Divining Leah [12]

Howl - STing

When Jim and Serafine finish their ritual, the world around them falls away. Future becomes present, and they can see the girl - Leah - standing atop a tall building. The wind whips through her hair and clothes. It is night. She is crying.

And then she jumps.

The building is many stories tall - constructed from glass and steel and concrete. She will die when she hits the ground.

But she doesn't hit the ground. Another shape comes hurtling after her, a figure cloaked in shadow - dark and indistinct. Jim and Sera will not be able to get a clear picture, and the only reason they know it's human is because it catches Leah in its arms. And then their fall slows, as though they'd become light as a feather. Drifting down on the breeze until they land safely in the parking lot below.

It is a hospital. Jim and Sera can make out the sign now: Aurora Presbyterian. And a handful of people are standing nearby, staring at Leah and her anonymous rescuer in silent shock. But then their eyes go blank and unfocused, and a moment later when they spring back to like, it's as though they'd forgotten what they'd just witnessed. Everyone returns to whatever it was they'd been doing moments earlier, as though nothing at all had occurred.

This vision fades, and a new one takes its place. Farther ahead. Leah is standing in what looks like a hotel room with three people. One of them is cloaked, as before. Shadowed and unclear. Another is a man in his mid-twenties, small but well-built, with a strong jaw, brown hair and wide, wild blue eyes. The third is older - late 40's and tall, with mousy hair and bright, intelligent eyes. Serafine will know him as the man from her dream. He is knelt before Leah on the floor, his posture non-threatening. When he smiles, his face transforms with charismatic charm.

"You don't have to be afraid," he says. "I can teach you to control it. I can help you make the dreams go away."

The vision ends abruptly. There is blackness, and then a sudden rush of indistinguishable shapes and colors. Time bounces back and forth, whirling through possibilities with no sense of clarity. Then they are back again on the roof of that hospital, and there is the girl. And this time they see themselves (Jim, Serafine and Pan) moving toward her across the windy rooftop. Someone calls out to her - a gentle, calming voice. (We are here.) Leah turns to face them.

And then, there is the man. The one with the charming smile. And he looks at her and says, "If you go with them, they will kill you. Maybe that's what you want, but not like this. Not the way they'll do it."

"Go away!" Leah screams. "All of you!"

The vision fades. A flash of something chaotic and violent - a fight between the three of them and the unknown mages. Someone's blood splatters across the roof.

Another flash. Leah jumps, and this time no one is there to save her.

And another. Pan drops to the ground as his arm shrivels and decays before their eyes.

Another. They stand and watch as Leah leaves with the man with the charming smile.

Another. Serafine drives away alone with Leah in the truck.

The future, as usual, is uncertain.

And then the vision ends, and the present is now, in the truck, pressed against each other as Pan drives toward their destination - the hospital.

Finding Leah [12]

Serafíne

The conversation is brief. Less than thirty seconds and it begins, Serafíne thumbs off her phone and tucks it back into an inner pocket of her leather jacket. Glances at the priest in profile as she reaches to grab her pack of cigarettes from the dashboard. The cellophane gleams in the dashboard lights as she fishes for her lighter and one of the cigarettes. Black-papered Djarums with gold foil wrapped at the joint of filter and spiced tobacco, the scent suddenly pungent, particularly in the cool night air streaming in from the open window.

"He's in," she tells Pan, low-voiced as ever, slipping the cigarette into her mouth. The lighter is curved carefully in the palm of her hand and she's leaning forward, head tucked out of the stream of wind when she cuts a glance back at Pan.

"Want one?" Speaking around the cigarette as she sparks the lighter and inhales, sharply enough to spark flame to paper, tobacco, spice. The scent is rich and pungent and the sugars in the mix crackle audibly, spitting before they begin to burn.

"Says he'll meet us there."

She exhales a thick stream of smoke through the open window, watching the city stream by and the neighborhoods change.

"Should I let your apprentice know where we're going?" Shoshannah, she means, though he may not know that. Because why else would the girl subject herself to limitations on alcohol and curfew?

Pan

The priest had eaten the grapes and carrots standing in the kitchen before they left and half of the sandwich on the way out the house and the other half once they were on the road. Lack of mindfulness but the body needs fuel. By the time he finishes eating the Cultist is off the phone. At a stop sign Pan brushes crumbs from the thigh of his jeans.

"No, thank you," he says to the matter of the cigarette.

Says he'll meet us there.

"Alright."

The streets are mostly empty for the folks who have mundane places to be in the morning have all gone to bed and those who fill their nights with alcohol are already in place until the bars close. Whenever they pass another car or meet one on the road it is a reminder of the necessity of safe driving.

Even in the darkness she can see his brow furrow at the mention of an apprentice but he does not immediately ask for clarification. After a few seconds pass he exhales and it passes as comprehension.

"I don't think that's a good idea," he says.

Jim

Jim ends up 'there', though they've got a head start on him and take Pan's car, while it's public transportation and the steady slap of desert boots that get Jim to his destination. He wears an assemblage of nondescript staples, a simple pair of crisp Levi's jeans in a dark navy selvedge denim and only a slate gray v-neck t-shirt thanks to the fair weather.

A baseball cap's brim is pulled down low along his forehead and casts a shadow on his face from the illumination of streetlights. The Cultist hoofs it from the bus stop and navigates his way down the sidewalks until he is close to 'there', looking for that same red truck he'd seen the first time he met Pan.

Serafíne

Pan doesn't think that's a good idea. Sera takes this with a surprising degree of equanimity, cutting the priest another glance back with the remark. Her face is bathed in the dashboard lights, her hair pulled back from its usual loose mass into a haphazard ponytail, the ends tucked over her left shoulder. He's quiet. She's nervous enough about whatever comes next that she's quiet too. Perhaps she's infected by the priest's laconic nature, imbiding it somehow from the aura that surrounds him.

Sera puts out her cigarette before its half finished. Pinchs off the cherry and flicks it out the open window so it flares and dances in the wind, peeling back in the airstream of the truck behind them to die in some damp gutter. The filter she keeps and stuffs either into the truck's ashtray or the little AAA trashbag Pan no doubt has looped around some otherwise non-functional nob or button housing. Her fingers still smell sweet, and the scent lingers in her hair and on her skin.

When Pan parks the truck, she slips neatly out of the passenger's seat, slithering down from the high cab to the sidewalk, dark boots solid on the ground. The taillights of a city bus gleaming as it pulls away from the corner ahead, or perhaps the familiar surge of Jim's resonance has her glancing up the street, the sudden flash of a grin illuminating her angular features. Teeth white between her red lips, and briefly sharp.

"There he is," to the priest, unnecessarily - for surely he can feel Jim's resonance as well as she can. Still a flash of her attention toward her fellow Cultist. The lively lift of her chin by way of greeting. The edge of her half-smile lingers on her mouth when she glances back to Pan. "Where to now, Padre?"

As if he was just giving them the city tour.

Serafíne

Per + Awareness

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 8) ( fail )

Pan

[awareness]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

+1 difficulty because I KNOW THAT PAN IS RIGHT NEXT TO ME

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 1 )

Jim

[ A-where-ness. ]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8) ( fail )

Pan

It seems as though he sets off into the park at random but she knows better. Perhaps can't feel anything but by the time they're in Jim's general vicinity Sera is within eyesight. All is right with the world. She marks him with a grin.

Onward!

"When I saw her--" Almost an hour ago. "--she was on a bench."

When the pair make themselves obvious to Jim the priest lifts a hand to wave. He's wearing a black button-down work shirt and slacks instead of jeans. Dark clothing nearly obviates his form in nighttime without his resonance washing over him.

"Jim," he says in greeting. "You didn't happen to see a girl running real fast away from a bench, did you?"

Jim

Jim ends up relying more on his corporeal senses. The red truck. The beautiful woman he's come to know a little more past the shell of a living body they all wear. The Man (who is sometimes) in Black. The park and its benches. He returns the wave, raising his hand at his elbow in a lackadaisical gesture.

"A lot of girls run away from.me. Real fast. But no, Father," at the sidewalk on the border of the park, which he cuts through the edge of to finally join them. "Namaste," to both of them, the greeting almost an afterthought, and bringing a genuine smile when finally faced with the resonance of the Chorister.

He looks around. "Find the bench? Would you know which way she ran?" They are ideas, but he is already turning back and forth, scanning the horizon for signs of others - people. Sprinting young women. Anything, really.

Serafíne

"Hey - " Sera to Jim, when he does finally join them. Her attention now is mostly settled on the dark shadows of the park, at night. The paths of the streetlamps cutting through the shadows, which only seem to exagerrate the dark, deserted sweep of the still, quiet interior.

Hands in her pockets, she glances aslant at the priest then. "We might as well walk, right? Maybe you'll recognize a bush or something. We can peek back and see if there's - anything that might help us find her. And I wouldn't be surprised to find a few homeless camped out in here, either. If the cops aren't harassing them out of the place. Bet they'd've noticed a runaway like Leah.

"At least they could tell us whether she's been hanging around here for long. If she looks okay or - if they've seen her at the local emergency kitchen."

So saying, she starts walking into the interior of the park, elbows held tightly against her torso, her long legs in easy motion. She is better dressed for this sort of expedition tonight than she is most nights. Those boots are solid workboots, and any illusion of height her clothing or proportions lend her disappeared the minute she slid down from the passenger's side of the cab.

While she walks, she digs into that interior pocket of her jacket for her earbuds, fumbling to slip the jack into the iPhone blind. Then, the brief flash of the screen as she wakes it, hits shuffle and tucks the phone back away. She tucks the right earbud in, and leaves the left to dangle around her neck.

Pan

It isn't the joke about girls running away from Jim that has Pan's attention drifting away. First his eyes move and then he turns around to face the center of the park. He isn't quite listening when Sera speaks and he doesn't follow when she starts to walk.

Though the night is warm and dry the man who is slow to react for the depth of his belief in acceptance shivers, hard, the reaction to whatever it is he senses beyond his conscious control. Low light hides the goose flesh that erupts on his arms.

Any other man would have taken the Lord's name in vain. Any other man of the cloth would have prayed aloud or crossed himself. The Singer doesn't do any such thing.

When he comes back to himself he realizes Sera's gone on ahead and he takes off walking faster than he usually does.

"It feels all kinds of wrong this way," he says. "Don't go wandering off by yourself."

Jesus Christ, Sera.

Jim

Jim is easier to herd along. Calm as a Hindu cow, he settles into a steady stroll somewhere between Sera and Pan, joining her as the latter speeds up at a brisker pace. Soon, they are walking the path through the park together. When both of them get closer they might be able to smell the faint piney musk of marijuana clinging to his clothing and short buzzed hair. His eyes are faintly bloodshot, though the sunglasses he usually wears (even at night) are hanging from their frame at the neck of his shirt.

"What kind of wrong? Tamas? Or something more corrupt?" He looks to Pan as he asks this, head gently tilted to the side, curious for more of what he's sensed that he has so obviously missed.

Serafíne

Life 1 / Prime 1 / Mind 1 Dif 4 -1 for specialty focus

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Extending dif +1

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 10) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Serafíne does not react immediately to Pan's admonishment that she not go wandering off by herself. There's time for both Jim and the priest to catch up to her a dozen feet or more down some curving path through the dark lawn while she fiddles with her phone, shakes out those earbuds and sets one firmly into her right ear, the long dark cord tucked behind, disappearing into the interior lining of her leather coat. By the time they reach her, she has mild, far-away look on her face, her eyes unfocused, her fingers unconsciously twitching into familiar chord patterns against her thighs as unhooks her focus from the physical and pushes herself outward, in expanding rings of awareness.

"Hmm?" - her question an afterthought, a lilting note as the priest's shadow falls across her path and Jim rolls up, smelling of musky and herbal, from a recently smoked bowl, joint, blunt. She's biting the inside of her lip - in thought or concentration, perhaps - hard enough to draw blood that hits her palate with a faint, coppery flare.

"Sorry - so. I don't really sense any people around here. I mean, prime space, right? No cops around to harass you and no bars on the benches to keep you from cat-napping the night away, but there's no one. Not much animal life, either. Something's chased them away.

"And that decay - " a glance here at Jim, her eyes gleaming in the faint light, " - from the warehouse," quiet here. "Nearer the center of the park. Is that what you're getting, Pan? Or something - " Head canted, still listening to the music. Somehow, she can feel the rhythm of it even in her words, not. A shake of her head, the faintest shiver of fear crawls up her spine, mostly swallowed by the stiffness of her jacket and therefore unseen. Echoing Jim, now - " - else?"

