What is Entropy?

A few days after their successful eradication of a nest of creatures who went to ash so soon as their clothing caught fire Grace receives an email from Samir.

There's a good chance he's stoned. It's the middle of the day when the thing shows up in her inbox.

Hey G: I've been reading about chance and mortality and all that but IDK if I'm getting the hang of it. I get that everything decays over time and with the right program I could alter the Code to exploit things breaking down without having to break them myself etc etc but I'm having trouble applying the concept of probability since probability is, you know, relative.

Like okay I know if you argue long enough then everything becomes relative and we reduce ourselves to solipsistic egomaniacs and I should be able to just make the universe do what I want it to do because that's how this works so who gives a shit why it does what it does (/s) but right now I don't know how to go about coding to account for every single possible random outcome Patterns are capable of introducing to the Tapestry without my head exploding.

-S.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Her reply comes back quickly, almost as if she were waiting for this email, somehow. She wasn't. But there's something about the sharing of information that scratches all of Grace's mental itches. We gather, so that we can disseminate. 

Hi Samir. I have some stuff to help you out here. First, I'd like to introduce you to a guy named Claude Shannon. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon]. I don't know if he was one of us, but based on the flame-throwing trumpet invention, I'd swear SoE? Anyway, Shannon came up with the idea of the Entropy of Information [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%29]

Basically, this has a lot less to do with things 'breaking down' per se, and more to do with the amount of information a thing contains. More information, more entropy.

Take this line:

--------------------

The dashes are constants -- guaranteed to be the same, guaranteed to stay just as they are. You can represent this information as above, or you can represent it like this: -20 as if to say, hey, it's just 20 dashes in a row, pretty simple.

Now take this line:

--.---..---.------

Now, you can't represent this as easily. There's added complexity. You can do it like this: -4.-3.2-3.-6 and there's still less total text required to represent it, but more than the first line. We can probably do a little better by analyzing patterns, and creating symbols:
(--) = a
(.---.) = b
thus our line becomes: a1b2a3

But, that's still a lot more involved than just -20.

The first line has less entropy than the second line. It also conveys a lot less information. A book made of nothing but a's, despite being made of the same number of characters as a dictionary, does not convey nearly the same amount of information as a dictionary. Meaning comes into being by the introduction of entropy.

Imagine the universe as a crystal, unchanging, unperturbed. It would be perfect, but rather devoid of information. Now start breaking pieces off. It suddenly requires a lot more information to represent the universe. Now start inscribing music on those shattered crystal surfaces -- now you've got even more information. All of those operations increase the entropy of the crystal universe. Creation and destruction are both entropic operations, in other words. Sides of a coin. Where you see entropy, you're seeing the effects of change.

Information entropy and physical entropy are the same beast -- an idea that comes naturally to those of us who view the universe as code and data. But it works out like that in realspace as much as it does in mathspace.

So, probability. How does that relate to information entropy? To get probabilities, you must first observe some data. Imagine, for example, that you have a dictionary. You are given the task of guessing a word picked out of the dictionary at random. You're kind of screwed. However, let's start filtering the result set. Each bit of data you can get will help you make a better and better guess. Let's say you're given the first letter of the word. If that letter is "a", you're a little more screwed than if that letter is "z". The z would narrow things down a lot more. So, the letter z carries far more information than does the letter a. Z is more entropy-laden than a, if you will. Z might even hold more information by itself than the letter combination "at" since so many words start with "at".
So, when dealing with probabilities, if you're trying to find something, you need to find enough bits and pieces of information about it to start solidifying your result, but you may never quite make it. Until you have all the information, you can make better and better guesses, but they might not be correct, they can only become more probable. If you're trying to hide something or make it less predictable, you need to scatter your information or encrypt it (basically, hide it within enough random data so that it's indistinguishable from random data). Preferably, both.

Sam
The last Grace heard from Samir was sometime yesterday afternoon when he emailed her to ask her for her thoughts on entropy. Specifically: probability and how to reconcile its objectivity. As is par for the mentorship course she sent back plenty of reading material to get him started.

And then he proceeded to stay up all goddamn night reading about information technology and Shannon entropy and the next thing he knew the sun was up.

Whatever he did between then and now is between him and Kalen. It's later in the evening. Grace is at home in the warehouse. She may start to regret giving him access to the building if he keeps this up. At least he can't teleport yet.

It doesn't take long to find her. He knocks first.

Grace
[Awareness!]

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

Grace
There's a knock at the door to the pantry. At first she's thinking it's Kalen, but then Kalen doesn't feel like a stab. Who feels stabby? Oh yeah.

She shouts his name through the closed door, right before it opens. "I wasn't expecting you. Pleasant surprise. What's up?"

Inside this place is a virtual cornucopia of things which shall not go bad. There's rock candy coffee stirrers, freeze-dried ice cream (along with other freeze-dried foodstuffs), about ten different kinds of coffee and inumerable types of tea. If Samir ever got the idea that their little compound was a bit of a prepper's paradise, he wouldn't be too far off. The kinds of apocalypses Kalen imagines are beyond the wildest dreams of most, however.

Sam
More than once the thought has occurred to him that if civilization collapsed around the warehouse that anyone holed up inside the warehouse might not even realize until the power went out. If the power went out. A house full of Forces Initiates is not necessarily beholden to power grids.

This stabby creature feels like Mind threads wrapped tight around himself. Nothing can get in that isn't already there. He always feels like that though.

He opens the door and pokes his head in. Flashes her a grin that is more uncomfortable than cocky and stays where he is. His eyes are a touch red. She knows that look by now. Cocaine isn't his vice. The pursuit of knowledge though. That's a high he can't sell.

Though it's restrained his hair is a bit of a mess. Shocks have escaped from the knot at the back of his neck. Make of that what you will.

"If I wrote the Code using SIC-POVM probabilities and translated a density matrix into a distro using the SIC-POVMs, do you think I could reproduce the statistical predictions on the matrix from those probabilities instead? That would give me related probability distros instead of a bunch of derivations, right?" A beat. He's hyper but not manic. Grace is the only person in the city who can tell the difference between his mental states. Dubious honor. "I haven't slept in like two days, I feel like I could see through Time if I really put my mind to it."

Grace
She squints at him. The sharp, quick words. The red eyes. The lack of sleep.

"SIC-POVMs. Okay. So. There's many ways to go about this. I think I know what you're talking about? If tangentially? It's a generalized measurement in quantum mechanics. But the IC stands for "Informationally Complete". What if you don't have all the information? If it's incomplete?

Can he think clearly on this much sleep deprivation? It's not improbable.

"Do you need some coffee?"

Sam
"... yes."

Before he lets go of the pantry door to step back and let her out Sam glances around at his surroundings like to make sure the walls are still intact. He holds the door open until she's through. That's the only way he can check and make sure the light is out inside the pantry and check to make sure the door continues to open and shut four fucking times before he goes into the kitchen to wash his hands. Which he does as he continues to talk.

As for his dilemma:

"See that's the problem I keep running into, right, it's that I have so much information I don't know what to do with, like whether it's even relevant or not, so I thought Well what if I just write the Code to account for the fact that I have my head up my ass it can't be that hard! Just because it doesn't mean shit to me or I'm not looking for it doesn't mean it's not there. Right? I mean I'll have to modify the program parameters if I ever get to where I decide I want to be able to influence the--"

His hands are wet. He waggles his fingers around like to give probability a physical interpretation and uses his sleeve-covered wrist to shut off the faucet. Stands there with his hands up in front of him like a surgeon because he can't find something he wants to dry them on.

Then a thought hits him.

"Wait a minute. Wait wait wait." He runs his hands through the escaped bits of hair. That's one way to dry them. "Last night... this morning... whenever, I was reading about this Craft out in east Asia where everyone was born male but raised as women and bound in service to demon kings, or something, I don't know, that's just what it said... anyway, they had to escape their homes because the First Emperor went apeshit and was trying to kill all of them, and on their way to the coast they were like Holy shit, the spring turtles are humble and fierce and shit, we want up on that. So they started adopting the turtles as pets and painting on their shells to... I don't know, impress their psyches onto the animals, and then after a week they would boil and eat the turtle, and the shell would crack in such a way that the dude-lady casting the spell could divine whether or not her his whatever next venture would be successful."

What the fuck are you talking about, Samir.

"It's not like I'm just going to be wandering around trying to metal-detect something I don't know shit about, right? If I'm using this, I'm looking for something in specific anyway. I'll have enough information to get that far. I don't need to account for incompleteness. The program'll do that for me."

Grace
He says yes, and so she goes to set a kettle on the stove, only once running into problems with this because he is standing around with his hands up in the air unaware of what to do with them. Water in the pot, water in his hair, spring turtles...

She's listening. She is also making coffee, turning on the heat, using energy to increase the entropy of the system of heating element, pot, water.

"I think your main problem is that you are attempting to run first before learning to walk," she says, snugging the lid onto the heating pot.

"I like to think of it as a journey. You start off with no information, everything is equally probable as the next. Like, the base Code when you're just looking at the random data of it. It could mean anything. You collect a bit of information about what you're looking for, and you can use that to update your probability set. Another bit, another update. Treat it like a process that never quite finishes, because as you nail your path down, it gets up and walks away again.

"Part of the problem is finding the point at which you cut the process short and say: 'Here, I have a pretty good idea of the information content now.'"

If it sounds less like she is talking about information, and more about the progress of life and death, you wouldn't be entirely wrong. She turns and heads toward the pantry again, opening the door. She doesn't feel the need to close it again four times. Very quickly though, she returns with some coffee beans in an unlabeled bag.

"At first though, you may only be able to tell that there is information there. Like, you don't know what it means -- just that it exists. Sometimes, that is enough."

Sam
Now Grace has a definitive answer in case anyone ever asks her what the worst Sphere to teach to an obsessive-compulsive reality hacker is. Attempting to integrate uncertainty and unknown variables into a paradigm that names Code as the basis of everything is all well and good until you realize all of Sam's weird rituals were born because his brain misfires and that's how he has learned to live with the anxiety his condition causes him. He cannot tolerate uncertainty and unknown variables.

His main problem is that he thinks he ought to be able to make sense of this Right The Fuck Now because the other Spheres came to him easy. Even the spirit world wrote itself into his paradigm without this much effort. The spirit world is straight forward compared to the world of probability.

Information. Life and death. Two sides of the same coin.

It helps to have another person tell him he's got the gist of it. Par it down a bit.

While she embarks on her quest to retrieve the beans Sam unleashes his hair. Runs his fingers through it to return it to some semblance of order. Of course he counts how many times he runs his fingers through it before he secures it again.

"You're right." He almost chews on his thumbnail but then he takes out his yellow plastic pack of hand-rolled cigarettes and his cheap plastic lighter and drops them on the counter instead. "You're totally right."

