Losing a Friend

Grace
Something shifting and sharp walks into An-Arch-Key Books (or Night Owl Books as the case may be). It's a store with two names, and sometimes Grace wonders whether there's a Point to that. Like, some kind of mystical symbolism behind it. But then, maybe it's something as simple as not being able to decide on a name. And then, maybe there's some kind of symbolism to that. Hermetics always have too many names. This from the one with at least four in regular use, but no mind the hypocrisy.
She's wearing that red coat that Kalen got her -- soft red suede, the color of fox fur. It almost seems out of place on the woman who otherwise doesn't seem to care much about how she looks, or the relative expense of what she wears. She wears that coat with jeans and sneakers and a mess of hair and a laptop bag slung around her that was also chosen for substance over style. And yeah, there's something symbolic there. It's a sign of just how much Kalen rubs off on her.
And Grace rubs off on others. Even Pan now has a phone through which he can send ALL CAPS messages to the rest of the Denver mages like some kind of freakish, glowing grandfather. She's sure he's going to start spamming them all with 'FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: GOD'S LOVE REVEALED IN POTATO CHIP' any time now.
Someone recently told her to focus on the goal at hand. Don't go after all the distracting heads. They're part of the goal, but not the goal. Keep your eyes on that, please. Go for the heart. And the heart? To birth the future. To be a beacon of information as much as Pan is a beacon of God's Love as revealed in potato chips or whatever his game is.
Delivering Ginger? It's not just a software installation. It's a calling.
"Hey, Kit? You here? I texted you earlier."

Adam
The front door to An Arch Key is unlocked. The pages of the books are beginning to saturate with his resonance he spends so much time here. Turn a page and it is valiant. Turn a page and it is relentless. Unfolding, the story. Never-ending, ceaseless, so brave, a flashing of -- the place is beginning to, very faintly, feel like Adam. Like the smell of fresh-sap in a maple forest or a candle after it's been blown-out somewhere, a lingering.
Bells, bells, bells as she enters. He had responded favorably to her text but at first her voice doesn't get an answer. Even after, when Adam wakes up, he is slow to stir, and he doesn't throw a shadow down the stairs when he drags himself off of the lovesac on the second floor, rolls across the well-trodden carpet and trips over a paperback somebody left on the floor, catches himself on the stair's balustrade which wobbles (entropy [soon]) as he leans down, and Grace:
Once he calls attention to himself, he's just a mass of dark hair, red-rimmed just-woken up eyes, "'Allo," he says, and then lets his body come down the stairs too, combing his hair back with his fingers, smothering a yawn.
"Is it, erm," mumble, "thirty already?"
There doesn't seem to be anybody else in the store.

Grace
After a life-and-death battle with her own Avatar while arrayed like a knight, Grace doesn't exactly find Adam's resonance quite so... out of place anymore. She is sharp and intense herself now. Perhaps not chivalric, though, because who interrupts the dragon mid-speech with a scream and a sword-slice? You're supposed to wait, to let them speak their last words or whatever other nonsense. There's lots of things that you're supposed to do that Grace just doesn't understand.
The place feels kinda all right, you know?
And then Adam descends in sleepy unsteadiness, and it puts a grin on Grace's face to watch. "Yeah, mumble thirty alright. Listen, you have a back room or something, so I don't get pestered by people who are actually here to buy books?"
"And ah, you're okay with this right? No... reservations? If you have questions, now is the time to ask."
As much as Grace does want everyone to adopt her systems, she's not going to force the issue on anybody. To free people is her goal, not control them. Not force them. Just... show them what they could be doing with her distributed networks, and let convenience do all the work. You don't win a revolution at gunpoint. Oh you can, but they rarely last. You win this kind of anarchy by it simply being the easiest, simplest, most beneficial course to take. Let water flow downhill. Let people access the network. Let the walls come down.

