Whitney the "Forensic Science Major"

Grace Evans
Today, Grace was walking back home the long way.

Most people would do so because they wanted to get more fresh air, or walk by somewhere nicer, or just see where that other bend in the road would take them.

Grace, however, got lost. On the campus she's been in for 5 years. With a phone in her pocket that can GPS with the best of them.

Thus is the danger of walking while thinking. You look up, and there's the interstate, and how did it get there?

So, she was now passing by the big gray train station on Colfax instead of going the safer, easier way through campus. This time, paying some freaking attention.

[Magedar Awareness!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

Whitney Terrell
Don't even ask what the other girl is doing here. Grace hasn't seen her around before though she looks as if she could be a student at her school. Hasn't had her eyes open very long but can pick up the girl's resonance. It isn't a subtle thing. Feels like a strong cool breeze in the morning that has as good a chance as reinvigorating one's spirit as it does of toppling a tree later.

And she's sitting on a bench outside with a patchwork knapsack parked between her ankles, knees together but her boots a good shoulder-width apart. She wears short-short khaki shorts and a hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, the ends of her sun-bleached hair spilling out from beneath it. Her fingernails are all painted blue but for the index fingers, which are yellow.

She has her cellphone out and is tapping out what looks to be a text message.

[gogo gadget magedar!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )

Grace Evans
The girl should also be able to pick up on Grace -- the feeling of something sliding out from under her feet, perhaps, that slipping shift like a fault.

Grace does pick up on the girl, the gust of her, though there is no actual wind other than the passing of vehicles today. And that put a stutter in her step. She's never felt this wind.

She looked around a bit warily, in her students' uniform of jeans, tee and laptop bag. Today's selection: a black shirt with a graphic design of a mermaid riding a T-Rex riding a motorcycle in space with the caption "Nothing is Unpossible!"

Whitney Terrell
She looks up from her phone as if she'd felt the ground irking underneath her. No way of telling by first glance that the girl comes from a part of the country where people yawn at earthquakes that don't cause major structural damage and power outages. It isn't the shift but the fact that it comes from a person and not from the earth that grabs her attention.

Up from her phone and right to the older woman. Whitney's eyes are blue in this light and she is one of those rare creatures that looks her age. Nobody tends to guess she has greater or fewer than nineteen years behind her.

"Whoa," she says and laughs a bit as she makes eye contact with the stranger. Doesn't point out her resonance though. That not be prudent. She lifts her brows and jerks her chin towards her wardrobe though. "I like your shirt."

Grace Evans
"Oh, ha, thanks," she says in response, her hand coming up to her hair, a bit uncomfortable perhaps. "I like your nails."

Oh come on, I like your nails? Really?

"So, are you new around here? I haven't seen you before. Freshman?" And the talking around things began, as Grace narrowed the space between them, approaching the bench.

Whitney Terrell
The girl laughs a charmed teeth-bearing laugh at the volley and pushes back her sweatshirt hood so that Grace can see who it is she's talking to. It isn't dark but Whitney had chosen a bench in the shade and around them are other people milling around waiting for this bus or that train to arrive. Smoke hung around the shelters and diesel fumes in the air.

Freshman?

"Hah. No, I'm like... a sophomore. I guess. I'm also kind of on academic probation."

Grace Evans
"Ohh... well, that sucks," Grace said, whumphing into a seat on the other side of the bench. Close enough that nobody would try to sit between them, but not too close.

"Well, you know, not everybody really likes the whole college thing. But I know the uni has tons of great tutoring programs, if you... Are even talking about that."

Her eyes wandered up to the sky, unsure. Sometimes, it was hard to tell if someone was talking about one world or the other.

Whitney Terrell
She gives the other Willworker time to contemplate the atmosphere and then smoothes her lips into a smile and sticks out her right hand. On the fourth finger sits a claddagh ring with the apex pointed outward. The wrist bears a rainbow macramé bracelet.

"Whitney," she says. "I was totally talking about that."

Grace Evans
Right hands go with right hands. Grace had to think about it a split second, before performing the bizarre North American Handshake Ritual for like, the 30th time this month. It's like people have to touch you before they're sure you exist, or before they can be sure they've met you, or something like that.
The handshake is not the most normal or confident ones Whitney has experienced.

"I'm Grace, and, well, listen, if you don't mind my asking, what is it that you seem to have trouble with in school? Maybe I can help?"

Whitney Terrell
"Uh..."

Nothing about Whitney's hand is out of the ordinary. Her fingers are slim and without callouses though they are not soft. She works with her hands but not in a way that would pigeonhole her as a musician or a carpenter or a markswoman. They are not cold and they are not bony.

She seems assured of herself and the ritual. That's until Grace goes back to the topic around which they circle like uncertain dancers.

"The trouble is my professor is sort of... not... like... living. Anymore."

Grace Evans
"Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. That sounds terrible," her eyes take that turn of concern and I-feel-for-you-but-really-can't.

"I guess not something I can fix with a little math booster, huh," she wavered, looked back up to contemplate the clouds.

Whitney Terrell
"I mean... I like, suck at math. It couldn't hurt."

When Grace looks up at the sky again she doesn't do anything to intentionally interrupt her. The other girl pulls her feet up onto the bench to sit cross-legged and fiddles with a lace.

"You're the first freshman I've met here. Whose classes are you taking?"

Grace Evans
Well, if she thought about it, she'd learned the most from Gadfly, as unprofessor-like as that one was. Their relationship was rather as informal as it got. Gadfly and Razor are not exactly normal names though.

"Um... you could say I'm taking some online classes," she said, after some thought.

"Not really classes, I guess, now that I think about it..."

Whitney Terrell
"Like..."

Whitney widens her eyes as she wracks her brain for the proper terminology for this euphemism. She's hanging out by the UC Denver campus but it isn't as if they ran into each other in the student union coffeehouse. They're at a train station.

"A peer review? Seminar? Thing?"

Yeah. If she's stepped foot on a campus to do anything more intellectually stimulating than crash a fraternity party it would surprise plenty of people.

Grace Evans
"Yeah, yeah, something like that. A study group."

Phew.

"So... how did you guess I'm a freshman? Did I do something wrong..."

Whitney Terrell
"Study group," she says in the mystified tone of one who has just been reminded of a word they ought to recognize from a mile away. In awe of her own absentmindedness.

Better to act stupid so people don't ask you for homework help than to let slip a correct answer to a difficult question in the middle of trig class and have all the mouth-breathers in class crowding you for after-school tutoring at lunch, that's what Whitney always says.

Grace asks if she did something wrong and the younger girl's eyebrows lift up on her head. She looks back at her for the first time since the handshake. Whatever expression nearly races across her face is yanked back at the last moment and she laughs.

"You're like, wearing a shirt with a T-rex riding a rocket ship." That's not an answer. "Also, you look kinda lost and don't seem like a total weirdo yet. Studying does that to you. Wait until you see a junior in the wild for the first time. They walk in the room and like, everybody is like Whoa, what the hell, man?"

Grace Evans
She looked down at her shirt. Huh. Nothing wrong there. "I thought you liked it."

"And I'm perfectly weird," she said, all fake ego-hurt, complete with ridiculous upturned chin.

Whitney Terrell
Which gets a genuine peal of laughter out of Whitney. She doesn't topple off the bench or anything but she does startle someone who walked too close to them and wasn't expecting to hear something so unbridled in this place. It gets Whitney a glower. Kids these days.

"You totally are," she says after a moment. There there. "You're gonna get weirder though. Trust me. I know things sometimes."

Grace Evans
"Ahh. I guess, one of those things. Things I didn't know."

She stretched out her arms on the back of the bench, "I don't know a lot of things, actually."

"I guess it would make one a little odd.  -er."

Whitney Terrell
She rakes her left hand through her hair and then decides she wants it pulled back off her neck. Slips a hair-tie from that wrist and starts French-braiding it out of want for something to do with her hands. One boot then the other finds the ground again.

"Kinda, yeah. So, like..." She wrinkles up her nose and makes a slight miscalculation with her braiding that will have strands falling loose around her temple later. Oops. She keeps going. "Have you decided on a major yet?"

Grace Evans
"Yes. Computer science," she says, and hoped the other knew what she meant by that. "Internet protocols, simulations, that kinda stuff. What about yourself?"

Yeah, of course, internet protocols... Considering her activities lately, bending them backwards and breaking in and... But even the most mundane of that kind of thing must be kept under wraps.

The thought of it lent a bit of a twitch to her face. Happy, and yet scared to get caught.

Whitney Terrell
Computer science.

The girl tries not to break out into a huge self-congratulatory grin as the blossoming new technowitch reveals herself to be just what she thought she might be. Could as just as well have been a Dreamspeaker or an Orphan but no no no. That shirt and that haircut and that crack about math tutoring.

And of course it comes back on her. Everything comes back on itself eventually. Whitney doesn't falter though. Her hands aren't particularly deft but she has braided her own hair before and with some persistence she gets it all secured and ties it off with the band.

