Halima Rahal

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]]

Echoes of Hydra's Claws

Kalen Holliday

[Are you still crazily sleep deprived, Kalen?]

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

Grace Evans

[Nightmares!]

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

Grace Evans

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

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

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

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

Patience Mason

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

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

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

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

Pan Echeverri­a

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

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

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

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

Kalen Holliday

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Brandt

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

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

Grace Evans

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

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

Patience Mason

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

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

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

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

Pan Echeverri­a

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

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

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

Kalen Holliday

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

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

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

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

Alexander Brandt

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

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

Grace Evans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patience Mason

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

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

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

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

[Arete 2 diff 4 WP]

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

Pan Echeverri­a

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

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

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

Arrogant bastard.

Kalen Holliday

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

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

Alexander Brandt

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

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

Grace Evans

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

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

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

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

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

Patience Mason

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

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

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

[Cha+Leadership WP]

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

Pan Echeverria

"Alright."

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

Serafi­ne

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

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

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

Serafi­ne

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

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

Kalen Holliday

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

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

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

Grace Evans

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Brandt

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

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

Patience Mason

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

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

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

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

[Cha+Lead]

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

Pan Echeverri­a

So much for that idea.

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

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

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

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

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

Serafine

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

"What's going on?"

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

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

Kalen Holliday

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

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

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

Alexander Brandt

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

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

Grace Evans

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

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

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

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

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

Patience Mason

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

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

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

Serafi­ne

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

Yes, powerful. 

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

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

Pan Echeverria

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

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

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

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

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

Kalen Holliday

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

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

Alexander Brandt

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

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

Grace Evans

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

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

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

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

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

Grace Evans

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

Serafi­ne

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

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

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

Patience Mason

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

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

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

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

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

Serafi­ne

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

Kalen Holliday

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

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

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

Pan Echeverri­a

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

Alexander Brandt

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

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

Grace Evans

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

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

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

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

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

Kalen Holliday

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

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

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

Alexander Brandt

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

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

Grace Evans

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

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

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

Kalen Holliday

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

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

Grace Evans

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

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

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

Kalen Holliday

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