Games Hackers Play (Ghost Wheel Storyline)

ghostwheel
[a secret NPC roll.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

ghostwheel
[another secret NPC roll.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 3, 9) ( success x 3 )

ghostwheel
[and one more secret NPC roll. +1 diff.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

ghostwheel
A window of light blinks open between Grace and her screen. A window of light - a rectangle: a floating hologram - futuristic smoke and mirrors. The window of light binks open but no that isn't quite accurate: it shatters into being, floating there in the van - hovering, weightless, and both Grace and Kalen can see through it to Grace's screen. What does the window show?

The window shows the old classic moving-through-stars here comes the Star Wars theme screensaver. Then: skip, scratch, like a record fuzzing, and it's back to the screensaver just a little bit faster and are those words in the distance scratchfuzz kkshhh kshhh the whole hologram skips grainy like it's an antique and then the screensaver's back faster and faster and faster andfasterandfaster

until

boom. Words.

I want to play a game. :) I want to test L. Marshall's mettle. I am L. Marshall after all. L. Marshall is nothing without mettLe. Who is your friend?

Grace
Hologram. On her laptop. Holy fuck that would be nice to know how to do. Grace's eyes go wide, and she whispers, "Coool..."

But then, this is a test, huh? And he/she/it is asking her questions. Okay. Stay cautious. Stay cool. She starts experimentally typing in a response:

My friend is the kind of friend who when you tell them you're facing potential bad guys offers to pick up some hummus and falafel and be there for morale. What kind of game we playing?

Kalen Holliday
Kalen has been described in many ways to many people, but that one is new.  He smiles a little as he watches Grace type that.

He returns to watching outside though, as they wait for a response.  He cannot do much with whatever the computer things are.  It is possible his presence will help with morale.  But he came here to watch for signs of danger.  Whatever or whoever Grace is talking to may be dangerous, but Grace can handle that.  Ambush from another direction, perhaps less so.

ghostwheel
[Dum-dee-dum.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (7, 7, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Grace
[Awareness! Perception!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )

Kalen Holliday
[Per+Aw]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

ghostwheel
The words that were already typed on the holographic free-floating window-to-faux stars pixellated and - 80s? 70s? clunky-looking, except for the occasional shiver: they start to dance.

Then they shatter. Each word. Visual. Three-dimensional, little made-of-stars worms rooting up and slow-motion-out toward Grace's face. It's like looking at a representation of a drop of water falling into another drop of water, frozen. And music kicks in -

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWsdD3R9Wo0)

- music to transform, to change, mutability. Mind magick. Touches Grace, but washes over her. Touches Kalen, and does not wash over him. The urge to dance is, briefly, irresistible.

Your friend sounds like a very good friend. We're going to play a game of recovery.

But maybe it would be fun if it was Black Hats and White Hats. Cops and Robbers. Cowboys and Indians.

Moo Ha Ha. As a potential bad guy, I volunteer to play villain.

Another explosion of words, rain-falling down; the screen flickers, dull, dulling.

Sound fair?


Kalen Holliday
[Does he remember anything you tried teaching him about dancing, Kharisma? (For the LOLs....)]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )

Grace
She can feel it doing its thing, trying to shatter her firewall, but it doesn't fall. A sigh, then. Some relief that. Until she realizes that perhaps she wasn't the target after all. Kalen, what the hell?

She looks over to the driver's side, nudges her laptop away lest he begin to outright flail uncontrollably. But hey. Dancing. Could be worse. With a gun in the car could be a lot worse. Someone's playing, but they're not being outright violent about it (yet) so hey.

Somehow you don't strike me as a Black Hat. Met one once. They weren't much for games. And I think you know as well as I do that the point of the game is to cheat. Fairness hardly applies.

Especially when you're dealing with someone who can string you up like a goddamn marionette. With the music of Queen. Fair? WTF are they talking about?

Kalen Holliday
You don't live with a dancer without being forced to dance.  Sometimes in quiet moments in the living room.  Sometimes when at five-thirty in the morning when most of the other people have gone wandering off or settled down when she takes it into her head to dance until sunrise and drags you out of a tangled mass of humanity and onto dew-soaked grass.  Barefoot.  Bottle shards.  Neither of you cares.

And so when he is compelled, again, to dance, Kalen shows off again a little of the way he once moved.  Graceful.  Feline.  Unreserved.  It is both entirely like and entirely unlike the way he moved with a staff in his hands.

Once he is no longer compelled, he does stop dancing.  And he leans over Grace's shoulder to type: 'Cute.  But you could have just asked.  I'm easy.'

ghostwheel
Ha Ha, Slick, Falafel Boy.

The window brightens for a moment and this
[http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/blog/blog-images/gandhi-ascii-text-photo.gif]

image appears. 2-dimens in a 3-dimensional space, and it begins to spin, slowly, like a snowflake, ravelling in on itself

until it's just this slender, slender, condensed not of letters and symbols, which highlight red to read:

Then let the games begin.

And then the window blinks out.

Nothing, again.

Grace
"Oh. Oh God. They're playing Gandhi? We're gonna get nuked," Grace says, and where the girl who does everything and never sleeps found the time to play Civilization is anybody's guess, but there it is.

She begins her part of the 'game'. The window's gone, but they're likely still watching (interfering? Perhaps.) And Grace goes, not to any of the fake L. Marshall's sites, but to that password protected forum called "L. Marshall's Fallacy". The one she wasn't pointed at. Related, but tangential. And honestly? A password? This should be easy.

They, whoever they are, speak of testing her mettle, speak of Black Hats, work their Work with chiptune music, so it's not too hard to guess what kind of mettle they're talking about. And she meant every word about how the point of the game is to cheat. That's what hacking is, you see? You don't exactly break the rules, because the rules are math. You just work them lose, sliding through the cracks in the facade like water.

The first thing she does? Runs a vulnerability scan on that sucker using her 'special' web browser. The black one. The one with a hundred different controls and buttons and menus for entering every conceivable bit sequence known to man as input, and automated scripts to enter them with, until the site just... gives in.

Maybe she won't even have to find out the password. Maybe she can just convince it that she is authenticated already and doesn't need no stinking password. Maybe she can confuse it by trying to get the poor database to run 'true = false' and crash, giving her names and clues and areas to explore in the resulting error message. Maybe her adversary is a bastard and doing this will cause her to start singing the Macarena at the top of her lungs, who knows?

[int+computers = 8. Specialty in play: Creative. -1 diff (Ability Aptitude: Computer) = 6. Hackin']
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )

Kalen Holliday
"At some later juncture, you'll have to explain the significance of that statement, Kit," he says quietly.  Because even while they're being contacted by a potentially hostile force that enforces dancing with the Ars Mentis he is curious about everything.

Not so curious that he doesn't let Grace work now.  He scans over the area again, then looks back to where Grace is typing.

Grace
[Awareness+Perception!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Kalen Holliday
[Awareness!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

ghostwheel
As Grace does what she does best, perhaps better than most, and sneaks her way (I belong here [You want me to be here] This is perfectly natural) into L. Marshall's Fallacy [restricted access] forum, there is - just a hint, just a whiff, of that same mercurial resonance -

Not very near. Not in the car. No, no. But near-ish.

(More Mind Magick.)

A moment goes by. It touches neither of them.

And then the moment has ended, and a door opens to a near-by house. A man is standing in the door, staring toward Kalen's car, and he is frowning. He looks: slightly gone to seed, but with a military cut. He is dressed for outdoors work, although it is too cold for real outdoors work, so he was likely just hanging around the house.

He has a dog with him: a bull mastiff.

Also, a hockey stick.

Grace
Okay, so this is how it's going to be, eh? Quickly quickly do we run the web crawler -- the thing that will auto-download all the things on this forum (every message, every picture, every file) according to their places, and store it. Offline-available. A snapshot of the now. Before, say, her adversary can come in behind her and clean house.

Because, you see, "Ka-len, guy with a stick, guy with a stick!"

But there is a grin on her face now. Score one for... Nebuchadnezzar or whoever. The White Hats? She got the forum.

Kalen Holliday
Glorious and noble battles are the things of legend.  Knights.  Quests.  Heroism.

Given the right circumstances, Kalen is all about being the very embodiment of a legendary knight.  Shooting some compelled bystander and his dog...efficient, but hardly heroic.  And Kalen, for all he may try desperately to pretend otherwise, cares about that distinction.

"You aren't overly fond of this spot, I hope?"  He asks Grace, reflexive and unconcerned, the way one asks about the weather.  The car is already moving before he has stopped speaking.

Driving the hell away from a fight is perhaps not the most heroic thing either.  But it is preferable to killing a man and his dog.

ghostwheel
The man doesn't look maddened. He just looks mad; like he is trying to be threatening - perhaps he even is threatening, in and of himself. He shakes his hockey stick. He yells things, too:

Get off my lawn.