Adam
The Virtual Adept wants to go into the backroom just in case patrons come by who might pester her. There are no crickets in An Arch Key Books, not right now, but one could imagine crickets chirruping in response. How quiet it is; used bookshops just don't get the foot traffic they did once, if ever they did have a lot of foot traffic. His eyebrows are up the way people who just wake up lift their eyebrows, as if by doing so they can tell their eyes to stay open, they can stretch their faces into wakefulness. Sleeping doesn't make one need to shave in and of itself, but the shadow of Adam's facial hair is thicker now than it was before. He could stand to trim it, neaten the edges, so it's less coaldusty. How he yawns again, or wants to yawn, but exerts some determination to avoid it.
If he has questions, now is the time to ask.
"Can you or will you use Ginger to do mass castings on those connected by her or track our movements?" He's wary, isn't he. "Say someone on the network disappears. You go into Ginger, do your," he wiggles his fingers, hacker-style, "thing, and approximate a location? Of the device she is installed on at least I suppose."
Yawn, again, although his eyes are more alert now, the sea-colour gleaming forth. "Yeah. There's a back room. This way," and it's toward the door behind that desk of Adam's, the one that says employees only.

Grace
Grace looks thoughtfully (at the books, not Adam). "It would be difficult even for me. I mean, I can do such things now, but the way Ginger's designed, there's no direct connection between any two people, only to the server, and the server doesn't broadcast. It doesn't reach out to your device, your device reaches out to it.
"That's intentional. It's meant to stop such types of attacks, where one could use Ginger to suss out our entire network. That would be bad."
It's a common explanation. Lots of people ask her that question. Few implicate her as the one with nefarious intent, however. It puts out a bit of the lightheartedness she may have had in coming here.
Grace follows him into the back room, pulls out her laptop and starts setting up. Her laptop bag is also stuffed with cables of varying types. USBs for Androids and iPhones and whatever else someone might come to her with. When her rig boots up, it's got a colorful background wallpaper that looks like tangled string or carefully twirled smoke, although it was clearly mathematically generated.
"I've already had to tell Eleanor that she couldn't set up private messaging for that reason. There can't be a direct connection between two users. Now, if I really tried, could I? Probably. I mean, if someone were to go to the other side or whatever, and I needed to boot them off the system, I have a couple ways I could go about it. Could kill this version of Ginger and start over. She has a kill switch. I could change the encryption, and only give trusted people the right password again. I could also try to find the one device and kill its installation, though that would be the hardest method, and I'd probably use something else to trace it. Emails, or phone calls or whatever. Does that make you feel better?"
Grace spits out the technical details and fixes like Adam can actually understand all the topics. That might be stretching it a bit, especially since he just woke up and is missing coffee. But still.

Adam
[Does he follow? Adam is tired. Intelligence +1 diff, just to see.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (2, 3, 5, 6) ( fail )

Adam
"Do you want something to - ?"
Eat or drink.
The backroom has more bookshelves, but they are less organized (there's organization out there?) than in the other rooms and only against two of the walls. They are also less stocked. There are boxes everywhere, haphazzard, a labyrinth of a maze of a thing, a curio cabinet with all sorts of curious things in the wooden niches, a bulletin board with a schedule and some handwritten notes, post-its, detritus; just what you'd expect. There is a couch that looks good for napping on, though Adam wasn't napping on the couch. A round table with rings of old coffee-stains, and, if Grace looked, perhaps some sigils scribed into the wood near the bottom, grooves on the floor scratched. He doesn't practice back here but somebody did once upon a time and there are signs of this practice in the strangest places.
There is also a sink and a counter with an electric kettle and a mess and a refrigerator. Box of ferret treats. Bowl of chocolate covered espresso beans, a handful of which Adam crunches on.
His eyes hood as Grace explains how Ginger works. "I didn't feel poorly before," Adam says, and then he smiles; it's a contained smile, and sweet, and also very solemn, but it filters towards his eyes while he scruffs his hair again. "But I was and am curiou... Hm, here?"
Focus, Gallowglass. He holds out a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans as if he just realized he hadn't actually given her anything yet. There are mugs, too. He's filling the mugs with coffee instead of tea. There's a pot. It's kind of cold, but it's coffee.
Why is it sticking to the bottom of the? Hmm. Maybe a fresh pot is in order.
"What do you recommend if something happens to you? Does Kalen have a, erm, way to shut it down or..."

