Whitney the "Forensic Science Major"

Grace Evans
Today, Grace was walking back home the long way.

Most people would do so because they wanted to get more fresh air, or walk by somewhere nicer, or just see where that other bend in the road would take them.

Grace, however, got lost. On the campus she's been in for 5 years. With a phone in her pocket that can GPS with the best of them.

Thus is the danger of walking while thinking. You look up, and there's the interstate, and how did it get there?

So, she was now passing by the big gray train station on Colfax instead of going the safer, easier way through campus. This time, paying some freaking attention.

[Magedar Awareness!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

Whitney Terrell
Don't even ask what the other girl is doing here. Grace hasn't seen her around before though she looks as if she could be a student at her school. Hasn't had her eyes open very long but can pick up the girl's resonance. It isn't a subtle thing. Feels like a strong cool breeze in the morning that has as good a chance as reinvigorating one's spirit as it does of toppling a tree later.

And she's sitting on a bench outside with a patchwork knapsack parked between her ankles, knees together but her boots a good shoulder-width apart. She wears short-short khaki shorts and a hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, the ends of her sun-bleached hair spilling out from beneath it. Her fingernails are all painted blue but for the index fingers, which are yellow.

She has her cellphone out and is tapping out what looks to be a text message.

[gogo gadget magedar!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )

Grace Evans
The girl should also be able to pick up on Grace -- the feeling of something sliding out from under her feet, perhaps, that slipping shift like a fault.

Grace does pick up on the girl, the gust of her, though there is no actual wind other than the passing of vehicles today. And that put a stutter in her step. She's never felt this wind.

She looked around a bit warily, in her students' uniform of jeans, tee and laptop bag. Today's selection: a black shirt with a graphic design of a mermaid riding a T-Rex riding a motorcycle in space with the caption "Nothing is Unpossible!"

Whitney Terrell
She looks up from her phone as if she'd felt the ground irking underneath her. No way of telling by first glance that the girl comes from a part of the country where people yawn at earthquakes that don't cause major structural damage and power outages. It isn't the shift but the fact that it comes from a person and not from the earth that grabs her attention.

Up from her phone and right to the older woman. Whitney's eyes are blue in this light and she is one of those rare creatures that looks her age. Nobody tends to guess she has greater or fewer than nineteen years behind her.

"Whoa," she says and laughs a bit as she makes eye contact with the stranger. Doesn't point out her resonance though. That not be prudent. She lifts her brows and jerks her chin towards her wardrobe though. "I like your shirt."

Grace Evans
"Oh, ha, thanks," she says in response, her hand coming up to her hair, a bit uncomfortable perhaps. "I like your nails."

Oh come on, I like your nails? Really?

"So, are you new around here? I haven't seen you before. Freshman?" And the talking around things began, as Grace narrowed the space between them, approaching the bench.

Whitney Terrell
The girl laughs a charmed teeth-bearing laugh at the volley and pushes back her sweatshirt hood so that Grace can see who it is she's talking to. It isn't dark but Whitney had chosen a bench in the shade and around them are other people milling around waiting for this bus or that train to arrive. Smoke hung around the shelters and diesel fumes in the air.

Freshman?

"Hah. No, I'm like... a sophomore. I guess. I'm also kind of on academic probation."

Grace Evans
"Ohh... well, that sucks," Grace said, whumphing into a seat on the other side of the bench. Close enough that nobody would try to sit between them, but not too close.

"Well, you know, not everybody really likes the whole college thing. But I know the uni has tons of great tutoring programs, if you... Are even talking about that."

Her eyes wandered up to the sky, unsure. Sometimes, it was hard to tell if someone was talking about one world or the other.

Whitney Terrell
She gives the other Willworker time to contemplate the atmosphere and then smoothes her lips into a smile and sticks out her right hand. On the fourth finger sits a claddagh ring with the apex pointed outward. The wrist bears a rainbow macramé bracelet.

"Whitney," she says. "I was totally talking about that."

Grace Evans
Right hands go with right hands. Grace had to think about it a split second, before performing the bizarre North American Handshake Ritual for like, the 30th time this month. It's like people have to touch you before they're sure you exist, or before they can be sure they've met you, or something like that.
The handshake is not the most normal or confident ones Whitney has experienced.

