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
Friday, October 16, 2015
Thursday, October 15, 2015
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'.]
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'.]
Sunday, October 11, 2015
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."
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."
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
The Welcome Wagon
Steel
[Right, before I forget again(!), Nightmares]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )
Steel
Of all the gin joints in all of Denver, the address written on the slip of paper that Steel tucked into a book was for this one. The slip of paper with an added message, no meant for Jenn’s attention. The place is somewhere out along East Colfax so, naturally, it’s not the nicest of places. There’s no warm wood panelling, no subtle lighting, no attractive and attentive bar staff with an extensive knowledge on the drinks on offer and the many and varied ways of mixing them. No, this place has a sticky floor, cheap booze, dim lights because of lack of maintenance (the neon sign in the window buzzes annoyingly, once you notice the sound), and a clientele that doesn’t ask many questions.
There are some booths along one wall, padded leather worn and patched in places. Close examination might dig out dried blood in the gaps between padding and wood, but then it’s maybe best not to look too closely at anything here. The tables are worn and battered, an occasional initial or message carved into the wood by a rough and, quite possibly, drunken hand. It’s no artwork.
The place isn’t all that busy at the moment – it’s late afternoon, so there’s a single barman on duty in the vague hope of capturing the early drinkers and getting a little business. A couple of booths are currently occupied. One contains a couple of men – battered and marked by their lives on the rougher end of the street – talking quietly about some piece of business or other. A woman perches on a bar stool, all suspenders and torn fishnets and heels. She’s nursing a gin and tonic, keeping an eye on the clock suspended over the cloudy, unpolished glasses in the racking. A bustier and small (fake) fur shrug maintain her dignity, or what remains of it.
The other booth, though. It’s occupied, but it would be so easy for the eye to simply slip over and move onto more interesting things. Its occupant is wearing a black leather jacket with a hoodie on underneath, hood currently pulled up. There’s a bottle of something cheap and nasty with a couple of glasses, but the drink hasn’t been touched yet.
Steel
[And a little Awareness?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
Elijah
[Do I notice my person here?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Elijah
He comes in soon enough. Jeans and a tee shirt- the vest is left at home. He's got a leather jacket built for riding a motorcycle that has some scrapes on it where it's clear enough that he may have wiped out a couple times. Or, rather, had a close call. Or whoever owned it before him had wiped out. It was hard to tell whether or not Elijah happened to do the damage to his clothes or if he bought them at a thrift store.
It was fifty/fifty really. Some things are worn all to hell and back out of his own abuses and other things aren't. The blond, who one could describe as pretty and not handsome, makes his way to the bar. Buys a beer in a bottle and waits his daamn turn to get something to drink. Looks at the woman in the fishnets and grins at her. Shoots her a wink and a raised drink. Doesn't look like a customer, so she probably doesn't pay him any mind.
There's silence there, while something buzzes along on his senses, some argument in a realm that he has no business understanding. There is a bloodstain on the floor and the owner of said stain doesn't seem terribly happy with the bartender but there's fuck all he can do about it. Elijah just takes a drink. Perches himself on the bar and takes out a shitty Nokia bright to check the time. Didn't bring anything with him that he couldn't necessarily lose.
Twenty bucks in cash. A fake ID. The necklace around his neck that he can't quite get off because it's tied on too tightly and he's just going to have to wait for the damn thing to fall off.
Steel
The woman glances up from her drink and runs her eye up and down Elijah, considering him. She’s no stranger to interested glances, but there is some experience in judging a likely john. Are they going to pay? Are they going to be into anything weird? (Yes or no may well depend on how much.) Do they look like anyone that the grapevine says to watch out for. There is some form of honour amongst those on the wrong side of the border with the law. If they don’t watch out for each other, nobody else will. Hell, the cops would probably be only too happy to scrape up another dead hooker.
But we digress. The woman runs her eye of Elijah but returns to her drink. It’s still a little too early – the after-work crowd are still chained to their desks. This is still her time. And, dammit, mother’s little helper does help to drown the sorrows just a little.
The lone figure in the booth picked a seat which let her watch who was coming and going, tucked back into the corner where the lousy lighting hides her features. She watches Elijah arrive, watches him order the drink, watches as he looks around and tries to find the strange woman who had returned his wallet.
She isn’t massively surprised when his gaze slides past and onwards. She had half expected it. She had something in mind – something to kill two birds with one stone. Life is too short for crap booze. Somewhere, someone had marked her. Someone skilled in more than mere art. No, they were true Artists. The pain and the meaning of the marks gives her the focus she needs when she battles for what she wants.
[Arete: Matter 2: Straw to Gold. Going with coincidental – mislabelled bottles happen after all – so TN5. -1 for time. There’s no rush, after all.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Steel
[And, damn, that's some fine whiskey now. There's also a strangely unflavoured sensation of Working coming from the booth.]
Elijah
He raises his bottle in salute- hard to fuck up something in a bottle afterall, and he turns. Turns and heads in the direction that he felt working ads though this were the indication of a divining rod and there was water none too far away. Elijah headed that way, moved with purpose.
He was no stranger to pretending like he belonged places. No stranger to bars even if he didn't seem like the type that belonged in this one. A mark (and a card shark, but this wasn't the kind of place where people played Texas hold 'em and Elijah expected to keep all his fingers). He settled in, reaches into his pocket and sets his pocketwatch on the table. Open.
The face is cracked and the inlay on the front has his blood worked into the grooves but in certain places it just looks like some maroon inlay for people that didn't want to think about what the Hell that watch has gone through.
"Insert witty reparte here."
Steel
The Effect had both effects that she had wanted. The whiskey, some bottom shelf crud that is only just more drinkable than industrial solvent, improves. The harshness of the contaminants fades, and a warm, smooth burn takes the places of the original harshness. It might seem like a waste to use their gifts to save a little cash on buying a decent bottle to begin with. But there had been the other effect she’d wanted. Something to draw the man towards her.
She unscrews the lid from the bottle and pours out shots into the two glasses. There’s a smile visible when Elijah makes his joke, amused. “Consider an appropriately witty repartee given. So should I call you Jason, or Elijah?” She nudges one of the glasses towards the man and takes the other up herself, lifting it in salute.
Elijah
"Right now, Elijah's the appropriate name. If things change within the next couple of months, though, I'll let you know," serious about that, too. He takes the glass that is offered- never one to turn something down; hospitality, of course- and he raises it. Just enough to meet her gesture. The shot glass is raised, placed on the table for a second and then downed.
It's a ritual, one he's familiar with and the glass is places upside down.
"But then there's the ever present question of what do I call you. You're very Cindarella minus the glass slipper and I kind of picture me roving across the kingdom interviewing random women asking if they found my wallet."
Steel
Steel follows almost the same ritual, taking the shot and returning her glass to the table. Only she returns hers the right way up, ready to refill. She takes the bottle and gestures towards Elijah. The question unspoken: More? She refills her own glass.
