Riley
[Morning routine: Alter Ego, Mind 2, taking all the time in the world, threshold 4, diff -1 (practiced)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 9) ( success x 2 )
Riley
[extending]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (2, 9) ( success x 1 )
Riley
[and again, NO GUTS NO GLORY RILEY YOU DIDN'T NEED BRUNCH]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (6, 9) ( success x 2 )
Grace
[Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
Grace
[Awareness!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Riley
[Riley has 6 "resonance stealth" to last the scene, otherwise she registers as a Sleeper until she casts/takes down the effect]
requiem aeternam interrupta
RULES (Full credit to Kai via Damon as always):
1. There is no post order, but please only post once for each post I make unless I say otherwise.
2.
This is gonna be a pretty laid-back one-shot, but do try to be timely
on posts. Within 10 minutes and if there is combat of some sort,
declare/roll in 2 minutes or less.I will give a polite warning if we
start getting too late with these.
3. You are free to multi-task, so long as you can abide by the above strictures.
4.
This scene...frankly, is more mood than a lot of risk. However, there
is some potential risk depending on what the PCs might do. I don't
anticipate combat but you never know; psychological and mental risks are
ALWAYS in play with my scenes. :D If you decide you want to bow out
based on that I am completely fine.
5. Please PM or IM me with
anything you want to be off-limits; phobias, triggers, themes, etc.
Also PM with any relevant Merits or Flaws (Nightmares, Phobias, etc.) or
any active magical effects (wards, Life enhancement, et. al) your Mage
has going on your person. If you need to roll those, or Nightmares or
the like, do so now. If none of these apply, no need to PM me with
“None”
7. Please keep track of your own health, Quintessence, WP, etc.
8. We are at the Denver Museum of Natural Science. Figure out why you're there and post yourselves in!]]
Fr. Echeverria
One
of the teenage boys who belongs to the after school program at the
Church of the Good Shepherd got into a fight with another boy from the
city school district not in the parking lot of the Denver Museum of
Natural Science but in the food court. They hadn't even purchased
tickets to go in. The story goes that the boy who isn't a parishioner
was sitting at a table with his girlfriend when the boy who is a
parishioner walked up to him and pushed him out of his chair.
His
mother is dead and his father works one full-time job and two part-time
jobs to support him and his three sisters. His father called Father
Echeverría after museum security called him. It was either he go down to
the police station or someone come in and physically collect him. The
other boy is eighteen years old and doesn't want to press charges.
The
priest has several hours between the noon mass and the afternoon mass.
If something happens he can just have Deacon Zavala do it.
At the
time of the incident Father Echeverría is walking out of the museum with
a sullen-looking sixteen-year-old boy at his side. The priest is
dressed all in black and has his hands in the pockets of his slacks. The
boy wasn't wearing a jacket when he showed up. He has the priest's barn
coat on now.
Riley
Why in the world would Riley
be at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science? Probably for the science
part, but there's not a lot there that appeals to her personal interest
in science. Nature, history, these aren't really her "bag" see.
There's a health science section on the third floor that comes kind of
close, and a space science area on the main floor that comes a little
closer.
Maybe it's just curiosity that has her wandering inside to
the line to pay $15 for a ticket to wander around some more. Maybe she
picked up on some unknown resonance and decided to discretly check it
out.
It's none of those things, really. The building is a new place she's never been into before and she wants to explore.
She's
through the line now, standing on the second floor landing between the
escalators, not looking at the people (not really) but looking at the
massive skeleton of a whale suspended over the first floor.
And
seeing people through the gaps in its bones. Just another person in the
crowd, a tall woman with long brown hair, a too big nose, dressed in a
light jacket, t-shirt, jeans, and black-and-white Converse high-tops.
Exploring.
[awareness!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Grace
Grace is at the museum today because it's been too long since she's been. No real reason per se.
Obviously,
when there is no reason for anything, the universe still has its own
reasons, its own way. Mages appear when they need to.
She's on her
way in when Pan is on his way out, with what's obviously a bratty kid
in tow. One of the shepherd's flock gone astray and pissed off about
that. Been there, oh yes.
The Adept is dressed in jeans and that
grey turtleneck jacket, innocuous and hard to remember to the Sleepers
around them. She waves to the priest, but his charge will likely not
even notice.
Serafine
Here is the flash of
something absolutely surreal: just outside the glass doors where the
patrons and hurrying out and hurrying in - a Cultist of Ecstasy. She is
smoking a cigarette. The cigarettes has dark blue paper and a gold
foil band around the filter. Her long hair is pulled back from her face
and twisted into a thick and rather messy brad. She has a thick spike
through the cartilage of her right ear and a bar that pierces her left
ear in an artful three-places and she's dress for the cold in, you know,
summertime clothes. Denim cut-offs and herringbone-patterned
thigh-high fishnets held up by black lace garters and a loose white
t-shirt over black lingerie and cropped leather jacket because why the
hell not.
Sera is talking to A Guy and A Girl, cupping her
tattooed left hand over her cigarette as she takes a pull. Laughing
about something.
She just woke up.
It is breakfast time.
God only knows why she's here.
No wait, maybe God does know.
Fr. Echeverria
[perc + aware]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 5, 5, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
Serafine
Per + Awareness.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1
requiem aeternam interrupta
They've
all found themselves here at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on
this chilly Sunday afternoon for their own reasons. Pan is here
dealing with, shall we say, congregational concerns. Riley and Grace
have both showed up out of a sheer Hey, this seems like a place to go today
mood, to explore and see new things (or revisit things they've seen
before). Sera is drawn here for reasons only God (or whatever power is
Out There) is aware of; the point is that she's here. They're all here
on this day, barricaded against the cold outside or just venturing out
into it.
