So, This One Time, I Hit Pan in the Face with my Cell...

Kalen Holliday
[Speaking of a need for grief counseling...nightmares!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 4, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Shoshannah Mitchell
[nightmares]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (3, 4, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Kalen Holliday
Now that he's convinced Grace to spend more time at the chantry and would like her to leave it as little as possible, Kalen is moving his part of their project to the office at the chantry.  Which means that he is currently trying to figure out some way to organize a collection of maps and notes and and printouts from Grace's program and newspaper clippings and books into some semblance of order.  He has, at least, brought his laptop, so he can look at the model Grace made for him.
At the moment, he is sprawled sideways on the couch so that he's leaned back on one arm of it, a cup of coffee in one hand, surveying the maps and stacks of paper in an attempt to figure out where to go next with them.

Shoshannah Mitchell
Shoshannah's been back in her pseudo-home for a couple weeks, now, and so the place feels of her again - of her anger and defense, of her presence that draws so much attention whether she wants it or not.  In however long it is that Kalen and Grace have been spending more time at the Chantry, neither of them has seen much of the Dreamspeaker.  Their paths simply haven't crossed, and given the size of both house and grounds, that's probably not a thing to raise any eyebrows.
If, of course, anyone cared to put forth the effort to forge such an expression.
Now, though, she's standing in the doorway of the office and clearing her throat.  "Are you using the desktop?"  The computer, of course.  She's got a book in hand, apparently in Russian, with sticky-note tabs hanging out of every page.

Kalen Holliday
"No.  Just move anything out of your way.  There isn't much on the table over there, but if you need more space, the books will do just as well on the floor as on the table."  It's spoken with the kind of calm that speaks of either trust or intense preoccupation with Kalen.  Judging from the way he is still looking at the map like maybe it will suddenly surrender all its secrets, it's likely that second one.

Shoshannah Mitchell
So Shoshannah goes in, giving Kalen plenty of space and not disturbing his work (for all that she's remarkably light in the backing down department, she's well endowed in the 'don't look at me don't touch me leave me alone' one) and moves the things on the desk just enough to make room for her book and start typing.  Kalen knows about her translation project, and so there's not much to be said about it, really.  And so it's quiet for several long minutes, but for the rustling of pages and tapping of keys.
Maybe it's best that way, really.  Neither of them hurts the other when they keep their mouths shut.
"Having any luck finding things?"  This is asked without bothering to look towards the Hermetic, or stop typing.

Pan Echeverri­a
Someone knocks on the door.
This someone does not wait for the people inside the Chantry to come and open it for him. But this someone, his resonance powerful-bright even on the other side of it, does knock before he comes in.
Shoshannah has about three seconds to pull herself together before the door reveals the someone to be Pan.

Kalen Holliday
[Awareness?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 10) ( success x 1 )

Shoshannah Mitchell
[Yeah, probably should have rolled that earlier,  Aware!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 4 )

Kalen Holliday
"We found many things.  Now we need to figure out which of those things is relevant.  There are a number of dates that could figure into significance various calendar systems, but generally people only find perhaps two to have any real importance in their own scheduling, so it is doubtful that the patterns we're finding correlate to all of them in any fashion that indicates something meaningful.
"Grace made a lovely map that rotates and tracks the time progression of events that we thing may be connected.  It seems...slightly more elegant than all this.  But I have no idea how to make something like that work for me."  He doesn't look away from the map, and his tone stays in distracted business mode, but at least distracted business mode isn't aggressive or hostile.
Kalen does look away from his map at the knock, in time to see Pan at the doorway.  He's already in a place with enough distance that the only change in his expression is a slight shift from thoughtful to wary.

Shoshannah Mitchell
It's funny, how Shoshannah stills when someone comes in and she feels that resonance - it feels like someone else she met recently, but so much more so.  So much more experienced, so much older, so much more.  Fingers stop tapping, eyes stop scanning the page, and she's still slow motion turning towards the door when Padre appears looking worse for the wear but better than the last time she saw him.
Her face is, of course, unreadable as she hunts for what to say, what to do.
Finally, she says, ".....are you really here?"  No, that's not bothering with an introduction - to be honest, she doesn't remember if one's necessary or not.  But then, for Kalen, "You see him too, right?"  Because sometimes, Shoshannah sees things other people don't.

Pan Echeverri­a
Valid question coming from a girl whose life has been plagued by the dead.
At the end of the summer the Chorister who has one long name that he gives to people when he first meets them and answers to 'Pan' every time thereafter stood six-foot-two and weighed close to 250 pounds if he didn't actually weigh so much. It wasn't fat. Between his height and the solidness of his build and age he stopped being a beanpole sometime around Shoshannah's age.
Then he put himself between two Cultists in a park and reanimated dead dogs tore him up and judgment came for him in the form of a blood vessel burst in his brain. He spent several weeks in the hospital and has been out in the middle of nowhere with a Verbena convalescing since then.
Kalen's first impression of the man goes something like this then: six-foot-two, less than two hundred pounds, somewhere in his forties, supporting his weight with an unobtrusive cane in a hand that bears no jewelry but for a watch around its wrist. His hair is off his collar but still in need of a trim and he's wearing a five o'clock shadow. He wears cowboy boots and black jeans and a black shirt underneath a black peacoat. He is unaccompanied but between his stature and his resonance one gets the idea that he doesn't need accompaniment.
With all the weight he's lost his eyes are more prominent than they were before. They're green. They look around the inside of the Chantry like he's taking silent inventory of where everything is and then he sees Shoshannah and a slow but honest smile comes across his face. When he speaks it is with a diluted Puerto Rican accent.
"I'd better be," he says. He starts forward and it's obvious he's using the cane more to keep his balance than because he's infirm. "C'mere, lemme look at you."

Kalen Holliday
"Yes," Kalen says quietly to Shoshannah.
For half a minute he watches the two of them, curious, but then he returns his attention to the map and leaves them their reunion in his presence but unstudied.  He isn't sure who this is, but it is evident enough to him that there is no immediate threat and that Shoshannah is more interested in reunions than introductions.  He can wait.

Shoshannah Mitchell
How she feels about this is unclear not because she's hiding it well (though she's obviously trying to do so) but because emotions are roiling - pleasure at seeing him here, relatively well, anger at being left (again), and so much more.  And she looks like she hasn't been sleeping in ages, at least not well, but otherwise about the same as he left her - all long limbs and piercing blue eyes and sullen attitude.  So she stands, steps away from the computer, and looks at least as inclined to throw a punch as she is to do what she actually ends up doing.
Which is launch herself at the man who looks too infirm to catch her, and may well be, wrapping her arms around him tight.  It's worth noting, perhaps, that the only other person Kalen has witnessed her being anywhere near this affectionate with is Sid, and that's not entirely the same.
There aren't any words - just that, an embrace and that reaction so visceral and intense that both men may well feel it with her - at least at first.  But then, there's more talking than most local mages have heard from her in one go.
"Didn't that Verbena feed you while you were there, Padre?  You'll eat whatever I make, right?  You need some fattening up, you'll heal the rest of the way faster.  Have you been able to keep up on what's going on, or . . . you had more important things to do.  Are you okay?  Are you staying?"

Pan Echeverri­a
Though he grimaces at the force with which Shoshannah launches herself at him Pan doesn't lose his balance or make any noise beyond a hard exhale. He makes the attack into an embrace by putting his free right arm around her shoulders. His eyes are not suspicious as they watch the young man sat on the couch but they also don't stay on him very long. He hugs Shoshannah as strong as he can and then holds her back at arm's length to do as he asked of her.
He looks her over like he's expecting her to look as poor as Sera looked when last he saw her. And then she asks question after question and he looks amused but he does not laugh.
"Slow down," he says. Indicates Kalen with a tilt of his chin. "Introduce your friend and then you can fill me in."

