Yes, Kalen, You Have Friends.

Kalen Holliday
[Nightmares]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Grace Evans
[Ohh yes! Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 3, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )

Kalen Holliday
Kalen is sprawled lazily over one of the couches in the living room.  There is the usual sprawl of things one associates with Kalen working on the coffee table: books, paper, a pen, coffee.  He takes up space, Kalen.  Entire couches.  Coffee tables.
Today though, he's added a laptop.  And stick page label tabs.
Thus far he has mastered several things involving the computer.  He can turn it on.  He can turn it off.  He has figured out how to lounge with a wireless keyboard and run the wireless mouse over any surface he damn well pleases that isn't reflective.
Useful things...he may have discovered mahjong.
No.  Upon reflection, that is the opposite of useful.

Grace Evans
It's Friday, and it's after school, and that means it's time to party! Oh, except no. Not really. This is Grace we're talking about here, and even her partying always has some reason for it other than just because.
No, today, as is true for most days, it is time to do.
Kalen and Grace's e-library project has yet to be formally sanctioned, but that doesn't mean she can't get a head start, does it? Figuring out what supplies the Chantry has in terms of computing equipment, figuring out what might be necessary to buy for infrastructure reasons (and also because she just doesn't know the status of the Chantry's network, what with using her own laptop, and that's a crying shame).
She wants a kiosk down in the library from which to access the e-greatness that is to come. There is a computer there. It's... well, it's... okay. Maybe it was fantastic when it was new, but that must have been over a year ago. I mean, come on.
Through it, she's able to find the rest of the computers in the place, taking stock of the local network and its security and its boring details (which are not so boring to Grace).
And then? She climbs the stairs, past the electronic locked doors, up to the living room where Kalen sprawls with his laptop, and the sight puts a little wry grin on her face. She's rubbing off on him.
"Hey, you find any of my cyber-stalkers yet?" she asks, the tone making it an obvious joke.

Kalen Holliday
"No.  And I think I might be able to do that with magic before I can do that with this thing."  He makes a little huff and sets the keyboard down.  "I rather imagine you'll find them find them first.  Does is stalking you so that I know the second you know creepy?"  He's...probably joking?
Probably.
He sets the keyboard and mouse on the table.  "Did you finish your diagnosis of the chantry computer?  Will it live?"

Grace Evans
She rolls her eyes and smirks. "It'll live. It's sufficient for what we have in mind at least."
A little jaunt has her behind the couch, looking over his shoulder (such an interloper). "What were trying to do that has you so frustrated? Can't be worse than cracking some encryption by hand.
"I swear, that Wall made me feel like a Hermetic -- filling a book up with a bunch of arcane writings that nobody else could possibly figure out. Mostly because my handwriting sucks that bad, though."

Kalen Holliday
"Some of us use secret languages and cyphers, some of us resort to terrible handwriting."  Kalen is, in a systematic if very novice fashion, trying to write very basic code.  It must be an exercise from one of the books on the table.  He smiles.  "Are we buying new computer parts?  Can I watch you fix it?"

Grace Evans
Oh, Kalen, you do know how to make Grace's day, don't you? She laughs, not at his novice code, but more in simple joy at his eagerness. "I swear, I'm going to make a technophile out of you yet."
She points at the screen over his shoulder. "Missing a semicolon. Easy mistake."
And that's just the start really. But first things first. Syntax is a pain, and so exacting it often throws those new to it.
"Remember how when you tried to program me to make lunch? It's very literal. It doesn't understand what you mean if you don't get the grammar just perfectly right."

Kalen Holliday
"Well, much as I am likely to learn to find your stalkers with magic first, I am also likely to have an intelligent computer by way of enchantment before programming.  But...backup plans never hurt anyone."  He leans over and inserts a semicolon.  "Also, thank you."

Grace Evans
"Hmm. Perhaps. But still, wouldn't it make it easier if you knew a little bit about how computers worked before enchanting one? Or does that not really matter at all, I don't know."
She crosses her arms over the back of the couch, leans over the thing, and puts her chin on folded hands. "Intelligent computer. Hoo, if you ever get that going, Kalen, I want to know. I want to talk to it.
"Speaking of backup plans, you know, I've been trying to get people signed up on Ginger lately. Would be nice if I wasn't Denver's single point of failure, in case I get hit with another Wall, and somebody needs access."

Kalen Holliday
"You love it when I learn to make technology do things for me and I love it when you make sound tactical decisions...."  There is so much amusement in his voice it seems like you should be able to touch it.  He adjusts his sprawl so he can face her.  "I'm listening."

Grace Evans
"Well, I've already done most of the hard parts. Making the software, making it work on different devices, you know? I think you should be able to install it. Or at least I can teach you how to install it. It's a bit different depending on what kind of phone or computer or whatever you're putting it on, but yeah... If you're up to it, I could make you an admin."
Anrkyangel would probably disapprove of this. Allowing a Hermetic to be an admin on the service -- and one who speaks of enchanting computers at that? But what better way to reel him further to the 'tech is awesome' side?

Kalen Holliday
Kalen watches her, expression all amusement save for his eyes which go serious as she pitches that idea.  "Assuming I can learn, of course."
A Hermetic who wants a self-aware library and thinks a computer that is granted sentience so he doesn't have to use a keyboard...?  Who doesn't think a telepathic connection with a computer isn't brilliant?  Isn't that what all of the advances in programming and nanotechnology and human-computer interfacing are for?  Their mind in perfect synchronization with the machine?  Instant communication?  Perfect understanding?  How could they not see that as telepathic bonds?  Sure, if the computer doesn't have a brain it cannot bond, but that bridge...give him a few years.  He'll be able to cross it.

Grace Evans
Grace huffs. "You can learn. If you learned how to perfectly draw all those sigils of yours, you can learn how to transfer files."
She walks around to the front side of the couch, and perches herself on the armrest like a regular heathen. "You know... I've been meaning to show you. Remember my Adversary? Hacking that stuff in your car?"
She pulls open her laptop bag, extricates her rig, and pushes the power switch. It's fast and silent, running an SSD inside instead of a hot and noisy platter drive. Boots up in seconds. And then, she's navigating.
"They remembered you. Thought I might share," she says, and turns the laptop to face him so that he can see the icon that was posted to the forum she cracked into. It's Kalen. A cartoony Kalen sprite, with a pink feather boa and a cane -- pimptacular.
"'Cause you know, I figure you'd get a kick out of this."

Kalen Holliday
Kalen's eyes widen and for a second it could be that you would think he was angry.  Until his head drops back and he starts laughing.  "Well.  Fuck.  Now I rather hope I don't have to shoot them."

Grace Evans
"I do too. For one, I think they'd be very difficult to shoot, when they can just puppet your body using chiptunes all day," she says, and sighs. "If they are bad news, I'm in some deep shit. If."
"Glad you liked their present though. Good to see the silver linings to things, eh?"
She flips the laptop around, types a bit, and then flips it back. On her screen are two similar sprites, both of Grace, only one's male and the other's female -- like someone couldn't decide which she was.
"I got one too. Or two too, actually."

Kalen Holliday
"Oh.  That.  That was adorable.  I can do something about that now though."
He studies Grace's sprites, head tilting to one side, then says thoughtfully,  "Soon, perhaps, even if I can do nothing else, I may be able to study them through their messages.  Location and tracking through cyberspace...was never my thing.  But I was taught to understand my quarry that I might find it.  If they keep doing things like this, that may prove of some help to you."

Grace Evans
"It's very strange. The message board I found was populated with a ton of posts from different people. And I was one of them. I still haven't figured out what it all means.
"I still think the only reason why it was so easy to crack was because I was supposed to. Part of the game. Have it be hard enough to break into to fool me into thinking the board's posts are legit. But then they strike me as the type to where if they really wanted to keep you out of a place, they would keep you out."

Kalen Holliday
Kalen frowns.  "You may have to follow where they lead for a time, but you'll have to figure out their ultimate intentions eventually.  Have you learned any of the Ars Fortunae?  I know you have some knowledge of the Ars Mentis.  The Ars Conliationis?"  In strategy mode we sometimes forget to translate the Spheres for our friends.....

Grace Evans
"The whobiwhat now?" she asks, amused at the long names, apparently. "Okay, I think I can figure out what Fortunae is, and Mentis is mental, right. But what the hell is Con-li-a-tion-is?"

Kalen Holliday
"Oh.  Sorry."  He smiles and draws out the word in an amused purr.  "Conligationis.  The art of connection and binding.  I believe the more commonly used term is Correspondence."  Unlike some of the Order, that correction was playful.  If she remembers it, very well, but he doesn't seem to think less of the commonly used non-Hermetic Sphere names.
"I think with those three, possibly with the Ar...."  See, this smile, when he catches it is still amused, but faintly apologetic also.  "Time.  Possibly with Time magic or exchanging Time magic for Entropy magic you might be able to jump to a step ahead of where they'll be instead of a step behind."

Grace Evans
Grace has not really thought of her studies as learning the Spheres of a Vaguely Latinate Magickal variety. Fortunae, for example, fails miserably as a word that explains the concept she knows as Entropy.
"Well, I know everything there except for how to see Time. I mean, I'm not even really sure it exists," she says, and what now? Time doesn't exist? She thinks about what it was that she just said, musing as her eyes wander the room. "I mean, if it really exists, and isn't just a figment of our imaginations. Like space, I guess."

Kalen Holliday
"And consciousness...?"  Kalen laughs, softer this time.  "It was one of the first things that I learned."

Grace Evans
"When I Awakened, I had this vision, you know. The world all fundamentally connected. I think that's the first thing that clicked for me, was that I could see the code, and it was all holographic. Holistic. You know? And then I went home that night and started trying to play with it, because."
Because she wanted some proof, some evidence that she wasn't crazy and the experience had been as real as it felt. Something like that.
"What does Time seem like for you?"

Kalen Holliday
"Fluid.  I don't see it as clearly.  I understand it more.  On an instinctual level.  Like how you know even with your eyes closed where your hands are.  Sometimes I do something, and I won't know why at the time.  And then, later, it is the perfect thing to have done.  As though I sensed it.
"Which...I see omens.  Have I ever told you that?"

Grace Evans
She shakes her head. "Omens? Like, predictions?"
There's a reason she uses that word. Predictions, like the ominous ones from a certain forum, yes?

Kalen Holliday
"Yes.  Usually in dreams, which makes having nightmares about all the ways in which people can die all the more exciting.  I can mostly tell them apart though.  So far as I know yet, always.  But one never knows, I suppose."  But there are those first few moments when he wakes where he has to sort it out.  There are reasons he doesn't often sleep in places near other people.

