You're Giving Me Heartburn

Pen
Pen is alone at the bar of a sushi restaurant, and it is quiet, mid-day instead of mid-afternoon.

A golden hour outside, the skies scrubbed clean; a bowl, a horizon broken eventually by the mountain spines, but how endless is the horizon. A golden hour inside, lunch special in full effect, but not many people around to take advantage of it. There is a window; the sushi chefs are visible beyond the wind. A waitress who is also the hostess loiters there, checking her phone.

Pen is writing in a hand-bound book, library cloth covers and careful stitch work up the spine. The pages are a comfortable color and the pen she is using is one that uses real ink and requires some care in the writing. She is using the pen, not much care; there is ink along the side of her palm, her thumb and forefinger.

Pen: with that daring (Dare You, Dare We, Dare She), that ardence gone into resplendence an immanent thing for her, present in the poise of her spine and the angle of her head on her neck, the way light kindles on her very dark dark red hair, which is wrapped up in a coronet today ears visible and set with many stones, garnet and carnelians and rubies, a long silver spike which looks like a compass spike hanging from one ear, well - it is carelessly bred glory, restrained beguilement.

Her clothing does nothing to detract from a first impression that she must be escaped from a Pre-Raphaelite painting, since her coat has been discarded, leaving her in some blousy Bohemian tunic with voluminous sleeves, something which looks like it might be worn to great effect while staring dramatically across a storm tossed sea at the ship one's father is wrecking using spirits of the air and water, or it might be worn by some stalwart and resigned lady-knight being burned as a witch. Her trousers are patchwork: varying fabrics and patterns, most of them in autumnal colors and golds and reds and so on and so forth. Badass oxblood boots, laced a trifle loosely toward the top, and of course there are things hidden in her boots if they aren't hidden up her sleeves.

Andrés
Their longitude has Sol close enough to straight overhead to call the hour high and yet the place is not exactly crawling with patrons. Few folks develop a hankering for sushi that cannot wait until dinnertime what with its price and its heaviness.

Perhaps she can feel him before she turns around to glimpse him. If she turns around to glimpse him. The two of them are noticeable even filtering out the impressions their Work has left upon the world. Hers impassioned, ignited. His foretold, frigid. Nothing majestic about him. He feels like a warning. He creeps people out.

The hostess puts down her phone to speak to him. Short handsome man in a suit and glasses and if he had a natural magnetism then he would really be a pain in the ass. But he doesn't. He has no magnetism. If he wants another's attention and he hasn't already got it, he interrupts. But for the interim the hostess is able to ignore the sense of impending doom he causes and chalk it up to the nostalgia of being in her twenties. Homesickness. Something.

She sets him down on the opposite end of the bar from Pen. Same rules of seating apply in food service as humans follow on public transit, in public restrooms. Sepúlveda notices Pen but does not go down to her straightaway. Orders a bottle of saké from her and food from the server behind the sushi bar before climbing down off his stool and wandering down the length of the bar to present himself.

"Penelope," he says by way of greeting.

Pen
The silver spike hanging from her ear swings when Andrés approaches, not because it is a lodestone and he is a magnetic cold front up in the North tugging it that-a-way, but because Pen looks up and over toward the Society man. This clear-eyed, thoughtful reserve about it; passionate does not mean unfettered, or uncontrolled, and though she is often rash - well. The woman smiles; it is a grave smile, but it lets loose light in the eyes; some radiance seeping upward, an openness which is prepared to be pleased by a surprise Andrés in the middle of the day. "Andrés, but what unlooked for good fortune, meeting company here on my lonely sojourn in the land of hunger."

She has no food yet, there are no signs of dishes or a soy sauce dish in need of being cleared away, but she has a cup of fragrant jasmine tea, half-sipped. She stands to offer Andrés her hand, forgetting about the properties of ink when it is wet to transfer from one surface to the other.

Andrés
It will take the hostess some time to bring him his saké and even if she brings it to his place before he has wandered back over to his seat he is not concerned with food or drink for the moment. Glasses still secure on his face. Removing them tends to be a sign of his investment in what is going on in front of him.

