Friendship is Magic

Elijah
There was no getting rid of him now. Samir had revealed that he had a treehouse and Elijah, having always wanted for a tree house, was living his dream vicariously through Samir Lakhani (Lakhani? Lah-kah-nee? Fuck.) It was a tree house, as in a platform amidst the trees and he could see things without having to actually get into them.

He'd brought a case of beer, some pot lemon squares (because brownies are so last year), and a kaleidoscope.

Elijah wasn't sure what Samir would do with a kaleidoscope, but he'd given it to him anyway, wrapped (I swear to God I did not give you a dildo) and presented as a housewarming gift because he hadn't actually done so before. So, there he was, laying on his back and staring at the sky and-

"I have no fucking clue how to tie a tie," he admits, despite the fact that he is actually wearing a tie today.

Samir
He probably should have known this would be the end result if he told Elijah that he had a tree house. The kid about lost his shit over the fact that he could conjure a love seat out of thin air. At the rate they're going he might as well just move that love seat out of his apartment and into the platform up in the tree.

Beer and pot lemon squares and a kaleidoscope are acceptable housewarming gifts. He washes the ever-loving hell out of his hands after he unwraps the thing but at least he handles it without too much in the way of tooth-pulling.

This revelation about the tie makes Sam frown.

"So... is that a clip-on, or..."

Elijah
"Nah, I talked Jenn into doing it for some bullshit reason. I can usually con someone else into tying it," he tells Samir, "basically, I'm not-so-secretly hoping you know how to do this and can impart your wisdom before I have to break down and tell my dad that, despite having told me that one time, I still have no fucking clue how to do this. I'm kind of afraid he'll think he failed as a parent if his son plays the harp and can't tie a tie."

Ah, there is a reason now. He takes another bite of lemon square, sits up long enough to dust the crumbs off of himself and let them fall away onto the ground far, far below, and thinks briefly of the second Creepshow movie. Imagines a man eating oil slick beneath them and-

Ugh. He reminds himself that he is glad they are on land.

Samir
"... do you want me to find a Youtube video?"

If anyone looks as if he has less experience tying ties than Elijah does it's Samir. He wears t-shirts and leather jackets and calls it a day. The most tying he does is to lace up his Doc Martens and make sure the twist on baggies of weed are secure. That's a long shot compared to tying a tie.

Even if he did know how to tie a tie he wouldn't be able to show Elijah how to do it. That would involve. You know. Touching him.

"Hang on. They have videos for everything on Youtube."

They don't have a tie readily available either but that could change in a few moments.

Elijah
"Can you find out what the fuck a half windsor is? Like, is there a whole tie etiquette thing I'm missing?"

He leans over without having to actually me touching Sam, just presumes that he has his phone and that the tree house has wifi because what else would one do in a tree house but watch Youtube videos while you're kinda getting a little stoned?

A beat passes, then?

"Do they seriously have videos for everything on youtube?"

He is suddenly reminded that you can't google technocrats.

Samir
"Dude, do I look like I know shit about tying ties?"

For the time being Sam tolerates Elijah's sliding closer. They've already had the most awkward moment of their fledgling bromance. At this point the more Elijah invades his personal space and reminds him of the time he offered to give him a handjob the better he's going to get at tolerating it when complete strangers do it.

In theory. He hasn't ever seen behavioral therapy in action. There's probably a Youtube video for it though.

"They have videos for pretty much everything. Anything that violates copyright law or basic human decency tends to get taken down pretty fast. You have to go on Liveleak or other sites to find the nastier ones."

He's seen some shit on the Dark Web.

"Okay. Half Windsor." Full screen. Rotate. "Go."

Elijah
"The fuck is Liveleak? Is that where the Mister Hands shit originated?"

Oh Elijah, you have no idea what horrors lurk on the internet.

Samir
"I think 4chan is responsible for that one, actually. Liveleak wasn't around in 2005."

If Elijah doesn't know what 4chan is then Sam isn't going to be the one to tell him. He'd like to assume that Elijah knows what 4chan is because Elijah knows what the Dark Web is and also Elijah asked Google what the Technocracy is. But you know what happens when you assume.

Elijah
"Man, fucking 4chan," is all he has to say for that one.

In the mean time, he has carefully extricated himself from his tie, loosened it to the point that it came free and he looks a little warily at the screen, as though he is fairly certain that he has made a right and terrible decision and he could have gotten out of having to tie this until he came back from Boston.

"So, like, what kind of shit is on Liveleak?"

Samir
Sam has found a way to prop the phone up against the side of the railing so that Elijah can look at a somewhat steady screen instead of the shakiness of Sam's hands on top of the shakiness of the cameraman.

It also means he gets to light a cigarette and judge Elijah as he waits until the week before he goes on this Very Important Apprenticeship Trip to learn how to tie a fucking tie.

"Executions, mostly. A lot of political and war footage. Beheadings, a lot, lately. Sometimes people post videos of car versus pedestrian aftermath or, you know. Dead babies and shit. Nothing illegal."

Elijah
And he's going through the motions, and he's not... adept at this. He fumbles through, yes, but he does stop the video, looks down and undoes the knot and scoots the video back, just enough to start over again. This is a skill that he is going to have to practice... a lot. He's getting there, of course, because he can write the world into his whims so of course Elijah is going to fucking learn how to tie a tie.

"So... it's like the Faces of Death stuff they had on Rotten dot com awhile back?" he shakes his head, "I mean, when Rotten dot com was a thing. I'm kinda glad that... y'know... I have no idea how to find half this shit. I kinda want to know more? But, like, I really... really don't."

Samir
"You really really really don't."

Spoken like someone who lives on the Internet. He was the one who stayed up all night the night before the raid on the Artist's minions' home. He saw some shit that night that might have made him vomit if he hadn't seen awful things done to children on the Internet.

Granted the shit he saw that night was enough to make him never want to see another person naked ever again in his life but the only person who saw a fraction of what he saw was Grace. They could just leave what they saw between the two of them.

It did not cause him an undo amount of mental anguish to set that building on fire. That the person who had made them zombies or vampires or whatever the hell they were in the first place wasn't in the building didn't matter much. They were monsters in their own right. Too far gone for redemption even if they had been innocent before the Nephandus did whatever she did.

Sam shakes his head hard and blinks as if his mind had wandered. It had. It does that sometimes.

Elijah
He looks at Sam for a second, between trying to figure out this half Windsor thing (which he actually did manage to do, and he looks down as if he isn't entirely sure that he did this right, but we digress) and his attention turns to Sam. He doesn't know what is out there on the internet, or the dark web. Elijah grew up in an age where he'd never not had technology.

Then again, he'd been offline for most of his formative years. The seedy people he'd found he'd managed to find in person. Has no idea the number of close calls he has had in his life time, doesn't think of the countless other things that could have gone wrong. Elijah does a lot of things, but in his core there are just realities that he doesn't think about because he doesn't think to think about them. Thought that To Catch a Predator was just a thing that happened on Dateline and that it could get so much worse.

But, Sam blinks and shakes his head.

"Dude, did you just have a 'nam flashback?"

Samir
"Had a 'your mom' flashback."

It's worth mentioning that Sam did eat one of the pot lemon squares that Elijah made. He wants to believe that Elijah isn't the sort of person to change a dirty diaper or jerk off a subway-dwelling heroin addict and then prepare food without washing his hands first. Until he can work organic data arrays into his paradigm he just has to trust people.

Woe and agony.

Back in the present he frowns at the lack of progress Elijah is making with that tie.

"Jesus Christ, I thought white people had to know how tie a tie before their first confirmation. Let me see that."

He drags the phone closer to him so he can refresh it and see what Elijah is supposed to be doing.

Elijah
"I can't be Catholic if I can't tie a tie?!"

Nope. That's noose. Like a tiny, formal way of killing himself. He's got to be getting a little closer. He lets out a little sound, a sad whine, because he has had more than one lemon square.

"Aw, my grandma's gonna be so mad now..."

Samir
[mind 1: learn the shit out of this.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Samir
All the Mercurial Elite appears to do is sit and watch a two-minute video in rapt silence. Takes him shushing Elijah at one point to really appear as if he is watching it. Even without sound he could watch what is happening and sort out what he's supposed to do.

"Alright," he says after about the halfway point.

Then he narrows his eyes in a sidelong glance at the Hermetic apprentice. Thinks about what he's doing before he does it.

"Just because I show you how to tie a tie doesn't mean we're getting married or anything, alright? I just... I can't watch you keep sucking at this, it's making my skin itch."

Elijah
[Dead serious! Manip+sub, +2 diff because I'm high as balls)

Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (1, 3, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Samir
[perc + empathy: shit, dude!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens] [WP]

Samir
[I didn't mean to spend WP. He only got three successes. YOU WIN THIS ONE, POIROT.]

Elijah
"No way, dude. If we tie a tie together, that's a thing. It's stupidly significant in the Order, it's like a tiny hand fasting. We've made a fucking pact."

Dead. Fucking. Serious.

Samir
At that he springs to his feet and holds up both his hands. Nope. Nope nope nope. More important than leaving his phone in the possession of a fellow crazy person is not tying a pact with said crazy person.

"You're on your own, man," he says as he backs towards the ladder.

Fucking pot lemon squares.

Elijah
It's too much. It's all too much, Sam springs up and Elijah falls over. Croons, crows, laughs hard enough that his ribs hurt and his face hurts and he forgets, for a second, that one of his friends is in mortal peril and is at home painting... uh... something. He didn't know what Jenn was painting, and at that moment he was too busy laughing his ass off.

"No, wait-" he can't stop. Can. Not. Stop. Laughing.

"Come baaaaaaaack I'm sharing my worldview with you, we need to be a- fuckin- cabal or something! You understaaaaaand meeeeee."

He had not stopped laughing, though, and probably about halfway down the ladder he responded with.

"Owww, get your phone."

Samir
I'm sharing my worldview with you--

Sam makes a noise like Elijah just flicked a booger at him and starts down the ladder. It is not a sincere sound. The fact that Elijah is laughing is kind of a giveaway that he just got got. He still screams like a little girl and continues along the escape sequence.

"Fuck my phone!" he calls up from the grass. "I'm gonna go take a shower and rethink my life!"

Elijah
"I'm totally not looking at porn while you're gone!"

He's totally going to look at porn while Sam is gone.

Samir
"Don't make me drop a couch on you!"

Friendship truly is magic.

Fuck yeah, Treehouse!

Samir
A few weeks have passed since Sam teleported the couch he so lovingly made for Elijah into the apartment over Floral and Hardy. Its piercing presence has really tied the living room together. The Mercurial Elite does not have strong resonance and it has started to fade but the fact that it still stabs people when they sit on it for the first time has been a source of boundless amusement for the Hermetic apprentice.

Or Sam can assume. He gets text messages sometimes. He hasn't told Elijah where his ass moved to yet. Elijah wants to hang out today though and Sam doesn't want to fuck around with public transportation on a Saturday so Elijah has the distinction of being the first person to see the Mercurial Elite's new digs.

He had the previous distinction of being the first person to see the Mercurial Elite's studio apartment. It was fucking depressing.

So: Sam is squatting out by Russellville Gulch. It's thirty-three miles outside of Denver and another forty-six miles to Colorado Springs. His Airstream sits next to Cherry Creek which is dry as fuck this time of year and a path of trees stands sentinel in the distance. The state park is about a mile or so south of his location. In order to get to it Elijah has to engage in some minor trespassing and then some minor hiking.

The Airstream does not have a deck. There are a couple of lawn chairs and a table with an umbrella where he can set his laptop. That piercing quality is everywhere. If Elijah weren't actively looking for him and invited on top of that it's likely he never would have found the fucking place.