Grace Evans
"Oh, God. If my dreams are omens, we're all in a lot of trouble," she says, a sad smile -- like she's laughing at something though it's still painful. "You ever... have problems with convincing yourself it's all really okay in the morning?"
It's like she's on the same wavelength as Kalen here. Or just, has had this particular problem herself.

Kalen Holliday
"I have people for that.  Kharisma.  Ramon.  Jack.  Garrett."  He pauses and his expressions softens.  "If I called her, probably at this point Sera.  Pan.  Fuck, even other-Kit."  He stops and stares at Grace, suddenly intent.  "I think that makes them my friends.  Some of them are other things, but...that's what that is, isn't it?  I'm only used to that from the outside."  He sound a little hopeful, but more curious because he is Kalen.  And he does not know quite how to understand that sometimes friends are a thing that happens to him.  It has never been a source of real concern to him.  But now, now that maybe something new has happened, he is excited about it.

Grace Evans
"Sometimes, you know, I have trouble figuring out if you're joking or serious. Yes, Kalen. Those are friends. People who would do that for you are friends," she says, smiles at him. "Like me. Only, I can't take your nightmares away. Would if I could though."
"You tend to get friends when you are a friend to others. I figured that one out a while back. Took a while though, I will admit."

Kalen Holliday
"I know you would.  We are like family."  Oh.  Look.  At least he didn't just now realize he had an actual meaningful relationship with Grace.  Because that...well...that would be sad.  And he says they are like family with the kind of offhand assurance that you mention gravity.  Or the sun rising.  The speed of light.

Grace Evans
She wants to say no. They aren't like family. When she thinks of family, it doesn't usher in happy thoughts. But he means family in the good way. Like he's a cousin or a brother she never knew until a few months ago, and it clicks. "Yeah. We are."
Friends. Family. Pseudo-mentor and pseudo-apprentice.
"I'm happy about that. I mean, I think if I didn't have someone I could talk to about things, I'd just... Not be able to deal."

Kalen Holliday
"Yeah.  It's not an easy transition.  I worry a bit about Alexander."

Grace Evans
"He seemed to take a trip to another world fairly well. Better than I did. Man, when I was that fresh, I was still looking for information in the university library about what happened. I didn't even know anybody yet. I think he'll be okay. But yeah. He'll have people if he needs them, I'm sure."

Kalen Holliday
"I know.  It's just hard not to worry.  We ran into him again and he seems...more unsettled when he doesn't have a crisis to deal with."

Grace Evans
"I know that feeling. It sharpens you, a crisis. Makes you push all the nagging questions and fears away till later. And then when it's over? Bam," she says, and smacks a fist into her palm. Bam.
"Well, if I see him, I'll try to offer some words of 'I have so been there'" Not words of wisdom then, exactly. Just recent experience.

No Longer the New One...

Alexander Brandt
[*peers at the room*  Boding, much?]

Kalen Holliday
[I may have copied those into an AIM message to Sam and asked if he was planning something....]

Alexander Brandt
“Sorry,” he starts after a moment.  “I don’t want to drag up bad memories for you, so just tell me if I ask something you don’t want to talk about.  But it almost sounds like you ended up with the Order out of chance, rather than choice.  Or would you have picked it if things had worked out differently at the time?
“But the part about making the world a better place?  That I get.  And that, I think, I can buy into.  Hell, it sounds like it’s just the advanced class for what I try to do already.”
Alexander looks around the room a little before adding, “Did you mention coffee earlier?  I’m guessing we’re going to be here a while.”

Kalen Holliday
"There is coffee, yes."  Kalen pushes himself up from sprawling over the couch and rises back to his feet.  You can see the way there is tightness at the corners of his mouth and eyes, but you have to watch for it.  At least the walk to the kitchen is short.  And level.  Nothing on Umbral mountains.  "Come.  I'll show you."
And he starts toward the kitchen.  "Once we have that book restored and scanned, would you be interested in translating it?  If not, there are others we can contact.  But you were there, I thought I'd see if you were interested before we sent it out to be done."

Alexander Brandt
Alexander rises from the comfortable chair and follows the other man towards the kitchen and coffee.  The box of food from the restaurant is picked up and carried along too – to be shared, if Kalen is still hungry.  If Kalen is choosing to skim over his questions and move onto other subjects, he’s not going to push.
“I meant to ask, did you find someone to take care of his remains?  And I’d be more than happy to have a go.  There were bits that didn’t make a massive amount of sense, but I don’t know if that’s down to the language changing or the text being about things I didn’t understand.”

Kalen Holliday
"Yeah."  He smiles a little and his eyes drop to the ground for a second.  "I was still a little on edge and told Pan to get here when he could and I'd explain.  So he teleported.  He thought...."  Kalen shakes his head.  "But it was just as well.  I kind of needed him."  It bears noting that Kalen doesn't seem to find it at all odd that the teleportation is possible, Kalen is only baffled that it happened in this case.
Watch Kalen swing back to a topic that is now preferable to just how upset he was that he's glad he knows priests who can teleport.  "It wasn't chance.  It was Fate.  It was always meant to be."  His voice doesn't sharpen but it radiates the kind of perfect certainty you hear from some people when they speak about God.  None of the venom that sometimes accompanies those words, but some of the love...perhaps.  There is at least warmth.

Alexander Brandt
There’s a silence where there should have been a footstep, as Alexander stop for a moment as he’s told about teleporting priests.  But this, apparently, is just One Of Those Things that is pretty normal in this new world.  So he keeps walking after Kalen.  “He must have quite the fervent congregation, if he can perform miracles like that.”
As he doesn’t know what’s in any of the kitchen cupboards, when they get there, Alexander helps how he can – checking the water in the kettle, or the filter machine, and topping it up if needed.  “I’m not convinced about Fate.  If everything’s already planned out, then what difference does it make whether or not we try to do anything.  Surely we’re just doing what was intended.  But,” he looks over from sorting out water to look at Kalen again, “I’m glad it all worked out in the end.”

Kalen Holliday
"They seem to be, but it is his faith and not theirs that allows him to do that."  Kalen points Alexander to things for a moment, coffee beans and grinders and kettles.  "I think that is what they are to him, though."
And then his expression all wonder and sorrow and hope at once.  "There is Fate.  But it is, in part, like Reality.  Changeable.  Fluid.  There are things that are meant to be, and some that might be, and some that are just slightest glimmer of possibility.  You can learn to see those things, those chances, unfolding outward like something blooming.  Muliple branching paths off multiple braching paths twisting around each other like tangled vines.  And then...then you can learn how to change their shape.  Alter you destiny or someone else's.  It...isn't to be done lightly.  But it can be done."

Grace
[Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (3, 4, 5, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace
[Magedar!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Alexander Brandt
Alexander turns, a tin of coffee beans in his hand, and leans back on the kitchen counter.   Can open, he looks down at the beans.  “I think I’ve seen that already, although I didn’t know what it was at the time.”  It takes him a moment to work out how to describe it.  “It’s like everything was connected.  Almost like lightning, arcing between everything.  And I could see possibilities, what could have been about to happen.  But none of it was definite.”  He shrugs.  “Am I making sense?”
He turns back to the coffee grinder and starts pouring out beans.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen leans back into one of the counters, crossing his bad leg over the good one at the ankle and shifting a not insignificant portion of his weight onto his forearms where they're braced on the counter top.
"Perfect sense, at least to me.  But I can see them, too.  You haven't figured out how to focus on them when you want to yet, I'm guessing.  You saw it more like lightning?  Or connections...like...I don't know electrical pulses between synapses?  It's important to understand what you saw, so that we can you a proper focus.  Eventually you'll be able to move beyond that, to just use your Will.  For now though, the props help."

Grace
Grace shows up at the Chantry with irregularity. Sometimes, she sleeps there. Sometimes she's there for a project. Sometimes she's there to keep some books company. But today, she's on a mission to hang up some fliers for the poor slobs who do not have Ginger for whatever reason.
She's not quite to the point yet where she can just make this sort of thing happen from her apartment or the office like some, so it's meatspace time, hoo-ray.
And what (or who), pray tell, does she feel upon getting out of her car and running up to the Chantry (because it's cold) but something familiar and something not so. At least it's not Eleanor. No, she would feel like being held underneath the icy, cracked lake until you died. And she would feel so much stronger.
Alexander. Cop Alexander. Mister Thursday. Assuming, that is, if she's got that frozen sensation pegged right, and it's not just the chill in the air.
The front door opens, and the shift of sands or of tectonic plates or the bit shift of a glitch in the system walks in. At least, that's what the others might sense if they are so in tune at the moment.

Alexander Brandt
The grinder loaded, he puts the tin down on the counter.  He takes a breath, trying to remember the details.
“I guess it was like...  I dunno, string maybe?  Strands.  Light and dark, dancing across everything that was close by.  Maybe a little like the way static dances between things?  Anyway, it kept shifting, but they would connect things together for a moment and then move on.  I guess I just saw the potential in the connections?”
And then there’s the sound of the front door opening, and a vaguely familiar sense of someone coming in.  “Grace?” he asks Kalen.

Kalen Holliday
"Okay.  Good.  If you were going to recreate the possibility for those connections with something, what would you use?  If you don't have an answer for that yet, I'll explain how I do it, but if you can answer before I tell you that, it may be better."
He breathes in the sense of all those shifting changing possibilities.  Of course, it is Grace.  Not because of the sense of her, but because those possibilities are what she is on some primal level.  They've practically summoned her with this conversation.  "Grace," he confirms with a smile.

Grace
Grace has been summoned by conversation topics a lot lately, whether she knows it or not. How Mages come together and fly apart again isn't something she really understands, but it's probably something mystickal -- with a k, because Reasons.
In any case, she can hear the noises in the kitchen, and when Kalen is in a kitchen, it means only one thing. Caffeine, of course. She knows him too well.
And indeed, when her head peeks out from behind the wall like the Kit that he has Named her for -- she's got one word on her lips. "Coffee?"

Alexander Brandt
Shifting.  Connections.  Fate?  No, not fate - chance.  Potentials.  Something not yet definite, then?  Or something that creates links?  String?  Coins?  Dice?  Maybe.  “Maybe dice, or coins, or something like that?  That seems to fit in with the shifting chances, I guess.  Cards?  I’m not sure.”
He looks round to the head peeking out around the corner.  Picking up the can, he gives it a shake and asks, “Sure is.  How long did you want to be awake for?”