Pan

If he knows how to fire a gun he has thus far kept that information to himself. He doesn't project himself as the sort of priest who would happily load a shotgun and go off to hunt demons if they were to punch through a rift between worlds and start destroying things. Sure as Hell hasn't sold himself as some sort of Nephandus expert.

Aside from that initial and involuntary tremor he is not quailing or giving consideration to turning back but neither is he gleeful at the prospects of running into something capable of unmaking the three of them or something bigger than the three of them, frightened newly-awakened teenage girl or not.

"This isn't disharmony," he says. Tamas; Disharmony. Potayto, potahto. "This is something else. New but strong, that sound like her?"

Jim

"Strong? Oh, she's ready to headline in Vegas," plodding forward near the edge of the pass, wavering into the grass now and then as his stroll weaves in an unpredictably serpentine pattern, looking behind trees, left and right, and always heading toward that center of the park where they'd thought she would be. Jim seems to remain calm, even as Pan touts the girl's strength.

Though none of them look eager for a fight, Jim seems to have put the idea of any sort of conflict out of his mind. Whether emerging from Leah, or from their group, it does not seem like a possibility or option. He is already trying to gather that positive energy from himself, harvesting it and radiating it outward with each step. Though it isn't an identifiable work of Will - just yet - that does not mean it isn't integral to his own system of belief.

"She's on the run. So, let's not corner her or surprise her, if she is here," continuing on as he speaks.

Serafíne

Sera listens to their exchange with her head tucked down, her chin skimming the collar of her jacket, hair twisted over her left shoulder in a tangled, curling mass. Her neck is taut enough with the gesture to show the faint beat of her pulse at the base of her neck. Her energy is sharper and brighter than Jim's, an awareness of danger that she cannot subsume and redirect the way he does, her blood spiked with adrenaline running hot through her system. Her gaze brushes over the priest's still countenance, and she favors the padre with a close-mouthed half-smile that shows little of the tension evident in her neck or the set of her shoulders.

"I bet she's hungry," her nostrils flare with an expelled breath she did not know she was holding in. Her tone is distant, speculative, but there is a brief and sudden edge to the curve of her mouth. " - we should've stopped at Subway." On reflection, the thing is, she means it.

"But yeah okay - " not that Sera knows how to not corner or surprise someone. She agrees in principle, " - god knows how many people are looking for her, too." Breathing out a low, quiet breath.

So they walk through the park; the distant sounds of the city night awash in the background, but little to hear other than their footsteps on the graveled or paved paths, the rustle of the leaves in the wind, the quiet, electric hum of the lamps dotted here and there on the jogging trail.

In the park's center, Sera doesn't say anything to them about the bench when they find it. They can see it as well as she can and the site of it gives her another faint shiver, which makes little show overtly given the stiff weight of her jacket. She stands on the path nearby though, and turns around in a wide circuit, studying the dark trees and the deep shadows, listening to the nightsounds all around. Could she be leaking energy? Serafíne does not know and does not want to ask.

This is assuredly where the girl spent most of her time.

"Wanna take a look back?" A darkling glance toward Jim, craning her neck enough to pull the earbud from her right ear.

Pan

At mention of stopping at Subway Pan pulls a face and looks for a moment like he's actually thinking about crossing himself. Sera can see his hand twist like he's about to.

But yeah okay.

They come to the bench and his eyes flick across the thing not because he recognizes the thing but because of what he recognizes around it. Of the path she took he saw only the beginning but he has led the two Time Mages this far. His eyes follow the direction the girl had taken off in an hour ago. On foot she could have gone five miles by now, further, could have gone in any direction.

He rests his hands on his hips and looks out into the darkness and lets the Cultists speak.

Jim

Jim halts long enough to contemplate the bench. The way the metal is pitted and nearly disintegrating to its baser elements, season upon countless season having set in - centuries' worth - so much so that the bench looks older than the very city it sits in the middle of.

A ruin in a place of life, and in this state - Pan says he can feel it, though Jim still can't - a lightening rod for more of these energies left by the wayward Leah.

"I don't know, Sera," a beat.

"We can keep looking back and dwelling in the past, or we can try and find her in the now. Try and find her before whatever future other forces are trying to force on her come to be. I'd rather that," his hand reaching out to the remains of the bench, though stopping short of touching it.

"Before this becomes her only future," a sadness in his voice at the end that presents itself, following the girl, like in this one of many artifacts and heaps of ashes left in her wake...

Like he can tell it threatens to consume her.

He looks to Sera. Sometimes she looks to him for answers, for decisions, but he seems to have come to terms with that and instead is warring with that impulse in his own way. By not warring with it. Instead, his words and suggestions are given to try and make her come to the same conclusion. Not force her to it. Not tempt her with rationale. But instead to simply express himself and see where her own heart ends up leading her.

"A step ahead, instead of a step behind?" It was more of an unsure thing. More of a feat. For some Cultists, it was more than all of that: the one taboo. For in the future can lie madness.

The true curse of the Seer.

He may have shown he had the craft of it. With his wards. With his seekings into destiny and space. But as of yet, it's a step he hasn't shown the willingness to take.

Until now.

Because what are Cultists if not the breakers of taboo. The transgressors of what they consider the true taboo. The last taboo. The chains of time itself.

Serafíne

There's a spike of awareness in her brows, a sudden sharpening of her attention on Jim when his first words are I don't know. She reaches up, thoughtlessly collecting the wires of the earbuds in her left hand, untangling the wires from the twist of her hair, which curls thick where she has not shaved it away. And it is freshly shaved since the night before - markedly shorter. The gesture is casual and quiet and thoughtless, the way her palms curves away the familiar weight. The motion to slip them back into the interior pocket from which they curve is arrested for the moment, because her gaze is sharply focused on the Disciple, dropping away - and steeply so - only as he gestures down toward the bench.

Then she takes it in, and that is where her attention lingers on the rusted, flaking metal, the rotting wood slates, all leaning haphazardly, ready to collapse with the force of a fey wind. Now, Serafíne is holding her breath, deliberately, until her lungs burn from the aching urge to breath and her body forces her to let go, to expel that breath and draw in another, just as deep, which she holds just as long, thoughtless as ritual.

She is in profile to them, more thoughtful than she often seems, her gaze skimming slowly over the lines of the bench. Something haunted, or haunting stark in the air around her. Nameless as the sound of the rain, or the memory of a lover's sigh in the darkest hour of the morning.

"Let's look ahead." A sharp glance up at Jim then, the first since she dropped her attention away from him to the broken bench. There is a sudden, wreathing smile that slices across her mouth, the edge of a nervous sort of exhilaration. Her eyes are bright with that knife's edge of fear and a sort of breathless, electric awareness.

"I'm pretty sober, though." A glance at the priest is her only explanation. "I need a bit to get into to the right head space, you know?"

Pan

Standing beside the priest for too long is almost enough to jolt folks into sobriety if they weren't there to begin with and she has spent the last five hours in his presence. Four of them in his house where even if she were looking to pilfer pharmaceuticals she would have found none. Narcotics Anonymous fliers in the church's corridor and that sense of distant delinquency about him.

For a body intent upon motion his stillness is enough of a tether so when his eyes go unfocused like his sight has gone someplace else it hardly disturbs the aura already around him. He breathes out once, hard, like it takes him by surprise but that's the only sound he makes.

A hand goes to his brow.

Jim

Jim is already pulling out a pack of cigarettes, menthol judging by the chevron of irradiated green, though the palm of his hand obscures the brand. He draws out a rolled joint from within, shoving it back into the front pocket of his jeans.

Ready to light it, but then he hears the exhalation and looks to the priest. The next gesture, the hand to his brow, is a familiar one to him. Something one does when one sees something that reality said one shouldn't be seeing.

He waits for Pan to regather himself before one of his eyebrows rises, a quiet inquisition as to what the man saw when he left the here behind for elsewhere.

Serafíne

"Padre?" Sera does not wait for Pan to gather himself. Her voice is a brief and quiet prompt, and then she's reaching out, the touch of her fingertips on his other elbow the other point of inquiry. The sweep of her eyes from Pan's hand against his brow, then outward in a moving sweep of the still shadows of the park's central square.

"You okay?"

Serafíne

(BRB)

Pan

He takes his hand away from his brow and blinks several times, runs the hand down his face and blows out another breath more controlled than the first exhale.

"Yeah," he says and he doesn't have to ask why concern would flare up in this place. Doesn't know that the wrongness of the girl's aura hasn't burrowed itself inside the Cultists' attention it has his. "She's--" His voice sticks in his throat so he clears it. "She's not that far from here but I don't recognize the building. It's tall. She's on the roof. East, like straight east from here..."

He thinks, quick, then pulls his keyring out of his pocket.

"Come on."

Jim

The sudden urgency of the directive enlivens him, as does the preceding revelation about just where Leah is. He does indeed follow behind the Padre, matching his pace as they go.

Serafíne

And Sera. She's lightfooted when she wants to be. An easy sort of athleticism that usually only shows itself in her physical confidence, or the careless way she wears those motherfucking platforms and heels she wears so often.

They reach the red truck in a handful of minutes and pile in. Were the moment not quite so urgent, Sera might point out once more that she's sober and should totally drive so that Pan can act as their divine dowsing rod. But it isn't that moment and so instead she climbs into the front seat of the cab and squeezes herself between the two Disciples, the priest and the guru, staring out through the windshield as if she, too, might somehow identify the tall building Pan saw in his vision as it sweeps by.

Pan

He did not lock the doors when they arrived minutes earlier but he opens the passenger door for the other two anyway before he goes around the front of the truck and lets himself in on his side. As not-stoned as she is this is the second time he hasn't taken her up on her offer to drive.

So they climb in and the Initiate ends up over the gearshift. The priest keys the ignition and realizes he has to reach between her knees to pop the parking brake.

"'Scuse me," he says, "sorry," before he pops the brake and puts it into first. His hand goes back to the steering wheel the moment it's up to speed.

Jim

Jim's eyes are as red as they'd been the handful of minutes before when they'd entered the park's deeper recesses - he'd needed some way to pass the time from the bus stop to the park - but he hands the unlit joint to Serafine anyway, looking from her to Pan and back. Then out the window, not willing to bring himself to ask if they can or can't smoke inside a priest's car.

Smoke. A joint. A doobie. Burn some bud. Get toasted. Whatever.

Instead he remains looking out the window as they drive along the edge of the park and away Eastward. Maybe where Leah had run from herself. As the world passes by the surroundings blur and jump back into focus with every dart of his eyes, fine movements of small muscles that direct rods and cones to soak up new interplays of light and space as they hunt down the end.

And whether she lights up or not (can or not, will or not) he begins to reach out along those same lines of destiny and fate that also are part of the mad entropy welling up in the lost lamb the padre is seeking out. Instead of looking back along the reverberations of time, though, seeking her out, he looks forward to where those ripples will go. What will reflect them back. And how she plays into that future.

[ Correspondence 2 / Time 2 / Entropy 1. Coincidental. Difficulty 4. Need 7 successes. Whoa. Blowing a WP. ]

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

Serafíne

Pan has lucked out. Sera's wearing jeans rather than one of the tiny skirts with fishnets and garter's she sometimes sports. She gives him a lilting, upward glance as he releases the parking breaking, then swings her left leg back over to the passengers side, curling her knees in Jim's direction in deference to the priest's sensibilities. That's how she's seated, precariously but finely balanced between the two as Jim hands over the joint. She toes him in the thigh, tells him to crack the window while she fishes her own lighter out of her own pack of cigarettes and lights up. She inhales deeply; holds in the smoke for as long as her lungs will retain it, then exhales a stream of smoke across the passenger's seat toward the open window. And again, and again. Does not pass back the joint until she's feeling the familiar hum in her veins, that pleasant lassitude in her muscles that has her reaching to find Jim's already unfolding vibe.

[Sooo, Time 2: Difficulty 4 (5-1 for spec focus]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Jim

[ Extended; +1 difficulty. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 10) ( fail )

Jim

[ Extended. Spending a Quintessence. Jim is at only 1 remaining Quintessence. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Jim

[ Extended. Need one more success. And he has the resonances! ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (5, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Finding the Lost

Sera

Serafíne sits cross-legged on the floor - of the iglesia? of his office? - while the priest starts his ritual. She has changed since her late night / early morning visit to the Church and arrived in the late afternoon, just as he finished evening mass, in worn jeans torn at the thighs and knees, the side seams frayed to nothing and mended with safety pins, because of course they are, and a t-shirt from one of the ubiquitous outdoor music festivals, worn thin from washing, over a black bra that showed through the white cotton. And another of her leather jackets, naturally.