Kalen Holliday
"Kalen Elliott Dane Michael Holliday, bani Flambeau."  Kalen offers from the couch, before Shoshannah has to try to remember all of his names.  There are no titles to accompany that name.  He has never been present long enough to acquire much in the way of titles.  There is one title he might have inherited, but he wants no part of it; not because he would refuse it but because if he were to claim it it would be an admission that there was occasion for that inheritance.
He rises stiffly, walks slowly and deliberately over to extend a hand to Pan with a limp pronounced enough even with his cane that it's evident he needs it for a lot more than balance.  It isn't until he's close that it's possible to tell his eyes are a pale green, like glacial ice.  Even up close their color is practically lost to the shadows under his eyes.  It might not be as apparent if everything else about him wasn't pale, his skin, his eyes, the spiky blonde hair that is so pale it is nearly white.

Shoshannah Mitchell
Friend.  Because Shoshannah knows what that word means, and she and Kalen act like they're that to each other, with the aggressive indifference (on her end) and the . . . whatever it is that Kalen's doing after having hung up on her earlier.  Not caring, sure, that fits as well as anything else.  "Kalen Holliday.  Hermetic.  He's trying to track down some things," she says, all dismissive tones even with the look she shoots his way that isn't that at all.  "Kalen, this is Pa . . . Pan.  Father Francisco Echeverria, Chorister."
Any more than that, they can work out themselves, particularly the part where she has to pretend to be social and polite and all those things she isn't really, when really she just wants to prickle and be defensive and is, in this moment, torn about whether she should pull Pan close and not let him go away from her ever again, or drive him away as quickly and efficiently as she tends to do with the Hermetic in their company.  And of course her introduction comes at roughly the same time as Kalen is offering his own, or very shortly before.  Kalen standing and talking on her own has her stepping away, letting that happen on its own without her interference.
Each of them can make his own judgments, after all.
"I'm going to make something.  You need to eat.  Any requests?"

Pan Echeverri­a
Before the Chorister can tell the Hermetic no no don't get up he does get up and he comes to the foyer where Pan was stood with Shoshannah. They shake hands. Pan absorbs the list of names reeled off but does not react to them.
To the matter of whether he has any requests for which food will appear from the kitchen Pan shakes his head.
"I trust your judgment, thank you, Shoshannah."
In the meantime Pan finds a place to light. He knows his way around or else he just isn't shy about making himself at home. He stays in the living room if only so they do not have to negotiate the short flight of stairs leading into the dining room.
"Mister Holliday," he says as they take their seats. "What is it you're tracking?"

Kalen Holliday
[Can you talk about this like you don't really care yet?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Kalen Holliday
Kalen resettles, in much the same position as before.  "An Umbrood by the name of Thakinyan that feeds on fear and madness and would like to come here and devour everything it can.  It appaers that it is currently possessing at least two people, though only one of those is confirmed.  It was kind enough to slip into the dreams of myself and another of the Magi here and delivered a warning that it will torture and then kill basically everyone we know that it knows if we don't cease our efforts to stop it.  I'm relatively certain that is its plan if we let it cross over and claim this place as well, so as threats go, that one isn't terribly effective.  I suppose it gets points for being being graphic and very creative, but that still doesn't bring it even to honorable mention in threats I've been given."  He gives Pan a look that is mostly distance and ice.
"What is it with the useless titles?  You can just call me Kalen."  For another few seconds he studies Pan, and then he smiles very faintly.  "It is my understanding that there are no few here who will be very glad to see you returned.  Welcome home."  There is no warmth to the tone, or even the smile, which makes it a rather strange welcome.

Shoshannah Mitchell
She looks at Padre consideringly, and nods before disappearing into the kitchen - there's some rattling around, but mostly she's heating up things she's already made.  No one who spends any significant amount of time around the Chantry has any excuse for going hungry, that's for sure - Shoshannah's not the best cook around, but she's pretty decent, and cooks like she's feeding an army.  This is why, of course, she and Kalen had that long ago conversation about feeding Denver's hungrier citizenry.  It's a few minutes that the men have, talking alone, before she returns with a bowl of chicken-lemon-rice soup and a plate of crusty bread and a side of hummous.  It's a good meal for someone who doesn't look so great and needs to gain some weight, as these things go.
There's no interruption, and now that the immediacy of Pan's reappearance has settled down she keeps that careful distance of hers, calculated to avoid any sort of caring.  The intimacy issues, they abound.

Pan Echeverri­a
So they sit. Pan rests the cane against the armchair he's chosen and knits his fingers together between his knees. He leans back in the chair rather than forward. It isn't a desire for physical distance that has his posture lapsing. Kalen gives his icy explanation of what's going on and the priest keeps his eyes on him and nods.
One time he'd told Shoshannah the story of where he ended up in his twenties. Kalen's demeanor doesn't faze him.
"Thank you."
This to either the appearance of the soup or the welcoming. His eyes lift from the papers atop the table to Shoshannah as she places the dishes down. Given that many of his meetings take place during meals he was at one point in his life adept at the art of listening while putting food in his stomach.
He doesn't mince words. They could sit here and talk titles and the gladness levels of the people who cared about him but the whole Umbrood thing is a bit distracting.
"You've only confirmed one possession?" he asks. That bread and hummus Shoshannah brought out isn't long for this word. "Who're the two people?"

Kalen Holliday
"One possession Shoshannah confirmed when she was scrying.  Joshua Keller.  The other was implied in the dream that Sid and I had.  It is possible that Lucia Montanari was just a convenient image to use, but I would assume she is possessed and it was through her that it invaded our dreams."  Still cold.  Clinical.  But there is a tightness around his mouth and between his eyes that says he's not interested in any more words than he needs to explain.
"We have some notes.  We can share them with you.  There was a film, which was, as best we can deternine meant to permanently trap the creature back in 1912 which was made by Umberto Montanari, bani Tytalus, who was eventually executed for consorting with the Technocracy.  The film recently resurfaced, in Keller's hands, and there was a second showing and a second bloodbath.  Shoshannah was there for that part, you may want her to explain it.
"And, after that, we can get to his very angry, presumably possessed granddaughter."  For the most part, he could be talking about the weather.

Shoshannah Mitchell
"It tries to possess you when you scry it," she says though of course doesn't say how nearly successful it was with her - but there's a reason, probably, the taste of her anger and defense are a little stronger than usual.  She's keeping herself warded in the ways she can.  She does add, however, "I've been having the worst dreams since I looked in on him.  You have no idea."
Which isn't strictly true, of course, other than in the way that it's difficult for anyone to understand another person's worst nightmare.
"Kalen thinks that destroying its - Thakinyan's - tether points will send it back to where it came from.  So finding them's a thing."

Pan Echeverri­a
Shoshannah finds herself in the crosshairs of Pan's attention when she speaks up. No change comes across his face. The sky outside was spotted with clouds and the sun is on its way to setting. Darkness suits his current condition. He would look beyond haggard in bright light. Now he just looks tired. Like he's recovering from a long bout of illness.
That doesn't mean he has anything in common with the women who were razed by the virus that struck last month. It's a parallel if nothing else.
The girl looks more angry and defensive than she normally does but does not feel as though she has been altered by the implied encounter.
"No," he says about her dreams, his tone empathetic without veering into condescension, "I don't suppose I do."
As for Thakinyan:
"I take it the film it came out of ain't a tether point."

Kalen Holliday
"More accurately, Alyssa believes that and I see no reason to doubt her," Kalen says in response to Shoshannah.
"It could be.  It likely is.  I don't know yet."  He leans back and relaxes a little.  "It's vanished again.  We know that it's got a base of operations, all circled off and Warded.  Grace and I are trying to see if we can use its prior patterns to establish any hunting pattern outside of that Circle so we can perhaps try to get to anything inside and destroy it without facing Thakinyan or so that we know when it is in its Circle and strike any tethers outside the Circle then.
"I've never met it directly, but after the dream I know what it feels like.  I could tell, perhaps, now if I were to encounter a tether.  But...I can't search them out from afar.  And searching from afar has proven a bit risky thus far."

Grace Evans
[Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

Grace Evans
[Perception+Awareness!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 8, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )

Shoshannah Mitchell
"It's . . . huge.  And very, very old.  I don't think there's an English word that encompasses it, really."  And Shoshannah, as multi-lingual as she is, may or may not be able to come up with a word in another language that does.  "It feels . . . dead, sort of?  But unnatural, not at all a part of this world or its processes."  Because it isn't, obviously, but description is a thing.  "I was thinking of seeing if I could find a tether my way."
Because of course Shoshannah goes it alone.  She keeps her distance and does what she says she'll do, but when it comes down to it?  It's a rare thing for her to ask for help, or invite anyone along for the ride.

