Taltos
[Write, write, write.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 6, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
Taltos
[Extending. Write, write, write.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Taltos
[Stam.]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (9) ( success x 1 )
Taltos
[Extending, but refining the process. +1 diff. WP.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 6, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
Taltos
[Stam.]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 )
Grace
Grace
doesn't waste time, it's precious these days. She's got Táltos' number,
and it's time to spread the information around. He gets a text, and it
goes like this:
Grace: Hey, we should get together sometime. When's good for you?
She
doesn't say anything about the real reason for meeting. As she said
before, 'I'll just invite you over for tea, or something, and it won't
be tea.'
Taltos
Somewhere in the city. There's a
man in his late twenties or early thirties or maybe mid twenties it's
awful hard to tell. The point is somewhere there's this man (beguiling, lusty [resonant]),
and he's outside where the wind can get him and when his phone dings
from his laptop case he hears it like an after-effect. Blinks his long,
straight lashes and then somewhere in the city there's a young woman who
just sent a text and she gets a reply text and the reply text goes
like:
Táltos: What about now?
Grace
Grace: I'm all for now, but... where? I need a few more dimensions :)
Grace tries to go with a math joke. Time being a dimension, space being three... So she needs to know a few more, yes?
Taltos
Táltos: :] I'm @ City Park by Ferril Lake right now
Táltos: The one iwth th boathouse
Táltos: *with
Táltos: But if you want to grab a drink we can meet at [near-by coffee shop-cum-independent bookstore]
Grace
[Awareness! Because always!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Grace
Grace: The lake is fine. BRT
It
doesn't take long, really. Grace lives very close, and when she is
close, there is that faint echo of slipping, sliding, reminiscent of a
tiny earthquake -- if Táltos is paying attention..
She wears what she always wears. It's jeans and sneakers, and that grey turtleneck jacket, topped off with her laptop bag.
Taltos
[IS Táltos paying attention to things? Awareness!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )
Taltos
Táltos (beguiling, Satyrical) is more alert and more energetic today than he was the other night when there was a Convergence [Confluence]
of Awakenened Individuals. The wind has braced him or the grass has.
There are late, out-of-season clovers near the soles of his big-big
boots, dockers or something with the laces half-undone, tongue gaping,
skinny dark jeans that are worn enough they're hanging onto his belt
like they've gotta do that or else. He's wearing a band teeshirt that's a
little short for him (he's just tall, tall and thin, makes him seem
taller, but less big), over that a jacket that's green and vaguely
military probably cozened from a thrift-shop chest. And, as usual, he is
a man who wears jewelry well: a series of necklaces, most of them
tucked beneath his shirt, one glinting gold, though only two rings on
his fingers today, and those not easily visible because his left hand
has a bandage wrapped around the hand and wrist.
And where is he
wearing all of this? By Ferril Lake. Under a tree that's beginning to be
turn as gold as the honey bees'd make from the clover by his feet, see,
its leaves rough and shaken, a laptop bag at his side and one arm along
the back of the bench. He was typing away earlier, but between getting a
text from Grace and waiting for her, he seems to have decided to just
watch the lake and the trees. He does it with enjoyment.
He does it with presence.
It's
hard to imagine Táltos feeling awkward about anything, no matter how
idle his hands are. They're idle now- or are until that sense of
slip-slide, quake-shake, shifting (something shifts, something is
shifting, little-changes, little pushes, little revolutions: oh, I am
beginning to know your resonance) has his nostrils flaring and has him
looking around until Grace comes into sight, then shifts forward, both
feet coming off the grass then thumping down again just as his hands
thump onto his thighs, then mid-rise he raises one hand instead (there's
a clink, a clatter, something belled and metallic around his wrist) to
say by way of greeting,
"'Ey, Grace!"
Grace
Her
shoes crunch on the grass (the grass that thinks with superpositioned
pigments that dance everywhere at once to find their way) and she's
thinking about that when she comes across Táltos.
His is not the
worst presence one could be in. There are others she's felt, stronger
and overwhelmingly dire or sickening. But Táltos enthralls. The very
clover beneath his feet reach out in their own responding lust.
"Hey,
yourself. I brought my stuff, you want to get hooked up?" she asks,
smiling. "I can also get your laptop, if you want. Or, do you have
questions first?"
Taltos
Mid-rise becomes
muscle-tremor (earth-quake, slip-shake), then muscles re-bunching then
slackening, so he sits down hard (and noisily) on his spine, spares his
bones a wince as a tithe to being alive to feel it, then scootches an
inch to the side, leaving Grace a clear space on the bench for her to
call her very very own, and then Táltos is regarding Sera's protégé
quite seriously. Quite seriously indeed, though the after-effect
eye-crinkle grin is still in effect: a mellow late-afternoon sort-of
light that warms his eyes. He swipes some hair off of his broad brow,
and says, "Questions first. Be prepared for an unrepentent and
mistrustful Luddite. Tell me the story of the information network, and
how'dja come to be its," here, he scratches the underside of his jaw,
"guardian or keeper?"
Grace
"See, this is why
we're in the park, and not in a bookstore... It's less easy to
overhear," she says, sliding her laptop out of its bag, putting it up on
the table.
"I got hacked by someone really fucking strong, who
told me that I had been spotted and my chat logs put on watch. So, the
guy I was chatting with and I had to get creative. See, the Authorities
really seem to perk up when you've got someone trying to teach you all
the history of the Virtual Adepts in plain text..."
"So, we came
up with Ginger. We being myself and Gadfly. He's been kind of showing me
the ropes, yeah? I set up the encryption, he set up the wards, and
we... took over a phone sex line." She's booting up the machine now, the
background a swirly math-y looking thing. It's not geometric, it's wild
and tangled.
"But you know, that's all well and good for the two
of us, now we have secure communications, but I thought why not extend
that to the rest of Denver? I mean, we could all use a way to talk about
important things without having the NSA hear about it first."
Taltos
"You got hacked?" He turns the echo into a question, Táltos, a clarification of the given value of You, because he's (unrepentent [mistrustful] Luddite) not sure she's using the word to mean her computer systems or just phone logs or a more invasive (more immediate [slip the thread into the spirit and drag out thoughts and words and control]),
and there's wariness behind it. He isn't someone who gets filled with
nervous energy when he's wary though he's always full-up of energy
unless he's drooping, wilting, and he's not wilting today, but the
point: the point! The point is his energy isn't nervous, but he does
sound wary, not skeptical but cautious or concerned.
He doesn't
interrupt again, and when she finishes her story he chuffs a laugh- this
earth-smoke sound of a thing, less humour than appreciation,
follow-it-up-with, "All right, I see. Nice. So,
forgive-me-if-this-is-too-whatever-or-retreading-old-ground-but," a wave
of his hand, sweeping, "but what do you think about the traditionalists
you've run across? Why're you them against the Authorities That Be? The
latter too still for you?"
Grace
He asks that
question, and it makes her eyes drag off of the screen where she was
working on setting up the program. "Too still? You mean, they slow
progress? Well, that's just the tip of the iceberg isn't it? Here's a
story for you. One kind of near and dear to my own heart. There was this
guy, right, and he's a genius. Decides to liberate the JSTOR online
library of science journals, because it's behind a pay wall, and all
that knowledge should be available. Should be accessible to the Third
World, should be accessible to anyone. He doesn't even break any laws
doing it," she says, sighs heavily.
"But they found something to
charge him with. And they killed him. I'm pretty sure of that now. The
papers say suicide, but I don't think so. It's played out like that
before. Time and time again, someone decides to do the right thing and
break down the walls, and they just..." she trails off, like she can't
come up with words strong enough to describe what they do.
"The
first one of Them that I met tried to get me to help track down Gadfly,
so that he could be disposed of, I'm thinking. I wasn't even Awake yet.
But... just fuck that. They treat people like they're obstacles, and
society like their Ponzi scheme," she says, and she's obviously upset,
can't really concentrate on the work now.
Taltos
Grace
is upset and Táltos puts a hand out. He either touches her hand,
knuckles raw-red, fingers long, a jangle of bracelets, or he touches her
shoulder. He touches her anyway: spring-warmth, clover-conjuring,
green-fuse driving, summer-kinged warmth. He's loud and he's unsubtle
and he might not be a person who invades personal space with impunity
but he doesn't always pay notice to it. Táltos (the táltos [shaman])
gives her a close-lipped smile. This wistful twitch of his mouth. Then
he withdraws again, resting his elbow hard on the park's table, near the
humming of Grace's machine, and cups his chin in his hand, leaning
aslant. His shoulders are narrow, but sharply delineated through his
jacket.
"Sorry about your friend ... or your hero. The genius."
He nods. The suicide-that-maybe-wasn't. Táltos looks contemplative, and
pats one of his pockets down, though he doesn't bring anything out of
it- it's this half-formed intention like he wants something but isn't
sure what it is.
"And I didn't mean 'slow progress.' I meant- " He
pauses. Then, "I don't believe you've used your spark, your
Jirilo-gift, uh, how do you say, a Working while we've been near, but I
can feel your signature and it feels like-" He squints, lashes coming
together but eyes not closing "- something eternally shifting, something
moving and revolutionary. It's just a little spark, but it's pushing or
changing."
"And they aren't for change. They're trying hard to make everything still and changeless."
Grace
She
nervously moves that hand away when he touches her. It's not that she
doesn't like him, but the contact of another person has never been
comforting to her. And now, the tingling nothing in her fingers makes
such unforeseen touches shocking with needles.
"Why would anyone
want to keep things the way they are?" she asks, disguising the strange
jerk of her hand by returning to the keyboard.
"Still, I don't
think that's the point. One could change the world for the worse, too. I
want to see it change, yeah, but for the better. Do you think, those
impressions you get of people have something to do with them as a
person?"
She is new, this one. She asks questions -- must ask questions.
Grace
"Here, give me your phone, if you are still interested."
[Sorry, forgot a line]
Taltos
[Ooh, do I notice? Empathy!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )
Grace
[Manipulation + Subterfuge = Nuh uh!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 7) ( success x 1 )
Taltos
Why would anyone want to keep things the way they are? "Better the devil you know."
Táltos
doesn't watch Grace any more carefully than you'd watch a Technocrat
(perhaps not a Union Technocrat, but the Sons of Ether and Virtual
Adepts will always be Techno-mages, Techno-crats, to Táltos), or let's
be honest, a strange Traditionalist, who's offered you a place on a
'secure' network they're in control of. He doesn't think she's nefarious
or going to use it against him -- she seems to be what she's presenting
herself as. But the dreamspeaker is still a touch wary. "If something
or someone does breach Ginger's security, does she have any standing
orders? Self-destruct, mass-warning dings?" The hand he'd put out
instead goes to his phone though he doesn't hand it over quite yet. He
takes it out though.
"And - you mean on a who-they-essentially-are
level? In some respects, I do. Those impressions tell a lot about how
someone looks and interacts with their own canny gift, you know, or how
they've used it in the past, or the how of
their usage- what they do in order to interact with the world on that
level. Personally I find how the balance between primal forces lays
itself out in a worker's resonance one of the most interesting things
you can feel in your bones."
Grace
"The beauty of
Ginger is that Ginger does not phone out. You contact Ginger, along
with whoever else might be trying to use the line for... ah... other
purposes. My little bit to alter your phone just lets you into the
deeper level. It will look to the rest of the world like you are in it
for, you know, phone sex," she explains, and is a bit nervous about
that. So far everyone's taken the idea fairly well, but then...
"If
Ginger gets found out, they'll be able to tell that some hacking went
on, but they won't be able to trace it back to you, and they won't be
able to trace our social network. There's just no trail to follow. If
Ginger gets breached, she dies a quiet death," she says, and there is
conviction in this.
"So, I mean, if you're worried, I'm not going
to say don't be. Everything's dangerous. Just, a lot of work has gone
into this. And some Work as well, if you get my meaning."
His
explanation of their resonances makes her wonder... The shifting
revolutionary, the thing that wants to break down the walls? Well, yes,
that does seem accurate. What is hacking, but breaking the barriers
down, and getting in? And she hacks the universe itself. She just looks at him with those ever-moving eyes, and nods, like 'yeah, I think so too'.
Taltos
His
reluctance doesn't spring from potential phone-sex line appearing on
his phone-records. Táltos doesn't have a wife or girlfriend who'd get
all irritated. He doesn't have invasive parents who'd be disappointed.
His reluctance just springs from a deep mis-trust, something that floats
underneath the surface. So he hesitates again, but then hands his phone
over. "All right, sounds fair enough. Just give me clear instructions."
And
Grace gives Táltos a look and nods, and he nods back. His mustache (and
it's a fine mustache, it is - well-kept, thick, practically glossy)
twitches as he considers something, then -- movement! -- just leans
forward, both elbows on the table now, hands together and fingers
twined, like he's anticipating, eyes going from his phone to Grace.
Watchful! Watchful. Expectant.
Unsure whether-or-not-he-should-be-quiet. He goes with 'quiet,' for now.
Well.
He tries to go with 'quiet' for now.
Grace
Grace
gives him a small smile, as he bores into her with his eyes. And then
it's to his phone, and to her laptop, and she connects laptop to phone
with a cord, and begins tapping away.
It's not long. So many have
received Ginger so far, that modifications to the program to get it to
work on their various devices have already been made. She just has to
run the right commands for this one. Every now and then, she sneaks a
side glance at him to see if he's still watching her, hawk-like. "So...
I'm not peeking, if that's what you think. I know it's hard to tell. But
I don't do that." Well, how would he know? She could peek, do far worse than that even...
After
a few minutes of extreme focus, she undoes the plug, and hands his
phone over, with a slight smile. "It's fairly simple. Just call the
number labeled 'Ginger' in your contacts. Or you can text it, if you
just want to drop off a message. There will be a menu you can interact
with."
And if Táltos does decide to test out his new toy, he'll
indeed be presented with the following menu, spoken in low, sensual, a
bit robotic tones:
"Hello, and welcome. To listen to messages,
dial 1. To view text messages, dial 2. To leave a voice message, dial 3.
To leave a text message, dial 4. And remember, love is just a dial
away."
Taltos
He does keep watching her.
Interested. Most of his weight hanging on his elbows instead of in the
seat of his pants like it should be if he were really sitting. Easy to
imagine Táltos as a kid being told to sit down properly at the table
young man. When she says she's not peeking, his eyebrows bristle
upwards, but he nods to accept what she told him. Believe it? Well,
perhaps. He's trusting her with his phone in spite of reservations, and
that'll have to be it, for now. But he does keep watching, curiously.
Táltos
accepts the (his) phone back and weighs it in the palm of his hand.
Muscle-memory wants it to be heavier. Wants it to be more of a stone.
Poetic language almost demands it. Of course the phone's just as heavy
as it ever was, just as dense, and he does play with it a little,
tactile man like Táltos can't resist, though he gives an exaggerated
little shiver at Ginger's sensual-laced-in-hollow-robotic voice,
smiling, "Gives me the willies, and not where you'd want 'em," and after
he's heard the menu, he says, "So it'll work like a - communal
message-board? Mass text-messages to everyone on the network, etcetera?"
Adds,
"Thank you. It's a very... social move." He has to think of the right
word there, that pause between very and social. "May I ask you something
about politics?"
Grace
Grace laughs when he says
Ginger gives him the willies. "Really? Sera wanted to marry her," she
says, seemingly not offended by his slight against Team Striped Horse's baby.
"Yeah, it's like a communal message board. People have asked if it
could do more, but not without breaking some of the security features,
and I don't really like that idea."
When he asks her about politics, she quirks a brow. "What about politics?"
Taltos
"I
think she sounds like a woman made of eggshells, an empty eggshell
woman," Táltos says. "How're you supposed to imagine holding such a
thing?"
Another, smaller, exaggerated shiver-shake.
Then,
"Well, I've heard your thoughts on the conventional fuckers, but I'm
interested in the perspective of somebody new on the Nine and all that.
How'd you pick your mentor. Gadfly," and he sounds musing. His eyes do
go softer when he starts to muse, but now that he's done playing with
the phone, slips it neatly back into his laptop bag, fingers lingering,
he's really just watching the apprentice. "There no other paradigm
you're drawn to?"
He doesn't sound like he's trying to devil's
advocate argue her out of her choice. He really does just sound:
curious. The kind of curiousity which is like a charm, scratched on a
tree, a song-whisper-thing, come-hither: his curiousity is always come
hither, huh? That's Táltos, hithering at the same time.