So they shake. Forgetful on the one hand and unconcerned on the other. So she'll smear ink on his palm. If he is on his way back to the morgue he'll have to wash and glove it anyway.

He rests one elbow on the edge of the unoccupied bar and tucks the other into the pocket of his suit jacket. No outerwear for the day is warm by winter's standards and he was only walking from the vehicle to the building anyway.

"What!" he asks. Exuberant in that way of his bordering Friendly and Tone Deaf. Almost manic. Hard to tell if he's joking or not. He indicates her journal with the hand attached to the elbow propping him up. Call it his right hand. "Is the journey so lonely? You have your thoughts."

Pen
"And they are good enough in their way, but you know thoughts will smother and dwindle and burn things and generally behave with great mess if they don't get air. So, company! How are you? How are your students; do you believe they will stay with the Society? Share some of yourthoughts with me, won't you."

Lines around her eyes when her eyes crinkle up like that. She hastily shuts her book (there's more ink, smeared, Penelope; you'll regret it when you open the book again), the pen pushed somewhere behind a dispenser of soy sauce or a jar of chopsticks wrapped up in paper.

Andrés
She bids him share some of his thoughts with her before he has had time to respond to the question regarding his students. Though she can see the response in the way he near-speaks but does not quite get there.

So he rakes his glasses off his face and lets them sit on the bartop for now. The hostess hovers in the background with his sake for a moment and has a moment where she can't decide if she ought to bring it to him or leave it where she set him. Then she decides ah well it looks like they're going to be staying a while since he's sitting at the spot beside the sunset-haired woman so she brings over the bottle and the cup and disappears again.

"They were never with the Society to begin with," he says while this is going on. "They found me, not the other way around, and besides, they're not cut out for the single-mindedness lifelong devotion to research calls for. My fervent hope is I'll find them more suitable patrons--oh, hey." Saké. He pours a glass. "I can answer their questions, keep them sated, maybe keep them out of too much trouble, but I can't nurture them. Does this make sense?"

Pen
The ink is blue; now it is blue ink on the side of her jaw, because Pen rests her chin on her thumb and curls her fingers against the bone there. Smudges, squid-blood, midnight, word-thrall. Other hand curls loosely around the cup of fragrant jasmine tea, and there is care in the way her fingers rest. Care, careworn, not precision exactly just an absentminded attention. We take some things for granted. That a cup will always be a cup. Matter mages do not take such things for granted. The cup might not always be this kind of cup; what is chimeric, truly?

"Of course, though it strikes me as unfair. They seemed fully capable of the single-mindedness of life-long devotion at your dinner; certainly, devotion isn't so difficult, once you've found something or been shown something that you fall in love with. Knowledge is so gorgeous, so fascinating, one of the easiest lovers to fall for and stay splatted over; how is your research? Do you get enough time to pursue your current, erm, project? Invention?"

Andrés
"Of course I do, I'm not wasting it attempting to fit the two of them into a paradigm they've already rejected. Their curiosity is encouraging, sure, but they don't have a singular passion, you see, they're Primordial."

He's indicated to Nick in the past that he doesn't have the slightest fucking idea what to do with them but that was another day at another restaurant and he and Time have a strange relationship. It's easy to become unstuck from it when he abuses it.

Pen
Pen laughs. "Very well, I didn't mean to imply you should, but there can be no 'of course' when you have a day job and two minds you are looking after besides your own. But I also meant to take the conversation out of the context of that pair."

Andrés
"Is that possible?" he asks. It sounds as if he's attempting to make a joke. "Anything is possible. Who am I kidding." He takes a swallow of his saké. "Yes, with all the distractions presenting themselves, I'm able to work on my research. That takes priority, you understand, the research is up here--" He uses his ring-bearing hand to provide a watermark somewhere above his head. "--and then the community is somewhere around here--" A notch lower. And so on. "--and then my profession, and then the kids, and then. Eh. Bodily functions. They're around here, somewhere."

Almost at his lap. Again with the tone that suggests he's trying to make a joke.