Kalen Holliday
"Grace and I prefer not to sleep, actually."  Kalen makes a soft huff that is half amusement, half resignation.  "Isn't that so, Kit?"
"Dice, coins, even cards aren't uncommon as a focus.  If they speak to you, we should try them.  We might have some here, actually.  We can try once we finish the coffee if you like."
He turns to look at Grace with huge pleading eyes.  "Kit...can you raid the board games for dice and playing cards and coins or poker chips or anything like that?"

Grace
"Awake? Forever," she answers, and perhaps she's talking about some other definition of Awake? "Seems like I'm meant to be anyway. Always too much to do to sleep."
She smirks at Kalen. "Yeah. Sleep's overrated."
Especially when it brings no comfort.
But her expression shifts when he starts talking about foci, and mentions cards and dice and coins and such.
"I could make him a dice roller. Hell, you could even, Kalen. Would be a good project for you. No limits to electronic dice, you know -- you can make it roll a thousand dice. You can make it roll dice with a thousand sides."
It's a kind of attempt at nudging him to the computing side isn't it? Possibilities should be so endless, Grace thinks.

Alexander Brandt
“So I should grind the whole tin then?”  He gives Grace a smile, then adds more beans for the third drinker.  They can always make more later on.  Preferring not to sleep?  Alexander isn’t a massive sleeper, but still gets it where he can.  “Too much that can’t wait until morning?  Or have you guys been whacked with the insomnia stick?”
“I’m happy to give it a try.  Although I’m still not sure exactly what the ‘it’ I should be doing is.”  The coffee grinder buzzes into life as he flicks the switch.  Loudly, over the noise, he adds, “I don’t think a computerised thing is really my thing.  I can get the basics done on them, but I never really got interested enough to learn more.”

Kalen Holliday
"Nightmares, actually."  Kalen says it with a calmness that makes it sound unremarkable.  Like constant nightmares are just a thing that happens.  Some people have red hair.  Some people are allergic to almonds.  Some people would prefer not to sleep at all to dreaming.  Perhaps they should make a series of picture books for new Magi.  These are the Traditions.  These are the Spheres.  These are all the ways in which your new chantrymates are broken.  It will be amazing.
He makes another huff at Grace, this one amused.  "Oh, are you recruiting now?  Because you totally should have come to House Griffindor with all the smug lion mages.  We're the best."  There's nothing at all barbed in it.  If he was really trying to recruit Alexander like some of his brothers in the city...he'd be dictating foci.
He smiles at Alexander.  "We'll get there.  But after the coffee.  You can wait that long, no?"

Grace
"Aww. That's so sad," Grace says once the coffee grinder stops, and it seems like she really means it, for whatever reason.
And then, she flips off Kalen with a bright-enough grin that makes the joke obvious. "Oh come on, Mr. I-Want-an-AI," she says, and turns tail -- to go raid a closet. For dice and cards and coins and whatever else. The games of chance that would make a name like Ars Fortunae make sense.
From a hallway away, they can hear her say "Just because you're wanting to enchant computers doesn't make you an Adept now does it?"

Alexander Brandt
Nightmares?  All sorts of personal crap, with added vampires and who knows what else?  Sounds pretty reasonable.  He’d woken up in a cold sweat a few times since Awakening, but that seemed to be settling down.  A few weird dreams as his subconscious worked its way around being dragged into the spirit world and helping a sentient spirit/construct find out what, and who, it was.  And only the faintest idea what these others have been through that would make days of sleep deprivation preferable to facing their demons.
He turns to look at Kalen, in disbelief.  “House Griffindor?  That’s from those films, right?  You’re not going to tell me that they’re based on real events too, are you?  But yeah, I can wait.  It’s less painful than beating my head against a wall trying to figure this out by myself.”
AI?  Enchanting computers?  Okaaay then, something else for the ‘ask about later’ list.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen laughs again at that.  "No.  No.  There are a few people here who have taken to jokingly referring to the Order of Hermes as House Griffindor, which...you should be careful about around any of the Mages from the Order who aren't me.  I think it's hilarious, but I always referred to House Flambeau as House Adrenaline Junkie whenever I could get away with it.  A few of the Order tried to recruit Grace, and she was annoyed.  I was just teasing her.
"Lets not worry too much about the Traditions for now.  You'll need to know about them eventually, but for right now, let's figure out how you work with magic, and we can work from there on where to go, okay?"

Grace
Grace returns, carrying several objects in her arms. She has:

• A cube-shaped container holding 4 dice. The container is also a big die by itself.
• A pack of cards
• A pack of larger cards in a decorative box (they're probably of the Tarot variety)
• A large, tall box labeled "Jenga" because she found it in the games pile and it sounded fun.

She picks up on that last bit of conversation as she strides in with all that stuff. "You're seriously teaching him how? Oh I want to watch."

Alexander Brandt
“Well at least that means Harry won’t be showing up, then.  Annoying, arrogant, sulky little...  Anyway, coffee.”  The ground coffee gets loaded into whichever device Alexander is pointed at, and left to work its own brand of magic.  Milk, or cream if it’s there, is fetched from the fridge.  “Basics are good,” he says in reply to Kalen.
Grace wants to watch?  “Go for it.  Just don’t go expecting much.  Unless I accidentally tear open the Gauntlet again.”  Half joking, half hoping that it’s a joke.  He has a look through the various bits that Grace has brought in.

Kalen Holliday
"Ah.  I doubt you'll be able to do that again for a little while.  Which is good.  Because there isn't much I can do about it if you do.  Callisto, she's our Chantry's guardian spirit and that Bear we were talking about, could probably handle it though.  We'll be alright."  His smile is probably more reassuring than that explanation, but he seems to mean it at least.
"And...I'm going to try to help him find something that works for him.  On a lot of levels, you don't really teach magic so much as help people remember it."  Oh, Kalen.  This is why you and half the Order don't get on.

Grace
Grace dumps all those boxes of things on the kitchen table, and then jaunts off to go prep herself a cup of whatever brew they've decided on, because hell yes, caffeine.
"You did what?" Grace asks, because like she knows what he's talking about.
Kalen always has the interesting ways to put things. You help people remember magic, do you? Like it was something they forgot while sleeping.

Alexander Brandt
“Apparently I opened up a rift into the spirit world, did something funky with chance, and then stopped time.”  He opens up the normal pack of cards and starts shuffling them, trying to sound like this was an everyday occurrence.  He looks at Grace.  “Doesn’t everyone do something like that when they wake up?”
“Oh.”  The cards are put down for a minute, and the takeaway box opened up.  The summer rolls are cold now, but still edible.  “Help yourself.”  Alexander grabs one in one hand, and picks up the dice container in the other and gives it a shake.

Kalen Holliday
"I'm good with just coffee for now," Kalen says.  "Those are the Vietnamese spring rolls I bring you though, Kit.  If you're hungry."  Not to be confused with the Thai ones.  Or...okay...any of the various ones.  There are a number of them.
Kalen smirks.  "I dodged a vampire straight into the path of an oncoming truck.  If I hadn't been so fucking terrified, it would have been like the greatest thing ever."
He smiles.  "Kharisma and I did about a thousand breathing exercises.  But, I think, if you want to just try, we can do that.  What you're looking for is a way to connect to the sense of those connections in the patterns of dice.  I'd recommend playing with them for a little while.  It's probably going to take at least a minute or two.  Watch the way they bounce or what numbers they land on or whatever you think is the most interesting and compelling thing."

Grace
Grace fiddles with her coffee cup, adding sugar and cream and caramel and then coffee from the french press, and then whipped cream from the fridge and then cinnamon sprinkles on top, until it becomes less coffee and more confection, right? A more glorious vehicle for the little molecules of excited neurotransmitters.
While she goes about it though, she watches Alexander. Alex. With his dice.
"Oh! Spring rolls. Yes, let us do that."
She grabs a spring roll and takes a perch at the table with her coffee. "Me, I did no such thing. I just had a vision. I think. Some guy was watching me the whole time, thinking I was on drugs."
She munches a bit of spring roll, and then looks a little alarmed at Alex. "I was not on drugs," she says, mouth half-full.

Alexander Brandt
Alexander takes a bite on the roll and, not having anything to put the rest down on, pops that in his mouth when the first piece has been swallowed.  Wiping his hand on his trouser leg, he opens up the container and takes a closer look at the dice inside.  Rolls them around in his hand, feeling for the weight.  He looks up at Grace, as she explains her introduction into Awakened life, and starts to look down again just as she adds the part about not taking drugs.  He sighs, rolling one of the dice around to get a better look at the numbers printed on the side.  Yep, someone’s told her.  “Did I mention that it was Sera who found me when it was all happening?”  Sera, tripping away on mushroom tea as he thought his sanity was slipping away.
The cards get another look.  Shuffled.  Fanned.  Cut.  Then put down on the table again.  He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a few coins.  Keeping hold of a dollar coin, the others go back into his pocket.  He flips it a couple of times, takes a closer look at both sides, then sets it spinning on the table.
“I’m not really sure what it is I’m looking for.”

Kalen Holliday
"Oh. Kit.  He's more worried about saving the world.  Do I look worried?"  Of course, Kalen mostly gave up crime.  Not that he didn't break into a place and help murder some people not that long ago.  But they were possessed by an Umbrood spirit and he's pretty sure if he explains the nightmarish shadow realm tentacles Alexander will agree that it just couldn't have been helped.
Kalen watches him switch between things.  "Okay.  Take that coin, hold onto it, take a couple breaths and imagine what those connections looked like.  Then try tossing it again."

Serafine
Oh hey.  Speak of the devil or maybe one of his more charming brethern and lo she appears.  Maybe they're alert, maybe they can feel Sera from a mile or five or seven away.  She wouldn't be all the fuck the way out here at or near dark - which is basically the wrong side of noon to her - for any reason other than the chantry.
There's no mistaking her resonance for that of any other.  She is as immediate and as distinctive as the scrape of a lover's teeth against your skin.  God, it was warm today and the air dry and the wind low and lulling but constant.  Just the stream of it, down the long slopes, out onto the high prairie.  Out here the grass is greening and spring bulbs are growing and there are daffodils, somewhere close, all in bloom, and Sera does not notice any of that, not really, because she does not give a living fucking about spring until she is out in the middle of it, sun on her skin, in a part somewhere, that is just starting to come alive at the edges with pale-skinned strangers blinking their huge eyes in the light, stretching to feel the lick of the sun's radiance on their bodies.
But yes: sundark and the chantry; a room in the chantry.  A Sera entering the room, just far enough through the threshold to lean her shoulder against the door, watching them, her dark blue eyes and blown pupils.
"You're looking for how things are put together.  Not any way you've ever known.  How they fit.  How they taste on the back of your tongue.
"Maybe it's not about connection for you; but where the pieces break apart.  Pan prays with his fucking rosary.  Grace writers computer programs.  I get high and have sex.  It's all magic."

