The Priest and the Zombies

Serafi­ne
Phobia roll for today's hospital visit
Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 1 )

Pan Echeverri­a
Don't fret about logistics everybody's tired and this is a fucking panic scene.

Rosa is sitting out in the truck whenever Sera arrives at the Chantry. Doesn't want to interrupt the priest in whatever it is he's doing in there. When she left him he was on the couch sweating profusely but had not popped a stitch so she acquiesced that yeah okay he could stay there and do whatever he needed to do but the doctor said he had to rest, Pancho, you got a health aide coming tomorrow, let's not dawdle.

The window is down and the keys are out the ignition and Rosa is not happy to see Sera but she does not pretend she is not there. She waves to her with a stone face and goes back to the knitting she's working on.
Since Grace has not had the pleasure yet and I just noticed her: a red 200- Toyota Tacoma sits in the driveway of the Chantry. A Hispanic woman in her late thirties sits behind the driver's seat. Her hair is pulled back into a neat bun. Her upper body is the only thing visible but even that gives her an administrative appearance. She glances at Grace but doesn't do anything to greet her.

And there's a big Hispanic guy sitting on the couch in the living room. He's dressed all in black and manages to look like he's in a lot of pain and not at all distressed about it at once. But Sera might also beat Grace inside. In which case -

Pan Echeverri­a
i'm gonna roll some shit and assume he did this earlier because YOLO.

[prime 3/corr 2/prob matter 1 or something: where the fuck is the person this fucking thing belongs to*
coincidental. base diff 5, -1 practiced, -1 appropriate resonance.]
*not the actual name of the rote
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Pan Echeverri­a
[extending, +1 diff]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 3, 9) ( success x 1 )

Pan Echeverri­a
[what are you, injured or something, you lazy fuck? i'll take it.]

Serafi­ne
SINCE WE ROLLING. Awareness.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )

Serafi­ne
Outside, Rosa waves to Sera and Sera waves to Rosa and these greetings are exchanged.  Stone-faced Rosa, and Sera with a quick slashing half-smile that has an inchoate echo of worry and transferred, transplanted pain and so many other things but is also: maybe a little giddy.

She's so glad he's out of that place.

--

So: inside with her.  Through the kitchen, her eyes half-closed, her head half-cocked, like an animal listening to a secret frequency no one else can quite hear.  Feeling him.  Feeling for him and following that feeling down to the living room.  Almost breaks into a run.  Feels, too, the lingering resonance of his work in the back of her skin and eyes.

"Pan!" There's so much wrapped up in his name, it sounds like a sob and so very pleased and god, he still looks so, so bad.  Sera exhales sharply.  She's about to hover, as people do in a sickroom.  Comes to the back of the couch can cannot stop herself from hugging him around the shoulders and from behind.  From resting her forehead for a long, silent moment against the back of his skull.

Christ, maybe she will start to cry again.

Grace Evans
[Awareness! Hope my internet doesn't hork!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )

Grace Evans
Grace has no freaking idea who most of these people are, or why Rosa is out in the truck, or whose truck it is. She only really knows that she wants to visit the library, not people.

Her own red Toyota (corolla) gets parked, and Rosa gets a smile anyway. Best to be nice, even if it's not returned.

She's got that laptop bag she drags everywhere, and is wearing a shirt today that reads "i have not yet begun to procrastinate".

Shirt, jeans, sneakers, laptop bag, and girl trundle up to the Chantry's door like it's any other day. And by now, she has learned this is a place where one does not need to knock. She just blows right in...

And God, what is that. Power, lingering in the air, and potency, and she's never quite felt anyone like this before. The scene of Sera bending over a broken man then, and again Grace feeling like an outsider in this place.

She clears her throat a bit, like, 'hey, someone else is here'.

"Uh, hi."

Pan Echeverri­a
Everybody looks awful when they're laid up. Now that he's back in his street clothes he doesn't look vulnerable and caged up. But he isn't heavily medicated either. His shirt is looser on him and his knees are sharper where they press against the denim. Though he feels her approaching Pan does not get up to greet her.

If he flinches or grits his teeth or chokes back a pained noise she knows no better.

