of too many days and too many drugs hanging in the air, the overwhelming sense of his despair.  And she doesn't say any of that, but there's an an indrawn breath, ragged, right?  Something like a spasm in the way her hands grip the stones framing the edge of the hot spring.

Tension in her shoulders as she holds herself: still, still, still.  Breathes in, out, in again.  Nods once, entirely to herself.  The answer to some old, old question.  "Why do you ask?"

Nicholas Hyde
Nicholas is not tipped forward but rather has settled back.  There is something open in his posture (perhaps this is more deceptive than it would seem) and in the set of his shoulders, the way the light falls on him and highlights the smooth plane of his nose and throws a gleam into the dark tangled chaos of his hair, turns the light blue of his shirt into a ripple of light and shadow.

If he understands her struggle to answer this question he does not say so, though in the look he gives her through the dark bar of his eyelashes suggests perhaps a sort of solidarity.  Nick, too, feels far more often than he thinks.

"Looking back?" and this is another question, a prompt, another of his invitations to talk more or less.

Perhaps she'll return to it.  When she asks him why he asks, there is this tilt of his jaw as he contemplates his answer and again, his eyes go questing for something past the limits of their sight.  Then, "I wondered, if you saw that too, if it made you hesitate."

Serafíne
"There was a priest."

Hasn't looked up yet, Sera.  Her expression is private and curtained, banked even, and that's a strange thing for anyone who knows her, but who knows her, really: now, as she was then?  This is an hour when the light is changing constantly.  The sun has slipped below the edge of some horizon and everything down below (we are all down below) is shadow-drenched but for the breathless brilliance of the sky, edged all around.  And the sky: skims the surface of the pool in dark reflection.

"First time I met him I needled him about maybe making out with me in his confessional.  A week and a half later he stood between me and a Fallen Adept.  Refused to let them have the soul of a girl who'd cried out to me in a dream, whose soul I'd sworn I'd try to save.  Or at least: give her a chance to save it her own damned self, you know?  To have a choice.

"And he was always there, whenever I needed him.  And fuck if I know if he ever needed me.  Didn't seem like he needed anybody, really.  Though maybe that wasn't true."

"If I ever hesitated, though.  I don't think that's what held me back."  She looks up here, at last.  Gives Nick a look, right then, entirely, unhesitatingly direct.  "Why?  Is that something that concerns you?"

Nicholas Hyde
Nicholas had caught, earlier, when Sera had said: I was where you are now.  It is hard to say what he thinks of that; it would be hard even for Nick to say what he thinks of that, of the possibility of all that could be given a few years' time.  Sera thinks of a priest, and Nick thinks of Jonas, of Ciara, names that seem long ago and far away now, because they are.

There is this still air that precedes his question, as though he is weighing this again, as though there are words he could have instead inserted before and after.  But instead: "Did she save it herself?  The girl."

The world is shadow-drenched tonight, and it seems to have enlivened him in a way: his eyes are brighter in the half light, and his skin which is light brown at midday seems to drink in the moon now.

He does not flinch beneath the directness of her gaze.  Nick has drawn one of his feet out of the water, brought it up against the rim of the spring, where water sluices down and back into the pool.  To her question, he says, "It concerns me.  I asked you because you seem more settled than many of the ones I've met, though," a glance flicked sidelong to her, an acknowledgement, "granted, I don't know you very well."

Serafíne
"Yeah."  So says Sera, "she did."  Just like that too, a musing curl to her mouth, and she doesn't tell Nick that he may have met the girl, because she doesn't know whether or not he has, and anyway: somehow she has never believed that that part of the story is in any way her own to tell.

--

Still the direct look.  Sera has dark blue eyes that go simply dark in all these shadows.   Straight, expressive brows.  These sharp features that are not plainly pretty, precisely, but are still  - quick, sharp, arresting, and that's her physical presence before anyone tastes the first lick of her magick.  Her mouth is open: the huff of a laugh largely unvoiced.  More the cusp of a breath than anything.

"I never really knew that many powerful mages.  You know?  A handful of Disciples.  Two Adepts, one of them Fallen.  One that priest I mentioned: and when I met him he was a Disciple.  Sounds like you've known alot more.

"And - " she looks down here; half-smiles and this is private, yeah.  Strokes the bronze ring on her right index finger with her the meat of her right thumb - reflexively, thoughtlessly.  This minute tic of a movement.  "I think you're the first person to ever call me settled."