Grace
Sera, she dances in (not literally, but metaphorically) all entrancement and actual grace, in a way Grace could never quite get the hang of.
And oh, look, her favorite people in the world are here, sitting down with a cop to enjoy coffee and spring rolls. Like whatever. It's so normal, so unlike the last time that the four of them were in one place together, that Grace snorts into her confectionary coffee.
"No, Kalen, you don't look worried," she says, but then anymore, half the time Grace puts fingers to keyboard she's either doing homework or breaking international laws. There is the problem. What does Alex have to say about computer crime?
And it's not like she's going to ask.
"Hey, Sera," she says, and Sera gets a smile.

Alexander Brandt
Basics – figuring out what works as a focus.  Tentacles?  That’s at least the intermediate class.
Alexander slams a hand down on the coin to stop it spinning – landing on tails, if anyone was keeping track.  He rolls it round in his hands again, feeling the edges.  Runs his hands over the text.  And looks up as Sera speaks.  There’s a smile for her, as she explains.  “Well I’m not religious, computers aren’t my thing, and I wasn’t planning on making use of the kitchen table for that.”  He is joking, but his attention passes back to the coin.  Rolling it around between his fingers.  Remembering.
Strands of dark and light, woven together.  Reaching out towards him, the owl, the bike, the ice, the road, a rock...  The pattern shifts, from moment to moment.  It ties things together, then lets them go.  Nothing is fixed, nothing is definite.
Then there’s the memory of the winter market, the ice creeping up his feet.  The storm.  The taste.  The feeling that everything became brighter after waking from the dream.
He flips the coin.

Alexander Brandt
[So, Arete.  3 coincidental, 1 for the sphere.  -1 for the Node nearby.  So, TN3!]
Dice: 1 d10 TN3 (9) ( success x 1 )

Kalen Holliday
Kalen breathes in the sense of Sera the same way he did when he first sensed Grace.  Perhaps he registers Resonance like scent.  Or perhaps it's a byproduct of thousands of breathing exercises in his training.  He turns his head to where he can feel Sera coming from.  "Sera," is all he says when she comes in,  Just her name.  Very softly.
"He's good people Grace."  He starts to try to say like Pan is, but while he and Sera are on that page and he is pretty sure Grace is still unconvinced.  So he just shifts back to watching Alexander and his coin curiously.

Serafi­ne
(Also do-di-do hope this works since my post is written.  Difficulty: 7.  -3 (resonance, focus, node))
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 3, 6) ( success x 1 )

Serafi­ne
(EXTENDING BECAUSE MY POST IS WRITTEN.  Plus willpower.  Stop interrupting Sera when she wants magic, reality. +1 dif.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 4, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafi­ne
"Hi Grace."
Sera's wearing a little black dress (the sort that should be capitalized all Little Black Dress) that leaves absolutely nothing about her whip-lean frame beneath it to anything like imagination.  There are sections of opacity and transparency and you can see the way she moves beneath it.  The hem covers her ass and then another inch or two, maybe, and then she has these lacy thigh-high stockings on that are opaque up to just above her knees, where the opaque black gives way to the Paris skyline.
"Kalen."  The hum of her mouth around the frame of his name.
Her heels are stillettos and she wears them - yes Grace - with a kind of grave that still feels rather sprawling doesn't it.  Masculine.  Maybe it's just the way she stands, the quick and edgy little smirk with which she favors Alexander as he flips the coin.
And she can see the coin and a thousand coins and edges of the coins; then and yes and soon and now all wrapping themselves together into a hurtling and fractional moment and it is Alexander's potential focus and the coin in the air and she wants to reach out and seize it and hold it singularly in place, like an unrelenting squeeze of the heart.
So she does.
"Make a choice."
Sera says, as the coin hangs there, mid-air, frozen in time.  Its own singular moment gone strange - this is precisely the point between, see - a threshold of reaction, liminal.
"Which way does it fall?"
- and then,
it fall the coin does.  End over end over end.

Grace
"Everyone is good people in their own minds," Grace shoots back, but then... Oh. "No offense, Alex."
It feels so cold, so sharply cold all the sudden that she's certain Alex has figured it out. And then Sera slips in between and stops the coin in place -- oh Sera.
She does like to show off. With coins. With pretzels that were once manipulated into a midair happy face as time ceased its flow rather selectively. There's just no denying the strangeness of what they are when Sera's around, is there?

Alexander Brandt
There’s a flicker of what Alexander  saw the first time, a dim flash around the coin as it spins in the air.  Where before he was seeing links between everything, now it’s only faint trails of light and dark around the coin.  Heads and tails both possibilities, landing on an edge a remote afterthought.  There’s that taste again – maybe it’s him, maybe it’s Sera’s working.  He’s concentrating on the coin, lost in thought.  Grace’s comment goes unnoticed.
Head or tails?  A 50:50 chance.  Only there isn’t, not this time.  He doesn’t know how he knows, but he’s sure.
The coin reaches its peak and freezes.  He looks over to Sera as she asks how it lands, and he knows.  “Heads,” he calls.  The coin hits the table with a thud, then comes to rest.  The face of Ulysses Grant looks up at the ceiling, a little condensation on the coin.  Eyes wide, he looks up at the others.  “Crap.”  Then the smile breaks, wide across his face.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen rolls his eyes.  Sure everyone is good people in their minds.  But he was talking about in his mind, where there are very few good people.  Although, he's getting a little sunnier about that outlook now.
His breath catches when the coin stops, then he smiles and breathes out when Alexander calls it.  He starts to move, then remembers this is Alexander, and so does not reach out to catch his shoulder.  "Bravo.  There you are, then.  Now you've got one of them figured out."

Serafi­ne
"Bravo," Sera tells him; she's already moving.  This louche elegance to her, this drunken sort of halo that feels warm, expansive.  And her bravo is fucking sincere.  There's a charge to it, an energy, the word feels like itself in her mouth, see?  Forward moving, the call-and-response of it, lovely.
A supple curve to her mouth; the edges, the sparking, fractional seconds as the coin falls.  She's rubbing the meat of her thumb gainst the old ink of a tattoo she does not remember receiving and feeling her place - in time.  In time.
The slip of her eyes to Kalen seems to include him in her applause.
Then she is in motion, arching from the doorframe, her heels loud on the kitchen tile.  Looping close enough to Grace to ruffle her hair.  Stopping long enough at the bar to grab a bottle before disappearing deeper into the chantry.

Serafi­ne
(My darlings, it is bedtime for me!  nini!)

Grace
Sera and the hair fluffing. It is a thing. Grace's hair gets messed with, mussed up -- but it was already mussed up to begin with, so there's no loss.
Grace munches more spring roll, like this stopping-time-and-predicting-the-future thing is something that just happens. Because it is. Awesome and inspiring as it may be, there is still food to eat and coffee to consume. Life goes on.
"So is that your first time actually trying to do it instead of accidentally doing it?"

Alexander Brandt
Alexander picks up the coin from the table, now slightly colder than when he flipped it.  He rolls it around in his fingers again, amazed that it worked.  He looks to the others again, still grinning.  “Thank you.  For everything you’ve done.”
Grace asks her question.  “Yeah.  I’ve been trying to work it out myself, but wasn’t getting anywhere.  I guess I just needed a helping hand.”  He nods to Kalen.  “Will the others work the same way?  The time, and the spirit thing?”

Kalen Holliday
There is just a slight dip of his head to Sera at the look, and he watches her move through the kitchen and then disappear.  Alexander it seems, will have something like his introduction to magic.  Join some Tradition or another with his mongrel training.  Or not.  He could remain without a Tradition at all.
"Of course.  He are here to help."  Kalen smiles.  "And...in a general sense, yes.  You'll need to find something to connect with.  Fate and Time...are mostly the same in how I approach them, but that isn't always true.  You have some idea though now, how to figure out how it works."

Grace
"Went better than my first time," Grace says, oblivious to the fact that someone could take that in multiple different ways.
"I ended up making a fool of myself. Fucked up my code real good, in front of my teacher, by the way, who proceeded to call me a newb."
She munches more spring roll, and then starts going at it again. "My first taste of paradox, that was."

Alexander Brandt
Picking a Tradition is a long way down the road, if Alexander ever does choose one.  It’s too early for him to know which one he’d fit in with, assuming that would be any of them.  So, for now, there’s no rush.  He’s got all the time in the world.
“So I just need to find something that fits in with how I see the other things working?  Ok.  That I can do.”  He’s already thinking about what could work.  A few possibilities.
Alexander looks at Grace, still playing with the coin, as she tells him about her first time trying this.  “Kalen was telling me about that before you arrived; Reality bouncing back hard when you push against it.  What happened to you?  With the paradox?”

Grace
"Nothing too bad. I wasn't trying to rip open holes into other realities or anything," she smirks.
"It feels just.... wrong. Like ice in your veins, you know? I hear if you screw up too badly it can hurt you pretty bad though. Kill even. So don't screw up."
Grace washes down Vietnamese spring rolls with coffee, giving herself a whipped cream mustache. Just the kind of accessory one needs after exhorting another not to kill themselves, right?

Kalen Holliday
Kalen settles back and lets Grace answer.  Much as when Sera stepped into the middle of his lesson for Alexander, he seems totally fine with this new and interesting education by tag team.  Alexander has seen the chantry, he's learned what one focus is, that's more than what Kalen expected to accomplish today.  Grace can explain Paradox.
"It can," he confirms.  "And it's especially dangerous if you're already injured."

Alexander Brandt
“Hey, I don’t make a habit of it.  Just the once.  And then that other time with the scarecrow.  But that so wasn’t my fault!”  Alexander laughs a little as Grace lowers her cup, running his forefinger along his lip as a hint.
“Any advice on avoiding it?  Or is it just an occupational hazard?”  Like drunks.  And hen parties.

Grace
"I've only run across it the once. Probably because I don't tend to do anything too fancy," she explains. "Reality, it kinda snaps back with equal force as what you applied to it, you know?"
Grace gives Alex an odd look when he wipes his finger across his lip, and then he can see the lightbulb go blinking on in her head. She wipes off her mustache and pops the last bit of spring roll into her mouth. Munch munch munch.
"Iono though, maybe ask Kalen that question? I am kinda newb myself," she says, in between chewing.

