Sid's Science

Sid
It was easier getting Grace to install Ginger on Sid's phone.  The Orphan was able to take that phone to wherever the Virtual Adept apprentice was and let her do her thing.  Not that Sid is a stranger to installing software or putting together hardware - she would consider herself a little low on the intermediate level of technology - but it was obvious from the day they met at Fireside that this was an area where Grace would shine.

That was then, this is now.  Now, Sid has invited Grace over to her home, a feat the newbie Mage might not realize for the sort of big-ish deal that it is.  It took crisis after crisis to get her to allow two of her closest friends inside.  So far, on the scale of weird shit that happens in Denver, Sid and Grace's involvement with crazy things has been mostly limited to that movie night.

The house itself is not that large and not that ambitious.  It sits on a small plot in a nice little neighborhood only a few blocks from the DU campus.  The front yard is a little brownish, even after all those rains, with not much by way of floral decoration.  A couple steps take one up to the front porch, which is just large enough for a bench and a small table.  The front door is painted white, that paint still solid and crisp and new from a renovation and subsequent care.  It's a nice little place, all things considered.  Whether Grace rings the doorbell or knocks on that white door, it's not long before the door swings open to reveal the tall redhead known to all of them as Sid Rhodes, Orphan of Mages, of questionable level of ability, office assistant and student at Colorado University: Denver.

"Hey," she greets, and steps back to allow Grace inside.  The living room is nice and neat and tidy - all the shared living spaces are.  There's a small closet for coats just behind Sid, a very large flat panel television on an entertainment chest, an L-shaped couch, and several bookshelves full of a wide variety of books and movies.  The colors are dark and brown and red; Sid's roommate picked them.  She, herself, is dressed in jeans and a plain grey t-shirt, her feet bare, her hair pulled to the nape of her neck.  "Shoes go there," she says, pointing to the rack for that purpose.  And then, as though she's only suddenly remembered her manners, she offers a slight smile.  "Thanks for coming.  Do you want something to drink?"  The words are softly spoken and genuine enough, but have the cadence of a memorized speech.

Grace
[Per+Awareness -- Sensing Sid?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace
Grace lives across the street from the DU campus, so she walks the short way to Sid's house. As she walks, she can feel the unmistakable desperate glee in the air that is Sid's signature on the world. It's not the worst experience, almost makes one appreciate Sid's presence a bit more than others, though that's not exactly fair. It's not like they get to choose.

Grace, for example, feels like the shifting of earth beneath your feet, the world suddenly lurching. It's faint, but there, if it's noticed.

The house is quaint, the kind of house Grace might go for, if she were into houses. And she climbs the stairs, knocks, waits, until Sid arrives and opens the door. Grace is wearing a jeans, sneakers, and a gray zip-up turtleneck jacket that looks exceptionally new -- rare for her. All her clothes are usually a bit rough around the edges.

She gives Sid a weird little handwave in the air as a greeting and steps inside. "Hey, Sid, look, we match!" she says, pointing at their respective outfits with a grin.

Shoes go... on a rack, apparently, and Grace sits down on the floor immediately to remove hers, if that is indeed the case No, she doesn't sit in the chair by the door, she goes and sits on the floor. Yes. Shoes thus offed, she quickly stands again, and places them on the rack.

"Oh, I'm fine! Really," she says, in response to the drink offer.

Sid
Their outfits do match, and for that Grace gets a slight widening of that smile.  It broadens and warms a little as she relaxes.  They are both a bit awkward, though there was a time when Sid was better at this whole...social thing.  Those days are in the past, though.  Grace sitting on the floor to remove her shoes gets a brief widening of dark eyes, but no words, no judgemental looks.  They all have their quirks.  If anything, Sid is very glad that that floor is kept relatively clean.  It's hard wood, though, so it's easy.  Sid doesn't offer to hug her, though despite her awkwardness it may seem like she wants to (she does).  She likes Grace, and that means she wants to hug her, but she's also almost hyperaware of the reactions and responses of others.  She knows that a hug is probably something Grace would put up with, but wouldn't enjoy.  Believe it or not, Sid cares about others' enjoyment almost more than she cares about her own.

