Let's not hack the library.

Ian Lai
[Per+Awareness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Grace Evans
[Per + Awareness]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

Ian Lai
Ian had texted Grace earlier that evening. It was the first she would have heard from him since before they'd both gotten sucked into Bastion. And maybe she'd expect something a little more involved for that exchange. But all the text said was: Hey, you up for meeting at the House? I wanted to talk to you, and I need to get into the library.

Then again, these things were generally better not discussed in text. If Ian even knew that Grace had been trying to help him. Which, all things considered, he might not.

He'd been at the gym just before driving out, and his hair was still slightly damp when he arrived at the Chantry, with the longer section hanging over his forehead. When he got out of the car, he paused to stretch his tired muscles, working out the stiffness that had developed on the ride over. He rolled his head on the axis of his spine once, slowly. Then he locked the doors and made his way up to the house. Grace was already inside. Even if she hadn't told him, Ian would feel her presence the moment he stepped through the door. So he followed the trail of her resonance over to the library and rapped his knuckles firmly against the heavy door to let her know that he was there.

Whenever she let him in, she'd find him leaning against the wall in jeans and a white v-neck, glancing at the time on his phone. He smelled like expensive shampoo and body products, and he smiled lightly when she appeared. "Hey. Thanks for letting me in."

Grace Evans
Grace gets up from the couch (where she had been thumbing through a book) and puts it aside. Ian did say that he needed into the library, right? And while her sixth sense isn't exactly humming this evening, it's at least picking up on him -- that feeling like you're in the presence of a predatory animal, sleek and lithe.

But when she opens the door, she gets the burst of clean-smell. Cat fresh from a bath? She sniffs at the air like she's trying to place the aroma, and then realizes she's creepily smelling someone.

"Hey, Ian," she says, and pulls the door and herself aside to let him in. "Now that you're out of that coma, you should talk to Pan. I can't really give you library access, all I can do is open the door if you need. And give you Pan's phone number."

Ian Lai
Ian raised an eyebrow when he noticed Grace scenting the air, and for a moment it almost looked like he might say something, but then Grace mentioned Pan, and Ian slipped his phone back into his pocket and began to make his way down the stairs.

"Yeah, Kalen mentioned him. But he never gave me a number. What's the guy like?"

Because generally speaking, it was good to have a sense of who one was talking to before asking a question like, 'will you trust me enough to give me free use of an important resource?' When Ian reached the bottom of the staircase, he glanced over his shoulder at the entrance, then flicked his eyes to one of the tiny security cameras.

"I bet you could probably just hack the security, if you wanted to."

Grace Evans
Grace huffs out a little laugh. "Pan? He's like God's own personal interrogation lamp. But he's a good guy. You want his number, I can give it."

She walks over to the couch, flumps herself down upon it, and huffs again at his suggestion that she hack the security. "That would just get you in trouble when someone finds out that you have access to something you shouldn't. Somehow I don't think you want to be on the receiving end of Pan Echeverria."

Her eyes track Ian as he moves into the room, but it doesn't seem like she's paying much attention to him all the same. More like off in her own little world while her eyes chase something because they're bored.

"Hacking is great if you want to slip past some defenses and then skip out quick. Long-term hacks are much harder. You've got to hide and hide and hide some more. Which I can do, sure," she says, and there's a little smirk to that.

"But there's another thing about hacking, you know? You find a shortcut and you take it. You don't make things hard on yourself. The shortcut to library access is call up Pan and ask."

Ian Lai
Considering the overall level of involvement and technical aptitude within the Denver mage community, it was fairly likely that, were Grace to ever do something like what Ian suggested, no one was likely to catch her. It begged the question of just how long they were likely to last without someone finally getting a little bit greedy or careless or destructive. But then, it also said something about the people here that so far no one had.

Maybe they were a disparate group, but they were careful of the things that mattered.

Ian, maybe, less so. But he didn't presently have any reason to steal the library books or set the place on fire. And if he really had been serious about asking Grace to mess with the security system, he wouldn't have brought it up in front of the security cameras. Grace offered up her advice about Pan, calling him God's personal interrogation lamp, and Ian got this look on his face like someone had just stuck a plate of rotten food under his nose. His expression smoothed as he walked past the library shelves, trailing his hands over the book bindings.