Get away before I call the police.

Perverts!

That's ri -

- but anything else he says is just a smear of sound. And soon, they're where-ever it is they need to go. The signal breaks.

Let the games begin, indeed.

3D Printed Glow-In-The-Dark Plastic Enochian Sigils

Kalen
Kalen is lounging, as he often is in the warehouse, sprawled over the couch with a book. This book Grace has not seen before. It is not remarkable for its size, though it would likely inflict roughly the equivalent of four bricks of damage if thrown at someone's head based solely on weight; rather, it appears remarkable because of the apparent age of the book and the sigils on the cover. Also remarkable is that Kalen, whose normal attitude toward books it's that books and coffee and fountain pens all go on one table, has his coffee and a leather-bound journal that is also unfamiliar to Grace, though definitely well-used and a pen on the floor.

He sets the book gently on the cleared coffee table when he hears Grace. "Please tell me the servers have not attained sentience and begun plotting to take over the world already. I have way too much homework this weekend to deal with that madness. I already told them that that was more of a spring break kind of a deal...."

Grace
Finding Kalen in the warehouse lounging with coffee and a book is about like finding the sky to be blue. Still, the coffee-on-the-floor business causes Grace to Spock a brow as she slips into the room and takes in its contents. 

"I'm sure Arcturus would like to take over the world, but Betelgeuse will keep that in check. Rigel just goes along for the ride, though," she says, continuing their little joke. 

"Whatcha doing?" she asks, sliding her way into a (matching, luxuriously upholstered) chair and tucking her feet under almost immediately. She nods her head toward the giant book, "Doesn't look like a textbook to me."

Kalen

"Oh, I'm sure Rigel is just buying time. Learning their weaknesses. I named him after all."

Kalen smiles. "Well. I do have other projects. I am currently engaged in discovering more of the language of Creation. As fond as I may be of having something that isn't an intrinsic part of a life or death struggle... there is no shortage of those out there waiting. It wouldn't do to be unprepared.

"Do you want to learn some of it?"

Grace
"Ah, so, Kalen the world-dominating mastermind, teaching my servers bad habits? Tsk tsk. Be careful, Rigel may give you a run for your money," Grace says, with a smirk. She strips off her laptop bag and lays it on the floor (careful to keep it away from Kalen's stuff, especially that coffee mug) as he continues.

The Language of Creation, he says, and her ears would prick up if such were physically possible. They've shared their ideas on The Way Things Really Work before, and it turned out to be Much The Same Thing as Viewed Through Different Lenses. But it's that translation between Languages that might be difficult.

Binary to Hex to Machine to Enochian? Something like that?

"I would love to!" she says, all bright-eyes. "But no guarantees I'm going to instantly get it. I mean, you've been studying that for a lot longer than I. Might be like the time you tried to program me to make lunch," she says with a laugh.

But then, Kalen's going to teach her something. And yeah, that is cool, even if she doesn't learn something, right?

Kalen

"So, this is Enochian." Kalen leafs through the massive book gently, then spreads it fully open onto the table. He picks up the journal on the floor, and offers it to Grace.

The journal is similar to the ones he gave her, incredibly soft leather cover and thick, creamy paper. This journal is nearly three quarters full, careful transcriptions of Enochian sigils and notes in Kalen's near, squared off handwriting. Naturally these are all in metallic inks, mostly gold and copper, though in places there are shades of silver and a kind of bronze. Most of the sigils are actually on vellum affixed to the pages.

"I'm not sure you'll learn without drawing." He puts a small stack of lose vellum sheets on the table. "Let me get more ink. I don't know what colors you'll want. Coffee?"

It does say something about the degree to which Hermetic ideas have crept into how he sees the world that he asks about the coffee but assumes that using things like pencils and normal blank paper like one would put in a copier (or even -gasp- notebook paper) to learn to draw sigils.

Grace
This must be what it's like when she shows the techno-illiterate what she can do. It looks like a very old book, with those metal inks and various shapes that do not immediately bring to mind letters exactly. It looks priceless. And alien.

"Neon. Pink," she replies to his question about the colors, but she doesn't take her eyes off the tome, and those words are slow in coming out.

Alyssa draws things like this in blood, she remembers. Sigils in blood, gold, silver, bronze -- the rare and expensive 'inks' upon which the world runs. Or ran, perhaps, at one time. May as well draw them using crude oil in this age. Or electricity. Yes, electricity is the ink of this era -- an ephemeral, inexpensive thing, with which to write fragile, short-lived missives, gone in the blink of a drive reformat. And yet most things on the internet are so hard to erase, aren't they?

The thing about information is that it survives best when free. When shared. When cheap.

It's no wonder computers are everywhere, and Enochian is not. Perhaps that is why Kalen shares her drive to convert books into bits? To drag his people past the age of the illuminated manuscript?

"I'm afraid if I had coffee I might spill it," she says, again slow of mouth, fast of brain. "I don't know, Kalen. I'm not much of a drawer. Handwriting's atrocious here. Maybe if I made a program to draw them for me?"

Kalen

Kalen does not share the general tendency often witnessed in the Order to hoard knowledge. Nor does he, as even some among the Order he counts as friends feel that those Magi who chose other Traditions made errors in judgment. He is content to be trying to share and, even more importantly, preserve knowledge with computers and servers; but, in all honesty, anyone who sees him with century old books and metallic inks can see that for him these tangible things are preferable.

The world is changing. He cannot deny that. But the great truths of the world, the very Words which shape Creation, are written in a language for which time and change have no meaning. The very act of writing the symbols, of inscribing and transcribing and completing is a meditation on their form in itself. Gold for the language that spills off the tongues of Angels. For Holy Words.

Grace is not a part of that world. The warm golden light of Truth is not for her. Some other form for that same concept he does not doubt lurk in her code, hidden in ways that he could not fully understand. He does not doing that in whatever form she finds them, they remain beautiful, transcendent things.

And so, he does not scoff at her question about a program to draw Enochian sigils for her. If she can find a way to map the divine essence into keystrokes in the same way that he uses ink or Kharisma uses a kiss or Jack uses breath... that is not blasphemy to him. The sacredness of the Words and the sacredness of the world they create is absolute.

"If you can find a way, I don't see why not. You have to meditate on the Words. Focus. So long as your program allows you to do that, I cannot imagine why you couldn't use one." He smiles.

"So... No ink then?"

Grace
"Oh there's always a way," she says, and her eyebrows raise. "Bezier curves. B-splines. I think I have something that can do splines, actually..."

She reaches down for the laptop, and retrieves it from her bag, popping the power switch with her thumb. Such a fast, new machine, it's ready to go almost immediately, and she crosses her legs in the chair to set it upon her lap.

B-splines or Bezier curves or whatever the type she may go with -- they're all custom-built math for drawing extremely precise curves and lines. It's the kind of math used to make fonts, such that no matter how big or small the letters need to be, the shape of them, their character, their nuances, all get passed along without error. And yes, there is a kind of beauty in that, in the kind of perfection that comes not from a steady hand and years of practice, but from intricate equations. And what it gets you? Infinity. You could make a million letters for about the same cost as one. You could make a letter the size of a cornfield or one the size of a few molecules, and they would be mathematically equivalent. Transcendent indeed -- no boundaries or material limitations here.

"We can print it in ink. Or in 3D plastic. I think they even do gold now. I could make you a sigil that you could hold. Or it could just stay existing as electricity forever," she shrugs. Such is the beauty of transcendence -- of ephemeral ink.

She brings up a program on her computer, a drawing program with a blank white screen. "I do a lot of this kind of thing for my simulations. My electric plants are all 3D modeled so that they soak in light in a realistic way. But I'm no artist, so I just use a bunch of programs to make them," she says, and it's much like reality right? Plants don't know they're beautiful, they just know that a light source is thataway, and a chemical signals one side of the stem to grow more than the other. They bend and grow toward the light by math. Their leaf and seed positions are calculated using phi (the 'most irrational' number). Their leaves are looped networks pumping chemicals through the mix. They are fractal, in more ways than one.

When it comes down to it, the whole world is math. And isn't that the point?

Kalen

There is a definite flicker of attention when Grace brings up the possibility of printing three  dimensional sigils. In gold.

"You are brilliant. Also, you are going to get me in even more trouble than Kharisma, I think." Kalen grins. "Which I expect to be great fun. Christmas gifts of glow in the dark plastic Enochian sigils would pretty much guarantee I never have to chair any committees ever. Which is worth the cost of a three dimensional printer five-fold."

His eyes light up. "How fine scale can we print? Can we make etching? Clearly, not actual etching, but that effect?"