Stood outside the gate while the congregation filtered past her, eyebrows raised, returning every dismissive or surreptitious look with a direct one of her own and an easy half-smile. Once they'd passed she slipped in and sat there, watching his back while he Worked.

All she could do was watch, and wait. Pace sometimes, and resist the urge for a cigarette, which came to her when she was waiting like this more than any other time, gnawed at the back of her throat and made her fingers itch for movement.

Four hours later, he finishes.
Four and a half-hours later, one priest and one ... Serafíne are seated in the cab of his Toyota. There's a frisson of irritation in her that he wouldn't let her drive, but she allows that to settle because even she can acknowledge that few people would want to be anywhere near a car she's operating.

Sera rolls down the window, allows the night air to sweep in past her, breathing in deeply. Glances at the priest, " - can I smoke in here?" - as she fumbles through her pockets and pulls out both her phone and a pack of cigarettes.

Regardless of his answer, she grabs the phone first, thumbs through her contacts, and hits connect.

That call goes to Jim. "Padre found her. She pushed back but he can still get glimpses. We're going looking right now." 

Pan

"Not here," he said to her when he left the church after the day's last mass.

They went across the street to the modest rectory where he sleeps and he locked the doors and then he went into what passes as a bedroom for four hours. The place is and has always been austere. A few books live on the kitchen table and lurk beneath the seating and beside the military-tight bed. If she went exploring she would find larder staples and basic toiletries and working light switches but no medication in the place. Not even a bottle of aspirin hidden in a drawer somewhere.

Four and a half hours later he's splashed water on his face and drank down a glass filled from the faucet and taken his keys off the countertop where they lay all night. They have to cross the street again to retrieve the truck. Its plates mark it as a commercial vehicle and no music blares from the speakers when he rouses the engine. No way in Hell is she driving. His insurance, like his paradigm, doesn't cover Cultists.

Can I smoke in here?

"Go ahead," he says.

When they pull out of the church parking lot and follow the posted speed limits to the highway he hasn't had any glimpses. He keeps his window rolled up while she's on the phone.

Sera

  Sera is - surprised - to when Pan leads her away from the church, across the street to a modest and otherwise unremarkable house. The truth is, she never thought about where he lived, but had she considered it she would have imagined him inhabiting some nameless and nebulous space in the bowels of the church itself. Sleeping on a folded-down Murphy bed in his office, or simply, tucking himself away in the catacombs or belltower (oh, she knows there is neither) until it is time to pray.

But no: this house across the street, which she had never before noticed. She looks at the facade, looks at him, looks at the facade again, the narrowest line between her brows, all thoughtful. Does not ask him if he lives here, though the surprise and curiosity is evident on her face. Like the priest, she cannot lie for love or money. She is what she is. There is no deception in her.

--

Sera follows the priest through dark interior, turns as he locks the doors, glancing at the dark walls and shadowy spaces. He does not bother to turn on the lights, because he does not require them, and it is true dark now so long shadows slice in through the windows, cut oblong shapes across the carpet. They go upstairs to the bedroom and she hooks a shoulder against the doorframe, studying the spartan surroundings.

He's going to pray or something; her eyes are dark in the gloom (she does not share in his light) as they trace over the line of his head and shoulders, the bulk of his frame. She's very quiet, turns away before he begins and starts - well, watching. Waiting.

Darts down the stairs after the first fifteen minutes or so, now flipping on the lights as she goes, now taking in the walls empty of all but a Holy Family wall scroll in the living room and the Our Lady of Guadalupe calendar (en español) in the kitchen. She crouches down on her haunches, attention ticking over the spines of the books she finds here and there. Opens neither his private drawers nor his linen closet nor his medicine cabinet, but does check out the contents of the fridge and circles back through the living space, cataloging the Virgin Mary candles scattered about. Listening to the sounds of the house settling about them, the muffled sounds from the street. A car passing, headlights slashing along the front windows.

She sits on his couch, feet propped up on the coffee table, and rehearses, idly, the chords and key changes in Light My Fire, then swings upright, boots solid on the floor, and spends sometime studying the postcards stuck to the fridge. The snapshot tucked beneath one separate from the rest.

Time passes. One hour slides into two and here and there she nips up to check on him, her booted tread heavy on the old stairs. Hand across her mouth as she watches him.

--

By the time the ritual is finished, four hours have passed. Downstairs, there's a sandwich on a plate, sliced on the diagonal, with a few carrots and grapes on the side waiting for him on the kitchen counter, beside the sink. If he thanks her, she just shrugs and flashes him a wry look. " - would've made you tostones, but then I might've burned down your fucking house."

--

Her window is half-down, she puts her crumpled pack of cigarettes, lighter tucked into the cellophane, on the dash as she makes that call, glances at the priest in her periphery, eyes tracing his profile as she makes that call to Jim.

While the phone rings, she considers the priest.

"Even if we don't find her, if we can find someplace where she's been for a while, I can look back. Maybe it'd give us some clues. Help us find a way to get a message to her."

There's a wiry energy to the Cultist after such a long, enforced stillness, just waiting which is never something she was made to do without stimulation. But, truth is, she has no fucking idea what comes next.

Ay, Dormilona

Serafíne

It is late Sunday night or early Monday morning, depending on whether one is the sort to see dawn before retiring for the night, or after waking at the start of a new day. Caged, sickly trees line the sidewalks here and there. Sparrows and robins and house finches, gray and brown and black, camouflaged and adapted to city life, dart among the trees have started to sing, so let us call it morning, even though the sky has not yet started to grow light.

One of the employees in the day care (they open before first light, so that the early shift workers can get to their own service jobs), sends the parish priest either an apologetic page (coded with an unhappy smiley by way of apology) or knocks, equally apologetically, on the front door of the rectory. She's twenty-something, a pretty girl, overweight, with a round face and a scattering of acne and warm brown eyes and long black hair. Her English is poor, but she refuses to speak to Father Echeverría in the Spanish they share.

Hesitantly, in broken but improving English, she conveys that there's a drunk sleeping one off in the sanctuary. She's sorry to disturb him and there's a bruised adoration in her eyes for the priest and it's still early (or late), but -

- well, they did try to wake him but he won't go.

--

The drunk is stretched out on one of the pews in the back, black leather jacket over her legs, turned on her side and curled up asleep. The lights are off, the sanctuary is redolent of candle wax, and the incense he uses sometimes to satisfy the Catholics who want something closer to high mass than low. Long shadows cut in through the windows, the amber-yellow of the streetlights through stained glass if they have them, or industrial windows if they lack them. Or perhaps he has flipped the switch for one of the circuits of lights in the sanctuary.

Once he sees her, there's no mistaking Sera. That hair. Even with his varied acquaintance, who else does he know who has both long, curling blond hair and a buzz cut?

She is dressed in a differently ironic pink dress - a different differently ironic pink dress than the airplane dress - and combat boots, and has a leather jacket wrapped around her bare legs and a black crocheted - well, something - draped over her shoulders. She's sleeping on her side, one arm cradled beneath her head as a pillow, the other tucked tightly against her torso, fitted, quite neatly and narrowly, on one of the back pews. Shoulders rising, and falling in rhythm with each breath.

Some people are light sleepers, stirring when the slightest movement or shift in shadows happens anywhere close to them. Sera is not one of these people. She does not twitch, or roll over, or murmur or sigh in her sleep, or shift on the bench and burrow into or away from sound or light, when the lights go on, or when his footfalls are audible in the shadowed space.

She does not wake easily. Calling her name will not do it, nor will a gentle nudge, nor will any combination of these things pull her from sleep. No, he has to take her shoulders and shake her if he wants her up.

Fr. Echeverría

And they've seen him come in to vanquish the dark times before like all they had to do was think of him to bring him to them. A drunk in the auditorium is nothing compared to the shootings and the overdoses and the suicides that have left empty spaces where their children used to be. The girl who wakes him up has no children but the ones she takes care of but she has a mother's nature and she does not want to wake up the flock's shepherd for she knows he does not sleep much.

What she knows and what she does not need to know do not often coincide. A knock on the door brings him to the door in the clothes he fell asleep in. All black, cowboy boots slid on before the knob turns and he answers.

Father Echeverría does not lock his door. He has not been here long enough but no one has the balls to come in unannounced. He's the biggest priest this congregation has ever had and he frightens those who do not believe in what he preaches. Purity in a man who has sacrificed his wretched life to a dying god.

He comes into the auditorium not with confusion but with conviction. It does not melt when he sees who sleeps on the padded bench like she has nowhere else to go. He left her a voicemail late Friday night. Her phone took him straight to it.

(Hola, Serafíne, habla Padre Echeverría, favor de llamarme a la iglesia, 831-6035, gracias, ciao.

Lazy Spanish run together like the Techs and the Fallen cannot understand him if he speaks like he's on a beach and not in the mountains.)

"Sera. Wake up."
Nothing.
"Ay, Dormilona. You can't sleep here."
Nothing.

With no eyes on him but those of God's the priest puts a hand on a small thin shoulder and shakes her hard like he would have thought she'd gone and died on him were not for the tidal movement of her chest.

Serafíne

Tell the truth, Sera is used to waking up in strange places. With strange people, at strange hours, in unfamiliar beds, the stirring sounds of a strange house all around her. The church pew in la iglesia del buen pastor is not the strangest place she's found herself some abandoned morning. It wholly possible that it is not the strangest place she's found herself waking just this week.

And she does wake, when he shakes her. Suddenly and abruptly and entirely - sitting up and putting an elbow underneath her, shoulders rising, the crocheted black shrug falling off her her torso, between her spine and the bench. There are a few minutes where she's just breathing like she's still asleep, which is to say deeply and luxuriously, sleepyhead indeed, her brows drawn together in that confusion that arises with those first few moments of waking. Who and what and where am I? Consciousness drawing together over the dark depths of the un- and sub-concious wrapped in the self-same body.

"Oh, hey." - and she sounds mildly abashed and muzzily aware of him, as her eyes touch on his midsection, the black clothes, slide up the column of buttons bisecting his chest until she finds his face. She's slipping upright, reaching for the jacket before it slips in a heap to the floor between the pews, tucking her legs beneath her until her feet touch the ground and she's sitting up. "Sorry - "

A quick slip of a smile. It comes and goes, bruised and as lazy as a waking puppy's curl of its tongue. Her hair is still damp from a shower, which means that she is clean, so blessedly clean, as are all the clothes she's wearing. Stretching her spine open, so that the vertebrae decompress, she reaches upward to push her fingers through her hair and pull it back and away from her face.

"Came over here after I got home and grabbed a shower and then I was like, fuck of course no one's around, it's a church not an after-hours club? So I figured I'd just hang out until you actually got up. Don't worry," a sudden twist of her grin, a flash of her eyes to his face. Beneath it, though, Sera is still subdued. From more than sleep and the shock of waking. " - I didn't smoke pot or anything in here. Wait, is it morning already?"

Fr. Echeverría

For his part he has not combed his hair or showered yet. Looks like he slept in the clothes he's wearing but not like he's just woken up. Despite the vague rumpled quality of his work shirt he shows no other signs of wear. Black jeans hide many a sin.

He waits for her to draw herself up out of dreams or deadness or whatever happens behind a Cultist's lids while she sleeps off the night before and if he's amused he keeps it off his face.

A wooden rosary has been tucked into a pocket, hand-carved crucifix hanging from his hip. It sings a confession of recent Working but it does not scream it.

With a sigh he drops himself onto one knee in the aisle, puts himself at eye level to her for the first time in their acquaintance and she can see better than she ever has in the wanness of a morning not yet severed from its birthing darkness that his eyes are green and his hair has gone not just gray but white in places.

"Just about," he says and coughs into his elbow to clear his lungs. The lifelong smoker's morning rite. "Got home from where?"

He remembers the phone. Doesn't trust that she does. He can't lie for shit and his face has no interest in helping him.