Kalen Holliday
"Well.  How much it will affect you does depend on how you do magic.  Anything that doesn't scream that it is magic is going to attract less attention from Reality.  Anything with less people who don't believe watching is going to attract less attention.  So, if I conjure a lightning bolt and strike someone with it, Reality gets relatively angry.  If I make electricity jump from some mechanical device like a bizarre malfunction, Reality only gets a bit annoyed.  If I forget manipulating energy and just look at how energy is flowing through some wires...Reality is pretty okay with that."

Alexander Brandt
“So... why didn’t reality bitch-slap me when I woke up?  Ripping holes between worlds and stopping time doesn’t sound too subtle, even if it was only me and a bird there.”  A quick leap of thought.  “So it’s only people who count when it comes to watching?”
The coin has been shifted between two fingers and is being quietly tapped against the top of the table, almost unconsciously.

Grace
"I don't know, man. About why you weren't uh... slapped. I mean," she says, and shrugs. "Maybe you got lucky."
She waves her fingers in the air, all woo-woo. "Maybe it was Fate."

Kalen Holliday
"Sometimes you just don't attract attention.  Mages...spirits...a very few people, they can watch you because they believe.  Most people though, no.  They see what you do and even if they want to believe it will still upset Reality.  But those things, the exact how and why...I can't explain those."

Alexander Brandt
Tap.  Tap.  Tap.
There’s a shrug at the suggestion of Fate getting involved.  “I’m not a big believer in Fate.  Chance, maybe.  But how long have you been at this, Grace?  The whole Awakened thing, I mean.  I’m guessing you use your computer to focus yourself?  How does that work?”
To Kalen: “So that cabal you were talking about?  Getting rid of nasties from the city the that the usual people – police, FBI, whoever – can’t take care of?  That’s still what you want to do?  Make the city a safer place?  What kind of thing are you expecting to come up against?”
Tap.  Tap.  Tap.
“Oh, any coffee left?  I got sidetracked.”

Grace
Heh heh heh. He wants to know how that works, eh? Best to show than tell, isn't it? Grace pulls the laptop bag off her shoulder and extricates the computer from inside. Plops it up on the table next to her coffee.
"Thing is, I can show you how it works. Want to see?"
She's going to show him whether he wants to or not. The question is rather unimportant.
"I don't believe in fate much myself, really. More of an anthropic principle of fate. I am alive here and now because I'm here and I'm now. There's other worlds out there where I'm not, but I'm not around in them to care about that fact."
The laptop gets booted up, and the Programs loaded. It only really takes a few seconds of almost-silent churning. From the looks and speed of this machine, Grace takes her focus very seriously.
"I've been Awake since July, actually. Last year," she says, offhand, as she messes with the thing.
"Now, I'm not going to tell you that this is The Way. I know enough Mages to know that most of them don't see things the way I do. But there is some pretty compelling evidence out there that suggests that our world isn't what you would call real.
"And by that, I mean the evidence suggests that the world is actually virtual. Like, if you believe that the world is made up of atoms, theoretically, there is a data-set that would describe each atom with such perfection you could duplicate them all, recreate the entire universe, even. So, at a fundamental level, we are the it-from-bit. Ones and zeros. Non-analog."
Her fingers fly on the keyboard as she talks, filling the screen up with what must be (to the uninitiated) bizarre syntax. Code, of a kind.
"And I tap into the code," she says, and hits the 'enter' key. The black screen fills with white, a never-ending scroll of symbolic text, shifting and bizarre and impossible to make sense of.

[Prime 1: Watch the Code -- Diff 4, Spending WP because]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Kalen Holliday
"Oh, that is still what I'm doing."  Kalen smiles.  "We've had a really scary spirit try to plunge the world into madness and terror, we've had people try to engineer a virus to destroy us, we've had a handful of other things.  Grace has a stalker.  I have people trying to kill me and I suspect it's because they think I know their secrets, because my girlfriend, or exgirlfriend, or fuck if I even know right now...knows them.  And, depending on the secret I might.  That's all thus far, but I've only been here since...August...?"
And he lets Grace show Alexander Code.  In fairness, he also looks.  He is fascinated by how she does that.  It doesn't work for him, but he still wants to see.

Alexander Brandt
He does want to see, and nods at the offer.  Still playing with the coin, he grabs a cup of - now lukewarm – coffee, and offers the remains of the French press to the others.  Alexander moves to Grace’s side and watches over her shoulder.
“How have you found it?  The whole new life thing?  Do you still have your old life too? What you did before it all went nuts, I mean.”  The code means nothing to Alexander.  Word processing, email, a bit of web surfing, and the systems the force uses to manage itself are his limit.  Anything involving figuring out which set of brackets to use is way above his head.  “So, the theory is that we’re not real either?  We’re not running around in some teenager’s console, are we?”
He watches her work her own brand of magic on the laptop, getting that tingle, that taste, as it happens.  But the symbols on the screen?  “It’s very pretty, but I have no idea what I’m looking at.  Ich verstehe es nicht.”  He glances at Grace, then looks back at the screen.  “Not a language I understand.”

Grace
[Matter 1, Entropy 1, Correspondence 1; diff 4; Rendering Reality! Woo! Spending WP because.]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Grace
Grace pinches her lower lip in her teeth when he asks how she's found it. Well, before this, she didn't have nightmares. She also didn't have so much more. "Life is just... more. More everything," she says, sadness creeping in a little. "More of the bad, yeah. More good things too."
"I still have some of my old life, really. I'm a grad student at UC Denver. Still trying for that degree, you know. But I had to quit my job, they didn't like me taking random weeks off here and there, and I don't blame them."
She doesn't explain why she's having to take those random weeks off, mind you. Just that she does take them.
"All the code on my screen is all well and good, but what can you do with it, right? It doesn't make sense, it's raw data" Grace cracks her knuckles and smirks at the assembled like of course she's going to show what she can do with it.
The fingers, they fly again, the code of reality flittering across her screen still, until it isn't any longer.
Code is meant to be rendered, and that is what happens here. With another flourish of enter-key pressing, Grace takes the Data and makes it sing for her, oh yes she does.
"You see, the Data is the underlying code that makes up Reality. So while your senses might be limited to a few channels of that Data, if you can pry it loose and look at it directly, you can do all sorts of neat stuff with it," she says as her screen resolves into a picture-perfect view of the room they're in. But the colors that everything is painted with aren't the real colors. Some things are blue, others red. Where there's a crack in Grace's coffee cup, it glows with a bright purpley sheen.
"Like here, I've mapped out a data-density routine for all the physical stuff in the room. So you can see where the stuff that's very 'dense' is. Data-wise, I mean. Some would call it Entropic, like the higher the color goes up, the more decayed that item is than others? But as you can see, the more complex items, the ones with many parts and such, they are also higher density than the more simple objects."
Talky talky, she is so focused and fast with her speech, like she goes into a whole separate realm when discussing this kind of thing -- almost as if the other people could have got up and left, and she'd still be here talking to an empty room about Entropy.

Kalen Holliday
He watches Grace explain Entropy, quiet again.  He is a terrible example for how Awakening and old lives mesh.  Because his old life was one he was glad to leave behind.  It isn't like that for most people.
So he lets Grace talk about her life and turn the things she can sense into a thing on a computer screen that they can see.  He might like the flexibility in what he can do, but he can't show other people what he does, not like this.

Alexander Brandt
Alexander waves his mug in the air, peering at the screen to see if anything changes.  “Do people generally keep their old lives when this happens?  I’m not so sure I want to give it up.”  Give what up, though?  He’s already walked away from one city, trying to make a new life in a new place.  Is there much to keep hold of?  For the moment, yes; he’s still – trying – to make things better, in his own little way.  Maybe there will be bigger ways in the future but, for now, not so much.  “What do the colours mean?”
He looks past Grace to Kalen, watching the man watching the screen.  “So if I did join you guys, what would you expect from me?”  He looks back at the screen, impressed at what he’s seeing even if he has no idea how it all works.  “And how do you see the world?  Not through a laptop, I take it.  Oh, what was the dust thing you did before?  Is that what you use to play with time?”

Grace
Alex is full of questions. And that's good, even though Grace's smile twitches a bit when he says he doesn't want to give up his old life. His job, perhaps. Because ugh, there are so many better jobs. "People tend to have trouble with keeping their old lives, Alex. It's hard," she says. Picks up her cup and runs a finger over the crack before drinking more coffee.
"The colors mean complexity. They go from red, through the spectrum up to purple -- least data dense to most data dense, least complex to most complex," she explains. "Although, they can also mean fragility. The more complex a thing is, the easier it is to break. Like, you can see the crack in my cup here it stands out a lot, because the surrounding cup is a lot less complex than a crack with a bunch of tiny fissures and imperfections, right?"
Motormouth of a woman, here. And it's all because she's showing off so.

Kalen Holliday
"Mostly to just be you," Kalen says.  "You're solid in a crisis, and we can teach you about more context and more tricks to help you not be quite so lost.  Although, I'm not going to lie, I was kind of lost when we got dragged into the spirit world.  Sometimes you just roll with where you are, because sometimes things'll just go sideways and crazy.  If you end up in a Tradition, awesome.  If not, also awesome.  Most of us eventually do, but you do what you want there.  None of us are worried about it."
"The dust thing is how I play with Time."  He smiles a little as he echoes that phrasing, and even tired there is a hint of a purr there.  "And sometimes Fate."  He does reach out now, and squeezes Alexander's shoulder if he doesn't pull away.  "I know this is a lot.  You're doing fine.  Promise."
"Though I am going to leave you with Grace and go take a nap.  Good night."
He waves to Grace.  "I'll see you at the office.  Call and let me know where you're sleeping."

Alexander Brandt
Alexander doesn’t pull away from Kalen, but does look gratefully at the man.  How anybody ever managed to work their way through all of this without any kind of help or advice, he’ll never know.  There just seem to be so many dangers and pitfalls to catch the unwary.  “I’m certainly feeling a lot happier about it all than I was this morning.”
He drains the last of the cold coffee in his cup, then stifles a yawn.  Looking slightly sheepish, he apologises.  “Sorry, I’m not sure where that escaped from.”  Checking his watch gets raised eyebrows.  “And I had no idea it was getting so late.  I really should head off soon.”
Going to rinse his cup under the sink, he calls out to Kalen as he heads off. “Thanks again, for all the help.  Let me spend a bit more time with Sid and Alyssa and I’ll let you know one way or the other.  And I need to talk to Alyssa about the spirit thing anyway.”  Then, to Grace, “And thank you, for showing me what you do.  I don’t know if I’d ever be able to do things the way you do, but at least it’s clear that there’s no one true way to do things.”