“I’m no fairy tale character, and I don’t believe in happy endings. You think she was really happy, getting married to a man she knew nothing about? Always looked down on as a commoner by the others in the court? Ending up as a miserable, twisted version of herself, trying to convince herself that being pushed to the side once her duty of creating the heir and spare had been completed? And don’t get me started on glass slippers. She’d have been better off escaping with the silverware and finding a better life for herself on her own terms.”
There’s another smile, amused at the thought of how that particular fairy tale might have turned out, as she takes a small, slow sip of the whiskey. “But to answer your question, call me Steel.”
Elijah
"So I'm going to guess you live a life free of superheated dancing shoes and people who are trying to cut their own toes off to fit in what was probably a really uncomfortable shoe?" he does raise the glass, pushes it over because of course he would want more. Chases it with the beer he ordered; it takes a lot more to get him drunk these days, and besides this was just making company. Forming connections with people who are all mystery.
She goes by Steel.
"How long have you been in town?" he asks. The basics, really. She knew a fair bit about him but he was building her definition from scratch. Couldn't even place what color her eyes were and he was actively searching.
Steel
Trust means different things to different people. To some, it is something simply given and received. Those who haven’t been burned by things turning sour. Those who haven’t learned the hard way that some things are best kept close. Those who don’t think twice about leaving the front door unlocked, or loaning their friends money because – after all – everybody is inherently nice.
Steel isn’t one of those people. She hasn’t been what she’d consider nice for quite some time. Things are offered slowly, waiting to see if they try to take advantage in some way. It’s human nature after all, to try to get some kind of advantage over others. It’s simply a way too feel better about yourself. It had even come to the stage where her appearance is something that she guards, happy to fade into vague memory as soon as the other person’s back is turned.
She notices the searching, trying to see – and remember – the details that Elijah was trying to make out. It’s tempting to shrug further into the shadow, maybe burn out the already-dim lamp above the booth. But wasn’t she here to try to form some kind of connection with the Awakened in the city? To try to find others like her, and learn about the dangers that she’s been lucky enough to avoid so far.
After a few moments of silence, she pulls back her hood and lets it settle around her shoulders. Dyed black hair is pulled back into a messy knot. She’s pale, with dark eyes and – currently – no makeup. Who said goths had died out? There’s some scarring just about visible under the hood, around the right side of her neck and jaw. It makes an interesting pattern, though. It almost looks like something exploded.
“I’ve been here a few months now. Some interesting neighbours.”
Elijah
"No kidding, right?" he says. Brows raised for a second as he makes out the details he suspects will fade with time when he looks away or walks out. Only the vague recollection of someone with dark hair and pale skil. He'll remember her eyes like obsidian, as though he needs to remember this for the future. That's what he'll remember, would be able to pick out, the easiest feature to hide from memory and the one that gives the most away.
He exhales, takes a long pull off his beer.
"Where do you want to start on the shitstorm brewing- Avatar storm, technocracy, or vampires?"
Steel
A lip gets turned up at the mentioned of the Avatar storm, but it’s not a topic that’s explored. Not yet, at least. “I guessed you had at least one infestation of rodents. I’ve already been attacked by one of them – Technocracy, that is – in one of your parks. I got away.” There’s a shrug, obviously she got away otherwise she wouldn’t be here right now. I didn’t get a good look at her, it wasn’t up close and personal, but I know it’s a blonde woman. Strong. Dangerous.” She holds the half-empty (not half-full) shot glass between two fingers and runs the tip of the index finger from the other hand along its edge. “I assumed that there would be more of them around. I didn’t know you had leeches, though. Are they a problem?”
The glass is returned to the table and a packet of cigarettes and a lighter are pulled out of a jacket pocket. The packet is tapped on the edge of the table and two common-or-garden cigarettes are pulled out. Steel offers one to Elijah.
Elijah
[Hermetics don't believe in lighters. Forces 2, Prime 1 (maybe2?). diff 5, -1 (I forget my lighter enough that this is practiced)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (5, 5) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Elijah
(wait, that might have been 6 because I'm not sure if that's vulgar without witnesses or not. Rolling paradox just to be safe)
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (3, 9) ( success x 1 )
Elijah
[I'm good]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Elijah
"They've been a problem. The Hermetics are planning a preemptive strike while another group of folks are trying to get ahold of technocratic agents and convince them to, like, take over the upper eichelons of the place and, you know, have less of an agenda to wipe us off the grid."
A pause, and he does take a cigarette, namely because the whole situation does make him want to smoke. He says something to himself, something under his breath half whispered and covered because he could have very well had a lighter there but the people at the table knew damned good and well that he did not and fire just happened. Small, brief, and understated. He inhales and takes the drag, breathes out away from the lady.
There's etiquette for cigarettes, you don't blow them at people unless you're a silver creen diva.
"They were for awhile, but they seem to have gone quiet. I kinda think they're mostly worried about fucking themselves over. Wash park is kind of monster central hunting ground after dark, but I'm of the belief that we shouldn't be scared off from a place and just let stuff
Steel
Steel’s face becomes still when he talks about what may be going on with the Technocrats. She holds her cigarette in her mouth and uses the lighter to ignite the end, taking a slow drag and savouring the feeling of the substances flowing through her body again. “It won’t work. The fuckers can’t be trusted. All they want is us wiped out of existence so that they can complete their control of the sheep. Even if there are some who might want to try, do you seriously think that there are enough to be able to take control of something as big as the Union?” Another long drag, although this time there’s no relief from the craving. It’s already been sated for the moment.
There’s a moment where she feels something changing, that Elijah is Working, and her eyes narrow. She’s still a little unsure, a little untrusting, and wondering If things were about to take a change for the worse. Hell, it wouldn’t have been surprising if they had. But… No, not this time. This time, he was just lighting his cigarette. She settles back against the padding of the seat and smiles again, relaxing. The smiles doesn’t reach far, but there is still some amusement there.
“So how do you know so much about their plans? The Order aren’t exactly known for their caring, sharing nature.” All through, Steel’s voice has been floating somewhere around the mid-Atlantic – maybe originally English or American, but time with the other had distorted it. Her tone, though, isn’t overly warm when it comes to the Order.
Elijah
"I told the guy that I was talking to that in order for diplomatic relations to work you have to actually have something the other person wants. We don't have anything aside from big puppy dog eyes and please don't wipe us off the planet, we promise we won't cause trouble and it's a fucking joke and makes a mockery of having an actual will. We shouldn't fucking bow and scrape for these people, it's bullshit."
He takes a drag, eyes the shot glass for a moment and is tempted, briefly, to take another drink. He waits, though. Doesn't want to end up sounding like Tom Waits before he's thirty. Provided he lives that long; he has a tendency to launch himself headlong into trouble.