Pan Echeverri­a
Letting the two of them bring him up to speed gives the priest time to pack away the food Shoshannah heated up for him. He made short work of the bread and was started in on the soup by the time they reached the matter of what the thing is and how much progress they've made in tracking it down.
He nods as Kalen states searching from afar is risky. Inadvertently slurps his soup when Shoshannah says she's thinking of finding a tether her way. But he doesn't drop his spoon. He sets it down on the plate where the bread once was and knits his fingers back together.
"I got a better idea. How about 'No'?"
That's not the end of his thought. He is thinking. But thinking and putting together sentences takes him longer than it used to. This feels like their last chance to argue their case before he tells them what he thinks ought to happen.

Grace Evans
Grace has been sleeping at the Chantry a lot lately. The Chantry's protections and her own feeble mental firewall make her feel just a bit safer, a bit more protected from the threat that so recently had Kalen and Sid both calling people at 3 AM asking if they were okay.
So, after school and work, instead of heading across the street to her apartment, she packs up the most important things in her world (her computer and phone) and heads off toward the mountains.
When she arrives, the world echoes back at her the reverberations of people she knows oh so well. And one of whom she doesn't. It's been months since she was last witness to the shining Pan of undimmed judgement. Well... He's back.
With that thought, the door shuffles open. She doesn't bother with knocking.
Tonight, she's wearing her usual jeans and sweater combo (because if it isn't a tee shirt, it's a warm sweater) in green this time. On top of this is a grey jacket, and on top of that, a laptop bag is slung across her body. Said body, by the way, is also thinner than the last time Pan saw her. And her face now carries more than its fair share of distant sadness. Dark circles rim her eyes, which she doesn't even bother covering up with makeup. Something is definitely off here.

Kalen Holliday
The set of Kalen's shoulders relaxes a little farther when Pan tells Shoshannah no.
Maybe he would have argued for something, but Grace arrives and his eyes light up and he smiles.  "Kit!"
That is all the greeting she gets, but he does pull his knees up, one leg being much more reluctant to obey that command then the other, to leave enough space on the couch he's claimed so that she can join him.  He does not ask her to explain anything or how she is or any of those things.  Enough is explained.  He knows how she is.

Shoshannah Mitchell
How about 'No'?  The look on Shoshannah's face, the set of her jaw and shoulders, everything about the change in her posture and expression calls out her rejection of this order.  "I can do things I think need to be done.  I'll take the suggestion under advisement, though."
So stubborn.  So independent and separate.
And then there's Grace and Kalen's reaction to her arrival; the former gets a hint of smile even as arms cross between Shoshannah and everyone else, even as her eyes lose most of their emotion and her expressive face stills.
"I'll take the expression under advisement.  Hello, Grace."

Pan Echeverri­a
"Grace. Hello."
He does not stand to greet her and he does not flinch at the wanness of her body. If he had not already seen Sera and heard a truncated version of the Hydra story he might have considered abandoning the current course to tend to her.
Might have. But Shoshannah had dug in her heels just before she came through the door. He had not reacted to that either. Not in an outward manner. Her resistance makes him draw a belated breath, deep and unrefreshed, and let it back out as if that took a good amount of energy.
With hands that are not as steady as they once were he consolidates the dishes on the coffee table and braces himself on the chair's arm so that he can stand. He picks up the dishes but leaves the cane leaning against the armchair. 'Shuffle' is a kind way of describing the speed at which he's comfortable moving.
"Shoshannah," he asks as he starts towards the kitchen, "forgive a silly question, but do you want to become the third possessed person?"

Grace Evans
"Hey, Kalen," she says, not nearly so excited-sounding, but still, as friendly as she can be right now. And then, a brief sad smile to Shoshannah. It's always good to see her well, even if she's acting strange. Acting strange is Grace's forte as well, especially lately. There's no telling what may be causing the loss of light in Shoshannah's eyes. Maybe it has something to do with being under constant threat of possession. Yes. Must be. "Hey, Shoshannah."
And then, to Pan, whose very presence makes her want to wilt, or hide from his light. "Hi... You're looking, uh. A bit better."
She crosses over to the couch, and settles down in the space that was so obviously made for her. Without context for the question that Pan asks Shoshannah, she just looks over at the Chorister and raises a brow. The expression asks a single word. 'What?'

Kalen Holliday
Pan has taken on wrangling Shoshannah, and Kalen wants no part of that right now.  And is shuffling around, shuffling takes a minute.  Kalen knows all about moving at a snail's pace.
Grace has taken up telepathy, or at least attempted telepathy with Pan.  That's fine too.  She came over and sat on his couch, so she is doing all the things he wants already.  She can join Shoshannah in paying attention to Pan.
Everyone more focused on Pan and Pan more focused on Shoshannah and dishes suits him fine too.  He lets his eyes half close, listening to them more than watching.

Shoshannah Mitchell
Shoshannah doesn't let Pan get far, shuffling, at least not with the dishes - she reaches for them, to take care of them at least, even if she's only minimally capable of taking care of anything else.  The Chorister asks if she wants to become the third possessed person, and she snorts; it's a dark, wry, bitter sound, that, so angry with herself and the world and everything in it.
"It tried once, but didn't take.  Why are you sure I wouldn't be able to handle it again?"

Pan Echeverri­a
Shoshannah springs up to take the dirty dishes from the priest's hands. He does not fight her for them. Even if he could he would not have fought her for them. The young woman snorts at his question and he stands not entirely steady on his feet but awaiting her response all the same.
He's looking a bit better. Thinner but not as if he is in danger of backsliding into a hospital bed or his grave.
Yet he admits the weakness of his flesh in putting a hand out to steady himself on the armchair. Over the back of the armchair he has slung a coat. He stands now in a short-sleeved black button-down as if he'd prepared to go to work when he dressed himself this morning. No white around his collar but he'd be just as much a minister wearing a potato sack as he would be in his vestments.
"I'm not sure," he says. "I'm concerned. I'm concerned because you describe it as huge, and very very old, and if it's already met you once it knows you better than you know it. Demons like that--" Whatever, man. Let him use whatever word he wants to use. "--once they're in, they can sweep you free of everything clean and make room for their friends. Throw a big old party. Just because it didn't take the first time don't mean you're in the clear, huh? Let someone it don't know yet try and find it."

Grace Evans
"Shoshannah. I know you don't like it when people tell you no. Just..." she sighs. "I feel terrible already. You know why? 'Cause it was my idea. I put the notion in your head. When I found out what happened to you, I almost couldn't deal. If something worse happens to you..." she trails off. Not really ready to face something worse happening to Shoshannah.
Pan doesn't help much, with his description of what may happen to her if Shoshannah tries looking again. Grace just doesn't have much to give to the girl but her own guilt, her own fear.
She leans her head in her hand, like this is just too heavy. "I feel partly responsible for your bad dreams. And considering how awful mine are lately, I know how horrible that is as well."

Kalen Holliday
Grace gets a little nudge with his foot, but his expression (at least for her) is all sympathy.
His expression goes more distant when he turns from Grace to Shoshannah, but his tone at least is gentle.  "It isn't even that you shouldn't try it.  You should not try it alone.  And, ideally, you should not try it until we are ready to spring.  If it knows what we are looking for, it may move its tethers, and we will risk running headlong into a trap for nothing.  No one is telling you you cannot do this.  We are telling you to do it with assistance at the opportune moment, so that we can improve the odds that everyone comes home and we send that thing away from this world again."