Sam looks a bit grubby but not unwashed. More like he's been camping for three weeks straight. He hasn't shaved his face in a while and his already brown skin has grown darker from being outside so much. Of course he's wearing sunglasses. It's sunny and gorgeous outside today. A slight haze from the west but that's to be expected.

As Elijah approaches the plot the other man abandons whatever the fuck he was doing to tramp away from the creek and greet him.

"Sup," he says.

Elijah
And it is. It really, really is because it looks so comfortable, and it is comfortable, once you get over the fact that you are going to sit on the couch, get stabbed, and then settle into a false sense of security not knowing if it'll happen again. It's like sitting on a sedative that makes Elijah's living room actually look pretty nice. Samir has a good taste in sofas when he's randomly making things for Elijah to sit on.

He concludes that he likes where Samir lives, even before he's seen the place, namely because of the lengths it takes to actually get there. It involves hiking (which he enjoys) and tresspassing (which is an endless source of amusement for him). He hasn't illegally been on private property since he broke into Elitch Gardens. Jumped the fence and said it was all in the name of transcendence or whatever was going on with that ghost girl who fell over the railing a few years back.

He was actively looking for Samir and he still got lost, ended up standing in a field for awhile while he yelled "I give up, Saaaaaaaaam, come get meeeeeeeeee."

Eventually he did find it though.

A little dirty but he doesn't seem to care.

"You have a fucking creek!"

Samir
"I mean..."

Looks a bit strange standing there in his wine-colored shit-kicker boots and black jeans with all that nature behind him. At least he's not wearing a jacket for the first time that Elijah can recall. In a t-shirt that shows off his nerd physique he looks like a kid who's been dragged out here for rehabilitation on a court order and not someone who chose this for whatever fucked-up enlightenment purposes he's concocted.

Sam turns to look at the creek. In the springtime it may burble. Right now it's still.

"It's not really mine, I just kind of look at it." He turns back to Elijah and then hikes a thumb at the trailer like to portend his impending disappearance. "You want a drink?"

Elijah
Does he want a drink?
"Yeah, whatcha got? I'll go for anything carbonated or anything above forty proof," he tells Sam.

It's pretty weird, though. He looks at Sam again, then at the creek- which Elijah is actually pretty content to let it stay over there. He eyes it cautiously, like he's still trying to figure out how deep it is. Concludes that he probably won't drown in it unless Samir beats him over the head with something or if he gets really drunk and just passes out face down in still water.

All things considered, Elijah concludes that would be a shitty way for his story to end. Yep, the creek stays right over there.

He meanders to the trailer.

"You don't have a deck," he announces, like this is a travesty.


Samir
"Am I supposed to?"

The inside of the trailer appears to have been decorated by a housewife with too much time and money. It's bright and clean but the curtains are tacky and all of the appliances are older than both the young men put together. A queen-sized bed takes up the entirety of the space to the far end of the trailer but it's a step up from an air mattress. Books and electronic equipment occupies every inch of storage space the trailer offers and then spills into the area under the bed frame.

Though the trailer has a space for a shower that would involve having access to running water. Which he doesn't. Yet.

Sam rifles around in the mini fridge for a few moments and then pulls out a can of off-brand citrus-flavored caffeine explosion. No alcohol. That's going to require some reality hacking. He offers a can to Elijah and cracks open one of his own before herding him back outside.

Elijah
"Dude. It's a trailer. You live in the middle of nature. Having a deck is required," he says, "plus it makes you way less likely to step out and fall flat on your face. It's a thing."

He looks around, doesn't touch anything until he has the off-brand soda in his hand and something about that makes him grin with absolute delight. Takes a long drink and bites back the aftertaste of Not Mountain Dew.

Samir
Their seating options are limited to the two lawn chairs underneath the patio umbrella and the ground. Sam is pushing it even living out here in the first place. He does not choose to sit on the ground. He sits his ass down in the lawn chair and watches Elijah's reaction to the drink.

"There's no high-fructose corn syrup in this shit," he says offhand. "Hope you like Mexican sugar."

Back to the matter of the deck:

"Dude, I don't know shit about building shit. I could probably just write a deck into the trailer's code but I feel like that defeats the purpose of living in the middle of nature."

Elijah
Raises his can again- concludes that Samir does not fuck around when it comes to soda and, despite what the corn industry says, you can taste a difference between high fructose corn syrup and real sugar. He might have had a little too much too fast, and he covers his mouth for a second to mask what is a decidedly weak burp. Somewhere, someone taught him manners.

"My dad runs a construction company," Elijah starts, "and for awhile he'd figured working with him was cheaper than rehab. I actually have mad deck building skills... I can also put a roof on your house if you decide to build something that needs a freaking roof."

Because, you know, he could have had an office job and played it cool and probably slept with the girl who did all the accounting paperwork. Instead, Elijah spent a couple summers busting tail and getting high or drunk or whatever after work. So, it was like Elijah actually worked construction.

Samir
"Ugh. A house? I had enough trouble keeping that shithole apartment clean. This is a lot easier."

He says like he didn't spend half his time cleaning the place anyway. This may be the first time he's joked open about his illness in front of Elijah but then again there's a decent-sized difference between someone who cleans often because they are a type A personality and someone who cleans often out of compulsion.

Besides: Elijah has spent time on psych wards. He knows what nonfunctioning obsessives look like. Sam does not look like a nonfunctioning obsessive. He does however smell and sound a little bit like he's been doing bong rips all afternoon.

"Let me think about it."

Like if he acquiesces to Elijah helping him build a deck they might as well start picking out silverware sets.

Elijah
"You live in, like, a magical fucking woodland wonderland, Sam. Like a fucking boss."

Doesn't say a damned thing about the fact that the outdoors is freaking filthy because, yeah, they both definitely know that it's dirty. The fact that Sam, despite smelling like Elijah's early high school years, is living in the middle of a germ-filled mess of nature is pretty fucking impressive.

"Also, you can totally trade in my slave labor for other shit. You made me a couch, and it's been a fucking source of hours of entertainment."

Samir
Not only is it filthy but it's crawling with lifeforms that Sam has only ever encountered in wildlife documentaries and Wikipedia articles. It isn't anything that's ever interested him before now. Seeing the world that exists on the other side of the Gauntlet had an affect on his brain that he has been grappling with for a while.

Either that or going into Quiet really fucked him up. He did get attacked by the amalgam of two teenaged girls. He has been withdrawn since then but it's hard to tell whether he's more withdrawn than usual or if that's his typical state of being. For keeping each other alive as they had the two don't know each other very well. You need time for that.

"Really?" This about the couch. Something about that statement makes him laugh. "Well, shit. Glad I could be of service. Here's to the couch."

Toasting with green fizzie-drink cans. They are living the dream over here.

Elijah
Clinks the cans together and down the hatch it goes. Doesn't shotgun the thing because this is a soda that was made with actual sugar. You don't just guzzle this shit. Besides, Samir lives int he middle of the wilderness. Elijah didn't know what it was that Sam did in order to keep his trash consumption in check, but he's in Colorado. They have to keep this whole nature thing pristine or else he'll get deported.

Then it's back to swamplands and avoiding his parents. Thank you, no thank you.

"I've acquired this temporary-but-it's-looking-like-not-temporary room mate named Aidan? The apartment is full of fucking Katrina refugees, but anyway. Aidan. Dreamspeaker, or whatever the fuck they call themselves now-" Hermetic problems. Can't be fucked to figure out the tradition's new name "-spends a fucking hour investigating this thing because it doesn't behave like a normal couch. He sees things like a super animistic view of themselves, and apparently my loveseat broke his brain for, like, a day."

Samir
Okay. That's fucking funny. Sam doesn't exactly fall out of his chair laughing but it's clear that this guy doesn't encounter much that strikes him as novel anymore. He lives on the Internet. The fact that he hasn't checked Reddit in ten minutes is a bit of a stretch for him. But he does laugh at the mental image.

"Seriously?" Yes seriously. "That's awesome. Next time I come over I'll turn it into a sectional. He won't know what hit him."

Elijah
"Dude, we could finally retire the IKEA couch! Because, seriously, the next time some fucking Quaesitor comes and sits in my living room I want a mildly pokey couch as a fucking even playing field."

Samir
"The fuck did you have a Quaesitor in your living room for?"

Elijah
"My apprenticeship was fucked before I started studying with Henry. He and this other guy wanted to talk with me and see if I was actually worth the effort of fixing the whole fucked-up-ed-ness over."

Throws his hands out wide.

"I haven't failed out yet! But seriously, it was like having a job interview with someone who is judging your soul."

Samir
"Ah, Houston, that's a big fat nope."

He puts the drained can as far away from him as he can get without throwing it on the ground. Removes the compulsion to fuck with it. It's bad enough he's been tapping the inside of his right middle finger against the lawn chair's arm and counting how many times he tapped and berating himself for counting and then starting over because if he was gonna tap on the damned chair he was going to do it in multiples of 23. Just to be civilized.

"So... why the Order?"

Elijah
There are two lawn chairs. He could, conceivably, sit in a lawn chair like a normal fucking person but he doesn't. Puts a hand down and settles on the dirt like he doesn't mind because, well, he doesn't. Actually kinda likes it, could go on about the feeling one has about being grounded and aware of your surroundings when you have a connection to land. Or, it could just be that he liked sitting on the ground. Did it in his apartment when there weren't people he was talking to that might take it oddly that he's camped out on the carpet like a four-year-old waiting for circle time.

"Because of words," he says, "like... the Order has this view on language- that there's this whole power and beauty and strength and definition and a bunch of other shit in language. I thought that the idea was beautiful, that the idea of naming something gave it strength and made it real and giving it a name informed the definition and..."

He trails off, realizing that he's rambling.

"They have this whole view that there's a language that spoke the world into existence, that there was Truth in that and I fucking loved it. Still love it. I thought it was interesting that the universe might be this gigantic, complicated piece of poetry and we're picking through extended metaphors."

Samir
Sam considers this. Gets through three sets of finger-tapping in the amount of time Elijah talks about his paradigm and the paradigm of the Order of Hermes and that's all well and good but he doesn't want to just sit on three sets. Four is a better number. A better ward against death than any other number he's tried and he hasn't discovered the extent of the things that could kill him out here. He hears coyotes and gunshots sometimes. Not the same kind of gunshots the city provides. This is a more reasonable use of firearms but it still wakes him up at night.

"That is quite possibly the gayest thing I've ever heard in my life," he says.

Elijah
"Dude, I have literally asked to blow you before and that was the gayest thing you've heard in your life?"

Samir
He nods a vigorous nod and stops tapping the fucking lawn chair.

"Yup." That's enough male posturing for one day. He asks, "So... what language is it?"

Elijah
"Enochian, language of the angels and shit," he said, "I know, sounds really Supernatural-esque but I swear it's an actual fucking language and Sam and Dean can eat me. It's weird, but it's absolutely fucking gorgeous and there is not an analogous human language for it. It's kind of the language of high umbral beings."

Samir
Sam considers this. Doesn't appear to judge it right away even though it's about as far away from what he believes as is the Verbenae paradigm. High umbral beings. Alright.

"Right on," he says. "So... that's why you joined the Order and had a Quaesitor sitting in your living room."

Makes total sense.

Elijah
There is something that Elijah doesn't say, that he has a theory. That if the language that spoke creation into being is spoken by high umbral beings, is there an analogue for the forces that live in the deep umbra? Is it all just a derivative of the same language or does it actually divide? He'd been thinking about Descent, about how that even fucking works. Doesn't want to know except he really... really does. All thought exercises before he passes the fuck out and doesn't dream.

Small courtesies.

Anyway. Quaesitor. Living room.