Grace
Kalen wants to know where she's sleeping, and if it were any other person, Grace might find that a bit creepy. Instead, she responds with a "Yeah, sure," because she knows why he wants to know where she is all the time.
Disappearances happen. They do. And when they happen to someone close to you, when you spend your nights dreaming about all the possible ways in which they could so 'disappear', well.
Grace closes her laptop. "Yeah, I've got things to do too. I'll see you around," she says, like it's an inevitability. Because Mages, right?
After being so abandoned, she posts a little note in the doorway about the e-library system -- the same note she posted to Ginger. For those who do not have phones or do not have Ginger yet. She would have posted another notice about Ginger, were it not for the fact that Alexander now has access to the Chantry, apparently. Natch.
Going to have to have a talk with him about that 'cop' thing soon. And how far he's willing to bend the rules.

Echoes of Hydra's Claws

Kalen Holliday

[Are you still crazily sleep deprived, Kalen?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 6, 6, 6, 10) ( success x 1 )

Grace Evans

[Nightmares!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 5, 5, 5, 6) ( fail )

Grace Evans

It's a day like any other, really. Grace came to the Chantry to keep the books company, and fell asleep on one of the library couches, an old programming manual clutched to her chest, twitching as she does in her sleep most nights. It looks almost peaceful, if you don't know what's going on underneath.

Everything's fine. Everything's normal. Until it isn't.

She opens her eyes, blinks. Blinks again, and looks down at her hands, at her body, and then a piercing, terrifying scream emerges from within her.

Someone is in trouble. Chances are, at least Kalen and Pan have heard this sound before, coming from the random places in the Chantry where Grace has chosen to nap, and know the reason for it. They might just choose to ignore it, until she screams again -- wild, uncontrolled, terrified.

Patience Mason

The chantry at dusk seems a place of quiet solitude, of repose and consideration. The tiny house on the hillside would seem a spec from the air, insignificant and utterly benign if one did not know the truth that lay within. 

Patience's arrival is heralded by the unexpected patter of feet upon the rooftop, for a second one might wonder if christmas had come early, but those sounds were to light for the heavy tread of one as weighty as saint nick, they were also to heavy to be any sort of raccoon be it individual or otherwise. No these footfalls resounded on the roof with directional intent, moving across the portion that was simply one story before the sound ended, and a thump as someone dropping to the patio stones might be heard.

The next moment Patience is walking through the front door, dressed in her riding leathers, with her hair piled high in the ever present victory rolls. She would take a few moments to look around, taking in the building she had only visited once before.

It was then that she might hear the scream...then that she might look for its source. A shame she'd never visited the library.

Pan Echeverri­a

Just the sound the priest wants to hear the second he walks through the front door: Grace screaming.

This is the first time he's been to the Chantry since Kalen summoned him after the collection of the dead Archmagus's bones and this time he didn't step into a door in one holy place and step out of a door in another holy place miles away. He drove. So he ends up walking in the door right behind Patience. Maybe they've already greeted each other.

Whatever he wanted to talk to whoever he saw first is going to have to wait. As soon as that scream hits his ears the priest steps around Patience and walks quickly. Does not run. But she can hear his footsteps picking up speed as they descend the stairs and slowing again as he lets himself in.

"Grace?" he calls. Not to try and locate her. He hears her just fucking fine.

Kalen Holliday

Kalen is, as per usual when he's in the chantry, lounging across one of the living room couches with a book in his lap and a cup of coffee.  There are shadows under his eyes dark enough that by contrast his pale green eyes seem colorless, as though color and energy both drained out of them.  Still, judging by the coffee, he seems disinterested in forming any kind of truce with dreaming.

And the screaming from downstairs gives a good reason as to why.  

He half-drops, half-tosses his book onto the table quickly enough at the first scream.  He can let a lot of things go, Grace screaming is not even a little bit like one of them.  He hits his feet quickly enough, sways a little, with an audible collision of teeth as his jaws snap shut.

His attention flicks, briefly to Pan and Patience.  At least Pan can get to Grace.  At least there is that.

Kalen doesn't try calling,  Just heads toward the library much, much more slowly than he'd like.

Alexander Brandt

Alexander arrives in a slightly more traditional style to Patience, by bike.  Anyone who may be listening would hear the purr of the engine as he pulls up alongside the vehicles already parked there.  Today he has no particular reason to be there, he’s just curious to see who’s about.  Maybe meet somebody new.  So, helmet hooked over a handlebar and dressed in his own bike leathers, he heads towards the front door, flipping a dollar coin as he walks. 

Faint, though it is, the scream still carries out of the house.  Grabbing the coin from mid-air, he starts running into the house.  Pushing the front door open, he skids to a halt at the sight of the two unfamiliar people.  Kalen, though – Kalen he knows, and asks, “What’s going on?”

Grace Evans

When they arrive in the library, down the stairs, past the locked door, they will find her. Her book's been tossed aside, and she's shaking, grabbing herself in a hug, and staring at a point in space where nothing exists.

And the first person to open the door will get a warning. "Stay... stay there. Don't come near me."

Patience Mason

The older gentleman who followed Patience in was the one the Etherite followed now. A smile of reassurance was cast in Kalen's direction as Patience waved to him. "Appropriate social and temporal Salutations Kalen." It was probably the shortest sentence he had ever heard her utter, but then she was moving quickly, and perhaps that was her version of a quick hello. 

She was moving then, moving behind Pan as they descended the staircase and if Pan proceeded in one direction to circumvent the table then Patience would proceed in the other, efficiently covering the most ground.

That is until Grace warns them not to come any closer, and Paige raises an inquisitive brow, her gaze sliding to the point in space that she was staring. "Grace, please quantify and assign appropriate clerical index markers to the ascribed frotean actuality." She said as she stuck her hand in one of the many leather pouch pockets at her waist before producing a slim tube that she held gently in her gloved hand.

"Establish a suitably extrapolated approximation of incumbent physical, noospherical and metaphysical endangerment based upon the Krelling doom scale, initiating a zero as a negative, to fifty four indicating temporal and relativistic planar collapse and nullification."

Pan Echeverri­a

Pan is the first one down the stairs. Biggest person in the house. Maybe not the strongest but he's tall and solid and about to round the corner towards the second half of his forties. Consciousness and power growing even as he stands here. Doesn't call himself an Adept yet but he's awful goddamn close to it.

He holds his hands palms-out so she can see he's not gonna hurt her and for now he listens. Lets Patience handle it. Which leads to his facial expression becoming a clear What the fuck?

Yes Grace. Please let everyone know there isn't an imminent planar collapse.

Kalen Holliday

All Patience gets in response to her greeting is, "Firefly."  

"Grace," Kalen says to Alexander, as he follows Pan and Patience toward the stairs.  "Probably not life-threatening unless we've been keeping cursed artifacts I don't know about in the library, but all the same."  He does not wave Alexander ahead of him.  Pan and Patience are already there.

Pan is there.  If it can be okay, it will be.  

Kalen wants to be there too, and, given another moment he will be.

Alexander Brandt

Alexander trails behind the others.  The library is new territory to him. Partly because the only other time he was here, there were other things to work through.  Partly, books.  They have their uses but, well, they’re not so much his thing.  So he slows, looking over the others at what’s going on in the room.  Peering at the spot Grace seems to be staring at, trying to figure out what’s there.  Wondering if there’s something going on that he just can’t see, yet – much like Sera and the rip in the Gauntlet he opened not so long ago.  And wishing, again, that he knew more about what he was doing.

The new woman tells Grace...  Something.  Which gets a double-take.  The words are English, but the sentences don’t seem to make all that much sense.  Something to worry about later.  Assuming that planar collapse doesn't wreck the rest of the day.  To Grace, he calls gently, “Back away from it.  Come to us.”

Grace Evans

There's a thing about viruses that most people don't know. Once you're infected with one, you are rarely entirely rid of it. Maybe the nightmares that Grace has continued to have since the incident indicated that everything was not, in fact, cleared out of her system.

Maybe Hydra lay waiting for her, after all this time.

It's the only thing that really makes sense, now that she can see it. She looks down at her hands, which she sees as crawling with ants, which burrow under her flesh, that sensation of writhing burrowing things inside of her, everywhere. Makes her want so desperately to just scratch them out, to rip at her skin and tear it off.

"They aren't real, they aren't real, they aren't real," she says, mantra-like. It's not a response to Patience. Not yet. She has to come to grips first, and then she might be able to speak.

Her breathing is labored, and she reaches up to wipe something away from her mouth, from her nose -- but the others won't see the blood that she feels, knows to be there.

"I am... I may be still infected with... a terrible plague. End of the world, Patience. Nullification of humanity, where does that land on the scale?"

The echoes of Hydra reach out to her. They are real.

She looks over to Alex, shakes her head violently. "No, stay away. It's meant to kill Awakened. Don't get near me. Don't you dare!"

[OOC: Just so everyone knows, the odd things that Grace is seeing, nobody else can. Her body is not actually covered with ants, she is not actually bleeding. It's all in her head. She looks normal, if a bit tired.]

Patience Mason

Patience, is an exemplar of her name as Grace goes through the throws of her nightmare, having manifested in the waking world. She was unawares of this plague, but then she was usually so disconnected from the other mages at large that she might well have missed the whole thing. She lets those sky blue eyes flicker to Pan, as if there might be some confirmation from the man before she turns her attention entirely back to Grace.

She speaks calmly, reassuringly infact, as a mentor might talk to a distraught pupil. "Nullification of the genus homo sapien sapien is idenitified and indexed as a level twenty two on the Krelling doom scale. While significant in scope to those bio-physically locked within the afformentioned genus, it is not..infact relativistically terminal." She reaches into another pouch in that moment and produces a pair of curious and bulky goggles which she sets upon her face, and with a flick of a button they begin to whir and occilate.

She then holds up that tube and red lasers begin to play over Grace, the books, the very room.

"Initiating cohesive reality data accumulation, please attempt to relegate internal processes as nominal as is noospherically possible Grace. Appropriate advisory, do not locate the source of the scan utilizing the incumbent optical nerves..such actualization may result in sterilization of the nerves." 

