Grace
[Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 5, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
Grace
[Perception+Awareness!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )
Grace
Grace
is expected, or should be. Who knows though, with Sera -- could have
caught her during a time when time makes so little sense that 'expected'
doesn't either. Or maybe she expects everyone at any time, and
therefore it doesn't matter.
In any case, it's Grace at the door,
knocking, in her jeans, black coat, sneakers ensemble, looking very much
like someone who doesn't want to be looked at. Stares just don't stick
to her, like the very opposite of a Sera whose very nature demands one
to stare.
She can feel that need to be enthralled by
Sera, just standing on the house's porch waiting to be let inside
(probably doesn't have to knock or wait, but whatever, Grace is Grace).
Serafine
Perception + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1
Serafine
Usually
one of the housemates or hangers-on opens the front door when it
requires opening, and it requires opening tonight because Grace is the
sort who knocks, no matter how many times other people have wandered on
in. It is a rather remarkably warm weeknight and although Colorado
seems to recall that it is still February when the sun goes down
and Sera does very little until the sun goes down so Grace, standing on
the porch, likely gets a bit chilled out there, waiting. She can hear
the rumble of bass from a stereo or something inside and the rush of
traffic and the laughter of a couple all bright and sharp in the air,
half a block away or more on this residential street and she can feel
Sera all familiar in there and something else, too, which might remind
one of thresholds, of places where things change.
So, usually one
of the housemates, but tonight it is Sera herself who pulls open the
door. She's wearing this complex combination of a cropped leather
jacket and something that seems to be silky and sheer beneath it and a
floaty, hi-low black skirt that hits her a few inches above her knees in
front and then cuts downward to be a bit longer in the back and really
rather conservative for a Sera, Grace might note, until that Sera opens
her arms, as she does, and hugs Grace, as she does, and murmurs some
greeting into Grace's hair, and smells like cigarettes and pot and has
some of that bright cold clinging to her skin-and-hair because she was
out back smoking, not in the house, and as Sera pulls away and the
embrace skims from embrace to hand-holding Grace can see why Sera is
wearing such a conservative skirt -
- it is entirely sheer.
Beneath
Sera has on these calf-high combat boots wrapped in leather straps and
buckles and bare legs and she grabs Grace's left hand with her right and
Grace can see the glint of a small ring of beaten gold on her right
index finger and lo Sera leads Grace down the hall and into the kitchen
and through the kitchen to the living room and asks her if she wants a
drink and procures any such drink as necessary and the housemates have
already shooed or perhaps they just aren't around and that is why Sera
is playing at being the butler in her very-own-house.
Grace
You
never really know what to expect in Sera's house. There could be a
party going. Or just a grouping of the regulars -- the band, the closer
friends -- all bending over backwards to please Sera at the center of it
all, whether they realize that they're doing it or not.
But
tonight, there is just the Sera, in a sheer skirt and combat boots that
are wholly unsuited to combat (all of which Grace ignores as being
someone else's fashion sense, as if she understood fashion to begin
with). Harder to ignore is the hug, which Grace accepts in that stiff,
unbending, robotic way. Yes, hello, Sera, ye of the hugs and hair
ruffles.
It's easy to smile, even though she's not here to speak of happy things.
She
waves off the question of a drink, though this will probably make Sera
sad. "Nah, I'm just here to talk," she says. "I saw Lena the other
day..."
And she lets that last sentence hang in the air. The sadness on her face must declare about how well that went.
Serafine
Grace
might wave off the offer of a drink but that does not mean that Sera is
teetotaling. Far from it. Sera deposits Grace in the living room,
full of artfully mismatched furnishing, where Grace can choose to curl
up in a papasan chair, or on a slightly threadbare green velvet sofa
with scrolled arms and artfully carved wooden feet, or in this delicious
wingbacked chair, or so on. Deposits Grace and decamps for the kitchen
and returns with a reuseable Nalgene water bottle for Grace and then
both a cup-and-saucer for herself and a pot of freshly, fragrantly
brewed Darjeeling for herself.
Spiked liberally with Stranahans, because this is Sera.
