Entropy and Nightmares

Kalen:	Kalen is partly curled up on an end of a couch in the library with a book. One leg is extended and lays along the curve where the back of the couch starts to rise up, and the rest of his body curls around the book, sideways into the couch. It's a rather sharp contrast to how he can be, either because of that consuming intensity or so remote and alien it seems impossible that he isn't some ageless force of nature, he looks younger.  More like just another person, though there is still that sense of an oncoming storm, the taste of ozone and the feel of electricity dancing lightly over Grace's skin.
Grace:	Grace's effect on the warp of the universe is weaker than most, shielded from view even still by the way she blends into the background and goes without notice. But still, for a while now, Kalen has been able to feel that sliding, slipping, stirring thing around. She's spending as much free time as the roads will allow in the Chantry, as Kalen's warnings got to her at last. It's safer here. Perhaps she's got the idea that spending time in the library would be a good use of time, or maybe it's just to say hello to her friend, but it's her whose presence at the door makes it chime and allow her entry. "Hey, Kalen. Looking comfortable there."
Kalen:	"I have been known to relax on occasion. It is rare enough that you may still wish to make note of it on your calendar." He closes the book but does not otherwise move. "How are you?"
Grace:	Her eyes scan around the room, and it's a thing Kalen has seen many times before, how she just tries to pick up on everything in her surroundings. "You know how I am," she says. It would take too long to go through the full explanation, and she doesn't want to lie. "It was good to see Sera though. We had a talk and... it was good." She crosses over to a chair near the couch where Kalen has curled, and proceeds to curl herself up too. "I feel a bit restless. Like, I don't think there's anything more I could possibly find about Thakinyan or Keller or any of that. I'm not going to go fight them, because what would I do, yell at them? So... I'm standing still, and I hate standing still."
Kalen:	"Well. Last I was forced to a complete stop I did mostly what we are doing now. A lot of reading. And I learned to really speak Spanish and developed a fondness for South American reds and really strong black coffee." Kalen smiles a little and sighs. "I'm not really great at it either, but for at least a little longer it's what I've got. What kind of thing would you like to be doing? Have you actually come to a point where you want to fight with something?"
Grace:	"Want to? No. It's more that they have my friend on a leash. And I saw what happened when that movie was played, and it can't happen again," she says, and curls her limbs into the seat even tighter. "What do I want to do, just... I don't know. I came down here to read my programming manual. It's something."
Kalen:	Kalen shifts, carefully, so that he can watch Grace instead of just listening to her. He's still relaxed, but that intensity is kindling in his eyes. "Then what do you want to do? If you could be doing anything about this situation, what would it be?"
Grace:	"Fix it," she says, a memory of a smile on her face, like she's being difficult on purpose. "I don't even know what the right thing to do is. But yeah. Save Shoshannah, destroy that film, move on, learn stuff, be myself again... Fix it."
Kalen:	"There are a lot of ways to fix things. The first two Mages I met were pretty mobile. They didn't work out of a chantry. They still don't. They a way of turning up where they're needed, but they do different things. Jack is a lot like me, or, probably more accurately, I'm a lot like Jack. Kharisma is a Seer, which...well she's better at it than I am. She also can command the Ars Mentis, and she...she puts people back together. She almost never fights with anything directly, that's not who she is. She's killed people, when she had to, but this war, it isn't a part of who she is. She's everything else, everything good." He smiles a little, then swallows. "Marcellus...was a brilliant tactician. He's the man who trained me to be part of the Order, and to be part of my House. He gave this war everything he was. He was never sorry and he was never afraid. There are people who find some balance, in between, but they are few and rare. You need to figure out who you want to be. You know what your goal is, but not your path. You need a path."
Grace:	"My path?" she looks around the library, at the books, at the collective knowledge, and then lifts her arms to it, as if to say: this. "I want to know everything. I want to know what the right thing to do is, even if I'm not the one to go and do it."
Kalen:	"Okay. Well, we've found all the information we can find. Beyond that point, it is rather like waiting to see if someone will live through surgery. As horrible as hospital waiting rooms are, you just have to accept that in some things you are helpless. The best you can do at that point is to reflect on what you have learned and try to understand what you could do better the next time."
Grace:	"Oh bullshit, I have to accept helplessness," she says, but it's not anger in her voice. In fact, there may have even been the start of a wry laugh in there somewhere. She gets up out of the chair, walks over to a bookcase, and pulls out that manual she was after. "I can bend the universe to my will," she says, like a cartoon supervillain, while regarding the book in hand. "Well. I can a little bit."
Kalen:	"Indeed, Kit. But you'll have to figure out how you will bend it, what world you are shaping. And, even for us, there are some limits. Which is why we tend to organize, to do things together that we cannot do alone. That understanding is where Traditions and Chantries and Cabals are born from, and while those may end up in structured places you are not fond of, that structure does, or at least at one point did, serve a valuable purpose. You want to learn everything, to have all the answers, and there is nothing wrong with that. We share that, in many respects. Once you have that knowledge, how will you use it to remake the world? What vision do you have of a brighter future?"