"Yep. Dude, it was weird- I think that, after a point, people that have been doing this magic shit for too long forget how to interface with actual normal fucking people. The Order has a whole don't meddle in the affairs of sleepers thing, which I think is there to keep people from, like, mindfucking their way into the presidency? But some people take it to the point that they're like ladida I live in a fucking tower and the magical world is the only thing that exists like it's not part of the same fucking world-" a second, "-and it's not just Hermetics that do that. Like, am I tripping? Do you see people do that, too? Am I overgeneralizing?"

Samir
"I mean..."

He's talking to someone who may as well live in a fucking tower but reality hacking is a different breed of beast. Perhaps. Humans can convince themselves of just about anything and the Awakened human is no different.

"I don't get out much. So."

Elijah
"Eh," he shrugs.

A beat.

"Hey, what's your last name?"

Samir
Elijah just discovered the fastest way to make a hacker paranoid.

"... why?"

For fuck's sake Sam.

"It's Lakhani. L-A-K-H-A-N-I."

Elijah
"It just bugged me that I don't know your last name? Like, I met you. And you know I've been in a shit car accident and a whole bunch of other things, and I had to find out you had a first name from Grace. I was just like, Elijah, you seriously can not keep being friends with someone you call 'that one dude'... and Lakhani is a fucking cool name."

Samir
Now is not the time for Sam to tell Elijah that he Googled the shit out of him before he went to go sell him drugs and that he probably knows more about him than is appropriate.

The night of the fire they did talk about their parents a bit. How Elijah's middle name was a girl's and how Sam didn't have a middle name because his mother didn't disclose who his father was if she even knew.

"Yeah, it's alright."

A beat.

"So... are you staying the night?"

Elijah
"Can I stay the night?"

Samir
"If you keep your hands to yourself."

Elijah
"Totally respecting your virtue, Samir."

Samir
He considers this for a moment. Stone-faced and even more so because of the sunglasses concealing his eyes. Then he stands from the lawn chair and tugs down the hem of his t-shirt and gives a jerk of his head towards the tree line.

"C'mon," he says. "I wanna show you this fucking treehouse I found."

Elijah
[I am not fucking excited about this. Manip+sub]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Elijah
"... you have a treehouse?"

Dubious, like he wasn't sure he wanted to believe Samir. Like this might be some truth that he isn't completely ready to face and soon enough he was meandering along in the grass anyway because there was a treehouse he could go see and Elijah guessed that maybe he could go see it.

Dusts the dirt off his butt and follows

Samir
[you are too fucking excited about this don't be a fag]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

A lack of dishonesty

Elijah
He had ducked out the back of a bar for a much needed moment to breathe.

Santa Fe looked very different when you weren't looking at the store fronts. The allies and the backs of buildings and the trash cans all made the places look the same. There was the occasional puddle, the loose gravel and hints of grass trying to stubbornly shove itself up through the pavement and say that it endured, because it is true and strong. Elijah wonders, briefly, if the Order felt strongly about weeds, how they persisited. How they were the epitome of something exerting their will upon their environment.

Weeds will grow because they want to. How dare anyone try and say otherwise.

But there he was, sneaking out the back of a bar with his top button unbuttoned and for the first time in a long time feeling like he was drowning in the open air. Feeling smothered by the actuality of the world around him and tonight, yes tonight, he was trying so goddamned hard to be present. COuld have gotten shitfaced but, instead, was outside of a bar in the back alleys sober, deciding instead that he needed to walk. Needed to pace. Needed to recenter himself before he rejoined the rest of the world and pretended that his best friend wasn't in mortal fucking danger. That there was nothing he could do about it.

That he could pretend that one of his other friends was dearly hurting, so disconnected and curled in on herself and splitting apart and he doesn't even know where the fuck to find her. Knows someone is taking care of her but, frankly, given who it is Elijah feels like his world is resting too much on the shoulders of a man who he has barely met. Trusts, yes. But perhaps...

Perhaps.

He makes his way through the back alleys, wonders if he should try and score something harder than whatever he could comfortably get from Samir.

Being present is fucking hard.

Serafíne
AWARENESS!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne
Weekend and still early enough that the bars and galleries are packed and there's foot traffic, not so much in the back alleys where Elijah has gone to pace but still: a cater-waiter taking out the trash, a prostitute with a short man in a dumpy suit negotiating at the back entrance to a dive bar.  And so on.

Chilly but not precisely cold, with banks of clouds slipping across the sky, and between the clouds and the light pollution there's not even a hint of the stars tonight.  Not from the downtown streets.

Elijah finds Sera on the empty patio of a small bistro (the last few patrons inside linger over after dinner drinks and desserts).  Coincidence this, really.  No reason, but sometimes the world functions like that.  Things fall apart, other things are put together again.  She's sitting on one of the wooden tables set back against a brick wall.  In summer these are shaded by great big offset market umbrellas but the umbrellas have been taken down: either for the night or for the winter.  The chairs are locked down and shunted forward against the table, but there she's sitting, leaning back against the brick, legs crossed at the ankles, wearing her curb-stompers and fishnets and a leather skirt that is half-metal rings, an old Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt, a flannel shirt, a leather jacket.

Leaning back against the brick, smoking a joint, one hand resting on Sid's big head.  The dog, of course, curled up beside her.

Banked glimpse toward Elijah out of the corner of her eye as he emerges from the mouth of the alley next door.  "I knew you were around."  Closes her eyes again, takes another drag.  "No one else feels like you."

Elijah
He exhales, hard and harsh like he took a hit of something that was too strong and it didn't feel good in his lungs. Like he was fifteen and lighting up for the first time because it seemed like something that could be fun or it got passed to him at a party and you fucking go for it, freshman. If you're gonna party with seniors, you don't wuss out.

"What do I feel like to you?" he asked, "I know how i see you, but it never really hit me to ask how I come across on a-" waves a hand, doesn't want to flat out say metaphysical level and words are failing him "-y'know. I get a lot of hurricane but I could never really swallow the irony."

comes her way, because she is there, a

Not quite alright.

Serafíne
Thursday late night: a few galleries still open, sure.  This opening or that charity function, the warmth of the sunlit day fast fled but anyplace with a patio has gas-flame heaters going to extend the useful life of their outdoor spaces well beyond summer.  Pedestrians aplenty though at this hour most of the people slipping out of the odd gallery or restaurant still open are not heading out to bar-hop, but are heading home.  Taxis hum on the corners and the bars are still - not crowded, precisely, but pleasantly full and life pulses up and down the street.

The Stone Pony had one of its signature Low-Dough Local Shows tonight and is more crowded than most.  There's even a fresh-donut food-truck (WARD'S DO-NUTS) parked in the empty lot across the street, which is hard to resist after a night full of drinking.

Out on the sidewalk in front of the bar, a certain creature sits.  Legs drawn-up to her torso, one arm loose around them.  Cheek resting against the apex of her knee, eyes kinda-mostly closed, she has had enough to drink and/or smoke that she is in that drifting phase, but periodically brings a spiced cigarette up to her mouth (sideways, pointing on an upslant, away from her golden curls) and takes a drag.  There's a dog curled up on the sidewalk at her side.

Folks leaving the bar to head across to WARD'S DO-NUTS walk around her without really looking at her or acknowledging her, but folks do that all the time with strangers sitting on the street.  Avoid eye contact, refuse acknowledgment, ignore, ignore, ignore.

Elijah
It had been a running of the gauntlet, really. He had intended on talking to Yvette today but found that she was conspicuously not at work and doing whatever it was Yvette did when she had a day off work. Nobody at the gallery knew whens he was coming back,; Elijah presumed she got fed up and quit. Shrugged it off, lacking some vital information to follow up on. It was the first few moments that he hadn't spent glued to Jenn today.

She was scared; he couldn't stop apologizing. We digress.

So, he was walking, walking because he needed the air and he's tracing back his thoughts and the words he's said. Should probably feel guilty about not offering to help but, frankly, Elijah wanted to be involved with this whole human chimera business about as much as he wanted to remove his kidney with a butter knife- which is to say, not at all. He inhaled slow and deep and tried to remember where it was that he had parked in the first place.

The walking always takes you somewhere, though, and soon enough the walking took him to a bar that he had considered going into but decided against because, well, he was working right now. It might not have looked like it, but the young man in his vest and button down shirt had actually been doing things that he had deigned to be important.

He doesn't pass by Serafine, though. Stops and sits down beside her, on the opposite side of the dog.

"You have a new friend," he said,indicating over to the dog.

Serafíne
Something so liquid about being this drunk, makes her feel like every joint in her body is made of warm, kinda melty butter, and that same looseness is evident when the creature opens her eyes and lifts her chin up-up-up just high enough to perch her chin-not-cheek on her bent right knee.  Up close she smells like burnt sugar, cloves, whiskey, sweat.  Has on this long-sleeved, high-necked dark sweater with little thumb loops at the end of the oversized sleeves, which may be the most modest thing he has ever seen her wear other than men's pajamas,

but no.  When he sits down or maybe when she moves he can see that it is cropped so high it does not cover the lower curve of her breasts, and is oh-so-slowly raveling.

"Hey."  Drunken ghost of a smile across her mouth, though its context is hard to read.  Maybe she's curled up here because she can't quite walk.  Maybe she's at the maudlin stage of way-too-much.  "Long-time no-see.  How're you?"

Then, a sort of orienting side-glance.  Oh, the dog.  Could be some random dog, right.  "That's Sid."

Serafíne
How are you Elijah?  Per + Empathy because.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Elijah
He's stressed, that much is clear. He's stressed but he's trying to play on being normal, because he can fake some normalcy from time to time- he's done it for years. Faked being fine long enough to get out of state care. Long enough that people think he's clean when he's not. He's stressed, but he wears it well when he's being honest about it.

Up close she smells like s'mores to him. The only time he's ever really had s'mores was when people were drunk and he associates the whiskey smell with camp fires for reasons he doesn't entirely understand. Or bonfires, more accurately. He associates campfires with tea and being cold enough that his bones ached and the air in his lungs was freezing and he had loved every blessed second of it because it meant he was alive and pushing past whatever limits he'd thought he had. Work until whatever the discomfort is becomes normal. Then, redefine.

He's stressed, but he's happy to see her. The kind of happy that comes when you've missed someone and he has, indeed, missed her. Missed the smell, missed the context. Missed the textures ebcause she had a number of textures. He didn't have enough details to render her into spoken word, but some part of him now has a strange taste in his mouth when he thinks of people as art because the concept could be taken too far and-

Well, now. That evokes a completely different scent on his senses.

"Hi, Sid," said in the voice that is reserved for puppies, a little like he's talking to a baby that might bite his arm off. Then, back to normalcy, "I'm tired, but I'll be okay."

A beat.

"Taking tonight to be alone?"

Serafíne
Sid cocks an ear and lifts her muzzle from her paws and looks up and across Sera's when Elijah speaks to her in that puppy-baby voice.  It's a look, you know: strange little doggie eyebrows moving, something on her new spiked-leather-collar clinking with the motion.  Then she drops her head back to her paws.  Thumps her tail once or twice in acknowledgment of the greeting but it is late and she is tired and it is sleep-time even if her human pack doesn't seem to understand that that's what darkness is for.

Sera, though.  Sera looks at him longer than the dog does.  Pivots her chin on her knee as if it were a fulcrum, and reaches out to offer him her cigarette.  Awkward little movement, that - hand half-buried in her too-long sleeve, thumb and index finger pinched around the filter of the cigarette like she was holding a joint.

And if he takes the cigarette, then her hand is free and she reaches out to give his hair an affectionate and maybe comforting ruffle.  Brushes her thumb over his temple.

