Mara
Those who were at the Chantry knew that Mara was
spending her time out in the field, watching over the twenty acre's of
land which were the purview of the Chantry and its defenders, it seemed
she considered herself something a watchman, or at the very least, an
awakened rent a cop.
Right now shes at the chantry however, the
young woman busying herself in the garage as she looks for something or
other. It might be odd trying to reconcile the rather flashy and urban
look of Mara's clothing with the fact that she has been spending most of
her time in the great outdoors, for all intensive purposes roughing it
with the exception of the occasional trip to the Chantry.
So there
she is, rummaging through the garage in search of...well something. The
tool racks have already been rummaged through, and now shes squatting
down looking through the benches and shelves.
"Theres gotta be one here somewhere."
Grace
[Perception + Awareness!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
Grace
Grace
had been in the basement, working on a project in the library when she
felt the familiar sensation she's come to name 'Mara' in the back of her
head -- that sense of immovable strength. And then, the eyes raise off
of her laptop screen up to the ceiling. Yes, that one... There's
questions to ask.
The book she was consulting every so often,
switching between that and the laptop gets abandoned on the couch with a
promise to return, and she climbs the stairs.
When she finds Mara
in the garage, the look on her face is a bit serious for Grace, usually
so prone to a kind of friendly smiling, even if she doesn't necessarily
want to.
"Hey, Mara," she says, and in the garage, that small voice echoes.
Mara
[Per+Aware]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )
Mara
Magi
were so rarely caught unawares, or at least were so rarely caught
unawares by their own kind. The presence and pressure of their
individualistic natures and the very fabric of reality that they twisted
and altered simply by existing giving them away like a torch in the
night.
That is why when Grace comes into the garage and her voice
resounds through the echoing space Mara does not strike her bare head
off the bench she was looking under, does not give her nice smooth scalp
a fresh and shiny new lump. No she draws her head out gently, and
behind that comes her arms, and in those arms a fine, and sharped edge
axe. Which she rests calmly in both arms as she turns around and tilts
her head to look at the newly awakened Magi.
"Sup Grace?" She inquires with a slight sidelong shift of her chin. "Wha brings you out here?"
Grace
"You, actually," she says, eyebrow raising at the appearance of the axe. Why an axe?
"I was wondering... what did you do with the body of that thing?"
Grace doesn't feel like she needs to elaborate, and neither does she wish to. It's a night she'd rather forget.
Mara
Grace
is quick to the point, and Mara rewards grace's cutting to the quick of
the matter with a small smirk as she let the axe handle swing down,
brining the business end of the axe up for her inspection. He runs a
finger along the edge, flicking it gently across the blade to test its
sharpness and then seems pleased by the results, she answers.
"Burned it, couple miles from here. If I didn't it woulda come back and had me for a midnight snack."
It was her turn to ask the question however, this one rather obvious. "Why do you ask?"
Grace
The
answer does not seem to satisfy, and Grace lets out a sharp "damn"
under her breath. "Oh, just wanted to examine it, you know, get
samples... I guess that's not happening."
Between the burning and the rain, there would likely be nothing left to sift through for clues by this point.
"Gadfly
will be so disappointed," she said, her face swinging up to stare at
the ceiling for a moment, before she comes back. "Wait, what do you mean
it would have come back?"
Mara
"I mean it woulda
pulled an old Jesus routine." Mara says with a nod as she stepped
towards the apprentice, the blade swinging up and the back side of the
blade coming to rest on Mara's shoulder.
"As in come back from the
dead and reassemble itself. Thing was called a Ghul, you either gotta
squash'em like a bug in one big hit...or burn em to make sure they don't
come back. Nasty little bastards."
She steps upto and then past Grace heading for the door to go outside. "Come on, we can talk outside while I work."
Grace
The sudden intrusion into her space makes Grace pull back a bit as Mara passes by. "Ghul. Okay..."
Monsters that come back to life when you kill them. What will they think of next?
She
follows Mara out of the house, into the big room called 'outside'. It's
a place she rarely stays for long, especially this far out of the city,
especially in the middle of the day (and the paleness this results in
definitely shows).
It's not her element. But then, she is also
chasing after the knowledge Mara brings, and to do that, one must chase
Mara. "How did you find all that out?"