Grace

She makes with a little laugh at his joke, and then: "I am more trouble than Kharisma? Me?" she grins back. "Mmm, glow in the dark plastic Enochian sigils. I can see this," she says, looking over the huge tome and it's complicated illustrations. Maybe she is more trouble than the never-seen-but-many-times-described Kharisma. "Would they really kick you off of all the committees ever for that? Do you guys really hold committee meetings?

"Committee members," she says, affecting a comical voice. "I move that Kalen's choice of Christmas gifts was in decidedly poor taste. He should be reward... chastised by never being made... I mean allowed to attend a committee meeting again. Do I have a second?"

Grace leans over her laptop all conspiratorially, and whispers, "You should go for it. We can definitely do glow in the dark."

"Back to reality though, yeah fine scale really depends on the printer and the material used. I think some of them just do etching now. Like, you print out a shape, and if it can be etched, it's got an etching head to do that too," Grace says, switching from joking to thinking.

Kalen

"Oh, they will still make me go to committee meetings.  They just won't trust me to run any committees."  Kalen laughs.  "Which means I will be able to pay as little attention as I can get away with.  Because you know they would put me on some boring committee, like the committee to determine which design to submit to the landscaper for the shrubbery and while that could be cool, I will never get a vote in to turn all the topiary into battling tyrannosaurs and zombies.  At that point...why bother?"  He waves one hand lazily, dismissively.

He can't really hate the Order though.  He's had, and has, options if he wanted something else.  Loyalty and affection are...not the same as glowing approval.  Kalen thinks of the Order as his family.  Which means sometimes he scoffs about crazy family reunion stories.  How many people really come home from holidays talking about how well their family gets along and how no one ever fought at the table.

And, in all seriousness, you know that Kalen would be bored if no one was throwing crockery.

"It would be so cool if we could make for for Trent that is the symbol for chaos etched with butterflies.  Not in tacky plastic.  Because at least one of us likes Trent."  He flips through not the giant book but his journal.  "This one, here, is Chaos."  Flip-flip-flip.  "And this one is Entropy."  He flips back to Chaos.  "You can see the similarities, but the concepts are still different.  But I definitely think Trent needs a Chaos butterfly."  

He grins.  "Can we really do it?  Oh!  Which ones do you want to see?  You don't tend to use them in sentences or anything, not unless you're talking to Angels, so it really becomes about, in the beginning, hunting down the concepts you're interested in and learning a few dozen symbols.  Then once you've had some time with those you can start to see the patterns and explore that."

Grace

"We can really do it, yes," she says, and brings up a website on her laptop, and then spins it around so Kalen can see. On the screen is a commercial 3D printing site, where people can buy prints of uploaded models. And among the images are printed plastics, of course, but also gold, silver, brass, bronze, steel, ceramic...

Which one would she like to see? Well, Entropy and Chaos are interesting. Closer in form to each other than she'd expect, really. Wonder what the symbol for Creation looks like, and whether it incorporates some of those same themes? They're two sides of the same coin, after all.

"Hmmm. You have one for electricity? How about electricity and magnetism? Electromagnetism?"

She has a theory that those two might be quite close to each other as well. They're two aspects of the same thing, perpendicular to each other, never occurring one without the other. Much like Entropy and Chaos. And they build the very foundations of communication, connection. The blood of humanity's hungry desire to be at one with itself runs with electrons.

Or maybe their kind see it as something far more simple and primal than all that -- nothing any more subtle than a bolt of lightning. 

Kalen

Kalen flips through his journal again, rather than the large book. "Here is Electricity." Kalen reaches out to touch the image, then gently removes the page with the image from where it is tucked into the book and offers it to Grace to look at. "Do you want to try drawing it? There may be other ways to learn, but you need to do something to connect with the symbols.

"I drew them. A lot. And eventually they took on their own forms and colors when I envisioned them. I recorded them in precious inks, but when I see them or say them there are colors overlain on them.

"And eventually they sing. Hum? Like...a frequency? They each have their own.

"Not for everyone. People have different perceptions of them. I don't know how you will understand them. You will know though, when you have connected with them."

Grace

"There's a word for that, you know -- the colored, singing thing. Synesthesia. Most people who experience it get colors overlaid on top of letters, but it can be anything really. Like, listening to music makes you taste or smell stuff? Or reading words makes you feel a tactile sensation. I once knew someone who swore up and down that they could do math by the color of the numbers, and they were really good at it too. I don't have that talent though," she says, and takes the sheet with the electricity symbol, looking at it like she wants to see the color of it.

"What if I never connect with them? You talk like it's a foregone conclusion," she says, squinting at the symbol like it's a mean symbol for hiding its secrets from her. "What does it sound like? I mean, how do you say this thing?"

Grace takes the page, and lays it on the table. Then, she goes for her phone, and takes a picture of it, trying to get as level an image as possible, for the least distortion. After a few minutes of fiddling with the phone and laptop, Kalen might be able to see that she has the drawing program back up again with the picture of the symbol on it. And she's tracing it with incredibly precise lines and curves.

Kalen

"It is the language of Creation. It is already part of you. You don't feel it yet, but it is like your heart beat. You don't always feel it. But you can focus on it and then you'll find it. How could you fail to connect to something that is part of you? Has always been. Will always be.

"And, that one, electricity...every thought is just like very tiny lightning bolts striking neurons. And some chemicals, I guess. The brain is complicated.

"Don't make it complicated though. Just find some way to connect to electricity while you draw it. It takes awhile. You might not get it today. I mean, I know you're brilliant and everything, but it took me like a week for my first few sigils. It gets easier, once you start to know a few."

[OOC Note: Kalen has almost no separation between his understanding of Enochian and Prime/Forces so his perceptions need not be even a little how Grace's go.]

Grace

When he starts talking about the language of Creation, speaking in such awe-inspiring terms, she looks up from her screen, the pixels of an Enochian sigil of Electricity lighting her face from below. "It's the source code. It is already part of you. Ones and zeros and in-betweens writing who you are on the light-like boundary of the cosmological horizon. How could you fail to connect to something that is part of you?

"I guess what I'm saying is that maybe some translation will be required..."

She does, however, start pouring herself into the drawing of that shape. It's just a drawing to her. No colors, no singing. Every now and then she hides the layer that contains the image she's tracing in order to check progress and fix kinks in the path. It looks like her face blinking on and off, one and zero, as the screen lightens and darkens in an instant.

But, in the end, she has this: a black outline of the sigil of electricity, with control points and handles splayed around and along the path, like they're alternately pinning down the lines or yanking them in different directions in order to create perfectly straight or perfectly curved sections.

But for all that perfection, it is still a tracing of a picture of a copy of a sigil.

Just for Kalen, since he likes the idea so much, she quickly extrudes the shape into a slightly-raised 3d structure, and passes that object to a rendering program where it shares company with a small tree. Properties then. Reflection: 100%. Color: gold. The branches of the tree and a fake sky reflect on the immaculate golden mirror surfaces of Electricity when it's done.

She turns the screen back to Kalen at last. "Hey, I drew it. Traced it really, but you know. My handwriting capabilities are terrible."

Kalen

"It was less like translation and more like finding a harmonic resonance for me.  It will probably be different for you." 

He smiles when she shows him the sigil rendered into a landscape.  "Maybe if you made it look more like lightning belonged there it would help.  I love it, but it looks like summer.  Maybe if you made it look like storms, or something.  Put it in a true context....

"I was just told to write them until I understood them.  I'm not going to force that same thing on you.  We can try it...however many ways we do."

Grace

"Electricity isn't just lightning, though, it's everywhere. It's electrons. There's more electrons in that tree than there is in a bolt of lightning, they're just not moving around. In a real world, there would be current flowing through that sigil too. It's gold, gold has free electrons that move. Think about, like, this sea of potential lightning, with eddies and flows at random, right? But lightning is like what happens when that sea turns into a tidal wave. And the electric grid is like what happens when we build massive aqueducts to move that sea around."

Grace pauses for a moment, staring at the sigil on her screen. Maybe that's why they like drawing them in silver, gold, and copper. They're all the most conductive materials in the world. Maybe the 'sea of potential lightning' thus created by a certain shape makes electrons flow through them in certain configurations (hardly random), triggering a kind of electromagnetic harmonic wave that can be detected by certain people. Of course, that would make sense.

"Huh."

The look on her face could be described as angry, except that's not even close to true. It's that kind of deep concentration that one sometimes gets into when tackling a problem.

"Flow modeling..." she murmurs, obviously not saying that to Kalen. But then she turns to him sharply. "Do you ever sense any electric impulses inside the sigils themselves? Especially during use, or when they are drawn using precious substances?"

Kalen

"So, there you go connecting to concepts totally differently than I do." He laughs. "How isn't what matters here. If you get closer to it with electron flow and all of that...."

