Cala

Grace
[Awareness! = How well is the Magedar working today?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
[I like rolling! Awareness]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Elijah
He had texted.

This particular book store cum coffee shop/gelato place was his most recent acquisition. He was now the mayor of a place called The Book Rack. The book shelves were packed high and full of second hand books of any and every kind. The cafe served things in mismatched mugs with bright smiles from the pink-haired Vietnamese girl who was slinging cappuccino today. The air even smelled like chai spices and some strange array of otherness that one seemed to only find in Asian food markets.

It boasted one of those little machines that heat seals the lids on the bubble tea. Elijah didn't know what honey dew and taro was going to taste like, but there were tapioca balls involved so he wasn't going to complain too terribly much.

He had a pile of books.

He'd already bought a couple, but was perusing the others to see if they were something that he actually wanted. Mostly art history. Things he couldn't replicate but most definitely wanted to understand. A beginner's guide to physics. Some first aid- bridging the gaps in his mundane knowledge base. Attire was comfortable, vaguely River Phoenix-esque with tousled hair and without the tragedy attached. Button down shirt, a pair of lacks, and a vest. There was a fine line between appearing like a hipster and a business school drop out, and today Elijah was most assuredly riding the line.

Grace
"Okay, so Elijah... You're going to maybe not want to do that," Grace says, walking up to Elijah. Like kittens to milk, so Mages are to information and the caffeine necessary to consume said information. She puts her hand out over his phone without looking up from hers. "Foursquare is so spy-tastic. I can find you too easily. At least make it a little hard?"

Smells like dead trees and espresso in here, and she takes a deep breath. Looks up and around finally, as though realizing at last that she might need sight to navigate. It does help. A bit. She's in her coat -- the all angles, suggestive of something vulpine. It was never her idea, but she's worn it enough and modded it enough to make it a thing thoroughly Grace. It feels like her -- sharp and shifting.

"You want to hit the ice cream at all?"

Grace has no books. Or at least, she hasn't chosen to buy any. She's read bits and pieces of quite a few while here, in complete disregard for 'this is not a library' rules. If it were up to her, every single thing in here would be digitized and given wings. Perhaps even including the people. Yep, definitely the people too.

Elijah
"Aw, come on. You have a steady stream of constant information regarding where I am and what I am doing at all times. In the event that I go missing, there's going to be twenty people at least who think that's weird because I'm not instagramming the Hell out of this," he only half whined, but his heart wasn't in it. There was a grin on his face and there he was. Comfortable and pleased and everything smelled like dead trees and espresso, and this awas a completely acceptable smell in the mind of one Elijah Poirot.

Does he want to hit the icecream? At all?

"I was hoping you would ask that, Tao said they have lemon pommegranate gelato," he said. He paused, "I dig the coat, by the way."

Grace
"I'll make you one. Give me an old coat you've got hanging around, and I'll fix it up for you," Grace says, and realizes that of course Kalen won't approve of that plan. He'd have Elijah in something new and tailored AND festooned with lights and infrared sensors. Grace is a creature of practicality, however, so Kalen can go take a flying leap -- into a ball pit or something, because she's not that mean.

"You'll need one to participate in the training room activities."

There are lemon pomegranate gelato scoops to obtain, so she starts wandering in that direction. Elijah can follow or not as he will, but she will keep talking.

"Didn't you ever think that those things were just a ploy to find out how to target adds at you better?"

Cala
Awareness.

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Elijah
"I'm pretty sure I've got a coat hanging around somewhere. I need some danger room gear, it seems," he couldn't help but grin, perking up at the notion that he was going to get to go be in a place where there was training for danger. Like an X-Man, but he didn't have cool mutant superpowers.

Magic doesn't count as a cool mutant superpower. That's completely different.

He does start to head that way, content to keep talking and acquire gelator because the idea of keeping him away from something with sugar was strange at best, "I figured it was a data mining kind of thing? You kind of voluntarily give up some privacy with social media. It's socially acceptably creepy."

Cala
Corner table in the little cafe, just within the spill of lights from the street.  Reflections, see.  Some businesses are starting to close down for the evening: the restaurant supply store next door.  Others are just starting up: the strip club on the corner.   The Book Rack isn't closing soon but the cafe is already half-empty.  Maybe it'll fill up again, later.  Folks who want gelato on the way out, or back in.  Some local band's local track playing over the soundsystem.  It's a concept album about biscuits.