That however is Grace's introduction to the priest: sat on the couch and being hugged from behind by a raw-nerve Cultist and gritting his teeth so he doesn't let on that his head still feels like someone hit him in the back of it with a hammer.

"Hi," he says. When he speaks he has a liquid characteristic to his accent that makes pinning down his country of origin difficult. He also has a lingering brain injury. That doesn't help. "Forgive me for not standing, I'm a little under the weather. I don't think we've met."

Serafi­ne
Sera is wearing a tiny cocktail dress.  It is: skintight with tiny spaghetti straps and a hem that ends approximately one inch from the top of her thighs and shows off, well, an awful lot of skin. The print is a dark crimson covered with flowers and she's wearing fishnets beneath and these strange high-heeled boot thingies that she walks in as if they were flats.  Makes her like six feet tall, or at least five foot ten, which is five extra inches than she has any other right to claim.

There are a few tears in her eyes when she lets Pan go, lifts her chin and uncurls her arms from around his shoulders and bends forward once more to plant a very gentle and entirely thoughtless kiss on the crown of his head.  His hair is probably greasy though surely they would've helped him shower before allowing him to leave the hospital.  At worst someone dusted one of those dry shampoos through his mop, leaving it with that strange, reptilian hospital scent and a paper dry texture like an old woman's hands.

So there's that moment that Grace - feeling like an intruder - sees and Pan does not see but feels and feels as a shadow-skin of pain, as a background starburst from the lingering brain injury, which looks like prayer and Sera, straightening at last, inhales as she does so and glances back at Grace.

"Grace, this is Father Francisco Echeverría.  Pan.  Pan, this is Grace," Sera's eyes are shining.  The tears haven't fallen.  "This is Pan.

"Pan - are you - is Rosa waiting to take you back to the rectory tonight?"

Grace Evans
It's.. a bit obvious this guy has been through a lot. And in the interests of being polite, Grace chooses to ignore that completely, whether its the right instinct or not. Somewhere along the line, she just decided to handle social situations in conditional statements. When in doubt, ignore is better than retry or fail.

And so, she smiles at the suffering man, walking into the room so he can see her without having to move.
"Oh, no worries! You don't have to stand.." And why would someone have to stand, anyway? Her face grows a bit confused as if chewing over that one.

Sera introduces them, and the pain in that glance takes a bit of the smile away, or at least a notch of it.
"Hey, they kept telling me I needed to meet you," she says. "Looks like it's not exactly the best time... maybe..." And her eyes wander the room like she's looking for an out.

Pan Echeverri­a
"They did, huh?"

Sera is closer to him than Grace and can hear the effort in his breathing. Can't hear any agreement that this isn't the best time. His tone betrays his amusement but it is laden by the weakness of his flesh.

Now that they're in view of each other she can make out that the strong sense of light in the place is not so much from the windows but from him. He radiates the way a light does and feels warm the way a light does but it is not like the light and warmth of their sun. Nothing so distantly harmless or easily studied.

If Grace feels like she's standing in the harsh red light of a road flare or blinking into the face of an interrogation lamp no one would blame her. His resonance is not always an easy thing to tolerate.

Something occurs to him and he breathes heavy for the revelation and the inability to move his head without blotting out his vision with the threat of fainting.

"Ah... you're the one just woke up. You got a mentor, yet?"

Serafi­ne
"Have a seat and let him talk," Sera murmurs to Grace, taking her in at a glance and absorbing that hesitance, the way she studies the room looking for an excuse, a reason to slip out of sight and perhaps mind.  There's affection and a familiarity to the way Sera slips her fingers through the priest's hair.  A familiarity he does not reject, precisely, not that he also does not melt into, as one might with her.

The gesture is utterly thoughtless.  He was so close to death and now she just wants to touch him or - something.  Absorb his pain through her skin.  Take his wounds as her own.

It's not a skill she has.  It's not a magic she knows.

Not now.

Not yet.

But oh, she glances up suddenly, like waking up and drops her hand from his hair to the spine of the couch, fingers curling around the back, tips tucked beneath the cushions.

"I'm gonna go get you some water or something.  You're staying here tonight, right? I'm going to call Katiana and tell her that you're sprung."

Sera cannot promise that the Verbena will come and heal him again but -

" - she's the one who healed you."