[Arete 2 diff 4 WP]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Pan Echeverri­a

Now he turns towards the door just to keep the others from wandering any closer. So long as Grace is panicking and yelling at them not to come any closer there's no point agitating her. If Patience can't handle this that's why he's standing there like he is.

Younger Mages don't get stronger if they don't have to figure things out for themselves though. That's another reason he's standing there like he is instead of barreling over and fixing it himself.

"Let her Work," are the first words he says to Alexander. Doesn't give the younger man his name or explain who the hell he is or why he's performing an impression of a human barricade. Just assumes Alexander is going to listen.

Arrogant bastard.

Kalen Holliday

Kalen hits the base of the stairs and studies Patience with lazers and Pan standing there and Grace beyond them for a few seconds.  He frowns a little, because it is Grace and he should therefore be right in the middle of it.  But Pan.  He trusts Pan.

And so he stops.  He reaches out to put a hand on Alexander's arm to stop him if Pan's presence hasn't already done it.  "Stop," he says quietly.  "If he says to let Patience handle this, let her."  

Alexander Brandt

Pan turns towards the door, tells Alexander to pretty much butt out.  That gets A Look from Alexander, but he returns to peering past at what’s going on in the room.  Grace is frantic wiping and scratching, Patience is... doing something, talking what sounds like nonsense.  He could try pushing past Pan but one thing Alexander here knows is that there’s a lot he doesn’t know.  So he stands his ground, looking round when Kalen lays a hand on his shoulder.  There’s no flinch, no drawing away.  But there is still a need to do something.

So he says, loudly enough for Grace to hear, “Tell us what you’re seeing.”  Then, quieter to Kalen, “What did that virus do to her?”

Grace Evans

Grace shuts her eyes while the lasers scan the room, but when they open again, she finds that point in space again, and shakes her head at it. "No... no..."

She rises from the couch, stumbles over to the far end of the library, like she's running from something. Truth is, she wants to get as far away from the other Mages as possible. She's a Typhoid Mary, or so she thinks.

At the other side of the library, she strips off her jacket, that grey turtleneck she always wears. Just a tee shirt underneath. She slides down a bookshelf, to sit on the floor, putting her knees between herself and the others, trying to symbolically block them out.

Then, she starts scratching at her arms with unflinching viciousness. The relief is evident on her face, but soon enough, she'll start to draw blood at this rate. To rip her skin off, before the ants eat it away entirely.

"I'm seeing... It's not real. None of it is real. It can't be real."

Patience Mason

The slow and steady sweep of the lasers seem to find no focal point as Patience evenly guides her hand across the room, the silence of the lasers made up for by the whir and clicking of the goggles on her face as gears and servos move about, slotting lenses into place while retracting others. But then it stops, and Patience puts away the tiny tube, and pulls the goggles up till they rest high upon her forehead and she looks dolefully to the others as she stepped slowly into the room, gently approaching. She spoke firmly, calmly and entirely reassuring as she approached, hands out.

"Grace, no active virus of any effective endangerment is currently active within this geo-physical locality, nor within your bio-physical structure. Increased activity within neuro-chemical transmitter's and amplified stress within your reticular activating system posits the ninety seven point six four six percentile that you have actualized a negatively attributed rapid eye movement event. Your bio-phsyical, noospherical and metaphysical personage will remain nominal for the forcastable temporal juncture."

When she gets close enough her arms are held out, though she does not touch Grace as she says. "May I initiate a dermal extremity interlock with intention to release appropriate counter neuro chemical transmitters to relegate and pacify the negativity?" She inquires, her hands gesturing towards her....it looks like she wants to give the woman a hug.

[Cha+Leadership WP]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Pan Echeverria

"Alright."

This to the other two men. He completely turns away from Patience and Grace and makes a gesture with both hands. A very clear gesture: Out. Go. Move it.

Serafi­ne

Hey Sera.  Focused as they are and have been on Grace there's no telling where she arrived or when and how.  Well, there won't be a discussion on those points in this post.  She's not there and then she is, see, stumbling a bit as she negotiates the stairs with the exagerated care of a drunk girl in heels negotiating stairs.  Walks like a goddamned rock star see on the level ground, but the stairs, darling -

- half on one, half on the next, Sera, wearing a short black leather skirt, thigh-high fishnets ripped to shreds, heels, and a hot pink lace bustier with black lace cups beneath an unbuttoned flannel, the sleeves rolled up, bracelets stacked up her arms, blond curls all wild. 

Steadily unsteady, sights the others (perhaps?) starting to climb back up and holds on to a railing.  Her tongue is against her teeth as she searches through the resonance to feel and separate out the most familiar ones.  She is so trashed.

Serafi­ne

(Perception + Awareness just for flavor/mah knowledged.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 5, 7, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1

Kalen Holliday

Pan gets more obedience from Kalen than...anyone still living.  But at this Kalen shakes his head, crosses his arms, and settles back against the wall to wait.  There is no glaring, no indication at all that the attempt to send him away upset him.  Just this calm refusal to comply.

"Shhhhhhhhhh...."  That is directed not at Pan, but at Alexander, quiet enough as to be barely audible.  "They've got it."  And he seems sure enough of that that it may seem strange he won't just go back upstairs.

Sera's entrance catches his attention, and so he follows that almost-command to Alexander with something even closer to an actual one.   "Sera.  Stairs.  Please."  Nevermind the please.  That is not really a polite request.

Grace Evans

Grace shakes her head at Patience. "Stay away from me. Even if what you say is true, I don't --"

She doesn't make it through her sentence before her eyes focus on something beyond Patience's shoulder, and she screams again, her body going taut against the books at her back.

She screams like she's dying, like there is no controlling the horrible noise coming out of her throat.

And yes, in her mind, that's exactly what's happening.

Skin is melting off of her, bones are crumbling inside her. Viscera pours out into the carpeting, and blood. Oh the blood, it washes over everything, over Patience, and there's not even enough thought left in her to worry about that last one. The visions may not be real, but the pain -- oh it is real indeed.

Alexander Brandt

He’s getting angry now.  Who the hell is this guy to shoo him away?  If it wasn’t for Kalen, trying rather more successfully to keep Alexander back...  But he does stay back.  He doesn’t leave though, mouthing  “Make me” at Pan.  Kalen notices Sera, and tells Alexander to help her.  A lasting look at Pan, followed by a glance towards Kalen and he turns to the stairs and holds out a hand for support. 

Hand held by Sera, lending her support, he can only turn towards the door when there’s another scream.  “Are you going to fucking do something?”, he yells at the others in the corridor.  Mainly at Pan.

Patience Mason

Patience listens to Grace with an even, steady look completely accepting of Grace's desire to avoid contact. She might have done so infact, if it hadn't been for the sudden screams, the sudden tension and undeniable terror in Grace's features. She reacts then, stepping forward and hugging Grace firmly, it was against her wishes, and for that Patience would apologize, but she does it anyways.

Her arms wrap around the other woman, providing the smells of leather and oil, of that cool scent of high altitude air and a hint of raspberry. The feeling of leather and the sound of it, the physical contact might be enough to snap the terrified woman out of it. To bring a hint of reality to the terror.

This is at least the theory Patience is working on as she gently 'Shhhh's' Grace as she rubs her back, holding firm as she adds.

"Nominal, all active relativistic forces and theorum's are nominal, nominal Grace, there are no frotean elements in active engagement." Her voice soft and reassuring as she tries, oh she tries to calm the woman down. 

[Cha+Lead]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Pan Echeverri­a

So much for that idea.

It looks for about half a minute as if Patience actually has the situation under control and is going to be able to calm down. That's where faith will get you sometimes. With Initiates and apprentices refusing to leave the room and the screaming getting louder.

He abandons that course of action to stride across the room. Doesn't rush over there with the intent to pull Patience off of her but the cadence of his boots hitting the floor is a clear enough indication that he's had it with the screaming.

"Patience," he says before he makes it over there, "move."

[do de do mind 2 time he's not letting the effect go this round]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 2, 6) ( success x 1 )

Serafine

Sometimes there is one step and sometimes there are two floating at different levels and the room is pleasantly spinning as the world has forgotten the precision of its various axes and all of these things are just fine with Sera.  Alexander can smell that smoke in her hair and see the glassiness in her eyes when he comes up to offer her a hand and she looks at him and looks at his hand and looks at him and she's smiling, wide, so out of synch with everything else going on, just happy and she says his name in her head three times before it makes it onto her tongue and then she says it not in her head but on her tongue, and then she does take his hand and another step, those heels, Jesus Christ, and then Grace screams like that and Sera's blitheness vanishes in the shadow of a heartbeat.  Tightens her hand in Alexander's and bites her tongue until the blood sluices softly over her palette and pulls him closer as she leans on him to steady herself the rest of the way down the stairs. 

"What's going on?"

(This is Sera's Watch the Weaving roll b/c she totally would.)

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Kalen Holliday

His eyes track Alexander moving to help Sera and Pan moving to help Grace.  Beyond the minimal motions required for observation, he remains still.  Quiet.  

He really was fine, and remains fine not barging into the room and getting into the middle of it.  But of everyone there, with the new possible exception of Sera, if Grace wants to see anyone there after this...it's him.  

"Pan's got it," is all he says softly to Sera.  "Shhhhhhhh.  It'll be alright.  Just wait."

Alexander Brandt

At least the other man seems to be doing something now.  What, he doesn’t know – one of the many things he doesn’t.  Maybe it’s a flaw of Alexander’s, not wanting to stand by and watch while someone is obviously suffering.  A need to help, to make things better.  Even if he doesn’t really understand what’s going on, there’s still that urge to try.  To do something.  Make things better.

So he’s not sharing Kalen’s belief that things will be alright, right now.  With Sera leaning on him, at least giving him some purpose here, he explains a little more.  “Grace was screaming.  Said something about about a virus, and how she didn’t want to infect us.  Seems to be scared of something in there, but apparently nothing anyone else here can see.”  He looks back to the door, trying to see what’s going on inside.

Grace Evans

After the little death is over, Grace slumps into Patience's arms. There's no more screaming, only shaky breaths. She doesn't return the hug.

It wouldn't be a hug that breaks Grace out of this. She doesn't like them. Doesn't like the sensation of touch. But Patience's voice, the strange words that she's never really had much trouble deciphering -- they do help to bring her back once the visions have cleared.

"It's not... That attack, I think it's over. For now, at least. Might be back. The last time I had this, they'd come in waves," Grace says, and her voice is worn through and gravelly with the screams.