The DNMS is host to many exhibits, and they bring no small number of people to gander and ooh and aaah
about the anthropological and geological wonders that surround them.
Today it is a little less occupied than it might otherwise be; maybe the
cold has kept them away, or perhaps it was just a sense that today was a
day to be Somewhere Else. Either way, there are still people
here wandering through the various floors and looking at the different
exhibits but not as many as you might think. There are the Sleepers
that Sera is speaking with outside, the boy that Pan is leading out, the
employees who wish they were home nestled in with a blanket and some
smattering of other people. But it is only the Mages who feel it.
Riley
feels it first, but Pan and Sera (and Grace, too) aren't far behind.
It's muffled, but it's there, sparking up in the upper floors of the
building and arcing its way down. The more experienced trio get a sense
of a hole being ripped in the fabric of mortality and a shining warmth
pulling itself through; it glows against their mind, invigorates them.
It's like birth, but ancient. Grace, for her part, just gets more of a
general ping that swells in the back of her mind.
It's coming from the third floor.
Riley
Riley
feels a jumble of things all at once. The first is a tension, because
there by the door she senses a collection of resonances, one of which is
at least a little familiar to her now. Mages, here? Of course here.
Here in Denver there is Grace and Man-Candy and Lena and Adam, so it
stands to reason that there are others.
And then she feels that
something else, something Other that feels like it's raining down on her
head. Invigorating, well that's nice, but what is it?
She pulls
out her phone and, well. She turns to look back over the railing,
across the main lobby to the front entrance where she senses that
cluster of people and yep, sure enough, Shit is that Grace? Well, so much for a planned meeting under more controlled conditions.
And
so much for keeping herself hidden until she susses out the Awakened
situation. Because when Riley pulls out her phone she thumbs the screen
on and she pulls up a custom-made application. Something that will let
her see the Code, and what sorts of bugs and glitches it has in it
today.
As she Works even this most minor of Workings, the air
around her begins to shift, so slightly as it leaks through the barrier
she's erected. Just the faintest thread of something inexorably
mercurial.
[Watch the Weaving, Prime 1, practiced]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 3) ( success x 1 )
Riley
[nix that, I forgot who I was playing, Riley ain't got no Prime augh!]
Grace
Ohh,
Grace-senses tingling. She takes a quick breath, and looks around, to
Pan, to Sera (who she's just noticed loitering at the entrance, and what
the Hell?)
It's happening again, isn't it?
Freakish
metaphysical weirdness, and a group of mages all 'happening' to be at
the right place. Gee universe, would be nice if you could put a little
notice on her calendar once in a while -- 'Weird Shit Today, 2-5 PM.'
She
doesn't feel the invigoration, the birth of something shining and warm
-- she just knows it's something strange. And she hopes it's not demons
crawling their way through the IMAX screen in this place. Shit.
In
any case, she makes her way inside, because even if it is demons
crawling their way through the IMAX screen, it's not like she can ignore that.
Riley
[for the record we're calling that an ENTROPY scan instead of Prime because Niko is an idiot today]
Fr. Echeverria
He
doesn't have a hand on the boy's elbow or shoulder because he's
trusting him to walk out of here on his own. Because the priest can
remember being sixteen years old and angry at the entire world and
willing to fight anyone who had slighted him even if that person were
his friend. His anger made him susceptible to the slightest kindness.
Drew him to people who understood him and he thought he could
understand. That's how his son happened. Ignorance coupled with
loneliness. His son grew up without a father because of his anger.
So
he understands this kid. Has sympathy for him even though the kid
doesn't grasp that his own father is trying very hard to provide for
them. No way for him to understand this without growing up or having
kids of his own but Pan would like very much for this kid not to have
kids.
As he walks of his own volition he has no need to lay a hand on him.
But
then something opens up upstairs. Pan sees in quick order Grace and
Sera but his alarm and the sharpening of his senses supersedes his
desire to great them proper.
"Manny," he says to the boy. Puts a
hand on his shoulder now. No one else notices anything is wrong but they
may yet. "I left my phone in the security office. Go sit in the truck."
"But--"
"Go."
[mind/prime 2: empathic projection.
coincidental.
he's going for compliance here, hence the prime. diff 5, -1 because idk
is 'intense' an appropriate resonance? i can supplement this with
intimidation if he fucks it up.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (3, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Fr. Echeverria
[OOPS MY FINGER SLIPPED]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )
Serafine
"Oh
my fuck," Sera mutters not precisely beneath her breath but around it.
It has been a strange handful of weeks and Sera - who has a surreality
all her own - is just there, sharing a cigarette with a guy who
moonlights as a bartender at The Abbey and pays the bills with a job at
DMNS, where he hides his many tattooes beneath a button-down,
long-sleeve white shirt, which does not really hide them. And he is
Talking About something and Sera is not really sure what he is Talking
About or what he has been Talking About for the last... well, for the
last god-knows-how long (two or three puffs of the cigarette) because
she's feeling something; feeling it open up in her; feeling it swell and
crack and bloom. Feeling that warmth, that -
- Sera tips her
head back; there's brick or glass or something behind her. Sera tips
her head back thinks about kissing That Guy because he's still talking
while she's just being.
And then she does kiss him.