And he asks if she's taking tonight to be alone and well, she gives him a neat little shrug and a banked, drunken blink.   "Yeah."  Could just have slid out of the bar for a smoke, though on an ordinary night she might've done that alone or might've done that with a stranger she wanted to make out with.  "Not sure if I can get up right now.  Ever have one of those nights where you're all fuck.  What the fuck are these things at the end of my things and how the fuck do they work?"

Elijah
She offers the cigarette and he does take it, takes a drag and tastes what's there. Has a moment and he's absorbing tastes and sensations and the way it feels when smoke tries to encroach into your lungs and your brain is insisting that this is bad for it but your body is telling your brain to fuck off. He doesn't actually smoke that often, all things told. More for ritual purposes or, in these instances, when someone else is smoking. He smokes a whole lot less once he started taking studying a little more seriously.

He closes his eyes when he feels her hand in his hair. Grins just a little at the edges and exhales away from Serafine and her new canid companion.

"I'd offer to take you home, but I'm afraid you might fall off the back of the motorcycle," he tells Sera, "and Sid wouldn't fit."

It takes him a little while, though, to piece through what she just said and it makes him laugh, "I haven't had one of those in awhile, I'm kinda jealous not gonna lie."

Serafíne
Truth is, she wouldn't mind if he exhaled in her direction.  She'd breathe that in, the way she does everything else.

"I have - " there's hang-time in her sentences, space-between and he can here that now, maybe see it.  She gestures with her free hand (the worn not sliding through his block locks) like the word she wants is floating in the air in front of her if only if only she could pull them out of the ether.  Oh, there.  " perfect balance.  I wouldn't fall off.  Sid's a fucking racehorse. "

He hasn't had one of those in a while; one of those nights, when she strings them together, one after another, like gleaming little gems on a hand-knotted necklace.  "S'cause all'a that fucking book-shit.   If you'd been my apprentice - "

Inhales again, all-at-once, and kinda refocuses, reaches for the cigarette because here's the deal, she wanted it back, yo.  "That why you're all stressed out?  Or is it something else?"

About ten feet down, the door to the bar opens.  Music spills onto the street, some electric blues with a deep bass line and a girl's lilting soprano floating above it as people come out into the bright, crisp night.

Elijah
"Well, if you want to go home, let me know because I can take you. And I'll go slow enough that, y'know, Sid can follow. It'll be like having a one person parade or some shit," he replies.

Forgets he has the cigarette, though, and then she's talking about how he could have totally had more blazing drunk nights and epiphanies set in motion by pushing and transcending basic human consciousness into something sublime. She's plucking it out of his fingertips and once he realizes she wants it he makes a little sound of recognition, gives it up with little fanfare.

Was he stressed out about the Order, though? Or was it something else?
"The book shit's pretty relaxing, not gonna lie. I like it a lot better than I thought I would," he starts, "but mostly it's-"

a second, he hears the floating soprano songstress in the background, enough to catch the pitch but not enough to pick out whether or not he knows the singer. "You remember that thing that tried to eat Sam and me in the park back in August?"


Serafíne
He asks her if she remembers that thing that tried to eat Sam and Elijah in the park back in August and Sera makes a strange little face; straight flat brows drawn together and a note of something like she's trying to put together a dimensional puzzle on a remarkably flat surface, or is maybe simply drunk, or maybe both and she doesn't really understand which is which.  But:

"Mmph."  That noise means, no.  She does not?  Remember that thing.  Remembers Samir being in quiet, though.  Remembers - oh so distinctly - a particular branching of time that no one else remembers quite simply because she reversed and reworked it and got knocked the hell out by reality for her troubles.  So: maybe one thing (hungry-monster) explains the other (Samir-in-quiet) and that Mmph could mean as much yes as no, or maybe even go on.

Someone's holding the door open for other someones and this little knot is breaking away to head across the street to WARD'S DO-NUTS, why not.  The soprano voice lilts beautifully in the bright cold air.

Elijah
[can I place that voice? Do I know it? Looking! per+alert]

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

Elijah
"Well," he continues, because there's a whole story here, he continues, "once Sam was a functional person again, we went to go check some things out. Looked back at the past, blahblahblah got a lead-"

it dawns on him that talking about this out in the middle of the open air when some incredibly polite Euthanatos is looking for a person who could literally be anyone probably wasn't the best idea. Drops his voice because (given the fact that he just saw a very familiar arm attached to a bearded person he totally recognizes) and-

"Long story short, Jenn did a painting that turned out to be a Nephandus and now Henry's calling in favors and I'm trying to sell Jenn on the idea of chilling with a bunch of reality breakers out in Morrison on an extended witness protection-style vacation."

Kiara
[Can we sense a Sera and an Elijah?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne
She's really fucking drunk.  Takes her a minute to let the loops and whorls of the story, the declensions and the allusions and all the strange little bits of code our Elijah (conscious of the public street, the story, the potentiality of intrusion) wraps this in but she's really strangely still while she follows the looping path and finally (does she know who Henry is?  WE ARE NOT SURE AND NEITHER IS SERA but this happens pretty regularly to her so it's really no big deal and also No Big Deal.
"Have you warded her?"  A sloe-drunk blink.  A beat.  "Has anyone?"

Has a few places where Jenn could stay if Morrison's objectionable.  Or if the folks out there object to having a potentially-hunted human so close to the Node, but doesn't say anything about that.  Not yet.

Meanwhile the last of the group has spilled out of the door and yeah, Elijah, you recognized that arm and the owner of that arm is starting to cross the street when he does a bit of a double-take and waves off Dee and a few friends and redirects, heads straight for the young Hermetic.

"Hey man." Dan greets Elijah when he's close.  "What are you doing out here by yourself?"


Kiara
"I don't get half of what we just spent two hours lookin' at, but damn if I didn't enjoy the free food."

The voice that curls along the street is masculine; low and steady. There's a consideration to the subtle edge of twang to it. Texan, perhaps, long ago. Now it's melted and softened into something else, something that doesn't stand out so entirely against the backdrop of Denver, but still -

"Well you've been collecting dust out there in Morrison long enough, I figured - "

"Funny. You remember where Deb said she was gonna swing by?"

There's the scuffle of footsteps and a couple appear, meandering down the street. They're dressed a little fancier than some; suit and tie for the man, a dark burgundy dress for the female that slinked around her ankles in a swish of silk. There's a slash of red painted across the female's mouth, it might have been enough to sight Kiara Woolfe but then -

There's that little give to the atmosphere. That pulse; that tickle of rejuvenating energy. Sid may well be the first to feel it. There's that supple tremor to the universe the Verbena brings with her with all her dark hair and quicksilver smiles; a vibration against the strings.

-

Half way down the street and they're passing a bar and Kiara makes this soft, subvocal noise and unlinks her arm; turns her face into the distance for a beat. Neal's pocket vibrates.

"Deb. She's about a block up." A beat, he's studying the younger female's face, tracking her eyes toward the bar. There's a cough. He passes her back a shawl with a pointed look that doesn't quite sit on his rugged features; handsome, though. Underneath the tired eyes and scruff and the softening paunch; still a handsome man.

Built from strong stuff, that was most of those from the mountains.

"Don't stay out too late."

She leaves a little red smear of lipstick on his cheek as they part ways and it's Kiara alone, eventually, the staccato clip of her black pumps against the pavement that finds the gathering, adjusting the strap of her little evening purse over a shoulder.

Elijah
"Yeah, she's covered. It's cool. She doesn't want to drop her whole life because bad shit happened. Like, I get that. I don't know when shit's going to blow over and you can't stop living your life because there's a possibility something horrific is going to happen," he sighs. Hard, harsh. Ah, that is what has stressed him out. "I've asked? But Jenn is not down with the whole witness protection spiel beyond what Mike's already done."

A beat.

"Mike's a wheel turning kind of guy," shrugs, that's all he says on the matter. "He's, like, the most weirdly honest person I've ever encountered.  Once shit blows over I'm totally buying him a bowl of pho or a beer or something."

Dan is coming across the street though and he smiles, bright, gives a wave, but it's his turn to make the puppy dog expression, head cocks to the side and looks at Dan like he doesn't quite understand what he means that he's out here by himself.

"S'just me and Sera and Sid," he gestures to the dog, "that's Sid. I think you have a new housemate."

Serafíne
WHAT THINGS DO I FEEL.  (Awareness)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne
So now: Elijah and Sera on the sidewalk and Dan closing the distance to Elijah, giving the young man a still, level sort of look that hooks his breath somewhere in the center of his body.  He glances at at Kiara and gives her wave of greeting.  Gaze snags on the retreating frame of the strange from whom she's parting, something about the set of his shoulders or -
- but no.  Dan's blue eyes drop to Elijah and he sinks into a crouch.  The sort of crouch an adept adult of some authority takes when speaking with a child in the midst of a tragedy.  Getting on his level.  "Sera's with you?"  Looks up from Elijah, searching the empty space beside him like he's trying to trace out her outline against the pitted brick wall of the Stone Pony.  Breathes out, softly.

Swears, beneath his breath.

And Sera can feel Kiara, the moving pulse of her energy, breathes that in feels it mingle strangely with her blown-out senses, breathes it in and in and in again, like maybe she'll never have to breathe the other way.  Except: she always does.

But there's Dan.  She's looking at him and can't quite look away, all snagged.  "He can't see me." Sera murmurs to Elijah.  She could shout, though, all she fucking wanted.  Doesn't have to be quiet about a thing.  "None of them can."

(Oh god, she's: drunk and god-knows-what-else and something hitches inside her like whoa.)


Elijah
[Manip+sub, I totally did not just say I saw Serafine.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Elijah
There is this horrible moment when Elijah realizes that he can see and hear Serafine.

Dan can not see and hear Serafine. She says nobody can hear her, or see her for that matter.

Now, there is a moment when Elijah has this dawning horror that there is a very real possibility that Serafine, the woman without a last name, is very much dead and he's seeing and hearing her because Elijah Poirot is a person who sees and hears dead people. This is not uncommon. There have been instances where it has been slightly more difficult to pick voices out in a room and tell which of them belong to bar patrons and which of them belong to people who are no longer people in the strictest of senses.

Usually, when he says shit like this, people ask him if he's on his medication (he's not) and try to determine whether or not he is hallucinating and a danger to himself or others.

So: Dan gets this.

"It's just one of those nights that you feel like you're with a person, that kind of persistent idea," he says, like it's an apology, "I don't know, it feels like..."

He sighs, runs his hands through his hair but stops where she might still be making contact because he doesn't want to brush her away. He's totally not going to be the one who tells Dan that Serafine is dead. He's trying very hard to spare him that information.

Which is good, because Serafine is very much not dead.

Kiara
The Verbena arrives somewhere between Dan dropping to his haunches and Serafine informing Elijah that Dan can't see her. That she's a phantom to them. Kiara's curling the edges of her shawl around her arms; winding it through and there's a little glossy program twisted in one hand. Something about a gallery showing - makes sense.

The dress, the complicated messy updo she's managed with her dark hair; it sits with strands framing her cheekbones. The cut of it, a v neck that highlights her lean frame, there's a lone pendant around her neck on a thin silver chain; crystal, it looks. Cut into a thin shape with a pointed edge and maybe once, something like it would have been enough to draw sidelong glances.

Murmurs and certain assumptions (hell, maybe it still does in the right company).

"Hey." She greets, her heel scraping against the ground as she comes upon them. She's wearing some vaguely sweet perfume the brunette. Her dark eyes swinging down and they fix, of course, on Elijah's company. Trace over (thin air). People spill out, talking about the music and Kiara's eyes shift to them for a beat as Elijah is saying -

"What's going on?" - Sharper, that. Kiara's voice comes out a little too punctuated, she's staring down at Elijah, now. The edges of her generous mouth pinching into a frown; brows constricting.