Grace:	She opens the manual, flips through it a bit. "I just don't like hierarchical structures. I like networks. And, coincidentally, that is my vision of a brighter future," she says, and that explanation is so woefully lacking. "In fact, I have a novel-in-progress explaining my brighter future. It's like, radical decentralization has been tried before, but it's all forced on people. You have to get it to emerge organically out of the existing structure. You can't take the means of production and force it into the hands of the worker, you have to make that idea so compelling it just happens," she says, walks over to her chair, plops herself down in it. "Like Ginger. We went and made the cost of communication very very low, and people talk to each other now. We made the idea of free information so compelling it just happened."
Kalen:	"You and Wikipedia," Kalen says with a smile that is real, if a bit tired. "What will you make next?"
Grace:	"I was thinking about indexing the library. OCRing all the books, making our own little Google. So, say, looking for a keyword or concept wouldn't take hours. And people could add their stuff to the digital library without having to hand over the physical copies. Though, I'm sure some would still love to sit there with a book in hand and have it take hours. And they can do that too."
Kalen:	"So...you'll make us a card catalog with no actual cards. That is an excellent plan. Would you like any help with it? I may not have any great skill with computers but I can read. And, for at least a little longer, I'm more useful off the field so-to-speak than on it. I can help you with the key words."
Grace:	"Mmm, the keywords take care of themselves, really. That part would be automatic. What's not automatic is the scanning. That part would take a while. And it's boring. But, the payoff... Hmm I wonder if there's a way you could just do it. You know, get the data out of the books without having to go through all the months of flipping a page and running a scan and flipping a page and running a scan..."
Kalen:	"That I am aware of, no. There may be people who can scan just by looking and transmit the information, but...that is far outside my experience. If the scanners are not complicated, I suppose I could still help."
Grace:	"Nah. Would just need to take good pictures. I'm sure a regular camera could do it just fine. And then, I'd get to work on some code again. Search engines are kind of interesting, you know? They're like entropy sieves. You can't check every word in every book, it would take too long, so you make an index formed in such a way that it ties everything together just so, and then shake the index. What you want is left behind, and so is everything its tied to. Like, the page and book you can find that information in."
Kalen:	"I...don't exactly work that way with Entropy. Still, it sounds promising." He taps lightly at the table with the first two fingers of one hand. "Trent may be able to help you better than I can, actually, if you're talking about Entropy and not entropy. I don't even know what an entropy sieve is. I know what those words are separately, but not together."
Grace:	"Mmm. Maybe I'm just working on a different definition than you are. Computer science has different concepts for things like that. But, in a way, we refer to entropy as density of information content. Like, something completely lacking in entropy would be very simple, and something highly entropic would be super complicated and hard to describe or calculate. So you kind of have to manipulate the entropy of stuff that's super complicated. Like making an index of it. It's breaking the information into little pieces and ordering them, so that you can then pass them through the sieve and search it," she says, and all the while, her eyes stare at the ceiling or scan around the room. In this mode, Grace can forget for a while. It's rather nice. But she doesn't look at Kalen at all. "You know, the English language has an entropy of 1.5 bits per character. A toss of a coin has 1 bit. So, the information content of a coin is one bit, the information content of a letter is 1.5, and on and on. I don't really know how to quantify that sort of thing for the universe's data though. I do have some ideas though. The manual... has some pictures..."
Kalen:	"So...you're...." Kalen frowns. "I know how to find the most likely thing, but...." He uncurls the rest of the way and swings his legs around, resting his feet on the coffee table. "Why is a coin toss one hit and an English character one point five?"
Grace:	"Mmm.. Well, because you get exactly one piece of information out of it when you toss a coin. Yes or no. True or false. You can only predict one of two states for a coin, and you'll be right about half the time, if you try to predict it. You would think the entropy of a letter would be fairly high, but English is really predictable. You know there will be a lot more a's than z's. And if you get a 'q' you know almost for certain that the next letter will be a 'u' and so on. So you can do a good job predicting it. And if you can predict from the start what's going to happen, that changes the entropy. Makes it less. Or, I guess you could also say, if you dial down the information content, you can more easily predict what's going to happen next."
Kalen:	"So. Coins are one because they have a fifty percent chance and letters are predictable because of association so...some keywords are predictable based on known association to it her keywords? Would that help you? I'm still lost. Trent might understand, he gets math and science and things. I mean-" And here Kalen lifts his hands, hooks his thumbs, and mimes a fluttering butterfly.
Grace:	"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to lose you," she says, and finally looks at him. "Just talking... trying to pass the time. Just.. if I ever do that -- lose you and I don't realize it -- sometimes I don't realize it at all... I get on to my little track, and I forget that others don't have years of math study with which to follow me. "As for Trent, well, I don't know. I think I kind of ruined my relationship with Trent within 30 minutes of meeting him. Not as badly as what happened with Garrett, but still."
Kalen:	"Trent's relatively forgiving. And...Garrett...that was my fault. I forget...he's not really the person I met. He's really good at...after his wife, losing...." Kalen swallows. "I should have thought about it. I'm sorry."