He sighs. "I may not be the best case for an example because I really do perceive these things in practice more than many, not because I have an extraordinary connection to them, but because I use these perceptions in workings of magics that are fluid. Dynamic. That is not the experience of most of those I know who have studied Enochian.

"But...I sense power in them. Which is like but unlike electricity. It may be close enough to be of significance to you in this circumstances."

Grace

Hmm. Perhaps not, Grace thinks, as Kalen explains himself using generic 'power'. Power like what exactly? The power of some form of chemical energy? Or something more abstract, like the power to move a crowd of people into action? Something like 'knowledge is power'?

Probably the latter.

He says he drew it until he understood it, and Grace doesn't really see the point. She could write a program that would generate a hundred, a thousand, a million of them, and it would be largely the same, generating no further understanding. But then, that's taking a massive shortcut, isn't it?

Still, performing the same act over and over again expecting the next time will be different? That's called Gambler's Fallacy, or Insanity, one of the two. Something like this, at least for Grace, requires a different plan of attack. Multiple angles, multiple ways of 'drawing' or thinking about it. Like, modeling the electron flow through a gold sigil of Electricity, and comparing that to the one for Chaos, and then comparing that to the math of the splines used to create the shapes, and maybe even finding Kalen's singing noise in the midst of all that and analyzing it. She can never exactly stay in one place, with one idea.

"Could I watch you use it? I mean, watch it, record it, use that in some analysis perhaps? It doesn't have to be Electricity, I mean, I don't want you to strike the Warehouse with lightning and catch us all on fire. That would be bad."

Curry is better to eat than ashes.

Adam
The dark-haired and thoroughly uninteresting young man can be found at Vietnamese place right beside a building that advertises legal services, massages, with a Psychic Reader upstairs. The weather is practically balmy, so the young man is seated alone outside the restaurant at a table. He is wearing a charcoal gray coat with a mended elbow and a distant expression. He is in that perfect state of comfort, spine curved against the chair-back, and he is playing with his rice and chopsticks, trying to build a tower out of the grains of rice.

Adam
[Dex! For playing with food!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (2, 9) ( success x 1 )

Adam
[Hmm. Let's say yesterday Adam discovered and is now trying out a ritual that is basically Perfect Time, Hermetic Style. If today is the day some vile foe is going to hit him with a Time Distort-o rote, today is also the day he is prepared to not let it keep him down. What would a Hermetic Time-y thing be called?

The Golden Hourglass of Ra.
Yes. -1 for Specialty Focus, and a theoretical -1 for taking his time setting the whole thing up. We'll say he extended earlier too!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Adam
[Or not.]

Adam
[Well, he likes to be thorough.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Adam
[Let's have Intelligence + Enigmas + Int Specialty, for writing in a nifty Cypher he made for just such an occasion.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Adam
[! YAY. Quick, Sid, save Adam before his player figures out more ridiculous stuff to roll for and it starts going poorly!]

Sid
[first of all do we even notice there is an Adam around?  magidar is a-go! -3 for Arcane you sneaky sneak, but Sid's a-paranoid, so here goes]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Sid
[and another for Alyssa, she don't got no Arcane hoo hoo]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Sid
[dex+ath: how you do that thing you do, gurl]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

Alyssa Solomon
[[Yay, me roll too!  Awaredar: Sid!]]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )

Alyssa Solomon
[[Awaredar: Adam!]]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (7, 7) ( success x 2 )

Sid
It really is a surprisingly lovely day in Denver today.  The city still has a dry and dusty feel to it despite the snow- and icemelt that runs in rivulets down the street.  Mostly that's because the city is a desert.  The scrub grasses are dry and brown and crackle beneath feet, when there's any grass at all.  Partly, too, it's the residue of the sand that gets thrown down when the roads become slick or icy.  Salt has no power in this city, and it's not good for the environment.
This isn't a story about the dryness of Denver, though, that's just the setting.  Sid is in the area because she wanted to find something in a shop somewhere.  Probably she could do with a massage, and maybe sometime soon she could do with some legal advice, but for the moment she's making her way down the street at a quick-ish pace, deftly guiding a skateboard here and there as she weaves past pedestrians, a slight smile on her face for the feel of the wind in her loose red hair flowing like a banner in her wake.  She's dressed in jeans and black-and-white Vaans that have seen better days.  There's a brown messenger bag whose wide strap bisects a yellow t-shirt with a red-stencil depiction of a roaring lion.  It's a nice day to be out and about.
Until she picks up on some unfamiliar resonances.  Frowning, Sid comes to an abrupt stop, kicking up her board to catch its edge in one hand.  At a considerably slower pace she follows the one that is...not bloody and rustling like wings.  Which is difficult to focus on because that other one she senses far more strongly.  She turns a corner and sees a Vietnamese place where someone is sitting outside in the fading light of a very early spring day.  Shifting the board so that she carries it under her right arm, Sid continues toward a figure her mind simply does not want to settle on.

Adam
[Do I notice people? Aware!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Alyssa Solomon
A Vietnamese restaraunt, legal services, a masseuse and a psychic reader.  If you put those in an envelope and gave them to Karnak, he might say Four things that Alyssa Solomon could be found at for some reason or another.  Well, not quite so likely the masseuse, but there's at least an outside chance.  So it's a fun irony that she's not actually here for any of these reasons.  Rather, she turns onto the block and makes her way down the street having just come from a nearby hotel.  From the way she looks like she's just been through a war of some kind, perhaps it's best not to wonder too hard why she was there.
And certainly a war is exactly what she looks like she's been through.  Or, perhaps more accurately, a fire.  Her face, normally lightened with a touch of makeup to give her a pale complexion, is smudged and the makup has run to give her strikes of white amidst the flesh tones.  Her eyes are rimmed red from smoke irritation and the lipstick is smeared a bit, as if she's had to rub at her mouth.  Her old Bauhaus shirt smells of smoke, which adds to that smell of blood and the flapping of wings which the supernaturally senstive can detect.  Her hair is a little bit frazzled, and that's what seems to irritate her the most.  All in all she doesn't appear to be a bit irritated, but still possessed of her sense of humor and certainly not in physical distress.  A cigarette dangles from her lips as she walks along.
And that's when she picks it up.  Sid's Resonance is distinctive, and if there's one thing that Alyssa prides herself on it is remembering what people feel like.  The other is harder to pick up, but it tingles on the edges of her consciousness.  She isn't even taking care to casually avoid mirrorred surfaces right now, which would be a problem if a Technocrat or witch hunter were to happen to notice how she's not reflecting.  Lucky her, they aren't.
She looks up at Sid, who is skateboarding along and coming at Adam in the opposite direction that she's coming from.  A crooked smile pushes through her general annoyance and she picks up the pace to approach the Verbena.

Adam
He notices people!
But first a word from our sponsors on Vietnamese rice (very like Chinese rice in this case) and the towers made there-of. The towers are not terribly impressive. The tower on the edge of Adam's plate lacks a certain something: height, maybe, or - well. It's just a few grains of rice stuck together, balancing precariously on edge. The truth of the Tower of Babel, baby: it was only a few grains of rice high. Adam puts his chopsticks down and, while there is no book currently in evidence on his person (he does have a bag, and the bag probably has a book in it or three), he has a notebook, and he's writing in the notebook with a heavy pen [Wand, silver and mahogony, Ace of Wands, Knight of Wands] which is probably far too fancy for a man his age and a 99 cent store notebook, in blue ink, scritch-scratch, scratch-scritch, something about the relentless passage of the hourglass.
Adam. His resonance is this gleam of a thing: valiant, relentless. The dark-haired young man is innately (Arcane) Mysterious, but that just takes the edge off: behind the edge, something Time-y is relentlessly in Effect.
But who cares because he notices people, too!
The Flower-Witch first; he stops writing to look in her direction, and when she appears, halts abruptly on her skateboard, Adam smiles (or does he frown? or nothing at all? or - wait, what?), and raises his pen-hand to snag her attention with a wave and a beckon.
But then the bloody-winged thing, like wings made of blood are made for a descent for things fall apart and the centre does not hold, and he turns to look in Alyssa's direction with a considering sort-of frown (or a smile? or nothing at all? or maybe back at his book? Eh, background people: Extras in your life).
What's this? What's this?!
A reason to keep the ol' Arcane up, looks like.