Straightens up and reaches for both of his lapels and pulls him in and
breathes out her smokey, spiced breath onto his beared cheek, her eyes
closed, her senses open, burning, burnished, bright.
[Mind/Life/Prime 1]
Her
cheek is smooth; his bearded. His breath is warm and a bit humid and a
bit sour; she can feel the radiant heat from his skin and he opens his
empty hand and reaches out instinctively to steady her, grazes her hip.
She's never come on to him before, not more than she comes on to most
people, and there's a startling intimacy about the moment that catches
him on the cusp of awareness, has him taking in the view of the lawn on
this cold spring day with a new - not appreciation, no. Perhaps merely:
perspective.
Then Sera sort of nuzzles him and lets him go and snuffs her cigarette beneath a booted foot and goes inside.
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (5, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
requiem aeternam interrupta
Manny
would normally, perhaps, argue with the good Father about having to go
sit and wait in the truck while the priest went to go get his phone. He
would say that he can just go home on his own perhaps, or deliver some
sort of snark (built on the back of being an angry teenager with
hormones marinating his brain) about how someone can lose their phone so
quickly. But the priest's command takes hold and the Sleeper sighs,
heading off to do just that.
Meanwhile, Serafine's Guy is caught
unaware by the sudden intimacy, and is caught just as unaware when she
steps back and heads inside. That was certainly unexpected, and he's
not sure what to do from there. He thinks about it for a moment and
then lets her go. He needs time to process that little bit.
Riley
lets a little bit of her sparkling aura, that inexorable but mercurial
nature slip out ever so very slightly and she gets a fix on something,
while Grace heads inside. They're all inside now, and...
Nothing
is crashing through the museum. This is no Ben Stiller movie and no
Tyrannasaurus Rex skeleton is playing havoc (or even chess). Its up
above them though, so who knows what terror may be awaiting them (or
what Sleepers may in trouble) that far up.
Fr. Echeverria
He
stands still long enough to feel a sense of assurance that Manny is
going to sit in the truck until whatever is going on upstairs is done
going on and in that amount of time Sera has decided to come inside.
"Hey,"
he says to her in the distracted tone of one who's listening very hard
to something going on a distance away. As soon as she's within arm's
reach of the priest Pan takes hold of her hand and matches her pace.
They're going upstairs.
Doesn't ask her if she felt that. If Sera
didn't feel that she can ask him. He knows she uses physical contact to
help her with her pagan rituals. If she wants to do anything on the way
up, well. You're welcome.
Pan though has to reach into his pocket to find his rosary.
[prime 1: SUP WEAVING WHAT'RE YOU DOING BUDDY -1 diff because practiced]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 2, 4) ( success x 1 )
Grace
Grace
can feel the brightness of Pan's righteousness as he tells the boy to
leave. But she can't help but look at Sera when that kiss happens --
can't help but stare, even though staring at kissing people is totally
not her way. Sera's entrancing, draws all eyes and all attention to her.
There
is something else, something familiar on the back of her brain,
something... but she doesn't know Riley well enough to place it, and
certainly doesn't know what Riley looks like.
Between the two
Disciples, she makes a choice of who to go to first -- Sera, of course.
Sorry Pan, but Sera's the one Grace makes a beeline toward upon entering
the museum. Pan joins them soon enough, though, and it's not like Grace
minds.
"Hey, guys," she says, when she gets close enough. Follows them, because hey if they don't know what to do...
Serafine
"Did you feel
that?" Pan is the first magus Sera encounters inside the museum, after
he has divested himself of his teenaged charge. The kid is
disappearing out doors still swinging from her entrance and Sera herself
is going to slip an arm through Pan's and slide up beside him.
Except, he's reaching for her hand, wrapping her hand is his, which
pulls her back from whatever is Above to the here and now, for just a
moment. A glimpse at his profile and they're already in motion, Sera
walking closer to Pan than is strictly necessary or perhaps even
proper.
Her pagan rituals, you know.
And then Grace, "Hi
Grace," Sera says and sort of reaches for her like to pull her into the
World's Strangest Threesome (not like that, darlings. Minds sharp and clean please.)
Someone somewhere wants them to Pay and Sera swipes an AmEx and lo they are through.
"It's just - being born. Being reborn, you know? Recreating itself, so fucking warm. Older than anything I know, too.
"Than anything I can imagine."
Sera tells them, the both of them, as they climb.
Riley
There
is a community in Denver that Riley is currently not a member of. Her
invitation got lost in the mail, maybe, which means boo no decoder
ring. But genuine boo because three Mages are gathering together to
probably help each other out, discuss, suss, plan, et cetera, and Riley?
Riley's
the loner on the second floor stepping onto the escalator to go up a
little further, to get let ooff on the floor where Egypt's on display
next to the dinosaurs and oh, well, hm. Maybe this isn't a Ben Stiller
movie but they are Awakened so anything is possible.
She pulls up a
program on her phone and looks for other Minds. Not Sleeper Minds, not
even Awakened Minds, but if they're possibly dealing with Other
Sentience Riley would kind of like to know ahead of time, y'know?
[Mind Scan, same as before]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 10) ( success x 1 )
Grace
Sera
says it's being reborn, recreating itself, and it's warm. Older than
anything. Grace puts two and two together and it comes up dinosaur.
"They
have an allosaurus skeleton up here on the third floor. I don't know if
it would be such a great thing if one decided to recreate itself,"
Grace says, and then stops herself. These two may not know what she's
talking about "Allosauruses are the meat-eating kind. Big enough to bite
a person in half."