Mara
Mara
leads Grace into the great outdoors, the woman given all the space she
could desire once they are outside the confines of the walls and the
narrow spaces of the hallways. Out here its obvious that Mara has been
at work. Over by the stables a recently fallen tree can be seen, its
limbs already cut from its trunk and it was now fairly obvious what Mara
intended to do with that axe.
Mara pauses by the tree and sets
the axe down, pulling off her fancy red leather coat [which had recently
been damaged, and then stitched closed thanks to the Ghul in question]
and set it aside before picking up the axe once more. She wore a plain
black T-shirt beneath, and hefted the axe.
"All up here." She said
with a gestured to her head before she took her first swing at the
thick end of the tree, lodging the axe within it. "When I trained at the
monastery back in Vancouver, they had us do plenty of reading ontop of
all the physical training...I remember reading about it."
Grace
"Ahh,"
so the book in question may not be in this library. And it's all up to
Mara's recollection of things which may not necessarily be correct or
complete. And the body is burned. Life sucks, and Grace is getting a tan
and a fouler expression by the minute.
"Well, it's good that it didn't wake up and kill you. Too bad though, that's the end of that particular trail."
Mara
Mara
sets into a regular pace of chopping as Grace's expression becomes
foul, the woman looking over after each swing of the axe to regard her
temporary companion. She paused in her swinging to shrug.
"Such is
the way of it." She says with a 'what can ya do' sorta tone. "Bigger
question we should all be askin ourselves, is where did the movie go,
and who took it." Mara's casual smirk turned sour at that, not pleased
by something as she went on.
"I snuck back into the theatre to
try and grab the film..but it was already gone, somebody took it and ran
south out of the city but I lost the trail at the city's outskirts."
She resumes chopping then, speaking between swings.
"That's where we should be focusing our efforts...maybe on the studio."
Grace
"Yeah,
I've been talking to a friend of mine about that one. I'm not dumb
enough to start doing a bunch of... ahem... research from here, but the
more I can find out about Joshua Keller and the studio the better."
Just, you know, getting caught hacking, having it traced to the source, to this source... Yeah. No.
"But
yeah..." she looks over at the grass, looking totally awkward and
feeling so out of place here with Mara chopping up a tree, and she just
standing there. "Ah, thanks. For what you did that night. I just ran.
All I could think to do."
And everyone else, well, they'd jumped into action. Mara most spectacularly.
Mara
Grace
feels awkward about standing there and doing nothing, and Mara for her
part doesn't seem upset by that fact. She'd brought Grace out here out
of her element, she didn't expect her to take to it like water.
But
then theres thanks given, self admonishment's proclaimed and Mara swung
one more time and left the axe in the wood, already having cut the tree
into a three smaller sections then it had been. She offered grace a
grin and waved a hand dismissively. "Hey, it's what I do, and hell don't
knock runnin away. If you don't know anyway to contribute to a moment,
best damn thing you can do is stay the hell out of the way." She said it
like it was a good thing, like Grace had made the right choice by
trying to get to safety rather then stand around.
"I've done that
more then a few times myself. Seriously, you did nothin wrong by that.
Sides, sounds like you've gotta all the angles covered here in the
aftermath, and me...well shit short of knocking down doors, I ain't
gonna be much help till its time to get busy again."
Grace
"Yeah.
I don't know. It feels so... How did you deal with it your first time
seeing something like that?" Hell, she had issues with the zombies, and
that was just hearsay. "It's like the world is suddenly chock full of
shit I wasn't aware of, and now it's going and finding me."
And
most of this she has trouble making sense of. Well, the movie... it must
be like a malicious file, right? The operating system of the universe
treats it like code, tries to run it. That she can understand, to a
degree. But it's still wildly out of her ballpark. How would one even
attempt to do that?
"What are you working on, with the tree?" she asks, trying to be polite, trying to change the subject maybe, even though it's a tree, and Grace would probably split her foot rather than a log trying to help.
Mara
Grace
asks about how Mara dealt with her first encounter with the
supernatural, with her first, oh my god moment that sent the world off
kilter to teeter on the edge of pure and unfettered madness. The Akashic
seems to consider that for a moment, looking at Grace with calmer,
thoughtful eyes that seemed to be judging wether to share.