"I heard, though, that some whispers say they've made contact with Control past the gauntlet and fuck if I know what Control is but I have no idea how to figure that out without putting myself on a watch list at best," he replies. She asks how he knows, and he shrugs.
"I know people. I'm pretty damn social so it all kinda comes together at a certain point. I don't know the specifics of what's in the works but I know that the people who know there is a plan have their panties in a twist over it."
Steel
Steel nods as Elijah talks about what they have – or, more specifically haven’t – got to offer in negotiation. “About all we can really hope for is survival. There won’t be peace. Just lots more fighting about who’s fucking right.” She takes another sip of the whiskey, following it with another drag of cigarette. The smoke gets blown upwards, towards the worn light fitting. Technically neither of them should be smoking, but this place barely passes hygiene regulations. It really doesn’t care about Clean Air or any of the other crap the hand-wringers come up with.
“And if those are the old leaders they’re back in contact with, it’s going to be harder for any of the fluffy little technocratic care bears to make a stand. Because all of the others that follow orders like good little sheeple will treat them exactly the same way they treat us. Deviants.” At the final word, she raises her glass in a toast and knocks back the remaining booze.
“I’m actually surprised that there’s that much rumour floating around. I’ve worked for the Trads in the past, and the Order have always been the most stuck up their arses about needing to know and operational parameters. At least you can have a decent piss up with a Cultist, but Hermetics always come across like they’ve sat on their wands sideways.”
Elijah
"I get the impression that their old leaders aren't people," he says, as though that makes him a little uncomfortable, as though he has mulled over the prospect and concluded that whomever Control is, or whatever it is, it isn't going to mind operating under antiquated protocols.
At the final word of deviant he does take the shot glass, joining in toast because he'd rather be a deviant than a part of the program any day. He doesn't know how close the sentiment might be, hasn't he always been a little deviant? Hasn't he always been drawn to the fringe?
She's surprised at the rumors floating around, though. "I'm pretty sure I'm the only cog in the rumormill. I heard from a friend, who heard from a guy in the order. That or they were all there in on the same meeting or whatevs. Crack in the flood gate and it's too serious of a matter to involve someone in the proverbial PR team."
"If you can get the Order on your side, you've got a force to be reckoned with but it's a fucking hard sell, even when you're on the inside of it. Plus side, if you bust your ass, people have to shut up and give you the props that you're due, it's pretty much in the manual," he says.
He does laugh though, grins a little mischievous and continues on, "I dunno, my mentor's not an asshole, but he's a lot more interested in the umbra than most people. So, there's that."
Steel
“Oh, that would be even better. You can’t even hope to appeal to human decency if the fuckers at the top aren’t even human. Not that I put a great deal of faith in that one, either.”
There’s the toast. And there’s still plenty of liquid in the bottle. It would be a shame to waste it. She refills the glasses again.
“I imagine they can be very impressive, to the poor sods who face them. And how many of those were wiped out by sheer, bloody-minded arrogance that they were right. Screw the facts, it’s not like they could ever be wrong. But hey, even if they are then there’s an acceptable level of losses in these things. Even more acceptable if you’re not one of them. Bust your ass? Yeah, they’re quiet after you get something over them. While they work out how to stab you in the back and get back the presti…”
The sentence isn’t finished as something that he said finally clicks in the back of her mind. She chuckles, now that how much of her leg she may have been swallowing becomes clear. “Let me guess, you’re about to join the bani Lord of the Celestial Lampshade brigade. My condolences. Use lube, the wand will go in easier.”
Elijah
To his credit, he actually does find it funny. Doesn't make light of the fact that he thinks it's fucking hilarious that he's joining the Celestial Lampshade brigade.
"Eh, I'm pretty easy so I don't expect the wand to give me too much trouble? I managed to swing it that someone buys be dinner first before I get screwed," he takes a drink of his beer to wash the taste out of his mouth so he can actually enjoy the amount of alcohol they're imbibing. "But yes. they haven't failed my ass out yet but apprenticeships are longer than Hell so I'm probably going to be an apprentice until I'm dead."
He makes a little woohoo noise, completely unaware of the fact that his trial period is actually about to expire and he's going to be starting a brand new chapter in his life that looks remarkably similar to the last few chapters, all things said.
"But yeah, historically speaking the Order's done some cool things and then some really shitty things so as a potential member of House Please-don't-hate-us, it kinda makes things hard."
Steel
“See, you’ve got the right idea already. Don’t go in assuming that they’re going to be doing this for your good. Chances are, somehow, it’ll be for their good at least as much as it is for yours. Just make damned sure that the price you’re charging is high enough to make it worthwhile.” Steel takes a final drag, the smouldering tip now almost up to the end of the filter. There’s no ashtray, so she just stubs the butt out on the surface of the table.
“And if they do keep you as an apprentice until you’re old and grey? Scraping and grovelling for the scraps of wisdom that they’re think you’re ready for. Will you still accept that it’s for your own good?”
Elijah
"Until I'm old and grey? Please, it's nice that you think I'll live that long, but I'm calling twenty-five a success story once I get there," she knows how old he is, or a rough approximation. Doesn't know that he plans on living a short, interesting life and leaving a messy corpse when he goes out. Shrugs it off and finishes his beer, still has a bit left on the cigarette.
"That's the thing with Enlightenment and wisdom- it doesn't give two shits about what your rank is or what other people think of you, it's a fundamental Truth. If you're seeking the Truth, and you find it, it doesn't matter what other people think. People that are holding you back based on dogma are killing themselves, and anyone with half a brain can tell, and won't put up with it," he puts the bottle down, "but it works for me, and I don't have to sell you on it because I'm not a fucking Jehova's Witness so I don't feel like prostheletizing to people who really, really don't wanna hear it."
He grins. Playful.
"But! If you are interested, I figure we can swap coppies of The Watchtower or something."
Steel
“Hey, it’s a stressful life. People go grey early. Have you considered the issue of early-onset male pattern baldness? Erectile dysfunction? I hear there are little blue pills you can get to help with that.” There’s another teasing smile. “Let me guess… House Flameball?”
Steel unearths the packet again, tapping out another cigarette and offering another to Elijah. Again, it’s lit the boringly mundane way and she takes a drag.
“Ahh, truth. Now there’s an interesting topic. And one eminently suited to large quantities of alcohol, although there should possible be a spliff or two involved as well. Is there one glorious, almighty truth that we’re all searching for? Or is this the point where you tell me to get off your lawn before you set the dogs on me?”
An evil smiles flicks across Steel’s face as she leans in close to Elijah and whispers, “I could show you my Watchtower but then I’d have to kill you.” Her eyebrows go up, questioningly, as she sits back again and takes another drag.
Elijah
"Ohhh, close but noooo, no flambe for me," she offers him another cigarette and he shakes his head, "thanks, though."