Serafíne

He drops to one knee and that's unusual enough that it draws her eyes right to him; her mouth is half-open, a breath she was taking arrested mid-movement. Surprised to find herself with such a clear view of his face and eyes, the strands of gray and white striped through his black hair, she searches his face as if it was her first time looking at him. Pulls the leather jacket she used as a blanket back up to the pew and puts it aside, then pushes her open palms down her thighs, smoothing out the hem of her dress.

"This cheap motel," Sera tells him with a diffident sort of half-shrug. Voice sheepish, like its a confession and not a story. Her mouth is curved upward at one corner like an apology, and though the expression shapes her cheeks, it does little to brighten the darkness in her eyes. Swallows hard, " - we went there after. Jim wove wards so they couldn't find us and worked a curse into them so they'd be fucked if they did?"

Sera's not sure who they are in the searching-and-finding scenario. But with both techs and fallen involved, they cannot mean well.

"So." Curls her fingers into the hem of her dress, nearly abashed, maybe to be subject to the scrutiny of someone so illuminating, all-bright against the darkness. As if the girl who can talk her way through four days of exile in a stinking hotel room with five fucking other people cannot quite settle on the proper.

"I know I called you - " - she remembers, too. The fact of it, though not the specifics. " - but I'm not sure what you got out of it. I was kinda fucked up." That is, after all, how she Works. He can feel it wrapped all around her being, even now, when she's sitting her sleepy and mostly-sober on sacred ground, and he's kneeling at her side. "Mostly I wanted to make sure you wouldn't go looking there if - "

A narrowing shrug, lingers in her shoulders even after the gesture's finished. If never came to pass. "So."

Fr. Echeverría

"Got enough out of it to decide if you hadn't shown up today I was going to."

An entire weekend with a connection that never made it through and nothing but the sound of escape or racing or just flight with no destination. Doesn't mean to make that confession but he does it anyway. If she hadn't shown up today he was going to go looking.

So long as he has been here he has professed no knowledge of other Awakened and even if he has never left the state Colorado is vast and entire communities could have scattered like ash after they lost the War. Entire communities did scatter like ash after they lost the War.

They have no reason to trust or even give a shit about each other but here they are even though his secretary threw out half their messages. He learned about that during the Confession prior to Sunday's Mass. Isn't supposed to mention anything he hears in Confession and he frowns at the thought but that doesn't keep it stoppered.

"Listen... Rosa didn't give me your message, or Jim's. I'm sorry."

Serafíne

Willpower

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

She has the sudden urge to kiss him. Not his mouth but his forehead and then his cheek. There are religions such a kiss would be a blessing, or a benediction. Perhaps even in his belief - Greet all brothers with a holy kiss. or Greet one another with a kiss of love - certainly in the history of his Church, whichever one lays closest claim to his heart. Another man could perhaps even read that urge in her - the softening in her sleep-lazy eyes and the twist of her mouth and the lift of her sharp chin, which she arrests, before the movement is fully born. But he is more man of god than man.

And she, she breathes a sharp breath out and arrests the motion. Turns her eyes aslant and shakes her head as if she would refuse his apology just as she refuses the thought of his searching for her against her warning.

"If I hadn't turned up under my own power and of my own accord," here her eyes dart back to his face, her mouth curves into the sort of sad, mysterious half-smile the oracles at Delphi must have worn, reading the future in the mists. "I wouldn't have been in a state worth finding."

So she does not kiss him, but she does reach out and grasp his hand with her own. The tattooed hand, the dark lines moving against her palm, but unreadable in the gloom. Her thumb brushes over the first joints of his fingers.

"I'm glad you weren't there. So, forgive Rosa, okay?

"I sort of wish that we hadn't taken Sid and Mara with us. If they know about it, the techs must be watching that place. Maybe we got lucky and it's been long enough that they're not hypervigilent. That seems unlikely.

"And someone was there after, someone who took him or herself out of the time stream. A hiccup. Like a scratched record. So, someone like that is surely capable of hitting replay. Better that they don't see your face when they do.

"Did I tell you about the girl?"

Fr. Echeverría

He reads nothing in the light of her eyes to suggest an impulse such as that she staves off with a quick exhale and he lets her take his hand because why should he not let her take his hand. This is the house of his Father and all who enter it call the man of god Father and why should a person who comes into this place and sleeps here in the safety of a place ringing with light even in his absence not take his hand if she should want to?

Even if she should wish him ill he would not shake himself of her. His trust in his God or in his own strength shows in the way he does not flinch at the passage of her thumb across his inelegant fingers.

For the sake of absolution, his own or Rosa's or the Techs' or that of the Fallen, he squeezes her fingers folded beneath his own and does not pull away from her.

So, forgive Rosa, okay?
His own sharp breath out now. He'd never felt anger towards her. One cannot forgive if one does not grow righteous in the face of a mistake but her contrition sprang up all the same.

Did she tell him about the girl.

"You did," he says. A beat to let that lay, and then: "Shoshannah and I had a visitor Friday night. The sister of one of the dead men. She told us about the girl, too, and..."

A briefer beat. His eyes flick over her shoulder to ensure their solitude before they come back and he goes on.

"There's a holy place, out past Red Rocks. She took us there."

Good morning, Sunshine.

Fr. Echeverría

[PAUSE]

Serafíne

Good morning, Sunshine indeed.

This revelation inspires the most complex cascade of emotions in her. Disbelief on some level, and a sort of hunger. Relief, right? And somewhere in there is a shearing twist of exacting, remembered pain. One of the dead men. One of the men whose ashes coated her legs and caught in her fishnets. Whose end she breathed and witnessed and watched and felt roaring across her othersenses as they were torn apart from within, rusting and rotting and disintegrating and dying and drifting to the ground the way snow drifts, lazy but not white.

Gray-black soot and ash. He has folded his hand more tightly around her fingers and now she redoubles the pressure without knowing what she does. Serafíne is not strong, but sometimes, my god, she is fierce. So she is now.

Then - abruptly - she shakes her hand free of his and brings it to her mouth. (Or, if he is not so easily shaken-off, she brings his hand to her mouth.) She is leaning forward, body folded low in her torso, at the hips rather than the spine. The rocking posture of an animal in pain. Or a girl trying not to puke. Presses her knuckles firmly against her flattened mouth, leaning forward, as she struggles to contain the sudden urge (once more) to vomit.

As if emptying her stomach might empty her mind of the memory of all that death. All that fucking pain. And not that sort she might seek sometimes - a waking clarity to pierce the veil of indulgence, but a mere ending, a deep and smothering darkness, screaming at the end.

So: there is quiet of sorts as she masters herself, sits there stiffly, willing the sourness in her throat to recede, willing her diaphragm and esophagus to relax. Resisting the urges of her body, whatever they are, is not natural to her. But she does, gritting her teeth, jaw flexed, eyes closed, until the moment passes. Then at last she drops her hand from her mouth, braces it on the pew beside her, and opens her eyes. She's staring forward into the dark shadows of the quiet church, but oh, she is aware of his bulk beside her.

"Sorry. I'm sorry - I mean, that's good - " Her eyes are shining in the dim light of the church. From the sheer physical effort of holding down her gorge or - no, those are tears liquid rimming her lower lashes, beginning to overflow. Just a drop or two, but enough to slip through her lashes and hit her cheeks. She reaches up, angrily dashes the fallen tears away, then runs her thumb along the lower lids, getting the moisture out of her eyes. Reaches to dash it away before it can fall onto her face again. The gesture is vehement, stubborn, resistant: very much Fuck you, tear ducts. "It's just I saw it all.

"And I knew they had a place. Shelby and Will and Jai. Outside the city somewhere, and while we were hiding out, I was thinking maybe we should go look. And how would we find it. But then it also felt so macabre, like - like, plundering the corpses of the dead, like scavenging, or -

"And I couldn't think - fuck."

This is all very stream-of-consciousness. "Fuck fuck fuck." Because there's also desire in her. She knows exactly what he means and these places are so rare (holy, he says, and though the pair of them have deeply different definitions of holy, she understands the reverence of the word. Might even use it semi-regularly herself, in far different contexts than he does.) that the longing is (almost) as gut-clenching and reactive as the remembered horror.

Twice remembered.
She's dreamt it twice.

It's a good thing she sleeps so deeply, Sera. If she didn't, she might remember more of her dreams, and not just the prophetic ones.

"What did she say?" Finally, a glance back. Her hands are on the pew again, and she sniffs against the liquid in her sinuses, trying to forestall any more tears, fingers wrapped beneath the hard wooden bench, flanking her thighs. Her head is forward, bent like someone readying themselves to kneel in prayer, but she rarely kneels and any prayers she utters take other forms, entirely. Shoulders forward, pulled narrowly, close in around her torso, damp hair falling loosely around her shoulders, drying into its usual kinks and waves. "The sister?"

Fr. Echeverría

When the memory and the pain of remembering come to claim her he lets go her hand but he does not rise from where he half kneels on the carpet. When it recedes again he is still there. Concern clouds his face but he does not question her even as his waiting is answered by invectives and words that don't make sentences.

He is not a man who asks a lot of questions. They did not meet when he was young enough to want answers to things he did not know he did not know, when his blood was hot enough to drive a person mad. Silence is something he holds to now the way one holds a candle while stood alone in a dark place but he is not afraid. Fear is not something one tends to exhibit when one believes that the body is but a vessel but he is still human.

Fear or something like it drenches the space around Sera. She is very human.

Which brings them back to the sister.

"A lot of what you already know," he says in a voice still low for the reverence in the place. "That the girl was Widderslainte. That the Techs are looking for more Fallen in the area." A pause. He is not a particularly gifted speaker but when he speaks it is the truth and that carries him past the dryness in his elocution. "That their parents left the house to her and her brother but she didn't want anything to do with it before he died, and she intends to stay here until she's sure she can trust us."

Serafíne

She is very human, Sera. It takes her some time to master those physical urges. After a few beats of silence she straightens her spine and draws back her shoulders. Still, though, she sits in profile, brings her hands from the pew to her lap, then crosses her arms, low over her frame. As low as they'll go while she's sitting there. The posture is defensive, but there's a tautness to the length of her neck, the muscles of her forearms that speak to the way she is mastering herself while he waits kneeling through it all, buffered from her the raw edge of her fear, the rank memory of the horrors she witnessed by the illuminating halo of his faith.

At last her chin rises the way her shoulders did, and she cuts him a half-slung glance, her eyes still bright with the tears she refused to shed for long, her nose red, her mouth still. Breathing forward, in a way that lifts her chest rather than her shoulders, deliberate and quick as if the consciousness of the act of it soothes her.

And nods, this minute little gesture in the darkness. Searching his features for a long moment before she responds. "Shelby said they were going to use Leah to lure the others. And someone put the illusion over the warehouse. The Techs would've cleaned that place up and erased it from property records and every map they could get their hands on.

"This bastard just threw up an illusion and took himself out of the time stream so we couldn't see him. I bet he's gonna go and check the playback, though. Then he'll know who I am. Sid and Mara and Jim too.

"I wonder if he's the guy from my dream. Jim said, maybe that's just Leah's Avatar made manifest, but maybe it's one of the Fallen the Techs are looking for."

Sera breathes out a quiet little burst of air, glancing away from Pan. Up toward the altar where he will celebrate mass, come morning light. Then she looks down at her hands, empty in her lap.

"Did the sister say anything about her criteria for trusting us?"

Fr. Echeverría

Patient though he is his body is not quite so and the position he's held these past few minutes cannot be maintained forever. He stays where he is and that concern and that sympathy dissipates but does not fade the more she pulls herself back into herself. She can see his right hand splayed on its thigh and the left held onto the pew ahead of them. But he does not move until she looks up towards the pulpit.

Then he stands, a sharp intake of breath and the resultant cough the only sign of exertion. He is big, not just tall but solid, and he carries what excess weight he boasts around his midsection in the tradition of aging men. Agility and he parted ways decades ago.

Once stood he considers the question and grips her shoulder. Incidental as the brushing of fingertips during a transaction but his hand is warm through the fabric covering her skin covering the muscle and bone beneath. Incidental but not impersonal.

"Time."

His hand leaves her shoulder.

"What's your plan, then?"

Serafíne

Her head turns sharply as he rises from his kneeling posture, blue eyes made dark by the gloom pulling up and up with him as he stands. Chin lifted, her features cheated into a three-quarters profile. Mouth half-open with an expression that seems half-formed, attenuated, expectant, until he remarks that time is her criteria.