Pen
This time there's no laughter, but the suggestion of radiance remains in her very clear eyes. Her poise is less grave now than it is steadied, steadying. "Mm." Acknowledgment. And then: "What theory are you researching right now? What invention are you dragging into being, wholesale, from the Muses of fire, etcetera, etcetera?"

Andrés
Given what she knows about him and knowing that she knows about him he does not joke that if he told her what he was working on he would have to kill her. Andrés is not a big fan of killing people.

"I'm going to a conference in Chicago in May," he says, "to speak on what we, we being medical examiners, it's not a big talk, but what we can do to better determine how much time has passed since death has occurred, and I'm working on a device that I think may help with this. This has been plaguing pathologists for... well, centuries. It isn't as simple as it is on the TV, eh?"

Pen
Andrés was the catalyst for an uncomfortable conversation, and an embarrassing lie which just might saddle Pen with a dog. He doesn't know this; there's no way he can know this.  But it was because:

Penelope does know Andrés. She was closer with his wife, but she knows Andrés, and what Andrés was like when he was a union of minds, before he became what he is now.

Left behind. Half. Unhalved, but not whole? He is whole, though: the individual man, the Frankenstein.

It isn't as simple as it is on the TV, eh?

"Here in the real world, one is not given epiphanies according to the need of some uneven narrative; thank god! I should hate to have no free will and to be incapable of transforming or being transformed, naught but a program or an equation. Is that the research you are consumed by right now; drawing a finer line on the ability to pinpoint death?"

Pen has a moment of conscience pricked woe; but then, Andrés deals with death every day, so surely discussing death isn't insensitive. Louise died years ago.

Andrés
Almost a year ago. Has it been a year? He is working to help Sleepers pinpoint the moment of a person's passage into death and yet he cannot say for certain how long she has been dead. April. He knows it was an April but how is anyone to know he's stopped paying attention to the passage of time in the months since then. As much as he drinks it's a wonder he has a career.

Death does not remind him of Hinata. Eloise. Louise. She went by more than one name. Everyone who met her loved her. It isn't her death he avoids talking about. Easier to avoid admitting that he misses her if he doesn't admit her at all.

Anyway:

"The difference of a few hours has let guilty men off the hook in court," he says. Not a flicker of memory. "'This man couldn't possibly have been stabbing his neighbor to death at twelve thirty, surveillance footage has him on the train at twelve thirty-five, that's five minutes before the ME says the victim died.' There's too many variables, you understand, sticking a meat thermometer in a body doesn't tell us anything. I think I may be onto something, but, eh, Enlightened Science and Modern Science aren't on the same page yet."

Pen
"Have you ever spoken to a Conventionalist?"

Andrés
"Of course I have. I work for the fucking coroner's office."

Pen
This is when the sushi comes out.

Pen has a big appetite for sushi, or is conventional herself in that one goes into a sushi restaurant hungry and thinks of course there will be no problem in consuming five different kinds of rolls, and it is only after one is full to the point of bursting having only eaten one and a half does the regret begin to sift in. Sushi left overs are not the delightful kind of left overs.

Pen's eyebrows had drawn sharp together at the of course, startled and concerned at the same time; these things leave when the waitress points out which roll as which, replaced by a sharp smile and a nod and some expression of gratitude. Pen looks at her sushi for a moment, before angling the larger plate toward Andrés: an invitation.

She busies herself undressing a pair of chopsticks, sliding them free. Breaking them, neatly. Chopsticks aren't so different from a wand, although their purpose is narrow:

feed.

"You keep saying 'of course' and I think of the Princess Bride and 'inconceivable.' Did you talk about your differing scientific philosophies?"

Andrés
As the angling occurs Andrés is draining his saké cup but he still flicks his eyebrows in acceptance. Pours another glass of rice wine and unwraps his chopsticks. Has to use his left hand because of where they are in relation to each other but he's left-handed so that is a fortuitous turn of events.

Nom.

Did you talk about your differing scientific philosophies?

"No," he says. And then frowns. And then clears his throat with saké. "Fuck no, why would we do that? There was an Infernalist running around, it's not like we were in the same football league."

He means football like soccer, not football like rugby's stupid cousin.