She leans in with that evil smile and he does lean in to meet her, eyes all green and delighted. He meets hers, thinks he will forget about this in the morning. Thinks he'll forget about a lot of things about her, all things said. Should probably play it closer to the chest but she's alone and she needs information. Information keeps people alive and he's not going to have some person whose name he only barely remembers die horribly because he decided to be tight lipped with what was probably going to be common knowledge in a matter of weeks.
She'd show him, but then she'd have to kill him.
"If you do it now I don't have to worry about going bald, then," his lips turn upward, and he's aware of how incredibly close they are while still feeling the distance, "must be worth it, though."
Steel
Steel takes a drag and holds it, resting the lit cigarette across the top of the shot glass. She leans forward again, to whisper. “It’s just one word. Survive.” She exhales, blowing warm, smoky, alcohol-tinged air across Elijah’s ear. She sits back a little, maintaining some of the proximity but giving enough distance to see each other’s eyes. “In the end, it’s all any of us can hope for. How many people do you know, or have heard of, friends of friends who heard someone talking about someone they met at a party, who have achieved the great A that’s supposed to be our great salvation? I’ll take a stab as a big, fat ‘none’.”
“At least you chose a Trad where you can at least have a little fun. Imagine trying to survive eternity without a drink, or a smoke, or other recreationals. What’s the point if there’s no fun?”
She meets Elijah’s eyes, cocking her head questioningly. “Tell me one thing. Who else is operating in the city? Any Disparates, or whatever the fuck they’re supposed to be called now?”
Elijah
"Chantry's got a cabal with two verbenae and a Euthanatos, who're all pretty badass. The Order actually doesn't have that much of a substantial presence here, not a lot of Akashics, couple Mercurial elite, and one fucking badass Cultist who runs with her own posse. We've got a few disparates, but y'know, we're not exactly organized. Everybody's a fuckin' island and nobody wants to play together, we're practically begging oh please, pick us off like flies with this. And I sure as shit am not a leader."
At least he knows that about himself. Doesn't make overtures to the fact that he could be anything other than the guy who knew people. And that's what it came down to, Elijah knew people, or knew people who could get ahold of other people, whose greatest self defense mechanism was having allies who might come together with the expressed purpose of making sure he didn't die horribly.
It's a completely different life than the one Steel has.
"Numbers fluctuate- there's people who blow in and out of town. Used to be a priest around who was apparently a real pillar but he got called away or some shit."
Steel
“Ever considered that might not be a bad thing? Get too big, too powerful, and you become a threat to the best biggest fish in the sea. Whether that’s leeches, or the Tech’s, or just another group who doesn’t want you on their lawn. Staying small can let you slip under the radar and do what you need to do. But there’s nobody specific trying to run the place? No Trad with the city under their thumb? That’s…” Better than I hoped. “Interesting.”
“Anyone Hollow?” This time, there’s just an edge of hope – of need? – creeping into her voice. It’s been bad enough being alone for months, creeping around the edges with no contact with the past or the present because it’s all been too damned risky. But now there’s some kind of contact – however much of it Elijah will actually remember – she really does want to know. Do I have anyone I can trust here?
Elijah
"Nobody wants Denver, so it's basically a playground for now. Keep quiet and you can do basically what you want. Just so long as you're not loud nobody's enforcing curfew."
"Alyssa left about a year ago," he says it like it's an apology. Because he's not numb, he's not clueless. He can tell the edge of hope in there and it's his job to dash it since he has no comrade to offer her. No one who understands precisely where she's coming from there. "So currently I haven't met anyone like that."
Steel
She nods. Nobody to suck up to, or justify things to, or really go around the backs of. No more than the usual mundane authorities and trying not to kick up too much attention by leaving any traces – or lack of traces – that are just a little too strange to be easily explained. A little more time to build some contacts and she should be back in business again. Mundane business, at least. It didn’t really sound like the other Awakened would have a great deal of need for her certain skills.
I haven’t met anyone like that. “Well, bollocks.” Steel’s gaze falls to the graffiti on the table, although she isn’t really reading about KJ and his (or her) claim on the table. “Worth a try. If you happen to hear of any arriving, keep me in mind.”
Elijah
"Do I actually get to have a way to keep in contact with you or are we doing this with dead drops in the park and mentally-encoded post-it notes?" he asks. Her gaze is on the table and he leans back. He's polished off what he came with. Feels comfortable enough but his eyes flick back tot he bar, then the entrances and the exits.
When did he become someone who could fake being professional? When did he become a person who might well be considered an adult and not some kid who was running around trying to make sense of where he fits within the universe? (the minute he stopped kidding himself and knew that he didn't fit anywhere, that was the moment. We digress) but there he was, keeping in contact with someone he doesn't quite know giving her the basic run down.
Steel
“For the moment, as corny as it sounds, this is the best place to find me. I’ll swing by when I can and keep an eye out for you. Unless you particularly like trying to swap briefcases with strangers in the park, but if you hang around here you can at least have a drink while you wait. I don’t have a phone right now and, no offence I’m not telling you where I’m staying. Not until I get to know you better.
“I’ve bumped into a couple of others. One woman with a whole sharp winged thing going on, and another woman with a pulsing, regrowing thing happening around her. Do you know them?”
Elijah
"No offense? But I have zero desire to know where you live," he says with his hands up, "I was thinking more, like, burner phone number or something but I'll make this a hang out. Provided I don't get mugged I think the place is kinda charming."
Charming as any place where there's bloodstains on the floor can be. The last time he was in a place like this he nearly died, learned how to be literally bullet proof afterwards because fuck that. He had no desire to go out in anything other than a blaze of glory. Maybe he should have joined House Flambeau.
"And yeah, I know them. They're not plants, they're real honest-to-goodness Traditionalists. The sharp winged one hates the Technocracy worse than goth girls hate spray tans."
Steel
“I’ll try to say hello, if I bump into them again. I guess there’s no secret handshake or one of us whatever? And watch what you say about goth girls, thank you.” The smile makes a return. “There’s nothing natural about looking like a satsuma.” She sniffs, sitting back and recovering the cigarette from the glass and taking a drag.
Steel taps a fingernail on the bottle. “You want to take this with you?” There’s another questioning cock of the head. “And some help drinking it?”
Elijah
He looks at the bottle, then looks at her. He considers for a moment, but not too long.
"Sure, you know where I live. I think Jenn's gone for the night."
Steel
[Dex+Larceny]
Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 3 )
Steel
“I do.” She stabs this unfinished cigarette out on the table and brushes the remains under the table. “And you have no idea how long it’s been since I got completely rat-arsed with someone.” She grabs one empty shot glass in each hand and, almost like a magic trick, they seem to vanish. The bottle, at least, is paid for and won’t attract any attention from the barman on the way out.
“Lead on, Macduff.” She shuffles out of the booth and nods to the barman on the way through. He barely notices.. The hooker at the bar looks up momentarily, checking out the movement, before returning to rifling around in her purse for a little something extra to get through the night’s demands.