"First
time for me? Was the first time I opened my eyes to the awakened world."
She said as she wrenched the axe from its lodging on the tree and
hefted it once more. "Much of Akashic's came to my house, showed me
eight objects, told me to pick one. I did...and the very first thing
that happens to me, is to have a bevy of my previous lives bombard my
brain, I saw how they lived, what they stood for, how they died..." Her
voice became quieter as she brought the axe down hard.
"Hell...I
felt how they died." She swallowed, an action most likely lost in the
motion of her swings. "But I've always been more of a reactionary,
more...go with the flow in the moment. So what works for me, might not
be what works for you."
She looks a the tree then, momentarily
contemplating it before shrugging. "I dunno..maybe a quarter staff?
Really I'd intended to just pile it all up as firewood for the winter,
but making somethin ain't a bad idea."
Lena Reilly
They
sense her before she's hear, of course. Possibly even before they hear
the sounds of the motorcyle. It's that tribal beat that alternately
pulses forward, then withers back only to pulse ahead again. Rhythmic,
almost electronic but ancient as well. And that's the first inkling
they get that Lena's nearby.
Lena's been at the Chantry fairly
regularly since she first told Shoshanna she wanted to help out. She's
here a lot of the time...basically whenever she's not working or home to
change and shower. It's close enough to say she lives here except that
she hasn't staked out a room (mostly because she doesn't really sleep
much). The green Kawasaki Ninja that can be seen parked in front of the
garage door pulls up and pulls to a stop, Lena getting off and
unzipping her leather jacket to reveal the shimmery green sleeveless
T-Shirt underneath. She's got a pair of close-fitting jeans and boots
with just a touch of heel to complete the outfit. No helmet,
because...well, just because. She makes her way around to the door,
slipping it open and stepping inside.
She's at least at the point where she doesn't need to knock before coming in.
[[Per+Aware! Uncanny Instincts]]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
Grace
That
description of Awakening... "Well, I suppose that would make one
believe in reincarnation really quick. Sounds oddly horrifying and
comforting at the same time." She does get a little more grounded at
that. A little more reverential of the gravity of the subject.
"Mine
was like this just... like I was dreaming, or high or something, but I
wasn't really. I kind of reached out to the communication grid and it
touched me back with an antenna, and then the world went even stranger. A
whole lot less real, for one."
She would explain it further, but
the last time she tried... Well, the way she really sees things tends to
get misunderstood. Or ununderstood.
Mara
Mara
takes a moment to listen to Grace's words, pausing in her work to ensure
she heard the woman's words. An awakening was an awfully personal, and
very sensitive thing to share and she chose not to belittle its sharing
by giving it only apart of her attention.
"Sounds pretty cool to
me. But the way I figure it. If you can survive your awakening with your
mind intact, your about as ready as you can be to survive whatever else
the world tosses at ya." The axe falls again, splitting yet another
piece of the tree into chunks, and now Mara sets aside the axe, letting
it lean against what remained of the tree as she started to gather some
of the cut logs up.
"Fraid I wouldn't agree with the comforting
part." She says with a shake of her head as she piled wood in her own
arms. "Hey wanna grab a few more chunks, load me up?" She asks as she
stands there waiting. "Feelin youself dangle by the neck." Mara shook
her head and looked off.
"Not much comfort in that."
Lena Reilly
She
picks up on the different Resonances around the house...and let's be
honest folks, this place is full of them. It's a Chantry, after all.
Even if Shoshanna isn't present, little traces of her anger can be felt
if you pay close attention (which Lena is, because...well, she's just
good at picking up on magic). Same with Sid's euphoria, tinged with a
touch of desperation. They get buried underneath the people actively
present and that rejuvenating node out back and the wards, which are
combined with several mages' Resonance including Shoshanna's and Lena's.
But
most strongly, she picks up on those feelings of Mara and Grace, a
unique blend of feelings that, in Lena's mind, fit together surprisingly
well. She sets her leather jacket on the back of the couch and looks
around before making her way back out the front, following the trace as
it grows stronger, into the stables.
She calls out as she approaches, just because...well, it's polite.