Nicholas Hyde
"Mm."  Nick does not know whether he has met this girl; perhaps it does not even occur to him that he would have.  The landscape of Denver is new and still unfamiliar, larger and smaller at once than the east coast.

Which he says.  "Pen and I met and used to live in coastal Connecticut, near Boston," he says.  His foot has found its way back into the water, and now he is looking into the pool with perhaps some longing, as though it's calling to him in a way that only he can hear: perhaps he'll climb into it, after Sera leaves.  "It's a very Hermetic area, but also just more populated by Awakened people in general,  I think.  At least in the urban areas.  There was a not insignificant number of Adepts there."

Almost an afterthought, then, "And a Master who I always felt would wrap me in a web and suck out my soul, given the chance."

His eyes turn to Sera then, to the ring she turns around on her finger.  "Maybe settled isn't the word.  You seem...more comfortable, maybe.  Less Other."

Serafíne
Poor Nicholas.  If Sera were longing to climb into those waters, she simply: would.  Regardless of her state of dress or undress, regardless of her goddamned audience or anyone else's sense of propriety.  Well, for the most part.

And he glances at her and she is not looking at him.  Listen, she is a spare thing, lovely and raw with this hint of the wild even when she is - as she is now - rather composed, really.  Still enough that one can see the delicacy of her features beneath the especial trappings of her sartorial style.  Ink on the cartilage of her elfin ear, skewered by a half-dozen piercings.  Ink below too, the shape and measure of which is mostly hidden by the fall of her massed (bleached) blond curls.

That ring she turns: thoughtlessly, meditatively, a habitual movement of which she is not wholly aware.  It is old, warm, beaten bronze with a flattened shield etched with symbols she does not know or understand.  And it has resonance of its own, see: the promise of unending flight, the flooding warmth of the sun.

"You don't have to follow the path that anyone else followed, yeah?  We all make our own.  And anyway, who says that forward is always the best way to go.  That's a fucking lie told by people who don't understand that time moves every which way."

Nicholas Hyde
Every which way, Sera says, and here Nick smiles: "Or back on itself."  We go forward and we end up somewhere where we've already been before.

Nicholas, see, for all his insight into others and elevation of emotion and joy in the human experience: he's still Chakravanti, and the world is cyclic, and his responsibility and duty lend him a sort of propriety that mean that there is little he does without intention.

Nicholas does observe the delicate line of her cheekbones and the dark roots of her hair, the ink just beneath her skin (perhaps he'd ask her about it, except there is little that annoys people with a lot of tattoos quite like intensely personal questions about what their tattoos mean.)  She is not looking at him and so he has looked away again, and his hands find each other and link together in his lap as the fading light of the sun sets fire to the plains.

"I understand that we all reach Ascension differently," he says, and this has a slight air of musing.  "I think the trick is in knowing how you want it to be different."  There is another look to her then, though this is sidelong and doesn't linger.  "Did you create your ring, out of curiosity?"

Serafíne
"I'm probably about to be heretical as fuck but I don't really like that word, you know?  Ascension.  I haven't always lived in Denver?  I flew to London the day I turned 18, and I was already awake when I got on that plane, even if I didn't fucking understand it, and I might've spent as much goddamned time as possible avoiding anyone in a position of authority or power because I kinda hate both: authority and power.  You know?  The mantling of it."

Except when she doesn't.

"All that hierarchy shit?  I think it's just as big a lie as the fucking rest of it.  Helluva lot easier to accept, though, when all these accidents of birth or time or power or devotion or history or what the fuck ever have put you at the top of the pile, right?  Which is some of the problem of your eat-your-soul Master, I'd wager."

Quick-flash of her neat little smile, which begins with a bright, defiant, toothsome edge that shades into something else: complex, aching, nostalgic for his question that follows, after.  "Naw.  I think it's Egyptian or some shit.  Hawksley gave it to me?"  Lilting pause.  Then: her voice banked, "Consecrated it when he left town."

Nicholas Hyde
For Nick's part, he has never heard it described in any other term other than perhaps Enlightenment.  It is not precisely that Sera's vehemence takes him aback: there are no signs that he is offended or set ill at ease by her heretical-as-fuck response.