Grace
[Entropy 1: Viewing the entropic states of the immediate area, Diff 4 - 1 for taking time.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 3, 8) ( success x 2 )

Grace
[Also, should include Corr 1, because reasons, bleh]

Grace
"Okay. I think the act of coffee-making will be a good one to watch," she says, somewhat enigmatically, and pulls out her phone. Coffee bag in one hand, thumbing through her programs with the other.

It starts off with the Code, until she pushes that through a rendering engine, and the room they're standing in (complete with tiny versions of Grace and Sam within it)

"So, what does it look like if I take my 3D representation of the room, and overlay it with a gradient corresponding to the relative levels of information content within the space?" she says, and her eyes flit to Sam.

A few more adjustments, and she has exactly that. When she turns the phone around, Sam can see the heat energy of the stove element dispersing into the water, into the air, carried along by the steam. He can see the twin engines of their bodies, busily converting energy into blue order on the inside, while releasing red chaos into their surroundings. He can see a hairline crack in one of the wooden chairs around the kitchen table, a bright purple against the varigated wood grain. He can see the light in the room, conveying its information in terms of photons. He can see everything, that is, that space can form a boundary for, in rainbow hues depicting their general level of entropy.

"As you can probably see, you can categorize information density without caring much about what that information is trying to tell you. Using this, I can tell if something has a weak spot, if that's what I'm looking for. Shows up as the universe requiring a higher level of information density to bring out the details of where it's weak, as opposed to where it's nice and solid and the same as everything else around it."

Sam
Enigmatic statement begets the lighting of a cigarette. Last time he'd ashed into an empty coffee cup. Smoking doesn't do much in terms of quelling his pursuit of cleanliness and decontamination but it does give him something to do with his hands.

He stuffs the lighter and the cigarette pack into his jacket pocket once it's lit and finds himself a cup before coming to stand behind Grace and peek to see the screen. Their eyes meet brief when she glances over at him after the rhetorical question. A few more adjustments and he leans one hip against the countertop.

"Whoa!" he says when she shows him the screen. Hasn't exhaled yet. The word is tamped down in his throat until he blows the smoke up towards the ceiling. "Is that the only Sphere you're running?"

Cigarette filter wedged between his lips and Sam has his hands freed up again. He has to reach into the inside pocket of his jacket to remove his handheld computer. Inspiration has stricken him.

Grace
She slides her phone onto the counter so Sam can still see it, and goes to grind her beans. They go into a little cup in the machine, and she turns it on. Suddenly, that machine goes to purple high-entropy in its complicated, destructive dance.

"Well, I had to get a representation of the area. For that, I used some Correspondence to map out the spatial dimensions of everything. But the colors and stuff is all information density, completely agnostic of what that information is attempting to convey. It could be the heat from the stove, or the way your cigarette smoke is dissipating, or the way the walls are propped up, making the house frame secure. As far as this program is concerned, it doesn't care. All we've got is order and chaos, known information and uncertainty, stolid and free.

"Now, this is easy to interpret, because we're right here. We do something," she says, and waves, making waves of shimmering gradients on her screen "and we know why the image just changed, right? In unknown arenas, it's going to be more difficult to figure out what is what. You'll get this mess of rainbow gradients that bleed into each other and don't make a lot of sense. You might want to combine the information density calculation with a matter scan, so you can see just the more solid and weaker areas of a pane of glass, so you know where to hit it the right way, that kind of thing."

Sam
[let's just roll grace's mentor thingie now to see what happens]

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (5, 7, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Sam
[i might as well do his library while i'm screwing around]

Dice: 2 d10 TN7 (1, 4) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Sam
Though he doesn't touch the phone he does keep leaning against the counter to watch what the room is doing on the screen. The hand responsible for the cigarette repositions the coffee cup he's appropriated and watches what happens when he slides it across the countertop. When he takes another drag off the cigarette and tips the ash in to join what he's already deposited.

Sleep deprivation will make anyone a bit deranged. He started out deranged though. Hasn't reached the point of staying awake where he is haggard and incapable of focusing. That's a look Grace has seen him wear before.

He doesn't take his eyes off the screen until he hears Grace finish grinding the beans.

"The Internet says you can use Entropy to tell if someone is lying. Is that a different program?"

Grace
"You'd want to do something a lot more focused than what I just did. That's a mess. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a lie and the AC coming on..."

She opens a cabinet, and out pops a convenient French press (Kalen's coffee-maker of choice -- they are literally scattered everywhere). She dumps the beans into the pot, and stares at the kettle like it is annoying her with its lateness.

Grace is actually pondering. Lie detection. How would you...

"I suppose if you subjected the sound of their voice to an Entropy analysis, that might work. Not like, the whole room, because then you're also going to get all the cracks in the ceiling and the car noises outside and everything ever. Might work even better if you combined it with a heartrate/persperation scan or a mind scan."

Sam
"I haven't unlocked the Life branch of the tech tree yet."

Oh Samir you're so funny. Funny or not he's gone and distracted himself finding something Grace can't answer super fast. What's left of the cigarette disappears with a quick hard inhale and he tosses the spent filter into the coffee cup.

Thin gray strands of smoke rise up out of the ashes. His eyes glance down at the screen as it changes to reflect the heat of the water extracting the coffee from the beans and the ember slowly dying in the coffee cup.

"Can you try it with Mind?"

Grace
"I could," she says, and the kettle starts whistling.

She slides it off of the burner, and pours the water in, providing a new show of slithering rainbows for Sam to look at. Heat and the exchange thereof is a thermodynamic entropy process after all.

"Want me to do it on myself and tell a bunch of shitty lies?" she asks, as the coffee grounds go swirling in the glass carafe of the French press.

Sam
Thermodynamic entropy processes are fascinating when you've been up all goddamn night and have replaced solid food with cigarettes and energy drinks and junk food from the corner store. They would be fascinating anyway but he's loathe to look away while Things are happening.

But then Grace poses the question the way she poses it and Sam snorts. Phrasing.

"Yes. Yes I do."

Grace
So, coffee started, she slides back over to her phone with a smile, completely missing why Sam just snorted at her. Oh well.

"Okay, let's get rid of Rainbow Road here," she says, and cancels the running program. "And do something else..."

She's never done this, Sam. Working a bit on the fly here. But, she starts by attempting to whittle away at the Data, focusing it to just her own mental state, a thing like a multidimensional snowflake. To that, she will apply a data density function, to calculate the information given and information hidden.

[Mind 1, Entropy 1 -- Lie Detector! Diff 4 - 1 taking time.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (4, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )

Sam
Nothing much to do but wait while Grace instructs the phone to focus on different data arrays. Waiting isn't one of his strong suits. He takes his own handheld computer out of his jacket again and taps a few keys. He won't be able to read the random elements but as long as they're screwing around with rotes they've never done before he might as well see if he can read Grace's aura while she's trying to lie.

Which means he drops the mind shield he always has running as a background process. Ah, trust.

[mind 1: mind empowerment! dialing his perception up to 11.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 3) ( botch x 1 )

Sam
[le backlash!]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (10) ( success x 1 )

Sam
[le soak!]

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

Grace
Grace, for her part, does not notice thing things have gone horribly wrong for Sam. She's too focused on her own coding, which goes rather more successfully. On her phone screen, a graphic representation of her mind blossoms into view, followed by a readout at the bottom, showing a deception probability meter.

She slides the phone onto the table again, so Sam can see.

"I enjoy coffee," she says, to her phone. It says there is a 12.58% probability of deception, and she grins.

The probability reading actually goes up a bit, while she is thinking of something decently horrible to say, and then skyrockets when she comes out with: "The Technocracy has the right idea, really."

Sam
Things tend to go horribly wrong for Sam. That will happen when he doesn't put forth any real effort despite all the anecdotal evidence supporting the hypothesis that reality hates Sam and loves backhanding him.

It isn't as impressive a nosebleed as the one he earned the night Elijah wanted to go gallivanting off to a high school football field by himself but he still boasts a thin trickle from his right nostril.

He blinks several times as his vision goes black and white on him. He is frowning as he puts his knuckles beneath his nostrils and pulls them away. The red isn't red. It will go back to normal in a few seconds but for a moment he is as distracted as Grace is.

Then she comes up with a mighty bold statement.

"You," he says before he reaches for a paper towel, "suck at lying."

Grace
Finally, Grace looks up from her work and notices. "Did you?" she says, making a motion about her nose. "Ohh. It happens," she says, and goes to get a mug.

"You should take a caffeine break. It might be the sleep deprivation getting to you."

That having been said, she slides her black mug onto the counter and starts rummaging around for additives. First, the fridge, for some cream. Then, a cabinet for some raw sugar rock candy stirrers. Then, the medicine jar of marshmallows. This stuff is dumped on the counter with her mug, and she goes for the plunger of the French press.

Sam
He blinks a few more times as his vision returns to normal and wipes the blood from his upper lip. Holds the paper towel folded up beneath his nostril in case it decides it isn't done oozing and comes to stand beside Grace to read the screen.

His eyebrows flick up and down once in approval. That answers the question of how in the hell the Sphere responsible for chance handles truth or the absence thereof.

As she cuts him off Sam leans back against the sink and stifles a yawn. Attempts to talk around it.

"If I stop now, the withdrawal might pop a blood vessel in my skull." Yawn over. "Will Entropy tell you the probability of me dying of caffeine withdrawal before I make it home?"

Grace
It says something about their mutual sleeping habits that Grace's answer to sleep deprivation is to prep his caffeine. There's just something about the quest for knowledge that drives one to obsessively talk for hours about That Thing On Your Mind. Grace has been there. He won't be sleeping yet.

"This is good caffeine, man. You won't be dying of withdrawal here," she promises. The lie detection on her phone also promises, with a 15.42% probability of deception.

The plunger settles itself into the bottom of the carafe at last, and she pours herself a cup -- does not get Sam one -- and starts loading it up with the things she likes (which is all of it). There's a candy stirrer and a floating marshmallow on top by the time she's done.

Tacos after Arson

Arionna de la Babin
[perc + alert]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )

Arionna de la Babin
perception + awareness

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Lavinia
There's a taquería next to an old movie theatre that got converted into a wig shop. The restaurant is old, probably was built when the wig shop was actually a theatre and had patrons instead of awkward balding people came by shopping for toupees (which, rest assured, is still very much a business that is booming.) There is a taquería next to an old movie theatre, and that taquería has a smell. A very distinct smell of fresh roasting beef and  baked goods when the door opened.

The menu was easy enough, but mostly in Spanish. Lavinia came there because, well, she was having one of those days where she missed family and therefore felt the need to stuff her face full of tacos and just binge. She could stand to put on some weight- she'd stopped eating for awhile, still exercised like she was taking in an adequate number of calories. She looks like she might blow over in a stiff wind, except her legs are solid, her arms are defined. Her stomach is flat.