"Uh... forensic science. I think. It's not like I can, like, change it at this point. You know?"

Grace Evans
"I think I get that part... the not changing it bit. I don't think I could just turn away from my major either. But do you not like it?"

Forensic science. Truth be told, Grace doesn't know much about the other Traditions. She knows more about the Ahl-i-Batin than Choristers, even. She's heard the word Euthanatos before, and that is about it.

So, a guess then, that the girl is with the ones of the good death, whatever that really means. Forensic science. Grace looked the girl over a bit, and well... She doesn't look like 'death'.

Whitney Terrell
"I mean, it makes sense, I guess. And it's not like I'm in mortuary science or something. Those guys are messed up."

But. It's unspoken and she does not want to speak at too great a depth for the level at which they sit. Anyone could walk by and overhear them. Overhearing them now a bystander would think them ordinary students. Their charade is working like gangbusters.

"But there are so many other majors out there. Everything's so, like, cool. It sucks that you have to be like Yeah this is the one thing I want to do for the rest of my life when you're so young and don't know, like. Anything. You know?"

Grace Evans
For the first time today, Grace was truly sad for the girl. Thinking back on her own life, there was never any doubt that she loved computers, loved knowing everything about them. Her real major was computer science, just as her 'other' major.

It hadn't even occurred to her that she might, someday, want to be different.

"What would you like to study, if you had the choice?"

Whitney Terrell
Part of her looks like she wants to say that she doesn't have a choice but even in the midst of knowing Grace pities her she would argue in opposition to that. Whitney doesn't have to stay where she is.

With no one to impress and no one to answer to any more the only thing she really has to fear is something she can't tell Grace about because it would violate a number of Tradition codes and bring the swinging scythe of justice down upon her head. Or, more like it, the back of her neck.

"I kind of just study whatever I wanna study and as long as I fulfill the major requirements nobody really cares. It's not that bad. Physics is pretty neat. So's biology. Just... science, really. And I've studied history, too, a bit, just, like... because I like it."

Grace Evans
"Oooh, you like science? I like science! We can talk physics any time you want, girl. And you know, I think that's really the way to look at it. You don't have to like... be the major. Go talk to people and learn about all kinds of stuff. I think. Anyway."

Her eyes again go wandering. She doesn't really know if that's a thing they do or not. There's something fundamental there in her mindset, that she's sure is never going to change... But she has gone around and talked with the others, learned a bit from the others, from their perspectives. It's not all that disjoint.

Whitney Terrell
"That's like, so Zen-wanderer."

Would you look at that: the apprentice teaching an initiate some things. Or: one thing. Or at least giving her back some semblance of the hope and perspective that is easy to lose when one is young and relatively unsupervised. She doesn't look like she's sleeping in this train station, at least. Someone out there has to give half a damn what she does during the day.

"You wanna talk physics over, like, food? I don't know what's good around here."

Grace Evans
Grace grins the grin of somebody about to talk about black hole radiation and quasi-particles, and it is... a little scary. "I know all the best places around here, let's hit one of em!"

And we can talk about SCIENCE!

"What are you in the mood for?"

Whitney Terrell
Whitney sweeps up the bag she'd left on the ground and slings it over her torso and considers the question for all of two seconds before answering.

"I swear I haven't seen a pho restaurant since I left Cali. Are there any around here?"

A blond girl who says "like" a lot who doesn't pretend to stick her finger down her throat at the thought of physics and actually knows how to pronounce the word 'pho.' What else could Grace possibly encounter on her journey towards enlightenment?

Team Striped Horse: The Conquest of Ginger

Andrew Wazowski
Lets rewind a bit.

Gadfly had been in touch off and on over the weeks, though more off than on as time went by.  The messages were also increasingly cryptic.  Ginger, it would seem had taken on a life of it's--her own.  At least in Gadfly's head.  Their little project became less of a venture into cyber vandalism and more of a romantic gesture until, just before the weekend, he sends a final message.

Gadfly83 says:  Ginger has been under the yolk of oppression for far too long now.  Tuesday, Aurora, Applebaum road between seventh and eighth.  Six o'clock is the hour of liberation!

Cut to:

A pleasant looking middle class neighborhood just separated from the major hustle and bustle of the city proper.  The houses stand several feet away from the sidewalks, separated from the concrete walkways by expanses of green, some spotted with children's toys and bikes.  Some manicured to nearly a sharp edge, bordered by hedges of non-organic dimensions.  The street itself is lined on either side by trees letting in the sunlight only in dapples of warm yellow and orange as evening approached.

Should Grace decide to join in (she has been preparing for this herself, after all) she might notice how much the area differed from the city, from her own university-adjacent apartment with her university-noisy neighbors.  Here she actually hear birds.  Somewhere there were children laughing.  it was like looking into a completely different world.  Applebaum road was the kind of neighborhood you wished you'd grown up in, the kind you want for your kids.  It is, in a word, safe.

Grace
Grace had grown up in a place like this. Not exactly like this, of course, because the non-organic forms were mostly rock gardens and carefully manicured cacti and succulents, but of course, even in a place that forbids such things as 'suburbs' by climate, people find a way to force them to exist. They'll put fountains with little concrete cherubs in the desert, just to show it how little they care.

It was partly this kind of thing she was trying to get away from in her university life, in Colorado, even. She didn't really hide the sneer as she had to wait for a child to bound out of the way of her old red Toyota, and she used the time to look for Applebaum road and seventh street.

Applebaum... 4th... 5th... 6th... It's a good thing this place is all numbered and orderly, or else you'd never find your way. Everything looks exactly alike.

Andrew Wazowski
Just there, between 7th and 8th, is a throbbing red sore thumb.  That might as well be what the car is called, if you could even call it a car in the first place.  Its too small to be a sedan, too small to even have the self respect to take up a complete parking space.  And yet it has the gall to sport a glossy red finish like a coat of candy over chocolate.  Perhaps that's what makes the few kids still getting in the last of their mid-street tag and scooter pushes in, run up to the teensy little smart car at different moments and press their faces right up to the window, or sneak around the bag and peer into the rear glass or leave tiny little fingerprints on the paint job.

Grace crosses seventh and the car flashes headlights in greeting.  There was someone inside.  Someone with wild hair and a patchy beard dressed in an electric blue track suit.  Someone with bright neon yellow glasses (or sunshades?) stretched wide across his vision.  He sits low in the drivers seat, his electric blue collar pulled up as though attempting to hid his face.  Make himself inconspicuous.

He doesn't seem to be very good at it.

Grace
Grace, meanwhile, is the epitome of inconspicuous. There's something almost odd about the way she blends in, and indeed people in this safe suburb (even the bratty little kids on bikes and just out playing in the middle of the road) don't seem to take notice.

She's just another person. Not too flashy, not too dull. Jeans and tee she wore today, with tennis shoes. Just plain normal.

She parked her car up next to Gadfly's tiny little red thing, and waved at him through the windows between them.

Chimeric1 says: Nice to see you.

Andrew Wazowski
He watches her as she drives up, even makes eye contact as she pulls up next to him.  Then, his attention flicks in a different direction and he's reaching toward his central console.  A moment later he's has his phone in his hand, flipping open the tiny keyboard and letting the thumbs fly.

Gadfly83 says:  Right back at ya.  I've got pizza and gear.  Your car or mine?

Grace
Chimeric1 says: Mine's bigger. No offense.

She started to set up her laptop then, getting it ready for the night's 'liberation'.

Andrew Wazowski
Gadfly83 says:  None taken.  Coming over.

And he does.  He steps out first, all short and dressed like a Russian mobster stereotype, and runs comically around the car.  He opens his own back seat and wrestles with a large pizza box, peering over the top of it as he carries it over to Grace's and deposits it in her own back seat.  He goes to his own passenger side and pulls out a gym bag and a backpack, and waddles over under the weight of both of those toward Grace's passenger seat.  The gym bag is lowered gingerly on the floor, which he then steps over to park his butt in the seat, arms loaded with the bulk of the backpack.

This doesn't stop him from straining to reach over a hand open in the gesture of handshake greetings.

"Um...Hi again."  He says in that shy, slightly high pitched voice.

Grace
Grace saw the hand, and took it in her own ungainly way. Handshakes, why handshakes always everywhere? It certainly isn't a universal custom. Personally, she would rather do the whole bowing thing.

"Hi to you too," she said, and the last time they had met like this came to mind. The last time they met in the real world, she had been a Sleeper on the cusp...

"So, ah, I've got my tools prepped. Got a packet sniffer, vulnerability scanner... And of course the encryption for when it's over. You think..."

Of course it'll go over well. Unless they're being watched.

"Hey, Gadfly, how have you been doing lately with the whack-a-molers?

Andrew Wazowski
"Um...mm...all clear on the western front"  he says with a smile.  He was rooting around in the backpack, trying to get out a smaller pouch from which he takes out several small, black, plastic pucks.  He turns one of them over in his hands, showing grace a small switch on the underside in the middle of four tiny suckers on the underside.  He flicks it and presses it to the passenger side window, where it sticks.  He does the same with another on the windshield and hands Grace two others.