Grace says she's fine, and Sid doesn't push her.  Instead, she offers her hands to Grace when she's gotten her shoes off.  If taken, Grace will notice that Sid's hands are warmer than most.  They feel a bit like stones heated before cheery little fire, comforting and comfortable.  If not taken, well, Grace will have to wait to find that out (unless they've held hands before, in which case Sid's narrator has forgotten).

The house on the inside is cozy and sleek.  It has the feel of a masculine owner more than a feminine, if Grace has an eye for that sort of thing.  The magazines spread haphazardly across the coffee and side tables (both matching in stain and style) are a weird mix of pop culture and science.

"My room's downstairs," she says as she turns to lead the way past a support beam and to a door on the left.  "Did you, ah, did you find the place okay?" she asks as she swings the basement door open and heads down.  The basement is more sparsely furnished than the main level.  That's because it's Sid's, all hers, hers to live in and hers to furnish, and for a long time she was broker than anyone else she knew by a long shot.  There's a rug and some bean bag chairs, a door to her bathroom and a door into her room.  She pauses at the bottom of the stairs and waits to make sure she didn't zoom off without her guest.

Grace
For all Grace is annoyed by touch, she doesn't turn down the offer of help up. There's a purpose to that, not some weird ritualistic human touchy-feely thing like handshakes. Grace's hands, in contrast, feel cold as she somewhat clumsily grabs at Sid's and helps herself up with a little "Thanks".

"I found it fine. I know the area, I just live a couple blocks from here. Strange, we live so close, huh? Well, okay, maybe not so strange, we both go to the campus nearly every day... But, you know!"

Grace dutifully follows Sid down to the basement, down to a place that looks remarkably like Grace's own sparse apartment. These two are like peas in a pod, right down to the matching outfits and nearly-matching social skills.

She closes the basement door behind her, and swings the laptop bag off her back. "So yeah... we safe to talk business now?"

Sid
"I met someone recently who said the rule for us was if we didn't want to be found, we wouldn't be."  It's only the second time she's told someone about her run-in at DMNS.  She's oddly protective of that information.  Luke didn't tell her she could spread his information around, after all.  "I don't think it's true for all of us, but.  I think it's...it's somehow both really easy to cross paths, and really easy to miss people.  Even when they're right under your nose."

Even with resonance, even with magic, even with Nephandi running around, or demon gate movies, or zombie dogs.  Sometimes people just get missed.

Grace asks if they're safe to talk business, and Sid glances past her up to the basement, then up at the ceiling.  After a moment she nods once.  "I'll get my tablet," she says, and for a moment she disappears into that bedroom, which is a little cozier than the main basement room.  Sid has her priorities.

"I have a desktop, too," she says, her voice growing louder as she leaves her room, closing the door gently behind her more out of habit than any desire for Grace to keep from seeing inside.  She's holding in one hand an android tablet she bought secondhand from someone at work.  It's not the biggest or the thinnest, but it gets the job done.  "I don't know, if I have this and my phone, do you think I'd need that many backups?"  As comfortable as Sid is becoming in this life of hers, she will always, always be paranoid about one thing or another.

She glances around and realizes that this room still does not have proper seating.  "Ah."  Looking back to Grace, she asks, a touch sheepish, "are the bean bags okay?"

Grace
"Sid, I certainly didn't want to be found by a demon movie... thing," Grace says, "But it certainly found me. I think a little caution is certainly warranted. You would too, or you wouldn't be looking to spread the love of Ginger to all your things."

Grace sidles over to the rug and beanbag chairs, plopping down in one like it's hers. The laptop bag is placed gently on the floor, and she pulls the equipment out while Sid's grabbing her tablet. "Oooh, Android. This will be good," she mutters to herself, when Sid procures it.

"It's not a problem for me to install it on everything. I don't mind," she says, squishing into her beanbag. "The bean bags are fantastic. I love it!"

Grace connects a thin cable to the tablet and powers it on. The other end goes to the laptop, and she taps out a few commands. "Other people's devices have been a little more difficult. iPhones require a bit of tinkering to bypass their ridiculous policies, older phones can be tricky to set up too. But this is easy. Your desktop should be super easy too." She says all this stuff while staring intently at the screen, almost like Sid isn't there, and she's talking more to the laptop...

