A terrible, terrible thought

Samir
And so they three go off into the early evening to investigate a football field.

Sam is not so much with riding in other people's cars. If the others are getting the impression he thinks of the outside world as a breeding ground for germs and disease and potential Quiet episodes then that just means they've had enough exposure to him to know how fucked up he gets when he fucks things up. But they have to go together and it's too far to walk so when he returns from the bathroom with the blood washed off his face and his big boy pants on they head off in Grace's car.

This time of year the football field is in use. Luck is on their side. There is no game tonight and if there is it's at another school. Only one light shines on the field. Its bulb is flickering.

The parking lot butts up against a chainlink fence that butts up against bleachers that stands over packed dirt and dirty cigarette filters and discarded cans of Natty Light. Crickets drone in the darkness. They three are alone.

"Fuck," Sam says as he reaches down and hauls his book bag onto his lap.

Grace
First things first, Grace has on her anti-bite jacket, zipped up to the neck. It might not stop anything from biting her face, but it's better than nothing. And jeans (honestly, does she wear anything else?)

She also has her phone out, to bend space and create a firewall from it, so that nobody can spy on them from afar.

Well, at least, that's the plan.

[Corr 2: Ward. -1 diff from taking time]

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

Elijah
And so, Samir knows the terrible not-so-not-obvious truth. Elijah was delighted at the prospect of actually getting to work. Grant you, last time that he saw something absolutely horrible he almost threw up, and pretty much presumed that he was going to throw up behind the bleachers of the stadium again, not unlike he was still in high school drinking Natty Lite and smoking pot. You start with the little stuff, moved on to the harder things pretty quick but the light stuff was fun. The light stuff had some pretty fond memories, namely because he could remember them. There were gaps, he minded them less now.

The light over the field is flickering and Elijah gets on out of the car, checks his pocketwatch like he didn't need it for something other than magical purposes. He could pretty well guess what time it was, didn't need to reach forward into things without a mention of how a watch that couldn't keep time was suddenly so perfect at noting things down to the second.

Circles upon circles. Spirals within a point that he didn't much care for, implied an end so he's tracing a circle along the face, over the crack in the glass where it broke on impact in a car accident. Just a crack, there's blood in the front of it, and he hasn't bothered to clean it off. Kinda likes it that way, but won't admit to it. Just says it's hard to get out.

"See, when you're, like, sixteen this isn't creepy," he said as he made his way to the fence. Kinda wants to jump the fence, but he knows it isn't strictly necessary. Suspects it might be but he's meandering that way anyway.

Samir
Sam frowns at the logic Elijah attempts to leave them with and scrambles out of the car to keep up with him. At once he fumbles the left strap of his book bag over his shoulder and hip-checks the door shut. If Grace hasn't got a wide area of effect going on her ward she may want to rethink her conservative strategy.

"No shit?" he asks sarcasm dripping thick as blood from his tone as he hurries after Elijah. Like he may have to haul him back from walking up to some unseen four-armed monstrosity and giving it a hug or whatever the fuck he was going to do the night Reality and Samir had their last tiff.

While Elijah is standing still for the five seconds he's liable to keep doing that Sam pulls out his handheld computer and taps a couple of buttons.

[corr/matter/mind scan: NO ONE IS SPYING ON US RIGHT? -1 diff for practiced rote.]

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

Grace
[Extending!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Grace
"Okay. I think we're good," Grace says, finally opens her door and steps out.

"Yeah, I think this is pretty nightmarish even without the nightmare things wandering around."

She heaves a sigh and walks up to the fence with Elijah. "Got wards up."

Elijah
[Doin' magic. Doobeedoo- looking at the past. Time 2. Diff 5- 1 (practiced) -1 (special focus [mothafuckin' pocketwatch])

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 6) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Elijah
[and more?]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 9) ( success x 1 )

Samir
No one else can see what Elijah sees. It does not play itself out in the face of its bloodied bruised watch. Nothing outwardly weird happens. As Grace climbs out of the car and Sam comes to stand beside him the sound of slamming doors and heaved sighs and unzipping book bag zippers all fall away.