There is a hearth in this room and an actual fire
crackling therein and that new-feeling sense of
places-where-things-change is also in the room. It comes and goes when
Sera comes and goes, recedes and rolls back in like the tide. Sera
circles past the fire and pours herself a teacup full of her spiked tea
and settles into the embrace of one of the corners of the sofa and
listens as Grace tells her that she saw Lena.
Sera can read the
sadness hanging like an aura about Grace, of course she can, but she
does not comment specifically on that. Just lifts the mug to her mouth
and murmurs, quietly, with that wholeness of attention that so often
defines her, "What happened?"
Grace
Grace takes
the water bottle, despite not really being thirsty, and then? Well,
let's not look at Sera. The fire, let's look at that. It's easier, isn't
it? And fires provide such great excuses to stare into them.
"I
went to one of her shows. She makes great music, you know? And
afterward, we went to a bar, and we talked, and she seemed very happy
that I wanted to know how she wanted to be helped."
Grace sighs then, because well, that's the good news...
"But how she wanted to be helped was for me and everybody else to stay the hell away from her."
Serafine
"I'm
sure she's good. She's always moving, you know? She feels like music,
too. A bit: the beat? Though electronica has never really been my
thing. I wanna hear skin against guitar strings. I want people to play
until they fucking bleed."
The teacup in Sera's hand is the old
fashioned sort. Bone china, painted with a delicate spray of roses,
gilded around the lip and handled, meant to be elegantly sipped. Sera
settles the saucer on her left knee and holds the teacup by its base
rather than its handle and watches Grace watching the fire. This is how
it goes: Sera's dark eyes and Grace's sigh. Sera's warmth and the
warmth of the alcohol in Sera's veins and Grace's sorrow. Quiet, as
Grace tells what she tells of the encounter, and then, just as quiet -
"What do you think about that?
Grace
"It's not going to help?" Grace offers.
She
runs fingers through her messy hair, not to try to un-mess it, just
it's a way to defuse the frustration a bit. "I told her that she wants
two things that can't happen at the same time, you know? She wants
people to know her and care about her and she also wants everybody to
stay away from her.
"Then, she just got mad and told me never to track her down again."
Serafine
Sera
lifts her tea-cup to her mouth and inhales the fragrant scent. The
whiskey mostly-overwhelms delicate notes of the steeped tea, but whiskey
is a good scent. All smoke and amber, a supple sort of imbibing fire.
The gesture is quite nearly meditative which is strange because Sera
isn't the sort given to meditating and her eyes are shadowed by
half-lowered lashes and the surface of the tea vibrates with her exhaled
breath.
She is just thinking, quite internally, her mouth
quirked upward at one corner, the leather of her little cropped jacket
creaking a bit when she shifts her left leg and upsets the saucer but
not the mug.
"So." Quiet. Strangely steady, Sera. "What are you gonna do?"
Grace
Grace's
eyes start dancing from coal to coal. "It was a mistake, me ever going
there, trying to talk to her. I'm the worst possible person for that
sort of thing. I just, I don't understand people sometimes, and I
can't..."
But that really wasn't the question asked was it? What
are you going to do about it eh? Grace turns to look at Sera. "I'm going
to stay away from her. I just don't want to fuck things up worse."
Serafine
"Grace."
There's
a certain command in the way that Sera says Grace's name. A certain
substantiality, a certain quiet weight. Something in the tone that
wraps around the spine and requires attention, because this is Sera and
this is how Sera is. Beneath that, an open and rather unrequited
compassion - the dark yaw of it damp in Sera's eyes and Sera shifts on
the couch and the saucer is now lost between cushions and spine and
someone else will find it three weeks hence, perhaps Dee, and then she
will know why one of the teacups has been without its saucer for weeks.
But,
"Grace."
And
Sera sets her more-than-half-finished tea aside on the coffee table and
shifts herself up to one knee and edges closer to the Virtual
Adept-to-be.
"People are always fucking opaque. No one
really knows what's going on behind someone else's eyes. We're as much
mysteries to ourselves as we are to each other, and that's okay. And I
don't know what the hell is going on with Lena, but it wasn't a mistake
for you to try to talk to her.