Grace
"There's no other paradigm you're drawn to?" she responds, smirk-filled, turning his question back.
"I
didn't choose Gadfly. Well, I mean, I say that, but... It's like, I
chose this a long time ago, long before my eyes were open. I wrote a
story once, about Alan Turing, and it made a few waves in places I
couldn't have dreamed about. Gadfly memorized it," she says, chuckles at
that one. "And when I had Awakened, he didn't even know. He just wanted
to meet this writer he was so fond of."
"So... We were friends from the beginning." The very beginning, actually.
Taltos
He
laughs -- a shake-of-his-shoulders, the sound something between the
fluid gleam of a snicker and the full-bodied
(love-of-life-want-want-want) of a guffaw -- when she turns the question
back. He says, "There are two other traditions with philosophies I find
interesting, though not quite true once I learn more. So yes, there
is." He crosses his eyes at her, and smirks: at himself? Perhaps. "So."
But
to give Táltos credit (and he's very good at multi-tasking, at
following more than one thread of conversation [at listening to the
sussuration of a storm, voices dragged through them, while also carrying
on a bar-crawl]), he settles as she talks about not choosing, about the
choice being made, about Gadfly and how they came to meet, and he nods,
cupping his chin in his right hand again.
"What's he like?" A pause, then, grin, "What impression does he leave?"
Grace
"Well,
as far as other traditions... I only really know a few very well. I'd
say... Sera's is close. She's the one who sat me down afterwards and
explained what had happened to me. But she couldn't grasp how I
understood the universe, and I couldn't grasp how hers works either.
Just, there's similarities, I can tell.
"The Etherites, I understand a lot better. I guess they would be a second choice?"
She doesn't really know why he's asking. But it's not like her to leave a question unanswered, her own or someone else's.
When he asks about Gadfly, she bites her lip. The first impression one gets of Gadfly is not particularly good.
"If
someone wanted to find the Platonic ideal of the junction between
distracted and nervous, he'd be a good candidate? He's very shy, very
paranoid. But he's utterly brilliant."
Taltos
"The
idea of going beyond all boundaries appeals, eh?" on Sera's tradition
and Grace's attraction (minute though it might be?) to it.
Táltos
cocks his head when Grace bites her lip, and then flicks a glance toward
the lake. He's still been resting most of his weight on his elbows, and
he finally (jangle, jingle) collapses back on his buttocks. "If I ever
come in contact with him, I'll keep that in mind."
"Come on," and
now he flattens his hands on the table, pushing himself up and standing.
"I'll buy you a drink, coffee if it's too early in the day, in
appreciation. Give appreciation to the grain spirits, or bean spirits as
it were. Tell me where I can find this story you wrote."
Monday, September 30, 2013
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Deathpolka
Serafine
It is somewhere north of midnight but not yet two a.m. Two a.m. which is after the last call for alcohol because the city of Denver tells the 'tender at Tooey's that the place needs to fucking close down at two a.m. So: somewhere north of midnight and south of two a.m. and a band that treads the line between black metal and hard driving polka is on the small stage in the performance space in the back. The lead guitarist is wearing a tophat and the drummer sports the world's longest beard and there's something thrashingly noisy about the music they are pumping out but no one's thrashing in the open space in front of the stage where the rope lights are snaking about, all glowing.
There are photographs mounted to the interior walls, an exhibit, and the photographer is a tall, lanky girl with an unfortunate overbite who is wearing three scarfs in succession wrapped around her neck and a t-shirt with the cover of The Giving Tree on it and she is talking to a not-quite-as-tall but still tall chick with blond hair curling and sweatdamp around her shoulders who is holding a bottle of tequila loosely between thumb and forefinger of her right hand, her posture familiar, easy, louche.
The wail of the guitar over the oompah polka beat disturbs her not at all.
Whitney
One of the perks of being nineteen years old is you're technically an adult and you don't have a curfew anymore and you can do whatever you want so long as the person responsible for you in a fiduciary sense feels you're doing what you're supposed to be doing insofar as bettering yourself and your station goes.
One of the downsides comes in the form of a huge Sharpie-black X on the back of your hand when you go into a bar on a weeknight hoping to catch a show.
At least the show is all ages and she still has her passport. No driver's license but she whips out the passport and tucks it back into her patchwork messenger bag and waits for Grace to show her driver's license. The girl is wearing combat boots and a knee-length olive green denim skirt and a brown henley underneath a black vest. Her thick hair is down and her eyes are blackly made up.
They've been out for a couple hours because Whitney was bored and didn't want to go home and hey Grace let's go to a show but that show ended and then the cops showed up and she still doesn't want to go home so here they are.
"Is that POLKA?" the blonde asks and then grins like that just made her night. "That is so rad."
Grace
It's not a movie, is what she keeps having to remind herself. It's only a crowd. Only people. (Only?)
Sometimes, though, you just have to get out. Grace hadn't gone and done anything remotely resembling play since that freaking movie, and something inside just wants to break loose.
So she said yes when Whitney offered to drag her out to do something. Besides, it's nice to reward one's self when one has had a major breakthrough.
Grace does have a driver's license, shows it with a (what she hopes is) matching smile. Whitney may have dressed appropriately, but Grace lacks the desire to dress for others, really, and is in her usual uniform of jeans, sneakers, and a grey turtleneck jacket over what is probably some silly t-shirt... There is no makeup to be seen on this one.
"Haah, sounds like death polka," she replies, laughing. It's one of those great and weird juxtapositions, this music.
Serafine
It is POLKA. It is polka / black metal and sometimes the noise fills the room and the beat moves beneath it, syncopated and familiar and niggling at the ur-brain that recognizes the polka beneath the metal and cannot quite believe that the top-hatted guy is both shredding and shrieking beneath it.
The performance space is tucked into a nook at the far-end of the bar with a projection screen over it playing old black and white movies. White-skinned women with dark eye make-up and pincurls, and jaunty little men in bowler hats. Just another layer of stimulation.
Sera is - well, unmistakeable and hard to ignore, even from a distance. Even glimpses through a crowd and across the room; even lost in the noise and the dim lights see: she is telling a joke or an elaborate story or listening to one but participating, bright and lively at the center of a knot of people far enough from the stage and the speakers that one can, occasionally, hear what a stranger says, though still likely not hear oneself think. Wearing her fucking uniform of the evening: the world's tiniest red silk wrap skirt which extends approximately 1/2 inch below her ass, torn fishnets, silver-heeled platformed boots covered in silver buckles that take her from 5'5" to oh, 5'10" or so, and a midriff-baring leather bustier covered with small silver spikes.
Midway through the conversation, though, she lifts her sharp little chin and scans through the crowd, her senses are open, see - always so damned open and she spots Grace across the bar, lifts her own bottle in toast or invitation and waves Grace over.
Whitney
[perc + awareness because yolo]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Whitney
"Omigod, it does..."
This isn't either of their scenes but it's good to hear Grace laugh and the sound of it injects laughter into Whitney's response and she's about to steer her towards the bartender and his wares when something else catches her attention.
At first it's the young woman across the room and that flash of her essence like she's the only person in the place who's dancing but then it's the woman herself. Gorgeous in a primeval dangerous way and Grace can see Whitney enthralled for a half-dozen heartbeats before she remembers where she is and shakes her head hard and realizes the dangerous-tall woman with the sidecut recognizes Grace.
"Is that one of Ginger's friends?"
We've switched from educational metaphors to harmless barely-audible euphemisms.
Grace
Sera simply cannot be missed, even in the crowd, even in the distracting music. Whitney and Grace are both staring at her, when she beckons.
"Yeah, she's a friend. Good friend. Come on, you've got to meet her," Grace says, heading over to the woman in red. Sera's surrounded herself with people, but... they're only people, right?
"Hey, Sera! I brought a friend. This is Whitney," she says, loud, necessarily so to beat out the jaunty, screaming, deathpolka.
Serafine
By the time Whitney and Grace reach her, Sera has muttered something into the photographer's ear, shared a toast and a familiar grin with a hipster dude in skin-tight purple jeans and an ironic brown fedora with a feather in the band, and slipped out of the small crowd. They are not alone, precisely. It's a bar, late on a Thursday: not packed but there are always people ready and willing to start the weekend early, and for some of it, it never stops.
Sera: smells of spice and smoke and alcohol tonight. Clove cigarettes cling to her hair, wreath around her skin, and she's been drinking straight from that bottle like a fish. Holds it with the familiarity a gunslinger reserves for his favorite revolver, doesn't she?
So she is bright and loose and rather smeary and also: laughing and dark eyed. So very dark-eyed tonight, because her pupils are huge, unfocused, devouring.
"Grace!" arms open wide, bottle in hand, nearly ready to huge the apprentice but some underlying instinct prickles some awareness or something so the gesture is shut down and subverted. Also hugging people when your clothing can cut skin is not necessarily adviseable. Still: arms open, her mouth a wide, quick, mobile slash as it drops to Grace's ear. Loud perforce, naturally - it is fucking loud in here. "I though you were a hallucination! Not really your kinda place is it? 'Course just 'cos your talking doesn't mean you're not, but you're making fucking sense so - "
Then she turns, all swimming-abrupt, fixes her too-large eyes on Whitney and lifts the bottle in tribute. "Whitney! Cool. You must be persuasive if you dragged Grace out for death polka - "
Or no, the bottle is not lifted in tribute. It is lifted in offering. First Grace, then Whitney.
Whitney
The newcomer hangs back until the acquaintances properly greet each other. Keeps one hand wrapped around the weathered strap of her bag and nothing about her catches the light save for a small stud in her left nostril. When Sera turns her attention towards her she sees a strong brow and a strong nose and the girl is only an inch or so shorter than her wearing negligible heels.
If Whitney had to run she could run in her boots. She stops herself from looking past Sera's waist because she could catch sight of more flesh than would be considered polite in mixed company and the lingering of whatever magic she's done in the last few hours laps at her like the heat of a familiar fire and Whitney already looks somewhat awed by the time the Cultist turns her attention towards her.
"Who wouldn't want to come out for death polka?" she asks. Her voice is bell-clear and low without being fried. She takes the tequila only when it's her turn and belts it out of the bottle like a champ. This isn't her first rodeo.
Her uncle's going to be pissed when she gets home but whatever. She might not even make it home. Life is fucking short. As she hands back the bottle she also extends her hand.
"Sera?" Just for confirmation. Eyebrows raised. They relax and Whitney smiles regardless of the response. "Nice to meet you."
Grace
Sera's having Fun, more Fun than Grace will likely ever touch. Grace wants to say something about hallucinations, but... it's one of those things, right? Shouting at the top of one's lungs about the truth of perception because the music is too loud just seems wrong...
"She's very persuasive, and besides, this is a celebratory get-out-of-the-apartment night! Woo!" And why not accept a bit of nerve-reducing alcohol really? It's not like she couldn't use it. She takes a pull from the bottle, makes a horrible face (gah, it burns) and produces a weird noise. And then, it's off to Whitney.
Who of course, handles her liquor far better than the actually legal Grace. Natch.
Serafine
"Serafíne," the Cultest amends in response to that question-seeking-confirmation. Has to shift the bottle from right hand to left to shake but she does that seamless and thoughtless and takes Whitney's hand in her own. Callouses on her hand as they make contact, rough but cool from the neck of the bottle. This quick, crawling little grin follows the correction. " - call-me-Sera."
How many times has she said that to how many strangers in how many rooms? Can't count and doesn't. Sera, takes her hand back and then her bottle back and yes, Grace, it is straight tequila, no lime and no salt so it fucking burns. Note that before Sera takes another pull she licks the back of her sweaty hand for the salt, though, and does-without the lime.
"Oh my fuck," as Grace takes that pull and actually woos, Sera tosses back her head, laughing beneath the scrawl of the guitar. To Whitney, " - you get super extra bonus points for that. Never thought I'd see Grace do a shot from a bottle of Patron."
While they're talking, a tall, blond, bearded guy detaches himself from the knot of people around the photographer and walks up behind Sera. Takes her shoulders in his hands, both familiar and careful of the spikes on her bustier. Grace will recognize him as Dan-he's-cool, the consor she met at Sera's house the night she came to install Ginger. To Whitney: just a tall, skinny, well-tattooed hipster.
He kisses Sera on the crown of her head then drops his mouth to her ear and murmurs something, which brings her attention swinging around, brief and full to him.
The exchange lasts just a moment before Sera's turning back to Whitney and Grace, offering both another shot from her bottle by way of apology.
"I gotta go see some folks off, you guys have a kickass night if I don't catch up with you again before it's over - !"
Whitney
One glug of alcohol in a body Whitney's size isn't going to tide her over the rest of the night but that black X on the back of her hand is enough to stop her from taking anything else that isn't given to her. She drank root beer at the last place they were at. That seems to be her beverage of choice.
And she would have kept drinking tequila straight out the bottle but for Sera has to go see some people off and Whitney is not sad to see the tequila go but Sera leaving has her pulling a face like aw come on don't go that is more playfully disgruntled than genuinely disappointed.
A name and a fingerprint are enough to help her in the future.
"Okay!" she calls in Sera's wake. Waits until she and the blond man have toddled off before she turns towards Grace with lifted eyebrows and a frozen-looking grin. "Oh my god, I'm sorry, but I have to ask: where did you guys even meet?"
Grace
"Ahh..." How to answer that one in a place so crowded with people? She pauses, her face going a bit blank in the effort to explain. 'Oh yeah, some guy noticed me walking around the Uni vibrating reality, and realized I didn't know what that meant, and gave me Sera's phone number?' Maybe if they were alone.
"She was... the one who explained to me what happened when I... you know..." Grace hopes Whitney knows. It would be a hard thing to explain.
"And where? In a bookstore!"
Sera's not actually allergic to books, as much as she seem like it at first glance. Something about books and covers and judging...
"She's really awesome, isn't she?" Awesome, in that awe-inspiring way, really.
Whitney
The sort of conversations people have in places like this when the ambiance is loud and the words swimming in alcohol tend to be just as loud and just as swimming. A lot of head bobbing and pointless interjection.
So no one notices them. Grace feels slipshod and Whitney destructive. They're young and aware of yet independent of what's going on around them. So the blonde nods and furrows her brow and says "Yeah, yeah," when Grace trails off. She knows.
They met in a bookstore. Unsure if it's a euphemism or truth but Whitney nods anyway and then a topic they can discuss without fear of punishment:
"Totally," Whitney says with briefly wide-eyed and complete agreement. And she's now nowhere in sight so she goes on: "Do you wanna, like, wait for her, or...?"
Grace
"There's no telling if she'll be back... I don't know, what do you want to do?" Grace just shrugs. Having Fun isn't really in her repertoire. The deathpolka is at least new and weird though, and she's in the mood for pretending like she's 'cool'.
Whitney's cool. Grace is awkward. And what else is new?
Whitney
"I kinda wanna stay out a little longer."
If Grace is going to pretend she's cool then Whitney can pretend she's good at asserting herself. She rummages through her bag long enough to find money and glances towards the bar.
"Come on, I'll buy you a delicious nonalcoholic beverage."
Grace
"Yes, I love delicious beverages!" Grace says, and gives Whitney a smile before weaving over to the bar and taking a seat with one empty barstool to the side (for Whitney of course).
"You know, I bought a plant. She's totally amazing!" The need to shout lends some extra oomph to Grace's pronouncements. But there's something there -- amazing female plants? And she does seem excited about it.
And Whitney will hear all about Chloe the english ivy as they sip root beers and listen to the screaming, shredding polka. It's the kind of conversation that confuses and amuses, as Grace goes on about plant physics like that is a thing to talk about at a bar. She doesn't do a great job of pretending to be cool...
But enthusiastic? Yes.
All in all, it was fun (at least from Grace's point of view) and really... desperately needed.
Thank the universe that the deathpolka wasn't (as maybe slightly feared) a portal to a monster dimension turning the crowd into a murderous horde...
It is somewhere north of midnight but not yet two a.m. Two a.m. which is after the last call for alcohol because the city of Denver tells the 'tender at Tooey's that the place needs to fucking close down at two a.m. So: somewhere north of midnight and south of two a.m. and a band that treads the line between black metal and hard driving polka is on the small stage in the performance space in the back. The lead guitarist is wearing a tophat and the drummer sports the world's longest beard and there's something thrashingly noisy about the music they are pumping out but no one's thrashing in the open space in front of the stage where the rope lights are snaking about, all glowing.
