The Cake was a Lie, but the Gingerbread Wasn't

Serafi­ne
Sometime after she first informed most of Denver's Awakened population about Ginger, Grace received a text from Sera intimating that she just didn't get it pls to show her.  They exchanged a brief volley of text messages and maybe even a damned phone call on the theory that the data was harder to extract or - honestly, wtf, Sera would not understand any of that - but the upshot is: a final invitation, verbal or otherwise, and an address, and a promise of cake.

The cake is usually red velvet.

Sera did not promise Grace hashish or mushroom tea or really good tequila or Stranahan's, but she has all of these things squirreled away somewhere in the big, four-square, three-story-with-a-basement-and-a-separate-garage-and-a-bridge house Dee inherited from her great-aunt.  Which Sera and her bandmates who are also her housemates share.

The neighborhood is hip, the treelined streets are crammed with cars, the dwellings a mix of older single family homes and rebuilds, condos, either retrofitted into old buildings or rebuilt, and small apartment complexes.

741 Corona Street is a blond brick house with dark green shutters and a once-loved garden.  It was slowly dying from lack of water, but the recent deluge has awakened the growth again and it is green-green-green, utterly overgrown.

The grass is too-high.  There is a porch swing and some old fashioned metal chairs on the front porch, and an ashtray on the bannister, and a fucking unicycle, and the sound of music from inside.  The screen door is closed but the inside door is open and the porchlight is on.

There's a doorbell, but the truth is most people just walk in.

Grace
Ginger just keeps on getting Grace out of the apartment, despite her many attempts to stay inside. Sera's house doesn't seem dangerous, exactly, but neither did the theater. Neither did her life before all this started happening.

But Ginger, and the data she contains must be spread. This is a duty. Even though Sera is so clueless!
She has to remind herself that there was a time when she was so clueless, and there was Sera with open arms. It's almost enough to forgive the texts back and forth talking about the secret server in plaintext, almost certainly being watched. Grace can only hope that there is a Razor up in the sky to cut it out of whatever database their conversation ended up posted to.

And cake. There will be cake. This is also a factor in Sera's favor.

So Grace climbs up from the street in that kind of mood, the 'I'm having to deal with a user' mood. She's wearing jeans, sneakers, t-shirt (it's got lemons on it, and the text: 'When life gives you lemons, keep them. Because hey, free lemons.") and a grey turtleneck jacket that doesn't look like it 'goes'. She's also lugging around that laptop bag she brings everywhere, because therein lies the whole reason for this visit.

When she gets to the door, she doesn't know the unwritten rule of 'just walk in'. She just rings that doorbell, and stands there, contemplating.

Serafi­ne
Sera does not answer the door.  Sera never answers the door.  There are people for that even though the people in Sera's life do not necessarily think of themselves as people for that, well look.  Sera is somewhere tucked away in that big house probably smoking something illicit and someone else - a tall girl with a good fifty or so pounds on the too-skinny Cultist and the curves that come from that and a certain rockabilly vibe - appears in the shadows of the hallway, gradually coming into focus as she approaches the front door.

"Hey!" the girl says through the screen, opening it with an easy click and pulling it back with her hand and then holding it open with her right hip.  Dee smells... honestly delicious, even from ordinary personal distance.  Yeast and cinnamon and burnt sugar and pastry and butter: she works in a bakery, and the scent of bread rising clings to her hair.  " - Grace, right?"

The sparest pause for Grace to confirm her identity.

"I'm Dee, Sera said you might drop by.  Said she promised you red velvet cake, but all I've got is gingerbread tonight.  Hope that's good enough.  Sera's in the garden, gingerbread's in the kitchen.  We've got whipped cream or lemon sauce to top it?"

--

Inside, there's a gentle sort of chaos to the place.  The lives of four twenty-something musician hipsters layered over the older treasures of a once-prized family home.  Hardwood floors covered with fraying Persian rugs, there are a solid half-dozen pieces of original art of some sort on the walls: paintings and collages and one woven piece, some abstract, some lovely, one quite nearly fucking obscene except: no, look again.  It is nothing of the sort.  Pieces of pottery and weird little Jesus statues and a portrait of Amelia Earhart and a spider plant in a dust old macramed plant holder dripping spider-babies down from its sides and a neon piece that just says LOL and so on.