Serafíne
"I know what's going on, Elijah.  Pan explained it to me.  I just - " Dan is still crouched on his haunches, skinny jeans pulled tight across his knees, hands braced on his thighs, weight balanced, only so.  Looks tired, sad, maybe a little bit strained but he is also trying not to look like any of those things and trying not to draw too much attention from his friends (and SERA'S FRIENDS) over there chatting and buying donuts.
"She's supposed to be staying with a friend of Pan's."  Neat glimpse up then, this grimace of greeting when Kiara walks up to them.  "I don't think it's a good idea for her to be here.  Right now it's only going to hurt her."
Then he looks past Elijah, not really close to picking out Sera's place beside Elijah against the wall.  "I'm sorry."
(Sera has, in the interim, buried her head in her knees.   Sid kinda stirs but Dan doesn't notice the dog either, even as the dog gives a hopefully-comforting thump-thump-thump of its tail.)
--
Kiara asks what's going on, maybe she's asking Elijah but Dan knows what's going on.  "Sera got hit with paradox, or something.  She can only communicate with people who are Awake.  She's invisible to everyone else. "
"I should probably go."  Before more folks come over and make the whole thing stranger and harder and more terrible and more remarkably ordinary: talking about the band, eating donuts, chatting about the party at so-and-so's tomorrow night, or such-and-such's dislocated elbow at the last Derby meet, and on and on and on.  Unless someone stops him, off he goes.


Elijah
"That... is so much better than what I thought it was," he looks at Dan, puts a hand on the back of his head and leans in to kiss him on the forehead. The gesture is one that bleeds off a very real, very palpable amount of tension that the young man was feeling. Pan explained what was going on to Dan. Dan knew Serafine wasn't dead, and right now this is absolute news to Elijah.

Dan explains what's going on and Elijah eventually lets go of the other man so he can actually leave, Elijah leans a little against Serafine, kisses her on the head, too, because she was there and she was alive and Kiara is there and she seems concerned but Elijah, for his part, was decidedly less stressed out because, obviously, while one of his friends was in mortal peril right now one of his other friends was very much assuredly not dead and this was a blessing.

"Sera's not a restless spirit," he tells Kiara, like this is fantastic news.

He curls in, content to stay on one side for the time being. Content to stay at Sera's side and doesn't say anything. Runs his fingers through her hair and doesn't know what to say to her. The world is passing around her, and she's an observer right now. People are moving on without her, and that is a painful place to be.

Kiara
There's this little moment where Kiara's features harden into something quite furious and angry. This moment where her spine straightens and her shoulders round back and she's got this gleam in her eyes that's all agitation. Her mouth thins into this little seam and she's staring down at the ground for a second as if she cannot for all her days quite decide what to do with that.

The anger. Not at Elijah, not at Dan. Not at Serafine, but - "Fuck." She lets out this little catch, her eyes closing and she turns her face into the distance, frowning hard.

Serafine's head is between her knees when she manages to compose herself enough to look back and then Dan is leaving and Kiara makes this tiny motion; a uncurling of her fingers as if she wants to say something to the man to comfort him because his friend is invisible, but how do you offer comfort for that. Where is the damn rule book for friends of those removed from your sight by paradox?

"We'll take care of her, Dan."

It's a quiet, futile thing to say and Kiara seems to know it. She does move, though. Wedges herself down near the Cultist and folds the edges of her dress between her knees, presses her shoulder against the other woman and says in this furious, vibrant undertone. "You're going to be okay, you know. Screw the universe. You'll be fine. I missed you."

That's futile too, but maybe it's also enough. She says, after a beat: "I have a spare room. If you want somewhere to be, you can stay there. Anytime."

Serafíne
Elijah kisses Dan on the brow and the older man allows it, gives this twinge of a not-quite-smile through his beard and returns half the gesture: reaching to cup the back of the young Hermetic's skull with tattooed hands.  Then he lets Elijah go and pushes himself upright.  Shares a grimace of something (and maybe anger is the right response to this bullshit, but it is rather difficult to work his way through his very real concern to something that bright and righteous.  And then there are Dee and Rick on the other side, absolutely in the dark, both kinda angry with Sera instead of for her, because for them the absence is total, is the story of Sera's semi-regular disappearances from their lives and some of the committments she makes in them: like really making a go of the band, you know, that one.

Fuck.

But, he straightens.  Says, "Thank you," quietly and simply to Kiara and turns on his heel to cross the street to the food truck and as he goes he's getting out his phone, texting or maybe calling someone.  And he doesn't want to look back, is telling himself not to but he cannot help it, as if he might someone turn his head fast enough to catch a glimpse of her and then hold her in his gaze.

--

Kiara wedges herself down between Sera and an adolescent dog with a spiked-leather collar who was laying down but sits up and puts her chin on her paws as Kiara sits.  Thumpthumpthump goes Sid Vicious' tail.

Sera sits there, her shoulders move like bellows, but without the regularity of tears.  Those are just great-big-breaths she is taking, maybe to steady herself, maybe to feel her body open up, maybe because they make her ribcage seem like it is being pried open and she would rather feel that physically than the other way it sometimes happens, the cracked ribs and the marrow within.  Or maybe she's doing that to try to keep from throwing up.

And she finally lifts her head from her knees, hair sliding through Elijah's fingers and she gives Kiara this quick tight smile of gratitude.  Oughta say screw the universe, I'll be just fine right along with her but she can't say either.  She is: a hungry ghost of a thing, and she wasn't made for silence, or anything like it.  "My phone doesn't fucking - "


One of her arms unfurls from around her legs, she makes a loose gesture, "work."  No selfies.  No texting.  No Ginger, no nothing.  "And I don't - I don't even know where you live."


Elijah
He's there, and he's trying to process, can't imagine what this is like for Dan. Can't imagine what this is like for Dee or Rick, either. Because they have no idea, just know that she isn't there anymore and doesn't know what they know about what but he presumes the answer is nothing. He presumes the answer is nothing and it doesn't drive a complete wedge in Serafine's friendship with them.

He doesn't know what to say. Doesn't know how to say it, either, only that he is glad she is alive. Only glad that she is a presence, even if it is a presence that is stuck between the worlds.

A second, then?

"You know, I could text people for you if somebody else can make your phone work. You just... y'know... gotta get people to do your communication by proxy," he says. Leans a little into her but then realizes that's not enough independence.

"We can make things work out."

Resolute. Because, if he said this, it obviously can be willed into being. They can make things work out, it would just take time.

Kiara
There's a cat on the second floor of Kiara Woolfe's apartment building that follows her on occasion. Sees the brunette passing and uncurls itself, stretches and arches its spine and slinks along with a chiming bell as its herald to wind around her legs when she passes. Sometimes, it happens. Other times - there's a dog walked in Washington Park that nearly threw itself at her; frothing and snarling.

They sense it, sometimes. What she is, that delicate twinge to the order of the universe. Sid, like the cat on the second floor, sits up and pays attention - Kiara's fingers reach out and ghost over his head, her fingernails scratching behind an ear.

There's a flash of a smile at Elijah over Serafine's head; bracketed in there between the pair of them as she is; a sliver of gratitude. A little indication of her approval, because: "Well that's just plain rude." A curl of amusement, a husk of wry humor in the pagan's voice as she unclasps the little purse she's had with her all night; the outside glitters with tiny black beads and inside there's a fold of notes, a credit card and a few loose dockets for who knew what.

She extricates a pen, Kiara. Uncaps it with the lid held between her teeth and scribbles down on the back of a take out receipt her address. "817 17th St, Bank and Boston Lofts. Apartment ... 422." She shakes it out to dry the ink a little and then holds it out to Serafine, her dark eyes roving her face.

"Whenever." She lets her gaze tick past her to Elijah and her mouth curls a little, because: has she seen Elijah since they'd returned? Days bleed together and its disjointed and odd to her, not a student of Time, but: she loses track.

The when, the where. "Hey, kid." Soft and easy, as if it were any other night and she'd caught sight of Elijah in a crowd. Never mind the universe.

Serafíne
Sera bumps Elijah back and doesn't really say much.  Pressure there, acknowledgment, awareness.  He's so damned optimistic it makes her spine feel brighter and she could tell him that it's not the same, because it isn't, but he says it so resolutely that she doesn't.  Somewhere in the middle of all this she turns and cups his head and kisses him firmly on the temple like she's comforting him not the other way around.

Then Kiara is scribbling out her address on a receipt, waiting for the ink to dry, handing the piece of paper to Sera who is drunk enough that she has to do a single and then a double-take as her focus narrows and then zippers open and then folds the receipt very, very neatly and lifts the fraying hem of her raveling cropped top and tucks the address into her lovely little black-lace bra.
Drifts for a while, after.
--
Not much later, a cab or maybe a solid and non-descript mid-price sedan pulls up.  Luxury brand, probably, but not the sort one notices.  The sort one doesn't-notice.  The street is mostly empty and that's a no-parking zone right in front of them but it's late.  No meter maids out.  Doesn't matter that he's double-parked in front of a fire hydrant.  A man Elijah knows, whom Kiara does not yet know (methinks?) gets out of the driver's side and circles the car.  He's tall(ish), mid-30s, pale skin, dark hair.  Greets Elijah.  Greets the dog and she knows him enough to stir-to-life when he comes around.  Introduces himself to Kiara, not formally because they are out in the open, but conveys enough about himself that she can guess his tradition and rank from his words, demeanor, and resonance.

Offers Sera a hand-up and she takes it and she doesn't wanna go,
but she does anyway.

Elijah
He waits until she goes, as though he can't quite process anything but wanting to be there with her. Doesn't know that she doesn't think this is the same, that she feels so apart, that she's aching that the world is passing around her and she can't touch any of it. He doesn't know what that's like, but he can imagine, does know from stories what it's like for ghosts. What it's like when they experience that second death- the one that comes when all of the people who remember you are starting to pass on and you fade from stories. Cease to be, drains your passions and leaves you there.

He doesn't envy the dead.

He looks at Kiara, grins something playful, "hey, you don't glow in the dark anymore. I'm a little disappointed, honestly."

Kiara
She watches Serafine go, Kiara, with this complicated little expression.

There's concern there of course, but something else fractured in it. A splintering of regret and uncertainty, a lingering consideration that doesn't quite abate even after she's inside the sedan and the mystery man climbs out and introduces himself. She looks at him but the focus is fleeting and brief.

A smile that doesn't reach her eyes, a long pause after the car peels away and she looks after it; evening wind rustling and winding loose hair around her shoulders; over a collarbone. There's music throbbing inside the bar, it sounds vaguely like a promise and a threat; the dull repetition. Like the distant boom of thunder that predicts the storm; the static gathering in the air.

Hey, you don't glow in the dark anymore, she laughs and scoots across with care until she's closer to him; until her shoulder brushes into him and she's pushing against him in a bid to unsettle him. "Shut up." She smiles and twists the program around in her fingers until the smile wears thin and dissipates, cants him a neat little look over her shoulder.

There's a faint sheen of glitter to the gold eye-shadow dusted on her lids tonight. It makes them sparkle. "How are you, Elijah?" She breathes out in this quick, sharp little exhale. "What's going on." It's the second time she's asked that, tonight. She sounds less agitated this time, though. More - resigned, now. To the awareness that there is something.

There was always something and perhaps in the wake of Sera - it feels far more conclusive.

Elijah
[This is me. This is me making us inaudible for other people. Forces 2: Shhhhhhh.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (6, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Elijah
She pushes against him and, melodramatic, he leans to the side as though he is off balance. lets out a sigh as though this were a big upheaval, as though she had toppled some great and powerful stone figure. He laughs, because at that moment there is delight. He leans back into his old position, back into something that he is comfortable with.