She's much stronger than she looks, it's almost uncanny. It's almost disconcerting.

But there she was, outside with a cigarette because she was nostalgic, because there was that aching feeling of missing something. The kind of thing that you could drown out if you worked long enough, worked hard enough, focused on what was in front of you. When things hurt like this, you turn to devotion. You turn to faith, and hers would not waver now. Purpose solidified like something eternal. She's smoking Oliver's brand, doesn't like the taste but she does like the smell. She used to smoke, kicked the habit after Ollie left because her supplier ran off to... what? Be a surrogate father? Nurse his wounds? Cut ties because looking at Lavinia hurt too much like Cameron? What?

She inhaled again, polished the cigarette off and dropped it so she could snuff it out with her boot. She has on shorts that only accentuate how long her legs are. Wears combat boots because she might need to run today. Tank top that's lower in the back than the front and a sports bra because... well, people expected her to wear a bra. This is where we open the scene, with an angel reflecting on her newfound situation that isn't so new.

Grace
[Awareness!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 8, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Grace
Where does one go when facing the uncomfortable ache that is being an accessory to murder? If you're Grace, a taquería, apparently.

She'd been miles away from the event. She didn't have to smell the roasting bodies up close and personal. Maybe that's why the beefy scent of this place hasn't totally thrown her stomach for a few loops yet. Instead, it draws. So, a detour from Saigon Bowl it is.

Almost immediately upon reaching the threshhold of the establishment, Lavinia, oh! It feels like the fires of God laid waste somewhere. They did, yesterday, but aside from that... Grace sniffs the air as she walks in, looks around the place, finds the one she's looking for, and just tilts her head, like yeah. I see you over there. Not hard to miss you, Lavinia.

She puts in her order -- pork and green chili tacos all the way -- and ambles off toward Lavinia's table.

Lavinia
[Per+aware, people?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Lavinia
Lavinia is hard to miss. She's always been hard to miss, feels very much like the purpose she has. Like she's easily labeled and hard to miss. The woman stretches (who is not so young, as she knows. A little older than most of the people she meets even if she doesn't keep track of her age anymore. Knows only when her sister marks the date because someone has to keep up.) She put in an order a little while back, something with lengua and enough habenero peppers to kill a small horse with it.

Fingers wave, she half scoots the chair out with one foot, crosses her legs and knits her fingers together in front of her, as though she was perpetually interested in what was to be said and what was to be done.

"What did you get?" she asks, as though she was meeting Grace here and not just finding themselves in a situation where they both overlapped.

Grace
"Pork and green chili tacos. You?"

Grace slides into a chair opposite Lavinia, the black of her normal t-shirt replaced with a grey zip-up turtleneck. Somebody is just a little bothered by biting things lately. Though, what peeks out from under the jacket is very colorful -- some sort of rainbow triangle design.

"Haven't seen you around in a while."

Lavinia
"Lengua and habanero with mangoes. It's like a danger taco," she replies. She takes in the clothing choices, quirks a brow for a second because Grace is... incredibly covered. Incredibly enough that it makes Lavinia wonder-

But! The subject changes and she doesn't delve into sweater territory. Yet. Maybe Grace just gets really cold. Computer people did tend to live in frigid wastelands of server racks and despair, it gets cold there.

"Between teaching Arionna and trying to rebuild some burnt bridges, I've been pretty scarce," Lavinia admits, "still operating as a one woman army. Turns out said army isn't getting a lot done."

Aidan
[I promise I have finally decided. I will post asap]

Aidan
[nightmares]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Grace
"That sucks," Grace says, peers off into a corner. "I always get fidgety when I don't get anything done."

Not that that's been a problem lately.

"How goes the teaching Arionna bit?"

Aidan
The air is cooling. The heat is leaving the city and Aidan wonders, at times, why it doesn't take any travel packages with it. Could it not build a fire if it felt like it were growing colder? Though really, they were separate entities at times... which begged the question of why exactly...

Sometimes his thoughts make sense, and sometimes they do not. He was an oddity. Today he wonders if there is a spirit for each type of food. Not the small guys he sees and speaks to, but the sort of overarching overlord of burgers and tacos. The Boss, if you will. Is there a burger spirit, that, if given proper penance, will bless every burger you eat thereafter? Would it be upset at someone like Aidan who shuns animal products? These are his questions.

Strange then that he seems to appear at a taco -place.-  It might have been his thoughts which brought him here, or perhaps the wind knew what he as thinking and pushed him along. He may have even come here by accident...but Aidan doesn't believe in accidents.

He wore a green top that he crocheted himself. It was a beautiful pattern, at least to him, and he felt a great swell of pride when he wore it. It was bigger than it ought to be, nearly hanging off his shoulders, but it was comfortable in the heat. Otherwise he wore normal, tighter jeans, and a pair of sneakers. Aidan was....somewhat... a simple creature. He felt.. well he felt bouncy. Like a soft spright that danced in the wind and played some lovely little tune that one couldn't help but follow. A wisp that bobbed to and fro, entrancing those around it with its light. That was what he was.

He slipped into the Taco place, poking his head in first as if to be certain nothing was there, and then he simply walked in, humming to himself. Lots of talking, lots of sounds that others didn't know, and sometimes that's what made it feel like home.



Aidan
[  for reference.. heh heh    https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/dd/de/70/ddde70c6020cc559383087e5dfc431ab.jpg    ]

Lavinia
She peers off into the corner, and Lavinia's eyes narrow slightly. She turns her head a little to one side, enough that she can hear Grace a little better and her deaf side is to the crowds. She's looking at the other woman for information, for input. She's looking at her like the hypervigilant creature will notice something before Lavinia has to.

Her senses aren't as sharp as they need to be. She hates it, but knows it's a fact. Knows it to be a truth she can't quite avoid. She's physically fast but mentally just a step behind, average. Strange that something otherworldly would be average.

"It's going okay. There's some fundamental concepts that we're having difficulties with due to a difference in world view. I tried to frame certain concepts under the umbrella of self-defense and I either missed the mark or she's intentionally trying to make me say that I don't know what I'm talking about," a pause, "I get the impression at times that she isn't really listening to me. I get it, she's a teenager, they always know way more than anyone else, but some things? If I let her learn them on her own it will kill her."

A huff, almost dramatic, "I'm never procreating."

Grace
Grace lifts her head at Aidan's entrance. She's heard of Technocrats in the area, but somehow, after a glance at the door, she doubts that any of them would willingly show up at a taco joint wearing homespun crochet. Perhaps that's prejudice talking, but whatever. She doesn't let the glance linger.

"Me either," she says in response. "Fuck that..."

With Grace's luck, she'd create a mini Arionna. Oh, God, the thought has her staring into the wall.

"We've got company," she says, to the wall.

Aidan
[awareness  perc spec - intuition]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 6, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

Aidan
Aidan and Lavinia have met. It was over the lovely sound of music, and the way her name simply suited her, but they met. Lavinia was an oddity on her own, but Aidan didn't mind; to him she seemed the way everyone else seemed, just more obvious and closer to what she ought to be.

He already knows Lavinia is there. He already knows because he can feel, not just her resonance, but he almost smell it...taste it... even see it. Grace is someone he doesn't know, a new set of sensations and tastes and he finds them...fascinating. But what doesn't he?

He seems to ounce towards Lavinia, and without thought, wraps his arms around her in a rather exuberant and tight hug. "Hello!" He says, pleased to meet back up with her. "You brought a friend. I like friends. Elijah shows me friends too. Special friends I mean. I mean I'm everyone's friend but I really like special friends."

Aidan paused and pressed his nose in Lavinia's hair, inhaling deeply. "You taste even better today!" He sits next to her, beaming happily, and turns his attention to Grace, flashing her an even brighter smile as he leaned over the table. "You make me think of toast."

Lavinia
Aidan is on her deaf side when he comes in. She doesn't really notice him until he wraps his arms around her and she stays still, shoulders up, eyes wide and she holds her breath for a second like someone had dumped a bucket of cold water down her spine. She doesn't squeak, either, because she's a dignified creature and recognizes that this person is hugging her and not trying to choke her out and, therefore, does not need to be met with a very physical response in kind.

Nope, Aidan is just saying hello, which she eventually picks out over the multidirectional hum of people.

Aidan has his nose in her hair, which is down and a mess of bright golden waves that tapers almost to sunlight at the ends. She's hard to miss, an ever expanding cosmos. The wrath of a displeased God. A herald to what has yet to come.

"I showered," she told Aidan with a laugh, the tension not quite bled out just yet.

"And... what are special friends?" she said, brows knit together for a second like she isn't sure if she wants to know what this Elijah person thought special friends were.

Grace
Wow. Aidan. Grace blinks, and her lips seem to disappear when she looks at Lavinia as if to question whether this guy is real.

"Why toast?"

This guy seems to know Lavinia and Elijah. The latter is understandable. A guy like this, with Elijah? Yeah. It fits. Elijah's the puppy, and this guy is the fairy who follows the puppy around as they roll in a field of flowers together. At that thought, Grace blinks at the wall again.

"Special friends are ones who you'd know are special from across the room, right?"

Aidan
"No. No not showered. Same as before. But better. Not like flowers. Shampoo smells like flowers. Tastes metal. Or like glass windows." He puts his chin in his hands, elbows on the table and blinks at Grace, watching her like any fascinated person might. But ah, Lavinia asks him a question and he looks at her, laughing softly. "Friends that are special." As if that answered it.

"I don't know." He says to Grace. "You just taste make me think of toast. I like toast. With jam. Little fruit jam with pieces of fruit in it. Not the smooth kind, but I like the smooth kind too. But the smooth jam lacks personality. It's very dull." He leaned back, putting his hands in his lap and straightening his arms as he did. "Yes! Friends we know when we see them but everyone is my friend so... so yes. Friends that can hear each other from afar. Or taste. or smell. or feel. Some people don't taste like anything. "

Lavinia
Grace looks Lavinia's way, Lavinia nods as if to confirm that, yes, this person was really like this. This was really happening but her eyes are wide and the Chorister (who, we should note, has stared down Nephandi and eviscerated spirits of corruption and destruction without batting an eye) looks overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sensory input.

"Aidan," she says for Grace's sake, and Lavinia doesn't introduce the Mercurial Elite because it isn't her place to give someone else's name away, "I think, sometimes, you might not want everyone to be your friend."

Clears her throat, "are you going to order? You should eat something, you're too skinny."

Grace
"Toast tends to lack personality unless it has something on it," she says, absentmindedly. Then comes the unfortunate realization that maybe those were not the best of words to say...

"It's true you know," she says, with a little cough. "There's some... bad people out there. You might not want to hug them all."