She grabs Patience by the shoulders, then, trying to gently push her away. "Are you sure? Sure about that nominal?"

Pan is there, looking like the judgement of God that he is, looking like he's just about had it with her. And she returns him a bitter look. Just what she wanted in a time like this, right? To look up into the Light of Righteousness and be found wanting.

Patience Mason

Patience counts the seconds as she holds Grace close, utilizing her own body as a sensor as she seeks to evaluate and consider Grace's emotional and physical state. She counts down in her head as she watches the signs. Hoping they begin to recede.

They do, at least in their way and when Grace seeks release Patience gives it to her, spreading her arms wide on that initial push without even a hint of displeasure. Infact its the opposite she is smiling pleased to see that Grace is returning to herself. She nods to Grace's question and with that same tone indicates. "Probability states that your nominal actualization at this temporal juncture remains stable with a ninety eight point one one three likelihood." She stands then, offering Grace a hand should she want it, but not expecting.

She then looks at Pan, stepping to the side should he chose to continue his activities but she assures him, just as she assures everyone in the hallway. "The negatively aligned neuro-chemical transmitters are no longer applying a primary influence upon Grace's active noosphere. Further intervention is concurrently unnecessary."

Serafi­ne

Sera flashes a glance at Kalen all glassy and open-eyed, all weavering, but there that other sort of alertness there, beneath the familiar skin of drunk-girl that she wears familiarly.  This is Sera's magic; how she finds it and how she skims her way into it.  How she starts to peel back the layers-of-things adn there's something, well, not precisely sacred about Sera-the-lush, but perhaps powerful.

Yes, powerful. 

She glances at Pan; of course she does.  Shares Kalen's faith in the man - of course she does.  To whom did she run after the Nephandus Adept came calling at her show? 

"Hydra."  Sera explains to Alexander.  Just the word, just the thought, sobers her a bit.  For the moment she isn't crowding in.  "We were infected with a virus that made us sick, made us bleed, and made us hallucinate our own deaths.  She's had nightmares ever since."

Pan Echeverria

If Grace had not stopped screaming there isn't a lot of doubt in the air that Pan would have pulled the Etherite off of her. He has that tension written into his shoulders. Didn't want to get involved in the first place because he knows the effect he has on the young woman. It's the same effect he has on everyone. Some people find comfort in the awe and others recoil from its strike.

But she does stop screaming. And Pan stops at Patience's side. Takes a step back. That bitter look Grace shoots at him does not go unnoticed but it doesn't bury itself in his flesh either. He hadn't had it with her. But Grace is not a mind reader and he is not projecting much for anyone else to go off of either.

Whatever effect he was going to force on her unravels. No backlash comes in its wake. It wasn't going to cause reality to rattle. Further intervention is concurrently unnecessary.

"Alright," he says. Quieter than he'd told her to move a moment ago. He looks at Grace not out of judgment or pity but brief assessment. The light down here doesn't do him any favors. He looks old. He is getting old. He's going to turn 46 in a few days. He drags his hand down his bearded face and takes another step back. "I'm gonna go make tea, then."

And out he goes. Up the stairs. Passes by Alexander and Kalen and Sera without saying another word. He coughs a smoker's cough at the top of the stairs and his footfalls lose their volume once he's reached the dining room.

Kalen Holliday

He lets Pan go.  There is a slight frown as he tries to figure out way too many variables he doesn't entirely understand at once.  Pan.  Grace.  Alexander.  He sighs and leans a little bit to look into the library.

"Hey, Kit.  You want me to come in or you want to just chill with Patience?"  Look at that.  Choices.  Grace can have them.

Alexander Brandt

“Were infected.  So she doesn’t have it any more, right?  Was that.. a bad dream, then?”  He’s asking Sera just as the screaming, thankfully, stops.  There’s a hope that things are getting better.  Or, at the least, not getting any worse.  Pan stalks away upstairs without a word; Alexander watches him go, just as silently.  He looks at Kalen, not understanding how this man could just let his friend – who is obviously cares about – suffer without trying to do anything to help.

To Grace, he calls, “You ok, Grace?”  He’s still tense, still angry.  It carries in his voice, but it’s not directed at her.

Grace Evans

Patience says everything is fine, in her own way. Fine. Okay. Great. For a few seconds, Grace just breathes, holds on to that feeling of air in her lungs (not blood).

There is still fear in her eyes though. Still, she shakes a little. It could all happen again. Usually, they could get some respite in between the waves of misery and death, but the waves were inexorable. They'd roll in like tides of blood, each one a little stronger than the last.

Sometimes, the lucid periods were the hardest to deal with, because then you had to come to terms with knowing what was coming next.

"You can come in. I think I'm not..." she puts a hand up to her nose, looks at her fingers after. "I'm not bleeding."

She doesn't take Patience's hand. Instead, she wraps one of hers around her mouth, shuts her eyes, and rocks slowly back and forth. Trying to stay calm.

Grace Evans

There's no real way to respond to Alexander. She's not okay. Not dead, but very much not okay.

Serafi­ne

"You know how people come back from war all fucked up?  PTSD and shit.  How your now gets all soaked in your then?"  Sera, low-voiced, drunk right now and really almost - sober.  This spare light in her eyes, this framing half-smile that pulls back into her body, that she inhales. 

"Let her know that I'll help her sleep tonight."  Sera tells Kalen.  She's never entered the library.  She's not line of sight with Grace and hasn't been and she does not follow Kalen in.  Does not crowd around.  "If she wants me to."

Then Sera go of Alexander's hand, then, and turns around, and walks up the stairs.

Patience Mason

Grace's response is not idea, but it suits the moment, one is not totally fine after such an episode so she simply nods as she takes a few more steps back to give Grace the air she requires. 

Infact she moves off, heading upstairs, and as she does she pauses to state.

"I require utilization of this physical structures lavatory, I shall re actualize your personages momentarily."

At that she's off up the stairs, heading to..well..the washroom.

[At that i gotta bounce out sadly folks, need to sleep :/] 

Serafi­ne

(Me too.  Fading Sera-and-Pan for the nonce.  So tired.)

Kalen Holliday

Kalen nods to Sera.  "Thank you," he says softy.  "Tell...."  Tell Pan something.  But Kalen cannot even understand what he wants to tell Pan, much less how to relate it to Sera.  So he just drops that entire line of thought and murmurs a second thank you to her.

Alexander gets a brief, weary smile.  Good luck reading the expression.

And then he walks slowly into the library.  "You are not bleeding.  Sid cured the virus.  It is gone.  It is over."  He sounds so perfectly, calmly certain of that.

Pan Echeverri­a

[Yes. Fading. We'll be picking up tomorrow if anyone wants to continue the hilarity in the afternoon.]

Alexander Brandt

The question, about the nightmare, wasn’t intended to belittle what Grace had been going through.  He’d woken from them in his own past, but his demons were - mostly - put to bed.  He’s seen the effects of call-outs gone bad on others.  How they didn’t, quite, seem to be the same person when they returned to work.  If they did.

Patience gets a quiet, “thank you” as she passes.  She had, at least, been trying.  She disappears upstairs, and Sera follows.  Kalen heads in to Grace.  Alexander stays by the door, leaning round so he can see Grace.  “Can I get you anything?” he asks, temper dying down.

Grace Evans

She raises her head to Alex. "Pan was making some tea?" she suggests. As if to say she's going to stay down here for a while. Why not deliver something decidedly un-bloodlike that might make her feel more human?

She looks to Kalen then, and he eyes drop to the floor. "Then why am I still like this? Why didn't it go away?" she asks.

"You don't have to answer, nobody can answer that, I think."

She pushes herself up off the floor, wipes at her face again, but this time not to wipe away hallucinatory blood. "You've never seen me when I was having a spell. It's not pretty, I know," she says, and it's about as close as she's going to come to 'sorry I worried everyone with my screaming for no reason'.

She wanders over to the couch, wavering a bit in her steps. She's still trying to hold it together, but she manages to make it to sitting down again -- a minor victory.

Kalen Holliday

"Sometimes things happen, and you don't know how to let them go.  In a broad, collective you sense.  Not you specifically."

Kalen settles on the opposite end of the couch from Grace.  "Imperfect world, Kit," he says gently, in response to her almost apology.  "We all know that.  We're just glad we were here."

"Sera said to tell you she'd sing you to sleep.  She went up to help Pan with the tea, but she's here."

Alexander Brandt

Maybe okay isn’t the right word.  Safe?.  Not at immediate risk?  However it’s best described, Grace is it.  She asks for tea, which gets a barely audible growl from Alexander.  Not at the request, but at who’s making it.  But she’s with somebody she trusts, even if Alexander doesn’t quite know how to take him now.  Someone who knows her better, who she apparently trusts.  Someone better suited for being there for her. 

“I’ll see what I can do.  Call me if you need anything  else.”  Call?  Yeah.  Leaving Kalen and Grace, to give them some privacy, he heads upstairs.  Heads to the kitchen where he asks Sera if she’d be able to take some tea down for Grace.  Just as wordlessly as Pan passed Alexander earlier, he returns the favour.  Then turns and leaves the house.  The temper is still burning, and he doesn’t want to hang around where it could do more damage.  There’s a roar of an engine from outside and the squeal of rubber as he drives off, burning the temper away with the adrenaline of speed as miles of asphalt pass under him.

Grace Evans

"Good. Good. I want her to put me out before it happens again," she says, shakily. "It always would... come and go."

She wraps herself up on the couch, legs curled up to her chest. Her shoes are still on, but she doesn't really care about that right now.

"I'm glad you were here too. Glad Sera's here. Fuck, I need this to not happen again."

Kalen Holliday

"Alexander too," Kalen says.  "You couldn't see it, but...you should be glad he was here.  There was a second I thought he was going to tackle Pan out of the doorway to get in here.  I think you'll have some common ground on your level of adoration there."  Which is very different from where Kalen stands, but then...they are normally so very different, aren't they?

"Do you want me to go get Sera now?"

Grace Evans

"Maybe," she says, looks up at him with fire in her gaze. Not at him, but at the situation itself. Just, why? Something Kalen said once echoes within her. The universe is a lucky little fuck, that it is so beautiful.

"Alex, he's... not a bad guy, I guess," she says. She guesses. Because, hey, he's a cop right? But then her eyes slide off of Kalen. For a split second, the books in the shelves behind him had started to bleed, bright red drops oozing out from between their spines.

She nods. "Yeah, go get Sera. Please."

Kalen Holliday

"Okay.  She'll be right here.  And then it will be better."  [And...wrap there for now?]