The girl at the corner table is farthest away from Grace and Elijah and the most aware of them.  An edge to her, the slantwise way she watches them.  It feels both refined and furtive.  And perhaps they don't even notice the way she watches them.

The way she is aware of them.

That doesn't mean they don't feel her.

(Manipulation + Subterfuge to hide her interest, et cetera.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 7, 7, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 5 )

Cala
Grace senses something new when she and Elijah start toward the gelato counter.  The sensation is hard to pinpoint, but it feeling like something opening, or perhaps an opening.

Grace
[Perception + Subterfuge = Can I tell you are trying hard not to let on?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )

Elijah
[Can I tell?]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 2

Grace
Grace is oblivious to the spying, but not to the sensation of someone else in the place. Some new presence filters in softly, and her head rises a tic. Who is that?

New Awakened people in Denver are often very new indeed. It doesn't surprise or put her on edge to feel an opening. She's just curious, looking rather like her nicknamesake -- foxlike in her quick glance around.

Oh. They have strawberry...

"Elijah. Green tea gelato. I think I have hit sugar nirvana," she says, presses her hand to the glass covering the gelato counter.

Somebody is totally unconcerned.

Elijah
He paused, mid approach to the counter and he knew better. He knew that he shouldn't be following that sort of curiosity, but there was something new, and his gut pulled him towards the corner and-

What sort of creature would he be did he not follow his gut. "What do you open," he says to himself.

Really, apprentices shouldn't be left to their own devices and Grace said there is green tea gelato and he nudges her a little before starting his approach to the corner, like Aurora Rose towards sme magical spindle, but less trance and more curiosity. Because he was a curious thing, that curiosity would get him into trouble at some point.

"I'm gonna make friends," he called back.

And thus it is off to the corner to make friends.

Cala
The girl - she is a girl - is winter dressed.  Dark coat, slung over the shoulder of the flimsy cafe chair.  Battered leather gloves pulled off her hands and left to their devices on the table.  Cup-and-saucer steaming on the table, one of the small metal teapots for the ferrying of hotwater on the table.  Dark hair and dark eyes.  Sharp, okay?

And forgettable.

She seems relaxed.  Watching the dark street through the dark windows, tending to her tea.  Strangers' reflections swimming across the surface, the bustle outside.  The smear of headlights, the spray of green-to-yellow as the stoplights outside change colors.

Seems.

Elijah sees her better than Grace.

Reads the wary tension that underscores that facsimile of ease and disinterest.

Someone is braced for something.  Someone is ready to run.

Grace
"Hmm?" Grace says. "Oh, new friend?"

She smiles at the guy who stands on the other side of the gelato counter waiting for her order. She's not going to give him any. Friends await. Or, at least, attempts at friendliness await.

No, she'll walk with Elijah over to the corner, letting him take the lead. Yes, let's see what'll happen. Let's see.

"Is that her?"

Elijah
Someone is braced for something. Someone is ready to run.

It makes someone else stop, or at least slow. She's going to run, she's going to bolt and something is going to happen. That much he knows, or thinks he knows. But he straightens, exhales and pulls his confidence together because he has to say something now that he's turned around and made his approach.

"Excuse me," he says, quiet enough to not be obtrusive. Loud enough to not be hard ont eh ears, "but is that any good?"

He gestured to the tea in its little metal teapot-and-cup-and-saucer set up. He doesn't justify, just continues, "I caught it out of the corner of my eye and I figured I might as well ask, ya know?"

Cala
The small cafe is half-empty, a few murmured conversations in the air, sure.   The biscuit concept album on the sound system, turned down to the level that Norah Jones' records often are: inobtrusive.

So there is not much to cushion the conversation.  To make it contextual or natural.  Not much in the air to give it substance - that glow that seems to spark in the air in busy social spaces.

The girl - the young woman - gives up the pretense used to conceal her interest as soon as it becomes clear to her that Elijah has chosen a deliberate path to her or near her table.  Elijah and Grace are half-way through the tables, one trailing the other, when she gives them both a frank, spare look.  She has dark eyes.  They touch on Elijah, then slide to Grace.

That is where they linger longest.