That's the hallway, a glimpse of the living room, past the wooden stairs and powder room, into the kitchen - which is bright and white or would be if the sky were anything other than relentlessly gray these days, if dusk were not falling to darkness, if if if -

Dee offers Grace a drink and cuts her a generous slice of gingerbread if she wants on.  Offers either real whipped cream or a warm lemoncurd sauce to dribble over it, and points Grace to the sliding glass doors that lead to the back garden.

Which is where Grace will find Sera.  The garden is damp and muddy from the constant rains but there's a break in the rain and anyway they mostly don't smoke - cigarettes or pot - inside.  Or, sometimes they do smoke pot inside the house and the rooms are also redolent with the musky scent but they try not to smoke inside.  It's bad for the art.

In the middle of the garden is a flagstone patio with a mishmash of furniture include a big cabana bed, which is where Sera can nearly always be found.  Seated cross-legged near the edge, sharing a pipe of hashish with a tall, skinny blond guy covered in tattoos  Whom Sera introduces to Grace as "This is Dan-He's-Cool," for all that Grace, even if she can sense Sera tonight, cannot sense any similar resonance from Dan.

And there's this moment where you just know that Sera wants to get up and hug Grace, like the possibility of a hug is clearly implicit in her body language, but in the end Sera remembers how stiff-armed Grace got when she tried to tuck up against her and just remains where she is.

Dan holds out that pipe for Grace to take or decline as she searches out a seat that is preferably not completely sodden.

Grace
[Awareness, can Grace sense Sera?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Serafi­ne
(Oooh and also awareness.  What sort of warning does Sera have? )
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Grace
Sera's the first Mage Grace ever felt. In the doorway of that bookstore, she felt that pull on her insides, drawing her in to where her eyes could barely escape the woman. Hard to miss indeed. Sera's here, and that's... well, expected.

But there is someone else at the door, and Grace makes with the introductions, smells the woman (good grief) and looks around the room a bit awestruck at all the stuff. Grace has a plant at her place. And it's not even there for decoration, really.

"Oh, thanks, I love gingerbread," she says to Dee, while looking at the neon 'LOL'. It's a sign that's just looking for a dark rainy alleyway to reflect in. All that stuff, what does she do with it?

And then, so distracted, she makes her way to the kitchen after Dee, and obtains that marvelous free food (with the whipped cream on top, if you must know) with a 'thanks' and a smile.

So arrayed, she walks back to the garden -- the very not-computer-friendly, wet garden to meet Sera. And, this is like oil and water, the two of them and her. She has no tattoos. She doesn't get stoned. She is unstylish, and uncaring about that. But that also means that to her, the others' appearances are just that.

"Hi, I'm Grace," she says to Dan, smiling again. But when the pipe is offered, it is declined. "Sorry, I don't... Shouldn't really, in case there's a problem I have to fix."

"Hey, Sera," she says, while looking for a seat. "Long time no see."

Serafi­ne
Dan takes Grace's refusal of the pipe with good grace, all told.  Does't make the standard joke about how that means there's more for them! because there is always enough for Sera and Dan, and for Dee and Rick, and for any other guests who wander through, which guests do, with a remarkable regularity.  There are ashtrays scattered out here too, a few have been turned over so they won't collect rain.  Others are brimming with water-and-ashes.  Sera and Dan have one with a handful of the dark blue-and-gold butts of Sera's clove cigarettes, perched on the cabana bed at Sera's knee.

"Grace, you're new, right?  Sera told me about you.  She was so excited, just talked about it for days."

Dan breathes out a cloud of smoke - away from Grace, though Grace may not notice the consideration - hands the pipe back to Sera who is smiling a rather endearing, goofy little grin as she takes the pipe and, oh, inhales, then closes the clever little lid meant to cover the bowl, smother the embers, and protect the bud, or in this cash the hashish, packed inside.

"You look great," Sera says to Grace as Dan pushes himself upright, stands - steadily all told - and finds Grace the dryest chair in the garden.  Actually, one that looks like somebody dried it off with a towel or something after the last shower.  "Awesome tee.  I love free fucking lemons.  Free fucking anything.