Aidan
Aidan shakes his head slowly. "Toast has a temper." He says most assuredly. "The more you burn it, the meaner it gets. The lighter toast is friendlier and talkative. The burnt toast is grumpy. I like them both though. Burnt toast is funny but I feel sad for it. They didn't choose to be burnt, some people just really like mean toast. But I'd be grumpy too if someone burnt me."

"Mmm... why wouldn't I want to be friends with everyone?" There's an honest confusion there, one he doesn't try to hide in the least. After all, why -wouldn't- everyone want to be his friend? He still doesn't understand why some people don't like other people. Spirits, he understands. Some things are just opposite of the other because they must be.

"Oh? Me?" He looks up, leans a little as if to reorient himself to where he is. "I don't need anything." A bright smile and an acceptance of just having company.

Lavinia
[Manip+subterfuge: This is totally not the warrior's equivalent of being asked to explain sex to your kids]

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

Lavinia
"Some people want to do bad things to others, Aidan," her voice is calm, comforting, because sometimes one does not need to be harsh but she delivers a harsh reality. Did the angels not speak fear not before? Was there not some comfort to be found in the divine?

"And, in a perfect world, we would have the time and ability to convince and help all of those people who would do something horrible to others and make them not do that anymore. But, in some cases, that would take lifetimes nd we are not graced with the burden of eternity. Sometimes, it's best to find people who will be good to you than waste it with those whose hearts and minds and souls are invested only in harming others."

There's a sort of elegance in the words. An elegance, of course, that came with the expense of being direct. And she would not lose her meaning.

"So, in those cases that you meet people who want to hurt you, you do not want to become their friend because they will more-than-likely actively harm you and you'll get hurt."

Grace
Lavinia lays it out pretty... thoroughly. But if Aidan hadn't come to this realization before, who knows? Maybe he's just that dense.

"This is a shit world," Grace says, sighs heavily. Her mind is filled with images she'd rather not have to see.

It's then that the tacos arrive, and Grace gives a thumbs-up of thanks to the waitress who may just have overheard that 'shit world' comment. She has three tacos, so she offers one to Aidan, even though he said he didn't need it. Sometimes you still want things that you don't need exactly.

"Want one? I have plenty."

Aidan
He's been on the victim end of people who do bad things to others, and yet he still doesn't feel the sort of anger that others might. Instead, he wants to help them. "People do bad things and want to do bad things because they think they have to. We should try to help those people. Being their friend means they'll have someone to be better for.." He smiles warmly at her. "I don't mind getting hurt if it helps make someone better. Isn't that part of why we're here?" He says it cheerily, as if he doesn't see the problem with his particular viewpoint.

Grace's comment about the shit world makes Aidan blink and the smile fades only a little. "It's a beautiful world!" He even throws his hands up. "It has trees, flowers, squirrels, chipmunks, cats, dogs, leaves, the wind, fire, the rain, clouds, tornadoes, beads, books, people, microwaves, and toasters and... and lots of things! That makes it beautiful." He let his hands drop down and looked to each of them. "Everyone has good in them somewhere. Sometimes it's just hard to see it."

But Grace is kind enough to offer her tacos and Aidan leans forward a little as if to look at what she has, or perhaps to smell it. "Thank you but I'm alright. I don't eat animals. I prefer to talk to them. It's rude to eat your friends."

Lavinia
Which is about when Lavinia's food gets here- mangoes, tongue, and freaking death peppers. Lavinia can not be fucked to eat food that isn't fourteen different kinds of obscenely hot. She picks up her taco, takes a rather hearty bite, and chews. She's not put off by the heat mixed with the sweet. She chews, tries to put together what she thinks and how she's going to handle this one.

Chews. Swallows.

"Okay," exhales slowly, partially because of the heat and partially because of the thought. She looks at Grace, points to her tacos with her eyebrows raised. An offer if there ever was one.

"Aidan, if you are not careful with the people you choose to save versus the people you can't save, you will die. For some people that is not a problem, but you have to think of the people you are going to be left when you are gone and how sad and upset and distraught they're going to be. It isn't just getting hurt, it's dying. Not everyone is understanding and not everyone is kind at first and it's very hard to teach them to be kind and understanding when they put you in the hospital at best."

Exhales again, looks down at her food and puts it down. It's hard to coax her to eat, looks at the food like it might not exactly be her best friend. Like it has to earn its keep and her enjoyment of it.

"And yes," she continues, "the world is beautiful because of all of those things but-" she stops. Purses her lips together and drops her voice, "-there are things whose very spiritual nature are corrupt and  their entire purpose is to cause damage or choke things out of worm their way into your very being and change you. Those are not good beings. Not anymore."

Grace
Grace nods, accepting his refusal of meat, and bites into her taco. She has no such reservations herself. Then, she looks at Lavinia's offer, and switches out one of her tacos for one of Lavinia's. Tongue and Death. Awesome combo. Her own green chili, lard, and pork tacos are positively mild in comparison -- but not entirely. Her mouth feels like it's on fire, and Lavinia's resonance doesn't help with that.

Ahh, endorphins.

She leans in to Aidan. "The world is great, yes. Because people work to keep it so. And sometimes that work isn't making friends with others. Yesterday, I watched a man get skinned alive," she says, pausing, because that image -- it hurts. "The ones who did it loved their work. Should we make friends with them?"

Aidan
[subterfuge + manipulation - I'm not at all unsettled or changing the subject because I don't want to deal with it]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Aidan
"Oh no one will mind. I'm just me."

"I know. Sometimes it's very hard. Granna tried to save things. She tried to clean up the bad places and make the spirits healthy. Some people didn't really like that very much." Aidan leaned into Lavinia, looking at her taco as she ate it. "What does it taste like?"

"I don't think I've had tacos." He feels like he knows the taste of them. It seems familiar, though Granna and him never got tacos, and he didn't get them at the ward. He got all sorts of foods, or at least alternative foods, but he didn't recall tacos.

"I  will have to make some!" He decided.

He looked at Grace suddenly, leaning in, chin in his hands. "Who is your family? I know Elijah's family and.... and Lavinia is something special. " And then he perked up. "Oh! OOOH. I got it. Oh.. no wait." He settled again, shifting his attention to the side.

Lavinia
She is content to nod along and then Grace said something that made Lavinia stop mid chewing of the green chili and pork taco. Swallows, doesn't seem like that really curdled her appetite too much, but she leans in, eyes locked on the woman for a moment, "holy shit, really?"

A beat.

"You know you can call me if you need assistance with things, right?"

Grace
"My family is mostly in Arizona. They're all Asleep, far as I know," Grace says, and it's all she offers.

She takes another bite of her taco. Mom would call this trash-people food. Maybe it's the reason she likes it so much...

"We handled it," Grace says, mouth full of hot chiles. "Thanks, though. I'll keep you in mind."

Aidan
"Hm?" He slips his attention back to the two of them. "Oh that's not what I meant." But he smiled regardless and let it go. Instead he leaned against Lavinia again and set his head on her shoulder.

Lavinia
"You holding up okay?" she says, but it feels hollow to her, doesn't quite compute and doesn't quite come off the way she wants. Offers her a smile that almost understands, or at least understands enough to know that each atrocity is its own wound, each situation is unique and needs to be dealt with as such. "I still need to bring my books by wherever it is you're doing things. They're no longer holed up in my car- I'm actually setting up basecamp for once."

She doesn't shrug Aidan off or tell him to get off her shoulder. Though, it would seem, eating is a little difficult for her.

"Sorry you had to deal with that, though. And that you had to see what you did, that's fucked up," that, though, doesn't sound stupid or anything other than sincere.

Grace
"Yeah, it was. They were pretty fond of doing fucked-up things. That was icing on a fucked-up cake, that," Grace says, upends her taco into her mouth.

"If I wasn't holding up okay, I wouldn't be here eating tacos," she says, through her taco, and gives Lavinia a shrug.

Chew chew chew. Swallow. Lips on fire. "You know where it is? I can take you. Can take both of you, if you'd like," she says, looks to Aidan with a question.

"We have a place with a big library, lots of couches, coffee and tea. Also laser tag, and a couple of cats. If you get into any trouble, you can go there, and it'll be a bit safer."

Aidan
"Granna says I shouldn't have coffee. She says the world might stop if I drank coffee. I don't know what she means but I do like tea! And cats! And you have books? Books have the best stories. Not the ones inside. But the ones they see. They see a lot."

He hasn't moved from his spot on Lavinia, even if he's making it difficult. She hasn't complained after all. He did lightly roll his head to look at Lavinia. "You have tents too? For your camp?"



Kiara
[Fly by Verbena mode, activate. Locate Peeps.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 3, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )

Lavinia
[Manip+sub: don't sound too excited there, Lavinia]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Lavinia
"It's always good to meet another person who eats when things are good," she says, doesn't seem to realize how much food she has left. Looks down, realizes that there is a fair bit of food left, and she makes a concerted effort to actually eat what is in front of her.

"I don't have  clue where this place is but I'd love to see it. Might be nice to be in a place where people are actually gathering and have a common goal," oh yeah, like she totally wasn't looking forward to this. Despite the fact that she knew where the chantry was, the place always seemed... odd. She felt disconnected, but to be fair, Lavinia was by nature disconnected from things. By nature a little off from the current puzzle.

"And basecamp is a catchall for places that you operate out of.No camping required."

Grace
Yeah, Aidan's 'Granna' had a point. The world might stop if Aidan ever drank coffee, because he's already at a Caffeine 10. Cranking him up to 11 might not be the best idea.

"After tacos, then," Grace says, because tacos are good. She picks up the one of Lavinia's she traded off and eyes it like it might actually be out to incinerate her tongue. Ohh well.

Down the hatch.

And her eyes bug out. "Oh... ow!"

Fuck habaneros. There are tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, and her face is turning as red as this feels.

Grace
[brb, afk]

Aidan
"Oh." A sort of sadness that is brief but present. "You don't get to sleep with the trees?" What better way to sleep? They could lull you to sleep with their words. Not that he doesn't feel like he couldn't just sleep here, it's just difficult. The city was noisier; it always felt like there was more in the city than nature...or maybe they all liked to talk more.

Grace's expression perks up Aidan and he straightens, his brows furrowing in concern. "Are you ok?!" Sliding his hands along the table top as if to grab a hold of Grace in some attempt to comfort. "Did it bite you?"

Kiara
[Don't wait for me to post, ya'll. I'm not sure if I'll hop in or not! But post around me regardless! :) ]

Lavinia
"Just feel the burn, just breathe through it- once the hot goes away you breathe out and it's sweet," she just breathes in long and deep, "my mom had a thing for habanero peppers so this is just how I thought tacos were supposed to taste for years."

She doesn't rush off to Grace's aid, just takes another hearty bite of taco because the prompt to keep eating (or finish eating, or start actually eating) isn't quite forgotten.

"She'll be fine, this is just standard pepper stuff."