--

Her mouth is flat.  There is a small, lumpen bag beneath her feet - leather like the gloves, battered, a match for her dark brown boots - and as Elijah comes up and says to her, excuse me, she is bending down beneath the table, stuffing or shoveling something back into it.

When she sits up again, she's pulling the drawstring closed.

Gives the teapot a sideglance.  Gives Grace another sideglance, her mouth flat.

"It's fine," she says, non-committal.  Reaching across the table for her gloves.  A glimpse in the mug and it doesn't even look like tea.

Just hot water and lemon.

Both free.

Grace
The stuffing of a purse, the going for the gloves -- these are 'I'm leaving' signals. Grace has done that before. The fleeing from danger impulse used to be quite strong with her.

So she just smiles at the woman, trying to impress upon her the non-monster nature of the two of them. Just good people, we are. Not going to hurt you.

When the cautious woman's eyes land on her, mouth flat, all nerves and furtiveness, Grace will wave at her. Chill. It's cool. We're all cool here. Look at how cool we are.

Elijah
[Is there magic going on I need to know about? Prime 1 - sans foci (because spouting off Words right now may be bad). Diff 4 + 3 = 7 ?]

Dice: 1 d10 TN7 (2) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Elijah
He's distracted.

There is a moment of focus there, and he is definitely distracted by somerthing or focusing on something just out the window. Just outside of his reach and he's thinking, and there are things he could say, and there are things he would want to say but he has so little language and Kalen had been very specific that those particular words were to be kept secret.

Can't very well be secret when you're talking to someone who is fleeing, now can you?

"Uh..." so, Mister Personable can't quite come up with words at that juncture. He's too torn elsewhere.

Cala
Elijah is distracted, trying to focus, trying to find the threads of magic in the air lingering around her.  He needs more time, perhaps more words, but the strange girl has already flexed her long fingers around the strap of her backpack and now she's picking it up.

Now she's standing.

She has no great height and something about her is forgettable in the same way that Grace can be forgettable.  Though she is taller than Grace, with a contained  expressiveness that flickers behind her mask like the shadows of passing clouds over a summer sidewalk.  These subtle flickers that are hard to spot beneath the tension.

Spare humor, the sort that some might call gallows.

A deep down impulse to smirk.

Her hair is pulled back and twisted into a loose bun.  Her clothing dark.

"Excuse me," she says, once she is standing, the pack slung over her right shoulder, the gloves in her left hand.

And then she cuts between them, headed toward the front door.

Elijah
"Why were you watching us?"

It's the first thing that comes out of his mouth, the first thing that is coherent and he lets that thread of magic start to pull and he can't quite find it, can't quite grasp the concept of that fundamental truth. He can't quite put a meaning to it all, he can't find where intent pulled the formless into the fold.

Not suspicious, just... frank.

Grace
"I think maybe we chased her off," Grace says to Elijah, as his tumult rises about him. "It happens."

She looks to her phone in hand, and starts tapping away at it. There is another thing Grace likes to do with new people other than say hi to their face. She also likes to send them her own brand of text message -- one that works without the intervention of a phone company.

So her screen goes black, replaces the black with Code, that she slips herself into. All things connect to one another, and you might say that phones are uniquely suited to the task. They send out signals and receive them in turn and all of this tying and untying and bending fucking space goes unnoticed because it is so commonplace. But Grace can tie threads where there should be none.

[Corr 2: Secure Communication -- We're trying to send a message to someone without knowing their phone number, with direct communication between the devices.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Elijah
[Per+alert]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 2, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 1 )

Cala
Elijah is distracted, trying to focus, trying to find the threads of magic in the air lingering around her.  He needs more time, perhaps more words, but the strange girl has already flexed her long fingers around the strap of her backpack and now she's picking it up.

Now she's standing.

She has no great height and something about her is forgettable in the same way that Grace can be forgettable.  Though she is taller than Grace, with a contained  expressiveness that flickers behind her mask like the shadows of passing clouds over a summer sidewalk.  These subtle flickers that are hard to spot beneath the tension.

Spare humor, the sort that some might call gallows.

A deep down impulse to smirk.

Her hair is pulled back and twisted into a loose bun.  Her clothing dark.

"Excuse me," she says, once she is standing, the pack slung over her right shoulder, the gloves in her left hand.