Then her mouth closes and her expression curves wry, so finely contained given her convulsion of remembered agony a quiet few minutes - five minutes, ten minutes? how long did he kneel there, on her level, concerned and sympathetic but allowing her to Be - ago.

When he grips her shoulder, the twist of her neck arcs another 45 degrees so that her chin is hovering over the webbing of his hand, where his thumb and index finger spread in different directions across the apex of her trapezius muscle. Her eyes linger on his face, then travel in a slow cascading point-to-point down his shoulder, his arm, the edge of his black sleeve, the inner joint of his elbow. The dark, wiry hair on his forearm. This time, she is well-contained, and does not curve her cheek over the edge of his knuckles. If the impulse exists, she holds it back well, though her mouth does part, just as he draws his hand away.

He's standing so she does, then, too - all at once. Hers is such an easy motion - the smooth contraction of her thighs, the easy balance she finds on the balls of her feet. Not a dancer's grace, just the confidence that comes from being very, very fond of the body one inhabits and well accustomed to its many uses.

"We're gonna find Leah. We can't leave her out there. She's alone and she's fucking scared and she didn't mean for any of that to happen. To her or by her or any of it." The sidelong look Sera shoots Pan in that moment is pugnacious. She does not think he would try to dissuade her or even oppose her in this, but. Ahh, but.

"They don't have her yet," a fierce little narrowing of her eyes, as she swallows hard. Tugs the hem of her skirt down over her ass and thighs to make sure she is not flashing him as she stands there. "Jim's going to scry for her, I figured I'd start with shelters and soup kitchens. Places with a free meal.

"When you're alone like that and have no place to go and no ideas about who's after you and - " Oh, impassioned, this, rushed through without discrimination, thoughtless in her haste. An arrest, she drops her eyes from the vicinity of his face, glances over his shoulder, through the entryway to whatever she can see of the gloom of the night turning to morning. There is still no sun in the sky. "Well. There are places you can go and people you meet, but it won't always earn you a meal. And sometimes you need a safe bed. Just for one fucking night.

"So. I'm gonna look for her.

"That's my plan."

Fr. Echeverría

And she doesn't have to tell him that this girl is young and terrified and that this was all out of her control. That so far as intent goes she's an innocent.

She doesn't have to explain to him what happens to people who have no place to go but he lets her anyway. He lets her and he listens like he hasn't heard stories sharing a vein from other folks and hasn't lived it himself and can't begin to wrap his head around the notion of being pursued. Nods and puts his thumbs in the mirrored belt loops of his jeans but does not tell her he knows.

Maybe she can see it in his form the way lost and angry folks see someone who has walked their path before and not hit the side of it in wait for the buzzards to collect his flesh from his bones. He isn't lost or angry but he accepts that she is those things just the same as he accepts that she is profane and unrepentant.

"Alright," he says. "Let me help."

Serafíne

But there are things she can see in him, in his silence and in his solidity. Hear in his voice and in his smoker's cough. Read in the rough parchment of his skin and the dark map of his countenance. Maybe even hear in echo in the way he calls a half-clothed Cultist who cannot keep the profanities out of her mouth even in the house of god dormilona when he finds her sleeping on a pew in his sanctuary.

"I knew you would - " she says in a rush of conviction, but he can read the tension of it in her narrow shoulders and in the cut of her spine against the thin fabric of her pink cotton dress. She knew he would but she has been wrong, can be wrong, is wrong so often that she makes a fucking art of it, and so, she knew he would but feared he wouldn't. Pink fucking cotton, for god's sake, which pulls taut across her scapula and upper back as she turns and reaches and throws her arms around his shoulders in a wide embrace that pulls her up onto her toes and has her leaning into him, smiling her relief into his chest for one long, unselfconscious moment. "I knew it."

And then for a much shorter, infinitely more self-conscious moment that has her tipping her head forward and pulling her long arms down from around his neck with a strange reluctance for all that it feels so fucking weird suddenly to be hugging a priest in a church in the predawn.

The narrowest little shrug, in the aftermath. One shoulder upward, as she looks away. Draws herself away, restores to him the personal dignity of space. The fey half-smile she casts him is almost shy. Or no, that reads it wrongly. It curls, a rich but quiet humor underneath.

"See, Padre? I had faith in you."

Fr. Echeverría

[YAY]

Fr. Echeverría

[Alright so going for Find the Lost first and if that doesn't do anything amazing going to go with ye olde scrying ritual.]

Fr. Echeverría

[Find the Lost - Correspondence/Mind 2.
Coincidental. Base diff 5, claiming -1 for spec focus and another -1 for it being in line with his resonance because I am a bastard.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )

Fr. Echeverría

[Extending, +1 diff.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 5, 6) ( success x 3 )

Fr. Echeverría

[Extending it again!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Fr. Echeverría

[That's not 8, dawg.]

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

Howl-witnessing

[Per+Awareness what is this people be looking for me?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Not one to back down from a challenge. [12]

Mara Andrews

A few days had passed since that fateful night, when Mara and the others had knelt in the ash of an old and venerable building and the lives of who knows how many awakened individuals. Since that point they had walled themselves in, sealing themselves against the outside world, a form of isolation one might say. In hopes that they would not draw the attention of those beyond their tiny little motel room.

It was late saturday, and by now each of the members of the team had secured their own little habitat in the crowded room. It was necessary of course, tempers were running ragged and patience was thin, and it had been for the best that each member of the team, had their own space..small as it might be.

Mara had taken the space between the one bed and the exterior wall of room, a small inclosed space that sectioned her off, giving her some space to exist. She had made a makeshift bed there as well, taking one of the spare pillows and propping just so, so that others might use the bed.

In this moment of their isolation, Mara sat there, cross legged and quiet. Her gaze was turned from the others, the woman looking at the exterior wall before her. Her hands rested on her knee's and breathing was slow and deep.

Serafine

Sera seems to prefer sleeping in the bathtub, for the gods only know what reason, but spends some of her waking hours sitting on the other side of the exterior wall, between the a/c unit and the front door. Days have passed, and the food is cheap and processed and the drinks are dwindling, so mostly they drink tap water. Sera alternates her clothes: sometimes she wears a t-shirt and underwear, while her bra and cut-off shorts are being washed or dried. The rest of the time, she wears a black bra with red details and cut-off denim shorts.

Goes about barefoot because god with her clodhoppers she could take off someone's toes if she stepped wrong. And barefoot, it turns out that she's pretty short. She inhabits space because she fills it, and seems tall because of the proportions of her body and the fact that she tends to wear shoes that, between the platforms on the soles and the heels, add at least four to six inches to her height. Which is ridiculous. So, it turns out that Mara is taller than Sera, which she may not have expected.

For all her talkativeness, Sera knows when to be quiet. She's sensitive to the vibe of a room and shuts the hell up when people seem to need her to shut up. And when she shows herself up in Mara's space, sliding across the bed against which the Akashic is resting her spine, she knocks.

In a way. Bare, pale legs slide down the shoulder of the bed preceding her. Sera's toenails are painted black spread with silver glitter, and her pedicure has held up better than her manicure in their exile. So: bare white legs, which haven't been shaved in a few days, glittering black toenails. The sour scent of another body in the close space, and

" - hey." Greeting and query all at once. If Mara looks up, Sera is perched at the edge of the bed, a look of inquiry on her striking features. Brows lifted, eyes steady, mouth still. "Mind if I join you?"

Serafine

(brb!)

Mara Andrews

Mara's choice of clothing in the gathering heat of the room had been utilitarian. She thanked the Record and the Akashakarma that she had the foresight to leave a pack with a spare change of clothing in her car, and so that spare change of clothing had found its way into the room. Where on the eve of their adventure she had worn military stylings with flare. The spare set of clothing was thoroughly utilitarian.

A pair of plain black yoga pants, flared and loose below the knee covered her lower half, while a simple grey tanktop covered her torso. She had thoroughly eschewed the use of footwear, or socks since their arrival, her toes baring a gentle shade of mint green, which at this state was in lamentable condition. Mara herself had chipped most of it off in an attempt to keep her mind occupied, and her legs were now similar to Sera's days of neglect left a fine stubble of the palest blonde.

There was another area of course which now saw neglect, Mara's hair, or lack their off now showed signs of resurgence, pale blonde follicles now sprouted from her scalp, and now and again the others might note her running her fingers over that growth with an irritated look upon her face.

Mara is aware of the intruder in her space when she sat down upon the bed, squishing the springs and those pale green eyes turned to regard the Cultist as her legs slid over the side, the gaze travelling up, up..until it rested upon that beatific, if unorthodox beauty. The question for parley, or simply a desire for company is expressed and Mara's full lips purse into a thin line...but then she nods.

"Sure...come on down." She said patting the space beside her. "Whats up?"

Serafine

Sera could use some clippers too. Her own (partially) shaven skull is not cut so close as Mara's and probably needed to be clipped even before their venture to the warehouse. Now, the neglected is more noticeable. As is the fact that her black roots are dyed black. So looking like a blond with black roots is a sartorial choice she makes.

Look, she slides down the side of the bed with ease. Not the sort of physical ease the Akashic shows so easily, but a certain confidence born of native athleticism - more grace than strength in this. Sera's skinny as a rail. Still, the bed creaks beneath her weight because it is a creaky bed, and sighs upward as she slips down the side, hands braced on the cheap carpet. The creature folds up her knees and wraps her arms around them, lacing her hands in front of them. Clothes off, she has more tattoos, the most prominent of them follows the curve of her ribcage on her left flank, but the shape is mostly obscured by the line of her bra.

"We're not gonna be in here forever, you know," she starts off, quiet, studying Mara's features in profile. Her own gaze attentive in its way, lingering over the curve of Mara's skull before returning to her features. Sera seams her mouth, considering her next words carefully. "And then there's the matter of what to do when we do get out. Aside from watching our asses, of course.

"Before the techs came, the folks in that warehouse were having an argument about what to do with Leah Walker. And I suppose I was wondering what you thought was the right course?"

Mara Andrews

They could both use a spa-day, really the entire team could. Somewhere to relax and refresh, recoup and rebuild. Not that everyone present would take such an opportunity. It was hard to imagine Jake or Jim sitting down and having their nails done and their bodies pampered.

But one never did know these days. Still that thought made Mara smile unconsciously, those full lips widening briefly as she hunched over at let her elbows rest upon her knee's. Her neck craning gently from side to side as she loosened muscles that had become still from a lack of movement. Her eyes narrow as Serafine speaks her mind, her features taking on the caste of someone who had opened themselves to a deeper level of thought, a deep breath taken as she turned her head to regard Serafine directly.

"Good questions, definitely. I've given it some thought myself, and far as I can figure, as that door there hasn't been smashed down..i figure were in the clear. So the best thing we can do is just go back to the way things were. Work, live, sleep..whatever." Her shoulders hitched upward in a gentle shrug before she stretched upwards, her spine coming in line with the side of the bed once more.

"Leah Walker on the other hand...is a whooole different problem." She reached up with both hands, the fingers of each interlaced as she brought them slowly over the stubble of her skull before letting them rest behind her head. She held that position for a moment, before her nose crinkled, and she quickly dropped her arms back down, obviously smelling something less then pleasant.

"I don't know about the rest of them, but to be honest? I don't think we have the pure power to take on something as strong as what Leah did...we'd all end up just like the others. Which leaves us with three options...we either leave her the hell alone and hope someone bigger picks up the ball. We try to convert her to the light side of the force....or we waste her before she sees us coming." Her words hang like a dagger in the air at that last sentiment, the woman obviously not excluding any options from her thoughts.

"To be honest.." Her features becoming apprehensive as she spoke. "I don't know enough about whatever the hell she is to make a call on this. The safest route is avoidance, the surest route is death...but neither of those really sit well with me."

Serafine

Serafíne listens to Mara's answers quite closely and quietly. She is in profile, her own head lowers, long hair pulled back into a ponytail except where it has been shaved. Her posture is loose but there's a tension beneath it, a quickening to her frame and her reflective gaze as Mara shifts from the problems of potential notice by the Techs or the Fallen. When Sera glances up like that, a quiet look on her features, her eyes darkly reflected, her mouth still, a neutral line in her sharp face, she is all still, thoughtful.

Then, Leah Walker. Mara lays out what she considers the three options, and when she describes the third option waste her before she sees us coming, the Ecstatic looks away, all at once. Inhales a deep breath in a quick sharp flare of her nostrils and otherwise swallows her reaction as well as she is able. She is so expressive, concealing feelings on the subject is well-night impossible. If there were a pencil in her hand, she would have snapped it in thoughtless tension.