"Okay! Done! Where's the other machine?"

Sid
Sid can't help it, she breathes out something that sounds like a laugh.  "I don't know anyone who would want to be found by a demon gate movie.  I meant more...us.  You and me.  Others like us.  Denver was really quiet when I got here.  I thought..." but she shakes her head, never mind that.  "But there are more of us than I thought there were."  There always are, her tone seems to say.

She breathes out with relief when Grace says she can install Ginger into everything.  Just the three things will do for now, but it's good to know for the future.  Her brows lift when Grace mutters, but she doesn't interrupt.  Android devices are still very new to her, but Sid never had much fondness for Apple products.
"Good thing I got the new phone," she says, which has to be true.  Her old one was a flip phone she picked up in 2010 and a cheap one at that, all battered and banged around from all those years of use.  "I like Android, it's easier to, ah, customize.  Oh, the computer.  It's...well it was going to be new when I started it," she says, and again she offers Grace her hand to help her up once she's finished installing to the tablet.  "In here," she says, going to that bedroom door and opening it again.  There are some shelves, the top one of which is covered in potted plants that are bright green and blossoming despite the fact that the window into Sid's room is high up on the wall, tiny, and on the opposite side of the room.  There's furniture in this room, though it's an ecclectic assortment of things found on the side of the road or bought at yard sales or what have you.  The desk is cluttered with papers and a small pile of text books and notebooks.  The bookshelves are mostly empty.  The covers of the bed are fairly new and fairly nice.  There are no personal effects, though, no little knicknacks or pictures or anything, the sort of things that make a place as lived in.  The only way Grace can tell that this is Sid's room is she can feel it, can feel Sid's resonance caught and held in the walls and the old fabric of her desk chair.  She jiggles the mouse and brings her computer to life.  And then she steps back.

Sid's computer is better than decent, though far from top of the line.  She put it together herself with parts she purchased over several months.

Grace
"Androids are fairly easy to upgrade with your own stuff if you want. And I want. So I do," Grace grins.
"Oh hey, nice plants. I bought myself a little ivy recently. Her name's Chloe," Grace says, as she walks into the room, carrying her laptop. She slides into the (happy, oh so happy) desk chair and sets the laptop up at the desk.

Someone else recently visited Grace's apartment and asked her if she'd just just moved in -- her place is just that bare. In a way, Sid's mishmashed basement feels like home.

Again, the cable gets attached, and Grace sets to work.

"Chloe is... interesting," she says, continuing about her silly ivy. "I've been doing some study on photosynthesis. Really amazing stuff that."

Sid
Sid glances to the plants, which are a wide mix of things, at least one of which should not be in bloom this time of year.  Hard to tell, though, because its natural habitat is not Colorado.  And maybe Sid uses fertilizer, or experiments on it.  Four those plants, four pots containing four of the same flower, were part of an experiment once.  One that Sid had had to abandon finally.  Sometimes theories don't work out.  Sometimes weird things are just weird things, with no bearing in science whatsoever.

"What kind is she?" she asks, hooking her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans and leaning her leg against her bed.  She's curious about this plant named Chloe.  "It can be," she replies, the corners of her mouth lifting at mention of photosynthesis.

Grace
"She is an English ivy. Hedera helix. Got her for a couple of bucks at a gift shop," Grace says, and yes -- imagine a little gift shop container of ivy with a little stick holding a little card to write someone a "Thank you" or "Get Well" and you'll know Chloe. In fact, the little stick holding the little card is still there -- Grace hasn't removed it yet, because she's Grace.

The takka-takka on her keyboard slows, like she's trying to think and type at the same time, and she finally turns, her eyes taking on a slight but noticeable wildness. "I saw one of the leaves computing a shortest-path algorithm utilizing quantum coherence. I saw it."

"It was so amazing. Certainly makes one think. I mean, I always thought that coherence would be instantly destroyed at room temperature, too much jostling by other particles. But there it was, being a tiny little quantum computer, like it just didn't care about the rules. Hah. I like Chloe."

She's both named and gendered a plant. And one gets the feeling that she wouldn't have, if it weren't for that little quantum coherence fact. It's less a plant to her anymore, and more a piece of wonderous new tech that she wants to prod.