"You're saying that right now
because you think that it didn't work, that you didn't fix it, that you
didn't fix her, that you didn't turn her around."
A small lilt of her shoulders beneath the leather.
"
- but you know, people aren't things-that-get-fixed. We're just
people, and we're all fucked up. We get things wrong and we get them
right and we get them in the middle and we get turned around and
sometimes - most of the time - those definitions hardly matter.
"Tell me this. Why'd you go see Lena in the first place?"
Grace
"Because,
I... I don't know. Just, all of the rest of us, we've had people
watching out for us. I've had Kalen -- you know he still makes sure I
eat?
"But she's so alone, and it's not fair. I
just wanted her to know that she didn't have to be. But I guess she
wants to be. Or, I don't know, maybe she wants to be alone because
everyone keeps fucking it all up when it comes to her."
Grace
returns attention to the fire. Forgets for a moment, in the dance of
flames. But it's only a moment's reprieve. But yes, there is that sense
that Sera is so likely to pick up on, that Grace feels in some way
responsible for the current loneliness of Lena. If only she could be
what Lena needs, but no...
Serafine
"So you went because you wanted to tell her that you were there if she needed you, and she didn't have to be alone?"
So Sera quietly interpolates, listening to the crackle of the flames and the pulse of guilt beneath Grace's skin.
The edge of a smile ghosting across Sera's mouth.
"Did you tell her that?"
Grace
"Yeah.
I did. Maybe not in those exact words, but yeah," Grace says. She curls
up in her chair, looks into the fire. "You think she's going to be
okay?"
The words have hardly left her mouth before she's certain it's not the right thing to say. If Lena's not going to be okay, what could anyone even do about it anyway?
Serafine
"I think she's magic."
Sera doesn't speculate on whether or not Lena's going to be okay. On some level, Sera might not even believe in okay as a reasonable generalized state of being for a mage and a Cultist of Ecstasy. Isn't okay
a middling sort of ground, a flat and undifferentiated plane of
existance full of even-keeled ships and second-rate lunchs in third-rate
cardboard followed by an afternoon of paperwork and fourth-rate sex in a
worn and familiar bed. The sort of flat and undifferentiated ground
where the magic inherent in any of those things; the miracle of
sunlight, the gravity defying power of a goddamned elevator, the quiet
comfort of sex with someone you love, in space that you have created
together, is lost to the dulled sameness of the rote.
So,
it
hardly matters whether or not Lena is going to be okay, right? Though
Sera knows what Grace means and gives Grace a smile and a look and
exhales.
"And I think she has the right to a will; she gets to make her own choices. She has to work her way through them. You know?
"You are not responsible for the choices she makes. Just the ones you make. You have the right to keep making them.
"I think you should respect her wishes. You shouldn't track her down. But if you want to talk to her, see how she's doing, you should give her a call."
Grace
"Oh
I'm not going to take away her right to choice. She's chosen. But
choices don't happen in a vacuum. It's not like there's Lena over there,
and everyone else over here, and we don't affect her at all when she
goes and makes choices. Environments matter.
It's like... ugh,"
Grace starts to say, stops, keeps going (because Sera's unlikely to
completely understand this part, but whatever). "It's like quantum
mechanics. You can't just isolate yourself completely from the outside,
because all interactions entangle you with the rest of the universe. I
mean, you'd like to think that you are just you and you're all in
control of you. But you're not you. You're everything. And entangled
with everything else.
"Something like that virus, man that's an interaction
for you right? We're entangled. No matter what I do, I can't stop
affecting her, or she me. I just don't know if I'm affecting her in the
right way."
Serafine
"I have no fucking idea what quantum
mechanics are," returns Sera, with this slow-curving smile that feels
full and ripe and on the edge; on the edge of something, right? Maybe even something new. "And if it's science shit, man. I don't think I wanna know."
Like she's holding something on her tongue.
Like she's holding some secret everyone in the world knows in and on and under her tongue.