"Oh, yeah.  When I said that Dan's cool I meant he's Cool.  My other housemates are awesome but you know, not Cool but Dan's like a - what do you call it - consor.  You know?  He gets it."

"And," Dan supplies, watching Sera with a sort of affectionate exasperation that melts into the leading edge of a wry smirk.  " - I'm in charge of her phone since she's hopeless."

Grace
"Yeah, I'm the new girl," Grace replies, and then looks over at Sera like, 'really?'

"You look good too," she says to Sera, and she means that... the last time she saw the woman, she'd just gotten over a juice fast and zombie attack, so she really is looking great, from Grace's limited perspective.

Dan is nice, she thinks. And he proves it by finding her a chair. "You know what I love? I love free fucking gingerbread." And to prove that, she takes a bite of the thing, and it is everything that is best about free food. Dee makes awesome things.

Sera's talking about how this one is special as she chews, and she kind of nods at that, though not understanding the term 'consor'. He gets it. That is apparently the meaning. Not quite thrumming with power, but in the know? Doesn't think Sera insane?

"Speaking of Gingery things... And phones, yes," she says, still kinda chewing on the sweet. "I did try to tell you on the phone, but there's only so much I can say. Ginger is a codename for a project I've been working on with my friend, see?"

She starts unpacking the laptop at that point, there's no point in stalling. Sera may be hopeless, but Ginger is kinda foolproof -- at least in Grace's estimation.

"From your end, it's just another number to call or text. Only whatever you say or write goes out to everybody. And it's safer. So much safer."

Serafi­ne
The Cultist flashes Grace a quick, brimming little smile at the compliment.  Which is objectively true: Serafíne is one of those girls, and amidst the pleasures of her own rainsodden garden, with her hipster friends, with a pipe full of hashish and a pack full of cigarettes and gingerbread and tequila and whatever-the-hell else she has or will consume, she looks - great, yes, absolutely.  Louch and decadent and vibrant, her hair curling from the humidity in the air, left long where it hasn't been shaved away.  Her torso a pale curve beneath a bustier beneath a dark hoodie.  Her usual fishnets-and-cut-offs on her shapely legs.  But:

that's not necessarily what Grace means.  Grace means other things, too.  Which has that edgy grin of hers both softening into a smile and then fading into something else.

"Then you oughtta drop by more often.  Dee works in a bakery.  She's always bringing home something.  Sometimes even pain chocolate, which is the best shit ever."

The Cultist bends forward and re-opens her pipe to take a peak and assure herself that the embers are out, then reseals it and sets it aside.  Lifts her chin to allow her focus to return to Grace, but yeah - it is weavering.  Sera is stoned enough that her limbs feel liquidy and her head feels like a lid has been lifted off her body.

"Like a party line?"  Mild skepticism framed into her features.  From somewhere inside her hoodie she fishes out her cell. "So I just need to add the number to my contacts?  Will it work with a landline?  I mean, some elders don't even text."

Grace
"Eeh, no it won't work with a landline," she says, sucking a bit of breath in between her teeth. "That's why I have to be here. It takes a bit of work on my end to set you up." She isn't going to say the words 'encryption' or 'end-to-end' or try to explain really. Instead, she just focuses on the setup, the laptop, the data cable, the necessary software.

And during all of this, she takes the occasional aside -- way away from the keyboard -- to eat some gingerbread. It really is good. Must thank Dee later.

"Well, you add the number to your contacts, and then if you call it, you get connected to Ginger. It's a voice menu, you know? Like, 'Press 2 to leave a message.'" So, it won't work on a landline. The encryption won't either, so if any unfortunate elder tries to access Ginger from a landline, they'll get the regular old 1-800-FAT-GRLS line instead, and at this thought Grace almost cracks herself up.

"Yeah, might be best for those elders you're talking about not to try to use this. They'll get phone sex instead. Might be a little confusing."

Serafi­ne
There is this nuanced curve to Sera's mouth.  A quick, graceful twist that surfaces, rises, and then dies.  The image of Pan or Katiana calling a phone sex line, maybe.  And a vague and lingering - something else that limns her dark eyes with another sort of light that does not shine.  Call it: banked.  Complex and more than a little bit private as Sera hands over her iPhone to let Grace work her cybernetic magic.