Could be worse. There are dinosaurs capable of
swallowing a person whole. That's not what we're talking about here,
just scythe-claws and dagger-teeth, in a body about 1.5 times human
height.
Sera reaches for her, tries to draw Grace into the group
hug they've got going, but where she usually gives Sera great leeway in
the whole touchy-feely thing, she's pretty damned reluctant to be drawn
into a tight huddle with Pan too. She'll hold somebody's hand, sure...
Fr. Echeverria
If
anyone had sent out invitations to join the Denver Awakened population
Father Echeverría would have thrown it in the shredder with everything
else he wants nothing to do with. Communities cause nothing but
headaches. He didn't receive an invitation though. He found a
Dreamspeaker girl who thought she could sleep under bridges and on park
benches with all of her earthly possessions strapped to a bicycle and
call it a day. It wasn't long before heathens were falling asleep drunk
in pews in his sanctuary and calling him to ask for help with Nephandi
and demons and dead Archmagus's bones.
Enjoy it while you can, Riley. Enjoy it while you can.
The
three of them are held up brief at the customer service counter because
apparently you have to pay for the privilege of entering a museum. The
girl at the register already knows why the priest is there and he has
the neon-colored paper bracelet around his wrist so Sera only has to pay
for herself and Grace. It really is like the most demented date ever.
Up they go.
"I did feel that," he says in response to Sera's observation.
And
then he picks up the pace. Drags the girls with him. Doesn't say
anything to the notion of an allosaurus coming to life because it's hard
to climb stairs and talk at the same time. By the time they get to the
third floor he's breathing heavy but it isn't anything to worry about.
He's just forty-six years old and doesn't exercise.
Riley
At
the top of the escalator, Riley stops, steps automatically to the side
as she looks down at her screen. It shows a map of the floor she's on,
with little blips for certain people (why yes, she did learn a thing or
two from Mssrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs, and then digitized
that idea), and the one that is the most interesting is one that is
quite large and in the block to the left of her. Riley looks up, looks
to the left, glances back over her shoulder again to see the strange
trio...taking the stairs? She frowns, her mouth quirking to the side.
Alright, girl, you're in Denver now, time to play nice. She only enjoys her solitary anonymity for a few moments longer.
Riley
steps back, leaning back into the shiny metal rail between the up and
down escalators, and she waits. Looking at her phone still, switching
over to another application.
And as she does she lets the shield
around her mind - around her resonance to be exact - disintegrate.
Revealing her to the others to be exactly what she is, which isn't so
different from what they are. Maybe Grace recognizes her now, or
recognizes the feel of her seeping through a wireless connection as they
worked together to crack a code or five.
"There's something over
there," she says, once they're within range, not looking up from her
screen. "Something old old old-" and there she breaks off because she
finally does look up, and over to a man in his mid-forties who looks
like he could be older, huffing and catching his breath. Pushing up
from the railing, Riley says, "Hey, is he okay?"
Meanwhile, that process is running in the background.
[but
before that she scried from a short distance, and took a little bit of
time to do it, so Corr 2, diff -1 (time) -1 (practiced), dropping a WP,
don't know how many suxx she needs so she'll be running this until she
hits it I guess?]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (7, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Serafine
"If
it's a person-eating dinosaur come back to life," Sera says, half-way
up the stairs, laughing just a bit. "I say we let security deal with
it." Laughing more than a bit. She's still holding hands with Pan, but
Grace escapes her reach. Slips away from Sera's reach and holds
herself apart and that's fine. They hoof it up the stairs, Pan going
faster than he should. Sera's humming a bit beneath her breath, leaning
into Pan and peering down the hallway in the direction of the Thing
Coming Into Being.
By the time Riley rocks up, Sera is distracted
by something else, the far-away look of someone... elsewhere. Riley's
presence does not register, not fully, not yet.
Sera has tipped her forehead into Pan's shoulder as he catches her breath and is feeling for the loose, abortive swirl of the Things superficial thoughts, the drift of them, the moving current -
[Mind 2: surface thoughts? Aka: feeling snacky dude? Difficulty: 5. -1 (focus) ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (5, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
requiem aeternam interrupta
[[A Thing]]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
requiem aeternam interrupta
[[Oh crap, sorry. ANother thing first, to see if that thing happens.]]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Grace
"Wait..."
Grace stops, tilts her head, looks over Riley (looks how she peers into
her cell phone, how she feels so suddenly like a silvery rush).
"Riley?"
She fishes into her laptop bag for her cell phone, and quickly rattles off a text to a certain number, just to be sure.
It's you?
The answering noise from Riley's cell phone is enough to answer that question.
"It's okay guys, I know her. She's one of us."
So now they've got two Virtual Adepts staring into their phones while a potential resurrected, reborn something awaits on the third floor of a nature museum. Sounds about right.
Serafine
"Fuck."
Sera curses quietly beneath her breath; perhaps just audible enough for
Pan to hear her, close as they are. "I was trying to see how well
disposed it was to us. Right? Like maybe it was just hungry or whatever and the order of the day was to fucking run.
"Whatever
is in there is brilliant; like, just - this sense of vast awareness,
and it knows we're here. It knows I was looking; it pushed me away
before I could sense anything more than a feather and a heart. "
Riley
Riley
is looking at Pan when Grace steps around him and spies her. The
Initiate offers the Apprentice a flash of a grin and a, "Heya,
sweetheart," and then one of them is digging around for a phone while
the other is glancing down to there's again. The process needs another
minute to go through, the image on her screen - she has a smartphone
with a nice wide, flat surface, a surface that is currently black with
green digits (letters, numbers, symbols) blinking in and out of sight,
slowly slowly slowly creating what looks like an ASCII image. It's
almost there, almost shows the glass cases with their ancient unearthed
mummies on display, and maybe whatever presence is inside there.