The
smile spreads like molasses, slow and rich, and she moves her head on
the fulcrum of her neck like a drunk girl does: keen to the pleasure of
movement. "But you're right. We're all entangled and everything's
connected and there's no fucking way to sever yourself; to build a wall
and cut those ties because even the act of fucking excision is different
sort of connection. You, Grace, you just can't know what the right way
is." A small shrug. "Even if you were a seer. Even if you were a
prophet. The future's this smear of shifting possibilities and now's
now and then's then. Sometimes you just have to accept uncertainty."
Grace
A
sad smile forms on Grace's lips. "Don't wanna. Accept uncertainty. But
then, there's another piece of science shit for you. It's a fundamental
principle of the universe that things are uncertain, that there are some
things that you can't know."
Unless, of course, you cheat.
Gadfly
used to do that, with her even. He sometimes didn't have the social
wherewithal to know what to say to another person without gleaning clues
from their brainwaves. A little creepy perhaps, but Grace understood.
If there were anyone who would understand, it would be her.
Loneliness can become self-regulating after a time. You forget (or never
learned) how to interact with people and so when you do, it ends in
disaster. And the cycle continues.
"Some people are better at
knowing what the right way is than others, though. I'm not one of those
people, Sera. I can be downright oblivious, and I know that. I didn't
pick up at all that Lena thought I was pitying her and hated it. Hell,
every time I saw her, I ended up happy, thinking it was a great time and
we had a nice talk. I was such an idiot."
Serafine
"Uncertainty makes us possible."
And
Sera tastes like it now; the new resonance in the air since last Grace
saw her is almost wholly defined by uncertainty. The space between,
right? One definition and another; one identity and another; one space
and another. The threshold.
The open door.
Passion in
Sera's voice is painted and vivid and there's something about it that
feels, well: unbounded and unbound. The edge of a smile and the coiling
of Sera's bare legs and those heavy boots wrapped around her calves as
she shifts position on the other side of the couch and drains her cup of
tea-and-whiskey nearly at a go, and then she sets aside cup and saucer
on the coffee table and settles back on the couch, the heavy boots
tucked beneath her rather small frame, an arm flung across the back of
the couch, this open energy about her that reads as masculine to most of
the western world because Sera expects to be able to take up as much
space as she wants, and a certain species of compassion in her eyes.
"Isn't
that three-quarters of what's wrong with everyone out there? All that
certainty. The loss of mystery. Refusing the challenge of not knowing
what the fuck you're doing.
"Near as I can tell, Lena would've
thought that no matter what you did. You've gotta let that go.
Misunderstandings are part of the territory of being human, you know?"
Grace
"Perhaps
she would have," Grace says. Perhaps Lena would have seen pity
everywhere in anyone, and no matter their actual state of mind. "I
didn't really think about it like that."
There is something to
blaming yourself, isn't there? We do it because we'd like to think we
could do something about a situation that's not actually in our hands.
We'd like to think we have control over our lives, or even other
people's lives. Blaming oneself, even if it hurts to do, is a way of
grabbing at power that was never handed over.
Lena certainly didn't want to hand that power over to Grace, nor to anyone. Maybe that was the point.
"Uncertainty.
Hmm. Yes. Part of the territory of being human. Right," Grace says,
repeating words, off in thought. "Sometimes, I don't know. I write a lot
of stories with questions about what that really means -- being human. I
guess I never really figured that one out."
Serafine
Sera
is leaning back into the embrace of her couch now. Lounging, with her
feet in those heavy boots curled beneath her ass. Which has to be
uncomfortable, although she does not really appear to be uncomfortable.
The fire is in her periphery. She can see it through the scrim of her
lashes when she turns her head aslant. She can hear the pop and crackle
as the flames find some bit of resin in the old dry wood. She can
smell the sharp, rather clean scent of the dead wood burning, burning.
The
house is mostly-quiet but there is music somewhere. There is music
from-somewhere and the sound is low, background. Sera might not talk
quiet so openly about magic and mage-things if Dee and Rick were around,
so it must be Dan somewhere in the house. Working, maybe.