There are photographs mounted to the interior walls, an exhibit, and the photographer is a tall, lanky girl with an unfortunate overbite who is wearing three scarfs in succession wrapped around her neck and a t-shirt with the cover of The Giving Tree on it and she is talking to a not-quite-as-tall but still tall chick with blond hair curling and sweatdamp around her shoulders who is holding a bottle of tequila loosely between thumb and forefinger of her right hand, her posture familiar, easy, louche.
The wail of the guitar over the oompah polka beat disturbs her not at all.
Whitney
One of the perks of being nineteen years old is you're technically an adult and you don't have a curfew anymore and you can do whatever you want so long as the person responsible for you in a fiduciary sense feels you're doing what you're supposed to be doing insofar as bettering yourself and your station goes.
One of the downsides comes in the form of a huge Sharpie-black X on the back of your hand when you go into a bar on a weeknight hoping to catch a show.
At least the show is all ages and she still has her passport. No driver's license but she whips out the passport and tucks it back into her patchwork messenger bag and waits for Grace to show her driver's license. The girl is wearing combat boots and a knee-length olive green denim skirt and a brown henley underneath a black vest. Her thick hair is down and her eyes are blackly made up.
They've been out for a couple hours because Whitney was bored and didn't want to go home and hey Grace let's go to a show but that show ended and then the cops showed up and she still doesn't want to go home so here they are.
"Is that POLKA?" the blonde asks and then grins like that just made her night. "That is so rad."
Grace
It's not a movie, is what she keeps having to remind herself. It's only a crowd. Only people. (Only?)
Sometimes, though, you just have to get out. Grace hadn't gone and done anything remotely resembling play since that freaking movie, and something inside just wants to break loose.
So she said yes when Whitney offered to drag her out to do something. Besides, it's nice to reward one's self when one has had a major breakthrough.
Grace does have a driver's license, shows it with a (what she hopes is) matching smile. Whitney may have dressed appropriately, but Grace lacks the desire to dress for others, really, and is in her usual uniform of jeans, sneakers, and a grey turtleneck jacket over what is probably some silly t-shirt... There is no makeup to be seen on this one.
"Haah, sounds like death polka," she replies, laughing. It's one of those great and weird juxtapositions, this music.
Serafine
It is POLKA. It is polka / black metal and sometimes the noise fills the room and the beat moves beneath it, syncopated and familiar and niggling at the ur-brain that recognizes the polka beneath the metal and cannot quite believe that the top-hatted guy is both shredding and shrieking beneath it.
The performance space is tucked into a nook at the far-end of the bar with a projection screen over it playing old black and white movies. White-skinned women with dark eye make-up and pincurls, and jaunty little men in bowler hats. Just another layer of stimulation.
Sera is - well, unmistakeable and hard to ignore, even from a distance. Even glimpses through a crowd and across the room; even lost in the noise and the dim lights see: she is telling a joke or an elaborate story or listening to one but participating, bright and lively at the center of a knot of people far enough from the stage and the speakers that one can, occasionally, hear what a stranger says, though still likely not hear oneself think. Wearing her fucking uniform of the evening: the world's tiniest red silk wrap skirt which extends approximately 1/2 inch below her ass, torn fishnets, silver-heeled platformed boots covered in silver buckles that take her from 5'5" to oh, 5'10" or so, and a midriff-baring leather bustier covered with small silver spikes.
Midway through the conversation, though, she lifts her sharp little chin and scans through the crowd, her senses are open, see - always so damned open and she spots Grace across the bar, lifts her own bottle in toast or invitation and waves Grace over.
Whitney
[perc + awareness because yolo]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Whitney
"Omigod, it does..."
This isn't either of their scenes but it's good to hear Grace laugh and the sound of it injects laughter into Whitney's response and she's about to steer her towards the bartender and his wares when something else catches her attention.
At first it's the young woman across the room and that flash of her essence like she's the only person in the place who's dancing but then it's the woman herself. Gorgeous in a primeval dangerous way and Grace can see Whitney enthralled for a half-dozen heartbeats before she remembers where she is and shakes her head hard and realizes the dangerous-tall woman with the sidecut recognizes Grace.
"Is that one of Ginger's friends?"
We've switched from educational metaphors to harmless barely-audible euphemisms.
Grace
Sera simply cannot be missed, even in the crowd, even in the distracting music. Whitney and Grace are both staring at her, when she beckons.
"Yeah, she's a friend. Good friend. Come on, you've got to meet her," Grace says, heading over to the woman in red. Sera's surrounded herself with people, but... they're only people, right?
"Hey, Sera! I brought a friend. This is Whitney," she says, loud, necessarily so to beat out the jaunty, screaming, deathpolka.
Serafine
By the time Whitney and Grace reach her, Sera has muttered something into the photographer's ear, shared a toast and a familiar grin with a hipster dude in skin-tight purple jeans and an ironic brown fedora with a feather in the band, and slipped out of the small crowd. They are not alone, precisely. It's a bar, late on a Thursday: not packed but there are always people ready and willing to start the weekend early, and for some of it, it never stops.
Sera: smells of spice and smoke and alcohol tonight. Clove cigarettes cling to her hair, wreath around her skin, and she's been drinking straight from that bottle like a fish. Holds it with the familiarity a gunslinger reserves for his favorite revolver, doesn't she?
So she is bright and loose and rather smeary and also: laughing and dark eyed. So very dark-eyed tonight, because her pupils are huge, unfocused, devouring.
"Grace!" arms open wide, bottle in hand, nearly ready to huge the apprentice but some underlying instinct prickles some awareness or something so the gesture is shut down and subverted. Also hugging people when your clothing can cut skin is not necessarily adviseable. Still: arms open, her mouth a wide, quick, mobile slash as it drops to Grace's ear. Loud perforce, naturally - it is fucking loud in here. "I though you were a hallucination! Not really your kinda place is it? 'Course just 'cos your talking doesn't mean you're not, but you're making fucking sense so - "
Then she turns, all swimming-abrupt, fixes her too-large eyes on Whitney and lifts the bottle in tribute. "Whitney! Cool. You must be persuasive if you dragged Grace out for death polka - "
Or no, the bottle is not lifted in tribute. It is lifted in offering. First Grace, then Whitney.
Whitney
The newcomer hangs back until the acquaintances properly greet each other. Keeps one hand wrapped around the weathered strap of her bag and nothing about her catches the light save for a small stud in her left nostril. When Sera turns her attention towards her she sees a strong brow and a strong nose and the girl is only an inch or so shorter than her wearing negligible heels.
If Whitney had to run she could run in her boots. She stops herself from looking past Sera's waist because she could catch sight of more flesh than would be considered polite in mixed company and the lingering of whatever magic she's done in the last few hours laps at her like the heat of a familiar fire and Whitney already looks somewhat awed by the time the Cultist turns her attention towards her.
"Who wouldn't want to come out for death polka?" she asks. Her voice is bell-clear and low without being fried. She takes the tequila only when it's her turn and belts it out of the bottle like a champ. This isn't her first rodeo.
Her uncle's going to be pissed when she gets home but whatever. She might not even make it home. Life is fucking short. As she hands back the bottle she also extends her hand.
"Sera?" Just for confirmation. Eyebrows raised. They relax and Whitney smiles regardless of the response. "Nice to meet you."
Grace
Sera's having Fun, more Fun than Grace will likely ever touch. Grace wants to say something about hallucinations, but... it's one of those things, right? Shouting at the top of one's lungs about the truth of perception because the music is too loud just seems wrong...
"She's very persuasive, and besides, this is a celebratory get-out-of-the-apartment night! Woo!" And why not accept a bit of nerve-reducing alcohol really? It's not like she couldn't use it. She takes a pull from the bottle, makes a horrible face (gah, it burns) and produces a weird noise. And then, it's off to Whitney.
Who of course, handles her liquor far better than the actually legal Grace. Natch.
Serafine
"Serafíne," the Cultest amends in response to that question-seeking-confirmation. Has to shift the bottle from right hand to left to shake but she does that seamless and thoughtless and takes Whitney's hand in her own. Callouses on her hand as they make contact, rough but cool from the neck of the bottle. This quick, crawling little grin follows the correction. " - call-me-Sera."
How many times has she said that to how many strangers in how many rooms? Can't count and doesn't. Sera, takes her hand back and then her bottle back and yes, Grace, it is straight tequila, no lime and no salt so it fucking burns. Note that before Sera takes another pull she licks the back of her sweaty hand for the salt, though, and does-without the lime.
"Oh my fuck," as Grace takes that pull and actually woos, Sera tosses back her head, laughing beneath the scrawl of the guitar. To Whitney, " - you get super extra bonus points for that. Never thought I'd see Grace do a shot from a bottle of Patron."
While they're talking, a tall, blond, bearded guy detaches himself from the knot of people around the photographer and walks up behind Sera. Takes her shoulders in his hands, both familiar and careful of the spikes on her bustier. Grace will recognize him as Dan-he's-cool, the consor she met at Sera's house the night she came to install Ginger. To Whitney: just a tall, skinny, well-tattooed hipster.
He kisses Sera on the crown of her head then drops his mouth to her ear and murmurs something, which brings her attention swinging around, brief and full to him.
The exchange lasts just a moment before Sera's turning back to Whitney and Grace, offering both another shot from her bottle by way of apology.
"I gotta go see some folks off, you guys have a kickass night if I don't catch up with you again before it's over - !"
Whitney
One glug of alcohol in a body Whitney's size isn't going to tide her over the rest of the night but that black X on the back of her hand is enough to stop her from taking anything else that isn't given to her. She drank root beer at the last place they were at. That seems to be her beverage of choice.
And she would have kept drinking tequila straight out the bottle but for Sera has to go see some people off and Whitney is not sad to see the tequila go but Sera leaving has her pulling a face like aw come on don't go that is more playfully disgruntled than genuinely disappointed.
A name and a fingerprint are enough to help her in the future.
"Okay!" she calls in Sera's wake. Waits until she and the blond man have toddled off before she turns towards Grace with lifted eyebrows and a frozen-looking grin. "Oh my god, I'm sorry, but I have to ask: where did you guys even meet?"
Grace
"Ahh..." How to answer that one in a place so crowded with people? She pauses, her face going a bit blank in the effort to explain. 'Oh yeah, some guy noticed me walking around the Uni vibrating reality, and realized I didn't know what that meant, and gave me Sera's phone number?' Maybe if they were alone.
"She was... the one who explained to me what happened when I... you know..." Grace hopes Whitney knows. It would be a hard thing to explain.
"And where? In a bookstore!"
Sera's not actually allergic to books, as much as she seem like it at first glance. Something about books and covers and judging...
"She's really awesome, isn't she?" Awesome, in that awe-inspiring way, really.
Whitney
The sort of conversations people have in places like this when the ambiance is loud and the words swimming in alcohol tend to be just as loud and just as swimming. A lot of head bobbing and pointless interjection.
So no one notices them. Grace feels slipshod and Whitney destructive. They're young and aware of yet independent of what's going on around them. So the blonde nods and furrows her brow and says "Yeah, yeah," when Grace trails off. She knows.
They met in a bookstore. Unsure if it's a euphemism or truth but Whitney nods anyway and then a topic they can discuss without fear of punishment:
"Totally," Whitney says with briefly wide-eyed and complete agreement. And she's now nowhere in sight so she goes on: "Do you wanna, like, wait for her, or...?"
Grace
"There's no telling if she'll be back... I don't know, what do you want to do?" Grace just shrugs. Having Fun isn't really in her repertoire. The deathpolka is at least new and weird though, and she's in the mood for pretending like she's 'cool'.
Whitney's cool. Grace is awkward. And what else is new?
Whitney
"I kinda wanna stay out a little longer."
If Grace is going to pretend she's cool then Whitney can pretend she's good at asserting herself. She rummages through her bag long enough to find money and glances towards the bar.
"Come on, I'll buy you a delicious nonalcoholic beverage."
Grace
"Yes, I love delicious beverages!" Grace says, and gives Whitney a smile before weaving over to the bar and taking a seat with one empty barstool to the side (for Whitney of course).
"You know, I bought a plant. She's totally amazing!" The need to shout lends some extra oomph to Grace's pronouncements. But there's something there -- amazing female plants? And she does seem excited about it.
And Whitney will hear all about Chloe the english ivy as they sip root beers and listen to the screaming, shredding polka. It's the kind of conversation that confuses and amuses, as Grace goes on about plant physics like that is a thing to talk about at a bar. She doesn't do a great job of pretending to be cool...
But enthusiastic? Yes.
All in all, it was fun (at least from Grace's point of view) and really... desperately needed.
Thank the universe that the deathpolka wasn't (as maybe slightly feared) a portal to a monster dimension turning the crowd into a murderous horde...
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Wonton Tacos -- That's Us
Taltos
Federal. Federal: wide avenues, Mexican and Vietnamese, Chinese and Salvadoran laundromats and noodle-shops and chop-shops and junk-yards and yards filled with detritus and dogs chained out front and the occasional colorful lick of grafitti and the even more colorful lick of a house that is now a liquor store but still retains some peeling easter-purple paint-color and it's an ugly street and there's a chicken loose and the some of the strip malls (broad, expansive - generous) are modern but they look tired and weary and like they're about ready for evening to finally arrive, to officially arrive, something beyond the evening of heavy cloudcover, of skies troubled by tonight's threat (promise [assurance]) of storm and perhaps more flood, Denver ringed 'round with silver linings and the air finally cool, cooling, snow-cool and tacky, and it's here in this weather and here on this stretch of Federal that Táltos who speaks to spirits and has spring contained beneath the skin of his hands, warmth kindled and kindling, hunches in a dark peacoat that's a little tight around his shoulders.
He hunches like a vulture, a long-limbed prey-bird, goat-man, mustache-waxed and curling up like a sly innuendo or a mischievous comment, skin translucent-pale eyes pink-rimmed and nose sharp, and where does he hunch? He hunches at a table outside a shop that sells tacos and street corn and he is working on something, braiding leather and beads and nails together, and there's a book with its paperback cover flopping whenever a wind picks up like a mouth that really wants to talk, and he looks sleepy.
Even sleepy, there's a certain vitality, a certain lust-(for-life), delineating the way he interacts with the world around him. The shape Táltos makes in the world is a shape that is queer and witching, you know. Energy.
Grace
[Awareness + Perception Go!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
Taltos
The man-with-the-mustache is resonant the way Will-workers are. There is a shard of star-brightness to Táltos, see? A sliver of something dynamic [creative, green fuse that lights], something Beguiling, though it doesn't take away, doesn't lead astray to diminish, just beguiling, coupled and twined with this sense of Lustiness, Lusty, like there's nothing he wouldn't fling himself all-hearted into, Live, Live, Live, and Taste It All, can't get enough...
....And then, of course, there's else. It is Else, it isn't His resonance, but it is attendant on him, clinging, localized, something cold, something Working On Him, something that is Harrowing [Malicious], that'll separate bone from blood, and enjoy it.
Patience Mason
[Per+Aware]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )
SerafÃne
Per + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )
Grace
Federal isn't the 'good' part of town. But it's the good part of town for rice noodles, and that's really the best kind of good. Grace likes to categorize the place as 'rugged' or 'full of character' to be generous. It's a place where one needs to watch oneself. But lately, that set of locations has included nearly everywhere, so why bother worrying about regular old normal violence?
She's got her feel on, the sixth sense that came with the opening of her eyes (the other eyes). It's feeble, but she pays attention to it, yes? Like a deaf person hearing for the first time, whatever noise comes through is like a symphony.
She's driving down the street now, stuck at a stoplight when she feels him. There is a symphony in the air tonight, a song she hasn't heard. It's pretty, catchy almost, like the kind of resonance you might want to hang around just to be a part of, if it wasn't for the dissonant undertone.
She looks around the street for the source, but there's people, and... a chicken, okay, and it's not like she knows who she's looking for. Eventually she just decides to pull in to the taqueria instead of waiting on the light. It seems likely enough. And tacos are food too.
Maybe she'll find the reason behind the beguiling song.
When she gets out of her (old, red) car, she's dressed in jeans, sneakers, and t-shirt covered by a grey jacket, with a laptop bag thrown over her shoulder.
She looks plain. Like anyone, really. Blends in, with that kind of quality that makes your eyes just slide off. Not a threat, not a standout, this one.