Grace
It takes Adam's offer of chocolate before Grace looks up from her laptop (now settled in on that napping couch) and lo her face does light up. "Solid caffeine! Oh you're the best."
That does help her mood somewhat. Chocolate and coffee? Yes please. She takes his offered handful and munches it with a satisfied expression.
And then, her eyes wander back up from her screen again when he begins talking about what would happen were something to happen to her. "Kalen's an admin. For that reason. So yeah, I gave him instructions."
It's never easy to talk about disaster plans. Oh, if you die, how will we do X? It's tempting to respond with some kind of solipsistic remark about how the universe will stop if that happens, so no-one need worry. Grace's actual response is solemn and true, but her mouth's still full of chocolate-covered espresso beans.

Adam
"Very well," he says, and his expression shifts off to the left. Far-searching, far-seeing, seeking; a considerate expression, which shifts into something blacker, wryly amused, private. He is an expressive creature: Adam. Especially when he has just woken up.
"I suppose you will want the, erm, hardware, just a moment," and is there a warning? Does Adam grin at her? No. Adam leaves the backroom.
Disappears out front.
He returns with his vintage mint-green typewriter, which he sets down on the table with its coffee-stained rings, and he pats it fondly. "This will work just as well, won't it? It has keys just like a cellphone."
An old cellphone.
"More elegant."

Grace
Grace slowly bends her laptop screen down to give Adam a fake withering glare. Hers is a sarcasm-laden face. "It's precious. Wouldn't want to corrupt it with programming. Heaven forbid.
"Actually, it is rather interesting. I could build you a keyboard out of it," and at that, she gives him a wicked grin. Yes Adam, let me take your keyboard apart piece by piece, infect it with electronics, and then piece it back together.
"Alas, even a keyboard isn't enough to house Ginger. Needs a processor of some sort. Some memory to hold the program."

Adam
He puts both hands over the typewriter's platen knobs, as if those knobs were ears, and he could shield the typewriter from Grace's harsh words. His eyes are still hooded, eyelids purpled from sleep, but there's an amused edge to the slant of his mouth now.
"A keyboard? What would I do with that? She works just fine as she is."
He takes his hands away and pats his pockets down. Brings out a cellphone, instead. An iphone, of course. There aren't even any keys.
"Tech, tech, tech," he says, and hands it over. "Don't you want to separate yourself from it? I don't mean go back to the farm and medievalism," a self-aware almost-smile here, "but something else. Something other. Oh erm," a blink. "Should I hold my tongue while you do your thing?"

Grace
She snorts at his trying to protect his poor typewriter from hearing evil. Yes, she does the same to her computers sometimes. Gives them a gentle pat when they're being good, etcetera.
She takes his cellphone, inwardly peeved at the Apple-nature of the thing. Why do so many Mages use iPhones? Are they being purposefully obtuse? She digs into the laptop bag for the white cable (has to be white, couldn't possibly have a cable that looks plebian, can we, Apple fans?)
It's not really the focus on looks that annoys her the most about this. It's just that Apple devices are the hardest to install Ginger on. Takes forever. And all because the company is a prick. Proprietary as hell. They have a term for Apple products: the Walled Garden. Fuck that shit. Almost as bad as Micro$oft. Worse, if you consider that they've conned everybody in to believing them the good guys.
"No, I really don't want to separate myself from it. I spent a good few weeks separated from it when I joined the Virtual Adepts, and I just about drove myself crazy."
She's suddenly very focused, very busy, as she plugs Adam's phone into her laptop and starts typing away. She's got to trick the damn thing into accepting an unauthorized program. Good thing she's had lots of practice with this on varying styles of iPhone so far, because Mages in Denver love the hell out of Steve Jobs.