Rather
unconsciously, Sera thumbs the ring on her index finger, rests her head
cushioned against the spine of the couch. Watches Grace, through
half-closed eyes. Listening as Grace repeats her words; watching the
thoughts drift across Grace's features like clouds against the sky.
"Who really has?" Sera asks her, rather quietly. "Figured it all out." Her eyes a sort of sloe-dark, full of something. "Tell me about one of your stories."
Grace
"Okay,
sure... There was this one -- I wrote it for Eleanor, but that was a
mistake. I figured something out though. I should never write stores for
a person. Should just write them for everyone. You write a story for a
person and... well, it's out of your hands what they do with it," she
says, stares off into the fire for a bit. "I mean, that's always the
case with stories, but you don't want to make it personal."
"Right,
so about it. I wanted to write something about reincarnation. So I
wrote about life extension technology, removal of the aging process.
What happens when people are granted the ability to live forever?
Something totally unnatural to the human condition, right? How they'd
sense, at some point, that a reset is necessary. To keep everything new
and exciting and interesting, and keep people going in good directions,
they need to have... Uncertainty. Yeah. Which is why we forget
everything when we die."
Serafine
Sera listens;
see? Her head turned a bit away, so that she can see the fire in the
grate, the leaping shadows it casts over the hearthstone, which is old
and scuffed but clean and well-polished, and which sits a neat
inch-or-so above the level of the old hardwoods. There are Persian rugs
scattered about, beneath the furniture, warm underfoot. Deep
burgundies and blues, and they are worn, the fringe messy and
incomplete, eaten up by errant vacuum cleaners one too many times to
remain intact. Art on the walls, all around, though this is something
Grace may remember about Sera's home and Sera's room: how many things
she collects, nearly all of which someone, somewhere, made with his or
her own two hands.
There are curtains and the curtains are velvet
and they are a rather rich brown instead of the crimson Sera wanted,
only because Dee objected that crimson curtains with a green couch would
look like Christmas all year long. Some of the Christmas lights are
still wound around the curtain rod. Short, squat little Edison bulbs,
and as the darkness deepens outside the rather cheery strand of lights
seems all the more present. The visible filaments glowing against the
dusk outside.
"I know fuck-all about writing stories. Dan and I
write songs, but they're not story-songs. Even so, I just write them
for me. And I figure, maybe as a side effect, they'll mean something to
someone else, and once they're outta you that's all you have.
"It's always
outta your hands what they do with it. What they get from it. What
they hear in it. Why they love it. Why they hate it. Every bit of it,
no matter whom you write it for, or why or when.
"That's pretty okay with me. But I'm a fucking weirdo.
"Anyway,
we can live forever. Or close to it. Hawksley has this book, written
two hundred years ago by an Ecstatic born in the 1960s, who may or may
not have been a hermaphrodite. Which may or may not have been
deliberate choice.
"I can stop time.
"Slow it down. Rewind it. Live it again. Want to see?"
Grace
Sera
talks about an Ecstatic born in the 60's who wrote a book two hundred
years ago, and the thing that immediately jumps to Grace's mind is Dr.
Who. Because of course it would. Speaking of immortals who 'reset' every
now and then, and leap around in time...
And she's about to respond, when Sera says she can stop time. And asks if Grace wants to see. Grace's eyes bug out.
"Yes. Yes of course I want to see!"
Serafine
Sera
is one of those rare individuals who has managed to befriend a nerd
and/or geek who has never heard of Dr. Who so she can hardly begin to
read Grace's reactions, to consider the leylines of awareness and
cultural references and so on that spring from Sera's brief description
of that particular book in that particular Hermetic's library.
And she is likely going to escape her initiation into the world of Dr. Who because yes, of course Grace wants to see. So yes, of course Sera - smiling rather indulgently - is going to show her.
Not
here, apparently, since Sera is uncurling her bare legs and shaking out
that see-through high-low skirt and nudging that teacup on the coffee
table a bit back from the dangerous edge and standing and opening her
hand to Grace and it appears that Grace is meant to follow.