"Hey
girls." That's when her head pops around the corner. She smiles
warmly at the Adept and Akashic and her body joins her head. "How are
you?"
Grace
"Well, no. I guess not. But you also are pretty certain now that life goes on, right? That's got to count," she says, hoping it doesn't just strike the wrong chord.
Grace
turns to the house, the chord in her mind turning to a full on beat,
that pulsing quality of Lena. "I think someone's here," she says, before
the Ecstatic actually arrives, calling out a greeting.
Grace smiles at Lena, even if she doesn't quite feel smiley at the moment. "Hey. I'm alive, is how."
Mara
Lena
arrives just as Mara is dumping some of the wood into one particular
corner of the stable, the Akashic squatting down to pile it up neatly.
It wouldn't do to just leaving it in a heap now would it? It's with a
chunk of wood in her hand that Mara waves over her shoulder to Lena, a
quick look over her shoulder as she says.
"Choppin wood. Sup with
you?" She then returns to work, quickly piling the remainder before she
stood up once more and brushed her arms off as she looked over at Grace.
"Yeah, it does...but, well you kinda have to experience it to understand."
Lena Reilly
"Just
stopping by for the day. I've got a standing gig at one of the clubs
downtown every Friday and Saturday and if I pass on them that's a big
loss for me, so I'm trying to get here earlier in the day to help out."
She takes a lean against the wall, watching the two. She doesn't offer
to help with the wood because...well, that's how someone gets cut.
Grace's carefully neutral answer draws a furrowed brow. "Just alive? What's keeping it from being better than that?"
Grace
"I
don't know, alive sounds pretty good to me," she says, with a bit of
extra meaning behind those words. "Considering the alternatives."
At least now Grace has someone to share the 'Standing around watching someone else work' feeling with.
"Did
you hear about the theater riot?" she asks, her face now definitely not
fake-smiling. She's gone all strangely serious, for Grace.
Mara
Mara
nods to Lena's reason for being here now of all times and she manages a
fully amused chuckle. "You sure you don't wanna show up after just
finishing a show? I bet that would be a sight, watchin ya try to do
chores after an all nighter." Her grin holds as the athletic young woman
stepped back over to the tree and hefted the axe in her hands once
more.
"It was something thats for damn sure." Mara says in regards
to the talk of the theater riot. "Movie coulda been better though." The
axe rises, and falls, little chunks of wood flying this way and that as
Mara continued her work.
Lena Reilly
Mara's joke
about doing chorse after an all-nighter draws a grin from her. "Are
you kidding? That would be freaking ideal. I never have more energy
than when I've just finished up a shift, and I don't have any ways to
actually work it out. I just don't want to vacuum while Sid, Shoshanna
and whoever else might have crashed here are trying to sleep."
The
grin fades quickly though, when Grace mentions the riot. She
remembers; she was here keeping an eye on the place with Kalen when
Shoshanna was dropped off. Kalen had hurried the Dreamspeaker off to
tend to the girl's arm, but the Ecstatic had gotten a few details, at
least. And then she'd read online about it via news sources. People
dead. She grimaces.
"Right. That's...definitely a point where alive is a positive option." She gives an apologetic half-smile.
Grace
"Sorry,
everyone else seems to be taking it all so well, and I'm just... " she
holds her hands in a clenched position on either side of her head,
making a face and shaking them -- it's an 'I'm going crazy' gesture. It
would be comical, if there wasn't that serious undertone to everything.
"It's
a first for me, really. So many firsts lately..." she trails off,
looking at the grass, so green now with all the rain. Green, and each
pigment molecule quantum superpositioned with its neighbors... Her mind,
it goes to random places, better places than the theater.
Mara
"I
keep tryin to tell her that she did just fine." Mara said as she looked
over at Grace and then Lena as she takes another swing with that axe.
"And hey, if you were gonna break down Grace, you woulda already done
it." Mara offers one last reassurance before she turns her gaze to Lena.
"Coulda
been a whole hell of alot worse." She says with a nod. "And what came
through the screen won't hurt anyone anymore. I call it a win, now we
just gotta find that film and deal with it. Now thats gonna be the
tricky part."
Mara has worked her way through yet another chunk
of the tree, cutting it down to size with quick efficiency, a thin layer
of perspiration upon her brow and over the back of her scalp in the
warmer afternoon air.