"I'm
looking inside now," a glance up and around, the museum is quiet but
hardly empty. She steps closer so that she's folded into the group now,
part of them and yet a little apart. There is a stud - tiny and
silvery, winking when it catches the light - in her left nostril. Her
hair is down but pushed back enough to expose her left ear, which bears
silver studs lining the organ from lobe all around the cartilage.
"Just...about...got it..."
[extending c'mon girl!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 7) ( success x 1 )
requiem aeternam interrupta
[[The other thing again]]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
requiem aeternam interrupta
The
four of them converge, and Riley makes a little bit of introduction by
way of pointing out that she knows some of what they know. Also,
checking to see if Pan is okay. But she's keeping an eye out to try and
see remotely into the other room, while Sera is trying to tickle at the
surface thoughts of whatever's inside. That provokes its own reaction.
But
we'll get there. First, introductions. Riley gets pointed out by
Grace, who gets a feel for the other Virtual Adept's aura and then
confirms it with a quick text. Mages, meet Mages. And Sera gives them a
quick heads up to the fact that whatever it is was able to push out her
attempts to take a look at what was floating on the surface of its
mind. They're working together for the moment, and Riley manages to get
her screen to pop up a look at the inside of the Egyptian exhibit.
It's like having a spy camera in the room, only the spy camera is
positioned in the best possible vantage point in order to see the entire
room. What Riley sees on that smartphone screen gives her a moment's
warning before the rest are about to see it.
There are several
exhibits in this Egyptology room. The source of the overall room (which
is not far from the stairs the trio of mages came up from) comes from
two women, found wrapped in linen in painted coffins over 3,000 years
ago. With them came several of these people, as scientists worked with
the doctors at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center to
examine them via X-Rays, CT scans and the like. These two coffins have
been within the room; one open, one closed. The one that has been left
closed did so because it frankly wasn't quite as impressive of a
specimen for display. Fascinating from a medical and anthropological
standpoint, sure. But its sister sarcophogus had a more visually
dynamic creature.
What Riley sees is that both coffins are open. One of them is empty, and someone is making their way out of the room.
The
Virtual Adept doesn't have a lot of time to warn them, maybe just
enough to get a word out before the person comes into view. She
(because it is a she) isn't wrapped up in bandages and sporting
the kind of ancient weathering that Jack Pierce so famously emulated on
Boris Karloff in 1932. It isn't even like the CGI decay on Arnold
Vosloo as he battled Rachel Weisz and Brenden Fraser. The woman's skin,
in fact, is clear and smooth, without injury or weathering. It's
darkened, the color that one would imagine the people of Egypt to be,
and she is short, around five and a half feet. They can certainly see
that there is nothing approaching any level of injury on her,
because...well, she is frankly not dressed. Any bandages or the like
were probably removed from her or dissolved years ago from study and
weather. She doesn't seem to be ashamed of it though (and thank the
gods that no one is around to see them talking to the nude Middle
Eastern woman because wouldn't THAT be awkward); she is more intrigued by the four of them.
And when she opens her mouth to speak...well, oddly enough she speaks in clear, albeit accented, English.
"You're wizards. Are you waiting for me?" She seems unsure what to make of it if they are.
Riley
Riley
does try to warn them, that what she sees is a room with a missing body
that's supposed to be on display - weird, so weird putting the dead on
display. Well, the room isn't missing a body, it's-
"Someone's-"
And then there she is, the strange Middle Eastern woman completely naked and in public.
Riley's brows lift and her dark eyes widen. "What the fuck," she says, voice quiet with surprise.
Squeezing
her eyes shut, she shakes her head. "Do you think," but no, don't even
finish that question, Riley. You're a smart woman. That was a feeling
of something being reborn and revitalized. The mind is vast and
ancient. And a naked woman appears from a room where a sarcophogus had
been recovered and is currently empty.
Do they think she came out of that sarcophogus? Yes.
"She's
supposed to be in there," she says, voice low, filling the others in
quickly. "Preeeeeetty sure she's one of the mummies retrieved and
brought here for study and display."
This woman says that they are
wizards and asks if they were waiting for her. Well, what did Winston
Zeddemore teach her all those years ago?
"Maybe?" It's not an enthusiastic YES but then the woman didn't ask if they were gods, did she?
Grace
"Okay,
well, at least you're not an allosaurus," Grace says, having poked her
head up from her cell phone in time to see the arrival of a naked woman.
Riley fills them in, and to Grace's credit, it doesn't much phase her. A
mummy. Okay. Shrug.
"We were, sort of, waiting for you. But we didn't know what you'd be," she adds. "Hi."
Yeah.
Hi, to the nude Middle Eastern woman who just walked up at the museum.
Grace honestly doesn't care about that part. Just relieved she's not
covered in scales and with five pointy ends.
"Who are you?"