Sid
Sid can imagine what Chloe must look like, tucked into her little pot, arms stretching out over the edge and reaching reaching reaching.  Looking for a cool place where she can thrive.

"What?" she asks, red brows coming together over the rims of her glass, confused.  For the moment, Grace keeps going, typing and chatting away.

"Did you do something to it?" she asks, curiosity piqued by a plant that cares little for the rules of physics.  "How did you see it?  Did you...did you work something?" she asks, not quite sure about her terminology when it comes to magical things.  One could say that Sid grew up on the outskirts of town, far away from a proper education on the glossary of magical terms people use.

Grace
"I didn't do anything to it, not to make it behave like that," she explains. "You know how photosynthesis is a bit more efficient than it should be? Well, huh, maybe you don't know... But it is. It's got this edge that classical physics just can't explain. I ran into that with my thesis, and it bugged me. So I looked into it."
She's psyched now, going on about something she's not even sure Sid has the means to understand. But surely Sid does. She likes biology, right? As for the how, exactly...

"Well... the how's complicated. I can show you. It's like... I use my computer to look at the plant's source code. I make a model of what's going on outside, and view it. I guess yeah, it's Working?""

Sid
Grace asks about the efficiency of photosynthesis and Sid is just about to answer when she catches herself.  She lets Grace continue instead, her mouth firming more than a little at maybe you don't know.

"I think you told me about the models when we met," she adds quietly, content to let Grace go on, to explain what she saw inside the leaf of a plant.  In the meantime, she starts coming up with her own theories and ideas and perhaps even eventual studies of her own.  She certainly has plenty of plants, more in her room at the Chantry than she has even here (excluding her backyard, of course).

And the truth is, she does like biology.  The problem is her instinct, the thing she's learned to do over the last several years is to, well.

[hide it.  manip+subt]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (6, 8, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )

Grace
[find it. perception + subt]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 6, 6, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace
She doesn't notice that Sid's about to answer her, because Grace's mouth is running at the speed of her brain, and Sid hides it very well.

"Yes, the models. I am working on a model plant, you see... Built off of math, physics, so it grows like a real plant, right? But building it like they say a plant is built doesn't quite work, yeah? Ohh, but now I know how plants work," she says, and turns back to the laptop. She brings up something else besides the installation scripts (they are finished, but Sid doesn't know that) and starts drawing on the screen.

"It's like, classical physics says that these particles in the leaves get struck with photons, and then they go off randomly. Some of them happen to make it to a sugar factory," she says, and draws a particle getting hit with light beams, and then an arrow pointing to the direction it's going to go.

"But what I saw was more like this... The particle gets hit with a photon, and it tries out every possible path it could take to the sugar factory. And when it finds the factory, the waveform collapses, and there it is. It's a quantum shortest-path algorithm," she says, and draws multiple ghostly circles, all 'trying different paths' to a literal factory-shaped diagram.

"It's really pretty. All that green," she says, looks up at Sid's top shelf with her plants. "All of it nonlocalized quantum computing brilliance. Of course Nature would be able to see what we can't seem to wrap our brains around, and freaking use it."

Sid
Sid moves to the end of the bed and leans back against it, so that her face is a little closer to the screen Grace is using.  With her better view, she analyzes the model, eyes tracing the lines that Grace draws, all the way up to the factory shaped diagram, which gets a slight smile.

"I don't know about models, but I think I can do that.  Maybe," she finishes, frowning thoughtfully.  Straightening, she reaches past Grace to grab a pen from the desk before straightening, turning on a pivot and going over to the shelf with those plants.  Each is the same, Grace will see, same type, same level of health, even the same kind of pot and same kind of soil if she has an eye for such things.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, the pot wedged between her thighs, Sid taps the pen against her lip two or three times before she starts drawing something on the inside of her forearm.  Grace can feel the magical charge of Sid's resonance build up around her, desperate but oh so joyous.  It's a feeling of creation, of growth and change.

Holding her hand near to the plant, Sid Wills its chemical structure to reshape, and reform.

[Alter Simple Creature, coincindental I think?  Life 2, -1 diff (never done this before, let's take it slooooooow)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (5, 6) ( success x 2 )

Grace
Grace grins at Sid's resonance as it fills her perception, that signature of her Work. But, it doesn't seem to do anything to the plant. Nothing obvious, anyway.