Patience Mason
Federal was new, in the grand scheme of time and space, what lay on that long stretch of concrete heading north and south was new. With its strip malls and restaurant's with all its tin, and aluminum and dry wall that was barely up to code. Take a few more of these elements away and Federal might well have been a shanty town in the heart of the city, but it had just enough money, just enough power to keep itself afloat, above the state of detrius and floatsam....wether that would be the case years from now, one cannot know.
This place is young, and the woman who makes her way down the street, appears to be...well she appears to be a number of things. Outwardly, she appears comparatively young, easily in her late twenties to early thirties with a style that spoke of pure retro vintage, her dirty blonde hair was up in a set of Victory curls, framing her head. Sky Blue eyes take in the street as she moves along at a casual gait, her long limbs supported on a pair of heeled boots making her impressive height of 6'1 all the greater tonight.
She wore a ankle length dress which flared out at the bottom with a hint of ruffling, along with a white dress shirt, firm and pressed beneath a woman's vest of a dark pinstripe which lay beneath high collared jacket of victorian styling of deep brown with leather trimmings. She gave the feeing of having stepped from an old tin type portrait, or perhaps one of those most ancient film reels.
Regardless, as she steps along the street, nearing the taqueria, one has to wonder what exactly someone like her, is doing in a place like this.
Taltos
[My turn to be aware of things?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Serafine
Oh, I-know-you is the hum beneath Serafíne's skin. See: I know you I know you I know you it sings beneath her tongue and in her eyes, in her blood which is warmer than you can know. She is here and looks half like she belongs here, some steetwalker. Look at the torn fishnets and denim cut-offs, the leather bustier (studded tonight except with little pink silk roses) that shows off her lean frame, the whipcord sweep of her torso, the supple and suggestive curve of her hips, in a narrow slice framed by the lapels of a leather jacket, which is a size or two too large for her and laced with leather straps and silver belts and also pierced through by a handful of round pins, one of which says ROLLER KING IS COMING and one of which has a picture not of fucking Che or even Bob Marley but of Emma Goldman and you'll have to get closer to read it because the print beneath the print of Goldman's face is TINY.
But see: I know you interrupts whatever it is that brings her out here and what brings her out here is perhaps wistfulness or nostalgia or some physical instinct where her body has not quite caught up to her mind or maybe she just thinks Pan will appear again, out of the blue. Just show up and be there the way he's supposed to but:
:one minutes she's walking and the next her direction is modified and she has her hands in her pockets and her head forward and there's a faint chill in the air and Sera does not yet understand just how wintry winter will soon be but for now she's still managing in fishnets and heeled boots and leather jackets and push-up bras and little else.
"Táltos the táltos," from behind though he felt her coming not like Sera feels everything and everyone but maybe his mustache twitched with awareness before Sera waltzed into the scene and right up behind the Dreamspeaker. Bending to kiss his cheek and wrap the cold and creaky leather arms of her coat around his neck like they are old friends and do-this-all-the-time. She is pleased to see him, not sleepy because she hasn't been up long, warmer than she should be because she's been - drinking, and something else too, something that makes her pupils wide and hungry but he cannot see that yet.
Not until she lets him go and saunters around the the table and flings herself into one of the spare metal chairs and starts investigating his paperback while giving him a lifting, lilting look,
"What are you making?" A blink, a pause, and a lifting look past his shoulder. "Oh, have you met Grace?"
Taltos
This plain young woman gets out of an old red car in the spare and worn-out and damp-drenched parking lot beside the taco shop. Funny, how the city smells when rain's an offering, all ozone and the shifting appearance of sizzle-cheese frying restaurant-smells tossed down the street like there's nothing else out there or the sudden mouldering look-there-is-rot of newspapers and trash beginning to go to mulch and then just spaces of rain-smell. Speaking of shifting, there's something faint and shifting attached to that plain young woman with the old red car or maybe the old red car or maybe a feather tossed by the chicken as it picks at some spare grass-blades poking up through concrete. Táltos can feel the shift -- and his busy fingers still. He leans [further] forward to put his elbow on the table and hold his book in place, and it's what Kat would call a confluence, a coming-together-of-threads, a net-witchery which sometimes happens and is dangerous dangerous dangerous as those who have the Will to work (or have been called to Work, or just given gifts by birth by The Ones Who Created The Everything, that little sparkling thing of divinity within) find themselves in the same location. Táltos' lifts heavy vaguely aristicratic eyelids and looks with bright interest from old red car girl to the Victorian daguerrotype no Edwardian daguerrotype no faded 1910s image walking and -
And Sera. Sera, glomping from behind. He grins, of course, even though her weight rattles a word in his chest and the back of his throat, an unh, or an oy, or an ah. This entirely natural grin that just transfigures his face and candles his eyes and his eyebrows go up and it's almost owlish it's almost manic but without that nervous edge without any adrenaline to make it too too sharp, just definitely twisted.
"Hey there, love." His throat is clotted from disuse; that won't last. He clears it, and says, "Only at the bottom of a vodka glass or during the occasional dream- were you going to introduce me?"
He seems to be under the misapprehension that 'Grace' isn't a name in this conversation; he takes his elbow off his paperback in order to let Sera get a better look at it, holds up the bracelet and says, throat getting thick again, "Making a gift. It's to wear around the wrist. But shh, can't say the b-word til it's done."
Taltos
[Crafts! How's it looking?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Taltos
[Acceptable.]
Patience Mason
The awakened bombard the world with their willpower, be it the will of the self, or the very nature of their awakened being blasting out waves of specialized energies, attuned specifically to each individual like a finger print. Tonight is certainly no different as a group of Magi converge upon the small taqueria and fill it with a complex mixture of positively and negatively aligned resonances.
Patience is not blind to these things either, and whatever plan she had, whatever destination she was heading for is, for the moment forgotten. The heels of her boots offer a different beat as she stepped from the concrete sidewalk to the asphalt of the taqueria parking lot, and made her way to the outdoor seating, taking in the sight of those who were slowly converging upon this place. An innate curiosity is writ across her features, delight at finding such a meeting and she steps up to the table to those she has met, and the one who she has not.
"A noted and indexed temporal stream derivative focal point!." She says, pleased as punch in her strange way to see these individuals. "An appropriately sociologically and culturally based verbal activation sequence to your direct and individualized personages." She says almost casually.
Grace
And then there's Sera, that one who is so very hard to miss, mixing her own song into the mix, and Grace just has to look for a woman wearing as little clothing as possible to find them both. She doesn't judge exactly, just she knows Sera, knows that uniform of hers, and it is cold and wet out tonight, Sera, what the heck.
If Sera is friendly with this guy, he can't be too bad, right?
It's strange how they seem to congregate. She'll go days without seeing anyone, despite Auraria crawling with willworkers. And now, here in the bad part of town, it's a crowd. She walks up to the two, her smile a bit awkward, suffused as she is with the excitement and fear of meeting someone new. Just, people like it when you smile at them, even if it's got to be forced at first.
She's waving a little greeting, and halfway through a small "Hi" when Patience sneaks up behind, and greets everyone so enthusiastically strange. Grace does this sort of sliding look behind her, and there is a woman out of time. Well.
"Hello, I don't think I've met you," she says, and as she says the 'you' she switches her attention from Patience to Taltos. Because, she hasn't met either.
None of them really 'fit' together, do they? The four make an odd group out here. But it's no matter.
Serafine
"Why - " Sera manages to sprawl in the rusting iron chair in the cool evening air with the promise of rain and the promise of snow and the promise of the mountains like sharp and soon to be snow-capped teeth in the west from every intersection. Dominant things, jagged and crowing but Sera - fuck them - she sits with her back to them and allows herself not-to-think and mostly to do other stuff. Manages to both sprawl and lean forward and then tilt her head aslant just so because the world is sweet and wobbly beneath her, shifting in strange and relevant ways from every direction.
Sera is about to ask if the bracelet will hear its name and decide that it wants to be something else like a fish or a bicycle or a fish on a bicycle or a mermaid or a pair of jelly shoes or a nun or an incandescent star but:
Grace. And the woman-who-talks-like-a-robot still talking-like-a-robot.
Sera beams at Grace. The light slides around the apprentice's head like colorful snakes. Oh, hey. Beams at Grace and kicks out a chair and introduces them "Grace, this is Táltos the táltos, Táltos, this is Grace. She's new. It was a Wednesday last month.
"And, both of you, this is the lady-who-talks-like-a-robot."
With a small flourish and a gesture at Patience, before Sera - weaving, she is not remotely sober tonight, Sera - leans in across the table and confides, aloud, to Táltos or Grace or both.
"I have no fucking idea what she just said."
Taltos
[Hmm. For fun. Wits! to see if Táltos can follow the words Patience says without preparation.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 7) ( success x 1 )
Táltos
The man -- he could be young, but he could be old; indeterminate, dark circles around his eyes, which're inquiring and seem less focused than they are simply accepting, glad for society, listening eyes, yes, that's the best way to put it, listening eyes ready to be mischiefing, ready to gleam -- cocks one eyebrow way up, forehead creasing, and the other eyebrow? The other eyebrow he cocks way down like a Dali-clock, tips of his mustache tw-twitching, head up like a cat rearing back, all that for the stream of strange tech-sounding babble which comes out've Patience's mouth like she's a coin-operated thing from a Verne novel and after holding that pose for a moment, pale eyes [there's the gleam, the dredge-up of starlight] going from her to Sera to Grace to Sera then back, he laughs - a surprised-sounding laugh, just a huff-of-breath, and says,
"Hello." Answer: that's what she said. And also: Hello. "That's quite the Golden Age Science Fiction verbal tick you've got there, Miss." Polite. "Pleasure to meet you both I hope. Like Sera said, the name's Táltos and that's also my work."
The braid of leather-and-nails-and-scraps-of-painted-paper gets placed beneath his paperback, and he offers his right hand to Grace or Patience, whoever takes it first, and then he offers his hand to the other. His hands are warm: spring-warm, conjure-up-rebirth-warm, and the pressure of them is firm.
Sera says that Grace is new, and this certainly gets Táltos's attention. He gives her a keen-curious look, says, "Did it happen suddenly?"
Pause. "Shit, am I being rude -- don't let talking stop you from getting tacos. They've got good ones. Wonton taco shells."
Grace
Again, someone finds out when she Awakened, and acts as though this means she has suddenly grown a tail. Grace shrugs, "I guess suddenly, yeah. Or you could say I had been preparing myself. Hard to say which."
The táltos mentions wonton taco shells, and suddenly she remembers the true reason she's braving Federal. "Woo, yes... I'll ah, I'll be right back," she says, "Oh, and hi, lady-who-talks-like-a-robot!" She waves at the assembled, and she goes to assemble tacos.
It's not traditional, wonton shells, but different is good, no?
Serafine
"I'm not eating," Sera remarks, flicks a glance at Grace and a slightly-more-skeptical glance at Patience. A glance that is liquid and moving and mediated by some rather powerful mind-altering substances opened up and rushing through her veins. Tilts her head back then as Grace goes off to purchase a plate of tacos for herself.
Beaming, " - but you could get me a margarita on the rocks with two extra shots and/or a bottle of tequila I'll pay you back!"
Patience Mason
There are greetings for both Taltos and from Grace and Patience offers them both a nod, before a gloved hand is offered to Taltos, and then to Grace. She is friendly, but reserved, or perhaps poised is the better term as she lets her eyes settle upon the moustachioed gentlemen as he speaks of her 'verbal tick' and she offers an apologetic look.
"An appropriate socio-linguistic verbalization pattern for this concurrent temporal framework is...negatively present due to a series of frotean focal points along the temporal stream. For this appropriate sociological appropriations are verbally assigned to each of your individualized bio-noospheric selves." She says in a casual tone. Her gaze turning to Serafine with a raised, and amused brow.
"Serafine, I acknowledge and inquire as to your concurrent physio-noospheric-metaphysical state, it is nominal?"
Taltos
[...Wits again!.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )
Taltos
"I recommend the sweet corn on anything," Táltos says, as Grace heads off to get a plate. And.
There are: wonton shells, and teriyaki meat, and tamarind sauce, and then there is pico de gallo, guacamole, mozzarella chese, mexican sour cream, carne asada meat, peppers and beans and rice and spiced shrimp (don't try those, though), wilted looking leaves. The tacos could be good. Corn, simmering in lime-juice and butter, slathered with mayonaise and chili. It's a cornucopia of taco-fixings.
"Frotean focal points? I'm not familiar with the word 'frotean,' or ..."
Táltos has to think about what Patience said in order to try and parse it. "... Well, is the verbalization pattern permanently lost because of those points?"
Grace
Grace returns after a short trying-to-order, hard-to-decide trip to the shop, with a plate of wonton shells filled with carne asada, beans and rice, and peppers and a large glop of pico on top of each one. She got enough to share, if someone were to want to. There's also a corn cob with butter and chili on, at Táltos' urging, and a margarita for Sera (and a Mexican coke for her) It's... a little much to carry, but she's managing with a smile.
"So.. ah, Sera, here's yours," she kind of gestures at the cup in her hand like, 'please relieve me of this'. "And you're also welcome to a taco if you want."
"And you guys, tacos are... well, they smell decent!"
Serafine
Sera hears: her name. So, that gets her attention. Sera's eyes are a rich, dark blue, the irises ringed in a midnight color that melts into something closer to twilight, flecked with hints of green and brown. Hard to see them though because her pupils are black and reflective and gleaming and three-or-so sizes too large.
But, her name, the flash of her eyes, lazy up from Táltos the táltos to Patience. Hmmm? Her eyebrows are straight across her narrowset and darkringed eyes but hmmm they lilt upward in neat little arcs of inquiry. Still no damned clue what Patience is saying, but Sera gives her a thumbs-up.
A double-thumbs up.
Then, Sera's attention drops from Patience back to the table and to: the bracelet beneath the Dreamspeaker's book. No no, not the bracelet. Not the b-word. This little quick parsed smile as she bans herself from saying it and gets lost in a rich and pleasant looping tangle, pulls it back and reviews it, then lets it move onward. The supple thread of her resonance in the air from a minor Work. But also: the not-a-bracelet, tucked beneath the book, Sera's lean fingers, tipped in chipped and peeling nail enamel the color of a gothic fire engine, working to pull the would-be-bracelet free.
Then Grace returns! with food-and-drinks and Sera tips her head back, long curling hair sweeping the spine of the chair, not-quite-focusing on Grace but reaching in her general direction from the here's yours and Sera is all "For me?" but she's thinking about the not-a-bracelet too. Greedy thing.
"Thanks," lazy grin a quick, razor slash across her features, the full weight and heat bestowed on Grace like a gift.
Patience Mason
"Negative." Patience says with a shake of her head. "A series of active paradigmically altering anomalies intrinsic in my personages meta-field's could be negated and potentially alleviate the concurrent pattern loss, however hypothesized negatively aligned effects to this bio-physical structure and the noospheric lattice contained within the cranial cavity are, at this temporal juncture of a superior sum then the projected positively aligned effects." She shrugs at this, seemingly at peace with that fact.
Grace returns, and Patience, well as the smell of the taco's reach her nostrils they flare gently, the woman nodding her approval to the very decent smell of the mexican 'cuisine'. "Affirmative." She says.
Taltos
To Patience, he frowns and says, "Too bad. Hopefully there's a way around the curse, a way to convince it to sleep in some other bed. One that isn't your mind. Did you give your name and I missed it?"
Now. Táltos is tired. He is etched with it -- immanent with it. He is tired, and he sweeps his shaggy, kempt-but-certainly-not-kept hair back from his forehead and reaches into a coat pocket (his coat-pockets are full of things, sliver of white-wand in one, a cassette tape in another, pencil stub and charcoal, a pocket knife) to pull out a hair-band and put the whole thing back. His cheekbones get cold and so do his ears, but that's just the price one pays for vision sometimes. Táltos: a man wearing many rings, many bracelets, clink-clatter, always noisy. Táltos isn't a quite man by any means, and he may be tired, but he'll be dead before he's antisocial.
So. Grace returns! And he'll help her unload, the easy air of someone with long-limbs who knows how to not knock things over with them and is usually esconced in a crowd where things get passed around, juggled, etcetera.
