[*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.
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.
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