Somehow I don't think you want to be on the receiving end of Pan Echeverria.

"Depends how hot he is." After a beat he asked, "Is he a Chorister?"

Grace Evans
Grace about cracks up at the talk about the relative hotness of Pan. Truth be told, Grace isn't exactly the best judge of human beauty, but she has eyes. That's not to say that Sera hasn't hit on the man relentlessly, but then again Sera is Sera. And Grace tries to keep the laugh in, because hey -- that is not cool. She's been the target of such laughter before.

"Pan's like, 50-ish? He was in the War. You could ask him to screw you, and he'd probably just not even care enough to tell you off. He's celibate, I'm pretty sure. He is so totally a Chorister."

Ian Lai
"I'm sure we'll get on beautifully." There was a heavy dose of dry sarcasm in Ian's voice. He left off looking at the books for a moment and sat down on the large office table in the center of the room. He slipped his phone out of his pocket again and unlocked the screen, navigating to the contacts list.

"Here, give me his number. And when you're done, you can install that thing you wanted to give me before." He held out the smartphone (a black Moto X) and looked at Grace with dark, steady eyes. He didn't say anything about why he'd changed his mind, or what it meant that he was handing over a piece of his personal property to someone he didn't know very well. "If the offer's still open, that is."

Grace Evans
She gives Ian the number she has for Pan, on the phone that Kalen got for him -- the phone that Pan can barely use. Or maybe by now the man's finally figured out what all the buttons do? Who knows.

It doesn't register as something remarkable to Grace. People hand her their phone all the time. But then he mentions Ginger, and her eyes rise up from the phone. "The offer's always open. What changed your mind?"

She finishes with the number, and then pulls her laptop out of its bag next to her on the couch. A cable gets connected between laptop and phone, it placed on one knee -- her laptop on the other.

"Also, I never asked. How are you doing since Bastion?"

Ian Lai
Grace would notice while entering Pan's number that Ian had a lot of names in his contact list - a fact that was not likely to surprise anyone. Beyond that, his phone was neatly organized, with the apps on his homescreen consisting of things like google calender and spotify.

"I weighed the potential merits and flaws and decided it was worth the risk."

It seemed an honest enough answer, if perhaps a bit vague. There was a longer explanation to be had there, but Ian didn't seem inclined to offer it. Perhaps it didn't really matter. Sometimes people just needed time to consider their options before committing themselves fully to a decision, and Ian didn't seem like the sort of person to make choices impulsively.

When Grace mentioned Bastion, Ian's expression shifted. His posture went still, and a crease of tension formed between his eyebrows. He didn't respond immediately.

"Did Kalen tell you about that?"

Grace Evans
"Well, no, not exactly," Grace says as she works, typing in the various commands to install the encryption on Ian's device. It's a nice one. Much easier than installing it on someone's Nokia brick.

"Me and a team of people went to Bastion after the event at Infinity. We went there to stop it. That incident wasn't the first time Bastion had tried to take people, and the number was growing exponentially. We had to do something. Did Kalen not tell you about that?

"We did look for you guys, but we kept ending up in different worlds. No way to find you, so we just had to keep moving."

Ian Lai
Ian was typically reluctant to admit when he didn't know something, but the longer Grace spoke to him about Bastion, the more evident it would become that in this case, there was quite a bit he didn't know. Someone sensitive to the subtle cues of body language might be able to tell how Ian felt about all this, but Grace, working as she was on the Ginger installation, might not pick up on those things.

She'd know that he'd gotten quiet though. That for the moment his interest in practical things like books and contact information seemed to have been put aside.

"No. He didn't tell me that." There was another reluctant pause, and then, "Was that her name? Bastion?"

Grace Evans
"I don't think Kalen really knows a lot about it either. He was in the same boat as you after all. By the way, Lena says hi. She was one of the ones who went with me. To, yes, Bastion. That was her name," Grace says, and there's a bit of wistfulness there, like she wishes many things had gone differently.