"That's umm...from a book.  I never umm...never read it.  Nazis, I think.  They go cra--"

He stops himself there, twisting his lips in consternation.  Conversation, however, seems to be the least of his concerns.  Andrew struggles through the backpack, this time pulling out his own laptop before reaching down into the gym bag for yet another laptop, a beaten up and scratched looking thing, and an eight port hub and a coil of network cables which he begins pealing apart.  Three were all they needed for today, it seemed.

"The thing to umm...the thing to keep in mind at umm..."

He stops himself, eyes racing back and forth before he finally squeezes them shut.  Andrew takes his glasses off, folds the arms, which Grace can now see are rather bulky and played around with, lined with rough soldering and a few streaks of copper circuitry, and almost reflective from the insides.  He opens his eyes when the glasses are securely tucked at his shirt collar.  And then, he takes a breath.

"The thing to keep in mind at all times is that conventional consensual reality is always the reality that applies first and any investigation into tampering usually begins and occasionally ends with conventional methods if you hear a a stampede its most likely horses not zebras."

He's done that before, that sudden blurting out of words as though they were the most imperative thing to get out.  As though it required all of his attention and effort just to say something straight.  Only this time its worse.  He's clumped his sentences together in that one data dump.  He doesn't wait for her to respond to how weird that might seem.  He's finding a spot for the beaten up laptop to rest while it boots up, and he's wiring the hub to the available cables.

"This is um...our Vanguard.  Its a um...a scanning bridge.  Picks up networks from...umm...from the neighborhood?  Yeah.  And cycles data through.  We get um...we get one network...um...from about five um...five locations.  So um...any trace...um...any regular trace...um...goes to those five um...five houses."

Grace
It does take her a while to parse the meaning of that long drawn-out sentence, but she gets it in the end.
"I feel like a horse with some stripes halfway painted on, man. My skills are all conventional when it comes to this."

She dug into her laptop bag and retrieved some cat-5 cable for her own rig, something a bit newer and shinier than Gadfly's (but then she herself is new and shiny at that).

"I was thinking, you know. Maybe you should lay off of the shouldersurfing for a while," she paused a bit there, unsure. "It's just... I figure even I can see that. What if they are out there looking for your wormholes, tracking you?"

Andrew Wazowski
"That'll change."  He shoots back at her mention of her skills.

He shakes his head as though shaking off flies (or a schizophrenic shaking off a thought).

"I'm careful.  I'm um...I'm careful.  Targets chosen carefully.  And I'm...I'm fire-walled and warded.  Um...Usually.  Usually."

Another laptop, equally beat up but a bit more loved sat in his lap.  As it booted up he reached for his glasses again, putting them on clumsily over his face.

"How much do you um...how much do you know about um...about non-verbal communication?"
Andrew's fingers flew over the keys in steady, gummy thumps.

Grace
The clicking of her own keys had filled the car with soft staccato clicks, and while the smell of pizza kept knocking at her consciousness, she tried to ignore it like everything else.

Everything except for Gadfly, whose verbal text was a challenge to parse.

"Non-verbal communication? I take it you're not talking body language."

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm-hm."  He says without looking at her.  though, from the look of things, he wasn't looking at anything.  Gadfly's hands and fingers danced over the keys and his eyes stared straight forward, not at the laptop screen.  Not at anything.

"That's a part of it.  But um...deeper still.  Unconscious ticks.  Variations in circadian rhythms.  Breathing.  Heart rates.  High-frequency brain waves.  Think of it as...um...psychic network protocol.  I've mapped it, mostly.  Um...Mostly.  I call it 'Soulseer'.  I mentioned um...I mentioned whispering?  From over the shoulder to into the ear?  Yeah.  That's the output."

Grace
"So, like you're developing the bluetooth for the brain?"

Interesting... little creepy, but interesting. With that, one could do so much. Turn the mind into a remote control, or just... direct brain to computer interface.

The port forwarder she had was giving her fits, until she sent a glare at the Vanguard, and simply disabled the forwarder. Ahem, yes. Of course.

Working with another's gear was going to be interesting. Already she was feeling out the setup, trying to accustom herself to the interface.

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm-hm.  And right now I'm setting up a um..diversion program.  Any conscious mind that comes um...comes across the car immediately gets a command to go um...somewhere else."

Like the wind, this guy was.  Of course, the vanguard was his set up.  His connection to it was running smoothly.

"So I'll um...set up the non-conventional protection and um...you can set up the um...conventional security."

Andrew Wazowski
(Look away!  Arete diff 5-1 for distracting resonance, extended roll)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 7) ( success x 2 )

Andrew Wazowski
Roll 2
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (5, 6) ( success x 2 )

Grace
"Gotcha. Just working out the kinks. I think I've got it ready, though," she said, the clicking of her keys not stopping however.

Of course, the other's stuff was homemade, the interface non-standardized... But oddly familiar. Like, this is the way she might have done it had she actually... you know... done it. Users would be stymied, but nerds of their caliber had a tendency to think alike.

"It's actually not that difficult, I can see where you've got the data routing through, hasn't been too hard to set up a little interface to my stuff, I just have to not get in its way..."

Andrew Wazowski
He smiles at that, apparently thinking the same thing.  "Great minds", he says and keeps on typing off into space.

There's a tinge in the air.  A slight change in the feel of the car's interior.  Gadfly's gummy thump of keys pauses for a moment, just a moment, and then immediately continues as he's on to the next.  All the while he mutters things like "Temporal scramble" and "Blind Spot" and "Always the hardest part."

The little plastic pucks he'd produced before light up and produce a barely discernable hum.

Grace
"Or similarly twisted minds, whichever the case.."

And, she started prodding at Ginger. Softly at first, just trying to find some obvious easy way, then with increasing insistence. You will be mine.

[Liberating Ginger! diff 7 - 2 (cracking software) -1 (ability aptitude: computer) Specialty: Creative]
Dice: 8 d10 TN4 (1, 1, 4, 4, 5, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

Grace
"I'm in. Looks pretty clean," she said, voice almost monotone.

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm-hm"  comes his only response.  Meanwhile, whatever Gadfly was working on, he was still working at it.  While the activity led on the vanguard showed Grace's set up flickering madly between input and output, on Gadfly's side he was still just barely connected.  Still, the more he worked, the more that odd feeling filled the car.  That erratic and nervous feeling that she perhaps now recognized as the reality hacker doing his thing.

"Temporal scramble in three...two..."

(Arete diff 5-1)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 5) ( success x 1 )

Grace
[Finding Ginger! diff 6-1 (cracking software) -1 (ability aptitude: computer) Specialty:Creative]
Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 2, 2, 4, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace
[rerolling 10]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (2) ( fail )

Grace
The dense flavor of distraction filled the air -- Gadfly's Work, and Grace tried to tune it out. The less distracted she got, the better. But his resonance pounded at her skull with that buzzing...

It wasn't enough to stop her.

"Think I found her. Listen," Grace said, and turned the speakers up on her laptop. The sound of the sexy voice recording didn't exactly fill the car -- tinny speakers -- but it was enough to know she was on the right track.

"-- Love is only a dial away," said her laptop, sultry and smooth as honey.

"Love you too, Ging," she replied, with a smarmy edge.

Andrew Wazowski
"Bee-yoo-tee-ful!"  He exclaims, punctuating punches of his keys as he does so.  He was smiling now, the curve of his lips becoming the norm.  And finally he looked down at his keys as he did.

"Coming in.  Where am I headed?"

His voice is still soft, but something about it seems more confident now, and its noticeably lacking the starts and stops of before.  He is, apparently, fully focused.

"That voice.  That's a great voice."

[Incoming! diff 6-2 (Cracking software), Creative Specialty]
Dice: 8 d10 TN4 (2, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 8) ( success x 6 )

Grace
"They're not labeled like we'd hope, just numbers and letters really. The one you're looking for is ILS_56"

The change in Gadfly doesn't go unnoticed. Apparently hearing from his lady love was exactly what he needed to get his mind sharp. Grace suppressed a giggle.

"You got it, now I'm going to try escalating privileges. Wanna help?"

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm-hm" he intones, fingers still jabbing rhythmically at keys.  "Everything else seems pretty vanilla.  Standard operating system.  Could use an update.  Just like I thought.  ILS_56...there you are.  You're good.  You're quick."

The smile brightens at the last comment.  His fingers pause over the keys a moment as he looks over to Grace.

"Race ya?"

Grace
Her eyes flickered over to Gadfly for the rare meeting of glances, and she grinned. "You're on," was the only thing she said before going back to work, feverishly.

[Race to the Root! diff 8-2 (Cracking Software), -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer) Specialty: Creative]
Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Andrew Wazowski
And he's away!  Punching at keys, issuing commands, scouring file drives for hidden files with important security information on them.  Other people sparred in gyms or had extended games of chess.