Grace
"It bit me with capsaicin. Best kind of bite. Mmm," Grace says, though her tongue is now a raging inferno.

She breathes through it. It doesn't improve. Mmkay. She leans back in her chair.

"The reason why people eat these things is because they bite, Aidan. It makes your endorphins just sing. It's not real damage."

Aidan
Aidan watches Grace with uncertainty. But even Lavinia agrees she's ok and he eases up, relaxes a little. "If it bites, why do you eat it?" Concern has now moved into confusion. It was like approaching an angry bear. If you knew it was angry, why did you make it angrier? "Maybe it doesn't like to be eaten. Seems like if it bites when you eat it, it's trying to defend itself."

Lavinia
"Because that's what peppers do, they have a kick. They're delicious, the burn is part of the appeal. It's not a literal bite- I watched a youtube video about this. They evolved that way because they're supposed to attract birds and detract mammals- hence the burn. Except, humans are occasionally attracted to peppers because of the flavor and they enjoy the spice. Like Grace said, it releases all those this feels amazing chemicals in your brain. It's a rush. Peppers are pretty much the only thing I will eat, even when I don't feel like eating."

And she finally finished a taco after saying that.

Aidan
[it's getting close to bedtime as a warning]

Grace
"Okay. Okay. I think I can do another bite now," Grace says, not about to be out-badassed by Lavinia. She squints, and takes another bite.

But, see, there's a thing about habaneros... The heat builds.

Tears again. Oh, hell. Feels like it in her mouth right now. Breathe, breathe!

"Or not!"

Lavinia
(Charisma+Expression- YOU GOT THIS)

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 4, 4) ( fail ) [Doubling Tens]

Aidan
"Seems they don't want us to eat them." Aidan has just decided he will not eat spicy things, just in case he's upsetting a pepper somewhere. The list of acceptable foods is becoming increasingly shorter.He moved a little in his seat then looked down at his chair contemplatively. He moved again, just a little. Aidan glanced back to Grace, brows furrowing just a little as he regarded her.

Lavinia
"Oh come on, you totally got this," except, of course, while she was saying this the look on her face clearly said oh sweet Jesus, the taco is trying to kill Grace and might succeed. It was clear across those luminous eyes, that angelic face.

Nope, Grace, you don't got this.

The taco is winning.

Grace
"If it didn't want to be eaten, it wouldn't be packaged in a bright red nutrient rich fruit. It spreads its seeds this way," Grace says, through tears. "It's just got a thing against mammals, like Lavinia said."

Oh, does it ever. Breathe, Grace!

"I think though, I'm going to take a break on the hot things. I've had enough hot lately." This must be karmic debt after helping burn a house down. Must be.

Aidan
[I'm going to need to bail because it's late]

Lavinia
(No worries! Thanks for the scene!)

Aidan
"Which means...it doesn't want you to eat it. I think that's good enough." Aidan stayed with them, though he grew quiet and listened to them. He stayed, wandering out with them to the office should they do so, or well... heading off his merry way, which would likely involve getting lost (again). But he didn't mind that very much.

Lavinia
She opens her mouth, looks sideward at GRace like there was confusion written on her face. Like there was some very obvious part of the puzzle that regarded understanding Aidan's adament behavior towards not eating peppers despite the fact that they'd both made arguments for it based only on the idea that he thought they didn't want it (and had no evidence to back that up) ... just...

"Huh."

A beat.

"I guess... I'm... talking to peppers? Later?.. this is not what I was meant to be doing with my existence."

Grace
"Well, next time I find some really bad dudes, I'll let you in on it. You need to check your messages more often," Grace says, leans back in her chair, wipes away heat-inspired tears.

"Want to pack up the tacos and head to the place?"

The place. Where there will be cats, and a library, and food that does not bite.

"Maybe I can down some ice cream and make my tongue not be on fire..."

Lavinia
"What? Use technology and messaging systems for their intended purpose? Blasphemy," she said with a grin. The woman was already getting on her feet and headed to the front to grab some to go boxes, "and I'd love to go. I feel like I owe you an apology for the death taco at the very least."

Grace
[And thus, the trepid adventurous trio goes to the Office for tea and cats and books -- the stuff Mages are into! Woo! And we wrap :)]

A House on Fire

vicissitude
Last night Grace and Sam drove out to a Wal-Mart parking lot on the outskirts of town and sat there in the dark while the younger of the two completed his hack of the Department of Motor Vehicles. They continued to sit there while he smoked a cigarette outside the car and used the information he had grabbed off the Internet to find the guy's physical location.

What they found on the computer did not comfort either of them. The vehicle's registration expired in 1972. The man to whom the vehicle was registered was born in 1938. If he were still alive he would be nearing his seventieth decade. He would not look anything like the scruffy almost-attractive man in the painting Jenn had created.

Once he had a lock on the guy's location they went back to Sam's place. He stayed up all fucking night watching his computer monitor while Grace slept on the air mattress. When she awoke in the morning his eyes were red and kind of wide.

That was when Grace contacted Kalen. Whatever he had seen on the monitor had put him off meat again. He had taken a video recording and when Grace wanted to see it again he excused himself. What she saw on the video pretty much confirmed that they were dealing with violent psychopaths who had a thing for blood and guts and divorcing people from their skin. It's a good thing the warehouse is full of vegan goods after Lakhani's Quiet anyway.

So: one Mercurial Elite is at her apartment near the university. The other is in his apartment above the Chinese dry cleaner. And Kalen is...

Kalen Holliday
Kalen has a ridiculous commitment to keeping peace with some vampires.  That attitude does not extend to vampires that turn people into flesh-crafted horrors.  Once Grace has explained the situation and they have a plan, Kalen heads toward the safehouse.  Lighting the building on fire should be the easy part.
Should.

But when do plans do as expected?

Kalen parks his car several blocks from where the safehouse is, turns the engine off, and starts to murmur softly.

[Mind 1 | Mindshield | D=4 (3 (coincidental) + 1 (sphere))]


Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 5, 7) ( success x 3 )

Grace
Grace is convinced. Even if Sam and Elijah aren't so ready to set people on fire, she is. She has video evidence. This is pretty open and shut. They aren't going to stop doing horrible shit to people, and therefore, when Kalen suggested the nuclear option... It didn't take much doing to convince Grace.

She's also quite ready to make sure this goes on without incinerating a city block.

First off, she's on the phone with Kalen -- Bluetooth device stuck in her ear and all. She's got a Soundcloud track of a guy screaming "INSTALL GENTOO" to a techno beat. It's rather low-key in the background, but still.

Kalen's idea is a good one. No matter what, taking care of your grey matter is a good idea. Therefore, she opens her "special program" and uses it on her own brain, bending the outputs back onto themselves, closing off the connections. Let's make a brain firewall...

[Mind 1, Mindshield, Diff 4 - 1 = taking time]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 4, 7) ( success x 2 )

vicissitude
In the other window Sam is listening to Swedish death metal. Because of course he is. It helped him whoop Grace's ass at laser tag once why wouldn't it help him whoop a Nephandus's ass at not getting set on fire.

He took Elijah back to his place to keep the Hermetic from having a total homicidal existential crisis by himself. It's not your fault Elijah. It's not your fault.

They can't hear what's going on at Chez Lakhani unless he keys in but they can feel him. Oh yes they can.

--

The house in question is on a block in center city Arvada, Colorado. As bustling as a city boasting a little over a hundred thousand people can bustle. On any side of the building in question is a real estate office and a marketing agency and an upscale loft-style apartment and a gastropub with funky nouveau retro sidewalk presentation.

If a fire took down here it would shut down an entire intersection and draw entirely too much attention to what they were doing.

Grace is working on a brain firewall. Sam is spying on the local EMS channel. That doesn't require magic or hacking. That just requires a cheap-ass scanner he picked up at Radio Shack.

The building in question is two stories tall. As Kalen approaches he cannot see in the windows. Some of them are boarded shut but even the ones that do not have boards over them are black as a starless sky.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen stares for a few seconds into one of those windows like a dark sky.  He remembers when some Umbral horror used darkness like that to try to devour his soul.  This hardly makes him feel like the monsters here could have been saved.

There is an intersection.  People.  These people are living closer to danger than they might guess.  He stops and takes in the scene, lighting up a cigarette.

And if they fail to contain the blaze?  What then?

Kalen bites his tongue hard enough that it starts to bleed, breathes in smoke, and exhales on a murmured prayer.

[Entropy/Life scan.  Are there vampire entropy sinks in that building?  Are there live people in that building? - D=3 (4-1(taking time))]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Grace
[Extending!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN3 (6, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

Grace
[Wrong number of dice...]

Grace
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 3, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

vicissitude
Beyond the cockroaches and the spiders and the rats nothing in that building is alive that cannot fend for itself.

Inside the building lie four dead bodies. Beyond the intelligence the younger of the two Mercurial Elites provided yesterday he cannot confirm or deny whether the one they seek is in there. But Sam has sent himself bloodshot staring at the monitor and the bodies haven't moved since the sun went down. Four bodies lines up with the number of upright individuals he saw there on the monitor last night.

Entirely possible that the four people inside that building have themselves warded against detection. That the swirling wrongness he feels through the smoke and the blood belongs to four Fallen. Either way:

They lurk. They sleep. They will rise again tonight.

Grace
Grace, rocking out to her awful free software mantra music, uses that to hide what she's participating in from her forebrain. This isn't the first time Grace has participated in a murder. It's not even the first time she's participated in murder by fire. Fire makes things clean again when nothing else will.

It's also still murder.

She finishes the program to rewire her mind into something tighter, more secure. Her screen dissolves into the static of unfocused Code again.

"I'm ready when you guys are," she says. Committed to the path, yes. Understanding of the path's importance? Also yes.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen looks around the building and starts to walk alongside it, still smoking.  Four dead.

"There are four," Kalen murmurs into the Bluetooth.  And there is a hint of something like regret in his voice.

Two of them are almost undoubtedly beyond saving.  The other two?  Do they deserve to die like this?  Do they deserve to linger in some twisted mockery of life?

Kalen swallows.  Wesley is hardly a mockery of life.  Just how much of an aberration is he?

Regardless, it is hardly as though Kalen is in a position to try to rehabilitate vampires.  Especially right now.

Instead, he looks for the most opportune place to work.  Electrical boxes, powerlines, anything he can use to his advantage.

vicissitude
There are four.

"Yes there are," comes Samir's deadpan voice over the Bluetooth.

He saw. So did Grace. He doesn't know about saving or not saving but he's sitting in a studio apartment with a distraught apprentice right now. They already tried the nonviolent angle. It isn't feasible.

That's all he has to say. He's conceding to Grace on this.

Grace
"Four? Not two..." Grace sighs into the receiver, a huff of static air.