"She was the creation of a cabal of mostly Virtual Adepts who were trying to create a beta-scale Reality 2.0. Well, they succeeded. And then the Technocracy took them out. All but a guy named Maddoc, who wasn't a Virtual Adept. I guess the Techs just had it out for the 'traitors'. But of course, without the expertise of the people they had just obliterated, they couldn't do a thing about Bastion.

She was kind of desperate, I think. Reaching out, trying to repair herself by abducting people. We... we rewrote her. Put all the corrupt bits back to whole again. And you know, that sounds a lot like a weekend job at the server farm, but God, Ian. It was like being there at the moment of creation, writing the words that started it."

The tack of fingers on keys stops as Grace continues, obviously enraptured with her own memories, her own voice.

"I could see my voice in the air like it was encoded data. Hell, I wasn't me anymore, I was code -- no filters, none of this fleshy stuff in my way, and Bastion was all laid out before me. I had admin privileges to a universe."

Would that she could return to such a state, no? But she blinks, the screen registering its success in front of her. She unplugs Ian's phone and hands it back.

"It's done."

Ian Lai
The thing is, Ian had never once considered the possibility that he'd been inside a simulation. Maybe if he'd been more technologically savvy, that kind of thing would have crossed his mind. But who would have imagined that, really? Without the knowledge that Grace and the others had been given by Maddoc. (Well, Grace might have imagined it. She was an Adept herself, after all.) As far as Ian had understood, they'd been trapped inside a very, very realistic mindscape - its level of sensory detail reflective of the power and creativity of the being that created it. And he wasn't wrong, really. The answer was both - and more. (Another reality.)

When Grace looked up and handed Ian back his phone, she'd see in his eyes that he was processing what he'd just been told - fitting pieces together and analyzing them in conjunction with what he'd already known and experienced. He took the phone from her and set it down on the table.

"Lena? From New York? The hell is she doing out here?"

It was the easiest of the many questions he had. Something simple and grounded in reality. Admittedly it'd been a long time since Ian had seen or spoken with Lena. But he hadn't expected to run into her in Denver, of all places.

Grace Evans
"She's been in Denver for like, over a year," Grace says. "She was more asking the same question about you, actually."

Grace has been around enough weird shit to know this dissonance -- the way the mind so readily goes from reconstructing universes to getting in touch with acquaintances from New York. And yet, she's aiming to drag the conversation right back again, swinging the pendulum back and forth between mundane and cosmic.

"Kalen said that you guys had been sent to a nightmarish place. Some of Bastion's worlds are worse than others. I don't know why she did that, but maybe it was in order to learn about the sadness of loss. She was watching us all, you know. I don't think she really understood why abducting people was wrong until we showed her what it does when your connections to people are severed like that.

I don't know if that's any consolation to you for what you guys went through, but hey. Maybe you helped convince a Godlike being to quit being a dick."

Grace sets to work shutting down the laptop and stowing it again, and realizes that she forgot to tell Ian how to work his newly improved phone.

"Okay, so, in addition to Pan, I've added another contact to your list. Ginger. Call the number, and use the phrase 'Hello, Ginger'. That'll get you to the menu, and you can add or retrieve messages through there," she says, and the pendulum swings back again.

Ian Lai
Grace spoke about these things with much more ease than Ian did. Maybe if he hadn't been caught off-guard by it, he might have asked Grace more questions about what she'd been through and what she knew. But tonight he was struck quiet with the weight of truth and memories. He listened to Grace speak, and for what it was worth, he seemed clear and present through all of it. And he nodded when she gave him instructions on how to use Ginger, filing the information away in his head.

Finally he said, "It was post-apocalyptic, where we were. There were fucking zombies. Be glad you never found us."

That was as much as he was likely to offer at the moment, but it was something. Possibly more than Kalen had said.

"I'm gonna be here reading a while. You don't need to wait for me if you've got stuff to do."

And Grace could wait, if she chose. Occupy herself with whatever she'd been doing when Ian arrived. Or she could head out and leave him to whatever it was he'd come there to research. Either way, Ian was done talking for the night. And he had a lot of reading to do, so he stood up and began to sort through various titles, pulling a few volumes off the shelves to take with him to one of the sofas. He'd be there for the next couple of hours at least, sprawled out in a relaxed pose while he focused on the text and whatever unspoken thoughts were running through his head.