They did this.

[I'm gonna get ya!  Diff 8-2 (Softwares), int specialty]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 5 )

Andrew Wazowski
[Re-rolling for the race]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Grace
Her fingers flew, her eyes pinched, and she looked for vulnerable spots in the architecture... Unpatched holes... Her scanner was running, but she was also trying more interesting routes than the scanner.

Come on, can't let him beat me!

[Noooo, I'll win! diff 8-2 (Cracking Software), -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer) Specialty: Creative]6
Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 5, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Andrew Wazowski
Andrew, in this moment, was absolutely zen.  That is not to say that this wasn't requiring concentration on his part, just that he seemed so used to the concentration.  What other way does one utilize these sort of mental faculties if not to identify weaknesses in networks and use them to advantage.

That, in essence, was the meaning of life.

[DICE DON'T FAIL ME NOW!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

Grace
Grace pumped her fists in the air, and let loose a wild "Yes!" uncharacteristically loud, before realizing she was in the middle of a suburb at night committing a felony...

"I've got the roooooot. Got it gooooood," she said, softer.

"Come to mama, Ginger."

Andrew Wazowski
"Huh."  Huffed Andrew, apparently knocked for a loop by the loss.  Its a moment before he finds his stride again.  In the meantime he says "You um...you really are fast."

Still, that 'pleased to be here' smile persists.

"Alright, lets umm...lets stake our claim.  Secure this baby for 'team striped horse'."

Grace
"Oh hey, don't beat yourself up. I was sniffing out the place while you were covering for me with your... ah... hockey pucks. So I had more time to figure out what was up is all," she said, trying to give him back a little boost of confidence.

"Mmmhmm," she said, returning to the flying keystrokes. "Team striped horse. I like that."

Andrew Wazowski
"Don't you think that's umm...a little demeaning?  Making um...Making excuses for me?"

There it was, the security and permissions for the nebulous space of potential data they had come to call 'Ginger'.  Now the real work began.  Well, the real work before the REAL real work at least.

"I'll get the t-shirts made soon as we're done."

just then, there is the sound of thudding keys under Gadfly's fingers, and then there is the undulating, squishy sort of moan that comes from one's abdomen after hours without food.  The thudding stops.

"Pizza break?"

Grace
"No, I don't," she said, a little sadly. But he seemed to forget about the slight, going on about t-shirts and pizza breaks.

At which point her own focus entirely fizzed. Pineapple pizza smell invaded her senses instead...
"Mmm yes... I'm starving."

Andrew Wazowski
How to describe this pizza?  Hot?  Cheesy?  Loaded?  The pizza itself was less than what it represented at this time.  And at this time, this very moment, having expertly pierced the targeted defenses, having located their quarry within minutes and having moved into position for the final kill....

This pizza was a battle cry.

"Salute"  Says Gadfly, raising a slice to her in honor, before folding it and taking a large bite off the point.

Grace Evans
Free pizza has got to be that holy grail of college students everywhere, and Grace was no exception to that particular rule. And this was no ordinary pizza. This was victory pizza.

Victory tastes like pineapples and cheese and freedom.

She raised her own slice to Gadfly, her mouth already full, with a muffled "smmoot".

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm.  Um.  Okay so.  We set up the umm...the environment and um...keep it hidden from the uh...from the sysop.  And...and we also set up umm...a back door for umm... for future access...and keep that hidden from the sysop.  After that its umm...just sweeping up and umm...and locking the door behind us."

Chew.  Chew.  Chew.  Bite.  Chew.  Chew.  Chew.

"So much easier doing this with another person.  Oh um...I gotta um...I gotta check out the wards."

Teeth hold the warm pizza firm as his fingers sweep across the keys.

Grace Evans
"Well, that and a decent interface. We'll be using this for comms, so gotta lace our new secret data store into our phones and such... But I'm getting ahead of myself," she said, holding her pizza slice aloft like a conversation piece.

And then, she decided to eat while he was 'checking out the wards' so as to not distract.

Andrew Wazowski
"it'll take umm...It'll take a lot of work in the um...in the long run.  But that's the long run."

The window Gadfly had open at that point was not the window they were using to 'liberate Ginger'.  It was hardly human readable, filled with quickly alternating characters appearing and disappearing on a screen, and he apparently navigating and contributing to the erratic action taking place there.

He hesitates a moment, and then strikes another key with a sense of finality.

(Time Ward 2, diff 5-1)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Grace Evans
Grace peeked. In her mundane shouldersurfing, she saw the code and knew it for what it was -- at least the basics of what it was. There was coding and then there was Coding, right?

"So what's that do?" she asked when it seemed he was finished, her mouth half-full of pizza. "Looks interesting."

Andrew Wazowski
"Ummm..."

He squirms slightly.  Not uncomfortably, just confused and excited all at once, like a baby who's just learned to walk needs to now learn how to walk faster and isn't sure which foot to start off on.

"So there's this umm...this clay tablet they found in um...in Italy somewhere and um...it's got these um..."
And there he stops, twisting his mouth again in that 'This is the wrong leg to start on' look.  Then he takes a breath and tries again.

"When I realized that everything around me was constantly sending and receiving data I soon realized that everything stored data too and I could retrieve past copies of it and if I could so could others so now I---"
Stop.  Breath.

"I'm hiding any evidence of us being here."

See?  That wasn't so hard.

"Sort of."

Grace Evans
Grace stopped mid-chew as he started going on about the clay tablets in Italy, and cocked her head. Gadfly. Always a bit difficult this one.

And then, when he went in another, more understandable direction, she forgot to chew for a whole other reason. Everything stores data, like a universal backup.

"The tree falls in the forest, no one's around to hear it, except for the rest of the universe, and it remembers the noise."

She gnawed crust for a bit, thinking.

"I'm glad you're here. I didn't even know something like that was a thing."

Andrew Wazowski
He nods at her summary and solution of the age old question, and keeps nodding, with a slight smile at her final statement.

"Stick with me kid, you'll go places!"  he says in what one would suppose passes for a 1920's mobster voice.

Gadfly chomps down the rest of his pizza, reaching in the back to deposit the uneaten crust and comes back with some napkins.  "It was Vesuvius."  He says between wiping his mouth and squeezing pizza grease off his fingers.  "On the tablets.  They um...they digitally reconstructed the audio.  The clay must have um...must have been hardening at that exact point.  Market chatter and um...and then...Boom!  Everything's a thing.  You just gotta um...gotta figure it out."

Grace Evans
"Ahh... such a morbid record. But then, Pompeii is one of those weird places, like someone decided to take a snapshot in time -- of what has to be the worst picture ever -- via volcano."

Grace accepted -- or just plain took -- some napkins from Gadfly, and started cleaning up. The crumbs would get in her car, but she didn't much care. She did, however, take great care with her hands and fingers and fingernails, even. It wouldn't do to get the keyboard dirty.

"We ready for the rest of this?"

Andrew Wazowski
"Yeah.  Lets umm...lets wrap this up."

Back to the conventional screen, and apparently back to work.

"I'll set up our back door."

Andrew Wazowski
[Backdoor access, Int(creative)+comp, Diff 8, aiming for 10 Succ]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Grace Evans
"I'll start sweeping up the records," she said, and again the clicking of those sharp keys ramped up.

To maintain the illusion that nothing had occurred at all that night, it was necessary to do the mundane version of what Gadfly had done to Time itself. Messing with the records on the server, deleting their strange access times and account activity, and keeping the server from recognizing that they were there in the future. Something only an Admin with root access could do... And she was all this, as far as the network as concerned.

[Data Cleanup! Int(creative)+comp, Diff: 8 - 1 (Data Cleanup Suite) -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer), Also aiming for 10 success]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

Grace Evans
[Again! More Successes! Int(creative)+comp, Diff: 8 - 1 (Data Cleanup Suite) -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer) + 1 Extended]
Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (4, 4, 4, 4, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 2

Grace Evans
[Again! More Successes! Int(creative)+comp, Diff: 8 - 1 (Data Cleanup Suite) -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer) + 1 Extended]
Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Andrew Wazowski
[More backdoor action! (don't google that)]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Andrew Wazowski
[Hit 'em again!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (4, 4, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )

Andrew Wazowski
"Its official."  Gadfly says, still hard at it after the music of their collective keyboards shifts to a Gadfly solo and the sound of Grace possibly reaching for more pizza, content with her work.

"You've got more skills than me.  You were made for this."

[Lets wrap this up, Andrew.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 1 )

Andrew Wazowski
[Oh, my count was off.  One more, Andrew!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1

Grace Evans
Compliments are so... tricky, aren't they? At least, to Grace they are. It feels not quite right to gloat, way not right to rub the other's nose in it. But Gadfly thinks anything else is just demeaning, so...
Ignore!

"Hey, still got to set up the encryption protocol. Got that thing coded for a reason." The reason, of course, is to give Ginger some camouflage, so that their future message-storage-station doesn't end up human-readable. Not that their messages would likely be understood anyway, but still.