She splinters to regrets, you see. Elijah knows regret pretty well, tries not to live with it but there's a young woman whose name he almost equates entirely with regret. With longing. She was gone and he was still here and he could be fine with that but occasionally things remind him of Alicia and he is reminded of the fact that he is human. That he makes mistakes. He's been looking for paintings and talking to gallery owners and making up excuses as to why his best friend can't make a gallery opening because he's scared and it's his fault and-

exhale.

Looks up. Talks to himself for a second.

"There is a silence where hath been no sound,
   There is a silence where no sound may be,
   In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea,
Or in the wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
   No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,
   But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
   Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,
   And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone"

Exhales and something releases, lets go, and the world around them seems... quiet. For now, at least, the world is quiet. For now, they could probably yell their damned heads off and nothing would happen. There's a problem with a person who could literally be anyone. Elijah isn't privy to letting his conversations be overheard for the time being.

"Remember that painting I posted on Ginger? The one that I asked my room mate to do and it was beyond fucking breathtaking?"

He knits his fingers together, gets comfortable because he's going to be here for awhile and he hasn't quite gotten the urge yet to go home because he's going to spend the rest of the night trying to ward the ever loving shit out of his apartment, work on contingencies and defenses and anything that would work as self-defense. He has someone to protect, and while there is something to be said about being a protector there is also something to be said about not putting people in situations where they will need to be protected. Perhaps, guilt. Perhaps.

He couldn't have known, neither could Jenn. They had all been operating under false pretenses.

"Anyway, turns out that whole thing isn't vampires, it's Nephandi and the guy who came and picked up Sera is dealing with it," he exhales, "I thought the whole thing was handled so, like, it didn't dawn on me that Jenn should have just trashed the damn thing and it would have been fucking wrong to ask her to do that anyway, she created a fucking masterpiece. I was pretty fucking sure Kalen said that the issue was handled and taken care of."

Shrugs.

"I should have followed up. Nobody knew, I can't be angry about that."

Kiara
It's a lot. Elijah spills out information and some of it the woman beside him can piece together; slot into some impression like pieces of a jigsaw. This connecting to that, slivers of information digested on Ginger. Visitors in town, a murder that would happen again, shapeshifters being hunted and the Fallen Ones.

(Not vampires, which must, to some tiny degree, be a blessing. But. Oh.)

It's a lot to process and the Verbena settles there beside him with a shawl half fallen down her back and her legs neatly crossed at the ankle. There's a ring around one of her toes, the nails all painted a shade to match the lipstick she wears and it's this thing she does, the pagan. Wears the clothing of some elegant city swan but lingers in the truth of what she was. Offers the hints, you understand, of something else. The pendant around her neck, the ring.

The little way she checks when Elijah starts to speak because - it's one of those nights, again. They aren't quite like the others spilling around them from the bar, meandering across to the vendor on the other side of the street. Not quite, though they do a decent job at pretending.

(Woolfe in Sleeper's clothing, indeed.)

So, then: "You couldn't have known. None of us could. That thing in the park we got rid of?" She leans back and turns her dark eyes on his face, assessing; remembering. The smoldering ruin of it; mouths and gaping teeth and the stench of diseased, misused flesh. She's got these delicate, lovely hands Kiara and they'd helped dismember and dispose of a corpse. Weighted it down in a river.

She'd closed the eyes of her mentor with those fingers, stood in the aftermath of the Union's work in a forest not so far from them, too. Slid dirt through her fingertips and look in the void carved into Time itself while another Verbena wept for the lost and all she'd felt was a kind of righteous fury, because how dare they. Because they'd live enough to pay for it.

Because, Jenn didn't deserve this, either and Kiara's expression gives that over, too. Sympathy, a lick of kindling displeasure. "How could we have known." A beat, her eyes drop away. "He's dealing with it, how, exactly?" She plucks and arranges her words carefully. A thoughtful arrangement.

Her mouth softening to some brief, considerate smile. "People talk about handling things so much, have you noticed? Contain it. Put it into a box with a cute label and somehow it's .... better. It's .... " She shakes her head, straightens and lifts her fingers to the bridge of her nose. "Sometimes you can't contain it. It's not that easy. I'm sorry that Jenn's been pulled in."

She touches his hand, a brief connection.

"What can I do? I want to help."

Elijah
"This Michael MacCarrick guy warded the ever loving shit outta Jenn. Like, I'm pretty sure that, for all intents and purposes, if someone tried to find her magically on a map they'd think she's in Canada or something," he said, "and frankly I care fuck all about whatever this Nephandus freaking does so long as Jenn stays a singular, easily recognizable human being.

"I met this guy and aside from being, like, not at all intimidating like the fucking Hermetics that sat on my couch a month ago- he's actually working with people. He didn't write Grace off when she was like dude, this is my city too and I'm not burding on not helping, swore a freaking capital letter Oath to the effect of I'll protect you with every bit of my being, and I really get the impression that he's been tracking this Nephandus for a long time. I don't think he's gonna stop until either said unspeakable evil is dead or he's shuffled off into the cycle again."

A beat happens. Elijah realizes he's talking a lot. Realizes he's saying a lot of things and hasn't probably given Kiara any time to process, he just went on with an explanation, and it was an explanation with a clear point- Elijah had respect for what Euthanatoi do. Has more than a vague understanding of what that entails (but not enough to really tout being an expert on the tradition, just enough that there had been courtships. If meetings had gone differently he wouldn't be with the Order and, instead, probably would have been calling Eleanor Yates his acarya instead of calling Henry his mentor.)

He takes a second, looks sideward at her and seeks her eyes. Takes in that considerate smile and he continues, "I think... that handling something is a process. It's not in a past tense. It hasn't been handled, it's in the process of becoming. It isn't enduring something- which says it is a labor, a burden to be taken. It's not fixing something, because that implies that a situation is broken or that you can even touch the tools necessary to repair it. You handle wild animals- it's either you, or it. And perhaps you find an accord and perhaps you don't. Perhaps one of you withers and dies and the other stalks triumphant."

He shrugs. Realizing that he's talking again, going on and on about what? Antics?

"I have no clue... talk to Grace? She has a better grasp of what's going on and what isn't. Maybe beef up security at your place?"

Kiara
"I don't know if there's any real way to handle the Nephandi."

Kiara speaks looking down at her hands; she's set the program in her lap; weighted down there beneath that tiny purse of hers and runs the edge of her thumb over her palm. She's quiet in the wake of Elijah's explanation, of his speech. There's so much urgent, striving belief in him and she doesn't, as she often doesn't, know how to process it.

Other than to tilt her face back at him and find his eyes and deliver a curling smile, tinged with affection and some flicker of regret. For what she'd seen, for what she's heard.

Perhaps for the whole sorry situation.

"Survive, maybe. But nature takes its course. You can throw your fury against a storm but it'll still rage on." She sits up, the pagan. Stretches out her legs and braces her hands either side of herself, her expression lingering for a beat in all Elijah had offered, painted into shades of concern and thoughtfulness. "If he's has been hunting this Fallen One that long, it must be powerful," Kiara offers in a murmur, cutting a glance at Elijah.

"Maybe the best thing we can do is stay out of his way and hope it stays out of ours."

A pause, then: "Although, given our track record, that doesn't seem likely, does it?" She smiles and leans back into him, rests her head on his shoulder, curling in. "I almost think I preferred the dragon."

Elijah
"Dude, this person made a chimera out of two living people and didn't flinch at reality. I don't think powerful quite describes what I'm thinking," he quirks his mouth to the side, inhales slow and deep and decides-

"I dunno. And, y'know? I don't care, I genuinely... genuinely don't care if it's nature or nurture or whatever, the whole pursuit-of-Descent thing? Doesn't jive with me. And I don't feel like ostriching on this but I'm not gonna get in the way if someone- anyone- has made it their business to make sure that what they do doesn't hurt more people," it's a strange sentiment. Not that he has it, but that it is a conviction. That this is something he could stand behind, a banner he would not put down, and Ideal. That there is suffering in the world, that you can not be complacent to that suffering.

Especially when it's so close.

"Is it kind of fucked up that I wonder if people would have given a shit about any of this if it wasn't one of our friends that is in trouble?" he leans into her, lets the thought sit there before he smiles, something lighter, "eh, you know, I feel like Henry really got me ready to handle dragons. I should move on to something else next- a new terrifying mountain."

Kiara
"You mean would we have let Michael MacCarrick hunt it down alone?" She murmurs, face half pressed into his arm; she winds one of hers around his and allows her weight to press in, there. Feels the comfort and familiarity of his warmth for a beat. "I don't know. Maybe. Can you really judge anyone if they said yes?"

She pulls back, searches his face.

"Ian told me that the Techocracy is here. That they're sniffing around and the first thing that I wanted to do, other than curse their names, was run. But I've seen what they're capable of. The way they take what they want with no regard to what came first." She looks out, beyond Elijah, then. Her expression hardening. "The Fallen Ones are no better.

They take life and twist it. They just devour everything. That's not nature. There's no process to that."

Her eyes tick back, mouth softening a touch. "I think I'd care. But I think I'd do whatever I had to, if it meant keeping people who matter out of harm's way." She reaches over and brushes her fingertips over his face; tenders them back through his hair in this ghosting, feather-light manner.

"We'll deal with this. And whatever comes next." She cuddles back in, the Verbena, folds the edges of her shawl around her body and tilts her face up; across. The vendor across the street is packing things up for the night; somewhere down the street a dumpster has overflowed; scraps of paper scatter along the gutter, some turning into a pulpy, gluey mess where the water touches them.

They'll dry there, most likely. Become a part of the streetside landscape.

Inside the Stone Pony the band plays on; or maybe it's just music, now. The door is pushed open and sound blasts out. This sudden auditory assault that Elijah's working dampens just enough that it sounds softer; translated through water.

"And Serafine, too. She'll be fine. It's - " There's this shift where Kiara presses against him. The nagging worry in her voice, low but persistent. "She's fine." The emphasis of it, her state of being might be as much for Elijah as Kiara.

Elijah
There is a moment when he just lets her stay at his arm, before he finally puts an arm around her, like this is familiar. Like this is comfortable. He knows he can't do a damned thing, when push comes to shove or any other cliche of finality, Elijah knew that he did not have the magical chops to make the big moves or the sweeping gestures. Has realized a long time ago that he has to deal in the finite and measurable.

Takes what she says and absorbs it. Thinks about it. Tries to process what precisely is there and what he has to do. He'd said as much- he gives two shits about the Nephandi. Is probably too naive to be terrified, or too brazen to be immobilized by the prospect that something may happen. Has had his feathers ruffled by close calls with the technocracy and here is his friend- telling him that she's seen what they can do and she wanted to run when she'd heard.

Kiara does mention Serafine though, how she'll be okay too.

"I don't want to run," he says, like this made it true. He didn't want to run, so the natural explanation was that he wasn't going to run. "And Serafine isn't fine right now. She has to have someone take care of her because..." he gestures, "there's a whole world full of people that she is very much a part of... that she can't be a part of right now. And I get the feeling that if someone wasn't here taking care of her, she wouldn't take care of herself.

"She doesn't ask for help, doesn't let people know if she's hurting and she expects people to just let her be this great untouchable goddess. We had a talk awhile back, about how I wanted to know her as a person and not as an idea and it was hard on her."

Kiara
Kiara is quiet for a long time, then.

Not a tense silence by any measure but perhaps - a thoughtful one. Elijah can all but feel the gears shifting in the Verbena's head. Turning over loose memories of the Cultist. Snapshots of moments she's shared with her, were they all surface, after all? Had Kiara ever really glimpsed who Serafine was beneath the exquisite tangle of chaotic beauty?

She can't argue with Elijah when he says that she isn't fine.