Adam
[Hee. Does Adam sense the inward peevement re: Apple things? Percept (People) + Awarepathy]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

Adam
He smirks; it's a faint smirk, almost more of a suggestion than an actual expression. But it touches his eyes; changes the way they look, if one is paying attention.
"You spent weeks separated from it when you joined the Virtual Adepts? Virtually a hacker wizard, I suppose. Virtual tools. Why don't you want to separate yourself from it?"
He goes to check the coffee. Putter around, while watching Grace every now and then, keeping her in his eye but trusting that she's not going to suddenly cast some sort of shifting wall-crumbling revolutionary wall that'll strike him at his heart and turn his bones to gold. Or something. Coffee smell begins to fill the room. He pours into one mug. Pauses; was that mug clean? He can't remember.
This miniscule shrug: see? He pours into a clean mug, hands one off to Grace, eventually takes a seat in one of the chairs on the table by the typewriter.

Grace
"Because, it would be like cutting off a limb," Grace says, absently, like she's not talking to Adam, but to herself. Off in her own world now, with just her and the problem at hand. Focused, but not on him.
"Why don't you want to separate yourself from how you do magic?" she says, with similar intonation to the last statement. "No more sigils, no more of Angelic tongues..."
She puts it in terms he can hopefully empathize with.
"Why separate yourself from anything at all? It's not even possible, I don't think. Everything's connected, whether you want it to be or not."

Adam
He breathes the coffee in. Holds the mug in front of his mouth; skulks over it, not at all like a bird of prey, but more like a vampire - that pale skin, those shadow-bruised sleepy eyes, that wild dark hair, that clear need for sunlight. Or maybe an owl, night owl's own wizard. Just smelling the coffee is waking him up, and Adam is not very diplomatic. He attempts to be, but he isn't.
"Because angelic tongues are sigils don't add to the wonderlessness of today's world; and who's to say the goal - one of many - isn't to transcend the need for sigils and angelic tongues?"
"'Everything's connected,' well, certainly, but use that idea as you just did and why not say sacrifice babies to demons because somebody somewhere is probably doing it and why bother separating yourself from it."
Beat. "Obviously I don't think using technology is synonymous with baby-sacrifice but relying on tools developed by the Union for sleepers in order to do magick - " a sigh. "On the one hand, bravo. Fuck them. Watch their ideas be turned into wonder regardless of intention. On the other hand, chancy. Helpful to them."

Grace
"Developed by us, you mean. The Virtual Adepts created the computer to begin with, back when we were called the Difference Engineers," Grace says, obviously hooked into at least some of the history of her people by now. "And then the Union killed Turing."
"Technology is a wonder, Adam. As much as you might hate to think so. They killed Turing not because he was corrupting their wonderless shit, but because Turing was trying to liberate tech. To free it. To make it what it truly is. They are the corrupters."
She looks up at Adam then, little humor in her eyes, because he's being somewhat of a little annoyance with his obvious anti-tech. "Yes. Fuck them. They try to take technology and science and put them in a straitjacket. They try to control it. It's outrunning them, but they don't even see it. They think they have some kind of easily tamed, linear beast on their hands, when it's headed for an asymptotic singularity.
"Are you sure you want Ginger? Or do you really want to burn your cell phone? I'm not going to force anything on you that you don't want."