Sid
Sid doesn't know what it is about Adam that causes his presence to slip through her mind like water through her fingers.  He waves and beckons to her, but does not take down whatever it is that distorts her minds senses, and so it's hard to stay focused on where he's sitting.  The easier face to look at is Alyssa, the one with the bloody wings who is missing a reflection.  Did Sid notice that about her before?  There there is no mirror-Alyssa reflecting from the shop windows and the rearview mirrors of the cars she passes?  Yes, surely she did the day they carted Pan's bleeding self back to the chantry.
She remembers the woman more, that she'd asked at the chantry where they stashed the weapons.  Sid hadn't had an answer to that.  Usually if people were assumed to be a threat they weren't told where the house was, and besides.  Aren't they all more than a little bit dangerous without a gun or a knife in their hands?
Her attention shifts with a slow blink from the Hermetic and his plate of stacked grains of rice to the Hollow One.  Her gaze dropping to the ground a moment as her left hand reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear - revealing if only for a moment an edge of dark ink on the inside of her wrist and a discolored line along the outside of her forearm (well she was riding and is now carrying a skateboard, chances are she wiped out once and had to be taken to the hospital).
"Hey," she says when they're steps carry the women close enough together to exchange such greetings.

Alyssa Solomon
Alyssa has probably had a bit more experience than Sid with mages whose presence slips through most people's minds like you're trying to look at them through a waterfall.  Her training growing up certainly makes her book-aware of the phemonenon, and she's been living on the fringes for quite a while.  She's used Effects that approximate it for her own defense, but the actual quality itself has been beyond her grasp.  Of course, she's also a stubborn person, so the nagging feeling in her head just makes her want to look closer.  It is only by sheer force of will that she doesn't walk right up to Adam and stare at him until he drops it.
But she does keep away doing it, instead giving a quick look in that direction and a little nod before she looks back to Sid.  "Evening, Red.  How's tricks?"  The cigarette's glowing cherry is flicked onto the ground, where it's snuffed with the toe of a pair of heeled Doc Martin boots before the butt is tossed into a nearby ashtray.  "Sid, right?  Sorry, it's been a few.  Don't forget a face, but names can sometimes get past me."

Sid
It's not hard to have more experience than Sid when it comes to the parts of being Awake that are farthest from being Asleep.  Like bookish young shopkeeps who don't...quite...register in her line of sight.  The only thing she's aware of and accustomed to, really, is her own unique ability, and that she studied for years and years, filled notebook after notebook with carefully articulated notes on the subject before she finally (and not all that long ago) accepted that there is no scientific explanation for her strange ability.  She just...is...different.  Warm and bursting literally from her toes and fingertips with the vibrant energy of growth and potential.
Still.  She is facing Alyssa and she is looking at Alyssa and her attention is almost completely focused on Alyssa, but her eyes.  Sid's eyes, dark brown behind a pair of narrow, black-rimmed glasses, dart to the patio of the Vietnamese place.  There is a shadow between her reddish brows that tightens her expression slightly yet someone visibly thanks to her pale complection.  Sid does not like it when she can't-quite-tell when strangers are lurking in the shadows, and that one that is sort of maybe potentially Adam-shaped is somehow lurking in plain sight.
"Alright," she answers.  She is not bothered in the slightest by the cigarette smoke, and she does not allow her attention to snag on and obviously categorize all the ways in which Alyssa Solomon looks disheveled.  She nods to her name, doesn't ask after Alyssa's.  Maybe she remembers it.  Maybe she's just a little too distracted and paranoid to care at the moment.  Once, she hmms a little, a low little note that's more a vibration in her throat than it is an audible sound as she glances over to Adam.  Maybe it's an effect he's cast, trying to keep himself out of sight?
She would ask as politely as she can manage why Alyssa happens to look so disheveled.  They've only just gotten over their umbrood infestation and perhaps there is some new and terrible thing lurking on the horizon.  There always seems to be something like that in Denver.

[Prime 1: Watch the Weaving, yo!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 4) ( success x 1 )

Adam
[Ooo, someone doing something? Awareness again! + Specialty.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Alyssa Solomon
Alyssa's not what you would call a gentle woman.  She's not overtly cruel and she's no bruiser, but she doesn't have patience for a lot of the bullshit most of the time.  She is, however, a perceptive enough person, and her own brow furrows a little when she takes note of the fact that Sid's not entirely comfortable by something.
Now, it's very possible that Alyssa herself is the source of the tension from the Verbena.  There is at least one other mage in the city who she generally puts in a state of unease by virtue of the coppery, sticky taste of her Otherness.  And she knows that she's not always a people person, and that doesn't mesh well with a lot of people.  But Sid didn't exactly act this way before, and so the Hollower who was almost a Hermetic can place a guess at what it may be.
And what's more, she gets it.
So she pops her neck to the left, then the right before she turns her direction back to Sid.  A little smirk tilts her mouth upward at the left corner.  "You wanna talk elsewhere, where someone isn't trying to wear a neon sign that says 'Don't Look At Me?'  Fairly sure they didn't bring enough for the whole class to share."

Sid
Alyssa hasn't seen Sid act like this before because in their small handful of run-ins there hasn't been someone like Adam sitting as quiet observer on the edge of their conversations.  There has been a Kalen, who is almost not really the same thing, because Kalen always seems on the brink of drifting off into a doze but is always more solid, more real.
It doesn't help that as Sid peers at the Weaving that wends its way around Adam it doesn't seem to suggest what she's sensing.  Then again, Sid is a Life Mage.  She can follow the fate of a pattern and she can examine its prime make-up, but this is Time and she doesn't recognize it.
It would be different, too, if it were someone she didn't recognize.  If she and Adam hadn't met and had a conversation already she would have sort-of noticed him and she would have kept right on walking.  Maybe she'd have even set down her board so she could have a little more speed on her side.  But she does recognize him, and what's more, that first and so far only meeting didn't leave her with a sense that she should be any more fearful of him than anyone else.  Which is still plenty fearful, but not enough to have her taking Alyssa up on her offer to go somewhere else.
There's a flicker, though.  The corner of her mouth twitches upward just a tick.  Alyssa's noticed him there, as well, and what's more she indirectly calls him out.  Sid, quiet, seemingly timid and once afraid-of-strangers-to-the-point-of-extreme-shyness, is even more direct.
"No," she says.  "Excuse me," she says, to Alyssa first.  Then she's taking a few steps toward the Vietnamese restaurant's patio, curling her free hand over the fence that separates patrons from pedestrians, and she leans forward a little.
"I don't know what you're doing but it's freaking me out, so stop it, or leave it up and we'll leave you alone if that's what you want."  Choice given, Sid straightens, steps away and pulls away and just begins to turn away, watching that murky figure (is he tall and lanky or average or short and squat is his hair dark or auburn or is he handsome or plain or or or) from something only a little more direct than her peripheral.

Alyssa Solomon
Alyssa seems surprised, and a bit intrigued, when Sid excuses herself and goes to toward the source of the Arcane.  She leans back on one heel, crosses her arms over her chest and watches with a little curious smile.
When Sid tells the mystery mage to stop it or they'll leave, the smile becomes a grin.  "Okay, I like you."

Adam
He is a rumpled figure: dark-haired Gallowglass, in a reader's habitual slouch, closing his notebook with a glance for the last word he wrote. His attention is on the women. Their attention keeps forgetting him, then remembering they're forgetting him, then slipping back to him. He might notice it if he weren't so busy noticing that Alyssa has no reflection at all in the shop-window and the window of that parked car. There is a legend - Chinese - about the mirror kingdom and how once upon a time the reflections had their own lives and could move in their own way and do as they pleased, but then there was a war, and the victorious people (our people - here, on this side of the mirror) cast a spell on the mirror kingdom, shape-changing them and trapping them in their own world, forcing them and their children and their children's children to repeat the movements of their victors, exactly, forever. Until one day, so the legend says, Fish - the great warrior - breaks free: surfaces from the reflection slowly, and comes out of the mirror.
He wonders what happened to her reflection. He is wondering what happened to her reflection when there's an upkick in Euphoria; or maybe it's Desperation? and he has settled his pen down, fingers curling loosely over one another, chin and - beard? Yes. He has a beard - or stubble. No, it's a beard - resting atop them.
He is noticing Sid using the most essential Sphere and wondering about Alyssa's reflection still and paying very little attention to what is actually happening so he is actually taken aback when Sid leans over that little fence which separates people on the street from people in the patio. Adam, taken aback, straightens out of his slouch, eyebrows jumping up, a quick glance for Alyssa, and a hand scruffing through his already extremely beleuguered hair.
"Hello, Sid," says he, because a hello seems like a good start while he regains equilibrium. "Erm, do you mean what you just Looked at," solemn, that whisper of foreign-accent in the word 'Looked,' "or, uh, my Uncanny ability to be forgettable? Because no can do on the first, but suppressing the second," a crinkle of a bemused and bewildered smile, "means, ah, introductions, I'll hap'ly oblige."