The reaction is so immediate, so fucking visceral, that Sera very nearly misses or misunderstands the Akashics last comment: that neither the safest route nor the surest route sit well with her. It's only while Sera is sitting there, breathing out slowly, in a faintly controlled rhythm that allows her to at least look back at Mara and count out each one underbreath that she realizes what Mara means. And decides that perhaps this isn't a lost cause yet.

"She's a sixteen year old girl. I saw her. I saw her aura. She didn't do that when she was being left alone. She did that after she was attacked, after the woman who helped her and healed her was murdered in front of her eyes, and when a bullet was coming for her head. She's scared and alone and she's a kid. That's what she is. Whatever's inside her she hasn't - "

Sera arrests the impassioned statement mid-sentence. She does not know what Leah Walker has or has not done by now with whatever's inside her, but her own position is out on the table, without qualm or apology.

"We're going to look for her. We can't leave her out there. If you don't want to get involved, or you aren't sure if you think we should help her, or whatever, I won't blame you for not getting involved. I'd still be there for you if shit goes bad on the other end of things. I wouldn't blame you, either.

"This feels dangerous, and it's not fair to force it on you. But if neither of those options appeals to you and you actively want to help her, we can work together."

Mara Andrews

Mara manages a laugh in that moment. Not because of Serafine's react to her words but simply because of one small statement.

"Feels dangerous?" She chuckles once more. "Sera, you have a mastery of the understatement." A wink followed to show the good humour in the words and just as swiftly as the levity arrived, it disappeared in a uncertain sigh.

"I'm down to help...I really am. But Sera, all the good intentions aside, we all have to be ready to acknowledge that this might be a lost cause. I sure as fucking hell hope it ain't, but...." And she leaves it hanging there, leaves the words unspoken, words that she obviously doesn't have the heart to say in this moment.

"So keep me in the loop alright? lemme know if theres anything I can do. I ain't about to back down from the challenge now after all." She spreads her lips in a confident smile, a sign of surety and purpose.

One can only hope they are up to the task.

Serafine

There's something - withheld about the singing glance that Serafíne shoots Mara in that moment. Her aura, her resonance, somehow banked beneath her skin The look is searching and perhaps troubled, but it ends with a little twist of her mouth in response to the other woman's confident smile.

"Cool," is what she says in the end, pushing herself up off the floor. The edge of a half-smile gracing her mouth as she leaves Mara's little section of the motel room. "I'll let you know."

Motel 6 + 6

Sera

Take the third right and then on 'til morning.

That's next, after. The ash coating their shoes and boots, the legs and cuffs of their jeans, accumulated like falling snow in the diamonds of a certain someone's fishnets is literal. Still there as they pile into the van, that moment of dissonance as they work out the logistics for meeting up again, since Mara drove herself.

They agree on a meeting point in an hour or two, someplace Else. Some anonymous exit in an outer ring of the city's suburbs, a cluster of strip malls and big box stores, fast food restaurants and brilliantly lit gas stations, the running lights of a constant waterfall of taillights and brights against the darkness. Dan drives through the darkened cityscape, taking turns whenever they present themselves, giving himself over to the maze of the city, the air in the truck humid and close and acrid with the scent of vomit. The rough, glottal sound of Jim puking re-awakens the dry heaves Sera fought down earlier. This time, she does not fight them. She bends over in the front seat, her head between her knees, and pukes up that stomachful of vodka into an airsick bag stolen from a long-ago flight. There's a stack of them in the glove compartment, because of course there is, and the paper is thick and waxed and heavy, but not really enough to block the scent, which permeates the air around them now. Her heaving is less deliberate, less ritual purging, more what-the-fuck-I-just-saw, and the first spasm relieves the worst of the pressure. Unlike Jim, when someone (Sid or Dan) thrusts a bottle of water in her direction, she takes it.

Dan slips a hand into her hair while she's throwing up. Just cups the back curve of her head, an acknowledgment of presence and awareness. Some insistence of comfort. Moves his thumb back and forth across the thick sweep of her French braid, and hums a bit to her, quietly while he drives.

Maybe half an hour into the drive, forty-five minutes, Serafíne digs her way through her pockets and the pockets in her little backpack, finds what she's looking for, and slips a little piece of perforated paper beneath her tongue. Jim's going to be working later; she'll help him if she can and it's best that they're on the same wavelength. He's been tripping balls all night, and so soon is she.

--

Their phones are all off, at Sid's insistence. So when they pick Mara up at that BP in I-Have-No-Idea-Where, Sera runs into the convenience store, fills up a reuseable shopping bag with supplies - bottles of water, gatorade and OJ that she knows she'll need later, snacks and snack and snacks: the sort that appeal to someone who's just getting hit by the speed buzz of LSD, with only the faintest hint of visual hallucinations smearing in around the edges of her peripheral vision. She also picks up two of the cheapest prepaid phones available in the place, pays cash and makes a brief call to the church on one of them.

Then hands that phone over to Sid, as Sera is unsure whether to throw it away or smash it or what. Let someone responsible figure that out. Someone for whom the wash of neon outside the windows of the van is not soon to begin merging into a malevolent smear of hothouse flowers that crack and crust and turn gray white and begin to dissolve into flakes that peel away and drift like snow in the air around them, but taste like ash in the back of her throat.

--

Mara collected, the van gassed up, they hit the road again. Sera always has cash - for cabs, for drinks, for drugs - but the van has a huge gas tank and the fill-up guzzles most of her ready cash and leaves her searching for the wallet of emergency funds tucked beneath the driver's seat to pay for their cheap hotel room that night.

Sometimes, the memories of the vision she shared with her fellow Seer shoulder their way through her hallucinating mind, swallow everything else - but Dan usually pulls her back here. Now: van and people and smoke and the curl of bile hanging in the air, the collapsed exhaustion of Jake's grief, where he's curled up in one of the bench seats.

He does it by singing, to/with her. Quiet, gravel-voiced but precise. When he hums it, the rising falling melody is all Beethoven. The Ode to Joy is so universal that the others might recognize it from the Ninth Symphony if they listen (and listen closely, his voice is quiet, his hum more suggestion than thing-itself). Sometimes, though, they take up the words, together in rough harmony. This is an old habit between them, they sing the song very, very quietly, like they are taking up some old conversation they've been having with the universe all this time, precise and sweet and raw. Except for the odd line here and there, where melody and language merge into such a note of raw expression that she feels the fucking vibration of it like a note struck so solidly that it both knots her in place and ties her into the womb of the world all around them, and there's her resonance: visceral and bright, ragged, fear and hope and sorrow and joy all scored together, and her Self laid open, raw to the all the pain and beauty of the fucking world.

I'm wide awake, it's mornin'.

 Sid


They agree upon a meeting place with an approximate time. Sid, quietly clinging to the strap of her bag, the furrow of her brow deeper than usual, manages to keep her head enough to tell them all to turn off their cell phones. Take out the batteries if they must. She doesn't know yet what the Ecstatics discovered in their vision, doesn't yet know just how deeply fucked they all will be if they're tracked and found, but she can tell it's bad.

Mara gets into her car and takes off and the others climb into the van, Dan behind the wheel, Sera beside him. Sid takes the first seat available after Jim, ends up sitting right beside him. Jake is the only one alone, but that's probably for the best right now, with his grief still so fresh and raw and terrible. It's one thing to expect the worst, to prepare for it, to assume that Shelby was never coming back. But without the certainty for knowing there's room for a little seed of hope to grow, a tiny little niggling thing that helps to keep a person afloat. Tonight that seed was crushed for the Consor. He needs a moment to attempt to come to terms with reality.

The van has hardly started when the sounds of retching fill the small enclosed space. Beside her, Jim buries his face in the closest thing he can find. Sid startles at the sound, leans her upper body a little away from him, eyes darting up down up down, from what she can see of his face to the liquid sag of the bag he's found fill with the contents of his stomach. Drawing in a deep breath, closing her eyes and steeling herself against the smell of bile, she lifts her left hand. It hovers above the curve of Jim's spine a moment before slowly, cautiously lowering down. She can feel the bumps of vertebrae against her palm, can feel the spasms of his back with each retch. Jim can feel the warmth of Sid's hand through the fabric of his shirt, the heat of it seeping deep into his skin, relaxing the muscles. Slowly, Sid slides her hand up his back, then down, the movements awkward, then slowly smoothing out to something more natural. Leaning forward herself, she rests her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, her face turned away to watch out the window as they drive and drive and drive.

===

Later, at the meeting place on the fringes, Sid collects the bags of waste, taking them from hands or picking them up from the floor. Without word or explanation, she goes into the convenience store along with Sera, but once inside beelines for the restrooms, backing up against the door and pushing her way inside. When she emerges a few minutes later her hands are empty (and freshly washed), the former contents of Sera's and Jim's stomachs fed to the city's sewage system.

Sera hands her a prepaid phone, and for a moment Sid merely blinks at her, confused, before accepting it. She has two calls of her own to make, the first to her housemate, letting him know she lost her phone but won't be home tonight and no, she doesn't really want to talk about it right now. Later, maybe. The second call is to her work, letting them know that she feels terrible and she doesn't think she'll be feeling any better by morning, so someone will need to take her shift. When she's finished she holds the phone out to the others, offering it in case someone else needs to make similar calls before dismantling the device and throwing a couple pieces into the nearby trash bin. She keeps the battery, because you just never know.

Back in the van Sid is quiet as ever. Her hands stay on the bag she has tucked in her lap, one wrapped over the other, which is clutching a fold of cloth. Her spine is curved forward, the slope of her shoulders is relaxed as she watches the lights streak past the darkened windows.

Jim

  The magi in his vicinity – maybe even the consors – can feel the weaving that is happening in the backseat as the van turns down the highways and byways of Denver. The sound of his stomach grumbling in protest seems to solidify, the urge of his being to be filled and sustained radiating outwards as they drive. Jim? Jim is silent. He focuses on an unforeseen destination. He focuses on his own want. Maybe a part of him focuses on the heat from Sid's hand, stirring deeper passions. And then he transcends outward to the wake of urges this creates, a moving ward that reaches out to play with the minds of those that might follow them.

Drawing law enforcement to stop, take a moment, and grab a cliche donut or some fast food. Maybe pull over and take a nap in one of the speed traps until their radios come alive. The hounds that would be hot on their trail, he hopes, will be drawn to instead indulge their baser instincts. Gluttony. Sloth. Maybe even lust, if there is a nearby girl or boyfriend to spend an unscheduled 'cigarette break.' And not bring their wrath down upon the magi he has surrounded himself with.

That same awareness that allows those who sit about him in the car to feel his weaving into the Tapestry, the echoes of his avatar laden with an addled resonance, might also sense an emotion on his face when it finally rises. That contortion, the shamed turn of his shoulders coupled with it, is that of guilt. He is not so much fearful for himself, but for those that surround him. The ones he shares a ride with, the one that had come to offer her own protection – Mara. The one who pats his back – Sid. The consors that were dragged into this.

Despite his apparent discomfort, again curling up as pangs and cramps grip his inside – his face is reddened with pinpoints of blood beneath its surface from engorged pores and his eyes shot red with the stuff – it's not until the hotel that Jim eats. Drinks. Whatever snacks are there he devours. The effects of the drugs have faded. But not for long.

Another dose spreading across his tongue. Another drop from the iodine-brown vial he pulls from his pocket. This one, this indulgence of vie, not hidden in the bathroom like before they'd headed out to the warehouse. He draws the motel curtains. He turns up the sputtering little air conditioning unit built into the lower wall, and sits across from it on the ground as he pulls his knees to his chest.

He shuts his eyes. Turns on. Tunes in. Drops away from his surroundings.

And begins another weaving as the earlier one fades away. One with a new purpose. One with new and – when he is finished – impressive strength.

When he is finished, every corner of the place is saturated with his resonance. His stoicism lends the cracked walls and fading paint the reassuring heft of a fortress. To the undisciplined? His addled and erratic attentions – well, it's hard to not cycle through the channels on the television, and maybe forget what task you're in the middle of beginning. And the psychedelic nature of his unhinged psyche will no doubt make for interesting daydreams and tinged REM sleep.

When Jim is finished his head is bobbing with fatigue. And beneath the simple lack of rest is a deeper tiredness. He'd given more than a bit of himself over the course of the night. The willwork had been a great feat, the crafting palpable in its strength to all within the ward, but it had also been a great labor.