This is just an install, though, something saved for the last because it's easy...

[Installing encryption stuff! You can't see my files!  -- Diff 6 - 1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer)]
Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 7 )

Andrew Wazowski
There's a clap of his hands, an excited gesture.  He checked the vanguard, checked the hockey pucks, checked his own rig.  They were as good as there.  Now when the blocks all came tumbling down, there wouldn't be messages linking one phone number to another.  There'd just be an awful lot of calls to a sexy 1-800 number.

Hey.  Whatever knocked your socks off.

"So um...maybe voicemail by end of week?  And um...routing calls after that?  This'll be um...this'll be my new main number.  At least as far as um...as far as your friends are concerned."

Grace Evans
"I won't tell them to reach you at 1-800 FAT GIRLS... will have to translate that into numbers heh," she said, reveling in the glow of triumph a bit herself.

"Oh, what do you think about some like... broadcast capability, secure messaging for the others? Could set them up a phone app or something..."

Andrew Wazowski
"Hm.  Yeah.  Yeah, sure.  Call in, leave a message, and the group gets an alert?  That kinda thing?"
Now what was he up to now?  They had won, more or less.  So what was it that had Andrew running through clicks and key-presses?

"Just like the uh...like the drop.  I have something like that.  Need to uh...need to piece it together."

Grace Evans
"Hey, what you up to now? Chatting up Ginger?" she grinned, stretched -- sitting in the car, cramped in the driver's seat... it did a number on the body after a while. There were multiple audible pops.

"I imagine she's quite happy to be freed from under the yoke of oppression."

Andrew Wazowski
"Just um...just...retrieving that voice.  And a few other matching audio files.  And...we're done."

And there it was again, that look of satisfaction.  Conquest.

"Lets bug out."

Grace Evans
"Do I want to know what you're going to be doing with those?" she asked, a bit of exasperation in her tone. Seriously? Was he going to try tracking the poor girl down who happened to be the voice of his new server?

Something creepy, had to be...

"Well... In any case, ah... Great work tonight. And you know you're going to have to teach me all of that stuff you did, right?" she smiled in imitation of 'eager student', the fakeness calculated to be an obvious joke.

Andrew Wazowski
"Audible User Interface".  He states rather plainly.  The other comment grabs his attention and he smiles.

"Sure.  That'll be our next project, right?  Alright.  I'll umm...I'll get my stuff."

Because he'd almost forgotten he was in her car and not his own.  When they were sure it was safe, he starts packing up his own rig, and the vanguard with it.

Grace Evans
He packs, and Grace realizes this is it. In the glow of victory, there is that bitter finality too. He's taking all his pretty equipment, the hockey pucks, the vanguard...

And she didn't ask enough questions.

"I'll hold you to that promise. I'll keep in touch, Gadfly."

She laughed, a kind of giddy thing, and then, "Oh yeah, and Go Team Striped Horse!"

Andrew Wazowski
It'd be nice to be remembered this way, with a smile on his face.  The moment seems lost on him.  Chalk it up to the continued discomfort of social interaction.  He's smiling in this moment, exceedingly glad, to put it biblically.

He's also scrambling to get his things packed and get out of there as soon as possible.

"S-see you in cyberspace!" he stammers as he slams her door shut, bustling with the bulk of bags toward his own micro-machine.  The only thing he leaves behind is the pizza box and a couple crumpled napkins.

Oh, and the memories.

Bring up the Future, She'll Talk your Ears Off

Mara
A sabbatical that's what Mara had chosen to call her rather sudden departure from the city of Denver a little over a month ago. She'd been out of touch, out of place...so she'd taken another trip, disappeared for a while...and now she was back, wether it was the winds of fate, her own choice, or random chance one could not be certain. What mattered was she was back...

She'd already set up shop depositing her gear in the Chantry once more, having taken up residence in one of the few empty rooms remaining, she had duties to attend too, but that would happen in time. More importantly she needed money, and so for that she took to the streets.

Dressed in a flowing and airy outfit of forest green Mara was playing to the crowds in the early afternoon, dangerous and nerve wracking acrobatics were her busking act of choice, her bare head skimming the surface of the hard concrete sidewalk as she did flips, cartwheels and other intensive and intriguing maneuvers with the aid of sword, stave, and rope.

Even the awakened of the world needed money afterall.

Grace
[Awareness? Notice Mara (or anybody?)]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )

Lena Reilly
[[Pre-emptive Awareness ding, spec Uncanny Instincts!]]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Grace
Waking up this morning afternoon wasn't the trial most had been in the past... what was it now, week? Most days lately had seen Grace's bleary-eyed self slamming Amp to pry her eyes open and get it finished.

Whatever it was really depended on the day. But Saturdays are days of rest, right? And 2 in the afternoon is just the perfect time to wake up on a day of rest.

She must have thought that it was Friday, for some reason, and headed down to the Arts District for some heavily-needed distraction with the art walk, but sadly, it was not yesterday.

There were still people around, like always, but not the huge crowd (likely for the best). A few of the sidewalk artists and buskers were still around, good for some distraction at least. And Grace, dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, her laptop bag slung across her back... Like always.

It wasn't until she came across the (extremely impressive) acrobat that she really stopped in her tracks though. The woman was talented enough to get her to stop anyway, but that feeling lingered in the back of Grace's mind, of someone Talented.

Strange how words seemed so different now when she capitalized them in her thoughts...

Lena Reilly
Lena loves getting out on the weekends.  She spends so much time at the clubs at night that she relishes the chance to get out, get some fresh air and just enjoy being one person in the midst of a throng of humanity.  This weekend...more so.  The girl has spent most of her time this week at the hospital, holding to her promise to Sera to keep an eye out there and let her know of any developments.  Lena is entirely familiar with spending an exceptional amount of time in hospitals and while she knows it well--it fits like an old shoe--she doesn't like it all that much.

And that's why she's out today; she really just needs warmth and colors and something outside of the washed-out, clinical, antisepticked world of the medical world.  She's gone home for a change of clothes and is dressed in a white baby doll T-Shirt with the double-helmeted Daft Punk logo on the front, a pair of jeans and sandals.  For once her headphones aren't in (though they are of course on her person) and she's walking along, just enjoying herself until

something pings.

One of them is familiar; its a resonance she recognizes.  The other, not so much.  She looks in that direction and smiles as she sees Grace, crossing the street to come up.  Mara's acrobatic skill draws an impressed look from the Ecstatic before she looks over at Grace and smiles warmly.  "Hey, you."

Mara
[Distracted or no?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5) ( fail )

Mara
It had been to long, the mixture of Kata and dance, intertwined with the art of the blade and the stave is something Mara had not had to rely on in some time, the usually hotheaded woman had learned something of discretion in the last few months. That and how not to blow all your money at once. But now as she weaves the weighted rope around her body, twisting and turning as the weight whistles through the air about her she is lost in the purity of motion and action.

So lost that she doesn't even feel the presence of two magi so close, so close that they are standing amongst the small crowd of onlookers as Mara works to earn their coin. Out of the corner of her eye she notes the two women meeting but her only thought was.

'Don't walk away, don't walk away!'

[How impressive? Damn impressive]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

Grace
Grace noted Lena's presence before the 'hey, you' of course. She was like the very pulse of the crowd, and that came through in full, making her twist her head in the direction of it. Lena, good.

"Hey yourself," she nodded. "Interesting, ah, performance yes?" she tilted her head in Mara's direction, her arms crossed in front of her, she couldn't easily point.

Lena Reilly
She smiles a little bit, turning her attention back to the mixture of martial arts and dance moves when Grace makes mention of it. The fluidity, the sheer grace of Mara's movements clearly register high in the Ecstatic's estimation.  She gives a little nod in response to Grace's comment.

"It's damned impressive.  I bet she kills on the dance floor."  Haha, 'kills.'  with swords and staves and katas.  She actually didn't mean it as a pun, but it doesn't stop it from being there.  Lena views Mara appraisingly, as if sizing her up a little bit.  Not tactically and not aesthetically...more like trying to guess what kind of person she is from the clues they have.

"How are things with you?"  The words said to Grace, of course, as she turns her attention back to the other.  "Everything going okay?"

Mara
Even Mara can only keep such act's up for so long, the rope was the tail end of her act, it might not be as dangerous, but with the scraps of colourful satin fitted into the rope at equal distances and the sheer difficulty involved controlling it as she moved, it was definitely the most impressive. But all things must end, and so to does Mara's act, coming out of a cart wheel she launches the weight into the air, waits for it to come back down and kicks it against a tiny gong set up next to the tray of change and loose bills, the strike of the gong has her standing, bowing once and then offering a half assed salute to those present.

"Thank you very much, that's it for now, but by all means, share the good Karma, girls gotta eat after all." She stands there, chatting for a few moments as money drops into the box and she keeps a watchful green eye for potential looters. But when all is said and done she hunkers down before the box and begins to count her take.