Shoshannah Mitchell
Don't think that Shoshannah didn't notice the difference, Kalen, or that it didn't steel her spine after Padre and Grace both worked to soften it.  Don't think that she doesn't (think she) know(s) what's going on there, or that she's as fully adjusted to it as she pretends to be after that initial glance, taking in what Grace said, and moving from her to you.  Just don't.
The girl (with the lion's tail) looks between the three older mages, all electric, flaming temper and a willful streak that isn't as strong as many but is still a thing to be seen, and would be a flaying thing if she could decide where to direct it, where to vent her irritation at this whole thing.  But then she looks at Padre again, not at his best perhaps but finally here and talking to her even if it is to tell her not to take the course of action she thinks most prudent and it's been a long time since there was someone she wanted to please as much as she generally does Pan (even if that would be a difficult thing for most people to tell).
"You know, each of you has gone solo into dangerous things.  I'm not sure you're the best to be offering this advice."  It's spoken with a sullen glare, and eyes raking over each of them (though they're noticeably easier on Padre than Grace or Kalen, those icy blue eyes) not particularly kindly.  "But whatever.  I won't do anything alone.  Excuse me."
She'd been walking towards the door, and pauses when she reaches it, looking back at Pan.  "It's good to see you.  Are you staying this time?"  And once she has his answer, she's off.

Pan Echeverri­a
Whatever. He'll take it.
At the question of whether he's staying this time he gives the Dreamspeaker a nod and says he'll see her tomorrow. It leaves his mouth easy like he's using to saying it and then she's gone. He does not slump into the chair he'd left to try and prove whatever point he was trying to make but he does sit himself back down again.
Recovery doesn't offer folks much in the way of dignity. The Chorister looks tired and somewhat dazed when he sits down again and though he lets one hand rest on its partnered knee the other hand goes to his wasted midsection like to assure himself everything's where it's supposed to be before it takes up its place on its own knee.
"When are you going to look at the wards?" he asks. He's looking at Kalen but his eyes flick to Grace and back halfway through the question like to include her in it.

Grace Evans
She looks over at Kalen when he nudges her, and well, she gets that. Yes, he doesn't want her to beat herself up. And she doesn't either, which is why the warning to Shoshannah.
To Pan, at his question, she's not sure which wards he means. "If you mean the ones out by Keller's place, someone's already been out to look at the wards. That's how we know about them. Right now, we're just gathering information, trying to figure out what to do next."
"Also, no, Shoshannah, I do not go out alone and do dangerous things," she sighs. Shoshannah isn't here, but it's more like a statement to the world at large. And she doesn't count hacking as especially dangerous. Maybe that's an issue.

Kalen Holliday
There is a second where his eyes narrow and he tenses and for a second it looks like he is ready to fight with Shoshannah but she's leaving.  And this time when Pan gets his attention it is with the full force of a storm about to break over his skin for a second.  Two seconds.  Three.
And then in that pause while he tries to figure out something to attack, Kalen notices the placement of Pan's hands and Grace's voice spills into the silence and he takes a breath.  "I don't know that I am going out to look at the Wards if they need a second round of scouting.  I am hardly...in any proper condition to go anywhere that may require running.  When we are committed to a fight...that will be another matter.  When standing to fight is your only option, you learn to choose your battles more carefully.  Grace and I have been trying to learn its patterns.  Understand its movements.  Learn when the opportune moment to strike may be."
His expression softens, though he hasn't relaxed again.  "You alright there?"

Pan Echeverri­a
All Kalen gets in the way of a proper answer is an affirmative noise from somewhere in the priest's throat. Yeah he's alright there. Not in any proper condition to go anywhere that may require running either but he's used to that. He's forty-something years old and has spent most of his life securely in the "overweight" end of the spectrum.
He doesn't run. He blasts apart whatever's running at him and leaves the rest of it up to his god.
"If you get stuck," he says. "Can't make sense of it or you're having trouble finding it. I'd like to help."

Grace Evans
"I can give you the data we're using, if that would be of any use. You have a computer?" she asks, knowing that her piece of the puzzle is currently located in a KML file that would look like gibberish printed.
"Or, oh... you don't have Ginger, I would have remembered that. We also have a kind of secret encrypted Twitter we're using to coordinate things," she adds. She doesn't know of Pan's tech level, or whatever distrust he might have toward such things. But still, it's her duty to at least try to spread information.

Kalen Holliday
"Yes," Kalen says, finally leaning back again.  "We are not turning away help.  Grace made this amazing computer thing.  I have notes all over the office.  You're welcome to look over anything and see what you see."
"There is more information on Ginger, and...if you must know I can explain about the dream.  I'm still trying to draw the symbols and I was going to see if Trent could help me identify them but it might be slightly less stressful trying to do that with someone I didn't see tortured to death and covered in them.  We can't assume we have time for those kind of distractions right now."

Pan Echeverri­a
Most of what they say makes sense. Most of what they say earns agreement in the form of a nod or the light of understanding in his eyes. Notes and information and the dream, the symbols would be good. Okay, sure, do it with someone he didn't see tortured to death, that makes sense.
One thing doesn't make sense though.
"Forgive me: what's a twitter?"

Grace Evans
She looks over at Kalen with a wide-eyed look. She hadn't heard this particular detail yet. Covered in symbols and tortured to death?
"Are you sure you want to write them down? It could be like... I don't know, a viral meme? Something like the movie itself?"
But then, Pan asks what a Twitter is, and for the second time tonight, the look she gives him is thoroughly summed up by 'What?'
"Okay... um... Well, I suppose less like Twitter, and more like a message board? On your phone?" Maybe that would be more understandable...
She pulls out her own phone, that sleek, very new Google smartphone, and keys in her own access to Ginger. She says the keywords, "Hello, Ginger" into the thing, and then opens up the messages. Of course, on her device, it's a nice interface as well. She made it herself. She just taps on it a few times, and opens up the latest message from Kalen, along with Sid's prior message and Shoshannah's response. It's obvious that Shoshannah's restless, but... maybe she's not the best one to go looking. Not just yet.
In any case, Grace shows him her phone, and what she's pulled up on it. "It's like this."

Kalen Holliday
Kalen just clear his throat softly at Grace's look.  "Really?  Did you think I would practically command you to move into the Chantry without some significant provocation?"  His tone is distant, less because he is wary of Grace and more because he is wary of how he'd sound if he let his voice do things like express emotion.  "Words and symbols do have power, but I doubt these work like that.  We call it by its Name, and it..."  He frowns, thoughtful.
And then Pan asks what Twitter is and Kalen smiles faintly.  Not mocking so much as pleased to have something entirely different to direct Grace at, and so he waves Grace off with a little flutter of his hand at Pan.
He stays quiet and lets her instruct for a minute, eyes half closing again.

Pan Echeverri­a
When Grace pulls out her phone to show the Chorister what it is she's talking about he braces himself on the armchair again and rises and moves to stand behind the sofa so that he can see what she is trying to show him. The screen is too small for him to see clearly so he grits his teeth and goes down on a knee beside the sofa.
There's no point moving over or telling him he can just sit down. Shoshannah is stubborn but she is also vocal about it. Father Echeverría is very good at not engaging people if his mind is already made up. It's a waste of everybody's breath.
"Wow," he says. "That's something."
With that he clears his throat and gets himself back on his feet. He looks drained now. He knows where everything in the house is and he knows where the bedrooms are. Has no way of knowing which ones are now claimed. When he left only two were. One of the people claiming the rooms has gone on now.
"I'm going to lie down for a few minutes. Thank you for letting me know what's going on."

Grace Evans
"Oh, ah, um... You don't have to..." she starts, and tries to stand up to show him the phone so the injured man can sit back down. Little does she know he's headed down to that knee. And Pan, the light of God, the already injured man, gets a cellphone to the jaw. It's not exactly going to bruise or anything, but she whacked him good.
"Oh, oh... shit... I'm sorry. Sorry. Are you okay?" she asks, the anxious worry making her double up on words. This is not Grace's finest hour.
He says he's going to go lie down for a few minutes, and she just puts a hand over her eyes and nods. "Sorry. We'll get you whatever we can. When you're up to it. I'm sorry for hitting you. It was an accident."