Besides. The keen edge of interest in a new mage hasn't been abandoned, oh no, never think that, the Ascension War is 'over,' but the dreamspeaker is always curious which way those who still open their eyes and find out they've been gifted decide to jump, what they believe, truth or lies: he's a traditionalist, is Táltos, polite enough about all those wrong ways of thinking, all those perfectly logical systems made-up by sorcerers to explain what's really just perfectly simple.
"I come here often," he offers. "It's a nice corner. Usually come in the morning, the sun makes a happy golden square."
Táltos finally notices Sera working at the not-a-bracelet and he watches her sidelong, his eyelids lowering (they're purpled, almost bruised, you can see the veins) in order to accentuate the side-long look. He doesn't stop her, though-- won't unless she starts to unravel it or pick pieces out of the braid. Pieces like: oh, what's that?
It was The Chariot. What's that? Sharp piece of blue-glass from a broken bottle, edged in rust. And that? Nail, scrapes- what's that? A coin, scratched over and out.
Taltos
Addendum, sociably: "So what'd everybody do today?"
Grace
"I went to class, worked on my thesis, had a spare minute to water my ivy, and I realized I hadn't eaten lunch," she says quickly, the words clipped. Really, she hadn't eaten breakfast either, and there wasn't anything but emergency ramen in the cupboard. Bad Grace.
With that, she snarfs a taco. It's a strange mix, the wonton wrapper and taco filling, but it works. And after all, what's an egg roll but the Asian version of a taco anyway?
"I've got... homework to do, but it's only two assignments, and there's the weekend left," she says, her mouth full of taco (she really does not care).
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )
Grace
[ignore that roll, I have nfi what I was doing]
Taltos
[You were succeeding with awesome success! At taco-snarfing? haha.]
Grace
[YES, it is my taco-snarfing successes. I should have rerolled the 10s.]
Taltos
[Do it now. It's not too late.]
Patience Mason
"My heritalogical and parentally assigned nomenclature and index reference is Patience Mason." She says with a nod to the man, looking slightly taken aback by the fact she had somehow failed to introduce herself. She then moved about to whatever seat remained lowered herself into it, smoothing out her skirt as she did so and watched the others as they began to eat.
"This previous solar cycle I utilized my primary temporal allotment to design, manufacture and service several teritary systemic elements of the atmospheric lighter then air movation craft indexed as the Aurora." She said pleasantly, her smile widening as she watched Grace absolutely devastate that unprepared taco.
"Secondary and tertiary temporal allotment's were utilized in standardized maintenance of this bio-structure and the physically inert domicile in which I concurrently inhabit." She then looks to grace and enquires.
"What particular focal points outline and actualize your hypothetical assertions? And in what primary field of focus does it reside?"
Taltos
[... Wits again!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )
Serafine
Sera works that bracelet free but does not work anything free-of-the-bracelet. The not-a-bracelet. She seems - absolutely fascinated by the pieces worked together, the braided bits of leather, the humming background resonance that is bright and full against her senses, and the way the night works its way back into her awareness, quiet and here and now. She feels the weight of Táltos' eyes on her, all sidelong, and lifts her sharp little chin in his direction without lifting her attention from the bracelet. Runs her thumb over the edge of the blueglass. The rim of the coin. And so on.
Allows her gaze to cut away from these things only when Grace speaks up and recites the ordinary boundaries of an ordinary day into which the extraordinary must now always, perforce, intrude. Her lazy mouth, all smoldering curve, twists ever-so-briefly wider. Flicks up to Patience as she has clearly just said two words that Sera understood. Namely: her name.
Is it Sera's turn to tell them all what she did today?
Oh yes. Yes it is.
"Shrooms." Is what she says, picking up her margarita, because Sera believes in polypharmacy. Her smile is cat-and-canary. They have no idea the way the night frames them, all the damned things she can fucking see. How the edges of the moment become unhinged and how she turns them, open and shut and back again.
Back to Táltos The edge of his features. The bruising around his eyes, all things come into sudden and irreparable focus.
And now her eyes do not and cannot leave him. She's just staring, Sera. Or rather: not staring, seeing a bit beyond-sight.
Serafine
(Time 2: scrying Taltos' future. Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms)
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 10) ( success x 1 )
Taltos
[Eh? Is somebody being magick right now?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Serafine
(Extending: Time 2 / Prime 1 - that curse! Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) +1 for extending)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 10) ( success x 1 )
Taltos
(Also, I say skip Táltos's post this turn! for realistic-conversationa-flow-purposes (and also because I'm making food now).)
Serafine
(Extending: Time 2 / Prime 1 - that curse! Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) +1 for extending)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Serafine
(Extending one more time: Time 2 / Prime 1 - that curse! Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) +1 for extending)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 5) ( success x 1 )
Serafine
(and skip Sera: she istripping / scrying and therefore oblivious. :) )
Grace
"Ahh, my thesis, yes... It's a computational biological simulation of plant life. I was going to try to make it as chemically accurate as possible. Now... I'm not so sure that 'accurate' is possible. Or at least, they wouldn't believe what plants can do. So, I'm just kind of, you know, getting it close." Patience isn't entirely unintelligible to her. Just partially. It's probably kind of like what other people experience when she goes on about 'computational biological simulations' etc.
Grace is not surprised to hear that Sera has been doing 'shrooms' today. That sounds about right. But the way the woman is now staring at Táltos... huh. Grace noms taco again, because why not.
"And you make... lighter-than-air craft? That's pretty cool," Grace responds to Patience, after having untangled a few more words.
Patience Mason
"Negative, while the indexed material and required processes are available to my noospheric lattice at this juncture I do not concurrently manufacture lighter then oxygen movation craft. Maintenance of my current craft is more then sufficient given to its...prodigious dimension's and requirements."
Patience listens intently as Grace goes on about her thesis, a direct comprehensive simulation of plant life and describes the hurtles involved in the project. She nods, considering these issues, a sympathetic mind to be certain before offering. "Have you referenced and extrapolated the potentiality of accurate simulation at a micro-biological level rather that of macro-biology?" She suggests, a hand gesturing to the woman. "The active noospherical consensus may adapt and acclimatize to the simulation of such extensive potential on the microscopic level initially, allowing for a future extrapolation into nominal sizing and structure?"
Serafine
And Sera just keeps - yes - staring at Táltos, although now there is something shifting, something distant rather than simply enraptured in the frame of her rather compelling features. Sera is breathing quiet steadily, all tidal, in through the nose and out through the nose, right, cyclic, the fingers of her right hand wrapped thoughtlessly around the not-a-bracelet , her left hand braced against the edge of the metal table, though her fingers are slackening a bit. The slide of her wholly unfocused eyes is like the slide of the yolk of a smashed egg down a kitchen wall. Exquisitely slow, viscous but still moving.
Grace
She squints at Patience. "I'm not sure I follow. I designed it to incorporate respiratory processes -- oxygen transfers, photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation... It's rather micro-biological in nature. That's actually the problem. Current understandings of microbiology are insufficient to accurately model what's really going on... And I don't know how to explain that in my thesis -- Oh yeah, everyone who is an actual biologist, you're missing all this stuff."
Táltos and Sera are likely off in their own world, while Patience and Grace live in theirs -- a world of big, sciency words. Tacos get demolished. And there is that corn, probably cool enough now, having given its heat away to the air.
"What's a noosphere?"
Taltos
Táltos listens to Grace and Patience thus: forehead-creased with attention, languid-eyelids (tired-still) but inquiring eyes, rain-pale, and once or twice a twitch of his mouth upward, imagining just what the Verbena would say confronted with these two, especially Patience, but Grace too, because he hears computational biological simulation of plant-life and he thinks plant-computer, and then he thinks Progenitor, and then his eyes get a little grim, and they drop to the sidewalk cracks which are, at least near Táltos, thriving, because he's another one who draws flowers out've fallow.
What's a noosphere?
"What's a computational biological simulation of plant life?"
Flash-of-a-grin, then-
... And then there's Sera. Who begins to Work, staring at Táltos, and startles his attention from the Technocrat Discussion to the Cultist-Ecstatic staring at him, and he stares back, cocking his head to the side, body drifting that-a-way as well, reflexively shoving one hand in his pocket.
Uncomfortable, but resigned.
Grace
[perception+Awareness = Does Grace pick up on whatever Taltos is thinking of her right now? AKA 'I'm not a Technocrat, thanks]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Patience Mason
"A tiered dissemination of data and informative simulations is the primary and most effective methodology for neutralizing the adverse and negatively charged aspects of the noospheric consensus. In addition, focusing your simulations upon a singular selective cell of a biological entity would simplify simulation and acceptance." Patience attempts to aid, or at least clarify what it is she's suggesting, but then there's an inquiry as to just what a noosphere is, and Patience smiles, tapping the side of her head.
"The noosphere is an appropriately assigned index for the processes and chemical electrical functionality of the cortex of homo sapien sapien." She says it like shes a teacher, explaining a topic. "To derive the appropriate terminology from the conglomerative index is that of noo- utilizing the linguistic system of ancient greek in reference to the cortex, while sphere...well." She shrugs, as if that is fairly simple to understand.
She then turns her gaze towards Taltos and raises a brow. "A digitized electrically simulated representation, not concurrent or ratified in any third dimension as a solid."
Taltos
Grace, perceptive, notices the grimness: and probably figures accurately what it is Táltos is remembering, or thinking of - maybe she's seen that look on others' already? Like her project reminds him of something uncomfortable --belonging to the Technocatic Union. That's what's there: remembered discomfort; it's separate still - for now - from suspicion or accusation. And sublimated by supreme discomfort which is directed not at the Technocrat-Mages (old-fashioned, they're all Technocrats who deal with Tech, aren't they?), but at staring Sera.
Serafine
And see: Sera. Serafíne-call-me-Sera is unfocused and lost and intent and intense on Táltos which he accepts with an uncomfortable and resigned mien and neither Grace nor Patience affect really to notice that Sera-who-is-stoned and may be really too stoned to be wandering around a neighborhood like this by herself after dark is also more-than-stoned. Is, to put it in simple and quiet terms, Working. Is needling threads and threading needles and splitting not infinitives but warp and weave and weft and the long threads are tacky and infinitessimal and her mouth, which is painted a glossy pink, is open and that far-away look catches the light and sheens her eyes and the margarita is ignored and they can eat tacos and talk about things Sera does not cannot will not begin to understand and Sera,
makes this quiet little noise, all hushed focus, like her heart is being squeezed. Her expression is darkening, is drawing in at the brow, is narrowing to a line between the brows, is kept close and closer.
Another noise, sharper but also breathy, back of the throat. Tension creeps into Sera's body language, wraps itself around her and she
shivers, unconsious of it but feeling the movement of it all through her body. Even the shape of the darkness around tem is altering, is becoming spiked and full of threat.
When she finally comes to consciousness, back to reality, the agreed-upon present moment, she breathes out in a rush, Sera. Reaches up to scrub away a handful of tears from the corners of her eyes. Her attention slides from the man's face to his hand and she breathes out sharply again, Sera.
Reaches for his hand.
"I hate that thing." She means the ring: must mean it, what else could she mean? "You have to get rid of it. Soon."
Grace
"My stupid thesis, is what it is," she responds, giving Táltos a grin. "Patience is right. I study computer science, and my focus is simulations. It's just... writing computer code that simulates a thing, so you can predict its behavior? That's my thing. One could even say it's what helped me get... here."
She's not entirely unaware of Taltos' darkened expression, the way his eyes scan the cracks in the ground. He's uncomfortable around her. So, maybe if she put it another way... She leans in all conspiratorially-like over her tacos, "So, I found out that plants think, okay? And it's amazing. And it's not something that I can just put in my thesis, because I'd have to explain how I know this."
Except that Patience seems to think she can put it in her thesis. Isolate it. Chop the plant into small pieces, and then analyze. She turns her attention back to the woman. "I don't think that would work, really. It all depends on showing it holistically. If it's isolated, they'll just say the effect is due to the isolation." Big sciency words again.
Taltos
(Ack, skip me one more time!)
Patience Mason
Patience nods to Grace's objection, but refrences back to what she said. "Thus the tiered release and extrapolation from the finite model. Each model shall proof and reinforce the previously asserted digitized revelations, thus negating any coherent and anticipated resistence within the noospheric consensus." She smiled, offering that last little bit.
But then her eyes swivelled over to Taltos and Sera, and she inclined her head and inquired curiously. "What must he negate from his personage?"
Serafine
"That fucking ring."
Sera breathes out a curse-as-a-curse and at-a-curse and her eyes are damp and intense and there's something shivering about her that she cannot quite tamp down because: she is a seers. Seers see things. Not always the things-they-want-to-see.
But she is rapt on Taltos, cannot unsee not when she has gone peering through the loose little threads, pulling pulling pulling, not even when the edges of her perception and starting to turn stained and dark and mottled.
Serafine
(I am going to have to sleep very soon. barely keeping it together right now.)
Grace
"Sera, are you okay?" Grace says, and she really is concerned. There's so much that a newbie like her misses, and she has missed Sera's Working, doesn't understand the sudden turn of emotion in her.
"What's wrong? What about the ring?"
Taltos
Grace grins when she re-explains, and Táltos chuckles, attention wavering from staring-girl back to the Scientific Ladies: "I see. All things think, and speak too; it can be difficult to lay-out in an easy to accept way," frown, spare, "using today's language. Sounds interesting, especially if the study of it helped you get to where you are today."
His hand is in his pocket. He doesn't bring it out. Fingers, long-fingers, bony-wrists, big-hands, tendons sharply delineated, shovel-fingertips, nope: clenched inside. The rings too, and the bracelets. He smiles at Sera though: something that's less a flex of the mouth and more a flex of crinkle-lines around the corners of his eyes.
"Don't look," he advises her (too-late), gently.
Grace
It seems her re-explanation worked for Taltos. He laughs, at least, and that's a start. But you see, there is a rift between the sciency ladies and the other two. There's also something that they are talking about (or around) that has Grace completely confused. "Don't look at what?"
Of course, she'd have to ask. Really. She does have to ask. There's something that keeps pressuring her to ask, and it's more than mere curiosity. It's a drive, like this is what life is, asking questions.
"I'm completely lost."
SerafÃne
"I already did," and Sera flashes him a similar smile, a bracing sort that is less a movement of her mouth than it is tensing of her cheeks and a faint narrowing of her eyes. Her eyes drop from his face to his hand and it takes effort for her right now to focus outside of the immediacy both the vision and the way the vision has shifted the celebratory edges of her trip to something else, darker, twisted, remnant, iron-bound and rusted, blooded and malicious and shot through with pain.
See: she sees also the smile; the gentleness of the warning. Marks it in a way that is considered but not thoughtful and then glances back to Grace.
Breathes out long and slow. Picks up her fucking drink.
Her hand, it's shaking a bit.
But Grace, oh Grace, Sera favors her with a lilting half-smile. It is fleeting and it does not reach the Cultist's dark and darker eyes, which are being devoured by her pupils.
"It's a long story, not mine to tell, and I know the outline only. Not the details. But, do you feel that edge?"
Malice, she means. The thing-that-doesn't-fit Táltos the táltos. "Sharp and wrong and bad. Hungry-for-disaster. Like rust, devouring a blade, skewering skin. It's not from him. It's from something-else.
"He's telling me, not-to-look into his future." A glance back at Táltos and Sera oh, she smiles. With her quick-curving mouth now, rising. "I should have asked." Sorrowing, in her way, which is whole and entire.
"Tonight's going to be a bad night, I think. And I should go. But come see me soon, Táltos. I want to help you break it, if I can.
"Grace," rising, Sera tosses back the rest of her margarita all at a go, because what the hell. Bends to plant a kiss on the crown of Grace's head. Sera smells like spice and alcohol and limes. " - I hope I didn't freak you out too much. Take care, okay?"
Taltos
Táltos grimaces. The grimace is as dramatic a contortion as any of his expressions. He's a guy with a lot of expression. He's a guy who is a lantern for his moods and they're whatever lights up inside and he grimaces. Hollow-eyed Táltos, he rubs his forehead with his other hand -- with the pads of his index and middle finger. Three bracelets there, one with a medallion made of bone, another with links of iron, and another which looks like one of those rubber bracelets you get for supporting a cause on which is stamped the word astronomical and then there's three copper beads next to teeth-keys. Then: fine, he takes his left hand out of his pocket and holds it out on the table. He has three rings on, one on the ring finger, one next to the one on the ring finger, and a thumb ring. The thumb ring is a simple band. The second ring on his ring finger is etched to look like leaves, a thick band. And the first ring on his fing finger is older-looking, a thick dull-gleaming band with catchments that look like they might open to show a secret message.