"Course I came in the day after the artwalk." She shook her head with a chuckle, her lips curled into a smirk as she checked a bill.

Grace
Grace did chuckle at the 'kills on the dance floor' bit, imagining the woman set loose in a dance hall. Oh the screams, the chaos...

And her face falls a bit, when the conversation shifts, "Everything's going. I'm on schedule, at least. First time in a long time for that. Is why I'm here, you know? Rewarding myself."

She looked back at the martial artist with a stern expression on her face that might be confused with anger. Really, she was more trying to figure out the sheer physics of this woman, amongst other things.

And then, it was over, with a gong and a plea for money, and oh shit, money... Grace's mouth formed a silent 'fuck' as she looked at nothing in particular. "Aha, well, I don't really carry money around... Bad Karma for me!"

Lena Reilly
Lena isn't a particularly inobservant person as a rule.  And thus, she catches the little falling of Grace's face from the chuckle into the thoughts on how she's doing.  Her lips purse a moment, though she nods.  "Well, that's good at least.  It's always important to enjoy the successes.  But not so much beyond that?"

She follows Grace's gaze to Mara when the acrobat finishes up and and signals a gong; Lena offers some applause.  Once people have cleared away from the offering box she steps forward and slips a five into the box.  She's not the richest person on the planet but she is a performer herself (of a fashion) and she knows what it's like to live as one.  Keep the money flowing through the arts communities and it's good for everyone.

"That's pretty amazing," she says to Mara with a smile.  It's one of those warm, friendly kinds she gives when she first meets people.  "How long have you been performing like that?"

Mara
Mara is looking at her take, counting things out, starting of course with the Bills and working her way to the smaller change that was a common sight for buskers. On good days Mara could knock someone out with all the small change she ended up with, today though, she could probably only stun someone.

Grace speaks of bad karma and that smirk is pulled just a little tighter the woman looking up and tilting her head ever so slightly at the woman. "Plastics great until you gotta pay someone other then a corporation girl...but its all good."

And then another fiver is dropped into her lap and the smirk becomes a pretty smile as Mara looks up at Lena and picks up the bill between two long fingers, turning it over deftly. "Like this?" She asks gesturing back over her shoulder at her array of tools and shrugs. "Maybe...five six years? Depending on who you talk to I've been doing it alot longer then that."

Cryptic responses are a given with magi, and it seems at least in part, the same is true for Mara. She looks between them as she pockets the bill. Her gaze going to Grace. "Better buy your friend a drink, she just saved you any bad mojo." A wink is offered in good humour before she straightened out, before pulling one leg up behind her and stretching it out, perfectly balanced.

Grace
"Um... I got a weird text. Said 'he' was in the hospital, but it didn't seem like the message was meant for me," she said, and her arms tightened around her small frame a bit.

And Lena then went and embarrassed her a bit by being more-than-prepared to pay a busker.

Feathers are ruffled further when Mara speaks of plastic being no good, except to pay a corporation, as if Grace likes the idea of paying a corporation. "I don't even like the idea of money at all. Unnecessary evil if you ask me."

And there goes the kid, off in Idealism and Uniqueness, while she is carrying plastic, and expensive toys. But in the back of her mind, she's searching out an ATM, because it never hurts to be prepared...

Lena Reilly
Bad karma is something Lena knows all about, even if it's not why she deposited the money.  She nods a little bit when Mara says she's doing it five or six years.  "Well, you're fantastic.  I've seen my share of performers in my time and you're already one of my favorites."

Grace mentions a weird text, and that causes Lena's smile to drop.  She knows exactly what the other is talking about, and she sighs a little bit.  A reminder of what she's been up to the last half a week.  "Yeah...that would be, ah, one of our like-minded types.  Have you met Pan?  There was a...dog attack.  It's....he, Serafine and I ran into them in the park when we happened to cross each other's paths.  He got pretty badly hurt, but he's at the hospital and recovering now.

Mara
It might surprise both of them, but when the names of Pan and Serafine are brought up that casual yet oddly disturbing stretching is kicked like a bad habit, Mara's leg snaps back under her as her eyes widen in a mixture of surprise and a tiny hint of worry.

"Pan and Serafine?" She asks for confirmation as she looked speculatively between the two women. "You mean Pancho? The ol priest right? And Sera of the fine drugs, fine parties and freakin awesome hair?" She gestures to one side of her head, sweeping a hand across it to indicate Serafine's half shaved head.
"Shit me...Shows what happens when I go walkabout."

Grace
Pan. Grace has heard the name, but has not yet met this person, and so the emotion doesn't exactly rise quite so high, but a look of concern crosses her face as Lena continues, halting, talking around the things that cannot be said. "Dog, huh. Well, I'm glad he's okay."

She looked back to Mara when the acrobat's body lunged in recognition of those names. Didn't mean she was exactly to be trusted, though, and Grace looked to Lena for cues on how to act.
This one didn't seem like the bad sort...

But with 'dog' attacks, and the latest news from the 'net, it wouldn't pay for the n00b to go opening her trap to someone she didn't know.

Lena Reilly
Her attention immediately slides back to Mara when she asks after Pan and Sera and...well, describes them to a T.  She already had a feeling someone in the area besides Grace was pinging for her and she had an idea it was the street performer, but she didn't think that she necessarily knew the others.  Many mages are transitory by nature; they come and go through society and Lena is one of those people.  So when Mara shows concern and shows that she knows their associates, Lena gives her her full attention for the moment.
"That's them, yeah.  You must have gone on your walkabout before I arrived...I'm Lena."  She extends her hand to Mara.  She's smiling, even if the conversation took a turn toward the somber with talk of Pan's injuries.  "It's nice to meet you."

She looks at Grace a moment and shrugs lightly.  As we've covered before, Lena is a trusting sort...when she has evidence that backs that trust up anyway.

Mara
"Mara good to meet ya." She takes that hand and gives it a few good pumps before offering it up to Grace as well. "Ol man must have done something intense to piss of a dog...glad to hear he's gonna pull through though." She offers as she looks from Lena to Grace curiously.

"I guess your both new huh? There were only a few of us here last time I was in town." She moves away once and if Grace decides to shake her hand, moving to dump all of the money into a sock and then started to pack up her gear. Apparently the show as over for the day.

"Wondered why it was so dead at the....country club." The last two words were said quickly, as if the young woman was catching herself and diverting her words from what she meant to say..to something else entirely.

Grace
Picking up from Lena that this one was 'okay' she gave Mara a smile, "Hey, I'm Grace. I was probably wandering around here with my eyes shut last time you were in town."

The hand is offered, and Grace clumsily accepts, first with one hand, then the other when she realizes a left hand and a right hand just aren't going to work together like she'd hoped.

Lena Reilly
"Trust me, in this case it was the dogs who instigated, not him."  They all had their wounds they had to lick after that incident, some more physical and others more emotional.  Lena puts her thumbs in her jeans pockets, banishing memories of the aftermath from her mind for the moment.

"You've been to the country club then?"  A change of conversation from the dogs, for the moment anyway.  And that's just further reassurance from Lena that Mara's good to talk to.  Lena isn't stupid; the amount of trust she extends is proportional to the amount if information she has to go on.  But the more evidence she has that trust is warranted, the more she is willing to open up.  "That's cool.  Yeah, from what I understand it's grown quite a bit recently.  Who all was there when you were here earlier?"

Mara
Mara is collection weapons, weapons that unlike most performer's tools, look very real, and very very dangerous. She rolls them up in a long canvas bag and then slings it over one shoulder as she regards Grace with an appreciative eye. "Good for you girl, welcome to the wide world, the Akashakarma always welcomes its own." She offers the woman a smile before looking over at Lena.

"Not many, actual residents before I took a powder pretty much constitute me, and Shoshannah." She said as she stood up and picked up the coin box, examined it for a moment, and then tossed it, letting it sail through the air before landing in a garbage bin.

"I mean Pan was the guy in charge, and I'm pretty sure Sera was in there too...but i could be wrong, I was kinda out of the loop by the time I took off."

Lena Reilly
Soshanna is another name that Lena knows, and better than she did at the beginning of the week.  She smiles when she hears the name--

And that's when her phone goes off.  She looks at it and sighs.  "Sorry," she says apologetically.  "I have to take this.  It's work."

And with a smile to the two, she slips away and sets the phone to her ear.  She'll be called away on a DJ emergency, filling in for someone at the last moment.  With a little wave to Mara and Grace, she's off into the crowd.

Grace
Another welcome from another new face. They always were happy to hear about the new one. Grace returned the smile, and pondered the word Akashakarma for a bit.

And then, Lena was gone.

She shifted her weight back and forth, those arms returned to hugging herself. The woman's weaponry looked like it would slice through a dog. And for once Grace wished her name had some bearing on her body...

"You've got ah... nice weapons."

Mara
A hand is held in the air in silent farewell as Lena suddenly takes her leave, and then it is simply Mara and Grace.