Kalen Holliday
His eyes open more fully when Grace starts to get upset and frowns.  Pan looks drained, but not mortally wounded.  Unless he's actively bleeding, Kalen does't really seem inclined to be overly concerned.
Even if he were more inclined to fuss, he's already seen how Pan reacts to concern.  And so all Kalen says is, "I should be around most of the night.  I keep odd hours.  Feel free to interrupt when you're ready."  He doesn't tell Pan to let him know if he needs anything, and he doesn't really say that he's there if Pan needs things.  If a few minutes should turn into Pan sleeping though, Kalen will creep into the room and leave him a bottle of water.  And he'll stay in the living room where he can hear Pan, instead of retreating to the office or the library.
"I'm pretty sure, by what I've heard, it will take more than that to kill him, Kit.  He'll be alright."  His tone with Grace is gentle, as usual.

Pan Echeverri­a
One day they'll look back on this and laugh. Maybe later that night they'll laugh about it. How Grace tried to spare the recovering priest the trouble of ducking down and ended up cracking him in the jaw with her phone. How he'd blinked a few times like he couldn't figure out what hit him and then Grace apologized more than once and he made a joke about that's why he doesn't trust cell phones before they settled down and he let her show him what she was talking about.
Later she's going to have to show him again. Maybe slower and allowing for the fact that he uses a pager and landlines to communicate still. He has a cell phone but it belongs to the church and he only carries it if he's expecting a birth or a death in the congregation. There is no way to calibrate his lifestyle to Ginger's but if he's back and wants to help they're going to have to figure out something.
"It was an accident," he says before he goes. Firmer than she'd said it. "No harm done, huh? Don't worry. We'll talk more later."
That spotlight-right-on-you feeling goes away the moment he leaves the room.

Grace Evans
"Yes, I know he'll be all right, Kalen. But I hit him with my phone," she whispers, once Pan is gone. "I whacked a guy who was attacked by zombies, survived, and probably saved Sera's life with my phone. It's kind of embarrassing."
Yeah, Pan feels like he's illuminating you with righteous judgement. From on high. It's like an assault on Grace every time she enters a room with him. But still, she didn't mean to hit him in the face. Sometimes, even men like that can go and save lives and be, in Sera's terms, badass. Denver needs badasses. That she would prefer him to be a different kind of badass is beside the point. At the moment.
"I should probably try to get some sleep myself. Hmm. The upstairs couch is the best sleeping couch you said?"

Kalen Holliday
"It is.  I'll be just down here if you need anything."