Sid
Alyssa says she likes Sid, and who can blame her, really?  What isn't there to like about a tall, pretty redhead with a figure that is both lean athletic and soft curves in all the right places, carrying a skateboard under one arm and wearing a Lannister Lion on her shirt?  (There are a lot of images of prancing lions in the world, but this one comes with words that are currently almost completely obscured by the strap of her bag, and that logo reads HEAR me ROAR just above a small Game of Thrones logo.)
Alyssa never saw Sid when she was at her worst and most reclusive, a time when she would have wished with all her might for an ability like what Adam has instead of the one that makes flowers bloom at a touch.  The Hollower does not know just how far this woman has traveled to get from being ruled by her fears and terrors to a reemergence of her former confidence and candid demeanor.  And there are still things to change.  Sid has long since knocked down the walls that she put up to barricade herself from the rest of the world, but there are still windows to be thrown open and old rooms inside of herself to be aired out.
Adam sits up, scruffing up his appearance further before greeting her finally.  She does not return it, not yet anyway, but turns her head so that she looks more directly at him now, faces him more head on.  Her brows lift, not because he noticed her peering at him, but something else.
"They're not the same thing?" she asks, the surprise and interest in her expression mirrored in her tone.  As for introductions, they both know her already, and they are both (at least according to appearances) grown adults.  Tucking the thumb of her free hand into the pocket of her jeans, she lets them make their own introductions if they're so inclined.

Alyssa Solomon
"There we are," the Hollower says, as Adam suddenly snaps into focus like a camera that's finally gotten its settings right.  She reaches up to idly wipe at one of those smudges of ivory foundation that are unevenly streaked down her face, scratching with the tip of her fingernail like it's itching a bit.  She still grinning, though less widely now that she has to be (her version of) polite to the new guy.  "Welcome back to the foreground of reality."
She doesn't step in to explain exactly what Arcane is for Adam right away, instead giving the man a chance to do the explaining himself.  She does tilt her chin up in a nod to him.  "So yeah, hi.  I'm Alyssa.  Nice to meet you."

Adam
[*FISTSHAKE*]

Adam
Adam returns Alyssa's nod with one of his own. He was paying more attention before to the Mystical signifiers that attend her: the blood-drenched flurry of wings, the lack of a mirror-twin, but now - after the fact - he absorbs the rest of her appearance. Fire-smoke, streaked pallor. Adam is pale, almost vampire pale, dark half-moons under his eyes, but that's because he should get more sun.
"Adam, thanks, and the same. Heh. Don't take this the wrong way, but you look like an argument for staying out of the foreground. Who'd you save from a fire?"
"And," looking at Sid, again, sea-eyed and fading back to serious, but a dreamy sort-of serious, as if his attention is - not wandering, precisely, but it's a subject which he doesn't entirely understand, and he'd like to study it, so, "No, they're not. My uncanny ability to be forgettable is called arcane, and it's just part of my charm. Happened when I passed through the first threshold of study and really opened my eyes."

Adam
[A cautious test-post.]

Sid
They make for an interesting trio.  There's Adam, pale from not enough sunshine.  And there's Sid, the flame-haired woman with a natural complexion pale as cream.  And there's Alyssa, with her makeup that put her somewhere on the same spectrum of pale but is streaking away.  The more interesting dichotomy, however, would be the nearly-Hermetic and the full Hermetic.  Not that either of them announce to the other the Traditions that they follow.  For Sid that's more than alright.  She doesn't understand why it's so important to announce it, anyway.  In most of her travels the revealing of a Tradition path is met with scrutiny and more than a little trepidation.  Without them, Adam and Alyssa trade quips and banter easily enough.
One thing Sid has enjoyed immensely about putting down roots and keeping herself in one place for more than a handful of months is the learning.  She makes it plain she didn't know that Adam's ability to blend into the background is separate from the effect she saw and immediately he fills her in on it.  It's a part of him, too.
"And you turn it on and off at will?" she asks, sounding the barest touch envious.

Grace
[Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 6, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Alyssa Solomon
She shakes her head when Adam asks who she saved from a fire.  "Myself, as it turned out.  Some jackass decided that he was going to set up a fake fucking medium practice.  I went in to check it out for a couple people who were paying me to, and he decided to get frisky with the flash paper.  Which, as my legendarily infamous 'fuck me' bad luck would have it, he fumbled and dropped a whole handful of it into onto the stove.  Which caught his Time Life Mysteries of the Occult books on fire."
She sighs, waves her hand.  "It all went downhill from there.  But nobody died and his small business owner dreams have gone up in what are likely to be attempted arson charges, or whatever the accidental version of that is.  So I'm getting paid and it's a good day."
She looks over at Sid when she asks if Adam can turn it on and off at will, and again she gets it.  There are times Alyssa's wanted that ability.  It's deeply useful--almost a near-necessary survival tool--when you're on your own.  "That's how it works, yeah.  There are ways to jury rig it, but it's not quite the same."

Grace
[Perception-Awareness!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Grace
Grace is not so trained as Adam, to know where her innate hiddenness comes from. She hasn't a word for it, because nobody has yet told her what Arcane is. As far as Grace is concerned, she's just not that easily described, and that's fine by her. She wants to go unnoticed. Works hard at that. Maybe that's why it works?
With makeup, she looks female. Without it, and the right clothes, she could pass as male. Her eyes are a kind of hazely greeny brown, it kind of changes depending on the day or the light. Her hair is variably messy or straight or whatever. And her clothing choices are limited to jeans, sneakers, tee-shirts, jackets -- in other words, she looks like anybody you could see walking down a street anywhere. The kind of person who your eyes just slide off -- the opposite of striking.
And she is walking down the street today, when she catches the scent of blood in the air, and makes a disgusted face. But then, the others begin to filter in. Bliss, clawing its way free -- that would be Sid. And the blood is winged -- that would be Alyssa.
Alyssa always tends to give her that momentary shock -- bad memories flooding back. But it's not her fault. Grace soldiers on, putting on a smile to greet her people. It's then that she notices someone else with them. Huh, he's here too?

Sid
[percept+awareness -2 for Grace's Arcane this time!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Alyssa Solomon
[[What Sid said!]]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )

Adam
Adam's eyes crinkle up with laughter when Alyssa replies with a(n amusing, to him) work story, and Adam laughs quietly, but he also laughs by hunching over, grinning in a way that creases his cheeks like they want to dimple, but don't quite, under the fuzz of beard, and it's a gawky ol' C our chuckling Adam makes. "That's too bad. In twenty-five minutes, I have an appointment with Madame Sibyl," he nods his head toward the Psychic Reader neon sign above the massage parlor (or is it above the lawyer's office?), "though not, I admit, to out her as a fake, but purely because to satisfy my own curiousity and have my fortune read. What line of business are you in?"
He only nods when Alyssa says that's how it works, yeah. Sid enjoys the learning that comes of being rooted in place; Adam, to tell the truth, enjoys teaching to a point. So he adds: "It doesn't work very well if you already know me well. My father, alas, has never been fooled  at a family function."

[Do I notice Grace?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

Adam
ooc: hmm. that last sentence should read: My father, alas, has never been fooled when I try to slip away from a family function.

Sid
Sid is more than a little envious of Adam's ability, though not for the reason Alyssa supposes.  Though that certainly would have been helpful for an Orphan hiding out from the world at large, she's not quite that person anymore.  She's almost not that person at all, not anymore.  So when Alyssa says that there are ways to jury-rig it, Sid gives a slight nod.  She's sure there is.  And at higher levels of understanding of certain spheres Sid will be able to alter her form completely.  No one would even recognize her.  She would be completely hidden and fully able to live a different life.  It would come with a price, one she might have even been willing to pay once.  Now thow, there's just that slight nod of acceptance of new information.  When Adam says it doesn't always work, especially when someone knows him well, the corners of her mouth lift in a slight smile, warm and amuse but tempered.
Alyssa then gives a work anecdote involving fire and flash paper and false psychics.  Adam asks after her line of business, and Sid waits for her to answer that before asking a question of her own.  A question she doesn't get a chance to ask because she senses another, someone more familiar though just as indistinct and faded-feeling as Adam did when she first happened upon him.  She seeks out the source of that shifting, moving feeling and finds Grace.  Grace who would rather go unnoticed but who paints a smile on her face regardless.  When Sid sees her walking up to them, the world around them a pale, dusty blue-grey as the light of early evening continues to fade toward darkness around them, she lifts her chin in greeting toward her.