And then she cuts between them, headed toward the front door.

Cala
Cala breathes out so sharply when Elijah asks that question.  It is enough to arrest her.  To make her stop her forward progress and turn around and just look at him.  There is still a sense of furtiveness about her but beneath that is something else he can only just read: a kind of defiance.  The look of saints and martyrs.

And - revolutionaries.

That smirk gets swallowed up in the collar of her oversized cloak.

There's no other answer for Elijah.

She gains the door soon after, pushes it open and heads out onto the dark street.

--

Meanwhile, Grace works.  Or rather, Works.


The screen of her phone goes black and she loses herself in the Code.  She knows this space, knows too that all spaces are one.  She's met the girl, she just needs to get through, and it's working, everything is pulling together, the connection -

- Wait.  There is no such number.

Anywhere.

Ever.

--

Outside: she does not double-back.  Does not pass by the cafe's windows.

Still, Elijah sees the girl through the closing door, a brief glance over her shoulder.

Something about bodylanguage tells him that she very well may actually run.

Lock.

Key.


Grace
"She's afraid. What is she afraid of?" Grace asks Elijah, though her gaze is a confused one, straight into her phone.

"She's blocking my attempts to reach her," she adds, in quiet whisper. "I refuse to believe that anyone that young anywhere in this city has never owned a phone. That's ridiculous."

Even more ridiculous than any number of things Grace has seen. Apparently not even watching a ghul burst through a movie screen and start causing a riot is enough to merit the level of disbelief she finds in that particular notion.

Elijah
"I don't know yet," he said. Yet being the operative word. Yet because there was a puzzle, because now he wanted to know, needed to know if he could just hold onto the memory of her long enough to be more than dark and with the smirk of a revolutionary. Someone with fire.

He doesn't know the word for lock in Enochian, but he does know the word for key. He knows it because he tastes it on his tongue, because his wrists and fingertips have practiced drawing that sigil and the meaning of it sticks with him.

There is a door, some kind of door- but... but in that corner, it wasn't a thing, it wasn't a tangible thing, it was a person. If a person could be a feeling and it lingered. His gaze sharpened, and he watched.

"Lock... key," he said. "Lock," and then, something under his breath, something a little more guarded and alien. Key.

[C'mon, pattern, what you doin'? Watching the weaving, perhaps? Prime 1?]

Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (1) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Elijah
[Magic, do what you will?]

Dice: 1 d10 TN5 (10) ( success x 1 )

Grace
"Oh, is that 'key' then?" Grace says, smirks, because she cares not for the rules of Hermetics. Kalen, who showed her his books of sigils long ago, likes to bend them from time to time as well.

Knowledge seeks such cracks in walls through which it can flow. Grace likes those faultlines.

"I just want some damn green tea gelato now. Miss Mystery can run away all she likes, I guess. If she doesn't want to talk so very hard, who am I to restrain her? Especially if she's afraid of us, that could be taken the wrong way..."

Elijah
"Whoever she is, she sure as Hell doesn't want to be contained or cornered, that's for sure," and that... sounds a little like approval from the young man. LIke he had room to really disapprove, but there he was. Things that were threads and intent and then ones and zeroes and keen edges and honed winged flight and they fluttered off into nothing.

Then something.

Then nothing again.

"I met a girl who didn't own a phone, like, ever? She may or may not have lived in a cult for the entirety of her life," he eventually does put his hands up and, hesitantly, turned around with a grin, "and it's key-ish. Approximation of what a key is for and not- anyway. Mostly key."

Grace
"Bah. Cults can be weird, I'll give them that."

So Grace is, a thing of constant contact with the internet and her devices, that she feels a pang of reflexive sorrow for such a person who had never known the joy of technology. To have nearly the sum of human knowledge hanging out in your pocket is a power so many take for granted. It's superhuman. A preparation for the day when humans leave humanity behind and become.

For today, green tea gelato. And a forgetfulness that droops over her. Is this what it's like when people meet her for the first time? How they look at her on the second time as though they don't know who she is anymore? Maybe the next time Grace sees Miss Mystery she'll have to ask herself why that person seems familiar, if it even registers at all.

Just one thing is for certain. They met a new Someone. She was afraid of something. She left in a hurry. And she never owned a phone (or, perhaps, had wards up to protect it).