Then, Sam reaffirms what he saw. All four of them were somehow involved in the... activities of last night. To be fair, Grace hadn't been paying too much attention. Who would?

"Shit. Well."

Well, that settles it, doesn't it?

"Okay, I'm going to zero in on Kalen's location, use that as the ground zero for this. I'd like to get the protections set up first. Then we move on to phase two."

Phase two being, of course, setting things on fire...

There's another huff of breath into the mic, and she sets to work. First off, to find Kalen and cordon off his general area...

"I'm going to start the action, Samir."

[Corr 2, Forces 2 -- Fire Containment Measures -- Diff 5 -1 for taking her time.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

vicissitude
"Yeah. 'Shit.'"

Nearly half an hour away the young man pinches the bridge of his nose. Forgets to kill his mic as he answers a question neither of them can hear. This could be concerning for at least one of them. He did just spend most of last month in Quiet.

"... yeah, I've got it on fucking Deity Mode. Go ahead."

Dot dot dot.

Grace is zeroing in on Kalen's location. Protections first. She's going to start the action.

"Right behind you, yo."

[corr/forces 2: group casting wut.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Kalen Holliday
Kalen lets Grace and Samir work.  Quietly and without further comment.  He settles against the boarded up building near where a power line runs into it, and waits for Grace's word.

Watches the way that the smoke blows when he exhales.

And he prays.  For the two vampires he has accepted are beyond saving.  For the two he has accepted he can't try to save tonight.  Because whatever has become of them, whatever has been done to their souls, Kalen is no longer able to simply believe that they are without them.

Grace
It's taxing, bringing the Code to understand what needs to happen here. She follows Kalen's signal to him, sees the house with the boarded and painted windows. That one.

Samir's help comes in right behind her, a piercing assistance she can feel as much as she can see. He helps strengthen their efforts, making sure there are no glaring errors in what she's doing.

Now, the part where she starts focusing on the motions of particles. She doesn't slow them, she just monitors them -- catalogs them. When Kalen starts his fire, the heat from it will not spread. The molecules around the boarded-up house will stay just as full of motion as they currently are. They won't allow anything more.

At least, that is the hope.

We'll contain it.

We'll make sure nobody else has to suffer. Not tonight, not to these sleeping dead. Not to the vagaries of their Magic either.

[Extending!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (5, 6, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

vicissitude
If this is the time for a philosophical debate on whether or not what they're doing is right none of them take it. This is not an issue of revenge for Samir although plenty would argue he has every right for it to be. A contemporary of the creature attached to the 1969 Ford Mustang fused the forms of two young women together and the rage-fueled brain inside that creature's head drove it to attack him and Elijah.

But Samir is not a vengeful man. This is not a matter of righteousness or retribution. If it happened to him and Elijah and it happened to those two young women it could happen again. A moral imperative inserted itself into their Code that night.

So here they are. Kalen has never seen Sam Work. He can feel it this afternoon as the young man types away at his console. The Code shows itself on a monitor wedged between the Dark Net and Civilization V. He could be distracted if he were the sort of hacker to allow himself distraction. He is not. Elijah is distraught but Sam is focused.

Grace's Work reveals itself to him. His may well reveal itself to her. They follow the same paradigm. They can contain the fire if they try.

[extending!]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Grace
Samir finishes it off, they do a little testing, it looks solid. The heat won't spread.

"Okay. We've got phase one done. Kalen? Your turn."

Sorry about that, too, her voice seems to say.

Kalen Holliday
Grace says to go and Kalen shifts his prayers for the vampires he is about to kill into a different kind of prayer.  He starts to mouth words in the language Angels.  Reaches out to the essence of the power coursing through the electrical wires and its potential.

He takes a deep breath, breathes out the last of the cigarette smoke and watches it drift, and then closes his eyes.

It is only a single murmured Word that commands the effect to begin.  That sets the entwining of power and fate into the manifestation of his will.

[Entropy 2/Forces 2 | D=4 (3(coincidental)+2(sphere)-1(time)) | WP]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (5, 5, 7) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

vicissitude
A single murmured Word is all it takes.

Center city. Downtown. The nucleus. Everything revolves around the financial district and the transportation hub even in a city small enough to disappear from the face of a map and they are in such a city. Twenty-first century and with the passage of time comes the necessity of electricity. If he had to Kalen could conjure power out of the rivers and the mountains. They all resonate with natural force.

He calls upon chance and circuitry. Faulty wiring in a building that may or may not be up to code. A building that houses asbestos and termite-pocked wood. Plenty of reasons why the building may have caught fire while those its neighbors remain untouched.

As he wills it so it goes. A generator on the roof or a conductor in the basement. Some arced potential skips a beat and catches a spark and that's all it takes. A spark catches flame and he has to stand on the sidewalk for nearly two minutes before he realizes what has happened. Arson is among the slowest of crimes.

On the curve of the minute-hand's second lap he sees the sharp-bright lapping of fire shone through windows that oughtn't let light through either way.

Another minute after that Sam says, "No one's called about a fire yet."

He means 911. Kalen still has time to escape.

Grace
Grace now has time to tap her fingers on the little kitchen table that serves a solitary inhabitant well (but wouldn't for more than one). Okay, now someone is curious...

"I'm going to have a peek," she says, "Make sure there's nobody running."

Because, if there are, by some miracle, any escapees, then that would be less than ideal...

[Corr 2, Entropy 1 = Dead things? Are they staying put? Diff 5 - 1 for taking time.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 6, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Kalen Holliday
Kalen breathes out.  Not a prayer now, just an exhalation.

And then, without looking back, he walks away from the building to the corner of the intersection.  He pauses and scans over the headlines of the newspapers in the box.  Lets the light change.  Waits to hear from Grace.

Grace
[Extending! Yes we are.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (6, 6, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Grace
The vampires, if that is what they are, are trying to run. They don't make it very far. The building, well on its way to collapsing, doesn't give them much protection from the sun once it's aflame. By the time they've woken and realized that things are happening -- it is too late.

The sun is a harsh mistress. The hardiest of them makes it about ten steps.

Their signatures of tightly-coiled Entropy, like frozen Time? They release. One by one, their frozen bodies change. Irreparably. Into ash.

"It's done," Grace says, another sigh into the receiver. "Need to get out of there. We'll keep up the protection until that fire is out."

vicissitude
... until that fire is out.

Sam does not interrupt her but he does cut in as soon as she has that sentence out to say:

"Dispatch just called for an engine. They have a two-minute response time. You good, man?"

Kalen Holliday
Kalen stops scanning the headlines and heads away from the intersection now, toward his car.

"I'll be in the car by then," he says quietly.  "I'm fine."  There is a touch more weight in his voice than there was when the night started, but that would be easy enough to miss.  Easy enough to chalk up to the quickly approaching emergency response teams and getting the hell out of there.

"Should I pick up udon on the way home?"

Grace
"If you don't, I will," Grace says. They're going to need it, she thinks. That and some good tea and some contemplation. It'll be all right.

She thinks of the week that Samir spent in his own world due to them. She thinks of the two women knitted into one being. She thinks of the images she could barely pay attention to on Samir's video. Deserving it barely begins to describe. It's not exactly a deserved death they've brought -- it's something else.

She knows they're not the only thing out there that's going bump in the night. But they were one of them. They weren't going to stop. They liked it too much. And now they can't do that shit anymore. That simple.

QUE-214

Samir
And so they three go off into the early evening to investigate a football field.

Sam is not so much with riding in other people's cars. If the others are getting the impression he thinks of the outside world as a breeding ground for germs and disease and potential Quiet episodes then that just means they've had enough exposure to him to know how fucked up he gets when he fucks things up. But they have to go together and it's too far to walk so when he returns from the bathroom with the blood washed off his face and his big boy pants on they head off in Grace's car.

This time of year the football field is in use. Luck is on their side. There is no game tonight and if there is it's at another school. Only one light shines on the field. Its bulb is flickering.

The parking lot butts up against a chainlink fence that butts up against bleachers that stands over packed dirt and dirty cigarette filters and discarded cans of Natty Light. Crickets drone in the darkness. They three are alone.

"Fuck," Sam says as he reaches down and hauls his book bag onto his lap.

Grace
First things first, Grace has on her anti-bite jacket, zipped up to the neck. It might not stop anything from biting her face, but it's better than nothing. And jeans (honestly, does she wear anything else?)

She also has her phone out, to bend space and create a firewall from it, so that nobody can spy on them from afar.

Well, at least, that's the plan.

[Corr 2: Ward. -1 diff from taking time]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Elijah
And so, Samir knows the terrible not-so-not-obvious truth. Elijah was delighted at the prospect of actually getting to work. Grant you, last time that he saw something absolutely horrible he almost threw up, and pretty much presumed that he was going to throw up behind the bleachers of the stadium again, not unlike he was still in high school drinking Natty Lite and smoking pot. You start with the little stuff, moved on to the harder things pretty quick but the light stuff was fun. The light stuff had some pretty fond memories, namely because he could remember them. There were gaps, he minded them less now.

The light over the field is flickering and Elijah gets on out of the car, checks his pocketwatch like he didn't need it for something other than magical purposes. He could pretty well guess what time it was, didn't need to reach forward into things without a mention of how a watch that couldn't keep time was suddenly so perfect at noting things down to the second.

Circles upon circles. Spirals within a point that he didn't much care for, implied an end so he's tracing a circle along the face, over the crack in the glass where it broke on impact in a car accident. Just a crack, there's blood in the front of it, and he hasn't bothered to clean it off. Kinda likes it that way, but won't admit to it. Just says it's hard to get out.

"See, when you're, like, sixteen this isn't creepy," he said as he made his way to the fence. Kinda wants to jump the fence, but he knows it isn't strictly necessary. Suspects it might be but he's meandering that way anyway.

Samir
Sam frowns at the logic Elijah attempts to leave them with and scrambles out of the car to keep up with him. At once he fumbles the left strap of his book bag over his shoulder and hip-checks the door shut. If Grace hasn't got a wide area of effect going on her ward she may want to rethink her conservative strategy.

"No shit?" he asks sarcasm dripping thick as blood from his tone as he hurries after Elijah. Like he may have to haul him back from walking up to some unseen four-armed monstrosity and giving it a hug or whatever the fuck he was going to do the night Reality and Samir had their last tiff.

While Elijah is standing still for the five seconds he's liable to keep doing that Sam pulls out his handheld computer and taps a couple of buttons.

[corr/matter/mind scan: NO ONE IS SPYING ON US RIGHT? -1 diff for practiced rote.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 6) ( success x 2 )

Grace
[Extending!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Grace
"Okay. I think we're good," Grace says, finally opens her door and steps out.

"Yeah, I think this is pretty nightmarish even without the nightmare things wandering around."

She heaves a sigh and walks up to the fence with Elijah. "Got wards up."