Pen
"What was it like? Were you surprised; were they? You'll forgive my questions, I hope, on account of my extreme interest in the Union and those backing it, and also my fervent hope that you are not -- " Penelope raps on Andrés's arm with her knuckles, gently. As if by doing so, she'll hear machinery rattling around there, some telltale beep. Her mouth hooks up, but she is too solemn for the humor to really transform her.

" -- a changeling."

Andrés
As often as Pen asks questions without leaving room to answer them he is able to drape a piece of tuna roll in ginger and dunk it in soy sauce and chew it. The eyebrow on the same side as the rapped arm lofts with the rapping but he does nothing to prevent or abort it. No clunking or chirping to indicate that the man is a cyborg.

Then they both descend into a frown. He swallows.

"A what?" Oh. Another slug of saké. These glasses aren't very big. "If I were a Construct designed to infiltrate the Traditions, you wouldn't tell the others, would you? Because if I were, I would have been making pretty good headway and that would have really fucked things up with my promotion."

Pen
There is a difference between asking questions without leaving room for an answer, and asking a question then qualifying it: the question was qualified, and Andrés's answering sally causes Pen's eyes to crinkle again, but naturally she waits now, gaze as curious and bright as any dark water might be with starlight shone down upon it.

Isn't quite certain what sushi roll she wants to start with, so dives right into the most challenging concoction: something chalk-full of (she is no sushi purist) fried food and greenery and how is one even supposed to fit it into one's mouth? The Flambeau will figure it out! Dare everything.

Grace
[Awareness!?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace
As if to defuse the accusations of Dr. Sepúlveda's changelinghood, a messy-haired woman in a sharp red coat walks into the sushi joint, making it feel as though the chairs have suddenly jolted to the left a few centimeters.

She's here for her own sushi, and well accustomed to going into restaurants to eat by herself. The universe, though, has other plans. It always does.

No one quite stands out like they do. Everyone else in the place is Sleeping and dull, but Pen and the good Doctor are vibrant in their own, extremely different ways. It draws Grace's eye over to the Raphaelite and the Frankenstein.

Oh, crap. It's him.

Andrés
[YAY AWARENESS]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 3, 3) ( fail )

Andrés
It's always good to provide a scientist with parameters. Especially if the scientist has the tendency to go off on tangents or ramble on for uninterrupted minutes or not provide the desired information because he simultaneously assumes everyone knows what he knows and acts like a condescending dick when he suspects they don't.

He's already forgotten the question. Questions. Eats another piece of sushi before he offers her this:

"I remember the end of the war. But plenty of traditions have fought wars against each other, over the years, and will still work together out of necessity."

He has his back to the door and is oblivious to Grace's presence.

Pen
[Er, awareness too?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Pen
Here comes someone else who is magic, has magic in their bones, in their shadow, in their very presence. Pen's sixth sense is sharp right now; she doesn't miss Grace's entrance.

Before Grace's entrance, this is the new Hermetic in town: Pen is listening, you see, alert and clear-eyed. "Well, yes. Is that what it was like, then; working with someone like myself, out of necessity?"

There is no rancor; but she is searching, questing, nonetheless. The Pre-Raphaelite maiden (no [Witch, knight, la belle]) does follow the urging of her intuition that talent for feeling the sea-change uncanny weather-shift and her eyes find Grace.

Of course she smiles at her over Andrés's shoulder; the same sort of startled, open-if-reserved preparation to be pleased that Andrés was met with. "Look," she says to the Society man. "It is Grace."

She waves her chopsticks.

Grace
Pen waves chopsticks at her, so it's not like she can just sneak back out the front door, now can she? There's a strange expression on Grace's face as she waves back to Pen, caught somewhere between 'oh, shit' and 'oh, hi'.

And she walks up through the forest of tables and chairs, past people as though they were trees, not even really looking at her destination either, more attention seemingly placed on the walls and ceiling. But when she arrives, she raises her brows and states: "Hi."

"You guys, uh... Oh, nice. I like that kind," she says, pointing to an array of sushi rolls.

Andrés
Look. It is Grace.

"What?"