[Right, before I forget again(!), Nightmares]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )
Steel
Of all the gin joints in all of Denver, the address written on the slip of paper that Steel tucked into a book was for this one. The slip of paper with an added message, no meant for Jenn’s attention. The place is somewhere out along East Colfax so, naturally, it’s not the nicest of places. There’s no warm wood panelling, no subtle lighting, no attractive and attentive bar staff with an extensive knowledge on the drinks on offer and the many and varied ways of mixing them. No, this place has a sticky floor, cheap booze, dim lights because of lack of maintenance (the neon sign in the window buzzes annoyingly, once you notice the sound), and a clientele that doesn’t ask many questions.
There are some booths along one wall, padded leather worn and patched in places. Close examination might dig out dried blood in the gaps between padding and wood, but then it’s maybe best not to look too closely at anything here. The tables are worn and battered, an occasional initial or message carved into the wood by a rough and, quite possibly, drunken hand. It’s no artwork.
The place isn’t all that busy at the moment – it’s late afternoon, so there’s a single barman on duty in the vague hope of capturing the early drinkers and getting a little business. A couple of booths are currently occupied. One contains a couple of men – battered and marked by their lives on the rougher end of the street – talking quietly about some piece of business or other. A woman perches on a bar stool, all suspenders and torn fishnets and heels. She’s nursing a gin and tonic, keeping an eye on the clock suspended over the cloudy, unpolished glasses in the racking. A bustier and small (fake) fur shrug maintain her dignity, or what remains of it.
The other booth, though. It’s occupied, but it would be so easy for the eye to simply slip over and move onto more interesting things. Its occupant is wearing a black leather jacket with a hoodie on underneath, hood currently pulled up. There’s a bottle of something cheap and nasty with a couple of glasses, but the drink hasn’t been touched yet.
Steel
[And a little Awareness?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
Elijah
[Do I notice my person here?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Elijah
He comes in soon enough. Jeans and a tee shirt- the vest is left at home. He's got a leather jacket built for riding a motorcycle that has some scrapes on it where it's clear enough that he may have wiped out a couple times. Or, rather, had a close call. Or whoever owned it before him had wiped out. It was hard to tell whether or not Elijah happened to do the damage to his clothes or if he bought them at a thrift store.
It was fifty/fifty really. Some things are worn all to hell and back out of his own abuses and other things aren't. The blond, who one could describe as pretty and not handsome, makes his way to the bar. Buys a beer in a bottle and waits his daamn turn to get something to drink. Looks at the woman in the fishnets and grins at her. Shoots her a wink and a raised drink. Doesn't look like a customer, so she probably doesn't pay him any mind.
There's silence there, while something buzzes along on his senses, some argument in a realm that he has no business understanding. There is a bloodstain on the floor and the owner of said stain doesn't seem terribly happy with the bartender but there's fuck all he can do about it. Elijah just takes a drink. Perches himself on the bar and takes out a shitty Nokia bright to check the time. Didn't bring anything with him that he couldn't necessarily lose.
Twenty bucks in cash. A fake ID. The necklace around his neck that he can't quite get off because it's tied on too tightly and he's just going to have to wait for the damn thing to fall off.
Steel
The woman glances up from her drink and runs her eye up and down Elijah, considering him. She’s no stranger to interested glances, but there is some experience in judging a likely john. Are they going to pay? Are they going to be into anything weird? (Yes or no may well depend on how much.) Do they look like anyone that the grapevine says to watch out for. There is some form of honour amongst those on the wrong side of the border with the law. If they don’t watch out for each other, nobody else will. Hell, the cops would probably be only too happy to scrape up another dead hooker.
But we digress. The woman runs her eye of Elijah but returns to her drink. It’s still a little too early – the after-work crowd are still chained to their desks. This is still her time. And, dammit, mother’s little helper does help to drown the sorrows just a little.
The lone figure in the booth picked a seat which let her watch who was coming and going, tucked back into the corner where the lousy lighting hides her features. She watches Elijah arrive, watches him order the drink, watches as he looks around and tries to find the strange woman who had returned his wallet.
She isn’t massively surprised when his gaze slides past and onwards. She had half expected it. She had something in mind – something to kill two birds with one stone. Life is too short for crap booze. Somewhere, someone had marked her. Someone skilled in more than mere art. No, they were true Artists. The pain and the meaning of the marks gives her the focus she needs when she battles for what she wants.
[Arete: Matter 2: Straw to Gold. Going with coincidental – mislabelled bottles happen after all – so TN5. -1 for time. There’s no rush, after all.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Steel
[And, damn, that's some fine whiskey now. There's also a strangely unflavoured sensation of Working coming from the booth.]
Elijah
He raises his bottle in salute- hard to fuck up something in a bottle afterall, and he turns. Turns and heads in the direction that he felt working ads though this were the indication of a divining rod and there was water none too far away. Elijah headed that way, moved with purpose.
He was no stranger to pretending like he belonged places. No stranger to bars even if he didn't seem like the type that belonged in this one. A mark (and a card shark, but this wasn't the kind of place where people played Texas hold 'em and Elijah expected to keep all his fingers). He settled in, reaches into his pocket and sets his pocketwatch on the table. Open.
The face is cracked and the inlay on the front has his blood worked into the grooves but in certain places it just looks like some maroon inlay for people that didn't want to think about what the Hell that watch has gone through.
"Insert witty reparte here."
Steel
The Effect had both effects that she had wanted. The whiskey, some bottom shelf crud that is only just more drinkable than industrial solvent, improves. The harshness of the contaminants fades, and a warm, smooth burn takes the places of the original harshness. It might seem like a waste to use their gifts to save a little cash on buying a decent bottle to begin with. But there had been the other effect she’d wanted. Something to draw the man towards her.
She unscrews the lid from the bottle and pours out shots into the two glasses. There’s a smile visible when Elijah makes his joke, amused. “Consider an appropriately witty repartee given. So should I call you Jason, or Elijah?” She nudges one of the glasses towards the man and takes the other up herself, lifting it in salute.
Elijah
"Right now, Elijah's the appropriate name. If things change within the next couple of months, though, I'll let you know," serious about that, too. He takes the glass that is offered- never one to turn something down; hospitality, of course- and he raises it. Just enough to meet her gesture. The shot glass is raised, placed on the table for a second and then downed.
It's a ritual, one he's familiar with and the glass is places upside down.
"But then there's the ever present question of what do I call you. You're very Cindarella minus the glass slipper and I kind of picture me roving across the kingdom interviewing random women asking if they found my wallet."
Steel
Steel follows almost the same ritual, taking the shot and returning her glass to the table. Only she returns hers the right way up, ready to refill. She takes the bottle and gestures towards Elijah. The question unspoken: More? She refills her own glass.