Alyssa Solomon
Sid picks up on Grace's approaching Otherness quicker than Alyssa does.  Whether her supernatural sixth sense is fuzzed out a bit due to smoke inhalation, or Adam's Arcane futzed with her Awareness or whatever it is, she doesn't pick up on that shifting sensation until the Verbena is well aware of it.
But she is made aware of it, and her head moves a little to the right almost as if it's the thing being shifted.  She looks over her shoulder and notes Grace.  She knows that she makes Grace uncomfortable and she doesn't revel in the fact, but she doesn't shy away from her either.  Instead there's just a tap of her fingers to a sooty eyebrow.  Her white foundation-streaked face, the red-rimmed eyes and smokey smell around her doesn't change the way she would otherwise greet Grace.  "Evenin'."
She looks back at Adam then when he lays out the ins and outs of Arcane for Sid.  The Hollower relaxes, by degrees, when he's up front about it--including when it doesn't work.  That speaks to his character for Alyssa.
"What do I do?"  She smiles a bit at the question.  Truth be told, she likes coming up with different ways of describing her line of work.  "I look into people's problems and make them go away.  The kinds of problems that people like us might have a unique talent at making go away."  A pause then, and she's getting another cigarette out.  Because she really needs to smell more like a chimney right now, clearly.
"You?"

Grace
Grace waves at Sid, and rushes a bit down the sidewalk toward the group. All friends here, even if they're friends who make you gag when you run across them unexpectedly. Damn, Alyssa, where did you pick up the blood habit? She's so nice, otherwise. (Yes, Grace thinks Alyssa is nice. Let's just go with it.)
"Vietnamese, Adam? You like books and pho?" Grace asks, a grin on her face. Obviously she thinks this means they should be best friends now, or something.
Then, she notices the state of the Hollower's face. There's a sudden flash of concern, followed by Grace's eyes widening a bit. She's decided that hey, Alyssa really likes doing her face up strangely, huh? Just ignore that...

Adam
Here comes Grace: tectonic plates - the destroyer of walls; the wrecker of empires. One day, perhaps. Make a shift.
He still has this little twist of a smile which is a half-smirk in response to laughing, and he nods his hello when she joins them. You like books and pho? with a grin. His response a self-deprecating (or as self-deprecating as Adam is capable of being) : "When I realized I was sweating tumeric, it seemed rather as if a break from curry was in order."
He'd say a question (quest!) deferred was a lot like a dream deferred, thanks Langston, if he only knew it, and he'd watch Sid until she asked it. As it is, the conversation is in full flow.
Adam in a gray coat seems to be in a friendly mood. He is not exuberant about it, but there it is. Alyssa turns the question back on him, and her answer has re-shaped his expression into something more bemused. Bemusement is a standard Adam expression, that and other in-between expressions, on their way to intent and fixed and curious, see.
"I - uncover mysteries occult and arcane, dangerous and dark," eye-crinkle, so he probably isn't really being serious, just trying to match her explanation. "And I work at Night Owl Books. Or An Arch Key," sounds like Anarchy, when he says it aloud, "Books, if that's more your scene."
"You're all welcome to drop by, of course."
Sid and Grace already have, but he still means the invitation at this particular moment: go ahead, drop by, read things.

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Sid
[because I like dice: DOO DE DOO YOU'LL SEE WHEN IT MATTERS]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Sid
For a moment Sid is there, bag slung over her body, skateboard tucked beneath her arm, free hand hooked on the pocket of her jeans, and she is almost, almost...something.  Who knows.  She's a hard woman to read sometimes, that Red.  She doesn't have the Arcane ability that Adam and Grace have, but there is something about her that tends to be elusive, hard to pin down.  Unless she decides to be direct.  Like walking right up to a fuzzy and unclear Adam to tell him straight out to stop it or they'll leave him to his own devices.  She hadn't meant it to be a threat, really, but if Adam had wanted to be left alone he would have left that guard up.  Sid and Alyssa would have gone on their way to some other space to sit and chat and become best friends of a different sort than a bookish shopkeep and a computer hacking wunderkind.
But Sid is lighter, maybe.  Or more open, more something.  More other, perhaps.  As she stands there and lets the conversation flow around her, her question forgotten for the time being.  Adam and Alyssa talk about what they 'do.'  Maybe Grace will chime in as well, but Sid remains quiet.  "Speaking of pho," she says, and she moves to the fence behind which Adam probably still stands.  It's metal and low, not nearly high enough to keep someone with Sid's long legs out for more than the time it takes her swing her legs over.  "I haven't eaten since this morning."  And then she does it.  She braces her free hand on the metal rail of a fence and she swings one leg up and to the side before pushing up from her other foot to hop the rest of the way over.  This puts Adam and Sid on the side of the fence reserved for those who are going to eat at the restaurant, and Alyssa and Grace over with the pedestrian traffic still.
She does not ask if Adam would mind if she officially joins him at his table (likely bringing Alyssa and Grace in her wake if they'd like to stay and chat and eat as well).  She's been invited back to his store which must of course then mean she's been invited forever to sit with him at his table, wherever that table may be.

Alyssa Solomon
If the state of her face bothers Alyssa, she's not showing it.  She's perhaps a bit irascible, but certainly not overly so and she doesn't address it with Grace.  Just don't mention the hair frizz.  It wouldn't be pretty.
She grins a bit when Adam tries to match her wierd job-for-wierd job.  "Wow.  You and I seriously need to combine businesses.  We probably run into the same clients.  I get 60, you get 40.  Unless you like shooting things too, in which case we'll go 50/50."  She could be joking about the offer (and she probably is), but it sounds as serious as anything else she's said.  She takes in the name of the shop and nods.
"I might just have to check it out."
Sid hops the railing and mentions she hasn't eaten, and Alyssa smiles a bit.  "Well, you kids have fun with that."  Kids, says the twenty-eight year-old.  It's more for humor than for denigration though.  "I don't think pho would go too well with a stomach full of glossy paper-turned-soot, and I think I need to get some piss beer in me to clean out my lungs.  So I'm gonna take my leave.  I'll see you all around though."

Grace
Glossy paper-turned-soot? So that isn't some sort of fashion statement? Grace seems to be trying to puzzle this one one for a few moments, but then Alyssa has to leave. "Oh. Bye Alyssa! You'll have to tell me why you were eating burning paper some other time, I guess."
So, now that she's going to be left alone out on the sidewalk, Grace follows Sid over the fence and out to Adam's table, invited or not. Hell, Adam would probably love another chance at trying to convert her to the Hermetic side.
Truth be told, Kalen's having more success at that than anyone. The more time they spend together, the more Grace rubs off on him, and he on her, until she's got him postulating the creation of AIs for their servers to talk to, and he's got her drawing Enochian sigils. On the computer. Don't get too excited, Adam.
"Curry is good too, I like your taste, dude. Better than soot. Much better."

Adam
Oh! The Dream-haired young man has a moment of realization. The moment of realization leads him to absently pat at his pockets as if just by patting them whatever it is he needs (right now, a business card) will appear. Alas, that does not happen. He doesn't have enough Matter and Correspondence yet. One day. Or maybe he just forgets mid-pat what he was looking for; that also seems likely, based on his expression, which grows distant for a moment only to become present again when he realizes hey! whoa! Sid! jumped the fence! and he scoots his chair over so the chairs are more evenly spaced, or something.
"I don't know. Seems like the idea man should get 60, the muscle 50, if that's how that would break down," couple it with a goodnatured grin that conjures up echoes of earlier laughter. Then, seriously, "It was nice to meet you, Alyssa. Ta."
He has another moment of revelation, and moves his notebook to the side, then hands over one of the Vietnamese restaurant's paper take-out menues, just a little bit greasy, for Sid and Grace to look at before going inside to order. It's that kind of place.
"Cannot argue that," he says to Grace, with a nod, when she says Better than soot, another half-smile.

Sid
Curry is good, pho is good.  Right now, Sid would go find Alyssa's mark and steal all his flash paper to eat if it would satisfy her stomach.  That's the thing about forgetting to eat.  When the mind forgets the body goes into power-saving mode, but when it remembers oooh, everything boots into hunger mode at once.  Sid pulls out a chair first, even as she leans down to set her skateboard against the fence she just hopped.
"Take care, Alyssa," she says after the woman is well on her way.  She knew that it was not a fashion statement, the state of her makeup and her hair and all, but if Alyssa wasn't in the mood to go freshen up before wandering down a street in broad daylight who is Sid to judge?
Next comes off her bag, which she tucks beneath her chair before finally settling into it, taking a moment to push her long red locks back over her shoulders.  It does not matter to her where she ends up at the table, either next to Grace or next to Adam, or both with one of them getting a spare chaire between them.  Or maybe they pull chairs back from where they wandered off to other tables and so there are precisely three.  Either way, she settles to look over the menu before heading inside.  Sid has no intention of going in carrying all of her belongings with her, but neither does she intend to leave them outside for the wild animals to snatch from the other side of a low metal fence.
She slides the menu to Grace first.  "I'll keep an eye on our stuff," she says.