She knows it. They both do, but there's a comfort to be had in simple, useless words. Metered out as if they could somehow bolster hope; cradle a tiny cough of smoke and spark a flame. "She was in Thailand." She does offer, eventually, from her curled perch beside him. The dress she's wearing is silk; wispy soft and giving beneath his fingers; her body heat bleeding through it where she's pressed into him.

Easy, unfettered connection.

"That much I got from Dan. Whatever happened to cause .... that. She's not fine." She sighs, acknowledging his comment with a fine little lift of a shoulder. "It's fucked up and I hate that she's going through it but I don't think we can fix this for her. I don't think it works like that.

Sometimes it's harsh." She's thinking of Arionna, now. Her blindness. The cost exacted from her. "You feel like walking a lady home?" She lifts her face to smile at him; it's a bright, infectious thing. Sudden and captivating and she wields it quite so.

"I'll buy you the last donut."

Elijah
"She's complicated," Elijah said, "but she's not broken. You can't get the places she's gone and break."

He smiles at that, and in that he does find comfort. Smiles at Kiara, for Kiara, because he feels like smiling. Because that is the comfort he can offer, because words for Elijah Poirot need not be hollow, and they need not lose their meaning. Everything he does now is wrapped in symbol and definition. Every nuance has a meaning beyond the meaning he's finding, every bit of being just another step towards some larger immutable Truth that he can't touch.

"And dear lady, I would love nothing more than to walk you home and for you to feed me donuts."

Kiara
[What up, wrap? How you doin'.]

Not Vampires

Elijah
Grace may be shocked to find out that the tiny apartment Elijah inhabited with his spoken-of-but-rarely-seen room mate is not a complete crap shoot. No, it's actually a pretty nifty little place were it not for the fact that the entire apartment feels like it's been hit by a hurricane, like it's the base of a revolution ready to start. It's upheaval, dissatisfaction and pushing for something more than what it was. The time he didn't spend at the warehouse was spent in a place that he was very surely making his.

The apartment was on top of a florist shop called Floral and Hardy- they had a decent amount of foot traffic and while one could call the building charming it had seem better days. It had definitely seen better days and while someone once loved this place, that time has long since passed. The door that would have let someone come upstairs to the apartments above was solid and wooden. Painted blue, chipped and fading. Kicked at the bottom a few times, signs of attempts at break ins hinted at the door frame but the door was still there. Still solid.

When his guests arrived, Elijah actually tidied up a little more. Picked up the notes that were scattered all over the place. Half-legible thoughts are scrawled in French on brick in chalk- diagrams drawn and wiped out and drawn again (and redrawn by Jenn with very explicit instructions as to how something was supposed to look because she had an eye for space and depth when he had the concept of what was there, yammered on about why something had to be a certain color or a certain size the same way he talked about an offset press or handmade paper) There was chalk dust on the floor, and he'd done a good job of cleaning it up but the apartment, with its rather colorful and movement-driven artwork on the walls, is a place where Elijah Works.

There have been entire novels and arias to the angels scrawled and scrubbed off  the hardwood floors.

The couch is a comfortable little number from IKEA while, on the other wall away from the art, there's a perfectly nice but piercing little loveseat in beige. The coffee table is antique and Elijah, realizing that this was important, has resisted the urge to sit in the floor and fiddle with the rug that was no doubt hiding some big breakthrough waiting to happen. He's perched himself, instead, in a queen Anne chair Jenn picked up at a yard sale. Good form but an ugly color. He'd already offered people whatever they wanted to drink, knows how to be a hospitable host.

"So," he started with, a little unstead with the prospect, "it's... not... vampires?"

Grace
Grace has never been to Elijah's apartment. But it might seem, to Michael, as though she has spent a great deal of time here, by how comfortable she is about being here. How she just seems like she owns the place. She wanders into the kitchen without prompting, and it's only when Elijah offers to get her a drink that she realizes she should let him. Coffee, for her, because the time he spent with Kalen had to have rubbed off a little, right?

The scribbling on the walls and floors says as much. She recognizes some of those, smiles at them, even though she cannot fathom how they Work.

She takes the loveseat along with her coffee, and just turns a stare at Michael when Elijah asks his question. Right. Explain that.

Michael
Having had dinner with him the night before Grace now knows a bit more about the Euthanatos in terms of his history and personality. He's in his early thirties and has a job as a day trader out in Los Angeles. It enables him to engage in wealth redistribution and suss out individuals who might have better luck if their next life started sooner rather than later and take a day or a week or a month off without having to explain himself because he doesn't have an office and he doesn't punch a time clock.

Really what he wanted to talk about is travel. Travel and books. Somehow he got wind of the fact that Grace was a writer. Thanks a lot Pan.

And now they're at Elijah's. Michael introduces himself with a handshake and a smile. Gives off the appearance of a precise and careful man though his resonance seems to suggest otherwise. He feels like the damage done after a steady storm. That moment of clarity after a long period of tugging at a problem. His power surpasses Grace. It's no wonder she rankled at the first sight of him.

If Grace is making coffee then sure Michael would love a cup. He sits on the IKEA number so he can see both of them while they're talking. Leans back and keeps his hands knit between his knees when he isn't manipulating a coffee cup.

"Vampires?" he says. Seems bemused but not confounded. Grace had used that word yesterday but he hadn't grilled her on why she would have thought this was the case. "Gosh, no." Far worse, he doesn't say. "Grace and I didn't have much of a chance to discuss the, ah... chimera you encountered in Washington Park the night of... August twentieth, was it?"

Elijah
There have been a series of terrifying, overwhelming people who have sat on that couch. This is not the first adept to sit on Elijah's couch and, he hopes, that he will 1: live long enough to see that capacity in himself and 2: will have the good sense to buy a different sofa before then. He suspects that this is important, gets the feeling that he probably should have worn a tie instead of a tee shirt and jeans. Half a dozen bracelets on one hand, a necklace that he still can't take off because Jenn tied the knot too tight.

"Yeah," he said, "I was meeting with my dealer Samir-" doesn't shy away from this, because he figures at this point Grace has to be incredibly aware of the fact that Samir is Elijah's dealer and there is a Euthanatos on his couch. They have bigger things to worry about than young men with substance issues "-and we're just hanging out, yeah? Going through the whole motions of we're totally not engaging in illegal activities because there's a protocol for this."

He says it with certainty. In case Mike or Grace were not aware and did not buy drugs regularly- there's etiquette.

"So, something moves in the bushes and it- I dunno... I guess, she? They?" like that makes him uncomfortable, because he knows that was a person, that what he and Samir killed had been a human being and he doesn't know what word to use. "Stands up and-" A beat, ping pong ball attention. Stream of consciousness; Elijah's nervous. Looks at his phone for a second and retrieves a gallery. Hands Mike the phone; there's paintings. Or, rather, painting, singular, of the chimera in question. A couple sketches that relay what movement and muscle structure would have looked like, but the painting is really what is note worthy.

Back on track.

"Anyway, yeah, it tried to eat Sam- it scratched me, we got really lucky. We handled it, but Sam bolted and I called a friend to help me clean shit up because there is no way in Hell that I could have left charred... whatever ashes in the middle of the park. Sam ended up in Quiet and when I went back later and looked back at it, it... like... it eviscerated a homeless guy. We were really fucking lucky."

Grace
Ohh, Elijah. Grace did not know that. So far, neither of the two neer-do-wells has made it a priority to let her know. To that new information, she just rolls her eyes. So that's how they know each other.

Also, there has been no attempt on Grace's part to look appropriate for a meeting with a Euthanatos Adept. She's always wearing jeans and t-shirts, and that isn't going to stop just because some people might consider that a signal that it's okay to disrespect her. Michael hasn't. In fact, he doesn't seem capable of it.

She sips her coffee, all pensive. The more she hears about that night, the less she wants to.

"I went to the park with him later, once we'd found Samir and things had more-or-less calmed down. Did some genetic analysis on... what was left of the remains. It was enough to figure out that the monster was a chimera of two women, but I couldn't get a clear picture of the kind of magic that went into that -- other than it was utterly disgusting."

Michael
"Yes. What you were feeling is called Qlippothic magick."

As much as he knows about the supernatural in general and the potential for the Awakened mind to become warped in particular Michael does not settle in to lecture either of them about it. He seems as if he is capable of speaking at great length about topics in which he is well versed. Most Adepts are. But he also looks as if he respects their time and doesn't believe himself to have much of it either.

Compared to yesterday Michael looks tired. Granted he is always pale. He is pale in the way that people of Anglo-Saxon stock tend to stay pale as if he lives in the frigid wastelands of the north and not Los Angeles but not the sort of pale that speaks of Jhor. This tiredness exacerbates the pallor. Gives him the impression of having bruises underneath his eyes. If he is tired it has not affected his demeanor. He's still cheerful.

"The Nephandi work towards a state of oblivion called Descension, and the way they view the world is so warped that they can't call on the nine Spheres. They have to think of things as falling apart rather than fitting together." A thoughtful brow furrow. "You mentioned a fire."

Elijah
"So it really is, like, an entire inversion of what most people do," like this was an aside, something that could either be confirmed or denied and tossed aside. He's keyed in at that point, unsettled but viewing it as a learning experience because, for as much as Henry has prepared him for the world, he and Henry have not talked much about Nephandi. It had been part of the conversation he got that involved don't consort with demons, which is a nonnegotiable point. Don't sell your soul.

It would be an inopportune time to think of having a screaming match with a wall at Pan's place almost a year back. The things we buy, the things we sell, a change in cadence and here was this man talking about something that is corruption incarnate and there had to be some way to learn more without getting in over your head.

Seems like a slippery slope. For once, he has the good sense not to follow the train of thought.

"Washington Park's had a lot of, like vampiric issues. It's been a thing, and when Sam came back around and we went to investigate it was, like, every point we looked back it was all after dark, to the point that it was freaking ridiculous. We had these sunlight-phobic beings causing problems and they abducted these two girls from a high school. I mean, I figured, there was no way in Hell this could be another mage, I saw what this person could do- in public. Closed this girl's mouth, like, wiped it off her fucking face- how did reality not even protest? I thought that kind of thing would write you out of existence."

This is the part that he's having trouble with. Vampires he could understand. Vampires he could rationalize having powers and not having to deal with paradox, but... he can't make sense of the idea that a mage could actually be that powerful. There's irony in a Hermetic apprentice not being able to fathom mages as god-beings.

Grace
"The fire was my idea," she says, over her coffee. And then, she sets about explaining herself, with a sigh.

"So, Elijah did some looking back through time, to try to see what had happened that lead up to this. That's when he saw this beautiful guy and his buddy take the two young women away from a high school football field. Like he said, wiped their mouths off their faces.

"So, later, we went to the football field and he looked some more. Found a car the friend used to transport the girls. Samir traced its license. Hadn't been registered in like 30 or 40 years, something like that. We traced the car back to the house, where some surveillance on the place led to us finding out that four people lived there who spent the entire night skinning people alive.

"I figured vampires. Before we set the plan in motion, I tried to make sure by running a scan for life signs and Entropic signatures. There was nothing alive in that house except for rodents and roaches. They showed up as dead bodies with a shit-ton of some frozen Entropic signatures which I've seen before in vampires. That's why the fire."

Grace
[Argh. I looked back at the logs, it was Kalen who did the life/entropy scan. Sorry...]

Michael
"Though I can't say as I agree with the method," he says and even as he's chastising them he does so in a way that is almost gentle, "if this individual is using the same modus operandi as ze has since... well, I personally have been tracking zir for the last two years, but I have met this individual before, in past lives." A beat. "It stands to reason that the vehicle's registration is expired because this individual is unaging." Another beat. "I don't consider myself a gambler, but if I were to place a bet, here, it would be substantial, and I would bet that they read as dead bodies because they were reanimated corpses that this individual had enslaved, mentally. You may well have granted them a mercy."