"Hey, what did you do?" she asks, insanely curious. "Can I see?"

She's already booting up that other program on her laptop, the one which lets her see. The screen at first looks blank, like something went wrong, but then she types in a command...

[Life 1 -- Sense Life, spending WP because 1/10 chance of botch]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Grace
And... that screen turns into... a rather extremely accurate plant picture. Exactly that of the plant sitting in Sid's lap.

Sid
Sid takes her time, her eyes on the plant in her lap.  She doesn't touch it, if she did that would ruin everything she was trying to work inside of it.  Instead, she holds her hand close to the leaves and concentrates.  This is one of those things she hadn't thought to try until Grace mentioned it.

When she thinks she's finished, she blinks her eyes rapidly, refocusing on the room.  And she turns her head toward Grace.

"I tried altering it on a molecular level.  To, ah, to see if I could create those pathways."  She would survey her work magically, but she can already sense the air shifting around her, the ground beneath her feet, the bed on which she sits seeming to move a little even though it doesn't.  Instead of extending her own consciousness again, she holds the plant out to Grace.  That smile grows when she sees that model appear on the screen.

"That's handy."

Grace
"Yeah, it's extremely so. I'm gonna just..." she says, trailing off, as she fiddles with the touchpad and the model grows sharply bigger. She's magnifying the structure. Soon, the screen is filled with brilliant green honeycombs, the cells themselves. And then, the chloroplasts. It looks a bit like this:

http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/Resources/Botany/Chlorophyta/Hydrodictyon/Chloroplast.jpg

"So yeah, let's have a look see... Find out what you did."

Sid
Grace trails off as she starts fiddling with her equipment, the scripts for Ginger forgotten for the moment.  At least, it's a background concern now.

And the thing is, the diagram that Sid drew a little of on her arm looks a bit like the cell-like structure of chloroplasts, except a little hastily and imperfectly represented.  Detail doesn't matter to this focus of Sid's, though.  For her, it's the thought that counts, and as she was thinking of rearranging the cellular pathways within her little plant, that's what she went with.

She comes around to the end of the bed again and sits back on it, her body leaned forward, bringing with her the brunt of her euphoric presence.  It tinges the air, stoking the excitement of both women to be experimenting and researching in their own way on a similar idea.  Sid places her hands to either side of her hips, her fingers twitching with too much pent up energy, the only sign of her own joy.

"Can you tell if it would work now?  Like you said?  I don't think I know enough about Forces to throw photons at it," she adds, rueful.  Like Grace, Sid still has a lot to learn about magic and how to wield it and will it to do what she wants.

Grace
"What do you mean? There's photons all over the place, it's a photon soup in here, or else we wouldn't be seeing anything," she says, but truth be told, there are no photons in her little image. Just the effects of them, and for that, she has to dig deeper.

The image on the screen grows even more, down and down to a chemical level, and there... One can see.
It's dance-like, but frenetic, and Grace has to slow the framerate down to watch it -- slowing the pulse of energy through the chlorophyll. You can tell that the molecules have partners in this dance by the way they're jostled, but the photons themselves -- absent. But the energy they impart moves, and it moves fast and everywhere at once. Life's engines of creation, on overdrive.

"Sid... you got this plant on speed. Hahaha!"

Sid
"No, I mean," she starts, but stops, watching the screen instead.  What she meant isn't important, not while Grace is enhancing and enhancing clear down to the chemical level, to where they can see what Sid would only feel if she performed her own scan.

She frowns, less excited, more concerned.  And she holds out her hands to take it back.  "I didn't mean to do that, it'll burn itself out.  Let me see if I can change it again."  Change it back, maybe.  Fix it.  Or change it into something new.

[And again!  Alter Simple Creature, same as before, take it sloooooooow]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (10, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace
Grace adjusts the view again, and this time the framerate only has to be slowed a bit... well, fewer orders of magnitude. But now, the energy moving through the plant in waves interferes with itself just so and the dance is less frantic. It sets up interference patterns whose hot spots just touch upon the places which Grace (and surely Sid) know are the 'factories' drawn minutes ago on her little diagram.