Serafine
Sera
does not continue hanging on to Pan. Honestly she is now
half-expecting an intelligent, malevolent, magickal man-eating dragon or
whatever sort of skeleton it is they normally keep on display in
these parts (this sort of museum is not one of Sera's regular haunts
under any circumstances, whatsoever, so the difference between dinosaurs
and dragons is will night indistinguishable to her and anyway she
probably believes more in dragons than in dinosaurs), something humid
and sloughing with compound eyes whirring with a vasty and primordial
intelligence she can hardly comprehend and beneath that, beneath that,
beneath that an awareness that feels equal parts bright and dark,
inhuman and alien and hungry.
Wouldn't you be hungry if you had just dragged yourself back into existance?
Sera fucking would be.
Of
course, Sera always Wants, remember how she Wanted after a thirty-day
fast from sex and drugs and even the simple pleasures of ice cream and
toast, imagine how much she would Want after 3000 years as a corpse, or
whatever, dragged around the world chained in the box in which she had
been bound.
And Sera, Sera Sera Sera, Sera steps out from Pan's side advances on the woman -
"Jesus Christ, did you just will yourself into existance? Just drag yourself back here again?"
- toward her really, already taking off her own leather jacket to hand over to the stranger.
"I mean, I didn't know
I was waiting for you. I just went for brunch and a Bloody Mary or
seventeen and saw Eric while I was walking and he was headed to work and
we started chatting about this show that his ex was putting on at
Gallery Twenty-Seven and before I knew it we were here and I was having a
cigarette and
"bam. Fuck. So no, technically no, it's a goddamned coincidence but Jesus fuck.
"I'm Sera. We should probably get you outta here. You can put on my coat.
"Hawksley's gonna be so fucking jealous."
Fr. Echeverria
Pan
would have ignored Riley's comment about whether he was alright anyway.
They have bigger things to worry about than some middle-aged guy
getting winded walking up two flights of stairs. It's just that none of
them know what it is until moments before it steps out to great them.
Only Riley sees what's inside the room and before she can tell them what it is -
The
priest slackens his hand just before the punker decides she wants her
freedom back. Doesn't come forward and take control of the situation.
That's not how he tends to operate. So long as it seems as though the
younger women aren't making anything worse he's fine with just standing
back by where Riley is and observing.
Oh Sera. Just what a visitor
from three thousand years ago needs to hear soon as she wakes up. Fuck
fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck fuck fuck.
requiem aeternam interrupta
They
all have their reactions to this woman standing in front of them, and
they're understandable. Riley and Pan, they're taking in the situation
in a measured way. The Virtual Adept says Maybe and the priest
lets the others do the talking. Meanwhile, Grace and Sera are more
direct, more forthcoming. And this all makes perfect sense. Riley is
someone who has hid her Resonance to date, so of course she would be
more likely not to reveal information right away, to wait and see. And wait and see is the good Father's jam.
Sera,
though, she's ecstatic and she offers a lot of words in response. The
woman smiles oddly, not quite sure exactly what the Ecstatic is
saying--she understands the words, but not the context--but she also
seems okay with being confused. It's almost as if she's used to it.
She takes the offered coat, looks it over and then slips it on. She
still isn't exactly covered, of course. There's a whole--well, let's
say she's a walking below-the-waist indecency charge waiting to happen.
But it's something, at least, and she rolls her shoulders, looks at the
jacket to see how it fits.
"Thank you," she says to Serafine,
gratefully, before she looks at Grace. "I am Halima Rahal. This..."
She frowns a moment, like she isn't sure quite how to explain it. "You
are not Children of Osiris then. But something like them, perhaps?
Ahl-i-Batin? Taftani?"
Her knowledge of Western Traditions seems to be off the mark. And finally, she asks,
"Where am I? This does not feel like anywhere I have been."
Riley
[Internet, tell me things!: int+comp (data retrieval), diff 8 -1 (ability apt)]
Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (2, 4, 4, 6, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
Serafine
"I'm Sera, you're in Denver, and I figure we should get outta here."
Sera
is blissful, though she's not wholly certain whether all of this is
happening at the moment, or whether she is hallucinating. Either way,
she embraces the moment. With that last bit Sera's turning to the
others in a sort of inquiry and reaching to peel her t-shirt up and
off. Beneath it she is still slightly-more-decent than Halima Rahal is
now: she's now wearing her usual costume of cut-off denims and a bra.
"Here,"
handing off the tee to the - you know - newly Awoken whatever-she-is -
and making a gesture with her hands. "Wrap this around your waist.
It'll at least cover your ass. Hey, did any of you guys drive?"
A
glance at Riley with her phone. "Is there a back door we can get
out?" Back to Halima Rahal, then. This quick slicing smile. "We
should probably get outta here. Some asshole's bound to wonder why
you're up and out of your coffin."
Grace
"No, we
are not any of those. The Ahl-i-Batin are gone," Grace tells her, and
where Grace picked that little bit up? She's not telling. The
Ahl-i-Batin have been gone for a long time, which means...
"This may be a shock, but the better question might be 'when am I?' You're in a museum. A place for antiquities."
Which means... you were an antiquity, oh naked woman.
With
that, Grace turns to her phone again. and why? Well, to pull up Google
Maps, and ask plaintively for it to give her a map of this place. Is there a back door that they could run to?
[Corr 1: Whereami? Spending WP because 1 Arete is asking for botch.]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (3) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
Riley
The
eldest among them are hanging back, one waiting to see how this shakes
out, the other shutting down a program and opening up a simple browser.
Riley is looking up the name, Halima Rahal, one ear pricking at
Children of Osiris (Oh really?), Ahl-i-Batin (Jesus that's old),
Taftâni - Riley lets out a surprised laugh. If any of them is an agent
of chaos and potentially vulgar magic, well, maybe it'd be her.