As
Sera is not wearing heels tonight, Grace and Sera are nearly of a
height. Naturally, bare-footed Sera would have no more than an inch on
Grace. The combat boots probably add another inch but still: they are
closely matched. Sera opens her left hand and it is sort of trailing
behind her and Grace can take it or not, at her leisure. She has known
Sera long enough to guess that Sera would not likely be offended by a
refusal.
And anyway Sera is on the move; sliding past the spot
Grace occupies on the couch, expecting Grace to rise and follow her out
of the living room, through the kitchen to the sliders from the
breakfast room facing onto the patio. There's a hardly-singed joint in
an ashtray parked on a parquet plantstand just inside the sliding glass
doors, and the bright burst of cold from the winter evening outside, and
Sera explains on the way that she probably needs to be a bit more high
in order to do it.
By then they are in the kitchen and even if
Grace took her hand in the first place they have stopped holding hands
because of the layout if nothing else, and Sera explains that she needs
to get stoned to do magic and glances over her shoulder at Grace, this
lashed and sweeping look, and says, "Unless you wanted to make out with
me, but I didn't think you'd volunteer."
This smile. She's at the
door between the kitchen and the breakfast room then then, has
unlatched the slider grabbed joint-and-lighter and opened the slider
just enough for the two of them to slip outside.
Where Sera lights the joint, takes a long, deep drag that crackles her lungs, and holds it, and holds it, and holds it -
-
then exhales, and passes the joint to Grace, while they huddle in the
leeside of the building, watch the dark and quiet garden.
Maybe they share the joint in silence.
Or maybe Grace gives her an education in the ways of Dr. Who after all.
Grace
Grace
takes the hand offered by Sera. Grace isn't exactly afraid of touch,
just doesn't so much like it when people do it unexpectedly. When they
get grabby hands and when those touches are laced with social meaning
that she cannot fathom. Like handshakes and hugs and all those other
human rituals. Like making out, for example -- a thing that has only
ever felt to Grace like she's being eaten by whatever highly unskilled
amorous person she's allowed to try.
And she has. For the sheer need to understand what humanity is. To try to be normal. It wasn't the right reason.
She never did it because she wanted to.
Still,
the comment about making out with Sera brings a smile to Grace's face.
Maybe she's just happy to have the subject changed to magic, away from
how horribly bungled the whole Lena thing went. "Let's just get high. No
offense."
The first hit brings the tickle of cough to her lungs,
with the mix of sharp cold air and smoke. But this time she holds it
down (okay, maybe with a leetle cough or two at the end). "So this is
part of the process huh? Have to get stoned first?"
Serafine
"The easiest way," Sera returns, and there's an it's
that is sort of elided at the beginning of the sentence. Swallowed
with the smoke and held inside her lungs and kept there, as blood flows
through and picks up the intoxicant along with the oxygen her body
requires, and carries it out, and out, and out. Sometimes Sera imagines
she can feel them, each little - what the fuck ever, molecule, nascent
and bright with possibility. All these connections inside her body; all
these connections in the universe.
She's smiling and it's a
sidelong smile as she takes another drag; a deep one, because that is
the way she works. She doesn't say anything to Grace about the cough
though she does stand ready to pat Grace on the back or the shoulder if
the spasms come too hard and too fast and become too eyewatering. Just
some steady reminder to the body of its functions, right?
" -
it's like it zips open your brain. When I'm playing with time." Sera
is smiling in a way that feels like it hurts; she can feel the muscles
in her cheeks, the way they move and the way they curve and right now
she is just very simply and very plainly happy. "Helps to remind me
that my skin is just a membrane. Pourous, you know?
"Other pieces seem to work better with other focii. Mind's always been music for me. Life is touch."
Sera's
standing there with her arms crossed, goosebumps on her limbs, teeth
set against chattering when she's not taking another hit and passing it
back but still: see the lazy way she swings her head back toward Grace,
using the glass door as a sort of sliding fulcrum, this drunken arc of
movement that has her looking at Grace all slantwise and unfocused, eyes
gleaming in the darkness.