The night the two teenaged girls became one they came not because of the beyond-beautiful man but because of the tall bruiser who came with him. It was the bruiser who tied the two threads together. Who acted as a gateway. Before they met the otherworldly creature they met the bruiser.

As time rewinds Elijah can see the girls walking through the parking lot one of them firing off a text on her phone while the other cups her hands and calls out a greeting that causes a girl who shares her honey-blond hair and heart-shaped face to stop her practicing and rush to the bleachers to greet them. Can spot him at the edges of the field watching not the cheerleaders practicing but the parking lot. Waiting for the two to arrive. His arriving some time before that. Expectant. They meant to meet here.

Before he came here he stepped out of a vehicle parked some distance away at the edges of the parking lot. Elijah can identify the make and model of the car and read the license plate number. The bruiser drove the car unaccompanied. Hard to tell from whence he came but if he's known to the bruiser it won't take much to find him. Not with two Mercurial Elites at his side.

Elijah
[Int3+technology2]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
"Jesus, guys, what was high school like for you?" he asks, the relatively liked blond stoner who (for his part) managed to not get caught doing drugs on campus or having sex on campus or any number of things on campus that he actually did because schools didn't really care so long as he wasn't dealing and besides, nobody cared that Megan was dealing.

We digress.

He's holding his watch, making a slow and purposeful walk towards the fence. He looks over his watch, has his thumb pinned to a point, stuck over the fifty three minute mark. He moved back just a tad. He stops walking, focuses his gaze on the face, cocks his head to the side before looking in the distance at the fence. Pins a place while his eyes flick to the face of the watch again.

Fifty one.

Looks back to the parking lot, then down at the watch.

"Q-U-E ... two fourteen. Green old sixty-something mustang. Door's got a rust stain on it, can't see the interior... Someone backed into it once and the paint's fucked on the passenger side, but they have motherfucking steel frames so who gives a shit who runs into it," he says. His voice isn't idle. Comes back to reality with his finger on the mark forty-seven.

"It looks, to me, like your regular joe guy knew our victims. The whole older guy in a car that could be cool when you're young and dumb kinda thing. "

Samir
While Elijah is looking through time to see what brought the two girls here Sam is unzipping his backpack to remove his laptop and balance it on the chainlink fence's top pole. He is not the most dextrous creature in the world so it is a precarious sort of balancing.

He comes back to the present and brings with him identifying information about a motor vehicle. The older kid's eyebrows fly up. This was more useful than anything he was expecting to come out of the Hermetic apprentice's glance back. Not that he doubts the apprentice! Elijah kept him from getting eaten by the girls after someone turned them into a sarlacc-mouthed monstrosity! But it is physical information that they can track.

Green old sixty-something Mustang. QUE214.

"Right on," Sam says before he starts typing.

[int + computers: LOL SAM DOESN'T KNOW ALEX IS A COP.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens] [WP]

Grace
"Ahh, cool. I'll see if Alex can look up that plate. He's got like, cop privileges. Should be pretty simple," Grace says. Perhaps it cuts Sam's hacking attempts short, perhaps not.

In any case, she's got her phone out and letting Ginger know.

Elijah
"I'm totally useful," he said, meandered back to the car and slipped his pocketwatch into his pocket. "How am I doing with the whole Hermetic Hubris thing, Grace? I'm totally terrible at being full of myself."

Samir
His eyebrows go up again when he hears Alex is a cop. He might have picked up on that from trawling through old Ginger posts but it isn't until Grace says his name aloud that he actually remembers meeting the guy.

Oh shit, his eyes say.

Kind of want to see if I can actually hack the DMV, his fingers say.

So Elijah meanders back to the car. Sam stays at the fence a moment.

[YOLO. 3 dice in this pool bc of the initial hack thing.]

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

Grace
Grace is typing away at her phone while Elijah is talking to her. She barely hears him, but looks up with a bit of conusion as she puts what he said together.

"Hubris? Oh yeah," she says, gives Elijah a thumbs up. "Totally nailing the awesome cosmic power pride."

Elijah
They just keep going.