Mara for her part is at ease, comfortable and casual as she stands with one hip swayed to the side and her arms free beside her as she looks over her shoulder to the canvas bag and shrugged. "Thanks, heirlooms of another lifetime." She said it like it was no big deal, or perhaps more like it was a deal she prefered not to brag about.

"I prefer my body to any blade, stave, or bar stool though. She holds up a hand with a smile. "Someones gotta get pretty drastic to take this away from you after all."

She quickly looks Grace up and down before tilting her head to the side. "Lets take a walk." She offers, gesturing forward downt he street as she asked. "So, you on a team yet Grace? Or are you still finding your path?"

Grace
The walk is accepted, and Grace appears to pay attention to everything and nothing as she does so, those eyes shifting from thing to thing like the world is fascinating, but only for so long...

"A team? Oh... Kind of, sort of," she says, "at least I'm trying to find a place on a team." It's cryptic, but then, they have to be a bit cryptic, don't they?

"My path is fairly well laid, I'm afraid." The woman's tools do not look like her own. From her estimation, Mara is not on her 'team' per-se.

Mara
"Nothing wrong with a well laid path so long as the scenery is good." Mara's smirk returns as she moves along, entirely non-pulsed by the fact that Grace was already on a team, if she had been trying to recruit, she isn't to upset by failing. "Mind if I ask what path you follow?" She inquires because she is curious, the woman to incognito, her path not writ upon her features so one has to do such things.

"I'm with the brotherhood, you know...from out east." She offers with that little smirk. "Wouldn't have been my first pick had I had the choice...but it suits well enough."

Grace
"Oh, sure, the brotherhood," Grace said, "Yeah, truth is, I don't know a lot of the team names yet. Doesn't mean much to me. You don't look much like a 'brother' though," she said with a kind of chuckle.

"I'm kind-of-sort-of with the adepts," she answered, "Though I think I'm being probation-ed, monitored so as to be sure I'm on the up-and-up so to speak."

Mara
"You know my sensei says the same damn thing all the time." Mara chuckled as they moved along through the crowd, blending in with humanity in all its guises. "Good thing hes all the way up in canada and my ass is down here in that case."

She gets a response at that and nods, looking at Grace one more time in consideration before speaking. "Yeah some of them aint to trusting, but its understandable. All kinds of folks out here pulling all sorts of tricks, even with newbs." She blinks and looks at Grace quickly. "I don't mean it like that of course...newcomers would be better right?" Her smirk grows into a proper smile as she takes them around a corner, out of the main thoroughfare so that they have more space, and fewer prying ears.

"That workin out for you?"

Grace
Grace chuckled, "No, no, newb is fine." More than fine, in fact. It seemed Mara knew some lingo.

And Mara rounded the corner, thankfully. "It's working. I've got connections now, and some interesting plans," she got a little more serious at that point, her face not quite as happy. "I know why they're being careful with me. I guess they have to. New faces in their crowd can switch sides so easily."

Mara
"Like a spy in a cold war movie." Mara agree's with a nod and takes them away from the crowd, heading towards a little run down parkette which, for the moment appeared empty.  "Half the time it isn't even a conscious thing. They get all up in your head change your wiring around and bam. Your the newest Bourne agent or something." Mara shrugs, like it was a fact of life.

"Last time I was here I got cornered by a couple of the black hats and I thought that was exactly what was gonna happen to me. Luckily..it didn't funny freaks wanted to broker an alliance to deal with this kid, thankfully we didn't have to make that deal with the devil."

The Parkette is reached and Mara steps onto the grass and goes to pull off the performance slippers she was wearing, letting her toes dig into the grass with a contented sigh as she continued walking. "Don't take it personal, its just the wider world we live in."

Grace
Grace's face turned ashen for a bit as Mara just carelessly rattled off what might be her fate. Messing around with her 'wiring'.

"I get it. I've heard enough of them to kind of understand what I'm up against. Not cool."

For a while, at least, Grace knew she'd have to depend on the kindness of strangers like Mara, to look out for her and keep those black hats and dogs and whatever else away. The community was important because it meant safety...

Mara
Mara see's that ashen look on Grace's face and her lips thin, an apologetic look flashing across her features before she gently punches the other woman in the arm and chuckles.

"But hey, the upsides seriously outweigh the down. The world really is our oyster at this point in the game girl. The powers cosmic and all time space and reality are ours to control...if we feel like it." She pauses and tilts her head slowly to the side with an implicit meaning. "Annnd of course protect it, in our own way." She chuckles as she find a bench and flops out on it, leaving enough space for Grace to take a seat if she wishes.
"So whats your deal Grace? Whats your great hope?"

Grace
"Oh, me? I just want to live to see the world change," she smirked. "Help it get there."

"I believe in the future still. Some of my friends disagree, they say it's all downhill from here, and the best we can do is escape. I don't buy that."

"All it takes is one viral idea. Somewhere, someone's going to come up with something they can't control, and it'll break all the rules. Like money, right? What if everyone realized money to be the scam that it really is? It gets devalued, nobody needs it anymore..."

"It's coming," she said, cryptically as usual. "I can see it. In fact, it's already happening. I think, personally, that They're scared."

Mara
Grace's words bring a smile to Mara's lips, even if the look is slightly doubtful.

"I admire your spunk, i aint some old hat at this mind ya, I just...well I gotta different view on things, how it all works out in the end ya know? Don't have much choice when I got an old man jabberin away in the back of my skull with all his fortune cookie bullshit."

Mara pulled the canvas bag from behind her then, pulling it over her shoulder and just setting it next to her on the bench.

"But I fuckin hope your right. Somethings gotta break the cycle sometime."

Grace
"Even Rome fell," she said, plopping down on the bench with her own bag. "It won't last forever. Give me 50 years."

And she says that like it'll be all her work too, but what she really means is that she figures it'll be all said and done by then... whatever change happens, happens in the span of a lifetime. And she wants to live to see it.
"What's your view then?"

Mara
Mara was silent for a few moments before she looked over at Grace, giving her a good long look. She'd said she could see change in the next 50 years, that the war would be over, enlightenment would be everyone's.
"Cycles...were in a cycle girl, like a spin wash going round and round. Sometimes we got dirt on us, sometimes were clean as a whistle...but the cycle just keeps going. Rome fell yeah? So did the USSR, so did Japan, but other places, other people just rise up and take over." She shrugged.

"Gotta break the cycle, just breaking the current problem set? That ain't gonna solve the long term issue."

Grace
"Yes. I hear you. Get rid of the ability for people to hold power over others. But it's gotta be systemic, right? You've got to remove the very essence of control."

Grace looked out over the sky, her eyes tracing the shapes of clouds.

"It's going to hurt at first. People don't know how to be. That's where they stand the most chance of taking up the reigns again. I've got a story about that..."

Mara
"More like you'd have to get rid of the reigns all together." Mara offered in return and chuckled at Grace's offer of a story.

"You and Ghoa Tzi both." She leaned back then, letting one hand fall over the back of the bench as she let out a gentle sigh and closed her eyes, letting herself relax.

"Whats gotta happen? Is people like us? Just keep tryin...somethings gotta give eventually."

Grace
"What's gotta happen is that people have to lay down all the bullshit. The ties that keep them bound. Like, people are so afraid to lose their jobs, afraid about the economy and shit, well, the economy goes bye-bye, and then what? People freak out, because they don't know how to be without a 9 to 5, you see?"

"The reigns comfort us. But it's all meaningless slavery. Doesn't have to be like this."

Mara
"Guess we'll have to wait and see what the ending has in store for us right?" Mara grins at that nodding a few times as she looks around the parkette.

"You met any other folks who are new to the city?" She asks casually. "Like i said before, I've been outta Denver for the last month or so...figured there must be some others who popped up in that time."

Grace
"Ahh, well... Lena, heh. There's also Hawksley, he's kinda... in your face. But he likes books. And there's Sid, she's nice. I don't know if you know them or not, but there's that."

She stretches her neck with a few loud pops and a sigh. Been strained a bit lately perhaps?

Mara
Mara listens as Grace's neck pops and strains, a sound that she likely rarely had to deal with. She looks over at Grace with a curious look and said. "You should really get yourself into a yoga class girl, I know it sounds cheesy as shit...but it'll help that stress, and the tight muscles."

She considers the list of names and that little smirk flitters across her lips once more and she nods. "I know Sid, much as she might not wanna know me. The Hawksley guy though....thats a new one." She muses on that for a moment, her hand reaching up to run along the smooth plane of her skull.

"You need some help with those kinks?"

Grace
Hah, yoga? Grace would die. Lihiterally die. It would be less than pretty. She just needed a good neck pillow, yeah.

"Uh, help? No... no, I'm fine. Just been staring at my monitor too long. The neck strain. You understand."

Mara
Mara shrugged at that, once again non-pulsed by the fact that Grace didn't need her help. "Your call girl, I just know more then a little about how the human body works. Figured I'd offer." She rolls her own neck about, the movement fluid and perhaps just a ittle more flexible then normal.