No.  Nicholas looks over at her while she speaks, and his eyebrows creep up toward one of the dark spirals of hair that winds down in front of his forehead, and when he draws a breath it is this quick bracing thing, as though this is the first time he has ever heard anyone speak of accidents of birth or time or power or devotion or history in this context.  Because it is.

Because something within him settled into place.  Can she hear it?

Her other response names another person he does not know, offers this explanation about consecrating, and to this Nick nods: perhaps he will return to it later.  Conversations are rarely linear, with him; he has a good memory.

"So if the mantling of it is the problem, do you - you personally - go about dismantling?"

Serafíne
"Mostly I personally go about partying."

And yet - you see - her direct look, her dark eyes.  This kind of challenging flash behind him.  The thing inside her that is meant for opposition, for clash, for saying fuck you to every unthinking convention in the world.    And something else, too: quick and keen and expansive, a strange sort of simmering, 'plosive -

"Which isn't - "  God, sometimes she says shit and then she doesn't know what she wants to say again.  All those words inside her, chasing through.  "Fuck, I don't know that I go about doing anything."

Nicholas Hyde
Sera's response makes Nick smile.  Nick, who is part of perhaps one of the most driven Traditions of the Nine, to whom the concept of self-sacrifice is so intrinsic that he had to justify to himself the decision to marry, and who additionally married into the other Tradition known for its drive: maybe he finds her response refreshing, in a way.  Perhaps he can also appreciate its symmetry in how it also flaunts expectation.

"You went and found Alex," he points out.

He'd glanced away, after her direct look, and back into the pool of water; this is less to be avoidant than it is the process of him gathering his thoughts.  His gaze is intent, as though he could read something there beneath the surface.  "I'd imagine it gets kind of jarring, to reject hierarchy and also find yourself closer to the top than you were before."

Serafíne
Sera smirks.  Yet another neat, compact little expression that twists her mobile mouth.  More private than prominent, but - she does glance back at Nick then, at his profile, perhaps she is trying to figure out if he's being sly.  Whatever she says: her views on power and hierarchy and their definition are neither constant nor internally consistent and she doesn't much care about that, but - no.  There is the lingering frame of his smile and the sense of composure, thoughtfulness about him that she finds quietly odd and modestly charming and she remembers with perfect clarity precisely how tolerant he was of her whims as he piloted her around Trader Joe's.

Then she looks away: and Nicholas may not be avoidant, but Sera is often precisely that.  Still, her smirk has eases into one of her smiles, and it is one of her stranger smiles, as she tells him, "Naw.  I mean, you met me for the first time and I'm the way I am," (she has not yet used the word: Adept in reference to herself) " - but in my head I'm me now, sure, but I'm also: every me I ever was.  That's not the strange part."

Nicholas Hyde
Is Nicholas being sly?

That's a question for which she would have difficulty discerning an answer, from his outward expression and tone.  What he had said was voiced not neutrally, but with a sort of quiet and contemplative empathy, this sense that if Nick were Sera this is perhaps something that he'd find difficult to reconcile.  There aren't any knives there, nothing he'd dig in and twist to make a point.

Sera says she is every me she ever was, and from the Chakravanti there is this glance in her direction, some look that implies both understanding and asks for it at once.  "What's the strange part?"

Serafíne
This one of of those strange ellisions in the conversation.  Nicholas asks Sera what's the strange part and Sera is still looking at him; and she is - yes, absolutely - searching perhaps for a razor or a knife or something that has an edge and this is much less about Nicholas, the way Sera searches his face for something of the intent behind that question, than it is about Sera.  What she sees there, though, moves her -

"What held me back, initiate to disciple, was my fear of the responsibility.  Because people fucking matter to me, you know?  And I have no idea what I'm doing.    I pretty much stumbled into that seeking, too.  I was stoned out of my fucking mind and there she was, in the room, and I wasn't looking and I wasn't thinking and I really don't think, much, but I fucking love magick and I can't quite resist her."

Nicholas Hyde
Sera is looking at him, and he is not looking at her anymore, and this seems to be how their conversation will go, in part.  Nicholas too has something delicate about him, in the way that his angles are sharp and his features are thin and his eyes have a perpetual sort of world-weariness about them.  His clothing, his dark sweater and grey pants, seem to constrain him and particularly in the dimming light: he looks as though he could be a Victorian painting of some fey creature, and they're a poor stand in for some sort of silver armor or draping robe.