He looks at them. Sitting there, looking at the two Mercurial Elite typing away and doing whatever it was that they were doing and... huh. They were still typing. Elijah cocked his head to the side, watching people type was.. uh...

"Oh my god..." he says, after about seventeen minutes.

During that time, Elijah paced a good circuit around the car, back to the fence, and then to the place where he could almost see grass. Elijah then laid down and stared up at the sky. Pats himself down to look for a pack of cigarettes.

"I'm gonna go stare at the otherworldly beyond," he finally finds a cigarette... but no lighter.

"... does the lighter in the car work?"

Samir
"... you can use my lighter."

He says this without looking up from whatever the fuck it is that he's doing with his laptop balancing on the fence. If Elijah comes closer to accept the gift of the shitty Bic lighter then Sam keeps typing with his left hand and uses his right to reach into his pocket and extract the thing.

If Elijah glances at the screen he won't be able to decipher the mess of windows the reality hacker has going on his screen. That's probably for the best.

Grace
Grace's spiel on Ginger doesn't take long to write. It'll take longer to work though, and she slips her phone in her pocket and looks over at Samir.

Blinks a few times.

"Dude. There is a car you know. I can keep people from spying on us, but not if they walk by."

She then looks a bit harder. The DMV eh? Samir looks pretty into it, so she doesn't chide him about the fact that she's already on that. Sometimes, you just want to see if you can do a thing...

She can definitely decypher the mess of windows hes got on his screen. She prefers different tools, yeah. But now's not the time for a holy war. Instead, she just watches him work, occasionally coming out with a "Holy shit, look at that" or "Craaap, they have the 4.9 version, patched that gaping vulnerability..."

Does Samir like the fact that he has a back-seat-hacker? Heh.

Elijah
[Staring at the universe, doobeedoo- Spirit 1]

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

Elijah
[No, seriously, unbridled cosmos.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 3) ( fail )

Elijah
[Motherfucker]

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

Elijah
So, he accepts the lighter. Lights up, takes a drag and gives the lighter back before going back to where the grass meets the pavement and he takes a long, purposeful drag. He takes a drag and he waits for the world to come around and become something fascinating but, it is really just a ball of frustration.

It takes half the damn cigarette until he finally feels the world coming apart. Coming between. He thinks about orders and hierarchies. He thinks about the mirror of how things work. Mostly, he lays back with his legs outstretched and stares at the stars.

"I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts..."

Shooting star, across his periphery between the worlds. He grins.

Samir
And that's how Elijah almost lost two of his friends on the Internet.

Were not for the fact that Grace has so thoroughly distracted Sam from the outside world that when he tries to pass back the lighter the reality hacker already has that wrist back to its place stabilizing the bottom-heavy laptop on the fence and is more aware of her presence at his left side because she is commenting on the same thing that has his attention already.

Behind them the world feels slightly like adventurous tumult but they aren't aware of it until one of their phones chimes with a notification and drags them back to the physical world. Right. Two grown people hanging around a football field fence while another lies in the grass and contemplates his place in the universe. Sam would have Internet access in Siberia. No reason to remain rooted in place for two fucking hours.

He taps a few more keys just to make sure the file he's looking for is actually uprooting itself and he mumbles something like acquiescence and then he's carrying the laptop towards the car cradled in the crook of his elbow. Grace is responsible for Elijah. She's meaner than Sam is.

Elijah
[Int+streetwise, diff 10. Do I know this chick?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN10 (1, 2, 6, 9, 9) ( botch x 1 )

Grace
Grace is responsible for Elijah. She walks up to his form lying on the grass, an imposing figure in the stuttering light.

"Hey. We're getting out of here."

Then, she turns and heads off to the car. It's almost as if -- he can come, or not. His choice. But they are leaving.

Elijah
He was laying on the grass. He had passed out after a good total of... uh... twelve minutes. He opens his eyes and the world floods back and there is GRace- a feeling of winged, keen-edged sharpness thanks to Samir being Samir, and he inhales sharply. Leans over to see if something is poking him in the ribs.

It's not his ribs, that's magic.

He grudgingly stands up.

"Hey, yay, we didn't need to get a posse today, win!"