He turns over his shoulder to see what it is Pen is talking about. Can't see shit from this distance. Claps his glasses back onto his face. Clarity!

Pen waves and he turns around long enough to refill his saké glass and then swivel around in his seat arm over the back of the chair to watch her approach.

Her brows started it. His lift up over the top rims of his glasses. All he has to say about her observation is - well okay he doesn't say anything he sips.

Pen
[Hmm. I feel like a Perc + Empathy roll: wait, ack, are there undercurrents here? is in order. On ... Grace! Because that was a strange expression.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace
[Considering what went down the last time Grace saw either of them, she has reason to be in a somewhat serious mood. There is some of that going on with her. But she also seems surprised to have stumbled across them again, and isn't overwhelmingly happy about that fact either.]

Pen
"I was skeptical about banana and sweet potato in a sushi roll - at what point does it cease to be a 'sushi' roll? - but the experience is convincing."

Pen considers Grace's expression; whatever she sees there keeps her from inviting the Mercurial Elite to join them. "I don't wish to detain you from your business, but I am glad you came over to say hello. Haven't yet had time to put much thought into our gladiatorial ring," and see, Pen sounds wistful.

But she is also very obviously giving Grace an out.

Andrés
[HOLY SHIT THE SEDAN IS WALKING WE'RE ALL DEAD]

Grace
Grace rubs at her eyes. "Neither of us have," she says, not wistful there. More sad. Neither Pen nor Andrés knew Alex, really. He's just a name to them. To Grace he was a friend. The last words he had for her were angry ones. It shouldn't end like that.

"My business is just obtaining calories, really. Not here for anything special."

And, judging by her mood, not interested in discussing the lighter side of things, the robot battles, the things that tend to make her bubbly and happy.

"I did want to thank you both, for you know, your support."

Grace
[Well, in truth, it is extremely complicated and not simple at all for a sedan to walk anywhere. So, Denver is just stating the obvious.]

Andrés
I did want to thank you both, for you know, your support.

The Etherite frowns and turns to look at the Hermetic. Searches her face quick for context and even though he is capable of reading minds it's difficult without his brainwave scanner and -

Oh right.

When the remembrance hits him he turns back to look at Grace but does not answer her. Pen's doing a great job so far.

Pen
Wizards have many weaknesses. Koschei the Deathless hid his inside a needle sharp as longing, inside an egg as smooth as water, inside a duck as white as snow, inside a chest as gold as dawn at its apex which was in turn buried beneath a great green oak tree on the island of Buyan in the great big sea. Merlin had his weariness with nature, had his desire for rest, or his curiosity and his lust, depending on the story. Their flaws are often Romantic in nature, or even Byronic: arrogance. Beset by trials and travails, they learn pride, and in leaning on their pride: arrogance becomes a stone, and drags them surely downward.

Pen has many weaknesses and she does not know how to hide them in a needle sharp as longing, has not yet been raveled up inside a tree or crystal cave but to sleep for the waking come another Golden Age, has not been dragged down to Hell. Which is to say:

One of her weaknesses: this burnished thing, this unrelenting flick whip uptick of compassion and the compulsion to act to do something about.

"A very unnecessary thanks; what would we be, if not ready to defend a man's freedom of thought and spirit when both may be taken from him?"

Beat. Grace seems unhappy, but she seems even unhappier now, and Andrés -- Pen flicks a glance toward the Society man; it is quizzical, questioning. And she says: "Would you like to sit, Grace? Feel free to have one of my rolls; I really ordered too many."

Grace
"What? Oh. Oh, sure. That would be great," she says, sits down. Truth be told, Grace doesn't usually wait for invitations. If she'd thought she was welcome at the table, she would have just sat down and invited herself, perhaps even helped herself.

She reaches out with her fingers, because chopsticks haven't been provided to her yet, and takes one of the banana and sweet potato rolls. "I know it's not necessary. I know you're probably great people and all. But still. You don't even know him, and you're... Yeah."

She upends the thing into her mouth whole.

Andrés
Sepúlveda pushes the rest of the bottle of saké in Grace's direction.

"You're giving me heartburn."