"If Pan or Kat every resurface," the Cultist remarks quietly, "I'll make you talk them into going mobile.  I don't think they'd listen to me, and fuck, I wouldn't know what to say."

Then Sera lifts her chin, indicating the laptop with a quick, darting little gesture.

" - this friend of yours, is he a VA?"

Grace
"Pan's gone?" she asks, oblivious. Being wrapped up in the prepwork, she doesn't notice the dying smile, and the darkened eyes.

"Okay, I am ready for the phone," she says, mouth half-full of gingerbread. "And yes, my friend is a Virtual Adept. He goes by Gadfly, and he's very good. Put up wards while we were hacking this thing so it... probably won't be detected."

She takes another bite of the gingerbread and chews, again away from the keyboard. "And even if it does, I put some... camouflage on the thing myself."

Serafi­ne
"Recovering," Sera explains, with a narrow shrug of her narrow shoulders, which is not quite herky-jerky.  She's mellow from her high, drifting a bit through it and smiles this half-smile, the bracing sort that Grace does not know her well enough to understand.  Dan does, though.  He unfolds himself from the cabana bed and crosses to another one of the mismatched tables on the flagstone patio.  Grabs Sera's clove cigarettes and a lighter and drops them in her lap, bending over to brush a kiss across her temple.

Which has her flashing him a slant-wise, upward smile - beatific.  Shining.

"New priest at his church though.  For the duration.  Has his fucking pager, too."

How that happened -

- well.

Sera breathes out, taps out one of her clove cigarettes and slides it into her mouth without lighting it, watching as Grace works on her set-up.  Listening like she has half a fucking clue about the first word Grace just said.
"Wards, listen to you.  Talking about fucking magic like an old hand."  This quick, illusive little grin.  So well, she does have half-a-fucking clue, Sera.  But only half.  "This dude Gadfly, though.  He's in town?  I've never fucking heard of him - "

Grace
The phone does not materialize, probably because Dan is busy making Sera shine like that. So, Grace looks up over the screen at them, the tiktak of her fingers on the keyboard gone.

"Ahh yes. He didn't look so great last time," she replies, sadly. Even though he made her skin crawl in that one brief meeting, it's never good to see someone so hurt.

"Yeah, Gadfly's in town, and I'm honestly not surprised you've never heard of him. He's only in Denver because he's in hiding."

Boy does that one ever hide. From the Techs, and from everybody else...

Serafi­ne
And of course it is Dan who remembers that Grace was ready for the phone.  Nudges Sera, who looks at him, and gestures for the iPhone.  Sera hands it to Dan, who hands it to Grace. Telephone with the telephone, Dan thinks and quirks a grin.

Sera still has yet to light her cigarette, and plucks it from her mouth, tapping it thoughtfully against her knuckle to settle the aromatic, spiced tobacco back down in its paper wrapper.

"In hiding.  Who the fuck's he hiding from?"

Grace
Grace sighs as she takes the phone, "Well, that's a story. The day I Awakened, there was this guy who showed up at my work. He was looking for Gadfly, and I had no idea what was going on. Let's just say that if I had opened my eyes a day sooner, I might have been snatched up by the other side."

The phone gets plugged into the laptop via a data cord, and she starts tapping away again. "We've all got to be careful. Hence Ginger."

"Well, ah... He's also really shy. I think I'm the only one of us in Denver who's actually seen him."

Serafi­ne
"Shit,"  Sera mutters around the cigarette, finally lighting it with the zippo with which Dan supplied her.  She inhales all deep, just breathing in smoke and breathing out smoke with a great flaring crackle as the sugars in the spiced tobacco catch fire, and burn.  "Brilliant timing, then.

That last-minute reprieve Grace received.  The way the universe waited to open to her until she was safe from the otherside.

"You should bring him over here, sometime," the Cultist continues, laughing, smoking drifting from her nostrils like a sleeping dragon.  " - I'm fucking brilliant with the shy ones."

Grace
"Yeah, my extremely lucky day."