"Maybe a little more - " a supple
shrug, wry and a bit aware. " - sensual than just plain touch. It's
like, a frame that you harness yourself to - it just, I don't fucking
know. Any of them can work. Pain. Pleasure.
"Some things just
fit," and her eyes fall; and Sera looks a little bit far away. " - like
a needle in the groove of a record. You know?"
Grace
Grace
lets out a little huff of laughter, like already things are getting a
little too just-this-side of funny. "No, I don't know. Honestly, for all
you try to recruit me, I cannot even fathom how all that works."
She
takes another hit when it's offered, of course, and lets it soothe the
tired mind, well worn out in worry and guilt. "I use my computer, but
honestly if I think about it, it's more that I use the computer to do
all the math. I know you don't want to know about all the science, but
it's so beautiful, Sera," she says, passes the joint back.
"The
first time I saw my little desk plant thinking about where to store its
little pieces of captured sun. Thinking. With green pigments all
superpositioned on top of one another, making little amazing calculations.
"And
then, you know, you can see the connection between everything in the
code. In the math. It shows you just how close we are. Like, I could
know what it is to be that plant if I tried hard enough,
because in some ways I already am a part of it, and it of me. Well, you
know. If you wanted to know what a plant feels like, I suppose."
A little sigh there, watching the smoke in the air. "Just so... beautiful."
Serafine
Time 3. Difficulty: 7 (Vulgar without witnesses). -1 (focus); -1 (taking time); -1 (resonance).
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 4, 5) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Serafine
"That's what I do,"
Sera is telling Grace, with this silly, liquid smile. The joint is
spent or near it and while she doesn't waste that shit is legal
now in the state of Colorado. More legal than the clove-spiced
cigarettes she favors, certaintly. So, there's no searching about for a
roach clip or struggling to smoke the last bits of seed trapped inside
the last slips of rolling paper because Sera takes one last inhale and
then opens her hand and lets the last miniscule
less-than-an-eighth-of-an-inch of the joint drift down to the damp
pavers of the patio.
Then Sera slings an around around Grace's
shoulder, and the gesture has these limits that are not parabolic but
maybe Grace can see the math in them; the motion of the arm, the limits
of the movement, the ricochet that is built in from the drugs they have
consumed.
Sera's smokey mouth against the fringe of Grace's hair,
and Sera rolls her into a bit of a hug and Sera's smiling and cold, so
COLD, but her breath is warm as she laughs against Grace's temple. "I
just don't need fucking math to do it.
"Come on."
Grace is
released. Sera pulls open the door and there is a blast of warmth
inside and they dash in and close the door behind them and stand there
bright and high and shivering and Sera is stamping her feet a bit to get
warm and then she is just stamping her feet to feel her thighs move and
somehow they are sliding all sinuous back through the kitchen and oh
hey, there's the bottle of whiskey and here's a bag of organic pretzel
crisps and does Grace want anything they can make chocolate later.
They
can get someone to make them hot chocolate later because Sera does not
cook when high (or anytime, really. Not her wheelhouse), and Sera's
leading Grace back into the living room, holding the bottle of whiskey
in one hand and this whole time they've been winding their way
back in through the house Grace has felt Sera's magic at the back of her
throat; against her skin. The rising resonance - and what is strongest
just now is the new resonance that stamps Sera - and they are just
inside the door of the living room and Sera takes that bag of pretzel
crisps and tosses it across the room, see. Another arc of movement that
Grace can calculate, can see, can know -
- which is arrested.
Abruptly. The bag of pretzels is frozen midair. The fire does not
move. The music barely audible drifting from someplace up the familiar
stairs is - well, it's just a droning not now, isn't it. Like a needle
stuck on a certain groove, the record unmoving.
Sera still has
her fingers wrapped around the neck of her bottle of whiskey, neat and
loose. It swings a bit as she reaches back for Grace's hand. They are
moving; the both of them. Their hearts are beating.
Everything, everything around them, is
just
stopped.
Grace
"Fucking
math," Grace giggles into Sera's hair. "Rigid body mechanics," she
says, and there's another giggle at a joke that Sera's unlikely to get.