Entropy and Nightmares

Kalen:	Kalen is partly curled up on an end of a couch in the library with a book. One leg is extended and lays along the curve where the back of the couch starts to rise up, and the rest of his body curls around the book, sideways into the couch. It's a rather sharp contrast to how he can be, either because of that consuming intensity or so remote and alien it seems impossible that he isn't some ageless force of nature, he looks younger.  More like just another person, though there is still that sense of an oncoming storm, the taste of ozone and the feel of electricity dancing lightly over Grace's skin.
Grace:	Grace's effect on the warp of the universe is weaker than most, shielded from view even still by the way she blends into the background and goes without notice. But still, for a while now, Kalen has been able to feel that sliding, slipping, stirring thing around. She's spending as much free time as the roads will allow in the Chantry, as Kalen's warnings got to her at last. It's safer here. Perhaps she's got the idea that spending time in the library would be a good use of time, or maybe it's just to say hello to her friend, but it's her whose presence at the door makes it chime and allow her entry. "Hey, Kalen. Looking comfortable there."
Kalen:	"I have been known to relax on occasion. It is rare enough that you may still wish to make note of it on your calendar." He closes the book but does not otherwise move. "How are you?"
Grace:	Her eyes scan around the room, and it's a thing Kalen has seen many times before, how she just tries to pick up on everything in her surroundings. "You know how I am," she says. It would take too long to go through the full explanation, and she doesn't want to lie. "It was good to see Sera though. We had a talk and... it was good." She crosses over to a chair near the couch where Kalen has curled, and proceeds to curl herself up too. "I feel a bit restless. Like, I don't think there's anything more I could possibly find about Thakinyan or Keller or any of that. I'm not going to go fight them, because what would I do, yell at them? So... I'm standing still, and I hate standing still."
Kalen:	"Well. Last I was forced to a complete stop I did mostly what we are doing now. A lot of reading. And I learned to really speak Spanish and developed a fondness for South American reds and really strong black coffee." Kalen smiles a little and sighs. "I'm not really great at it either, but for at least a little longer it's what I've got. What kind of thing would you like to be doing? Have you actually come to a point where you want to fight with something?"
Grace:	"Want to? No. It's more that they have my friend on a leash. And I saw what happened when that movie was played, and it can't happen again," she says, and curls her limbs into the seat even tighter. "What do I want to do, just... I don't know. I came down here to read my programming manual. It's something."
Kalen:	Kalen shifts, carefully, so that he can watch Grace instead of just listening to her. He's still relaxed, but that intensity is kindling in his eyes. "Then what do you want to do? If you could be doing anything about this situation, what would it be?"
Grace:	"Fix it," she says, a memory of a smile on her face, like she's being difficult on purpose. "I don't even know what the right thing to do is. But yeah. Save Shoshannah, destroy that film, move on, learn stuff, be myself again... Fix it."
Kalen:	"There are a lot of ways to fix things. The first two Mages I met were pretty mobile. They didn't work out of a chantry. They still don't. They a way of turning up where they're needed, but they do different things. Jack is a lot like me, or, probably more accurately, I'm a lot like Jack. Kharisma is a Seer, which...well she's better at it than I am. She also can command the Ars Mentis, and she...she puts people back together. She almost never fights with anything directly, that's not who she is. She's killed people, when she had to, but this war, it isn't a part of who she is. She's everything else, everything good." He smiles a little, then swallows. "Marcellus...was a brilliant tactician. He's the man who trained me to be part of the Order, and to be part of my House. He gave this war everything he was. He was never sorry and he was never afraid. There are people who find some balance, in between, but they are few and rare. You need to figure out who you want to be. You know what your goal is, but not your path. You need a path."
Grace:	"My path?" she looks around the library, at the books, at the collective knowledge, and then lifts her arms to it, as if to say: this. "I want to know everything. I want to know what the right thing to do is, even if I'm not the one to go and do it."
Kalen:	"Okay. Well, we've found all the information we can find. Beyond that point, it is rather like waiting to see if someone will live through surgery. As horrible as hospital waiting rooms are, you just have to accept that in some things you are helpless. The best you can do at that point is to reflect on what you have learned and try to understand what you could do better the next time."
Grace:	"Oh bullshit, I have to accept helplessness," she says, but it's not anger in her voice. In fact, there may have even been the start of a wry laugh in there somewhere. She gets up out of the chair, walks over to a bookcase, and pulls out that manual she was after. "I can bend the universe to my will," she says, like a cartoon supervillain, while regarding the book in hand. "Well. I can a little bit."
Kalen:	"Indeed, Kit. But you'll have to figure out how you will bend it, what world you are shaping. And, even for us, there are some limits. Which is why we tend to organize, to do things together that we cannot do alone. That understanding is where Traditions and Chantries and Cabals are born from, and while those may end up in structured places you are not fond of, that structure does, or at least at one point did, serve a valuable purpose. You want to learn everything, to have all the answers, and there is nothing wrong with that. We share that, in many respects. Once you have that knowledge, how will you use it to remake the world? What vision do you have of a brighter future?"
Grace:	She opens the manual, flips through it a bit. "I just don't like hierarchical structures. I like networks. And, coincidentally, that is my vision of a brighter future," she says, and that explanation is so woefully lacking. "In fact, I have a novel-in-progress explaining my brighter future. It's like, radical decentralization has been tried before, but it's all forced on people. You have to get it to emerge organically out of the existing structure. You can't take the means of production and force it into the hands of the worker, you have to make that idea so compelling it just happens," she says, walks over to her chair, plops herself down in it. "Like Ginger. We went and made the cost of communication very very low, and people talk to each other now. We made the idea of free information so compelling it just happened."
Kalen:	"You and Wikipedia," Kalen says with a smile that is real, if a bit tired. "What will you make next?"
Grace:	"I was thinking about indexing the library. OCRing all the books, making our own little Google. So, say, looking for a keyword or concept wouldn't take hours. And people could add their stuff to the digital library without having to hand over the physical copies. Though, I'm sure some would still love to sit there with a book in hand and have it take hours. And they can do that too."
Kalen:	"So...you'll make us a card catalog with no actual cards. That is an excellent plan. Would you like any help with it? I may not have any great skill with computers but I can read. And, for at least a little longer, I'm more useful off the field so-to-speak than on it. I can help you with the key words."
Grace:	"Mmm, the keywords take care of themselves, really. That part would be automatic. What's not automatic is the scanning. That part would take a while. And it's boring. But, the payoff... Hmm I wonder if there's a way you could just do it. You know, get the data out of the books without having to go through all the months of flipping a page and running a scan and flipping a page and running a scan..."
Kalen:	"That I am aware of, no. There may be people who can scan just by looking and transmit the information, but...that is far outside my experience. If the scanners are not complicated, I suppose I could still help."
Grace:	"Nah. Would just need to take good pictures. I'm sure a regular camera could do it just fine. And then, I'd get to work on some code again. Search engines are kind of interesting, you know? They're like entropy sieves. You can't check every word in every book, it would take too long, so you make an index formed in such a way that it ties everything together just so, and then shake the index. What you want is left behind, and so is everything its tied to. Like, the page and book you can find that information in."
Kalen:	"I...don't exactly work that way with Entropy. Still, it sounds promising." He taps lightly at the table with the first two fingers of one hand. "Trent may be able to help you better than I can, actually, if you're talking about Entropy and not entropy. I don't even know what an entropy sieve is. I know what those words are separately, but not together."
Grace:	"Mmm. Maybe I'm just working on a different definition than you are. Computer science has different concepts for things like that. But, in a way, we refer to entropy as density of information content. Like, something completely lacking in entropy would be very simple, and something highly entropic would be super complicated and hard to describe or calculate. So you kind of have to manipulate the entropy of stuff that's super complicated. Like making an index of it. It's breaking the information into little pieces and ordering them, so that you can then pass them through the sieve and search it," she says, and all the while, her eyes stare at the ceiling or scan around the room. In this mode, Grace can forget for a while. It's rather nice. But she doesn't look at Kalen at all. "You know, the English language has an entropy of 1.5 bits per character. A toss of a coin has 1 bit. So, the information content of a coin is one bit, the information content of a letter is 1.5, and on and on. I don't really know how to quantify that sort of thing for the universe's data though. I do have some ideas though. The manual... has some pictures..."
Kalen:	"So...you're...." Kalen frowns. "I know how to find the most likely thing, but...." He uncurls the rest of the way and swings his legs around, resting his feet on the coffee table. "Why is a coin toss one hit and an English character one point five?"
Grace:	"Mmm.. Well, because you get exactly one piece of information out of it when you toss a coin. Yes or no. True or false. You can only predict one of two states for a coin, and you'll be right about half the time, if you try to predict it. You would think the entropy of a letter would be fairly high, but English is really predictable. You know there will be a lot more a's than z's. And if you get a 'q' you know almost for certain that the next letter will be a 'u' and so on. So you can do a good job predicting it. And if you can predict from the start what's going to happen, that changes the entropy. Makes it less. Or, I guess you could also say, if you dial down the information content, you can more easily predict what's going to happen next."
Kalen:	"So. Coins are one because they have a fifty percent chance and letters are predictable because of association so...some keywords are predictable based on known association to it her keywords? Would that help you? I'm still lost. Trent might understand, he gets math and science and things. I mean-" And here Kalen lifts his hands, hooks his thumbs, and mimes a fluttering butterfly.
Grace:	"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to lose you," she says, and finally looks at him. "Just talking... trying to pass the time. Just.. if I ever do that -- lose you and I don't realize it -- sometimes I don't realize it at all... I get on to my little track, and I forget that others don't have years of math study with which to follow me. "As for Trent, well, I don't know. I think I kind of ruined my relationship with Trent within 30 minutes of meeting him. Not as badly as what happened with Garrett, but still."
Kalen:	"Trent's relatively forgiving. And...Garrett...that was my fault. I forget...he's not really the person I met. He's really good at...after his wife, losing...." Kalen swallows. "I should have thought about it. I'm sorry."
Grace:	"Don't be sorry for trying to help. It just... didn't turn out quite right, that's all. So far, I have a fifty-fifty track record with your Order. Entropy of one," she says, with a tiny smirk. "I suppose if I could predict that sort of thing, it would be a real trick."
Kalen:	"If it helps, Trent and I didn't really get on, and then we fought. Well, I fought and he was remarkably calm about it which was really infuriating at the time. And, I was furious at a lot of things that weren't him and somehow this turned into us drinking whiskey and discussing philosophy." Kalen smiles. "Don't worry, I'm not saying you should come have dinner with us. Just...if you see a moment to try out an olive branch, it can be worth it with him, okay?"
Grace:	"Well, maybe. You say he knows a lot of math and science and things?" she curls up again in her chair, relaxing into the comfort. Opens up her book again, not really aware of the fact that you shouldn't do that while trying to have a conversation. She can do both. With a bit of fiddling on her laptop, she can do both with perfect concentration.
Kalen:	"You've met him. What does he feel like?" There is a second, maybe two where Kalen goes even paler than usual. He remembers too well the feeling of butterflies twitching and falling still, of constant shifting falling still. The faces of the dead. And they aren't dead now. Not yet. But....
Grace:	"Butterflies fluttering around. Something like you too. Like a storm. Hey, are you... okay?" she asks, noting the way he goes pale and how his face turns.
Kalen:	"What?" He shakes his head a little. "I'll be better when we get rid of Thakinyan. Its threats were more than a little unnerving. I mean, I dream about you all dying all the time, but this was different. Not just because some creepy possessed bitch was in my dreams and Sid's dreams, but I felt your Resonances die. It was...a whole new kind of horror."  He rubs a hand over his eyes. "But I am fine, Kit. A little unnerved and perhaps more than a little exhausted, but only the first one of those things is really even unusual. New types of horror comes with the territory." He smiles. "Flambeau and all...."
Grace:	"You dream about me dying all the time?" she asks, worried. "I dream about me dying too. And Sid and Sera and Lena. Is that why I need to sleep in the Chantry now? Because she threatened me with... that?"
Kalen:	"You're sleeping in the Chantry because that and because I have lost almost everyone I have ever trusted or loved or considered family. I would rather like that trend to break. I told you, Kit. I see a beautiful world, but I know how dark it gets sometimes."
Grace:	"Well. Hm. The last time I was certain to die, I didn't. Maybe if I develop a track record, or something..." she says, closes her eyes. The book is still open in her lap, but she's... off somewhere else, dealing with the feeling of being in between crises. "But I'll stay here. I doubt Shoshannah would mind me crashing on her couches."
Kalen:	"Are there no spare beds left?" Kalen asks. "If you must, this couch is the best sleeping couch in the library. The best couch in general is the one in that little upstairs room."
Grace:	There are spare beds, but Grace doesn't know that, and hasn't thought to ask. She has been crashing on the couches, and getting up early to make it to class on days when the roads are clear enough. "You know the best sleeping couches already? Why don't you sleep in a spare bed?"
Kalen:	"I don't sleep here on purpose. I...." He runs a hand through his hair. "I kind of unnerve people sometimes. With the screaming. I'm kinda a mess when I sleep." Which he sounds more embarrassed than concerned about, which is...so very like him.
Grace:	Grace looks off at some books. "I wonder if I scream. I don't think I do, but I'd be asleep when..."
Kalen:	"Well, if you keep sleeping here and you start waking up to very concerned people, you probably make noise. People tend to make a bit of a fuss sometimes. Otherwise, with everything going on, I'd sleep here more."
Grace:	She just nods. "This sucks." A concrete statement of fact if there ever was one.
Kalen:	"Yeah. I have no coping strategies to suggest to you, sadly. Mine tend to involve very physical company, sometimes very physical company that can get in my head. Ramon used to sit with me and pray, which worked out well enough, but if it was really bad he'd start asking angels to intercede. Most of my oldest friends tend to practice the Ars Mentis and tend to like, or at least tolerate, a good bit of contact."  And yet Grace sees Kalen touching people only rarely.
Grace:	"Well. There was Sera. She sang me a lullabye to help me sleep," Grace says, and there's a bit of awe in there, for Sera. "Speaking of very physical company who gets in your head. It helped. But.. Sera's.. dealing with her own trauma. I don't want to be a burden."
Kalen:	"I don't sing. Or get in people's heads. But I could stay with you. And...read or something."
Grace:	Grace is, shall we say, a little oblivious. Most young women, when a guy asks to watch them sleep, would be a little creeped out, Bella Swan being a giant and horrible exception. However, Grace does not pick up on either real or imagined come ons very well. And that's probably a good thing, in this case. So, she just looks like she's pondering. "But, don't you have to sleep too?"
Kalen:_	"Mmmmmmm...I think I might sleep at Garrett's place eventually. Under the circumstances it seems inadvisable to sleep in somewhere unprotected. But I can be awake for awhile. I don't really keep regular hours anyway."