Adam
"If I didn't want you to install the doohickey, I wouldn't have said 'install the doohickey,'" Adam says. His voice is wry; the mug of coffee now held two-handed, because he's taken a long draught of it. "Technology is a wonder. It's a wonder that is so taken with itself that it has stifled other wonders. I'm not an uncivilized bastard," Adam says, a certain emphasis on uncivilized.
"I'm not unsympathetic to the Virtual Adepts - or 'Difference Engineers' - plight in wanting to be separate from what they see - you see - as a stultifying atmosphere. Heck, I enjoy being able to skype with mum and dad, for a given value of 'enjoy.' I like driving." Which is something he'd never say if he'd driven recently or was thinking about how may stupid drivers are on the road. "But I'd better enjoy being able to say a word and talk to them in a pool of water - harder to bill, wouldn't you say? And I simply don't understand how a complete reliance on tools that the Conventionalists use and develop is..."
He trails away. He's relentless, Adam, however: he's also fresh woken. "Well, isn't something you'd want to work around. That's all I mean by... Why don't you want to separate yourself from it? I thought separating yourself from it was the point. Transcend. Ascend."

Grace
She had gone back to typing while he was talking, but then her eyes flick up to his in a glare when he says 'That's all I meant by...'
No, Adam, that is not what you meant by it. You didn't mean Ascending through technologic means, you meant abandoning technology as a means. Say what you mean.
"If we all worked around it, then we would have no one with any idea of how to keep them at bay. It's not the tools that are inherently evil, it's the control. We free the tech, we free minds. We free people. And we can only do that through breaking the Union's control over it. You want to break that hold, you have to use the kinds of methods we do. Illegal downloading of television shows is how a growing segment of the population gets its media anymore. People are now allowed to create their own media and distribute it themselves, and thattoo is getting more popular. People who are really free to think are capable of doing amazing things, like talking through water puddles. If we don't dismantle their system from inside, the Traditions may as well give up entirely, Adam."
As she... well, let's put it bluntly, rants to Adam about how backward his ideas are, her voice gets progressively tenser. He's getting to her, to be certain, but also getting her riled up about the evils of Technocracy. A double whammy if ever there was one. She despises Them.
And then, she grunts and stares at a proprietary bullshit interface, trying to convince it that she's totally the App Store.

Adam
He sets his coffee cup down at some point during her rant. He folds his arms across his chest, planting his feet more firmly on the ground. Grace's glare had met a pair of unrepent eyes; after all, he meant what he said. Perhaps he isn't eloquent enough for diplomacy; certainly, he isn't. Ask his father. Ask most of the Hermetics who know him, and the other Traditionalists too.
"For the love of," he says, irritation a sharp edge that exasperation gleams on, somewhere after 'it's not the tools that are inherently evil.' He doesn't try to talk over the rest of her rant; he seems interested, not least because he doesn't feel she's engaging with what his ideas are. He's not that eloquent. And after she's said her piece, grunted, stares at his phone, he preserves silence for a space. He's diplomatic enough for that.

Grace
She types away, a grimace on her face at Adam and at Apple. It's hard to say which is more annoying at this juncture. Probably Apple. It has farther reach, more adherents, more actual danger in its ideals.
And it's also losing to her. She's jailbreaking the thing without it even knowing. Such a great term that -- jailbreaking.
Anyway, her program installs quickly after that.
"It's done," she announces, and unplugs the vile thing to hand it back to Adam.
And then, she starts packing up, sour of mood. It's not that she didn't know there were Mages who would hate her whole shebang because Virtual Adepts use technology. She knew that. They have their reasons, too. But still.

Adam
He knows himself well. He doesn't want to provoke himself into a similar rant, so he takes the phone back and plays with it a little, running his thumb over the screen and: "So how do I - ?" Unless it's self-evident, in which case Adam reads some of the older Ginger posts.
"Is there a way to see who all has access to Ginger? So if, say, one posts to her, one knows who did not receive the word?"