"I'm Grace, and, well, listen, if you don't mind my asking, what is it that you seem to have trouble with in school? Maybe I can help?"

Whitney Terrell
"Uh..."

Nothing about Whitney's hand is out of the ordinary. Her fingers are slim and without callouses though they are not soft. She works with her hands but not in a way that would pigeonhole her as a musician or a carpenter or a markswoman. They are not cold and they are not bony.

She seems assured of herself and the ritual. That's until Grace goes back to the topic around which they circle like uncertain dancers.

"The trouble is my professor is sort of... not... like... living. Anymore."

Grace Evans
"Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. That sounds terrible," her eyes take that turn of concern and I-feel-for-you-but-really-can't.

"I guess not something I can fix with a little math booster, huh," she wavered, looked back up to contemplate the clouds.

Whitney Terrell
"I mean... I like, suck at math. It couldn't hurt."

When Grace looks up at the sky again she doesn't do anything to intentionally interrupt her. The other girl pulls her feet up onto the bench to sit cross-legged and fiddles with a lace.

"You're the first freshman I've met here. Whose classes are you taking?"

Grace Evans
Well, if she thought about it, she'd learned the most from Gadfly, as unprofessor-like as that one was. Their relationship was rather as informal as it got. Gadfly and Razor are not exactly normal names though.

"Um... you could say I'm taking some online classes," she said, after some thought.

"Not really classes, I guess, now that I think about it..."

Whitney Terrell
"Like..."

Whitney widens her eyes as she wracks her brain for the proper terminology for this euphemism. She's hanging out by the UC Denver campus but it isn't as if they ran into each other in the student union coffeehouse. They're at a train station.

"A peer review? Seminar? Thing?"

Yeah. If she's stepped foot on a campus to do anything more intellectually stimulating than crash a fraternity party it would surprise plenty of people.

Grace Evans
"Yeah, yeah, something like that. A study group."

Phew.

"So... how did you guess I'm a freshman? Did I do something wrong..."

Whitney Terrell
"Study group," she says in the mystified tone of one who has just been reminded of a word they ought to recognize from a mile away. In awe of her own absentmindedness.

Better to act stupid so people don't ask you for homework help than to let slip a correct answer to a difficult question in the middle of trig class and have all the mouth-breathers in class crowding you for after-school tutoring at lunch, that's what Whitney always says.

Grace asks if she did something wrong and the younger girl's eyebrows lift up on her head. She looks back at her for the first time since the handshake. Whatever expression nearly races across her face is yanked back at the last moment and she laughs.

"You're like, wearing a shirt with a T-rex riding a rocket ship." That's not an answer. "Also, you look kinda lost and don't seem like a total weirdo yet. Studying does that to you. Wait until you see a junior in the wild for the first time. They walk in the room and like, everybody is like Whoa, what the hell, man?"

Grace Evans
She looked down at her shirt. Huh. Nothing wrong there. "I thought you liked it."

"And I'm perfectly weird," she said, all fake ego-hurt, complete with ridiculous upturned chin.

Whitney Terrell
Which gets a genuine peal of laughter out of Whitney. She doesn't topple off the bench or anything but she does startle someone who walked too close to them and wasn't expecting to hear something so unbridled in this place. It gets Whitney a glower. Kids these days.

"You totally are," she says after a moment. There there. "You're gonna get weirder though. Trust me. I know things sometimes."

Grace Evans
"Ahh. I guess, one of those things. Things I didn't know."

She stretched out her arms on the back of the bench, "I don't know a lot of things, actually."

"I guess it would make one a little odd.  -er."

Whitney Terrell
She rakes her left hand through her hair and then decides she wants it pulled back off her neck. Slips a hair-tie from that wrist and starts French-braiding it out of want for something to do with her hands. One boot then the other finds the ground again.

"Kinda, yeah. So, like..." She wrinkles up her nose and makes a slight miscalculation with her braiding that will have strands falling loose around her temple later. Oops. She keeps going. "Have you decided on a major yet?"

Grace Evans
"Yes. Computer science," she says, and hoped the other knew what she meant by that. "Internet protocols, simulations, that kinda stuff. What about yourself?"