Then
she glances up, glances down no wait looks up because the woman with
the half-shaved head and the thick messy braid of blonde hair is
undressing. "Uh, you know there's a gift shop downstairs, right? I'm
pretty sure they'll have shorts or a towel or something." Because the
last thing they need is not one, but two people wandering around getting them noticed by the cops.
But Sera is free to do whatever because Riley's screen is white with search engine screens and ohhhhhhh.
Those expressive brows lift upward again, and then crash down in a frown.
"Hey,"
she says, sidling closer to Mr. Tall Dark and Too Fond of Johnny Cash.
Her voice is low and she's holding her phone over so he can take a look
at what she's found. Apparently Halima Rahal hasn't been dead a
thousand years. She's only been missing for about sixty. She's leaning
in to Pan, moving so that her left side is facing him if she has to,
because he's the closest, Sera's over there, and Grace she knows is
still pretty low level. Keeping her voice down to just the pair of
them, Riley asks, "You wouldn't happen to know how to look for curses or
bad Effects, would you?"
Oh, someone's asking if she knows a way
out. Grace is on it, but Riley looks over her shoulder and says, "A
back door's going to have an alarm, but I'll see what I can do." But
before that, she looks back at Pan.
requiem aeternam interrupta
There
is an easy back door exit that they can get to, though they'll have to
get down to the second floor to do so. There's no exit out this high.
Fr. Echeverria
Pan
does reach out and tilt the phone away from Riley so that he can read
what's on it. That appears to change his opinion as to whether the women
can handle sorting out what to do with her. Maybe they can look back
and answer the question that Riley is asking him. But Grace is on her
phone and Sera is trying to cover the nude woman's ass.
He's
wearing black slacks and a button-down short-sleeved shirt tucked in and
belted. If he were inside the church right now he'd have a collar on.
An alcohol-abusing no-account gringo punk who didn't have a career
during the time when most of these women were young enough to begin
developing an interest in music isn't what he aspires to when he gets
dressed in the morning.
Concern over crowding and overwhelming the
woman gone now he hands the phone back to Riley and says "Thank you" in
a voice she's hearing for the first time. It's husky and accented and
that's all he says to her before he walks over to the Egyptian woman.
"Sera,"
he says as he crosses the floor, pulls out his keys, "the truck's
parked outside. Pull it around back. There's a bag in the backseat, it's
got a change of clothes in it, she can change when we're downstairs."
Just ignore Manuel.
As for their guest:
"Miss
Rahal, hi, I'm sorry. What everyone's saying is you're a long way from
home and we're gonna try and help you." He doesn't put his hand on her
shoulder but he looks as if he would if she were clothed. His eyes don't
drop below her chin. He's had lots of practice dealing with naked women
recently. "What's the last thing you remember?"
[entropy 1: are
you cursed or something? +3 diff because he's not using his entropy
focus FUCKING SMOKE ALARMS, -1 diff because quintessence, does
illuminating count here for appropriate resonance? -1 diff for that
too.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )
requiem aeternam interrupta
Halima
nods when Sera introduces her, says that she's in Denver. She actually
seems to know the name of the city, for what that's worth; she smiles
appreciatively when the T-Shirt is offered and takes it to cover her
lower extremities. "Thank you. I don't wish to draw any undue
attention to myself." The sentence comes with a wry smile when Sera
suggests that someone might wonder why she's up and walking around. "I
would imagine that would raise a lot of questions. I am sure that it
already will."
She nods to Grace, not surprised that she's in a
museum. The idea that the Batini are gone does strike her, though. The
delicate (newly-regrown) eyebrows knit together, and for a
moment she seems hesitant, unsure how to take that. But there isn't a
lot of time to focus on that because in the meantime Riley has shown Pan
some relevant information and she's planning to hack their way out the
back door and Pan is stepping forward to elucidate her. She listens to
him as she finishes covering up all the parts of her that would cause
her to be thrown in jail.
"Yes, I gathered as much," she answers
to him. "As to what I remember..." She pauses, as if she isn't sure
how to answer that. "In this world? It was 1953. I was in Cairo.
That is...a difficult question to answer, I am afraid. My memories are
not entirely linear. I have been wandering the realm of Duat--the
underworld--for however long it has been."
Grace
The
familiar Google Maps interface goes up on her phone, but apparently
Grace is able to zoom far further than most. Her fingers zoom in and in
and in and in, and suddenly instead of streets and maybe the shadow of
the outline of the museum on her screen, there's walls and exits marked,
as well as a scrollable 3D interface for the floors. Soon enough, she
finds what she's looking for.
"Second floor. There's an exit
toward the back of the second floor," Grace says, showing Riley while
she's at it. They'll need to know where to go.
Then, Riley goes on
about shorts or a towel, and Grace shrugs and unzips her turtleneck.
She's got a t-shirt underneath, so she's not going to scandalize anyone,
going around without clothes.
And that T-shirt? It is a darker
gray than her jacket, and has a design on the front like
this: http://img1.etsystatic.com/029/0/6153077/il_570xN.565328593_23or.jpg
"As
long as we're stripping to take care of Halima, one of you can take my
jacket so we don't get arrested. I want it back though. I don't know
that we have time to go down to the gift shop."
Ever practical, Grace.
Serafine
Sera
accepts the keys easily, flashing Halima a quick half-smile, turning to
accept the keys from the priest's hands. Rising to the tip-toes of her
Doc's to brush a kiss across the edge of his cheek with a tender,
rather intimate murmur of assent as she does so. Slides the ring around
her index finger and breathes in the sense of all that light, then
exhales with a sigh.