“I’m no fairy tale character, and I don’t believe in happy endings. You think she was really happy, getting married to a man she knew nothing about? Always looked down on as a commoner by the others in the court? Ending up as a miserable, twisted version of herself, trying to convince herself that being pushed to the side once her duty of creating the heir and spare had been completed? And don’t get me started on glass slippers. She’d have been better off escaping with the silverware and finding a better life for herself on her own terms.”
There’s another smile, amused at the thought of how that particular fairy tale might have turned out, as she takes a small, slow sip of the whiskey. “But to answer your question, call me Steel.”
Elijah
"So I'm going to guess you live a life free of superheated dancing shoes and people who are trying to cut their own toes off to fit in what was probably a really uncomfortable shoe?" he does raise the glass, pushes it over because of course he would want more. Chases it with the beer he ordered; it takes a lot more to get him drunk these days, and besides this was just making company. Forming connections with people who are all mystery.
She goes by Steel.
"How long have you been in town?" he asks. The basics, really. She knew a fair bit about him but he was building her definition from scratch. Couldn't even place what color her eyes were and he was actively searching.
Steel
Trust means different things to different people. To some, it is something simply given and received. Those who haven’t been burned by things turning sour. Those who haven’t learned the hard way that some things are best kept close. Those who don’t think twice about leaving the front door unlocked, or loaning their friends money because – after all – everybody is inherently nice.
Steel isn’t one of those people. She hasn’t been what she’d consider nice for quite some time. Things are offered slowly, waiting to see if they try to take advantage in some way. It’s human nature after all, to try to get some kind of advantage over others. It’s simply a way too feel better about yourself. It had even come to the stage where her appearance is something that she guards, happy to fade into vague memory as soon as the other person’s back is turned.
She notices the searching, trying to see – and remember – the details that Elijah was trying to make out. It’s tempting to shrug further into the shadow, maybe burn out the already-dim lamp above the booth. But wasn’t she here to try to form some kind of connection with the Awakened in the city? To try to find others like her, and learn about the dangers that she’s been lucky enough to avoid so far.
After a few moments of silence, she pulls back her hood and lets it settle around her shoulders. Dyed black hair is pulled back into a messy knot. She’s pale, with dark eyes and – currently – no makeup. Who said goths had died out? There’s some scarring just about visible under the hood, around the right side of her neck and jaw. It makes an interesting pattern, though. It almost looks like something exploded.
“I’ve been here a few months now. Some interesting neighbours.”
Elijah
"No kidding, right?" he says. Brows raised for a second as he makes out the details he suspects will fade with time when he looks away or walks out. Only the vague recollection of someone with dark hair and pale skil. He'll remember her eyes like obsidian, as though he needs to remember this for the future. That's what he'll remember, would be able to pick out, the easiest feature to hide from memory and the one that gives the most away.
He exhales, takes a long pull off his beer.
"Where do you want to start on the shitstorm brewing- Avatar storm, technocracy, or vampires?"
Steel
A lip gets turned up at the mentioned of the Avatar storm, but it’s not a topic that’s explored. Not yet, at least. “I guessed you had at least one infestation of rodents. I’ve already been attacked by one of them – Technocracy, that is – in one of your parks. I got away.” There’s a shrug, obviously she got away otherwise she wouldn’t be here right now. I didn’t get a good look at her, it wasn’t up close and personal, but I know it’s a blonde woman. Strong. Dangerous.” She holds the half-empty (not half-full) shot glass between two fingers and runs the tip of the index finger from the other hand along its edge. “I assumed that there would be more of them around. I didn’t know you had leeches, though. Are they a problem?”
The glass is returned to the table and a packet of cigarettes and a lighter are pulled out of a jacket pocket. The packet is tapped on the edge of the table and two common-or-garden cigarettes are pulled out. Steel offers one to Elijah.
Elijah
[Hermetics don't believe in lighters. Forces 2, Prime 1 (maybe2?). diff 5, -1 (I forget my lighter enough that this is practiced)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (5, 5) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Elijah
(wait, that might have been 6 because I'm not sure if that's vulgar without witnesses or not. Rolling paradox just to be safe)
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (3, 9) ( success x 1 )
Elijah
[I'm good]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Elijah
"They've been a problem. The Hermetics are planning a preemptive strike while another group of folks are trying to get ahold of technocratic agents and convince them to, like, take over the upper eichelons of the place and, you know, have less of an agenda to wipe us off the grid."
A pause, and he does take a cigarette, namely because the whole situation does make him want to smoke. He says something to himself, something under his breath half whispered and covered because he could have very well had a lighter there but the people at the table knew damned good and well that he did not and fire just happened. Small, brief, and understated. He inhales and takes the drag, breathes out away from the lady.
There's etiquette for cigarettes, you don't blow them at people unless you're a silver creen diva.
"They were for awhile, but they seem to have gone quiet. I kinda think they're mostly worried about fucking themselves over. Wash park is kind of monster central hunting ground after dark, but I'm of the belief that we shouldn't be scared off from a place and just let stuff
Steel
Steel’s face becomes still when he talks about what may be going on with the Technocrats. She holds her cigarette in her mouth and uses the lighter to ignite the end, taking a slow drag and savouring the feeling of the substances flowing through her body again. “It won’t work. The fuckers can’t be trusted. All they want is us wiped out of existence so that they can complete their control of the sheep. Even if there are some who might want to try, do you seriously think that there are enough to be able to take control of something as big as the Union?” Another long drag, although this time there’s no relief from the craving. It’s already been sated for the moment.
There’s a moment where she feels something changing, that Elijah is Working, and her eyes narrow. She’s still a little unsure, a little untrusting, and wondering If things were about to take a change for the worse. Hell, it wouldn’t have been surprising if they had. But… No, not this time. This time, he was just lighting his cigarette. She settles back against the padding of the seat and smiles again, relaxing. The smiles doesn’t reach far, but there is still some amusement there.
“So how do you know so much about their plans? The Order aren’t exactly known for their caring, sharing nature.” All through, Steel’s voice has been floating somewhere around the mid-Atlantic – maybe originally English or American, but time with the other had distorted it. Her tone, though, isn’t overly warm when it comes to the Order.
Elijah
"I told the guy that I was talking to that in order for diplomatic relations to work you have to actually have something the other person wants. We don't have anything aside from big puppy dog eyes and please don't wipe us off the planet, we promise we won't cause trouble and it's a fucking joke and makes a mockery of having an actual will. We shouldn't fucking bow and scrape for these people, it's bullshit."
He takes a drag, eyes the shot glass for a moment and is tempted, briefly, to take another drink. He waits, though. Doesn't want to end up sounding like Tom Waits before he's thirty. Provided he lives that long; he has a tendency to launch himself headlong into trouble.
"I heard, though, that some whispers say they've made contact with Control past the gauntlet and fuck if I know what Control is but I have no idea how to figure that out without putting myself on a watch list at best," he replies. She asks how he knows, and he shrugs.