Grace Evans
It's like Grace just can't exactly... look at him. Not that she usually sits and looks people in the eye when she's talking to them, but there is this feeling like she's being judged, stared down with authority... And it grates against her. Even broken, he radiates.

The girl Whitney told her something about 'meeting a Junior' in their college-student-code. How everyone in the room would turn and go 'woah'. And yep, this guy must be... Or more than that. God, he practically glowed.

"I don't um... ah... I have a friend," she manages, and sits down on one of the solitary chairs, slinging her laptop bag off to the side. Sera apparently isn't going to 'let' her get away. Again, the grating feeling returns.
Grace looks up at Sera with this weird, 'wtf' expression when she hears her say he was healed by someone. This is after he's been healed? Oh, Hell.

"You were the the one in the hospital, weren't you? Must have been some dog.."

Pan Echeverria
Let's get one thing straight: he can barely walk. If this place were beset by Nephandi Pan could do the same thing that landed him on death's door in the first place. It would keep the others safe but it would kill him if his god saw fit to claim him. His god had already seen fit to claim him but his god also gave his friends and his family and others to whom he is bound if only by circumstance from another life the resources to keep him from Him.

That's the bitch about free will. It both serves as proof of and negates the notion of a divine plan.

Point is: he can Work. They can feel the searchlight sense of his magick staining not the air immediately here but if they go out back, to the Node. It takes him a long time to move from one place to the other because his entire body is screaming at him to lie still, you stupid asshole, you're in serious trouble.

But Grace says it must have been some dog that landed him in the hospital and normally Pan would have laughed but if he laughs he's going to throw up or pull his incisions loose and he doesn't have the energy to laugh that hard anyway. He smiles weak and breathes out a huff of laughter.

"Wasn't the dog so much," he says. "Dog was dead. The teeth, though."

And he turns to Sera and works a silver band off his fifth finger. Man big as he is has weight to spare but he's burning through it like a snowbound mountaineer burning through a lumber pile. His spare tire isn't with us anymore. His arms don't look so strong as they used to. He keeps losing weight that band will fit on his fourth finger soon enough. He doesn't have any other jewelry on his person. The priest isn't married.
He holds up the ring in fingers that shake and asks, "Her name's Katiana, huh? Don't bother calling her, I'm going to go talk to her myself."

That explains why Rosa looks like she's in such a great mood today.

Serafi­ne
"It was a pack of them," Sera clarifies for Grace.  Does so with a dark flicker of close-set dark blue eyes beneath rather straight dark brows.  Oh, the Cultist seems sober, but that is probably an illusion.  At least when it comes to evaluating the number and depth of substances in her blood.  Sober though, as an adjective -- this spare half-smile that threatens to spill tears over Sera's lower lashes once more.  " - someone always has to stand in front of people."  With a glance at the priet's dark head.  "Like a fucking hero or some shit."

Then Pan's holding up the ring and Sera's eyes snag on it, the glinting circle of reflective light.  Circles the couch instead of disappearing into the kitchen, party girl in her slinky red dress tucking herself with a degree of care next to the big, injured priest.

"She gave you a ring," murmured with a look from the ring to his profile, a lashed glance.  "Put it back on.  You don't want to lose it and can hardly hold it upright.  And you're in no condition to go wandering around the countryside looking for a witch.

"You can still barely sit upright.  Oh Pan."

Sera's own injuries have closed.  She pulled out the stitches Justin put into her arm, and perhaps Katiana pulled out the rest.  Just new, angry looking skin covering the bite on her left arm.

Grace Evans
The dog was dead, but the teeth...

Grace's face twists into this mask of confusion, and suddenly she does meet his eyes, and then Sera's with a bit of admonishment. "Dead dogs did this?"

And nobody bothered to tell her anything. She could venture a guess why, maybe protecting her, not wanting to scare her, other bullshit excuses. All she got was a text saying that somebody was in the hospital, and Lena's vague mention of a dog attack.

But whatever. They weren't going to have excuses to keep things from her soon anyway. Ginger was coming along nicely. And if they didn't keep her in the loop, well... someone's icon might just get swapped with a picture of Dick Cheney. Or just a dick. On accident. Really.

The scene of Sera fawning over Pan like that... Grace's brow rose a tic.