"I'll bring the truck around."
PAN IS LETTING HER DRIVE SOMEWHERE. PAN IS LETTING HER DRIVE SOMEWHERE.
Probably because it is midday and she doesn't seem especially altered but still,
PAN IS LETTING HER DRIVE SOMEWHERE,
which
stops her, not precisely then, when Grace is offering Sera a jacket so
that she will not get arrested for wandering around the museum in a bra
(hint: Sera always wanders around in a bra, and never gets arrested) and
Sera takes the jacket.
It is a boring jacket.
Sera therefore leaves it unzipped.
Anyway, Sera takes the jacket and the keys and gives Halima et al a Ta
and turns back to the stairs and starts down them and only remembers
the last time she got to drive Pan's truck when she's half-way down the
stairs, and that knowledge, that memory is sharp in the back of her
throat by the time she gets to the first floor and starts out toward the
parking lot, intending to bring the truck around.
She doesn't
know about the kid won't know until she gets there but what the hell.
Sera's a charming creature. She speaks Spanish. She'll find a way.
Riley
Grace
is looking for a backdoor, Sera and Pan are talking to Halima, and
Riley? Well first she is impatiently waving away Grace's phone. "We
should scatter. Someone take Halima out the back, anyone not necessary
to that can go out the front. I'll take down the security for a few
minutes, long enough for you all to get out. I'll contact you after."
She flashes Grace a quick grin that is maybe meant to be sort of
reassuring? It's a brilliant sort of smile that Riley's got, a charm
that pulls people to her, drawing them in like a magnet. It is part
reassuring but mostly it's excited. This thing she's about to do?
Break into the security system and take it down for even a little bit?
This is the sort of thing that she lives to do.
Then the lanky
woman is heading to the side, shifting her laptop bag so that when she
finds a bench and settles into it the bag is resting in her lap. Then
out comes her laptop, simple on the outside but oh so shiny on its
inside. A custom build, because that's how Riley rolls. Nondescript
outside, amazingness within.
She unfolds the device and wakes it up, and gets to work.
[Corr 2: O, Security Systems, Open Your Gateways To Me (getting into the security system to SHUT IT DOWN)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Grace
Okay,
fine Riley, don't figure out which door you need to take down, just
wave Grace away like a gnat. Suppose she'll just take them all
down, and... whatever. The disappointment doesn't exactly show on her
face, but yeah -- it's not like the one thing that Grace can do in this
situation just got waved away by someone she was trying to be cool for or anything.
And then, Grace gets grinned at, because Riley is about to do something legitimately cool, and yeah, that doesn't help.
Her tradition-mate makes some sense with the scattering idea, so she goes to Pan and shows him
the map instead. Surely his techno-ignorance doesn't extend itself to
computerized maps, right? Everyone knows how to read a map.
"So
yeah, just go out this way... I'm going to go try to help Sera find the
truck," she says, and ambles on downstairs. Really, the strongest among
them should go with Halima in case there's trouble, she reasons.
Fr. Echeverria
The priest has an awful lot of questions.
Knowing
that she disappeared in 1953 and hearing her say that that is the last
thing she remembers. That she's been wandering the underworld.
Witnessing her calm as she emerges nude from a sarcophagus. Hearing the
names of long-dead traditions. This is something they're going to have
to discuss at greater length later.
Not right now. Not in a museum
during business hours when he's got a teenager in the truck and
security could respond to the downed door locks any moment.
Pan
doesn't know how any of that works. He can sense Riley Working behind
him but he doesn't attend to it. He turns away from Rahal to glance at
the phone screen Grace tilts towards him. He doesn't quite know what
he's looking at but he frowns the way he frowns when he's reading
anyway.
"Okay," he says. "We'll be right down."
That settles
that. The door Grace pointed out is very close. He puts a hand on her
elbow without glancing down. No point risking seeing something he
doesn't need to see.
"Vamos. Come on."
requiem aeternam interrupta
Sera
may wander around in just a bra and not get arrested, but she's
certainly not getting particularly pleased looks from security people
that she passes when she makes her way down to the first floor. They
can't call the police because she's not actively indecent but it's very,
very likely that she would be asked to leave and not come back (they have children
here, the manager would say) if she wasn't already on her way out the
door, heading off to the car in order to deal with poor sixteen year-old
Manny who has no idea what this barely-dressed white chick climbing
into Pan's car is doing. But she has the keys, and it probably won't be
difficult for her to convince the kid that it's all fine, she's a
friend of Pan's or however she approaches it. The car heads around
toward the back.
Grace points out the door, and it's a piece of
cake for Riley to hack her way through the alarm system, aided by a bit
of magic. The social dynamics between the group is noticed by Halima,
but she doesn't say anything because she knows she has a lot to learn
still about all of them before she can make a complete picture.
And
then, Pan's hand is at her elbow and with a slight nod of her head,
she's letting him guide her along. This is their dance right now, and
she's willing to let them lead. The path to the back door is
untroubled; they pass by a couple security guys walking along, but
outside of Halima getting the same kinds of looks Sera received, no one
questions them.
The back door opens with ease, and they're heading
out into the chill air. Halima squints at the bright light, is
surprised by the cold. She knew of Denver. She didn't know it.
Riley
[int+comp]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
requiem aeternam interrupta
[[Fade/Pause/Whichever]]
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