Elijah
This... is so far out of Elijah's scope of comprehension that he can't help but look at the Euthanatos on his couch like he's trying to process calculus. The method of operating, the process of following this person, all of it just...

Elijah Poirot existed within a single lifetime. Had he been aware of the enormity of his own existence and truly grasped the eternal nature of their avatars he would have gone mad a long, long time ago. It's a courtesy, you see, that he doesn't know these things. The man on the couch lets him know that there were bad calls made, but not in such a fashion that he's likely going to be beating himself up over the next few weeks.

"... what do we do now?" because that was the problem now. Now, Elijah was aware of the fact that there was an Enormous Problem in their city and judging by his tone alone it seems to hit the initiate that he's aware of how precious little he is capable of doing to prevent whoever is out there from doing whatsoever ze chooses.

Doesn't like it. Doesn't like it a goddamned bit.

Grace
Hmm. Met this individual before, in past lives. Grace has met those who believe themselves to be reincarnated -- who remember who they were. It doesn't have any place in her own personal world-view, but she can't deny that these people believe what they say.

Michael doesn't agree with the method used, and Grace wonders what his preferred method would entail, but doesn't ask. As far as she's concerned, they did the best they could.

Elijah wants to know what's next. "We find out whether this Nephandus died in the fire, I'm guessing? Or do we know for sure that's not the case? Elijah, do you have that painting? The other one that Jenn did?"

Michael
Not until they start using the word 'we' does Michael seem as if he has a problem with this discussion. At the first utterance he is in the middle of sipping from his coffee mug. His frown is a quick thing and then he sets down the coffee mug and scoots to the edge of the couch where before he had been leaning back. Focused intensity in his gaze.

The pictures Elijah had shown him are caught in his mind. He had not had to take hold of the phone. Let Elijah swipe through them himself. That painting Jenn had done of the Nephandus in question was beautiful in a way that was difficult to wrap the mind around.

"I've seen the painting," he says. "Looking for an individual with the features Jenn captured isn't effective. Ze changes zir physical appearance too often." A beat. "What I'm about to tell you is strange, and I apologize for that. But I receive... telepathic messages from this individual, from time to time. I have been unable to discern a pattern, but I received the most recent message ten days ago. October second."

So their new friend couldn't have died in the fire.

"I doubt ze has stayed put this long, but I have been wrong before. This is a dangerous individual, and I'm glad you did not engage zir. My student is with me, and I don't require any further assistance."

There is no 'we', basically.

Elijah
"She put it in a gallery in Santa Fe, said Yvette just about shit herself when she saw it. I can ask her to take it out? They're asking, like, close to seven grand- nobody in Santa Fe is going to pay that, so I really doubt we're gonna have to worry about it selling," he tells Grace.

Like anyone would have the nerve to buy it. The painting Jenn had done was a masterpiece, pure and simple. There are a very select number of people who would try to buy a painting like that- they either had no idea what they were looking at, or they were so entitled that they believed they deserved a piece of art of that calibre in their home.

Fuck, for all Elijah knew people could buy things like that and burn them, wipe out the little traces of what came so achingly close to perfection outside of a vaccuum.

"I don't wanna sound like a dick," which is what one says right before they say things that make them sound like dicks, "I have zero interest in getting between you and whoever this person you are hunting is. I get that my presence within a five mile radius of this is probably a liability and I want this to work.

"My friend who painted that stuff is a sleeper. She gets that magic is a thing because we've talked about it, but that's it. I don't want her getting hurt, or getting anything remotely close to-like- yeah."

It gives and he isn't hiding it, he's concerned. He's concerned and he's scared and he has something and someone worth protecting, and Elijah is going through words and layers and he is building things up so it doesn't seem nearly as daunting, "I just... I would like to know your recommendation as to what I need to do to make sure my friend stays a singular entity."

Grace
Elijah says what he says, and Grace -- quick to put two and two together -- "Tell her she's got a buyer. I'll be there in 30 minutes."

Because no, like Hell that painting should be displayed. Anywhere. The sooner it can be taken down the better. She'll have to use Kalen's money to do it, but she sincerely doubts he'd have a problem with that.

Then, she turns her attentions on Michael, and... She's not gleeful. More survival-mode. Maybe it has more to do with Jenn being in danger than anything, but there's something else there too. "As you might be able to tell by now, you could certainly try to stop me from providing assistance, and hey -- that's your prerogative. You'd probably succeed. But I'm warning you, you'll have to actually try. If I have to, I'll funnel information to you through Pan.

"Because look, if you fail, I live here. I have to clean up after you."

So yeah. Do what you want, Michael. Grace is going to do what she wants.

She's already packing up to leave at that point, shuffles her coffee on the table, stands, gets her keys out. "I'll ask at the gallery if anyone's been asking questions about that painting. If they have, Jenn should probably hide. And I mean, she'll want wards."

Michael
Spoiler alert: Michael MacCarrick is not a gambler because he has a terrible poker face. He could not manipulate his way out of a paper bag. He's too damned nice. He has the ability to keep his thoughts off his face if he has the proper motivation and enough warning that he will need to do so. But he is not skilled in the art of time.

Hearing that the painting is in a gallery in Santa Fe causes him to have a visceral reaction. It is only obvious if either of them happen to be looking at him then. It isn't quite a wince because he knows that they may very well be looking at him but wincing is the gist of that reaction.

But he says nothing and the conversation continues on. Grace is going to be in Santa Fe in thirty minutes to buy the painting. Michael has seen the painting. Elijah doesn't wanna sound like a dick. And so on.

... if you fail, I live here. I have to clean up after you.

Michael doesn't like throwing his weight around. There isn't much of it. He's six feet tall and weighs maybe a buck sixty. When they both stand from their respective pieces of furniture he does not cut an intimidating figure and when he walks around the coffee table to stand in front of her he does not seem as if he is trying to block her path.

She does not get another word out. He holds out his right hand.

"Give me your hand," he says. Gentle still but firm. He's not fucking around.

Elijah
The Order of Hermes has taught Elijah Poirot a very valuable survival skill- when the grown ups are talking, you shut the fuck up and let them talk.

Well and so, he sits back a little more uncomfortably in his chair and looks at the two mages like he would really rather be in the other room. And not here. But he's here.

Fuck.

Grace
It's hard to believe that this is the nice guy with whom she ate goat stew not long ago, talking about books and not the work at hand. He was a better man then.

Part of her wants to reach for her phone, get the fuck out of here. But he'd probably just stop her.

"Why?"

Michael
Poor Elijah. If he didn't have the proper motivation to stay in the library and do his homework before he probably does now.

It's hard to believe that this is the intelligent woman who introduced him to Denver's only Nigerian restaurant. She was less infuriating then.

"Too many people have already died because of zir," he says. The way he says it though it sounds as if what he's really saying is because of me. Like he should have put this thing down already and it's a failing on his part that he hasn't. "If you're not going to leave it alone, I'd like to swear an oath to you, and accompany you to Santa Fe."

He looks down at his own hand before looking her in the eye. She doesn't have to take it. He's not going to make her do anything she doesn't want to do even if she did goad him. That just means he'd have to find another way to stop her.

Elijah
[Juuuuust a quick I think I read you right look, per+empathy for Mike?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Elijah
"Dude, Grace, please," he is pleading with her here. He doesn't have ground to stand on but god damn it this is his house, "we don't have time for the whole buddy cop trust building montage- just... have a working relationship or something. Just... trust him enough to know that this is, like, part of his tradition's karmic purpose in all this shit. It's not ego. If he's telling you I'm swearing an oath to you, that doesn't get done lightly."

A beat. He exhales hard and runs his hands through his hair. Hasn't gotten out of his chair. Hasn't invaded space, hasn't made motion that he's going to get in the middle of this mess.

"The guys not cutting you out of action, he's trying to make sure more people don't die, just... please, let the guy do his karmic duty."

Grace
[Haha. Let's try out this Per/Empathy thing too? Michael, are you blaming yourself for all this?]

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

Grace
Well. Now it's starting to make a little more sense. Perhaps he's had help in the past, and they ended up flayed. She looks down at his hand like it's covered in poop.

She practically ignores Elijah, or at least seems to. She's listening, she's just not peeling her attention off of Michael.

"I don't know how many people I've ever had to tell to direct their anger in the right places to the right people, because I've lost count by now. Whoever helped you in the past? Whoever ended up dead due to this quest? They are not dead because of you. They are dead because someone else decided to kill them. I do hope you know that by now. If you don't, you've already lost. Give a person like that that much control over you, and they will break you."

Oh, she isn't done yet. Not even slightly.

"I once gave someone my hand, and she used the contact to infect me with a virus that made me live out my skin-dissolving death over and over again in hallucinatory hell. She ended up having so much guilt over what she'd done that she blew herself sky high in the attempt to wipe out her little group's work. I guess the moral of the story is -- I'm putting a lot of trust in you. Don't be a dick with it."

With that, she reaches out and grasps his hand.

Michael
Both the Euthanatos and the Mercurial Elite listen to Elijah without taking their eyes off the other one. The calmest standoff in recent history. Michael stands with his left arm down at his side and his right hand waiting for Grace to make a decision and even when she takes a shot at his wording or something she sees in his eyes he doesn't falter or put his hand back in his pocket.

After one lecture and one story he still hasn't put his hand away. She's putting a lot of trust in him.

He returns the grasp. His fingers and palm are cool and dry. His grip is firm but not painful. He does not smile when he says, "I look forward to discussing the difference between responsibility and guilt with you the next time we have dinner."

Closed eyes and a breath to center himself. Opens them again and lets the breath go.

[mind/prime 3, corr 2: idk what to call this rote. oath of protection or something. prob vulgar af but practiced/taking time/quint = diff 4 anyway. he might extend it bc time duration. it won't kick in until he actually swears the oath.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (3, 4, 4, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Elijah
Elijah sinks into the remarkably uncomfortable Queen Anne chair and takes a moment to reflect on how incredibly awkward this is for him to watch. So, taking this time to be a little paranoid about his best friend potentially becoming part of a larger whole in a way that he really, really, really wasn't comfortable with, he decided to text Jenn.

you should ditch class. For the foreseeable future.

Grace
"Yeah, I know. We're all responsible for our own actions, including myself," she says, and then takes a breath herself. She can feel the way the weft of the world is bending to him. Whatever he's doing, he shouldn't be distracted. Paradox is a bitch.

He wants to take on responsibility for the Nephandus he's failed to stop. They are going to disagree about the wisdom in that until the end, likely...

She looks down at their joined hands, wondering if that was a mistake. Well, too late now.

Michael
"Grace Evans," he says, "from this moment until the moment we have completed our task, your well-being is no less valuable and no less sacred than the well-being of my own soul, and will be guarded and protected and treated as an extension therein, regardless of physical distance or my own incapacitation."

Translation: Even if Grace runs off to attempt to take down a fleshcrafting Nephandus on her own they will have a telepathic link that enables him to cast effects that will assist her from a distance. Also if he even thinks about doing anything to harm her (like say he's under the mental control of said Nephandus or something) that will be considered botching this particular effect and not only will he be incapable of going through with it but he will also be in a world of hurt.

This is what she gets for trying to tell a Euthanatos leader that she does what she wants.

[extension: might as well make this shit permanent.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (1, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Grace
She'd dismiss the words as just talk, if she didn't feel them sinking into her. He's lacing them with power. Again, he's taking responsibility for someone he probably shouldn't. She's bound to him now. If she decides to do something stupid, it's endangering him too, which -- she wasn't going to do in the first place, but still. It's not like he knows that.

She nods at him, and hopes her expression of slightly-reduced alarm conveys something to him. "Thanks for not being a dick."

Then, his hand is released. "Come on. Let's get that painting off the wall."