Elijah
[Doin' magic. Doobeedoo- looking at the past. Time 2. Diff 5- 1 (practiced) -1 (special focus [mothafuckin' pocketwatch])

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 6) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Elijah
[and more?]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 9) ( success x 1 )

Samir
No one else can see what Elijah sees. It does not play itself out in the face of its bloodied bruised watch. Nothing outwardly weird happens. As Grace climbs out of the car and Sam comes to stand beside him the sound of slamming doors and heaved sighs and unzipping book bag zippers all fall away.

The night the two teenaged girls became one they came not because of the beyond-beautiful man but because of the tall bruiser who came with him. It was the bruiser who tied the two threads together. Who acted as a gateway. Before they met the otherworldly creature they met the bruiser.

As time rewinds Elijah can see the girls walking through the parking lot one of them firing off a text on her phone while the other cups her hands and calls out a greeting that causes a girl who shares her honey-blond hair and heart-shaped face to stop her practicing and rush to the bleachers to greet them. Can spot him at the edges of the field watching not the cheerleaders practicing but the parking lot. Waiting for the two to arrive. His arriving some time before that. Expectant. They meant to meet here.

Before he came here he stepped out of a vehicle parked some distance away at the edges of the parking lot. Elijah can identify the make and model of the car and read the license plate number. The bruiser drove the car unaccompanied. Hard to tell from whence he came but if he's known to the bruiser it won't take much to find him. Not with two Mercurial Elites at his side.

Elijah
[Int3+technology2]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
"Jesus, guys, what was high school like for you?" he asks, the relatively liked blond stoner who (for his part) managed to not get caught doing drugs on campus or having sex on campus or any number of things on campus that he actually did because schools didn't really care so long as he wasn't dealing and besides, nobody cared that Megan was dealing.

We digress.

He's holding his watch, making a slow and purposeful walk towards the fence. He looks over his watch, has his thumb pinned to a point, stuck over the fifty three minute mark. He moved back just a tad. He stops walking, focuses his gaze on the face, cocks his head to the side before looking in the distance at the fence. Pins a place while his eyes flick to the face of the watch again.

Fifty one.

Looks back to the parking lot, then down at the watch.

"Q-U-E ... two fourteen. Green old sixty-something mustang. Door's got a rust stain on it, can't see the interior... Someone backed into it once and the paint's fucked on the passenger side, but they have motherfucking steel frames so who gives a shit who runs into it," he says. His voice isn't idle. Comes back to reality with his finger on the mark forty-seven.

"It looks, to me, like your regular joe guy knew our victims. The whole older guy in a car that could be cool when you're young and dumb kinda thing. "

Samir
While Elijah is looking through time to see what brought the two girls here Sam is unzipping his backpack to remove his laptop and balance it on the chainlink fence's top pole. He is not the most dextrous creature in the world so it is a precarious sort of balancing.

He comes back to the present and brings with him identifying information about a motor vehicle. The older kid's eyebrows fly up. This was more useful than anything he was expecting to come out of the Hermetic apprentice's glance back. Not that he doubts the apprentice! Elijah kept him from getting eaten by the girls after someone turned them into a sarlacc-mouthed monstrosity! But it is physical information that they can track.

Green old sixty-something Mustang. QUE214.

"Right on," Sam says before he starts typing.

[int + computers: LOL SAM DOESN'T KNOW ALEX IS A COP.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens] [WP]

Grace
"Ahh, cool. I'll see if Alex can look up that plate. He's got like, cop privileges. Should be pretty simple," Grace says. Perhaps it cuts Sam's hacking attempts short, perhaps not.

In any case, she's got her phone out and letting Ginger know.

Elijah
"I'm totally useful," he said, meandered back to the car and slipped his pocketwatch into his pocket. "How am I doing with the whole Hermetic Hubris thing, Grace? I'm totally terrible at being full of myself."

Samir
His eyebrows go up again when he hears Alex is a cop. He might have picked up on that from trawling through old Ginger posts but it isn't until Grace says his name aloud that he actually remembers meeting the guy.

Oh shit, his eyes say.

Kind of want to see if I can actually hack the DMV, his fingers say.

So Elijah meanders back to the car. Sam stays at the fence a moment.

[YOLO. 3 dice in this pool bc of the initial hack thing.]

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

Grace
Grace is typing away at her phone while Elijah is talking to her. She barely hears him, but looks up with a bit of conusion as she puts what he said together.

"Hubris? Oh yeah," she says, gives Elijah a thumbs up. "Totally nailing the awesome cosmic power pride."

Elijah
They just keep going.

He looks at them. Sitting there, looking at the two Mercurial Elite typing away and doing whatever it was that they were doing and... huh. They were still typing. Elijah cocked his head to the side, watching people type was.. uh...

"Oh my god..." he says, after about seventeen minutes.

During that time, Elijah paced a good circuit around the car, back to the fence, and then to the place where he could almost see grass. Elijah then laid down and stared up at the sky. Pats himself down to look for a pack of cigarettes.

"I'm gonna go stare at the otherworldly beyond," he finally finds a cigarette... but no lighter.

"... does the lighter in the car work?"

Samir
"... you can use my lighter."

He says this without looking up from whatever the fuck it is that he's doing with his laptop balancing on the fence. If Elijah comes closer to accept the gift of the shitty Bic lighter then Sam keeps typing with his left hand and uses his right to reach into his pocket and extract the thing.

If Elijah glances at the screen he won't be able to decipher the mess of windows the reality hacker has going on his screen. That's probably for the best.

Grace
Grace's spiel on Ginger doesn't take long to write. It'll take longer to work though, and she slips her phone in her pocket and looks over at Samir.

Blinks a few times.

"Dude. There is a car you know. I can keep people from spying on us, but not if they walk by."

She then looks a bit harder. The DMV eh? Samir looks pretty into it, so she doesn't chide him about the fact that she's already on that. Sometimes, you just want to see if you can do a thing...

She can definitely decypher the mess of windows hes got on his screen. She prefers different tools, yeah. But now's not the time for a holy war. Instead, she just watches him work, occasionally coming out with a "Holy shit, look at that" or "Craaap, they have the 4.9 version, patched that gaping vulnerability..."

Does Samir like the fact that he has a back-seat-hacker? Heh.

Elijah
[Staring at the universe, doobeedoo- Spirit 1]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 5) ( success x 1 )

Elijah
[No, seriously, unbridled cosmos.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 3) ( fail )

Elijah
[Motherfucker]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
So, he accepts the lighter. Lights up, takes a drag and gives the lighter back before going back to where the grass meets the pavement and he takes a long, purposeful drag. He takes a drag and he waits for the world to come around and become something fascinating but, it is really just a ball of frustration.

It takes half the damn cigarette until he finally feels the world coming apart. Coming between. He thinks about orders and hierarchies. He thinks about the mirror of how things work. Mostly, he lays back with his legs outstretched and stares at the stars.

"I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts..."

Shooting star, across his periphery between the worlds. He grins.

Samir
And that's how Elijah almost lost two of his friends on the Internet.

Were not for the fact that Grace has so thoroughly distracted Sam from the outside world that when he tries to pass back the lighter the reality hacker already has that wrist back to its place stabilizing the bottom-heavy laptop on the fence and is more aware of her presence at his left side because she is commenting on the same thing that has his attention already.

Behind them the world feels slightly like adventurous tumult but they aren't aware of it until one of their phones chimes with a notification and drags them back to the physical world. Right. Two grown people hanging around a football field fence while another lies in the grass and contemplates his place in the universe. Sam would have Internet access in Siberia. No reason to remain rooted in place for two fucking hours.

He taps a few more keys just to make sure the file he's looking for is actually uprooting itself and he mumbles something like acquiescence and then he's carrying the laptop towards the car cradled in the crook of his elbow. Grace is responsible for Elijah. She's meaner than Sam is.

Elijah
[Int+streetwise, diff 10. Do I know this chick?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN10 (1, 2, 6, 9, 9) ( botch x 1 )

Grace
Grace is responsible for Elijah. She walks up to his form lying on the grass, an imposing figure in the stuttering light.

"Hey. We're getting out of here."

Then, she turns and heads off to the car. It's almost as if -- he can come, or not. His choice. But they are leaving.

Elijah
He was laying on the grass. He had passed out after a good total of... uh... twelve minutes. He opens his eyes and the world floods back and there is GRace- a feeling of winged, keen-edged sharpness thanks to Samir being Samir, and he inhales sharply. Leans over to see if something is poking him in the ribs.

It's not his ribs, that's magic.

He grudgingly stands up.

"Hey, yay, we didn't need to get a posse today, win!"

Elijah, holding himself hostage

Elijah
And so, he had asked how to make something bloodproof.

It was a pretty common request, or so he thought, because he was starting to figure out how literally messy his life was going to be. Kalen had not warned him of this. Kalen had given him wonderful analogies and taught in a very hands-on fashion but when it came to trouble, Elijah needed to be hands off. Very hands off. Let the big kids deal with it and just not add to the trouble that was already brewing.

There was a problem with this; he was one of the big kids now. He is one of the people that has to set forth and make certain that the city is safe and things are right and mysteries are solved because there was knowledge to be had and the world couldn't become a better, more enlightened place if everyone was too busy being turned into giant flesh-eating hybrid beings. Nope, that was not going to happen. Grace had done well, never came off as patronizing. Didn't write him off as not knowing what he was talking about, and he actually found that he had skills other people didn'thave (for the first time in a manner that did not regard the spirits- which was hit and miss and disregarded by his previous mentor but embraced by his current one)

So, he asked how to make something bloodproof.

Asked Samir in a rambly text message and set up a location they could hang out- warehouse. The warehouse was clean, a place that both of them knew and, more importantly, a place that Jenn wasn't likely to try to come along because he really, really, really didn't know how to bring Jenn back to life without literally selling his soul and he would do it, too, without a question asked even though he knows not to. Everyone has a price; Elijah's come to terms with his. Doesn't put himself in situations where he can be bought.

So they meet at the warehouse. Elijah's a shot of tequila into the evening, more for ritual. You're going out, you take a shot. You steady yourself for whatever comes next. Dress the part and try not to look like a goddamned prat even though he's shaved what little stubble he has recently and looks like an easy goddamn mark. Ditched the vest because, even if he needed a place to put his pocketwatch, you dress for the occasion.

That big angry guy Jenn painted up probably didn't go places where people wear vests and carry pocketwatches.

Samir
Not that Time mages are the greatest sticklers for schedules and punctuality but it's worth mentioning that Samir shows up nearly thirty minutes late.

Why he shows up nearly thirty minutes late isn't anything Elijah needs to know about. He has witnessed a couple of facets of the older kid's illness but it occurred under the fog of Quiet. That he's a hacker and a drug dealer are perfectly reasonable explanations for any other quirks or tics the budding Hermetic might witness.