Yeah, of course, internet protocols... Considering her activities lately, bending them backwards and breaking in and... But even the most mundane of that kind of thing must be kept under wraps.

The thought of it lent a bit of a twitch to her face. Happy, and yet scared to get caught.

Whitney Terrell
Computer science.

The girl tries not to break out into a huge self-congratulatory grin as the blossoming new technowitch reveals herself to be just what she thought she might be. Could as just as well have been a Dreamspeaker or an Orphan but no no no. That shirt and that haircut and that crack about math tutoring.

And of course it comes back on her. Everything comes back on itself eventually. Whitney doesn't falter though. Her hands aren't particularly deft but she has braided her own hair before and with some persistence she gets it all secured and ties it off with the band.

"Uh... forensic science. I think. It's not like I can, like, change it at this point. You know?"

Grace Evans
"I think I get that part... the not changing it bit. I don't think I could just turn away from my major either. But do you not like it?"

Forensic science. Truth be told, Grace doesn't know much about the other Traditions. She knows more about the Ahl-i-Batin than Choristers, even. She's heard the word Euthanatos before, and that is about it.

So, a guess then, that the girl is with the ones of the good death, whatever that really means. Forensic science. Grace looked the girl over a bit, and well... She doesn't look like 'death'.

Whitney Terrell
"I mean, it makes sense, I guess. And it's not like I'm in mortuary science or something. Those guys are messed up."

But. It's unspoken and she does not want to speak at too great a depth for the level at which they sit. Anyone could walk by and overhear them. Overhearing them now a bystander would think them ordinary students. Their charade is working like gangbusters.

"But there are so many other majors out there. Everything's so, like, cool. It sucks that you have to be like Yeah this is the one thing I want to do for the rest of my life when you're so young and don't know, like. Anything. You know?"

Grace Evans
For the first time today, Grace was truly sad for the girl. Thinking back on her own life, there was never any doubt that she loved computers, loved knowing everything about them. Her real major was computer science, just as her 'other' major.

It hadn't even occurred to her that she might, someday, want to be different.

"What would you like to study, if you had the choice?"

Whitney Terrell
Part of her looks like she wants to say that she doesn't have a choice but even in the midst of knowing Grace pities her she would argue in opposition to that. Whitney doesn't have to stay where she is.

With no one to impress and no one to answer to any more the only thing she really has to fear is something she can't tell Grace about because it would violate a number of Tradition codes and bring the swinging scythe of justice down upon her head. Or, more like it, the back of her neck.

"I kind of just study whatever I wanna study and as long as I fulfill the major requirements nobody really cares. It's not that bad. Physics is pretty neat. So's biology. Just... science, really. And I've studied history, too, a bit, just, like... because I like it."

Grace Evans
"Oooh, you like science? I like science! We can talk physics any time you want, girl. And you know, I think that's really the way to look at it. You don't have to like... be the major. Go talk to people and learn about all kinds of stuff. I think. Anyway."

Her eyes again go wandering. She doesn't really know if that's a thing they do or not. There's something fundamental there in her mindset, that she's sure is never going to change... But she has gone around and talked with the others, learned a bit from the others, from their perspectives. It's not all that disjoint.

Whitney Terrell
"That's like, so Zen-wanderer."

Would you look at that: the apprentice teaching an initiate some things. Or: one thing. Or at least giving her back some semblance of the hope and perspective that is easy to lose when one is young and relatively unsupervised. She doesn't look like she's sleeping in this train station, at least. Someone out there has to give half a damn what she does during the day.

"You wanna talk physics over, like, food? I don't know what's good around here."

Grace Evans
Grace grins the grin of somebody about to talk about black hole radiation and quasi-particles, and it is... a little scary. "I know all the best places around here, let's hit one of em!"

And we can talk about SCIENCE!

"What are you in the mood for?"

Whitney Terrell
Whitney sweeps up the bag she'd left on the ground and slings it over her torso and considers the question for all of two seconds before answering.

"I swear I haven't seen a pho restaurant since I left Cali. Are there any around here?"

A blond girl who says "like" a lot who doesn't pretend to stick her finger down her throat at the thought of physics and actually knows how to pronounce the word 'pho.' What else could Grace possibly encounter on her journey towards enlightenment?