Lena Reilly
Grace is shaken
by what she's seen, and that frankly makes sense. Even a mystic would
likely be shaken with their first experience involving an otherworldly
creature, and Grace is not a mystic. She thinks in programming
languages; hacking reality and rewriting the code of the Tellurian. A
creature that has escaped from another realm...that's something that, to
use a pun, does not compute.
Mara reassures Grace and points out
the logical aspects of it; Grace did fine and she hasn't broken yet.
Both of those are reassurances and compliments. Lena, for her part,
gives a faint, sympathetic smile to the Virtual Adept.
"I suppose
it probably wouldn't help to say, 'Don't worry, you'll get used to
it?'" It's said with a touch of humor to it. "Honestly, I probably
would have done the same thing. All of my experiences have been, shall
we say, thoroughly terrestrial, and not of the Extra variety." There's a
point to this, of course; it helps put it in a potential framework that
Grace can maybe deal with more. Creatures from another realm or
dimension: thaty's difficult for a technologically-minded person.
Aliens? Easier, and not entirely wrong either.
She nods a little
bit to Mara. "Yeah, that's definitely good. Things would have been a
lot worse if you guys hadn't been there. Anyone have ideas on how to
track it down?"
Grace
Grace does listen to Mara.
But this week is the first time she's ever watched someone die, and the
first time she experienced... well, that. She didn't know that some of
those lifeless bodies were dead at the time, but it doesn't really
matter. It still struck something deep when she read the news on that
point.
"It's not about my 'doing fine'. I know I'll be okay." It's
everyone else. It's watching and knowing you can do nothing while
others are definitely not doing fine...
"But yeah. I do have some
ideas there. Unless this film was handed over by some completely
mysterious stranger, with no emails no Facebook messages, no phone
calls... I can probably find a trail. Or at least find out more about
who we're dealing with."
Mara
"I managed to scrape
its resonance, or at least the resonance of who swiped it out of o the
projection room." Mara offers, describing the feeling of the film or the
culprit as subtle, insidious, and otherworldly. "It was pretty strong,
up until it got outta the city, then I lost it somewhere in the
wilderness, not enough to go off of." She shrugged as she squatted down
to pick up some of the wood, and move it over to the corner where she
had been stacking it up.
"Sadly at that point my area of expertise
dwindles down to just about non existent." Mara offers with a chuckle.
"Like I was telling Grace, shy of knocking in a few doors I have to hand
it off to folks like you to actually solve the mystery." She doesn't
seem perterbed by this fact however, she knew, that at least for now
that she had a particular role to play, and the investigative parts of
this mystery were not apart of that role.
Lena Reilly
Grace has a couple ideas, and Lena nods a little bit. "That'd be a good start...it would at least give a chance to go off of."
That
actually gets the Ecstatic considering something, her brow drawing
together again as she contemplates. "It's probably a long shot, but
I'll ask some of my friends in the club scene. They tend to be into the
artsy stuff...music, movies, it all kinda goes hand-in-hand."
She shrugs. "No guarantees obviously, but you never know if it'll pan out. If I hear anything I'll call it into Ginger."
Grace
"Ginger will love you for it, too." And at that, there is a bit of pride. It's one thing Grace can do about the situation -- provide appropriate tools. Spread information.
"Oh, Mara, you don't have Ginger yet, do you?"
Mara
"Never
had a thing for Ginger's no." Mara said in response, obviously
misconstruing what was said as she finished piling up the wood she'd
chopped with a sigh. She looked at her work and nodded turning back
towards the other's and then to the Chantry visible through the doors of
the stable.
Ginger's aside I think I'll leave you to ladies with
your big beautiful brains to figuring this all out, while I go take a
shower." She says as she steps towards the door, but giving Grace that
wide berth she prefers.
"Maybe catch you guys in a while aight?"
She calls over her shoulder as she snags up her red leather jacket in
one hand and the axe in the other and steps smoothly off towards the
chantry, in search of her reward for hard labour.
[Sorry guys im fadin to fast to hold out..so that there is my finish for the evening.]