He isn't exactly packing the weight he'd lost over the course of his Quiet back on but he's pumped the brakes. Looks a bit hollowed out but not like he's starving. Grace kept him from it.

Unlike the nights when he has shown up to hand off an order to Elijah the Mercurial Elite is carrying a backpack slung over one shoulder. He's dressed as he usually is in shit-kicker Doc Marten's and a beat-to-hell biker jacket overtop his grunge-bohemian sense of fashion. His long hair is tied back in its usual knot. The last time Elijah saw him his hair was loose and wild.

He's chewing a thumbnail as he lets himself into the warehouse and finds Elijah. He's an Initiate of Correspondence. It doesn't take him that long. They sure as shit are not going to a place where people wear vests and carry pocket watches.

"Hey," he says. Stops chewing his thumbnail. Where the hell is his hand sanitizer. In the pocket with his cigarettes. Brilliant. "You ready?"

Elijah
That's something that they both have in common- they're both skinny and probably a little nonthreatening. Elijah could not intimidate an overpacked grocery bag, even though he's broken many a bag under the weight of his desire and determination to shove everything into one fucking paper sack because I am not taking two goddamn trips I live upstairs this is bullshit. (Seething, my dears, is the word we look for here.)

But he's there, not thinking of grocery bags, but he is thinking about the last thing he ate. Poptarts. If he dies within the next eight hours for some reason, his last meal will have been tequila and poptarts. Somehow, he suspects that the founders of the Hermetic Order would not be terribly pleased.

Samir comes in, and his first response is to compliment his hair. Or tell him that he looks fantastic, but what he does do is give him a once over and concludes that, yes, Sam is good at this. Is he ready?

"Yeah," he says, jacket's a little worn from riding a motorcycle and wiping out once upon a time (not too fast, didn't break a bone but he did scrape the ever loving shit out of his helmet.) "Wanna go on an adventure?"

which sounds like we're going on an adventure.

Which sounds like we're going to go do something stupid.

Samir
Sam had been wearing an expression somewhere between trepidation and anxiety when he first came into view. Of course he had been. This is the place where Grace kept him alive with carob cookies and unconditional acceptance based on camaraderie and friendship. He half expects her to come rappelling out of a ventilation shaft at the mere utterance of the word 'adventure.'

At the mere utterance of the word 'adventure' his face falls.

Oh fuck, his eyes say.

"... should we Scotch Guard your shirt first, or...?"

Elijah
"You know, there's a shitty joke about a pirate captain and a red shirt and brown pants. I'd tell it to you but it really, really sucks. So just kinda groan and pretend like I went there," he said, beaming some bright oblivious smile that seemed all too perfectly aware of what he was going to do. Crimes are committed with actus rea and mens rea- a guilty mind and a guilty act. Elijah could never commit a crime because how often did he ever seem guilty about anything?

"But yes please? If we achieve nothing tonight we can at least say we scotchguarded my shirt-" which was a v-neck teeshirt paired with a beatup pair of jeans and some shoes that bore no mention. "- for which I totally owe you."

Samir
Longest of long-suffering sighs.

"You don't owe me," he says at a volume barely above a mumble as he removes his new not-charred-to-shit handheld computer from an inner jacket pocket and starts to type in a command. "Jesus Christ why didn't I just email you the instructions..."

[forces/matter 2: THE CLEANEST SHIRT IN THE WORLD. coincidental? -1 practiced rote, -1 unique focus. i am a fucking twink. gonna extend next round.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 10) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
"Because, secretly, you know your email would get sandwiched between an email from Fetlife and Career Builder and I'd miss it."

Samir
Still barely above a mumble:

"... I don't even want to know why you're getting emails from Fetlife..."

[extending! +1 diff.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 3) ( botch x 1 )

Samir
[backlash damage]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )

Samir
[soak it you little shit]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
"Dude. You and reality need a safeword, boundaries bro," he said. Blinks, disappears for a moment before returning with a roll of papertowels.

Grace
Grace does not appear, repelling out of a ventillation shaft. Instead, she just appears in the doorway like a normal human.

She's not a normal human, but anyway.

She appears just as Samir flubs it -- great day, huh? Totally not embarrassing at all..

"Hey. Samir. Elijah."

It's about all the greeting they're going to get.

Samir
So reality bitch slaps Samir for trying to help Elijah not end the evening with his shirt drenched in blood.

At the rate they're going it's going to be Sam's blood. Again. He weathers the blow like he's getting used to taking such bitch slaps. Still hurts and still draws blood. It patters onto the floor between his boots for several seconds before he sighs heavy again and pinches his nostrils together.

"Fuck," he says after Elijah's quip. He's holding out a hand for the paper towels when Grace walks in. That's all the greeting they get. His voice is muffled by the plugged nose effect. "Hi, Grace."

Despite the fact that he has his nose plugged Sam can smell the last thing everyone in the room ate. Thanks a lot Paradox. Thanks a lot Pop Tarts.

Elijah
"Hey Grace, Sam and I are investigating," like this was a wonderful thing to say. He holds out the paper towels like this was normal. No judgment, "and he was going to help me scotchguard my shirt because I'm kin sick of getting disgusting."

Elijah
(*kinda sick)

Grace
For the record, the last thing Grace ate was a block of freeze-dried ice cream.

"Investigating what? The thing with 4 arms again?"

She sounds... Perhaps a bit nonplussed.

"And how? I thought we did all the investigation we could?"

Samir
A second ago they were going on an adventure. Now they're investigating.

Sam looks back over at Elijah. With the paper towel stopping up his nose he doesn't sound any more dignified than he did a moment ago.

"... what?"

Investigating what? The thing with four arms again?

His blood is on the floor. He realizes this when he glances down. Gives him something to clean up while he's debating whether he wants to just sneak out and hope Elijah forgets texting him in the first place.

Elijah
[Manip+sub: don't act like the prospect of danger doesn't utterly delight you]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]

Elijah
"The ability to look back in time has a limited range, but I was able to see all the way to the football stadium. stands to reason that there would be an area of effect that you could check. WE've got the time frame, know what we're looking for- an exit of sorts. Our suspects are going to go back to the same location which would be some kind of base of operations or something at some point because this isn't something you can do out in the open, right?"

Oh god, and he makes it sound like it's so laborious, like this is one of the few ways he was thinking of but that he so genuinely hoped that this would be helpful. They haven't run out of all options, "so we look for overlapping circles. Focus on looking for the dude- and I mean dude as a gender neutral term- that is decidedly less terrifying. we're just looking for people, not engaging and if it's a bust it's no big deal. Samir's totally good with distances and stuff so we don't even have to do anything if we can find out a common hangout or something. Just sit back and watchfrom a distance and, you know, not die horribly in the comfort of our own homes."

Grace
Grace listens. Elijah goes on about distances and not having any ability with them. He has to be present at the place where bad things happened.

That means he has to be present at the places where bad things could happen again.

Grace frowns.

There's blood on the floor, so she frowns at that.

"Looks like you're off to a great start."

Samir
There was blood on the floor. Sam has just finished mopping it up with another paper towel. He hasn't grown bold enough to remove the one from his face yet. This ain't his first backlash-induced epistaxis rodeo.

"I'm never leaving the house again," he says as he rises from his floor-cleaning crouch. To Elijah: "So... I read what you posted on Ginger. Stage One Dumb is done already. You're talking like..." He takes the paper towel away from his face. Aside from the blood staining his nostrils and upper lip it doesn't start oozing again. "'We don't HAVE to do anything?' Really? You mean to tell me if we spy on this dude and his buddy, and we catch them making more My First Body Horror Barbie Play Do monster things, you're just gonna be like 'Okay cool now that that's sorted let's go get a taco' and that'll be the end of it?"

Elijah
"Phase two dumb usually involves rounding up a posse full of people with torches and pitchforks after we've figured out who and what we're dealing with and carrying on some kind of initiative to take care of it. the natural reaction when you're seeing, like, irrevocably messed up shit is oh my god, kill it with fire but sometimes you really can't kill it with fire right now.

"Besides, if someone's making crazy assed what-the-fuckery, we don't actually have the capability to fix it ourselves so that's some heavy shit."

A beat.

"Basically if that happens we'll figure out if I'm a posse of one or not if it comes down to that. My general inclination is dear god no because if you die without getting your information out, you failed."

Grace
"No. No posses of one," Grace says, and sighs. Like, if Elijah is going to be that stupid, he isn't doing it alone.

"If you find out where this shit is, I'll help you deal with it. And we don't have to go to it with pitchforks. I'd prefer not to."

Then again, things with that kind of power sometimes have the ability to screw with you from a distance right back.

Samir
Sam tongues the back of an incisor like to stopper up any further judgmental protestation of Elijah's plan of action. Now that they know about it ignoring it isn't the ethical thing to do. This is a guy who spends most of his time on the Internet breaking into other people's secured data and getting child pornography and human trafficking sites shut down. It isn't like he just sits at home beating off all day.

In the end he sighs and removes his handheld computer again. That's two people who won't let Elijah go off to do stupid shit by himself.

"I'd prefer not to pitchfork off into the night with someone who eats Pop Tarts for dinner, either," he mumbles.

[TRYING THIS SCOTCH GUARDING SHIT AGAIN IF HE BOTCHES THE EXTENSION HE'S GOING HOME. same modifiers as last time.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
"Fantastic," chipper, because Elijah has found out something very important: he can hold himself hostage for any number of things and get by okay. This is a win. This is an incredible win, and he slips his hands into his hands only to look down incredulously to see if there were any remnants of poptart on his shirt.Nope.

Wait...

How... did...

Huh.

Samir
[getting the extension out of the way now so we can scene transition]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Samir
[retconned perc + empathy roll: did he know elijah was full of shit? IDK if his specialty applies.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 7 ) [WP]

Grace
Elijah is happy, Grace just rolls her eyes at him.

"You are entirely too happy to have your monster hunting posse aren't you?"

Grace isn't nearly so happy about this whole thing.

"I'll go with. You'll want a ward up to make sure nobody's watching you as you get closer," she says. She's still of the opinion that this might be the work of some evil mage.

Elijah
"No." Yes

... are you sure Flambeau wouldn't want him? Elijah seems very intent on dying young and horribly in a blaze of holy fire and sunlight.

Samir
You are entirely too happy to have your monster hunting posse aren't you?

No.

"Yes he is," Sam says in a deadpan.

I'll go with.

They're all of the mind this is the work of an evil mage. Maybe one of the Fallen. They're not thrilled about it but here they are.

With that the younger Mercurial Elite executes the program with a final keystroke and tucks the small computer back into his inner pocket. For the rest of the night Elijah's shirt will repel whatever stains and smells come at him.

"I'm gonna go throw up real quick. I'll meet you out there."

Best posse ever.