When she is moved to make her response, that is when Nicholas looks over at her again, absorbing her words.  There is some warmth there in the crinkling of the skin around his eyes as she makes mention of her fear of the responsibility.  "People matter to me too," he says.  "But it sounds like you...it sounds as though you've been able to stay responsible.  Responsibility doesn't always mean forcing the world to fit your vision."

Serafíne
"Hmmm."  There is a musicality to that musing hum.  This inflection of a minor third, perhaps.  Or a minor fifth: something to fit the strange sense of mournful constraint that scrims through world around Nicholas.  And the creature's voice is fine and strangely fond and also, truly: bemused.  "I guarantee you'll be the only person this week, this month, the year to say that I am both settled and responsible."

Some stirring from within the house (some thread, some awareness, some change, some affinity, but she is, beneath all this, a Seer and an Oracle so for fuck's sake shouldn't she know when her best friend, sometimes-lover, songwriting partner and partner-in-crime is climbing up the stairs from the library downstairs, ready usher her back into the world, just fractionally before he appears?

"But I'm pretty sure if I can manage it, you can too.  I mean: you're thinking about it, and it's important to you, and fuck, you have a leg up on me since I'm guessing you're smart and sober more than fifty percent of the time.  I dunno if that's comforting or not, but I also think: that you shouldn't ever have to move at anyone else's pace but your own."

Nicholas Hyde
There is this short note of mirth, something wry-touched, that comes from deep in his throat.  And here, Sera was looking for knives and razors and perhaps this is where it is, though they don't seem to be for her.  "That's the magick of words.  They mean different things to different people."

Some stirring from the house, and Nick turns his ear in that direction before recalling: ah yes, she'd said Dan was in the house.

Again, some warmth as Sera tells him to move at his own pace, and voices confidence.  And all he says is, "Thank you, Sera."

Serafíne
That stirring, which Sera senses before it actually occurs and Nicholas the moment is does resolves itself into the tall, thin figure of the consor seen through the evening sky, reflecting over the glass sliders that separate within from without.  Cold enough out here that the doors are still closed, this haze of condensation further obscuring the interior.

Sera kicks her bare calves through the water and then she is gathering herself up, quick and sure.  A subtle athleticism in her spare frame that is usually spent simply on the world of balancing like a badass in the damned shoes she prefers to wear, which has a much simpler expression when she is - as she is tonight - lithe and barefoot.  Too bad she didn't bring Sid out here tonight.  Sera misses the animal when she's absent; but then forgets she's missing her, quite as quickly.  It's for the best that three other people share the house with her: otherwise as much as Sera adores the animal, she would never remember to feed it day after day after day after day, all the mundane work of life she manages to ignore, refuse, avoid.

Nick says that words mean different things to different people, and Sera says, "I dunno.  Hermetics, man.  Somehow I think most of them would disagree."  Winks as Dan slides open the door and Nicholas thanks her and there is this moment where her instinct is to touch him.  To drop a neat little hand to his head, his hair, or perhaps his shoulder.  More, maybe.

But listen: she arrests the motion.  Glances up at Dan with a lift of her straight brows.  He's standing there, tall and lean lean lean, skinny jeans and a band t-shirt and maybe a wallet chain, probably a wallet chain, holding keys, they're dangling from his left index finger, his eyes on her.  Inquiry there: clear as anything.  The are you ready? sort.

And she is, so it seems.

"Night, Nicholas.  See you 'round."

Nicholas Hyde
The door opens, and Nick's head twists around to regard the consor as Dan stands in the threshold between the chantry house and this space outside.  There is a smile for Dan then, a sort of warm if casual regard as he lifts his hand and waves.

Sera's parting words about Hermetics draw his eyes back to her, and there is something conspiratorial, however humorous, there.  "Can't agree on everything, I suppose," he says.  There is no inkling that he is aware that Sera's instinct is to touch him, and she stops the motion before it starts anyway, and Nick stretches, arching his back and twisting his neck around until they both pop.

"Good night, Sera.  Good night, Dan!"  Slightly raised volume here, so that it reaches Dan's ears where he stands.

And the two of them leave, and Nick turns a pair of contemplative eyes back on the hot spring, and he has enough care for consequences to lift his sweater over his head and cast it aside before he soundlessly slides into the water.