Lena Reilly
She
can't help but be amused by Mara's response and even laughs a bit as
she heads off. It's not anything spiteful; Mara'll figure out what they
mean by 'Ginger' later. She's just finds the misconstrued words deeply
funny.
Her attention shifts back to Grace, and she grins a
little. "Clearly, she's just never had the right ginger." The smile
fades quickly enough, but doesn't go to a serious expression; more of an
impressed one.
"Honestly Grace, that's really goddamn cool what
you guys came up with. Seriously. I'd venture to say it'll be
downright invaluable."
Grace
A laugh, something to
break up the oppressive cloud of unhappiness that plagued Grace -- and
it's so welcome. "Ohh yes. And Ginger's so sweet too. I think Mara'd
have to fight Gadfly for her though," she said, a bit of a lilt in her
voice.
"Thanks. It was fun to set up, really. There was pizza. And races."
Lena Reilly
"Races?"
She gets the pizza...obviously, pizza goes hand-in-hand with all-night
(and maybe multiple all-night) work sessions. She's more of a Chinese
and Indian food take-out girl herself, but the point is...when you're
busy putting stuff together, whether it's lines of code or the right mix
of beat, synth, vocals and everything else, you don't really want to
take the time to cook. It cuts down on your productivity.
And Lena's not much of a cook anyway.
The
races thing seems to present multiple possibilities in her mind
though. "You mean, like, programming races? Or something with, likely,
rolly-chairs to break up the monotony?" She seems honestly curious.
It's a world she only has the very slightest inkling of, but one she
respects.
Grace
With the disappearance of Mara
back into the house, there is no longer any reason to stand out in the
sun other than collecting vitamin D, and so Grace starts to wander back.
But she laughs at the idea of Gadfly in a rolly chair having an actual
race.
"Oh man, I mean programming races, yeah." She 'lowers' her voice down to a very loud whisper, and says, "I won!"
Thinking
about those good memories... Sitting in her car with pizza and mind
fuzzers, the vanguard, and so common to Gadfly, a history lesson on
Pompeiian clay tablets.
Lena Reilly
She smiles at that, enjoying Grace's change in mood and her appreciation of her win. "Well, go you. That's awesome."
When
Grace starts to walk back, Lena comes along with because...well, let's
be honest. She appreciates the company, even as closed off or
isolationist as she can be sometimes. And because she doesn't have
anything to do in the stables. She lets a few feet linger in between
them, keeping to the programmer's left. Enough so as to be not so far
that it's awkward, but not so close that they could accidentally collide
if one of them misunderstands the other's path and turns at the wrong
time.
"I hope he's not a sore loser. That would be rough."
Grace
"Nah. He's cool," she says, simply. "He's teaching me things."
On
the walk back, she takes her time. Nature's not her element, but it's
not horrible either, especially now in the change of seasons. "Mmm..
Bluetooth for the brain. I have a lot of studying to do, cause he shared
all his notes with me. Pretty sure it's all of his notes."
Lena Reilly
"Really?"
She nods, impressed. "Wow. That's...I always kind of had the
impression that Adepts were sort of protective about their stuff. So
that's really cool that he shared it with you."
In truth, she
doesn't know a whole lot about the Tradition, and she doesn't try and
hide the fact. She's met one or two before and they've had some brief
conversations before the tech level went way over her head, which is
about when the talk dies out.
She looks over at Grace, considering a little. "Any progress on getting him out of his shell at all?"
Grace
"Really?
I mean... Huh. I thought they were all about the open source. But I
don't know, really." In truth, Grace doesn't know a whole lot about the
Tradition either, other than what could very well be misleading
propaganda. Actual experiences with them have been rare, outside of
Gadfly.
"Mmm... A little. When we liberated Ginger, we did it face-to-face. It took a little bit, but he got used to me, I think."
Lena Reilly
"Well,
good." She smiles a little warmer at that. She may be a bit of a
social isolationist herself at times, but that doesn't mean she wants
other people to be. And there's a big difference between a little
isolationist and Gadfly's anxieties.
They hit the house, and she
gets the door for Grace. "I'm gonna go to a walk around of the
property, make sure everything's in place. I'll see you later." And
with Grace on her own way, Lena heads off in her own direction for the
back yard.
[[[Aaaaand wrap!]]]
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