The tapping continues in starts and stops, and Grace's face is slack in the reflected light from the screen, until Sera says she's brilliant with the shy ones, and then she rubs her eyes -- but there's a giant grin underneath that hand.

"Oh wow, Sera, you'd break him."

Serafi­ne
"That's entirely possible."

Which naturally just widens Serafíne's edgy little grin into - yeah, something wide enough to banish whatever shadows there may have been in her dark eyes, shining just as sure and clear as that look she gave Dan a moment or seventeen ago.

The creature shifts back on the bed - which is a little bit damp from the rain, but only a bit - holding her cigarette between her index and middle fingers, curling her fishnet-clad legs beneath her lean frame, bare feet tucked beneath her thighs, her heels on the flagstones in the shadows at the edge of the bed and arching her spine in a way that makes the bare skin of her abdomen and torso, the dark cut of her push-up bra, impossible to ignore.

"But fuck - everybody needs to be broken sometimes."  Not precisely disagreeing, no.  Just shifting idea tangentially.  "How the fuck else do you get remade?

"We usually have people over on the weekends.  Sometimes a full-blown party, sometimes just fifty of our closest friends.  Y'all should come over.  Or, fuck.  We've got some more gigs coming up.  Come see us play."

Grace
Grace is really not entire sure Sera won't break her as well, and she looks up over the screen. "Just fifty of your closest friends? So many people... I ah, wouldn't mind hearing you play though. That sounds good. I can't promise I can drag Gadfly anywhere, though."

"Hmm... but I might be able to convince him to watch." The typing stops, and she unplugs the phone, walks up to Sera, and hands it back.

"I took the liberty of putting the number in so you don't have to. So... try it out?"

Serafi­ne
"Shit, fifty's nothing," another flashing little grin as Sera shifts her cigarette from her right hand to her left and reaches up to take the phone from Grace with her right hand.  Is only a little bit high so actually operating the thing doesn't seem to be a problem for her right now.  Sera, well, pulls up her contacts and scrolls through the Gingers (there are two other entries for Ginger: one someone's actual name.  The other, well.  God knows how he got tagged as "Ginger" in Sera's phone) and finds the newest one.

"That's a slow night," Sera's - boasting?  exagerrating?  telling the straight and plain truth? - while calling Ginger.

On speaker phone.

"So I just call it and I leave a fucking message for everyone?  Does it tell everyone the message or do they have to call in too?"

Grace
Grace says the keywords: "Hello, Ginger," and the phone begins to speak. The voice that comes from the tinny little phone speakers is sultry, seductive, and robotic all at once. Ginger, you see, has the voice of one of the operators at the phone sex line. But piecing together a menu from her voice -- well the splicing isn't perfect.

"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," Ginger says, and Grace facepalms. Gadfly's been tinkering with the menu. Or something.

"They'll have to call in to listen to it. It doesn't phone out. That's one of the perks, actually. It means we can't be traced to each other," Grace says, in response to Sera.

Serafi­ne
"Oh Jesus fucking Christ, Grace - " Sera is swearing volubly though not venomously.  There's just such delight in her voice, and even Dan, who is standing at the foot of the cabana bed now with a hand on his hip, lighting a cigarette of his own, is chuckling.

"She's so fucking brilliant."  Then, raising her voice as if that might help the damned robot understand her,  "Hello Ginger Will You Marry Me?"  And yes, loud enough that Sera is practically speaking in all caps.  "This is fucking awesome."

Sera is going to leave them so many damned messages.

Grace
Grace has to laugh at the scene. Sera's talking to Ginger like Gadfly does sometimes -- personifying the thing.

If Sera dials a 1, she'll get Ginger's voice again, stating that there are no voice messages.

A 3 or a 4 does what it says.

But a 2... Well, that delivers a list of texts, Grace's hacklog, and Shoshannah's ghul information. It's got all the current information that the Mages of Denver have seen fit to leave, should she be interested. Unfortunately, it's not fun stuff.

Maybe Sera can leave them some fun messages.

"She is brilliant. I mean, I helped make her, right?"

Serafi­ne
"You did."  Sera, with a quick and winning grin.  " - and you're a fucking miracle."