Tempest Lion

[The Lion: http://g.nordstromimage.com/imagegallery/store/product/Gigantic/10/_8196710.jpg]

Grace Evans
The globe on Grace's laptop monitor spins on its table in the library, backlit with unmoving stars, and glowing with sunlight on one side. But it lacks clouds, this representation. The engineers must have thought that too complex, too unpredictable. They could have faked it, perhaps, but this earth is naked.

It's also got pushpins in it, which if they were real, would blot out the sun for miles and pierce the mantle with their sheer size, so it's a good thing this is merely realistic.

It is, of course, what she's been working on for a couple of snow-covered days, before the snow excuse for staying at the Chantry ran out, and so did all of her leads. Now, she's staying inside the underground bunker that is the library for other reasons.

Grace is not at her laptop at present. She's reading a book. It's one she usually goes straight to when the curiosity takes her. It's an old programming manual, which is odd because one usually does not learn programming through books. But it's not like there's a stackoverflow for universe hacks (at least not that she knows of) so she has to make do.

It has pictures, and source code, but more importantly, liner notes written in sometimes pencil, sometimes pen. Whoever the writer was is not here anymore. At one time she hoped they were still around, but lately that seems less and less likely.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen wanders down into the library.  Any illusion that he might have been just coming down by chance, and not because he was looking for Grace, is rather spoiled by the fact that he is carrying enough takeout for two people and a shiny, cobalt blue gift bag.

He pauses when he sees Grace reading, head tilting to one side.  And then, without a word to interrupt her, he moves to settle in the chair nearest hers.  He starts pulling boxes of food out of the bag and placing them on the table - not close to the laptop or any notes.

Grace Evans
[Perception+Awareness!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace Evans
[Also, should have done Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (3, 3, 6, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Kalen Holliday
[Right!  Nightmares!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )

Grace Evans
Kalen's like a storm rolling around above ground, and she senses that -- the way the universe responds to his presence -- well before he's actually down the stairs. It doesn't really interrupt her reading, because he's been here a lot recently, working on his part of their research project. And for a while, that's what she thinks he's up to, playing around in the office with his papers and string, because for some reason he needs his data to be physical.

But then, he's down the stairs, and there's a storm underground. She lowers the book slightly, peering at him over the pages, at his bags of food and... what? A present?

"I see you're feeding me again. Not that I mind. Also, hi."

Kalen Holliday
"It seemed silly to go get food and not bring you any back."  Some people would have asked what she wanted.  Kalen just tries bringing back options and paying attention to which options Grace likes,  New options get added to what seemed to be her favorite options.  Then that process continues.  It's methodical and experimental and...entirely not how normal people figure out what their friends like.

He slides a pair of chopsticks and a fork across the table to her,  Then, a little more hesitantly, that gift bag.  He has never displayed hesitance about the food.  Not even the day he brought back Caribbean food that was curries and goat and almost nothing conventional for Denver.

Grace Evans
Grace enjoys odd food. Odd anything, really. And even goat curry isn't the weirdest she's had and liked. She doesn't get out much anymore, but it's been Kalen's insistence that even if she's not ready to go outside and sit in a restaurant that she eat something that's made the hollows in her cheeks lessen over the weeks. Her body went through a lot. It needs the material to build back what the Hydra stole.

So his food delivery system is never turned down. It might be a little weird, but so is she. It doesn't quite occur to her that it's strange even.

But the gift bag, that's new.

She ignores the food for a bit, putting down the precious tome of Programming, and inspects the present. She's expecting maybe some equipment, or some papers on Thakinyan perhaps (why they would be in a gift bag is unknown) but the stuffed lion it actually turns out to be? Completely out of the cobalt blue.

"Uhh..." her brows knot. She pulls it out of the bag slowly. It's soft, cute, with tiny bead eyes. But she's confused. Why this? Kalen is being very strange. She looks over at him, remembering that hesitation, and she knows that she is missing something important here.

"It's adorable. And thank you. But, what is it for?"

Kalen Holliday
"So, it was snowing," Kalen says.  "And...it was the first real snow and it was...there wasn't much snow in Arizona.  I suppose you know that.  My sister thought snow was pretty much magical.  It always reminds me of her.  The first time...."  He ducks his head, like he is about to say something impossibly ridiculous that he knows is ridiculous.  "We used to make toys out of bits of junk we found.  She wanted to be a princess, so we made a wand out of what I'm pretty sure was a piece of a car antenna.  We bent wire into this really lopsided star and...."  He clears his throat.  "And anyway I always go buy presents on the first day it snows.  Mostly donation presents, since historically I'm not much for friends.  But, this year, I have friends.  Also, your room is missing anything...really personal."

[And, how did you do on your thing I forgot to roll until now Kalen?]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 2) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Serafi­ne
(Perception plus Awareness.)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 2

Grace Evans
Grace remembers this story, knows why he can't finish it. She just nods. This gift is obviously a special thing for Kalen, and well... Stuffed lions may not have much of a use, but it's not like it isn't... soft.

There's a bit of consternation at the idea that he thinks of her as a child, but well... This is in tribute to his sister. She can't say it was a bad idea. It really isn't.

"Yeah. I know. I usually just... try to keep the clutter down," she says, but really it's that it never occurs to her to buy things like this, things without a purpose. It bothers her sometimes, that she seems to lack the impulse, or have emotional connections enough to have anything 'really personal'.

"Well, it's appreciated," she says, and tries to smile. It's a sad thing, really, but she tries.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen smiles back, as effortlessly as if she had actually succeeded brilliantly in her smiling.  "There was a minute I thought about getting you a robot.  But I bet you could build better than any of the robots I could buy you anyway.  Also, they robots lacked a certain charm."

He picks up a carton and pokes at the food inside it with his chopsticks, then sets it back down.  He seems about as interested in the food tonight as he did the night at Garrett';s.  "I got one for Sid too.  Not a lion.  Sid's is different.  She will either think it's cute or punch me.  I suppose we'll see.  But I think we're okay now."

Serafi­ne
There are things Sera knows, sees, understands, feels, becomes, without every quite understanding how or why.  Sometimes the universe just unzips itself in her presence and everything is opened up, hollowed out: made known, right down to the bone.  On a night like this, once, Sera caught a glimpse of Hawksley's avatar, inhuman, winged.  Christ.  Tonight Sera can taste them in the air: Grace and Kalen belowground, down the dark steps, behind the firesafe door in the bunker-of-a-library.  And everyone else who has been here too,

since the last time she was here.  Which was also the first time she's been here, in a long, long time.

Footsteps: floorboards creaking overhead before they turn and head down, the murmur of voices at the base of the stairs before the library door swings open.  Sera ducking beneath Dan's arm as the consor holds the door open for her.  He's three-quarters of a foot taller than she is.  She does not have to duck, really.  It's just a habit, it comes with walking across thresholds.

"Hey."  Her dark eyes cut past Kalen, linger, searchingly,  intently on Grace, then cut back to Kalen.  The greeting encompasses both of them.  The introduction, though, "I don't think you've met Dan," with a cant of her head toward the tall, tattooed, bearded blond hipster who is her shadow tonight, "Dan, Kalen, Kalen, Dan.  He's Cool." - is mostly for Kalen.  She takes in the books, and the take-out, and the lion, and gives the pair of them the suggestion of one of her smiles.