Grace:	"Don't be sorry for trying to help. It just... didn't turn out quite right, that's all. So far, I have a fifty-fifty track record with your Order. Entropy of one," she says, with a tiny smirk. "I suppose if I could predict that sort of thing, it would be a real trick."
Kalen:	"If it helps, Trent and I didn't really get on, and then we fought. Well, I fought and he was remarkably calm about it which was really infuriating at the time. And, I was furious at a lot of things that weren't him and somehow this turned into us drinking whiskey and discussing philosophy." Kalen smiles. "Don't worry, I'm not saying you should come have dinner with us. Just...if you see a moment to try out an olive branch, it can be worth it with him, okay?"
Grace:	"Well, maybe. You say he knows a lot of math and science and things?" she curls up again in her chair, relaxing into the comfort. Opens up her book again, not really aware of the fact that you shouldn't do that while trying to have a conversation. She can do both. With a bit of fiddling on her laptop, she can do both with perfect concentration.
Kalen:	"You've met him. What does he feel like?" There is a second, maybe two where Kalen goes even paler than usual. He remembers too well the feeling of butterflies twitching and falling still, of constant shifting falling still. The faces of the dead. And they aren't dead now. Not yet. But....
Grace:	"Butterflies fluttering around. Something like you too. Like a storm. Hey, are you... okay?" she asks, noting the way he goes pale and how his face turns.
Kalen:	"What?" He shakes his head a little. "I'll be better when we get rid of Thakinyan. Its threats were more than a little unnerving. I mean, I dream about you all dying all the time, but this was different. Not just because some creepy possessed bitch was in my dreams and Sid's dreams, but I felt your Resonances die. It was...a whole new kind of horror."  He rubs a hand over his eyes. "But I am fine, Kit. A little unnerved and perhaps more than a little exhausted, but only the first one of those things is really even unusual. New types of horror comes with the territory." He smiles. "Flambeau and all...."
Grace:	"You dream about me dying all the time?" she asks, worried. "I dream about me dying too. And Sid and Sera and Lena. Is that why I need to sleep in the Chantry now? Because she threatened me with... that?"
Kalen:	"You're sleeping in the Chantry because that and because I have lost almost everyone I have ever trusted or loved or considered family. I would rather like that trend to break. I told you, Kit. I see a beautiful world, but I know how dark it gets sometimes."
Grace:	"Well. Hm. The last time I was certain to die, I didn't. Maybe if I develop a track record, or something..." she says, closes her eyes. The book is still open in her lap, but she's... off somewhere else, dealing with the feeling of being in between crises. "But I'll stay here. I doubt Shoshannah would mind me crashing on her couches."
Kalen:	"Are there no spare beds left?" Kalen asks. "If you must, this couch is the best sleeping couch in the library. The best couch in general is the one in that little upstairs room."
Grace:	There are spare beds, but Grace doesn't know that, and hasn't thought to ask. She has been crashing on the couches, and getting up early to make it to class on days when the roads are clear enough. "You know the best sleeping couches already? Why don't you sleep in a spare bed?"
Kalen:	"I don't sleep here on purpose. I...." He runs a hand through his hair. "I kind of unnerve people sometimes. With the screaming. I'm kinda a mess when I sleep." Which he sounds more embarrassed than concerned about, which is...so very like him.
Grace:	Grace looks off at some books. "I wonder if I scream. I don't think I do, but I'd be asleep when..."
Kalen:	"Well, if you keep sleeping here and you start waking up to very concerned people, you probably make noise. People tend to make a bit of a fuss sometimes. Otherwise, with everything going on, I'd sleep here more."
Grace:	She just nods. "This sucks." A concrete statement of fact if there ever was one.
Kalen:	"Yeah. I have no coping strategies to suggest to you, sadly. Mine tend to involve very physical company, sometimes very physical company that can get in my head. Ramon used to sit with me and pray, which worked out well enough, but if it was really bad he'd start asking angels to intercede. Most of my oldest friends tend to practice the Ars Mentis and tend to like, or at least tolerate, a good bit of contact."  And yet Grace sees Kalen touching people only rarely.
Grace:	"Well. There was Sera. She sang me a lullabye to help me sleep," Grace says, and there's a bit of awe in there, for Sera. "Speaking of very physical company who gets in your head. It helped. But.. Sera's.. dealing with her own trauma. I don't want to be a burden."
Kalen:	"I don't sing. Or get in people's heads. But I could stay with you. And...read or something."
Grace:	Grace is, shall we say, a little oblivious. Most young women, when a guy asks to watch them sleep, would be a little creeped out, Bella Swan being a giant and horrible exception. However, Grace does not pick up on either real or imagined come ons very well. And that's probably a good thing, in this case. So, she just looks like she's pondering. "But, don't you have to sleep too?"
Kalen:_	"Mmmmmmm...I think I might sleep at Garrett's place eventually. Under the circumstances it seems inadvisable to sleep in somewhere unprotected. But I can be awake for awhile. I don't really keep regular hours anyway."