Grace
is high, and forgetting and looking forward to the show that Sera's
planning, and everything is so much less sad and more funny now. They go
inside, and there's a burst of warmth which is nice oh yes.
Sera
beams with something in-between, something not quite there, doesn't she?
And why hadn't Grace picked up on that before, but yes there is
something different today about the way Sera feels, as she fills the
surrounding space with herself literally and figuratively.
And
then stops time, just to show Grace how that works. And it's all so
silly and wonderful, that she laughs -- barely even registers it when
Sera's hand slips into hers. "Oh, wow Sera! This is awesome!"
Grace says in the most honest of ways. Couldn't change the way she said
those words if she'd tried, so excited and awed and... "Can we touch
stuff? Like, rearrange the pretzels into a happy face or something?"
Serafine
"I
don't know," Sera returns, inhaling deeply and satisfyingly through her
nostrils. The world feels strange and each second is accumulating
beneath her skin, isn't it? She can feel everything shearing outside of
her, where the thousand tender hooks that connect her to the ordinary
forward movement of things are beginning to pull in the wrong
direction.
Sera's thumb skims across Grace's knuckles and Sera is
still smiling as she draws Grace into movement, tugging her forward to
walk toward and around the frozen pretzels. "You can try."
A small squeeze, Sera's hand to Grace's.
"Everything'll start up again. I can only do this for so long. But if you wanna make a smiley face in the pretzels - "
Well, go ahead Grace. Go ahead.
Serafine
Extending. Difficulty +1
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Grace
Grace
-- gleeful, oblivious Grace -- she works fast (extremely fast,
considering all this is truly happening in a blink's span) at taking
pretzels, frozen in time, and making a little smiley out of them. Two
eyes, a little curve of a mouth. Laughs at her work, doesn't she? Oh
yes.
And also, thinks about what some passive observer might see.
Two blurs, perhaps? Instantaneous pretzel and human teleportation? When
it stops, will the frozen snacks continue to have the same momentum, or
will they just drop to the floor? So many questions, and none of them
being: is this the right way to use our power over the universe? To have
a little fun with it? And she doesn't question how Sera's doing either,
pulling the threads of fate such that they might snap and hurt her
back.
Grace just doesn't have all that much experience with the universe's ire.
No, she just points at her little smiley masterpiece and says, "That's so cool."
Serafine
Paradox.
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )
Serafine
Soak!
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )
Serafine
Sera
watches Grace with an obvious and rather indulgent pleasure. Sera is
high. She is fucking stoned and the world moves around her like a wheel
and now she is stopping the wheel, arresting its movement. No, no. Here.
It
feels right to her, correct and natural, that she should be divorced
from the proceedings of ordinarily. The future and the past have
always, always come to her, unmoored, for quite as long as she
remembers, though the truth is - and here is another truth that Grace
does not know - that Sera has not remembered for long.
But here;
her living room. Time stops and a would-be Virtual Adept apprentice is
re-arranging pretzel crisps into a smiley face. Sera breathes out,
bright and bemused and follows and ruffles fingers through Grace's hair
and all too soon the moment ends. Perhaps even Grace can sense it at
the farthest edge of her awareness: the kinetic energy of reality
snapping itself back into shape. The paradox blow.
It hits Sera
like an uppercut; her head jerks back from the force, but her body
absorbs it. And then they are in time again. The pretzels are falling
and there's likely not enough time to figure out how. Did they remember
their momentum from before? or shift - or fall. Everything in a blur
so it is almost impossible to say.
Grace
There's
another giggle when the world blurs itself back into place, the whole
snap-shut-slipping feeling of sliding back into time. But then, Sera's
head snaps back, her body jerking with it, and seriousness washes over
Grace again.
"Woah... you okay?" she asks, lazily.
Serafine
"Course
I am, Grace," Sera demurs, with this half-lazy smile. "That's just
Paradox. You do something - obvious, it all snaps back at you. Find a
way to slip it beneath the skin of things, to explain it to ordinary
mortals, and you're fine.
"Now c'mon. I bet you're gonna get the munchies soon, and some of these pretzels are still in the bag."
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