The visual effect is that of a shimmering green veil, with little spikes of activity right where they need to be. And the rest of the plant is relatively still, with little energy lost.

"Oooh... changed again," Grace says. "You should.. you know, do one of these different things to each plant, and see what it looks like after! I bet you could grow some neat stuff."

Sid
"I might work it in my garden," she says, studying the screen, the plant held between her hands now.  "It's going to get cold soon, I bet I could make some things last a little longer."  Not that she really has to worry about cold snaps.  With a touch, Sid can restore almost any plant, she could bring a tree to bear fruit in the middle of the winter.

She looks up at the shelf.  After a second she rises to put the plant back up there with its fellows.  "Starting in here would be a better place to start."  Looking back to Grace, the corners of her mouth lift into a slight smile.  "We have a privacy fence, but, ah.  Neighbors, they might notice if the clematis is climbing the fence in the middle of November.

"How's the install?" she asks, for the moment bringing them back to the original purpose of Grace's visit.  Moving over, Sid perches on the edge of her bed again.

Grace
"Oh, that's done... I just got sidetracked, I know... I'm sorry. But yeah, it's functional," she says, unplugs the laptop and cord from Sid's computer.

"But really, you can do that? Make the clematis live through winter?" Grace sounds quite interested. "You know a lot about plants, then. I can just watch. I wouldn't know the first thing about how to... do what you just did."

Sid
Grace apologizes and Sid gives a slight shake of her head, a wordless Don't worry about it.  Which she could say, but then Sid's lived, well, a while using as few words as possible to communicate.  Slowly, though, she's shaking off the rust of a disused social skillset.  She'll get there.  Or maybe she won't.

"I think so," she says, but shrugs.  "I never tried it before.  I never tried that before."  And then, quietly, "I'm so behind."  But!  There is another slight shake of her head, this time for herself.  Soon enough.  She'll get there soon enough.

And another shrug.  "A lot of it's just...knowing the cell structure.  Or the chemicals.  That make up a living thing.  At least, that's how I understand it."

Grace
"So you do know a lot about plants then. That's quite a lot. I mean, I saw the marks on your arm, that's like... the chloroplast structures, right?"

She glances over at her screen, the thrumming, scintillating thing upon it. "And this, it makes sense to you?"

Sid
Sid looks at her arm, at the diagram she made.  Mouth quirking, she runs her thumb over it, the ink still just-wet enough to smear and obscure it.  Not to hide it, of course, Sid doesn't mind it's discovery right there above that odd tattoo of hers.  Two circles, seven dots (one in the middle, two on the inner circle, four on the outer), and beneath it the words WE ARE MADE OF STARSTUFF.  She nods, yes, that's what the diagram was.  "It's, ah, it's how I focus.  On Life, anyway."

Looking over at the screen her head tilts, a shadow forming between her brows.  Eventually there is another nod.

Grace
[perception + empathy = Does Grace get that Sid is hiding what she really knows?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Sid
[does she??? subterfuge]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Grace
"Sagan. I like Sagan. He said a lot of cool things," Grace sighs. "Like, how we are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

And there goes the scientist, off on a more mystical bent. "I really believe that, you know."

"But... you like Sagan enough to get a tattoo, and you know all the chemicals and processes of plants... Why do you hide so much? I mean, you're not just a science buff, are you?" she asks the question carefully. It's not a judgement. Grace fears being called the T word herself. She's just intrigued.

Sid
"Me, too," she says, smiling a smile that vanishes a second later, morphing into a frown.

Sid, perhaps strangely, doesn't fear being labeled as a Technocrat.  Probably because she doesn't know much about them, except to flee if they show up.  Flee like the wind.

Her eyes lower to her hands, to the tattoo there, and shifts her arm, stretching it down and twisting it so that, at least from her angle, she can see the edge of her forearm.

"Because, then people ask me how I know and I can't tell them.  I mean, I can, I guess," she adds with a shrug.  "But it hurts.  And they react badly, and it hurts even more."

Grace
Grace's expression: sad and confused. Why? But then, it hurts Sid to talk about it, somehow. Grace looks like she's about to say something, then changes her mind, and it comes out like this: "Wh...uh..."

"I'm sorry..." For what? She doesn't know. But it's the learned thing to say when people act like Sid.