"I felt you doing it; I would've stopped you, but..." But he doesn't know how to stop that kind of seeing, and see, he means it too. He grimaces again, and then taps the ring-that-might-hide-messages, and says, lightly enough, "She's talking about this ring; haven't figured out how to get it off yet. Soon, though!" He sounds optimistic.
And then stands up in order to bid-Sera-an-appropriate-farewell, which appears to be a hair-scruff right now: "Sure. You be careful, Serafíne. Grab yourself a taco. You're too thin."
Patience Mason
Sera describes an edge, a danger somewhere in Taltos' future and Patience narrows her gaze in consideration of these facts as they are revealed, it's something to consider, something to watch. She glances to the ring set upon Taltos' finger and arches a brow, regarding that unexplained, and potentially dangerous device before looking up at Sera.
"It is with internalized certainty and projected empathetic emanations that I extrapolate hope that your REM cycles are not overtly disrupted Sera." She offers the woman, evident that she was on her way out. A genial nod is given as well, a parting farewell as the Cultist departs.
She then looked back to the others, to Taltos in particular and inquired. "At what particular geographical locality did you acquire that frotean device." She inquires, gesturing to the ring in question.
Grace
The sad-eyed, slightly (a lot?) out of it Sera is still trying to teach the young, and for that Grace can only give her mad props. But instead, it just comes out like this: "Oh..." because there is so much to that explanation.
"I do feel it..." she says, and Sera kisses her on the head, and Grace's eyes open a touch more, like that was completely unexpected (but it should have been).
"I'm not freaked out. I didn't get freaked out when crazy rained from the silver screen, I'm not going to get freaked out now. You be good, Sera," she says, and gives her a smile. Sera's not going to be good. Sera's going to be Fun. But you know...
Taltos
"It was in a box from my grandfather," Táltos tells Patience: "Part of his effects." Then, with a thought, "What tradition do you follow?" Because: maybe if she's a Son of Ether -
Though his attention swings, and see, Táltos, leaning against the metal chair he stood up from, one hand on its back, he gives Grace a quizzical look: "Crazy rained from the silver screen? Is that a literal or metaphorical statement?"
Grace
"Both. Listen, do either of you have cell phones? Or a computer maybe? I can hook you up with the information network. It'll tell you all about the crazy," she says, and picks up the corncob.
"I was going to the movies to get my mind off of the... zombies. Big mistake. The movie, it was like a Trojan Horse. It just masqueraded as a movie. I'm sure you heard about the riot? Three people..." she trails off... bites corn.
"Anyway, we're trying to figure out where it is."
Patience Mason
"I am a active part of the socio-political-paradigmic amalgam indexed as the Sons of Ether." Patience says with a slow nod. "Your genealogical predecessor..." She consider's, her eyes flicking to the ring again. "Frotean, assuredly frotean."
She rises almost in tandem with Taltos, stepping out and away from the chair before pushing it back into place, leaving the location much as she had found it. Of course, Grace had seen to it that several taco's would never be seen here again...but then wasn't that was this place was for?
"It has been a memorable and index worthy temporal reference point." She says with a nod, pausing to give Grace her cell number, Taltos as well before turning to go.
Serafine
"Tch," Sera mutters, a smile and a correction all at once for Táltos. Who says she is too thin which is true, objectively. That smile is unfocused; is superficial, is the sort that skims over her features and slips away, half-remembered. She glances up at him as he scruffs her hair, her gaze skewing away from him toward the shadows beyond him and,
"I meant it. Mean it. We'll go see Jim. We'll do something."
--
Patience, well, Patience Sera still does not understand. But Sera does seem to register well wishes and a good night or even a sleep well. Dear Patience, Sera is only beginning her trip, she will be awake for hours and hours. But see, she shoots the woman-who-talks-like-a-robot a half-smile and says, "Thanks, man. You too."
And Grace finally, assuring that she is not freaked. She is not freaked now, will not be freaked, is made of different stuff than that.
Sera would've freaked when crazy rained from the silver screen. Sera did freak when a fallen mage asked her to dance. Sera -
- is not going to bed good. Is probably not even going to be Fun tonight, but, she flashes Grace two-thumbs up as she starts to saunter away. "Always am."
Nearly-serene, reassuring, assured. Then she: stuffs her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket and walks away from the outdoor tables at the taqueria, off down Federal. Maybe toward a bus stop, maybe someplace else. God knows.
Taltos
Táltos does. He even has it on him, his cellphone, in one of the many pockets of his peacoat. He has to take things out to get it: half-a-feather, a pack of cigarettes, a cigar, a stone, another stone, yet another stone, a rock, the beginnings of a rubberband ball, an old coin limned in moss-green, a bandana, and then - hah. There. The cellphone: he plugs in Patience's number, and then - Grace gets a considering look; the flick of a half-frown. "That sounds interesting," he agrees, cautiously; either of silver screen craziness, or being hooked up to a network by - is she a Virtual Adept? She sounds like a Virtual Adept. Maybe that's just prejudice: computers and networks. "I'd like to talk about it," and here, he sounds grave, because peeling back the Trojan Horse Zombie lingo and there's something a dreamspeaker can be interested in: something speaking, something more. "Plug in your number or, uh," and look. He searches through his pockets again, putting things in, accidentally breaking a piece of charcoal, look, he has a little bottle of vodka, and then: a couple bent-up business cards. His full-name, underneath it: Author. An e-mail address. A phone-number. A fax-line.
Grace
"We'll have to meet again sometime. I'll call you, Patience. Next time we're in the same temporal geographical location, you'll have to meet Ginger," she says, mimicking the strange speech. "Son of Ether, eh? I remember reading about you guys in my notes. Nice." And that explains the way the woman schooled her on Science. Will have to talk again. Mmm yes.
"And you too," she says to Taltos. It's easy to think she's talking about a person. "I'm not going to talk about it over the phone though... Just, I might, say, invite you over for tea. And it won't be tea?" She smirks, takes his card, reads... "You're an author?" she says, and her face lights up. "I was published recently, myself." and there is a bit of pride in that tone. "I'm not good, just... you know, it's a hobby," and then, the self-deprecation.
She gives Patience her number, and Taltos her number, and promises that next time... next time, there will be installations going on.
Taltos
[And because Noel is awesome, we are allowed to fade there. *zip*]
Federal. Federal: wide avenues, Mexican and Vietnamese, Chinese and Salvadoran laundromats and noodle-shops and chop-shops and junk-yards and yards filled with detritus and dogs chained out front and the occasional colorful lick of grafitti and the even more colorful lick of a house that is now a liquor store but still retains some peeling easter-purple paint-color and it's an ugly street and there's a chicken loose and the some of the strip malls (broad, expansive - generous) are modern but they look tired and weary and like they're about ready for evening to finally arrive, to officially arrive, something beyond the evening of heavy cloudcover, of skies troubled by tonight's threat (promise [assurance]) of storm and perhaps more flood, Denver ringed 'round with silver linings and the air finally cool, cooling, snow-cool and tacky, and it's here in this weather and here on this stretch of Federal that Táltos who speaks to spirits and has spring contained beneath the skin of his hands, warmth kindled and kindling, hunches in a dark peacoat that's a little tight around his shoulders.
He hunches like a vulture, a long-limbed prey-bird, goat-man, mustache-waxed and curling up like a sly innuendo or a mischievous comment, skin translucent-pale eyes pink-rimmed and nose sharp, and where does he hunch? He hunches at a table outside a shop that sells tacos and street corn and he is working on something, braiding leather and beads and nails together, and there's a book with its paperback cover flopping whenever a wind picks up like a mouth that really wants to talk, and he looks sleepy.
Even sleepy, there's a certain vitality, a certain lust-(for-life), delineating the way he interacts with the world around him. The shape Táltos makes in the world is a shape that is queer and witching, you know. Energy.
Grace
[Awareness + Perception Go!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
Taltos
The man-with-the-mustache is resonant the way Will-workers are. There is a shard of star-brightness to Táltos, see? A sliver of something dynamic [creative, green fuse that lights], something Beguiling, though it doesn't take away, doesn't lead astray to diminish, just beguiling, coupled and twined with this sense of Lustiness, Lusty, like there's nothing he wouldn't fling himself all-hearted into, Live, Live, Live, and Taste It All, can't get enough...
....And then, of course, there's else. It is Else, it isn't His resonance, but it is attendant on him, clinging, localized, something cold, something Working On Him, something that is Harrowing [Malicious], that'll separate bone from blood, and enjoy it.
Patience Mason
[Per+Aware]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )
SerafÃne
Per + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )
Grace
Federal isn't the 'good' part of town. But it's the good part of town for rice noodles, and that's really the best kind of good. Grace likes to categorize the place as 'rugged' or 'full of character' to be generous. It's a place where one needs to watch oneself. But lately, that set of locations has included nearly everywhere, so why bother worrying about regular old normal violence?
She's got her feel on, the sixth sense that came with the opening of her eyes (the other eyes). It's feeble, but she pays attention to it, yes? Like a deaf person hearing for the first time, whatever noise comes through is like a symphony.
She's driving down the street now, stuck at a stoplight when she feels him. There is a symphony in the air tonight, a song she hasn't heard. It's pretty, catchy almost, like the kind of resonance you might want to hang around just to be a part of, if it wasn't for the dissonant undertone.
She looks around the street for the source, but there's people, and... a chicken, okay, and it's not like she knows who she's looking for. Eventually she just decides to pull in to the taqueria instead of waiting on the light. It seems likely enough. And tacos are food too.
Maybe she'll find the reason behind the beguiling song.
When she gets out of her (old, red) car, she's dressed in jeans, sneakers, and t-shirt covered by a grey jacket, with a laptop bag thrown over her shoulder.
She looks plain. Like anyone, really. Blends in, with that kind of quality that makes your eyes just slide off. Not a threat, not a standout, this one.
Patience Mason
Federal was new, in the grand scheme of time and space, what lay on that long stretch of concrete heading north and south was new. With its strip malls and restaurant's with all its tin, and aluminum and dry wall that was barely up to code. Take a few more of these elements away and Federal might well have been a shanty town in the heart of the city, but it had just enough money, just enough power to keep itself afloat, above the state of detrius and floatsam....wether that would be the case years from now, one cannot know.
This place is young, and the woman who makes her way down the street, appears to be...well she appears to be a number of things. Outwardly, she appears comparatively young, easily in her late twenties to early thirties with a style that spoke of pure retro vintage, her dirty blonde hair was up in a set of Victory curls, framing her head. Sky Blue eyes take in the street as she moves along at a casual gait, her long limbs supported on a pair of heeled boots making her impressive height of 6'1 all the greater tonight.
She wore a ankle length dress which flared out at the bottom with a hint of ruffling, along with a white dress shirt, firm and pressed beneath a woman's vest of a dark pinstripe which lay beneath high collared jacket of victorian styling of deep brown with leather trimmings. She gave the feeing of having stepped from an old tin type portrait, or perhaps one of those most ancient film reels.
Regardless, as she steps along the street, nearing the taqueria, one has to wonder what exactly someone like her, is doing in a place like this.
Taltos
[My turn to be aware of things?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Serafine
Oh, I-know-you is the hum beneath Serafíne's skin. See: I know you I know you I know you it sings beneath her tongue and in her eyes, in her blood which is warmer than you can know. She is here and looks half like she belongs here, some steetwalker. Look at the torn fishnets and denim cut-offs, the leather bustier (studded tonight except with little pink silk roses) that shows off her lean frame, the whipcord sweep of her torso, the supple and suggestive curve of her hips, in a narrow slice framed by the lapels of a leather jacket, which is a size or two too large for her and laced with leather straps and silver belts and also pierced through by a handful of round pins, one of which says ROLLER KING IS COMING and one of which has a picture not of fucking Che or even Bob Marley but of Emma Goldman and you'll have to get closer to read it because the print beneath the print of Goldman's face is TINY.
But see: I know you interrupts whatever it is that brings her out here and what brings her out here is perhaps wistfulness or nostalgia or some physical instinct where her body has not quite caught up to her mind or maybe she just thinks Pan will appear again, out of the blue. Just show up and be there the way he's supposed to but:
:one minutes she's walking and the next her direction is modified and she has her hands in her pockets and her head forward and there's a faint chill in the air and Sera does not yet understand just how wintry winter will soon be but for now she's still managing in fishnets and heeled boots and leather jackets and push-up bras and little else.
"Táltos the táltos," from behind though he felt her coming not like Sera feels everything and everyone but maybe his mustache twitched with awareness before Sera waltzed into the scene and right up behind the Dreamspeaker. Bending to kiss his cheek and wrap the cold and creaky leather arms of her coat around his neck like they are old friends and do-this-all-the-time. She is pleased to see him, not sleepy because she hasn't been up long, warmer than she should be because she's been - drinking, and something else too, something that makes her pupils wide and hungry but he cannot see that yet.
Not until she lets him go and saunters around the the table and flings herself into one of the spare metal chairs and starts investigating his paperback while giving him a lifting, lilting look,
"What are you making?" A blink, a pause, and a lifting look past his shoulder. "Oh, have you met Grace?"
Taltos
This plain young woman gets out of an old red car in the spare and worn-out and damp-drenched parking lot beside the taco shop. Funny, how the city smells when rain's an offering, all ozone and the shifting appearance of sizzle-cheese frying restaurant-smells tossed down the street like there's nothing else out there or the sudden mouldering look-there-is-rot of newspapers and trash beginning to go to mulch and then just spaces of rain-smell. Speaking of shifting, there's something faint and shifting attached to that plain young woman with the old red car or maybe the old red car or maybe a feather tossed by the chicken as it picks at some spare grass-blades poking up through concrete. Táltos can feel the shift -- and his busy fingers still. He leans [further] forward to put his elbow on the table and hold his book in place, and it's what Kat would call a confluence, a coming-together-of-threads, a net-witchery which sometimes happens and is dangerous dangerous dangerous as those who have the Will to work (or have been called to Work, or just given gifts by birth by The Ones Who Created The Everything, that little sparkling thing of divinity within) find themselves in the same location. Táltos' lifts heavy vaguely aristicratic eyelids and looks with bright interest from old red car girl to the Victorian daguerrotype no Edwardian daguerrotype no faded 1910s image walking and -
And Sera. Sera, glomping from behind. He grins, of course, even though her weight rattles a word in his chest and the back of his throat, an unh, or an oy, or an ah. This entirely natural grin that just transfigures his face and candles his eyes and his eyebrows go up and it's almost owlish it's almost manic but without that nervous edge without any adrenaline to make it too too sharp, just definitely twisted.
"Hey there, love." His throat is clotted from disuse; that won't last. He clears it, and says, "Only at the bottom of a vodka glass or during the occasional dream- were you going to introduce me?"
He seems to be under the misapprehension that 'Grace' isn't a name in this conversation; he takes his elbow off his paperback in order to let Sera get a better look at it, holds up the bracelet and says, throat getting thick again, "Making a gift. It's to wear around the wrist. But shh, can't say the b-word til it's done."
Taltos
[Crafts! How's it looking?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Taltos
[Acceptable.]
Patience Mason
The awakened bombard the world with their willpower, be it the will of the self, or the very nature of their awakened being blasting out waves of specialized energies, attuned specifically to each individual like a finger print. Tonight is certainly no different as a group of Magi converge upon the small taqueria and fill it with a complex mixture of positively and negatively aligned resonances.
Patience is not blind to these things either, and whatever plan she had, whatever destination she was heading for is, for the moment forgotten. The heels of her boots offer a different beat as she stepped from the concrete sidewalk to the asphalt of the taqueria parking lot, and made her way to the outdoor seating, taking in the sight of those who were slowly converging upon this place. An innate curiosity is writ across her features, delight at finding such a meeting and she steps up to the table to those she has met, and the one who she has not.
"A noted and indexed temporal stream derivative focal point!." She says, pleased as punch in her strange way to see these individuals. "An appropriately sociologically and culturally based verbal activation sequence to your direct and individualized personages." She says almost casually.
Grace
And then there's Sera, that one who is so very hard to miss, mixing her own song into the mix, and Grace just has to look for a woman wearing as little clothing as possible to find them both. She doesn't judge exactly, just she knows Sera, knows that uniform of hers, and it is cold and wet out tonight, Sera, what the heck.