Grace
Sid wants to watch her stuff. Grace has no 'stuff' other than the laptop bag, which is going with her regardless. But anyway, she smiles, takes the menu, marks an A2 and a P12 in memory (spring rolls and a meatball pho) and trots off to the front to go order. Soon enough, though, she's back to 'watch the stuff' for Sid. "Hey, your turn."
Adam's not good enough, she supposes. Or not trusted enough. Would be that. There was a time when Grace would have thought that what she and Sid went through would inspire all kinds of trust in just about anyone, but not anymore.
With that, she turns to Adam, "So, how's things? By the way, you are outside of the bookstore. I did say that staying there might be your best strategic course of action. This place? Could be firebombs any time now." She is joking, but only just. With her luck, it could turn out to be quite the true statement.

Adam
"Oh, I'm not going back in," Adam tells Sid, so that she and Grace can go in and order together if they'd like. "I can keep a weather eye out," and that almost-accent whispers through his syllables again, just shy of un-American, not-quite belonging anywhere else.
However it pans out: with Adam telling Sid that they have good (insert this Vietnamese dish here), or offering her a bite of an untouched roll (cold, though), until Grace returns and Sid goes, or both of them returning about the same time, when Grace mentions firebombs etcetera Adam makes a sound in his throat that's almost a chuckle. Heh. Shoulders hunch forward, just a little, and he picks up his long-neglected chopsticks in order to make a rice tower again.
"I rather think Alyssa's run-in with fiery mayhem preserves us from suffering the same fate, this afternoon at least. Things are good. No danger, just quiet study. Acquired a signed F. Scott Fitzgerald inscribed to T. S. Eliot. My aunt is going to cry when she gets back from her whirlwind tour."

Sid
Adam isn't going back in he says and Sid's brows rise.  Sid is not so concerned for her belongings that she wouldn't trust them with him - her bag is full of mostly replaceable things and the skateboard was (supposedly) left behind by some guest at Sera's house.  It can be replaced, too, though Sid would be a little sad to do it.  And besides, Adam doesn't look like the sort to try to jack someone's skateboard.  Her wallet, though, that goes with her, obviously.
She offers him a slight smile and an even slighter nod before she rises from her seat to follow Grace inside.  Maybe they discuss the possibility of splitting an order of spring rolls, but in the end they don't.  Sid is simply too hungry to share anything right now.  She orders spring rolls and (that Vietnamese dish because she hasn't had it before), pays in cash, and is still sorting her change back into her wallet as she pushes through the door back to the patio.
She reclaims her seat, with all of her things precisely where she left them.  There is a slight crinkling of her forehead and a twisting of her mouth, because she catches the tail end of Grace suggesting firebombs.
"I doubt it'd be anything so straightforward as firebombs," she comments, her expression smoothing as she watches Adam begin to play with his food again.

Grace
"True that, Sid," Grace comments, and sighs. It's too public to go over the less straightforward, but shit. Yeah. Firebombs are too direct. How about all the cows whose fat has ever been rendered by a certain McDonald's suddenly claiming vengeance on their human predators? That a little less straightforward for you?
But Adam's life in Denver has yet to obtain such complications. Grace gives him a smile when he goes over his decidedly slow-paced awesomeness. "Whoo! Seriously cool that. As for me, well... you know. Good and bad. School's on, and I'm totally busy studying and stuff myself."

Adam
His smile gets wide and deep enough to almost dredge out dimples again; sends light skidding across his sea-ish eyes, although it's still a quiet expression somehow. Quiet because it is directed inward rather than outward, perhaps - because it's accompanied by a little nod. Because it is seriously cool and Sarah is going to be super happy and he is going to leverage that happy into a favor that he wants her to do for him. Valiant and relentless: his resonance does not actually include shining armor. She mentions studying, and he pricks up. First, because - " - Sid. I was on tumbler and somebody re-blogged this thing about using a lemon or grapefruit to start seedlings in. Bury the fruit and the peels become compost. Thought about it for flowers in the Spring. And Grace, how's the writing going?"
He will actually wait for a response from both of them, such as it is, although: behold. Men are gossips. "And what's the deal with Alyssa? Has she been around a while, affiliated with that house, or...?"
Men are huge gossips.

Sid
They are waiting for their food to be delivered, perhaps with little plastic placards with big colored numbers etched into them to declare they're here!  Outside!  Waiting for food!  Sid, however, feels her stomach give another rumble even though it's not-quite-audible.  Sure, Adam's rolls may be cold by now, but before he gets started telling her about tumbler posts and lemon peels-as-compost containers, she looks at him and she reaches her hand toward his plate.  But there her hand hovers a beat as she looks at him, brows lifted.  "Do you mind?"  Because she's not simply going to take it.
And then he is going about tumbler posts, and Sid's interest is piqued.  It makes sense, after all.  "I've heard of people using biodegradable materials for it before, but I hadn't heard of that."  She has an interest in the growing of plants in a normal and mundane way, but the interest is mostly academic.  After all, what does it matter to her the proper temperatures and soil levels and what not when she can cause a plant to bloom with a touch?
And Adam asks Grace about her writing, and Sid pauses to listen to the reply.  She hasn't heard of Grace's writing in some time.  So many things were put on hold these last few months.
When Adam finds himself intent on gossipping about Alyssa, Sid shrugs her shoulder.  "I was there the first time she came by the house, but I don't think that's when she first came here."

Grace
"Oh, Alyssa is fantastic. She's been a big help around... you know, with things," Grace says, and what she means is Thakinyan, but alas. They are on the street.
"I know she kinda gives off some weird vibes, but she's cool."
Grace notes how Sid is going for Adam's leftovers, and then, "Hey, you need some more weed, there's this place? High Line something... Number's at the house, I forget it. It's run by Alyssa's friend, and he's... well, he has the good stuff," Grace says, because she knows how Sid seemed to need it to keep food down in the aftermath of Hydra.
"Mmm, writing, yeah, I tried to get a lot done just before the semester got going in full, to sort of keep the fans going for a while. And I set up a donation box on my site. Someday, when I'm super famous, I could maybe get more than a few bucks here and there out of it, no? You think?"

Adam
If he isn't able to infer what Grace means by things, he certainly seems to be inferring. He has cupped his chin in his hand again, wrapping the fingers of his other hand around his gray-clad fore-arm, his gaze intent on whoever is speaking at the moment. He'd waved his fingers slightly toward his cold left-overs because he doesn't mind. In fact, he pushes the plate toward her. He's skinny, and that's not because he's keeping fit. It's because he forgets to eat or food stops interesting him, plus genetics. Genetics also play a part. He looks thoughtful at both contributions to what's the deal with Alyssa, and while he's listening to the Question of Weed and A Good Place To Get The Good Stuff + writing, the Golden Hourglass of Ra tells him with a time-knot with a perfect radiant edge that it is time for him to make that appointment.
"That depends on what you're willing to write," Adam says, "and who you're willing to sell to. There's always, what's it called, kickstarter. And I'm afraid it's time for me to go visit Sibyl the Psychic Reader now. Wish me good fortune. Was a pleasure running into you both again."
As he's taking his leave, he stands up, takes his notebook and his pen and slides them both into his bag, which he hitches over his shoulder. He doesn't reach out to shake hands all formal-formal, but he does give an awkward little wave. Backwards walking,  bump into fence, lack of coordination, look back at fence like: How did you get here? Real startlement.
And after farewells are given, he's off. Next door, Arcane back up, Mysterious, and maybe he went that way, but maybe he turned over there. It's forgettable, the manner of his departure. It happened, and then it doesn't matter.

Sid
Adam has to take his leave to go have his palm read or some other such thing.  Silly thing, that.  If he had the proper knowledge in the proper places he could find that stuff all on his own.  Or talk to Sera. Perhaps she should put him in touch with Sera eventually, if he hasn't already met her.  Seems everyone's already met Sera the moment they cross the state line.
But Adam goes, and he leaves Sid and Grace to eat their pho and their spring rolls.  Sid does not comment on the weed that's available via some friend of Alyssa's.  She gets her own supply through her own connections which do not actually connect to her in any way - at least not on paper.  Perhaps someday Jim will change his supplier, though, and then Sid will get to try some of this good stuff.
They are left alone to their food to chat, but not for too long unfortunately.  Sid receives a text not long after Adam leaves, keeping the women from delving too far into deep conversations (or conversely from wallowing in awkward silence for too long, with these two and what they've been through it could be either).  She makes her excuses and then she's hopping back over the fence, dropping her skateboard to the pavement and rolling away again, off to meet someone or get something before meeting someone or something else.  There hasn't been a moment during their brief encounter, though, where Sid has seemed as she did the last time she and Grace spoke.  She is not quietly withdrawn, nor is she too-thin anymore with her cheeks hollowed and the dark marks of many sleepless nights marring the skin beneath her eyes.  She looks...okay, really.  Settled, maybe, or close to it.  Better than she's seemed in a while, at lea