Grace
"I've set it up so that you have the contact in your list. Just call Ginger, and then say the password. It's 'Hello, Ginger'. From there, it's pretty self-explanatory. She'll tell you what to do," she says, cold and still quite annoyed. "There's a list of people with access in the Ginger archives once you get there."
She's putting the laptop in her bag, wrapping the cord up and... And then it's over.
No reason to stay where she's surely not wanted. Not even sure why Adam even wanted Ginger in the first place, unless he's the worlds largest hypocrite. Heh. Probably.
When Adam calls the number, he gets Ginger on the line, in all her sexy robot glory. She'll tell him to remember that 'Love is just a dial away' and proceed to list the numbers he can press to read, listen to, or leave messages. It's the voice she hears, tinny and distant, that gets to her in the end. Gadfly was going to make her sound more real...
"The guy who decided she should speak with that voice, he was the one who taught me how to do magic in the first place. He was being hunted by the MIB because his ideas were dangerous," Grace says, and the tone of her voice is a hard thing -- sharp. "They played cat and mouse with him for weeks, and he always stayed a step ahead, until he didn't. I fucking hate them. Don't get on to me for using 'their' tools again."

Adam
[Temper, temper.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Adam
"You - " Adam says, and his voice is heated: could cut skin from a body and leave the body beneath the skin whole. He leashes his temper quite forcibly; yanks it back.
"I wasn't 'getting on' you; I was asking you why. Why you don't want to separate yourself from technology, as it seems your own vaunted revolutionary people gave you the opportunity." He has mostly leashed his temper. "When I don't understand somebody's position, I ask them to explain it; I ask why, and try to reveal some of my own fucking thoughts, but since a technophile like you can't seem to listen to any thoughts that don't -- "
No. He leashed his temper. "Look, let's just agree never to discuss Foci again, I'll continue to not presume that you love the Union, and I'll thank you not to presume that I'm anti-progress or anti-technology just because I don't look at people downloading free movies as a big fuck you to the Techs. Thank you for installing Ginger."
"And I hope you find the guy who first taught you again; there's nothing worse than not knowing what happened to your teacher."
He hustles her out. Well. He is trying to hustle her out; he's easy prey for hitting, though.

Grace
She slings the laptop bag across her body as she stands, as he hustles her out. And she's not fighting him in such hustling. But she's also not shutting up.
"I don't think you're anti-technology, I know you are, because you said tech adds to the wonderlessness of the world, and don't try to tell me you didn't. Your point is not about transcending the need for Foci, it's specifically about how you don't think technology makes a good one, because some assholes fucked up the world with it. I got your point about the sacrificed children, thank you very much," she says, and maybe Adam isn't the only one with a short fuse. Maybe it's just that he's stepping ungracefully on each and every one of her nerves whilst having the temerity to own Apple products.
"Well, excuse me for trying to put it back to rights the best way I know how, huh? Screw me for not just fucking burning my laptop and walking away, right? I'll just cut off my damn arms, that'll show them. They'll really be scared then, huh?"
She actually hustles her own self out. Maybe the last bit of her rant falls on deaf ears, because she's out the door by then. But she doesn't really care if he's around to hear by that point.

Adam
[Doo-dee-doo.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Adam
You said tech adds to the wonderlessness of the world.
"It does."
Your point is not--
"Don't tell me what my point is. I know what my point is."
I got your point about sacrificed children, thank you very--
"Clearly, you did not."
He starts to hustle her and she hustles her own self and there is some mutual hustling; this they can agree on. This also means that, although Grace is hustling herself out, Adam is still present, part courteous host and part just: time for us to go to our separate corners, so clearly I will be walking you to yours.
Well, excuse me for trying to put it back to rights the best way--
"Will you stop leaping to conclusions?"
Screw me for not just fucking burning my laptop and walking aw--
"Tell me, does the chip on your shoulder control you 100% of the time or only 100% of the time somebody isn't stricken by the wonderful possibilities of technomancy?"
And there's the door. The door to the backroom and the front door. Adam doesn't follow her all the way to the front door; he stops at his desk. Maybe she slams it and the bells ring in her wake. Maybe she rounds on him to glare once more before leaving.
"Fucking crazy women," Adam, his player is very sad to report, says once Grace is actually gone.