He is finished in more ways than one. He pulls himself onto one of the beds. He pulls a pillow under his head, sweat-soaked fabric of his shirt clinging to him. He manages to give Jake a final glance, a final appraisal, before looking to Serafine.

"Can you? Can... Can you tell them what we saw." Again his words nearly disjointed. His eyes visibly heavy before they close. Whether or not he has drifted off to sleep is anyone's guess. His breathing is deep and steady.

Sera

  Dan rents the hotel room, pays cash, brings back the keys. Yes, actual keys on plastic diamonds inserted into locks to admit the patrons into the room. An old-fashioned motel that long-since lost its franchise for failing to live up to the lax standards of some low-end chain targeting itself to strapped tourists and unexpected travelers, and is now instead directly marketed toward truckers and prostitutes of every variety.

While they’re exiting the van, Dan hits the glovebox firmly and watches it open. Takes in a breath, glances over his shoulder at the others there, then pulls out two handguns, checking the clips and assuring himself that the safeties are on. They make him nervous, he can't hide that, but he knows the basics. His voice is drawn, quiet.

“Hey,” to Sid as she’s going inside. “ – do you know how to use one of these?” Offering it to her as casually as he can. She does not; he nods. Dan makes asks the same question of Mara – can she use one of these? If she says yes, he offers her one. Sid and Mara are the only ones he queries. Sera is fucked up. Jim is Working. Jake is -

- well, he should not have a weapon close to hand.

--

Inside the hotel room, Sera sinks down against the wall between the a/c and the door, her spine straight and upright, legs bent at the knees, elbows resting on her thighs. She looks thoroughly disconnected from the world and these levels of reality, but the truth is she’s following the weaving Jim performs on some altered level, feeling the cage he builds around them with his resonance, breathing in the shifting patterns as he warps them to form the powerful wards he builds. No: not just breathing them in. She sees them pulled like taffy from the raw stuff of the universe, weaving them into braids, braiding them into weaves, patterning them into the walls and the ceiling, changing and charged and dark and raw. She has not seen work like this in -

- well. Quite literally, she could not say.

--

This is the second time Serafíne has told this story tonight. The first time, she muttered it in five addled and virtually inchoate sentences into a cheap prepaid phone in the brilliantly lit parking lot of a BP filling station. The coronal flare of headlights in her peripheral vision like the birth of galaxies, her awareness all smeary-bright, her heartbeat in time with the steady pulse of the universe. Just so - exquisite - all the cross-sections of awareness and the way they converge, the cage and mobile ward Jim was building around that van with the raw stuff of his own desires, every fucking level of them.

--

Now it is later. Now always becomes later, except when you play with Time. Then now can become both later and yesterday, without discrimination. Sera is still on the floor; the beds are left for others. The reflected resonance of the Disciple's wards is creeping into her spine, beneath her skin. That's why she's sitting up so straight, her head canted aslant, forehead against the doorjam, listening to the work of the walls. Which are living with Jim's energy. The desire for a cigarette, if only for the familiar movement of her hands, the crackle of the tobacco in her lungs, is like a lozenge in her throat. But - oh, stoic (hah), infected by that sensation, lingering in it like a strange dream, wallowing in it the way she might revel in the space she has in a cool, clear, empty porcelain bathtub, she resists. Takes a sort of pleasure in that resistance and does so half-a-dozen times without realizing she has done it before.

So, see. Jim asks her to tell the others what they saw, and she is summoned back to now-or-later, and looks at him, this brief and focused survey that drops away to her guitarist. Dan is seated on the edge of the bed, watching over Jake. Watching over Sera, for that matter. Though from a bit more of a distance. He has put the weapons he retrieved from the car away, tucked them into the bedside table with the Gideon Bible and the 1987 Greater Denver Area Yellow Pages, careful to assure himself that the safeties were thumbed on. As Sera starts to speak, he retrieves Sera's leather-bound folio, opens it to the next blank page, which is the first one after her dream as she's written nothing all week, and takes notes. The names, particularly.

"We saw nothing of whomever worked the illusion," Serafíne's voice is always low, more rough and raw tonight than it often is, but it still has a certain power to it. With Jim's wards, the pulse of his resonance surrounding them, it might seem somehow disconnected from the creature seated beside the door, who is now, while she speaks, slowly pulling the piecework of her French braid down, alive to the feel of her hair between her fingers. Perhaps to some of them the sound of her voice floats in a susurrant stream, like mist drifting through some half-deserted forest, the broad, protective trunks of massive trees the stoic walls caging them in, while strange, unruly night-sounds, that undeniable sense of disorientation and dissociation woven into Jim's working, too play havoc with their senses.

" - though there was a piece of memory sliced out of the timestream. Erased, or warded from our seeing." A thought arises and she turns her head, finds and focuses, vaguely, on Jim's shadow on the far bed. "If the illusion was the Work of the mirrorshades, why would they have bothered to erase themselves from the moment?"

Her question is not rhetorical, and has just occurred to her, but it is a question for later and now is now and also then, and she is telling the story of when. So she returns to it.

"We saw the girl from my dream. The one who asked for my help."

Something of the girl's reflected, remembered confusion and fear insinuates itself into Sera's voice. It is not merely empathy. Closer to a spasm of the sympathetic nervous system. No matter. It passes. Slips back into the stream of consciousness.

"Her name is Leah Walker and she is sixteen years old."

"Shelby and a man named Will rescued Leah from," a flexion of her neck, a movement of her jaw, "the mirrorshades. She was unconscious when they brought her back to the warehouse and they warded themselves in, and let her sleep. They spent a day watching over her by themselves."

"That night, the rest of their cabal found Shelby and Will. Shelby let them in, and they crowded into the warehouse arguing about the rescue and Leah Walker's fate. A man named Jai had instructed Shelby to leave Leah to the technocrats, but Shelby refused. And so, this split between them. This dissension.

"Shelby said, she could not leave Leah. The mirrorshades were going to dissect the girl, splay her open, study her and needle her and break her down into her constituent parts, and use her as bait to catch," a soft, sharp breath. Withheld and raw, " - the others."

"Jai wanted to kill Leah. He said," Something of the Euthanatos' remembered passion, his fury, his righteous power, infects the remembered words. "She is Widderslainte. She is Tamas gone mad."

"No." This is Shelby, in response. An abrupt, calm cessation. Steady certainty. The other half of the echoed argument cool as a hand on a fevered brow. "She is a child. Her name is Leah Walker and she is sixteen and she is terrified and she is a child, and fate can be changed.

"So they argued."

--

"That's when the Technocrats arrived." Sera is far away now, her heart beating faster. The fight vivid in her mind and body; her spine though, against the walls and those stoic wards holds her upright even as her throat constricts around the words, makes them rougher, ragged with violent sensory overload from the memories. "The other six, who make twelve.

"Leah was asleep as the fight exploded around her, but she lurched away when she was wounded. She was crying, mad with pain and fear."

Quiet.

The tale returns to, "Shelby was pinned beneath one of the Technocrats, in desperate straits. But she Worked a healing on Leah from across the room, before the woman attacking her sunk a knife into her heart. And her blood - "

Sera's hands are tucked beneath her legs. She looks so relaxed, so tuned in, so dropped out, but beneath her knees her hands are fists, nails digging into the palms, the punctuate clarity of pain leashing her focus to the immediate and physical, to the spare-bones facts she seeks to relate. When the nails are not enough, her grip shifts. Fingers pushing deeply through maze of flexor tendons in the inner wrist, into the distal radial-ulnar joint.

"A man leveled a gun at Leah. He had and took a clear shot, but in that moment, something in Leah Awakened. Virulent and dark and powerful - quiescent before and quiescent after - but so, so strong in that moment.

"The bullet froze, mid-air, and crumbled to ash.

"And then the gun. And then the man who fired it. And then the rest.

"Flesh and blood and bone. Bricks and mortar and stone."

When they walked through the warehouse, they were walking through a crematorium.

--

"And just as abruptly, whatever awoke in Leah Walker went quiet. Disappeared. Evaporated. Burrowed its fucking," sudden, unleashed vehemence. Venom. " - way back inside her, and left her standing in the ruins.

"And she was a sixteen year old girl, again. And she screamed.

"And she ran, away."

Mara

Mara had expected many things this evening, had been prepared for violence, for pain, perhaps even death [or so she believed] fear, though not something unexpected was also not fully prepared for. Not her own fear, but the fear that spilled from the others, the intense need to leave, to flee, to go to ground. She had fled with them, taking her car and doing as she was told, driving in a nearly endless loop which gave her all the time in the world to think, but no time at all to calm, to reflect.

She had been at the rendezvous when the others arrived, her neck craning to the side to ensure that it was them and not someone else, one might wonder how long she had been waiting there leaning against her little old accent in the darkness of the night, her form illuminated only by the headlights of the van and the distant and stark light of the street lamps which seemed to watch them, an expectant gaze that seemed to imply that there were eyes everywhere, and that there was nowhere to hide.

Her posture as she stepped to the van and listened to the plan was one of calm, an almost aloofness that should not have been possible given the reaction the others were having. But in her face all her fears were visible, the tight lines of muscle and sinew drawn taught with worry and fear, lips tugging this way and that in apprehension, eyes wide and scanning the darkness like a small creature praying and hoping that they have managed to outrun or outsmart a predator who's only desire was to end them.

She followed them of course, there was safety in numbers as the old saying said and Mara was not going to turn away from them in this moment. She followed in her car, refusing to leave it behind, and when they reached the motel she parked it on the other side of the lot well away from the other vehicle, perhaps it would not matter, or perhaps it would be their ace in the hole should they need to flee.

It is here as she stepped quickly towards the room, her arms wrapped around her, her head lower then any had seen previous that Dan approaches her, discreetly offering her the cold heavy weight of iron. She looked at it like it was something venomous and insidious and she simply shook her head. "I don't know the first thing about guns." She said as she turned away and strode into the room, her jacket dumped on a bed as she paced the room, nervous energy rolling off her like a tide.

This behaviour continued as Jim began his weaving and casting forming a safety net about them. It continued as Sid entered, as Serafine slid to the floor and played with her hair, and as the cultist began to tell the tale gleaned from the strands of time itself Mara continued her inexorable circuit, seeking clarity through motion...or perhaps simply a last ditch effort to avoid the full brunt of her thoughts.

It is only upon the completion of the story that Mara's feet still her movements, the woman looking around the room at her fellow magi and consor's. She bit her lip nervously, the muscles in her face twitching as her eyes seemed to water. She turned then and strode towards the washroom.

"I'll be in the shower."  

Sid

The first night in the motel room was one of the hardest for Sid. She'd curled up in the room's only "comfortable" living chair, an ugly thing of sturdy orange and yellow cloth that was anything but comfortable, and tried and failed to sleep. Some time in the night she rose, wanting to get some air, but was stopped at the door. The quiet conversation with one and then both of the awakened Ecstatics lasted into the small hours of the morning, when Sera rose to make a bed of the tub and Jim rolled over for more sleep. Sid curled back up in her chair, and her rest was a little better, but still terrible.

The next day was long. Six people stuck in a room together with nothing but snack foods and whatever entertainment could be found on basic cable. Or whatever Jim or Sera had at their disposal. Sid sat on the floor by the door again; somehow the nearness alleviated the claustrophobia that rose and fell in waves, with each crest rising a little lower than the one before. She spent most of the day writing in a notebook she kept in her bag. Every inch of the pages, in, around, and above the blue college-rule lines, was covered in her neat handwriting. Some pages have drawings, tidy little diagrams or detailed profiles of her room-mates done in miniature. Sometimes exhaustion overwhelms her and she dozes, pen falling one way, notebook dropping in her lap as her arms go slack.

Friday night, desperate for an hour, maybe two (if she's lucky) of uninterrupted sleep, Sid caves to Jim's simple, "There's room," something she might not have done if he hadn't pulled the covers aside a little, making room. She collapses into it, her long red hair fanning out over too-thin pillow, still wearing her jeans and t-shirt from the day before. Curling onto her side, she scoots as close to the edge as possible, so close that if she rolls even a little in that direction she'll tumble right off. It's there that she hopes she'll stay through the next few hours, but she doesn't. At some point she wakes to the warm closeness of another body, her arm draped over their torso, her head nestled in the crook of a shoulder. It's Jim, of course, his chest rising and falling beneath her elbow with each breath. Sid pushes herself up onto her elbow, squints down into a face that may or may not be awake.