If Sera is friendly with this guy, he can't be too bad, right?
It's strange how they seem to congregate. She'll go days without seeing anyone, despite Auraria crawling with willworkers. And now, here in the bad part of town, it's a crowd. She walks up to the two, her smile a bit awkward, suffused as she is with the excitement and fear of meeting someone new. Just, people like it when you smile at them, even if it's got to be forced at first.
She's waving a little greeting, and halfway through a small "Hi" when Patience sneaks up behind, and greets everyone so enthusiastically strange. Grace does this sort of sliding look behind her, and there is a woman out of time. Well.
"Hello, I don't think I've met you," she says, and as she says the 'you' she switches her attention from Patience to Taltos. Because, she hasn't met either.
None of them really 'fit' together, do they? The four make an odd group out here. But it's no matter.
Serafine
"Why - " Sera manages to sprawl in the rusting iron chair in the cool evening air with the promise of rain and the promise of snow and the promise of the mountains like sharp and soon to be snow-capped teeth in the west from every intersection. Dominant things, jagged and crowing but Sera - fuck them - she sits with her back to them and allows herself not-to-think and mostly to do other stuff. Manages to both sprawl and lean forward and then tilt her head aslant just so because the world is sweet and wobbly beneath her, shifting in strange and relevant ways from every direction.
Sera is about to ask if the bracelet will hear its name and decide that it wants to be something else like a fish or a bicycle or a fish on a bicycle or a mermaid or a pair of jelly shoes or a nun or an incandescent star but:
Grace. And the woman-who-talks-like-a-robot still talking-like-a-robot.
Sera beams at Grace. The light slides around the apprentice's head like colorful snakes. Oh, hey. Beams at Grace and kicks out a chair and introduces them "Grace, this is Táltos the táltos, Táltos, this is Grace. She's new. It was a Wednesday last month.
"And, both of you, this is the lady-who-talks-like-a-robot."
With a small flourish and a gesture at Patience, before Sera - weaving, she is not remotely sober tonight, Sera - leans in across the table and confides, aloud, to Táltos or Grace or both.
"I have no fucking idea what she just said."
Taltos
[Hmm. For fun. Wits! to see if Táltos can follow the words Patience says without preparation.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 7) ( success x 1 )
Táltos
The man -- he could be young, but he could be old; indeterminate, dark circles around his eyes, which're inquiring and seem less focused than they are simply accepting, glad for society, listening eyes, yes, that's the best way to put it, listening eyes ready to be mischiefing, ready to gleam -- cocks one eyebrow way up, forehead creasing, and the other eyebrow? The other eyebrow he cocks way down like a Dali-clock, tips of his mustache tw-twitching, head up like a cat rearing back, all that for the stream of strange tech-sounding babble which comes out've Patience's mouth like she's a coin-operated thing from a Verne novel and after holding that pose for a moment, pale eyes [there's the gleam, the dredge-up of starlight] going from her to Sera to Grace to Sera then back, he laughs - a surprised-sounding laugh, just a huff-of-breath, and says,
"Hello." Answer: that's what she said. And also: Hello. "That's quite the Golden Age Science Fiction verbal tick you've got there, Miss." Polite. "Pleasure to meet you both I hope. Like Sera said, the name's Táltos and that's also my work."
The braid of leather-and-nails-and-scraps-of-painted-paper gets placed beneath his paperback, and he offers his right hand to Grace or Patience, whoever takes it first, and then he offers his hand to the other. His hands are warm: spring-warm, conjure-up-rebirth-warm, and the pressure of them is firm.
Sera says that Grace is new, and this certainly gets Táltos's attention. He gives her a keen-curious look, says, "Did it happen suddenly?"
Pause. "Shit, am I being rude -- don't let talking stop you from getting tacos. They've got good ones. Wonton taco shells."
Grace
Again, someone finds out when she Awakened, and acts as though this means she has suddenly grown a tail. Grace shrugs, "I guess suddenly, yeah. Or you could say I had been preparing myself. Hard to say which."
The táltos mentions wonton taco shells, and suddenly she remembers the true reason she's braving Federal. "Woo, yes... I'll ah, I'll be right back," she says, "Oh, and hi, lady-who-talks-like-a-robot!" She waves at the assembled, and she goes to assemble tacos.
It's not traditional, wonton shells, but different is good, no?
Serafine
"I'm not eating," Sera remarks, flicks a glance at Grace and a slightly-more-skeptical glance at Patience. A glance that is liquid and moving and mediated by some rather powerful mind-altering substances opened up and rushing through her veins. Tilts her head back then as Grace goes off to purchase a plate of tacos for herself.
Beaming, " - but you could get me a margarita on the rocks with two extra shots and/or a bottle of tequila I'll pay you back!"
Patience Mason
There are greetings for both Taltos and from Grace and Patience offers them both a nod, before a gloved hand is offered to Taltos, and then to Grace. She is friendly, but reserved, or perhaps poised is the better term as she lets her eyes settle upon the moustachioed gentlemen as he speaks of her 'verbal tick' and she offers an apologetic look.
"An appropriate socio-linguistic verbalization pattern for this concurrent temporal framework is...negatively present due to a series of frotean focal points along the temporal stream. For this appropriate sociological appropriations are verbally assigned to each of your individualized bio-noospheric selves." She says in a casual tone. Her gaze turning to Serafine with a raised, and amused brow.
"Serafine, I acknowledge and inquire as to your concurrent physio-noospheric-metaphysical state, it is nominal?"
Taltos
[...Wits again!.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )
Taltos
"I recommend the sweet corn on anything," Táltos says, as Grace heads off to get a plate. And.
There are: wonton shells, and teriyaki meat, and tamarind sauce, and then there is pico de gallo, guacamole, mozzarella chese, mexican sour cream, carne asada meat, peppers and beans and rice and spiced shrimp (don't try those, though), wilted looking leaves. The tacos could be good. Corn, simmering in lime-juice and butter, slathered with mayonaise and chili. It's a cornucopia of taco-fixings.
"Frotean focal points? I'm not familiar with the word 'frotean,' or ..."
Táltos has to think about what Patience said in order to try and parse it. "... Well, is the verbalization pattern permanently lost because of those points?"
Grace
Grace returns after a short trying-to-order, hard-to-decide trip to the shop, with a plate of wonton shells filled with carne asada, beans and rice, and peppers and a large glop of pico on top of each one. She got enough to share, if someone were to want to. There's also a corn cob with butter and chili on, at Táltos' urging, and a margarita for Sera (and a Mexican coke for her) It's... a little much to carry, but she's managing with a smile.
"So.. ah, Sera, here's yours," she kind of gestures at the cup in her hand like, 'please relieve me of this'. "And you're also welcome to a taco if you want."
"And you guys, tacos are... well, they smell decent!"
Serafine
Sera hears: her name. So, that gets her attention. Sera's eyes are a rich, dark blue, the irises ringed in a midnight color that melts into something closer to twilight, flecked with hints of green and brown. Hard to see them though because her pupils are black and reflective and gleaming and three-or-so sizes too large.
But, her name, the flash of her eyes, lazy up from Táltos the táltos to Patience. Hmmm? Her eyebrows are straight across her narrowset and darkringed eyes but hmmm they lilt upward in neat little arcs of inquiry. Still no damned clue what Patience is saying, but Sera gives her a thumbs-up.
A double-thumbs up.
Then, Sera's attention drops from Patience back to the table and to: the bracelet beneath the Dreamspeaker's book. No no, not the bracelet. Not the b-word. This little quick parsed smile as she bans herself from saying it and gets lost in a rich and pleasant looping tangle, pulls it back and reviews it, then lets it move onward. The supple thread of her resonance in the air from a minor Work. But also: the not-a-bracelet, tucked beneath the book, Sera's lean fingers, tipped in chipped and peeling nail enamel the color of a gothic fire engine, working to pull the would-be-bracelet free.
Then Grace returns! with food-and-drinks and Sera tips her head back, long curling hair sweeping the spine of the chair, not-quite-focusing on Grace but reaching in her general direction from the here's yours and Sera is all "For me?" but she's thinking about the not-a-bracelet too. Greedy thing.
"Thanks," lazy grin a quick, razor slash across her features, the full weight and heat bestowed on Grace like a gift.
Patience Mason
"Negative." Patience says with a shake of her head. "A series of active paradigmically altering anomalies intrinsic in my personages meta-field's could be negated and potentially alleviate the concurrent pattern loss, however hypothesized negatively aligned effects to this bio-physical structure and the noospheric lattice contained within the cranial cavity are, at this temporal juncture of a superior sum then the projected positively aligned effects." She shrugs at this, seemingly at peace with that fact.
Grace returns, and Patience, well as the smell of the taco's reach her nostrils they flare gently, the woman nodding her approval to the very decent smell of the mexican 'cuisine'. "Affirmative." She says.
Taltos
To Patience, he frowns and says, "Too bad. Hopefully there's a way around the curse, a way to convince it to sleep in some other bed. One that isn't your mind. Did you give your name and I missed it?"
Now. Táltos is tired. He is etched with it -- immanent with it. He is tired, and he sweeps his shaggy, kempt-but-certainly-not-kept hair back from his forehead and reaches into a coat pocket (his coat-pockets are full of things, sliver of white-wand in one, a cassette tape in another, pencil stub and charcoal, a pocket knife) to pull out a hair-band and put the whole thing back. His cheekbones get cold and so do his ears, but that's just the price one pays for vision sometimes. Táltos: a man wearing many rings, many bracelets, clink-clatter, always noisy. Táltos isn't a quite man by any means, and he may be tired, but he'll be dead before he's antisocial.
So. Grace returns! And he'll help her unload, the easy air of someone with long-limbs who knows how to not knock things over with them and is usually esconced in a crowd where things get passed around, juggled, etcetera.
Besides. The keen edge of interest in a new mage hasn't been abandoned, oh no, never think that, the Ascension War is 'over,' but the dreamspeaker is always curious which way those who still open their eyes and find out they've been gifted decide to jump, what they believe, truth or lies: he's a traditionalist, is Táltos, polite enough about all those wrong ways of thinking, all those perfectly logical systems made-up by sorcerers to explain what's really just perfectly simple.
"I come here often," he offers. "It's a nice corner. Usually come in the morning, the sun makes a happy golden square."
Táltos finally notices Sera working at the not-a-bracelet and he watches her sidelong, his eyelids lowering (they're purpled, almost bruised, you can see the veins) in order to accentuate the side-long look. He doesn't stop her, though-- won't unless she starts to unravel it or pick pieces out of the braid. Pieces like: oh, what's that?
It was The Chariot. What's that? Sharp piece of blue-glass from a broken bottle, edged in rust. And that? Nail, scrapes- what's that? A coin, scratched over and out.
Taltos
Addendum, sociably: "So what'd everybody do today?"
Grace
"I went to class, worked on my thesis, had a spare minute to water my ivy, and I realized I hadn't eaten lunch," she says quickly, the words clipped. Really, she hadn't eaten breakfast either, and there wasn't anything but emergency ramen in the cupboard. Bad Grace.
With that, she snarfs a taco. It's a strange mix, the wonton wrapper and taco filling, but it works. And after all, what's an egg roll but the Asian version of a taco anyway?
"I've got... homework to do, but it's only two assignments, and there's the weekend left," she says, her mouth full of taco (she really does not care).
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )
Grace
[ignore that roll, I have nfi what I was doing]
Taltos
[You were succeeding with awesome success! At taco-snarfing? haha.]
Grace
[YES, it is my taco-snarfing successes. I should have rerolled the 10s.]
Taltos
[Do it now. It's not too late.]
Patience Mason
"My heritalogical and parentally assigned nomenclature and index reference is Patience Mason." She says with a nod to the man, looking slightly taken aback by the fact she had somehow failed to introduce herself. She then moved about to whatever seat remained lowered herself into it, smoothing out her skirt as she did so and watched the others as they began to eat.
"This previous solar cycle I utilized my primary temporal allotment to design, manufacture and service several teritary systemic elements of the atmospheric lighter then air movation craft indexed as the Aurora." She said pleasantly, her smile widening as she watched Grace absolutely devastate that unprepared taco.
"Secondary and tertiary temporal allotment's were utilized in standardized maintenance of this bio-structure and the physically inert domicile in which I concurrently inhabit." She then looks to grace and enquires.
"What particular focal points outline and actualize your hypothetical assertions? And in what primary field of focus does it reside?"
Taltos
[... Wits again!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )
Serafine
Sera works that bracelet free but does not work anything free-of-the-bracelet. The not-a-bracelet. She seems - absolutely fascinated by the pieces worked together, the braided bits of leather, the humming background resonance that is bright and full against her senses, and the way the night works its way back into her awareness, quiet and here and now. She feels the weight of Táltos' eyes on her, all sidelong, and lifts her sharp little chin in his direction without lifting her attention from the bracelet. Runs her thumb over the edge of the blueglass. The rim of the coin. And so on.
Allows her gaze to cut away from these things only when Grace speaks up and recites the ordinary boundaries of an ordinary day into which the extraordinary must now always, perforce, intrude. Her lazy mouth, all smoldering curve, twists ever-so-briefly wider. Flicks up to Patience as she has clearly just said two words that Sera understood. Namely: her name.
Is it Sera's turn to tell them all what she did today?
Oh yes. Yes it is.
"Shrooms." Is what she says, picking up her margarita, because Sera believes in polypharmacy. Her smile is cat-and-canary. They have no idea the way the night frames them, all the damned things she can fucking see. How the edges of the moment become unhinged and how she turns them, open and shut and back again.
Back to Táltos The edge of his features. The bruising around his eyes, all things come into sudden and irreparable focus.
And now her eyes do not and cannot leave him. She's just staring, Sera. Or rather: not staring, seeing a bit beyond-sight.
Serafine
(Time 2: scrying Taltos' future. Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms)
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 10) ( success x 1 )
Taltos
[Eh? Is somebody being magick right now?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Serafine
(Extending: Time 2 / Prime 1 - that curse! Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) +1 for extending)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 10) ( success x 1 )
Taltos
(Also, I say skip Táltos's post this turn! for realistic-conversationa-flow-purposes (and also because I'm making food now).)
Serafine
(Extending: Time 2 / Prime 1 - that curse! Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) +1 for extending)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Serafine
(Extending one more time: Time 2 / Prime 1 - that curse! Dif 5 -1 (merit) -1 (focus - shrooms) +1 for extending)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 5) ( success x 1 )
Serafine
(and skip Sera: she istripping / scrying and therefore oblivious. :) )
Grace
"Ahh, my thesis, yes... It's a computational biological simulation of plant life. I was going to try to make it as chemically accurate as possible. Now... I'm not so sure that 'accurate' is possible. Or at least, they wouldn't believe what plants can do. So, I'm just kind of, you know, getting it close." Patience isn't entirely unintelligible to her. Just partially. It's probably kind of like what other people experience when she goes on about 'computational biological simulations' etc.
Grace is not surprised to hear that Sera has been doing 'shrooms' today. That sounds about right. But the way the woman is now staring at Táltos... huh. Grace noms taco again, because why not.
"And you make... lighter-than-air craft? That's pretty cool," Grace responds to Patience, after having untangled a few more words.
Patience Mason
"Negative, while the indexed material and required processes are available to my noospheric lattice at this juncture I do not concurrently manufacture lighter then oxygen movation craft. Maintenance of my current craft is more then sufficient given to its...prodigious dimension's and requirements."
Patience listens intently as Grace goes on about her thesis, a direct comprehensive simulation of plant life and describes the hurtles involved in the project. She nods, considering these issues, a sympathetic mind to be certain before offering. "Have you referenced and extrapolated the potentiality of accurate simulation at a micro-biological level rather that of macro-biology?" She suggests, a hand gesturing to the woman. "The active noospherical consensus may adapt and acclimatize to the simulation of such extensive potential on the microscopic level initially, allowing for a future extrapolation into nominal sizing and structure?"
Serafine
And Sera just keeps - yes - staring at Táltos, although now there is something shifting, something distant rather than simply enraptured in the frame of her rather compelling features. Sera is breathing quiet steadily, all tidal, in through the nose and out through the nose, right, cyclic, the fingers of her right hand wrapped thoughtlessly around the not-a-bracelet , her left hand braced against the edge of the metal table, though her fingers are slackening a bit. The slide of her wholly unfocused eyes is like the slide of the yolk of a smashed egg down a kitchen wall. Exquisitely slow, viscous but still moving.