"She is kind of right. You look like you should stay here tonight and get some rest. Not like, do stuff."
Oh yes... 'do stuff'. Fucking brain. She crossed her arms, as if to protect herself against shame...

Pan Echeverri­a
"Stuff's already been done. I know where she is."

He puts the ring back onto his fifth finger and leans back against the couch. Even if he were at his fighting weight with his intestines in no danger of busting out of their stitches and his head not pounding like he's finally regained consciousness after a bender and the comedown Pan hasn't made a habit out of arguing with unbelievers.

Back to the zombie dogs.

"Maybe... ¿hace cúanto, Sera, un mes?" He's telling the story to Grace but he keeps forgetting what day it is. "July, I had to bury a parishioner. Name was Eduardo. He died young. Came up from Veracruz but didn't have the papers he was supposed to have so getting him in the ground took a long time. And he didn't stay there. Day I was meant to come back to Denver his nephew came and got me. Said Eduardo was scratching at the door of his grandmother's house. I had to bury him a second time. Far as I know he stayed buried."
Leave it to a priest to go on at length about something other people can barely understand while in a state other people could not tolerate.

"I never found out why he got up again. Looked like some kind of ritual. Don't know why anybody would want dead dogs walking around again. The news say anything about it? Or the, ah, on the computer?"
And he's looking at Grace now, not Sera. She must look like she lives on the Internet.

Serafi­ne
"More than that," Sera murmurs back to Pan, shifting easily from the priest's Spanish to English and back again, like someone who was bilingual from an early age, rather than someone who learned a few lines in another language in school along the way.  "You were in the hospital for two fucking weeks.  You came back the day Jim and I tracked down the guy selling the PCP."

He isn't arguing with her and he's in no shape for her to attack him from behind and kidney punch him for being a fucking idiot, as she is wont to do when he is a fucking idiot, so Sera does not argue back either, but gives him a Look and maybe wishes she and Rosa were fellow conspirators rather than whatever-the-fuck they were.

"It's something old," Sera tells Grace.  "An old grudge, an old anger.  An old spirit or something.  I had a dream about it the night before we were attacked.  The moths and a figure dressed in owl feathers on the stump of a broken tree.

"Maybe that's it, the broken tree?  That saturating sense of coagulated rage, and a rain like blood."
She is telling this as much to Pan as to Grace.

"But I haven't seen anything else.  Haven't had any dreams about blood raining down from the sky either."

Grace Evans
The Spanish in her native Arizonian half-assed understanding went something like, 'how long ago was it, Sera, a month?' but she doesn't let on that she kind of knows what he says. He might start speaking too fast using too big words or something.

And then, the realization that he's talking about zombies. And human ones. Of course, Grace's brain doesn't exactly go to 'zombie' first. It goes to the lab. Human organs and nanotechnology, and the symbol H+. And then, oh shit, what if he's infested with 'bots. Her eyes grow big, but probably not for the reason they're expecting. She doesn't find it impossible.

"I did look at some news reports after Lena told me. They just said it was rabid dogs," she says, her voice is tinged with some small measure of fear, but there's a hardness there -- of a mind hard at work, putting pieces together.

"But there is some word I did hear from another source. There's a secret Technocrat bio-lab in Denver. They're researching human organ growth and nanotechnology, trying to upgrade people. Maybe they found a way to upgrade dead people."

She listens politely to Sera as she talks of spirits and trees and moths, and well... those would be metaphors, right? Something moth-y. Flying and feathers, and blood from the sky to say it's airborne... But that's as much conjecture as anything.

"Sorry, Sera... I don't know anything about broken trees. But it's all sky-stuff. Feathers and rain and moths and the tree. Maybe that has some kind of significance?"

Pan Echeverri­a
A secret Technocrat bio-lab in Denver. Researching human organ growth and nanotechnology.

And they wonder why the Chorister kept trying to break out of the hospital and is now sitting on a couch outside the city inside of lying in bed at the rectory. If he were smart he'd lie on a bed at the Chantry and let them try and coax the witch out to him but Sera is already convinced of how idiotic the man she adores is.
And then everyone in the scene got fucking tired and eventually Pan went back out to the truck and Grace went to the library and IDK Sera drank some whiskey and took a nap.