Saturday night it's back to the chair.

Which brings us to Sunday, a day when some of them may be on their last nerve with each other. Too many days in close quarters with strong personalities. Not to mention by now their food stores are either empty or close to it. Sid has to make another phone call to her work. They all heard it, hear her tell them again that she can't come in, and they hear her stammered side of the conversation that consists mostly of Ahs, Uhs, and Buts, and ends with her setting the motel phone handset quietly back on its base.

For a moment she just sits there on the edge of one of the beds, chewing on her thumbnail. When her hand drops down, she looks up. At Sera, at Mara, at Jake and Dan, and finally at Jim. "I want to go. I want to leave," she repeats, her brow furrowing, her voice low yet firm. "I can't help you find Leah from here. So...so I'm going," she says, rising. She has to get her socks and shoes on, gather up her belongings, which is exactly what she sets about doing.

Sera

They're there a few days. In that cheap motel room in Nowheresville. Six people in a single motel room with one shower and two beds and one chair and one television (which Serafíne turns off, compulsively, whenever it is left one with no one watching it. She refuses to subject herself to the white noise of it; does not even think about it, makes no mention of the habit, and would not herself understand why. But listen: institutional memory, this) and one microfridge. Fridge and microwave bolted together.

They are not the only group of six in one motel room, especially not in a place as cheap and rundown as this, which advertises weekly rates and offers space not just to truckers and prostitutes and low-end salespeople on the road, but to migrants of all sorts. They do not go outside, but sometimes, at a certain hour of the day, they can hear children outside. A few of the rooms are flanked by cheap children's toys. Second-hand bigwheels and faded Lil Tykes slides, the plastic cracked and weathered by the sun.

Dan and Sera have been on the road before. In that fucking convenience store, they picked up cheap, calorie dense food that can sustain them. Starving artist stuff. Ramen and bread and peanut butter, booze and chips and hot pockets. Microwave popcorn, and some fruit. A sack of apples and a basket of strawberries. For the strawberries, Sera is grateful beyond words. But this stuff won't last long. Not with six mouths to feed, and by the time Sid is finished hiding out, their larder is getting attenuated.

The first night Sera sleeps, when she finally sleeps, in the fucking bathtub. It is still damp from Mara's shower, but she doesn't care. Wake me if someone wants a shower, she said, but if they try she sleeps like a stone. It requires work to wake her up, and if they're tentative, if it is Sid, for god's sake, who's trying, Dan will give her a hand, shake Sera physically awake. Sera swims to consciousness like a deep sea diver returning too fast from pressurized depths.

And she sleeps like the dead.

She's fine, Dan'll say, if asked. She's always been like this.

---

The only instrument in the van was an old acoustic guitar. So, Sera and Dan share that out between them when people are awake and in need of distraction. Sera's fine with the guitar, but Dan - he's really good. He sits propped up against the wall, eyes closed in concentration, feeling the music as it emerges from the vibrating strings. They play songs by Bob Dylan, Will Oldham, Joni Mitchell, PJ Harvey, The Pogues, and they sing them together in rough and easy harmony. They play Cool as Kim Deal by the Dandy Warhols, and that gets Sera on the subject of Kim and Kelley Deal and then she spends like an hour in this recursive loop, fixated on the bass line from the Breeders' Cannonball, trying to figure out why the fuck that thing is so awesome.

There's nothing to do but talk. Or sleep, or get fucked up. So Sera does all three.

She asks Mara where she's from and what she does, and my god if Sera finds out that Mara is a contortionist she wants to see that, right fucking now. She will be astonished and delighted and demand that Mara show her how to do that and then falls on her ass eleventy million times attempting to follow the Akashic's instructions and laughs it off every time.

She asks Jim what was his first trip and when and where and was it before? he opened his eyes. Needles him for more Ghandi quotes and Hunter S. Thompson quotes and any other quotes he wants to quote at her. She takes requests, for music, and claims to know everything everyone asks for but is not always correct, ends up humming mistaken lyrics into being.

She tells them that she and Dan came here by way of Raleigh-Durham and Brooklyn before that. She talks about North Carolina quite a bit, Brooklyn very little, and whatever came before Brooklyn not-at-all. Tells them stories about parties and festivals and bars and happenings she's been to and the people she's met there. About some amazing fucking guy who carves these fucking - animal totem statues out of wood logs with chainsaw. Just tell him what animal you want and he goes town. He sells them on the side of this random road way back in the hills.

Serafíne makes a spectacle of herself whenever distraction is necessary, but not of Sid. Never of Sid. The shy redhead is given space, to be or breathe or participate in the conversation when and where she will. She is not put on display. And someone always has an eye on Jake. Sera or Dan or Jim. The handoffs are natural and thoughtless. When Sera's there, she sits physically close to the kid, and is mostly quiet. Which is astonishing considering how much she can talk when she wants to talk.

About this show one night - or this chick who or - that fucking art professor - or that redneck bar or the time she was tripping and it was sunset and it was June and they were in western North Carolina sitting on this ridgetop and the hills were wreathed with mist and the sky was on fire, but fading, and then, and then - the fireflies started to come out, one by one by one, and it was like watching stars mating and galaxies being born and comets searing through the darkness, searching for home.

--

When Sid announces that she's ready to go, Sera glances toward Jim, her blue eyes flickering over his features. Gauging whether he thinks the coast is clear. Whether they've shielded themselves long enough. Truth is, she's ready to go, too. But Sera, she awaits Jim's word.

 Jim

The press of a body that comes that Friday night stirs only Jim's unconscious. Though the word, only, belies just how much of Jim that entails.

When Sid is looking down at his face his eyes stay shut, his breathing remains subdued by the steady tidal lapping of good (necessary) sleep. And though his body doesn't move much it does seem like... Well, maybe it does the same thing that had gotten her on the bed and left her eventually clinging to him. His muscles and bones and being seems drawn to her. To another living being that is the same in important ways and (just as importantly) different in ways that intrigue him.

Maybe it's how two Cheerios feel in a bowl of milk. Sticking together when a spoon is coming to eat them.

Jim tries and mostly manages to keep this barely-voluntary bonding experience as bearable as possible. The guitar helps. The junk food helps. The smell doesn't. The door and walls don't for some of them. For Jim it's the children outside playing, that sound is what both does and doesn't make it easy. When they do Jim sometimes claws his way to the window, glancing at them through the thin slits of curtains. Watches them with an awe and a curiosity and like it's the best television show he's ever seen – the TV stays off, so his basis for comparison may be limited, but his basis for comparison is also real life outside a digital fishbowl, so there's that.

The questions help the most. And the stories. Sleepaway camp for wayward willworkers and deviants. Jim's first time was on a train to a museum. He never got off the train. He grew up in...

Wait for it...

Cherry Hills Village. He went to school at the University of Denver. Has a degree.

What did he study?

Botany. Biochemistry. Cognitive neuroscience. He rattles them off like he shouldn't stop at one, just like he did the day he skipped from the first to the next.

“What is this a job interview?”

A day passes. A second. He is able to withstand the time with all these social and mental and observational exercises. His spirits build.

Sometimes he's meditating. Sometimes he's writing in his own little book with little words and ideas of varying size and impact. Sometimes he transitions fluidly between one and the other.

But when Sid says she wants to leave, he nods, and almost looks uncomfortable with Sera looking at him for an answer. "Watch your back. I'll be watching it too."

And with that, though the spell remains, the curse of it is lifted by Sid's gumption and Jim's word. He still doesn't seem thrilled with that last part. Heap responsibility on an Ecstatic... Well, he's the one who had done that. But tell him what it is. Make him aware of it. And see how he reacts.

Jim reacts by getting up to take a piss.  

Sid


Perhaps encouraged by the storytelling of the others, Sid opened up a bit about her own past. She'd tell them a little about Chicago, which doesn't sound much different from what they've seen of her Denver experience, except that in Chicago there was a man. When that went south she went west until she couldn't go west anymore, ending up here. Before that? She doesn't remember, she says.

The time spent in the room isn't all bad. Sid even almost laughs a little when Sera tries and fails to contort her body like Mara. Though clearly interested in Jim's schooling, his courses of study, she doesn't pry. Prying leads to reciprocal questions, and Sid is still reluctant to open up about some areas of her life.

When Sunday rolls around and events occur that tell the orphan enough is enough, that's all it is. Sera looks to Jim after Sid's quiet outburst, but Sid doesn't wait. When he speaks, though, she stops in the middle of tying on her scuffed-to-hell sneakers, her eyes seeking him out across the room before dropping with a small nod.

Maybe others are moving now, gathering up their belongings in preparation of their own departure. Maybe they don't. Sid doesn't immediately beeline for the door once she's got her shoes and socks on, her bag slung over her shoulder. Digging through her bag for something, she stops in front of Jake, holding out her hand. Nestled in her upward facing palm is one of her test tubes, small and plastic and filled with grey ash from the warehouse. She doesn't need it, probably doesn't need any of them. It's unlikely she'll find out anything the Ecstatics didn't already discover in their shared vision, but she'll keep the other two just in case. If nothing else, they'll help her with her understanding of non-living matter. But this one...this one she can part with.

"So you can say goodbye. On your terms."

If he looks up at her, meets her dark eyes behind the lenses of her glasses, Sid meets it for a few seconds before her gaze shifts to his nose and then drops entirely. In those seconds, though, the consor would see understanding and empathy. The quiet, timid redhead knows a thing or two about closure. If he accepts it, she hands it over carefully, reverently. If not, she sets it down on top of the microwave/fridge combo, just in case he changes his mind.

And so ends Sid Rhodes' time in the stasis of the motel room.


Howl ST

It was difficult to know what to expect from the grieving consor when they arrived at the motel. A person in his state could be capable of anything. It was probably wise that Serafine thought to keep a close eye on him.

The first night, Jake didn't sleep. He and Sid kept silent company, neither making any attempt to engage the other while the night's long hours drifted by. It was debatable whether Jake even registered the passing time, or the discomfort of his body in its curled position against the wall. He hadn't wanted to take a spot on the bed, or anywhere that may have brought him in proximity of a warm body. Instead he'd taken up residence on the floor near the window, close enough to the A/C unit that when it hummed to life he could close his eyes and tune out all the other sounds. (White noise.)

The next morning he took a shower. When he came out, he crawled into the bed that Jim had occupied the night before and went to sleep.

He didn't get up again until about 7:00pm, at which point he finally seemed to remember that he was alive and needed to eat. Through all this, he barely spoke to the others, but there was a sense that something about the young man had changed. The desperate tension had lifted itself from his frame, leaving him tired and grieving - but calm.

The next day he started talking again. Not much. Mostly he watched and listened while the others found ways to pass the time. But once or twice he allowed himself to be engaged. It started while Dan and Serafine were taking song requests. Near the end, when the pair were winding down, Jake shifted on his chair and said, "Can I play one?"

When Dan handed over the guitar, the consor settled the instrument in his lap. He played a couple of chords to warm up, then after a beat of silence began to play Jeff Buckley's Opened Once.

In the half light, where we both stand
in the half light you saw me as I am
I am the railroad track abandoned
with the sunset forgetting I ever happened

The consor wasn't a professional musician like Dan and Serafine, but he played well and he had a good voice. If anyone asked him why he'd wanted to play that song, he'd say it was because it was one of Shelby's favorites.

After that, Jake spent a lot of time watching the children out the window. At one point, a couple of kids rode past on skateboards, and Jake grinned and said that one of them had a good kickflip. At some point, they'd find out that this was what Jake did for a living - that he was a professional skateboarder, and that he'd met Shelby when she'd come by to take some pictures at the skate park.

Shelby was a photographer. And a singer.

So time passed. And eventually the day came when the group simply couldn't take being in the same room together any longer. As they were getting ready to go, Sid approached Jake and offered him the vial of ashes.

Jake looked at it for a long moment. The truth was, none of them had any way of knowing whose ashes were inside of it - or if any of it was even human. But it was all that remained of Shelby, and real or symbolic, the offer meant something. Jake nodded and took the vial, tucking it gently into the pocket of his jacket. "Thank you."

Eventually they all piled into the van (all but Mara, who took her own car,) and drove away. Drove home.

And when they dropped Jake off at his apartment, there was a sense that, despite everything, he was probably going to pull through.