Grace
She squints at Patience. "I'm not sure I follow. I designed it to incorporate respiratory processes -- oxygen transfers, photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation... It's rather micro-biological in nature. That's actually the problem. Current understandings of microbiology are insufficient to accurately model what's really going on... And I don't know how to explain that in my thesis -- Oh yeah, everyone who is an actual biologist, you're missing all this stuff."
Táltos and Sera are likely off in their own world, while Patience and Grace live in theirs -- a world of big, sciency words. Tacos get demolished. And there is that corn, probably cool enough now, having given its heat away to the air.
"What's a noosphere?"
Taltos
Táltos listens to Grace and Patience thus: forehead-creased with attention, languid-eyelids (tired-still) but inquiring eyes, rain-pale, and once or twice a twitch of his mouth upward, imagining just what the Verbena would say confronted with these two, especially Patience, but Grace too, because he hears computational biological simulation of plant-life and he thinks plant-computer, and then he thinks Progenitor, and then his eyes get a little grim, and they drop to the sidewalk cracks which are, at least near Táltos, thriving, because he's another one who draws flowers out've fallow.
What's a noosphere?
"What's a computational biological simulation of plant life?"
Flash-of-a-grin, then-
... And then there's Sera. Who begins to Work, staring at Táltos, and startles his attention from the Technocrat Discussion to the Cultist-Ecstatic staring at him, and he stares back, cocking his head to the side, body drifting that-a-way as well, reflexively shoving one hand in his pocket.
Uncomfortable, but resigned.
Grace
[perception+Awareness = Does Grace pick up on whatever Taltos is thinking of her right now? AKA 'I'm not a Technocrat, thanks]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Patience Mason
"A tiered dissemination of data and informative simulations is the primary and most effective methodology for neutralizing the adverse and negatively charged aspects of the noospheric consensus. In addition, focusing your simulations upon a singular selective cell of a biological entity would simplify simulation and acceptance." Patience attempts to aid, or at least clarify what it is she's suggesting, but then there's an inquiry as to just what a noosphere is, and Patience smiles, tapping the side of her head.
"The noosphere is an appropriately assigned index for the processes and chemical electrical functionality of the cortex of homo sapien sapien." She says it like shes a teacher, explaining a topic. "To derive the appropriate terminology from the conglomerative index is that of noo- utilizing the linguistic system of ancient greek in reference to the cortex, while sphere...well." She shrugs, as if that is fairly simple to understand.
She then turns her gaze towards Taltos and raises a brow. "A digitized electrically simulated representation, not concurrent or ratified in any third dimension as a solid."
Taltos
Grace, perceptive, notices the grimness: and probably figures accurately what it is Táltos is remembering, or thinking of - maybe she's seen that look on others' already? Like her project reminds him of something uncomfortable --belonging to the Technocatic Union. That's what's there: remembered discomfort; it's separate still - for now - from suspicion or accusation. And sublimated by supreme discomfort which is directed not at the Technocrat-Mages (old-fashioned, they're all Technocrats who deal with Tech, aren't they?), but at staring Sera.
Serafine
And see: Sera. Serafíne-call-me-Sera is unfocused and lost and intent and intense on Táltos which he accepts with an uncomfortable and resigned mien and neither Grace nor Patience affect really to notice that Sera-who-is-stoned and may be really too stoned to be wandering around a neighborhood like this by herself after dark is also more-than-stoned. Is, to put it in simple and quiet terms, Working. Is needling threads and threading needles and splitting not infinitives but warp and weave and weft and the long threads are tacky and infinitessimal and her mouth, which is painted a glossy pink, is open and that far-away look catches the light and sheens her eyes and the margarita is ignored and they can eat tacos and talk about things Sera does not cannot will not begin to understand and Sera,
makes this quiet little noise, all hushed focus, like her heart is being squeezed. Her expression is darkening, is drawing in at the brow, is narrowing to a line between the brows, is kept close and closer.
Another noise, sharper but also breathy, back of the throat. Tension creeps into Sera's body language, wraps itself around her and she
shivers, unconsious of it but feeling the movement of it all through her body. Even the shape of the darkness around tem is altering, is becoming spiked and full of threat.
When she finally comes to consciousness, back to reality, the agreed-upon present moment, she breathes out in a rush, Sera. Reaches up to scrub away a handful of tears from the corners of her eyes. Her attention slides from the man's face to his hand and she breathes out sharply again, Sera.
Reaches for his hand.
"I hate that thing." She means the ring: must mean it, what else could she mean? "You have to get rid of it. Soon."
Grace
"My stupid thesis, is what it is," she responds, giving Táltos a grin. "Patience is right. I study computer science, and my focus is simulations. It's just... writing computer code that simulates a thing, so you can predict its behavior? That's my thing. One could even say it's what helped me get... here."
She's not entirely unaware of Taltos' darkened expression, the way his eyes scan the cracks in the ground. He's uncomfortable around her. So, maybe if she put it another way... She leans in all conspiratorially-like over her tacos, "So, I found out that plants think, okay? And it's amazing. And it's not something that I can just put in my thesis, because I'd have to explain how I know this."
Except that Patience seems to think she can put it in her thesis. Isolate it. Chop the plant into small pieces, and then analyze. She turns her attention back to the woman. "I don't think that would work, really. It all depends on showing it holistically. If it's isolated, they'll just say the effect is due to the isolation." Big sciency words again.
Taltos
(Ack, skip me one more time!)
Patience Mason
Patience nods to Grace's objection, but refrences back to what she said. "Thus the tiered release and extrapolation from the finite model. Each model shall proof and reinforce the previously asserted digitized revelations, thus negating any coherent and anticipated resistence within the noospheric consensus." She smiled, offering that last little bit.
But then her eyes swivelled over to Taltos and Sera, and she inclined her head and inquired curiously. "What must he negate from his personage?"
Serafine
"That fucking ring."
Sera breathes out a curse-as-a-curse and at-a-curse and her eyes are damp and intense and there's something shivering about her that she cannot quite tamp down because: she is a seers. Seers see things. Not always the things-they-want-to-see.
But she is rapt on Taltos, cannot unsee not when she has gone peering through the loose little threads, pulling pulling pulling, not even when the edges of her perception and starting to turn stained and dark and mottled.
Serafine
(I am going to have to sleep very soon. barely keeping it together right now.)
Grace
"Sera, are you okay?" Grace says, and she really is concerned. There's so much that a newbie like her misses, and she has missed Sera's Working, doesn't understand the sudden turn of emotion in her.
"What's wrong? What about the ring?"
Taltos
Grace grins when she re-explains, and Táltos chuckles, attention wavering from staring-girl back to the Scientific Ladies: "I see. All things think, and speak too; it can be difficult to lay-out in an easy to accept way," frown, spare, "using today's language. Sounds interesting, especially if the study of it helped you get to where you are today."
His hand is in his pocket. He doesn't bring it out. Fingers, long-fingers, bony-wrists, big-hands, tendons sharply delineated, shovel-fingertips, nope: clenched inside. The rings too, and the bracelets. He smiles at Sera though: something that's less a flex of the mouth and more a flex of crinkle-lines around the corners of his eyes.
"Don't look," he advises her (too-late), gently.
Grace
It seems her re-explanation worked for Taltos. He laughs, at least, and that's a start. But you see, there is a rift between the sciency ladies and the other two. There's also something that they are talking about (or around) that has Grace completely confused. "Don't look at what?"
Of course, she'd have to ask. Really. She does have to ask. There's something that keeps pressuring her to ask, and it's more than mere curiosity. It's a drive, like this is what life is, asking questions.
"I'm completely lost."
SerafÃne
"I already did," and Sera flashes him a similar smile, a bracing sort that is less a movement of her mouth than it is tensing of her cheeks and a faint narrowing of her eyes. Her eyes drop from his face to his hand and it takes effort for her right now to focus outside of the immediacy both the vision and the way the vision has shifted the celebratory edges of her trip to something else, darker, twisted, remnant, iron-bound and rusted, blooded and malicious and shot through with pain.
See: she sees also the smile; the gentleness of the warning. Marks it in a way that is considered but not thoughtful and then glances back to Grace.
Breathes out long and slow. Picks up her fucking drink.
Her hand, it's shaking a bit.
But Grace, oh Grace, Sera favors her with a lilting half-smile. It is fleeting and it does not reach the Cultist's dark and darker eyes, which are being devoured by her pupils.
"It's a long story, not mine to tell, and I know the outline only. Not the details. But, do you feel that edge?"
Malice, she means. The thing-that-doesn't-fit Táltos the táltos. "Sharp and wrong and bad. Hungry-for-disaster. Like rust, devouring a blade, skewering skin. It's not from him. It's from something-else.
"He's telling me, not-to-look into his future." A glance back at Táltos and Sera oh, she smiles. With her quick-curving mouth now, rising. "I should have asked." Sorrowing, in her way, which is whole and entire.
"Tonight's going to be a bad night, I think. And I should go. But come see me soon, Táltos. I want to help you break it, if I can.
"Grace," rising, Sera tosses back the rest of her margarita all at a go, because what the hell. Bends to plant a kiss on the crown of Grace's head. Sera smells like spice and alcohol and limes. " - I hope I didn't freak you out too much. Take care, okay?"
Taltos
Táltos grimaces. The grimace is as dramatic a contortion as any of his expressions. He's a guy with a lot of expression. He's a guy who is a lantern for his moods and they're whatever lights up inside and he grimaces. Hollow-eyed Táltos, he rubs his forehead with his other hand -- with the pads of his index and middle finger. Three bracelets there, one with a medallion made of bone, another with links of iron, and another which looks like one of those rubber bracelets you get for supporting a cause on which is stamped the word astronomical and then there's three copper beads next to teeth-keys. Then: fine, he takes his left hand out of his pocket and holds it out on the table. He has three rings on, one on the ring finger, one next to the one on the ring finger, and a thumb ring. The thumb ring is a simple band. The second ring on his ring finger is etched to look like leaves, a thick band. And the first ring on his fing finger is older-looking, a thick dull-gleaming band with catchments that look like they might open to show a secret message.
"I felt you doing it; I would've stopped you, but..." But he doesn't know how to stop that kind of seeing, and see, he means it too. He grimaces again, and then taps the ring-that-might-hide-messages, and says, lightly enough, "She's talking about this ring; haven't figured out how to get it off yet. Soon, though!" He sounds optimistic.
And then stands up in order to bid-Sera-an-appropriate-farewell, which appears to be a hair-scruff right now: "Sure. You be careful, Serafíne. Grab yourself a taco. You're too thin."
Patience Mason
Sera describes an edge, a danger somewhere in Taltos' future and Patience narrows her gaze in consideration of these facts as they are revealed, it's something to consider, something to watch. She glances to the ring set upon Taltos' finger and arches a brow, regarding that unexplained, and potentially dangerous device before looking up at Sera.
"It is with internalized certainty and projected empathetic emanations that I extrapolate hope that your REM cycles are not overtly disrupted Sera." She offers the woman, evident that she was on her way out. A genial nod is given as well, a parting farewell as the Cultist departs.
She then looked back to the others, to Taltos in particular and inquired. "At what particular geographical locality did you acquire that frotean device." She inquires, gesturing to the ring in question.
Grace
The sad-eyed, slightly (a lot?) out of it Sera is still trying to teach the young, and for that Grace can only give her mad props. But instead, it just comes out like this: "Oh..." because there is so much to that explanation.
"I do feel it..." she says, and Sera kisses her on the head, and Grace's eyes open a touch more, like that was completely unexpected (but it should have been).
"I'm not freaked out. I didn't get freaked out when crazy rained from the silver screen, I'm not going to get freaked out now. You be good, Sera," she says, and gives her a smile. Sera's not going to be good. Sera's going to be Fun. But you know...
Taltos
"It was in a box from my grandfather," Táltos tells Patience: "Part of his effects." Then, with a thought, "What tradition do you follow?" Because: maybe if she's a Son of Ether -
Though his attention swings, and see, Táltos, leaning against the metal chair he stood up from, one hand on its back, he gives Grace a quizzical look: "Crazy rained from the silver screen? Is that a literal or metaphorical statement?"
Grace
"Both. Listen, do either of you have cell phones? Or a computer maybe? I can hook you up with the information network. It'll tell you all about the crazy," she says, and picks up the corncob.
"I was going to the movies to get my mind off of the... zombies. Big mistake. The movie, it was like a Trojan Horse. It just masqueraded as a movie. I'm sure you heard about the riot? Three people..." she trails off... bites corn.
"Anyway, we're trying to figure out where it is."
Patience Mason
"I am a active part of the socio-political-paradigmic amalgam indexed as the Sons of Ether." Patience says with a slow nod. "Your genealogical predecessor..." She consider's, her eyes flicking to the ring again. "Frotean, assuredly frotean."
She rises almost in tandem with Taltos, stepping out and away from the chair before pushing it back into place, leaving the location much as she had found it. Of course, Grace had seen to it that several taco's would never be seen here again...but then wasn't that was this place was for?
"It has been a memorable and index worthy temporal reference point." She says with a nod, pausing to give Grace her cell number, Taltos as well before turning to go.
Serafine
"Tch," Sera mutters, a smile and a correction all at once for Táltos. Who says she is too thin which is true, objectively. That smile is unfocused; is superficial, is the sort that skims over her features and slips away, half-remembered. She glances up at him as he scruffs her hair, her gaze skewing away from him toward the shadows beyond him and,
"I meant it. Mean it. We'll go see Jim. We'll do something."
--
Patience, well, Patience Sera still does not understand. But Sera does seem to register well wishes and a good night or even a sleep well. Dear Patience, Sera is only beginning her trip, she will be awake for hours and hours. But see, she shoots the woman-who-talks-like-a-robot a half-smile and says, "Thanks, man. You too."
And Grace finally, assuring that she is not freaked. She is not freaked now, will not be freaked, is made of different stuff than that.
Sera would've freaked when crazy rained from the silver screen. Sera did freak when a fallen mage asked her to dance. Sera -
- is not going to bed good. Is probably not even going to be Fun tonight, but, she flashes Grace two-thumbs up as she starts to saunter away. "Always am."
Nearly-serene, reassuring, assured. Then she: stuffs her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket and walks away from the outdoor tables at the taqueria, off down Federal. Maybe toward a bus stop, maybe someplace else. God knows.
Taltos
Táltos does. He even has it on him, his cellphone, in one of the many pockets of his peacoat. He has to take things out to get it: half-a-feather, a pack of cigarettes, a cigar, a stone, another stone, yet another stone, a rock, the beginnings of a rubberband ball, an old coin limned in moss-green, a bandana, and then - hah. There. The cellphone: he plugs in Patience's number, and then - Grace gets a considering look; the flick of a half-frown. "That sounds interesting," he agrees, cautiously; either of silver screen craziness, or being hooked up to a network by - is she a Virtual Adept? She sounds like a Virtual Adept. Maybe that's just prejudice: computers and networks. "I'd like to talk about it," and here, he sounds grave, because peeling back the Trojan Horse Zombie lingo and there's something a dreamspeaker can be interested in: something speaking, something more. "Plug in your number or, uh," and look. He searches through his pockets again, putting things in, accidentally breaking a piece of charcoal, look, he has a little bottle of vodka, and then: a couple bent-up business cards. His full-name, underneath it: Author. An e-mail address. A phone-number. A fax-line.
Grace
"We'll have to meet again sometime. I'll call you, Patience. Next time we're in the same temporal geographical location, you'll have to meet Ginger," she says, mimicking the strange speech. "Son of Ether, eh? I remember reading about you guys in my notes. Nice." And that explains the way the woman schooled her on Science. Will have to talk again. Mmm yes.
"And you too," she says to Taltos. It's easy to think she's talking about a person. "I'm not going to talk about it over the phone though... Just, I might, say, invite you over for tea. And it won't be tea?" She smirks, takes his card, reads... "You're an author?" she says, and her face lights up. "I was published recently, myself." and there is a bit of pride in that tone. "I'm not good, just... you know, it's a hobby," and then, the self-deprecation.
She gives Patience her number, and Taltos her number, and promises that next time... next time, there will be installations going on.
Taltos
[And because Noel is awesome, we are allowed to fade there. *zip*]
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)