"I know people. I'm pretty damn social so it all kinda comes together at a certain point. I don't know the specifics of what's in the works but I know that the people who know there is a plan have their panties in a twist over it."
Steel
Steel nods as Elijah talks about what they have – or, more specifically haven’t – got to offer in negotiation. “About all we can really hope for is survival. There won’t be peace. Just lots more fighting about who’s fucking right.” She takes another sip of the whiskey, following it with another drag of cigarette. The smoke gets blown upwards, towards the worn light fitting. Technically neither of them should be smoking, but this place barely passes hygiene regulations. It really doesn’t care about Clean Air or any of the other crap the hand-wringers come up with.
“And if those are the old leaders they’re back in contact with, it’s going to be harder for any of the fluffy little technocratic care bears to make a stand. Because all of the others that follow orders like good little sheeple will treat them exactly the same way they treat us. Deviants.” At the final word, she raises her glass in a toast and knocks back the remaining booze.
“I’m actually surprised that there’s that much rumour floating around. I’ve worked for the Trads in the past, and the Order have always been the most stuck up their arses about needing to know and operational parameters. At least you can have a decent piss up with a Cultist, but Hermetics always come across like they’ve sat on their wands sideways.”
Elijah
"I get the impression that their old leaders aren't people," he says, as though that makes him a little uncomfortable, as though he has mulled over the prospect and concluded that whomever Control is, or whatever it is, it isn't going to mind operating under antiquated protocols.
At the final word of deviant he does take the shot glass, joining in toast because he'd rather be a deviant than a part of the program any day. He doesn't know how close the sentiment might be, hasn't he always been a little deviant? Hasn't he always been drawn to the fringe?
She's surprised at the rumors floating around, though. "I'm pretty sure I'm the only cog in the rumormill. I heard from a friend, who heard from a guy in the order. That or they were all there in on the same meeting or whatevs. Crack in the flood gate and it's too serious of a matter to involve someone in the proverbial PR team."
"If you can get the Order on your side, you've got a force to be reckoned with but it's a fucking hard sell, even when you're on the inside of it. Plus side, if you bust your ass, people have to shut up and give you the props that you're due, it's pretty much in the manual," he says.
He does laugh though, grins a little mischievous and continues on, "I dunno, my mentor's not an asshole, but he's a lot more interested in the umbra than most people. So, there's that."
Steel
“Oh, that would be even better. You can’t even hope to appeal to human decency if the fuckers at the top aren’t even human. Not that I put a great deal of faith in that one, either.”
There’s the toast. And there’s still plenty of liquid in the bottle. It would be a shame to waste it. She refills the glasses again.
“I imagine they can be very impressive, to the poor sods who face them. And how many of those were wiped out by sheer, bloody-minded arrogance that they were right. Screw the facts, it’s not like they could ever be wrong. But hey, even if they are then there’s an acceptable level of losses in these things. Even more acceptable if you’re not one of them. Bust your ass? Yeah, they’re quiet after you get something over them. While they work out how to stab you in the back and get back the presti…”
The sentence isn’t finished as something that he said finally clicks in the back of her mind. She chuckles, now that how much of her leg she may have been swallowing becomes clear. “Let me guess, you’re about to join the bani Lord of the Celestial Lampshade brigade. My condolences. Use lube, the wand will go in easier.”
Elijah
To his credit, he actually does find it funny. Doesn't make light of the fact that he thinks it's fucking hilarious that he's joining the Celestial Lampshade brigade.
"Eh, I'm pretty easy so I don't expect the wand to give me too much trouble? I managed to swing it that someone buys be dinner first before I get screwed," he takes a drink of his beer to wash the taste out of his mouth so he can actually enjoy the amount of alcohol they're imbibing. "But yes. they haven't failed my ass out yet but apprenticeships are longer than Hell so I'm probably going to be an apprentice until I'm dead."
He makes a little woohoo noise, completely unaware of the fact that his trial period is actually about to expire and he's going to be starting a brand new chapter in his life that looks remarkably similar to the last few chapters, all things said.
"But yeah, historically speaking the Order's done some cool things and then some really shitty things so as a potential member of House Please-don't-hate-us, it kinda makes things hard."
Steel
“See, you’ve got the right idea already. Don’t go in assuming that they’re going to be doing this for your good. Chances are, somehow, it’ll be for their good at least as much as it is for yours. Just make damned sure that the price you’re charging is high enough to make it worthwhile.” Steel takes a final drag, the smouldering tip now almost up to the end of the filter. There’s no ashtray, so she just stubs the butt out on the surface of the table.
“And if they do keep you as an apprentice until you’re old and grey? Scraping and grovelling for the scraps of wisdom that they’re think you’re ready for. Will you still accept that it’s for your own good?”
Elijah
"Until I'm old and grey? Please, it's nice that you think I'll live that long, but I'm calling twenty-five a success story once I get there," she knows how old he is, or a rough approximation. Doesn't know that he plans on living a short, interesting life and leaving a messy corpse when he goes out. Shrugs it off and finishes his beer, still has a bit left on the cigarette.
"That's the thing with Enlightenment and wisdom- it doesn't give two shits about what your rank is or what other people think of you, it's a fundamental Truth. If you're seeking the Truth, and you find it, it doesn't matter what other people think. People that are holding you back based on dogma are killing themselves, and anyone with half a brain can tell, and won't put up with it," he puts the bottle down, "but it works for me, and I don't have to sell you on it because I'm not a fucking Jehova's Witness so I don't feel like prostheletizing to people who really, really don't wanna hear it."
He grins. Playful.
"But! If you are interested, I figure we can swap coppies of The Watchtower or something."
Steel
“Hey, it’s a stressful life. People go grey early. Have you considered the issue of early-onset male pattern baldness? Erectile dysfunction? I hear there are little blue pills you can get to help with that.” There’s another teasing smile. “Let me guess… House Flameball?”
Steel unearths the packet again, tapping out another cigarette and offering another to Elijah. Again, it’s lit the boringly mundane way and she takes a drag.
“Ahh, truth. Now there’s an interesting topic. And one eminently suited to large quantities of alcohol, although there should possible be a spliff or two involved as well. Is there one glorious, almighty truth that we’re all searching for? Or is this the point where you tell me to get off your lawn before you set the dogs on me?”
An evil smiles flicks across Steel’s face as she leans in close to Elijah and whispers, “I could show you my Watchtower but then I’d have to kill you.” Her eyebrows go up, questioningly, as she sits back again and takes another drag.
Elijah
"Ohhh, close but noooo, no flambe for me," she offers him another cigarette and he shakes his head, "thanks, though."