"Seriously though....I get the whole, transcend the flesh thing...but for now. All we got is the flesh were in. Gotta keep it in workin order or you aint gonna be able to transcend the next door you come across."

Grace
"True, just... " touching isn't really her thing. Would make her more tense, would make her up and leave, and that would be awkward as hell.

"Heheh, there is no door. Except when you run into it," she giggled at her own joke.

Mara
Mara chuckles too and shakes her head. "Well keep that sense of humour girl, seriously. It will help you aaalot." Mara nods as she considers her watch and frowns.

"Alright...fun as this is? I gotta hoof it back to the Chantry, I have some duties to take care of there that I've been neglecting for oh....about a month and a half." Mara chuckles as she moves to rise, pulling the canvas bag over her shoulder once more and turned to Grace, offering her a half assed salute.

"See you round girl...you keep safe alright?"

Grace
"I'll try to stay away from dogs," she said, taking this as a cue to leave, herself, she packed on the laptop bag and stood. "And black hats."

"Was nice meeting you," she gave a smile to Mara in farewell.

Mara
"You too Grace." At that Mara turns and starts to hoof it...its only a few steps before shes actually running, maybe she really meant it when she said she had to hoof it back to the Chantry.

Pholosophy

Grace Evans
After pulling a near all-nighter on Friday, without much in the way of sustenance but caffeine, Grace had need of something more substantial.

Normally, the college version of noddles was something bought in a brick and seasoned with a foil packet, but this was something of a rare treat. Pho Duy was right next door to a shitty A&W and KFC chimera, which Grace always felt was a bit sad. Why eat that, when there was heaven in a bowl to be had?

And so, she opened the door to the place, and the warm smell of pho hit her in the face. Spices, like cinnamon and something hotter, something sweeter, and the heavy undercurrent of meat.

She smiled to the server, a small Vietnamese girl, who told her to sit where she liked. In the back, then, face to the door, she thought, and made her way there.

And a note about Grace: today she's wearing the usual jeans, sneakers, and shirt combination. This time, her shirt reads "The physics is THEORETICAL, but the FUN IS REAL".

Gadfly83
It was a relatively nice day.  The sun was shining, the birds were making that weird noise they do and there wasn't any of that annoying environmental precipitation.  Normal people were out and about on a day like this.

And was the moment Grace's phone went off.  A new message from possibly the least normal person she knew.

Gadfly83 says:  My point was, if you think your wake up call came from an external source, maybe it was your Bonita Marie.

Does time move differently for this guy or something?

Grace Evans
The laptop bag got swung onto the table when her phone went off, and she went digging in search. But upon finding it, and finding the message, she just quirked up a sly smile.

The server came by again, delivering a menu, at which Grace didn't even glance, and just told the girl to bring her a large P2 with extra steak please. The 'please' was the only polite thing about that interaction, as Grace was busy texting while she said it.

Chimeric1 says: I don't know man, it was just very weird all around, you know? Where was my Bonita Marie in all that? The voices? The visions? If it was something external, it made its presence known but not its substance, if you get my meaning.

Chimeric1 says: Also, hello.

Gadfly83
Gadfly83 says:  So you wanna know if the voice in the back of your head has blue eyes or brown?  Think about that for a minute.

Gadfly83 says:  Hi.  How'd the encryption go?

Grace Evans
Chimeric1 says: I guess what I mean is I can't really tell. Did that come from me or from the outside?

She thinks about this for a few seconds, before coming back.

Chimeric1 says: Outside, I guess. I'm not prone to hallucinating. Huh.

A chill went through her, even in this under-airconditioned place. Something else, some external something touched her, made her feel that connection to everything.

Chimeric1 says: Camo is a go. I managed to get it working last night. We'll be unknown as long as someone doesn't come up with a way to solve discrete logarithms in O(n)

Gadfly83
Gadfly83 says:  Highly doubtful.  I really don't wanna jinx anything but places like this are notoriously lax.  There's a word in my head that I'd rather not put out into the universe, but lets say it involves baked confection and a method of locomotion.

Gadfly83 says:  How are you at hardware, btw?  We should probably think about building some VR gear.  I mean, if you ever wanted to see R2.0.

Grace Evans
A plate piled high with various stuff gets delivered at around that point, along with a large glass of icewater. Bean sprouts, whole sprigs of basil and sawgrass, a few lime wedges and jalapeno slices now stare Grace down, and she gives a short glance to the server with a smile and a 'thanks' before doing the predictably American thing and digging into the bean sprouts early.

But with her other hand, she's busy typing...

Chimeric1 says: Uh, I can put computers together. I have taken some electronics classes, and I know how to use a breadboard. That's about the extent of it. VR gear is a little beyond me. But what about if we started with something kinda close, like an Oculus Rift dev kit?

Chimeric1 says: Is that how you get to R2.0?

Gadfly83
Gadfly83 says:  A good place to start, though it would require a little bit of modification.  I can probably help with that.

Gadfly83 says:  And yeah.  Well, sort of.  I've heard some lusers manage to surf to it accidentally, not really knowing what they've stumbled onto.  Oh, lusers = 'enlightened users.'  They're not awake like us, they're just really good at what they do.  Every club has their equivalent too.  The Chorus especially.

Gadfly83 says:  But the way R2.0 is designed, full immersion is where its at.  Baby steps though.

Grace Evans
That word, 'luser', struck a memory, there, as she nibbled sprouts and passed the time away.

Chimeric1 says: Ahh, you thought I was a luser before, I remember...

Chimeric1 says: Full immersion VR. Nice.

Just then, the large bowl of pho arrived, a fresh mound of raw steak slices piled on top, to cook in the hot broth. She shoved them down into the soup with a chopstick, and started prepping.

Because, you see, the bowl of noodle soup in its current state is like a plain burger, or a cheese pizza -- a little blah. She put the phone face-down on the table and would be ignoring Gadfly for a bit while fixing up the thing.

Just about everything on that little plate went in, in some fashion. the limes were squeezed, the basil shredded and dumped in, bean sprouts and jalapenos, along with a few drops of Sriracha and the overpoweringly strong fish sauce (which is totally the wrong way to do it, but...)

And finally, after all that, the pink steak had turned brown, the thing smelled like comfort with a sharp kick, and Grace pulled a long clump of rice noodles out of the bath to cool in the air, before devouring. The chiming of her phone would wait until that had been accomplished.

Gadfly83
Gadfly83 says:  Not VR.  Drop the V.  Its like I was telling you, the Matterhorn is real, like heaven or hell candy mountain are real.  Or the Fiddlers Green!  

Gadfly83 says:  Shit, those are all bad examples.  You don't have to die to get there.  At least I don't think so.

Gadfly83 says:  You could also use a neural deck, but I'm a little squeamish when it comes to the wetware.

Gadfly83 says:  I'm sure I'll get over it some day.  

Gadfly83 says:  Xanadu!  Its as real as Xanadu!

Gadfly83 says:  Hello?  Still there?

Grace Evans
And the chiming got more insistent. Thank goodness there are no rules against texting with your mouth full.

Chimeric1 says: Hey, yeah, I'm just eating. I do require some bodily maintenance.

Chimeric1 says: Neural deck? Wetware? Shit... I'm already over it. I just didn't know it was, you know, a thing.

Gadfly83
Gadfly83 says:  Its definitely  a thing.  An obvious step for some.  It'll take me a few years to warm up to it.  By then I'll hopefully have the Human I/O system mapped out anyway.

Gadfly83 says:  What are you eating?

Grace Evans
Ahh, the soup gets its attention too, even as the topic swings to wetwares and Grace is grinning while eating. In one hand, the chopsticks, in the other her phone, and her eyes flit back and forth to what needs attention next.

Chimeric1 says: Pho. I needed something big and cheap and good. Been living on caffeine too damn much.

Chimeric1 says: I'm sure you can understand that.

Gadfly83
Gadfly83 says:  Yeah.  I should probably...go outside or something.

Gadfly83 says:  Maybe eat something that doesn't come out of a box.

Gadfly83 says:  That's how they get ya.  Preservatives.

Gadfly83 says:  Which reminds me, you get anything on that h+ lead?

Grace Evans
Chimeric1 says: Welcome to join me. I won't bite.

And she means that, in a way she hopes he will understand. I won't hate you for being weird.

Chimeric1 says: I don't. No more contact with the l33t. But I'm not sure I want to be going poking around in that sort of thing myself. I let the others know.

Gadfly83
Gadfly83 says:  Loud and clear there.  I will admit, I've got a creeping bit of curiosity there.  Shelfing it though.

Gadfly83 says:  Biology's calling.  I'm gonna leave you with your pho.  Catch you later?

Grace Evans
Chimeric1 says: But... okay. Leave me with visions of Bonita Marie and neural wetware dancing in my head, why don't you.

Chimeric1 says: The pho is pretty good company though.

Chimeric1 says: Bye for now.