"I don't know what happened to you, and... I guess I don't need to. None of my business," she gives Sid a little crazed half-smile. Truth be told, Grace really wants to know. It's something wrapped up inside her to know, and admitting that it's none of her business is very difficult indeed.

Sid
Again Grace apologizes.  Sid looks up, momentarily confused.  She hadn't pried, she hadn't stared her down like she was some puzzle waiting to be unlocked like that Hermetic.  She didn't inundate her with questions like Sera sometimes does.

Luckily for Grace who wants to know but knows this is a thread of information she should leave untugged, she's inadvertently stumbled across the secret only two other people seem to have learned in getting Sid to open up.

Leave her alone.  Let her be.  Back off when they get too close.  It makes her want to be more like how she used to be and less like how she's come to be.

That doesn't make it any easier.  The words come slowly, when they come at all, halting and hesitant as though each one is a barb that cuts something inside of her as she pulls them out, one by one.

"It's just...it's.  It's complicated," she says finally.  "My...Awakening, it was, ah."  Her hand reaches up to scratch just beneath her ear, her eyes are focused somewhere to the side.  Somehow, that makes it just a little bit easier.  She can't keep avoiding Grace, though, who is sitting right there, her resonance shifting all around Sid's bedroom.  When she looks at her, her mouth is quirked into a humorless half-grin.  "It was brutal.  Or well.  The Awakening itself was wonderful.  It's trigger, though, that was.  Brutal.  I had to get away.  From where I was.  So.  I ran.  And I left that life behind.  All of it."

Her fingers lace together, but her face crumples, and her voice breaks.  "It's just, it's so hard.  I didn't want a fresh start, I just.  I wanted to be safe."

Grace
Another Mage describing their Awakening as something horrible, disturbing, something so private they can't talk about it. But Sid did even more -- ran away from a life. And it looks like it's still so painful.

To Grace, this is like watching someone with a head would, and being unable to help. She just... doesn't know comforting yet. Some might reach out for a hug, but not this one. Hugs are not comfortable things to Grace.

And her own Awakening was so gentle in comparison to most others she's heard, that it's hard to empathize. She can't say 'oh, I know, mine was rough too' or anything. So she just sits there, uncomfortable, trying to imagine what to say.

Eventually, she decides on, "That does sound really tough," and looks away. "I... um... If you want to talk about it you can. Or not, that's cool too."

Grace
[would = wound, bleh]

Sid
[awarepathy!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Sid
Sid realizes immediately that Grace is...if not uncomfortable, awkward.  Unsure.  And she gets it, she really does.  She's been there, still goes there sometimes when she's around people she doesn't know well, or doesn't trust.  Except in her case, it wasn't that she didn't know how, it was that she was afraid.

No tears drip down over her cheeks, but Sid does sniff, showing that it was a near thing.  She offers Grace that same slight smile, grateful and sympathetic all at once.  But she shakes her head.  "It doesn't really help," she explains in a quieter voice than before.

And then, stronger as she sits herself up a little, straightens her shoulders, tries to feel something that had withered away over the years and is just starting to strengthen again, "I've been trying to keep moving forward.  I made my choice, and it hasn't, well, it's gotten better."  She glances around the room which, Grace wouldn't know, has newer and slightly nicer things in it than before.

"I'm sorry, too."  She rises then, offering Grace that slight smile again.  "It's getting a little late.  You walked here, right?  Do you need a lift home?"

Grace
"Well, that's good, that's... you know, looking to the future, and all that," Grace says, still a bit uncomfortable. She knows she struck a nerve with Sid, and doesn't want everything to go 'blargh' all the sudden. Damn, but other people can be hard to figure out.

But still, watching Sid put herself back together isn't perfect either. Aren't people supposed to, you know, cry it out? That's the way it happens in the movies at least. Maybe she's just not trusted, or maybe that discomfort Grace feels is written all over her face, and Sid's just holding it in to be polite. Or...

And then, Sid wants to take her back home. Okay, yeah.

"Oh... Well, normally I'd say no, but there's zombies and stuff out there," Grace replies, apologetically. The laptop with its still-shimmering green landscape gets shut, and she gets out of the chair to go put it away.