She leans in with that evil smile and he does lean in to meet her, eyes all green and delighted. He meets hers, thinks he will forget about this in the morning. Thinks he'll forget about a lot of things about her, all things said. Should probably play it closer to the chest but she's alone and she needs information. Information keeps people alive and he's not going to have some person whose name he only barely remembers die horribly because he decided to be tight lipped with what was probably going to be common knowledge in a matter of weeks.
She'd show him, but then she'd have to kill him.
"If you do it now I don't have to worry about going bald, then," his lips turn upward, and he's aware of how incredibly close they are while still feeling the distance, "must be worth it, though."
Steel
Steel takes a drag and holds it, resting the lit cigarette across the top of the shot glass. She leans forward again, to whisper. “It’s just one word. Survive.” She exhales, blowing warm, smoky, alcohol-tinged air across Elijah’s ear. She sits back a little, maintaining some of the proximity but giving enough distance to see each other’s eyes. “In the end, it’s all any of us can hope for. How many people do you know, or have heard of, friends of friends who heard someone talking about someone they met at a party, who have achieved the great A that’s supposed to be our great salvation? I’ll take a stab as a big, fat ‘none’.”
“At least you chose a Trad where you can at least have a little fun. Imagine trying to survive eternity without a drink, or a smoke, or other recreationals. What’s the point if there’s no fun?”
She meets Elijah’s eyes, cocking her head questioningly. “Tell me one thing. Who else is operating in the city? Any Disparates, or whatever the fuck they’re supposed to be called now?”
Elijah
"Chantry's got a cabal with two verbenae and a Euthanatos, who're all pretty badass. The Order actually doesn't have that much of a substantial presence here, not a lot of Akashics, couple Mercurial elite, and one fucking badass Cultist who runs with her own posse. We've got a few disparates, but y'know, we're not exactly organized. Everybody's a fuckin' island and nobody wants to play together, we're practically begging oh please, pick us off like flies with this. And I sure as shit am not a leader."
At least he knows that about himself. Doesn't make overtures to the fact that he could be anything other than the guy who knew people. And that's what it came down to, Elijah knew people, or knew people who could get ahold of other people, whose greatest self defense mechanism was having allies who might come together with the expressed purpose of making sure he didn't die horribly.
It's a completely different life than the one Steel has.
"Numbers fluctuate- there's people who blow in and out of town. Used to be a priest around who was apparently a real pillar but he got called away or some shit."
Steel
“Ever considered that might not be a bad thing? Get too big, too powerful, and you become a threat to the best biggest fish in the sea. Whether that’s leeches, or the Tech’s, or just another group who doesn’t want you on their lawn. Staying small can let you slip under the radar and do what you need to do. But there’s nobody specific trying to run the place? No Trad with the city under their thumb? That’s…” Better than I hoped. “Interesting.”
“Anyone Hollow?” This time, there’s just an edge of hope – of need? – creeping into her voice. It’s been bad enough being alone for months, creeping around the edges with no contact with the past or the present because it’s all been too damned risky. But now there’s some kind of contact – however much of it Elijah will actually remember – she really does want to know. Do I have anyone I can trust here?
Elijah
"Nobody wants Denver, so it's basically a playground for now. Keep quiet and you can do basically what you want. Just so long as you're not loud nobody's enforcing curfew."
"Alyssa left about a year ago," he says it like it's an apology. Because he's not numb, he's not clueless. He can tell the edge of hope in there and it's his job to dash it since he has no comrade to offer her. No one who understands precisely where she's coming from there. "So currently I haven't met anyone like that."
Steel
She nods. Nobody to suck up to, or justify things to, or really go around the backs of. No more than the usual mundane authorities and trying not to kick up too much attention by leaving any traces – or lack of traces – that are just a little too strange to be easily explained. A little more time to build some contacts and she should be back in business again. Mundane business, at least. It didn’t really sound like the other Awakened would have a great deal of need for her certain skills.
I haven’t met anyone like that. “Well, bollocks.” Steel’s gaze falls to the graffiti on the table, although she isn’t really reading about KJ and his (or her) claim on the table. “Worth a try. If you happen to hear of any arriving, keep me in mind.”
Elijah
"Do I actually get to have a way to keep in contact with you or are we doing this with dead drops in the park and mentally-encoded post-it notes?" he asks. Her gaze is on the table and he leans back. He's polished off what he came with. Feels comfortable enough but his eyes flick back tot he bar, then the entrances and the exits.
When did he become someone who could fake being professional? When did he become a person who might well be considered an adult and not some kid who was running around trying to make sense of where he fits within the universe? (the minute he stopped kidding himself and knew that he didn't fit anywhere, that was the moment. We digress) but there he was, keeping in contact with someone he doesn't quite know giving her the basic run down.
Steel
“For the moment, as corny as it sounds, this is the best place to find me. I’ll swing by when I can and keep an eye out for you. Unless you particularly like trying to swap briefcases with strangers in the park, but if you hang around here you can at least have a drink while you wait. I don’t have a phone right now and, no offence I’m not telling you where I’m staying. Not until I get to know you better.
“I’ve bumped into a couple of others. One woman with a whole sharp winged thing going on, and another woman with a pulsing, regrowing thing happening around her. Do you know them?”
Elijah
"No offense? But I have zero desire to know where you live," he says with his hands up, "I was thinking more, like, burner phone number or something but I'll make this a hang out. Provided I don't get mugged I think the place is kinda charming."
Charming as any place where there's bloodstains on the floor can be. The last time he was in a place like this he nearly died, learned how to be literally bullet proof afterwards because fuck that. He had no desire to go out in anything other than a blaze of glory. Maybe he should have joined House Flambeau.
"And yeah, I know them. They're not plants, they're real honest-to-goodness Traditionalists. The sharp winged one hates the Technocracy worse than goth girls hate spray tans."
Steel
“I’ll try to say hello, if I bump into them again. I guess there’s no secret handshake or one of us whatever? And watch what you say about goth girls, thank you.” The smile makes a return. “There’s nothing natural about looking like a satsuma.” She sniffs, sitting back and recovering the cigarette from the glass and taking a drag.
Steel taps a fingernail on the bottle. “You want to take this with you?” There’s another questioning cock of the head. “And some help drinking it?”
Elijah
He looks at the bottle, then looks at her. He considers for a moment, but not too long.
"Sure, you know where I live. I think Jenn's gone for the night."
Steel
[Dex+Larceny]
Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 3 )
Steel
“I do.” She stabs this unfinished cigarette out on the table and brushes the remains under the table. “And you have no idea how long it’s been since I got completely rat-arsed with someone.” She grabs one empty shot glass in each hand and, almost like a magic trick, they seem to vanish. The bottle, at least, is paid for and won’t attract any attention from the barman on the way out.
“Lead on, Macduff.” She shuffles out of the booth and nods to the barman on the way through. He barely notices.. The hooker at the bar looks up momentarily, checking out the movement, before returning to rifling around in her purse for a little something extra to get through the night’s demands.
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