"Study break?"  With a lilt of query in her often-flat brows.  "Or nascent safari?"

Grace Evans
"Nah. I mean, I can take things apart and maybe put them back together again, but designing a robot? No."
She also picks up a carton of whatever the cuisine du jour happens to be and inspects it with chopsticks. Udon noodle stir-fry? Where does he find these places? By now he must be figuring out that she has a soft spot in her heart for noodly Asian dishes though. She's even quite good at using those chopsticks. So, she's got noodles hanging out of her mouth when he exclaims that he's patched things up with Sid. That just gets an eye-widening.

"Oh, you guys are good again? That's wonderful," she says. Grace, let's put it bluntly, has a lot of experience talking with her mouth full. So, she is. It's a rule she knows, but breaks because she doesn't think about it.
And that's when she feels Sera. And her eyes go wider still.

She turns toward the door, expectantly. Some day, she will perhaps learn not to react to each and every bit of resonance she senses, but that's not this day. And that's not for this resonant being.

She gives Sera that sad smile, that mixture of hurt and happy that came out so fully earlier. "We're hunting something, I suppose that's true. Both?"

Kalen Holliday
Dan gets a little wave at the introduction, but Kalen seems about as interested in strangers as he is in the food.

"Well, now I feel like an idiot for not also picking up some rhinos and a whole herd of wildebeests.  I could have done the whole floor here up like the Serengeti.  That would have been something."

"And yes, we are hunting, but...on break for a moment at least.  I haven't seen you in awhile.  How are you?"  He has to know what happened to her, but he makes absolutely no mention of it.  She could as easily have been away cruising the Mediterranean all this time by his tone.

He glances back to Grace and laughs.  "I apologized.  It does happen, from time to time.  There is a specific alignment of the stars and all that has to happen first, but...every now and again.  And then some crazy bitch got all dramatic visual about some threats.  And then we both called Trent at like three am.  I'm sure he loved that, but once he got over the initial bit of it, he was gracious about it."  He stabs his chopsticks into the container of fried rice and nudges it a little farther away.

"I haven't seen her since, but I think we may be speaking now.  It's probably better than yelling or pointed silence."

Serafi­ne
"I'm brilliant," Sera lies, and Sera is good at many, many things, but lying is not one of them.  She lies terribly.  There's something about the way her mouth curves in that frame of a half-smile, in the subdued gleam of her eyes, the way they catch the artificial light from the library lamps, the swirling chaos of the globe on Grace's computer screen that communicates a flash of gratitude for Kalen's circumspection.

Dan is close behind her, settles his hands familiarly on her shoulders, and bends to murmur something into the chaos of her blond curls.  Sera tips her head back to him, glancing over her shoulder with some degree of reassurance.  He gives her a brief look, then one that lifts over her shoulder to the pair of other magi and lifts his left hand in a wave that is both: answer to Kalen's greeting, and a brief farewell as he turns to head back upstairs.

"If you were going to fill this place with stuffed animals,"Sera does not care for hunting.  Or no: Sera does not have the energy for anything except the slow and terrible work of healing right now, and so she does not ask: about what they hunt, or why; about the threats; from whom, to whome.  Any of it.  There's no room inside her for that knowledge, right now.

No fucking room at all.

"You should fill it with magickal creatures.  You know.  Not rhinos.  Sphinxes.  Griffins and manticore.  Fucking unicorns.  Satyrs and all the rest."

Grace Evans
"Zebras," Grace adds, with an odd look of reminiscence. Zebras may not be magical creatures, but they are to her. Striped horses. And there she is, staring through the wall, worry written on her face.
And then, that strange moment ends.

She knows Sera is not brilliant. She knows the road her friend is on is a long one. But still, it is so very good to see her here, making conversation about stuffed sphinxes and manticores. And now she knows how it must feel to Kalen every time he sees her try -- to leave the apartment, to go out and be social with people, all of that.

So Sera gets an even more genuinely happy smile from her, before she digs back in to her carton of noodles.

Grace Evans
[Ohh man, I just realized how insulting that looks to Sera. Change 'brilliant' to like 'completely well']

Kalen Holliday
Kalen doesn't say anything about Sera's suggestion at first, but something about the way his eyes linger on Sera and then scan the room suggest he's actually considering filling the library with huggable magical creatures.  He does smile a little when Grace adds zebras to the list of magical creatures.

"Is that what I should do, now?"  It doesn't seem so impossible he might, Grace and Sera have both caught him in moments where he has been at least present enough to seem human.  "Perhaps."

"Are you hungry?  You can have some of this.  There's enough here for three."  There is enough for three.  But that wouldn't matter since there is definitely more than enough for one and Kalen seems to have completely dismissed the thought of eating.

Serafi­ne
Sera is not hungry.  Or rather, Sera is the sort of creature for whom meals and usually suggestions made by other people.  She forgets to eat as often as she eats, more often than she eats - and drinks herself silly, and finds herself in a warm diner with her cheek against the cold window at three-thirty-eight a.m. watching the smear of taillights in the street outside through her eyelashes while a stranger puts a plate of hashbrowns in front of her and someone who loves her reminds her of the peculiar purpose of forks.

But: shared food.

"Thanks," she hitches a skinny hip onto the table and unearths her hands from the pockets of her dark hoodie, pulled low over her short leather skirt.  Her black, heavy boots swing in a pendulum arc as she picks up one of the take-out boxes quite literally at random and wholly by chance.  Opens it to find steamed dumplings fragrant inside.  Which is best because she's not bothering with chopsticks, " - zebras, Grace?  One of these things is not like the others.  Winged zebras, I'll allow.

"Maybe.  There's probably a story about them, somewhere.  In hieroglyphs or, you know, what the fuck ever."

A brief pause, and then,

"The hunting stuff.  Something to do with the movie?"

Grace Evans
"It's something Gadfly used to say," she says, and then swallows a mouthful. "That we're like zebras masquerading as horses. And then I said I felt like a striped horse, something in between, you know? Anyway. They're magic to me."

And Gadfly is gone, missing. The longer it gets, the more she thinks maybe something more than just forgetfulness happened to him. Lost in time, like the mystery writer of liner notes in her favorite library book...

"Yeah. It has to do with the movie."

And she doesn't say, 'because it's likely still after me, and definitely is attacking Shoshannah,' because... It's just not fair that horrible things keep happening.

Kalen Holliday
"It'll be alright," Kalen says, and his voice is all hazy distance again.  He rises and waves Sera at his chair.  "Speaking of slaying monsters, I should go and see how I'm to do that.  If you'll excuse me."

And.  He.  Bows.  It's stiff, less because the movement is unnatural and more because Kalen hasn't moved with anything resembling fluid grace (absent perhaps a few gestures) in some time.

"I do hope that you both enjoy what remains of your evening."

[Because someone's player has to go sleep.  Stupid sleep.]

Serafi­ne
Sera has not actually touched the dumplings.  Just opened them, and she's looking over the open container at Kalen when he bows - when he bows.  Whatever she was going to say, Sera allows it to dissolve, for the moment.

"Alright," she tells Grace, quietly.  "Zebras too."

Then cuts a glance back to Kalen, somber, sober.  Aware.

"Fair sailing."

Grace Evans
"Goodnight. Thanks for the food. And the lion, too," Grace says after Kalen. And for the constantly being there, and for the trying to help, and for keeping her busy... All that too.

"Sera, you should eat," she says, a bit serious. "You're leaving me with all the noodles rice and dumplings. I'm going to burst," she adds, a bit less so.

And then, there's noodles hanging out of her mouth again, when she slurps up some more.

Kalen Holliday
Kalen's eyes flicker for a second.  Surprised.  A little amused that Sera remembered.  She gets a very brief, but warm smile for that.

He waves over his shoulder in response to Grace.  "Of course, Kit.  Anytime.  I'll just be upstairs."  But he does not look back, and soon after, even with that limp, he is gone.

[Thank you both for scenes!]

Serafi­ne
"'Course I'll eat."  Kalen leaves.  Sera leans back to watch him limp out of the library, then turns back to Grace, sitting more fully on the library desk at which Grace is working, over which all the take-out has been spread.  Sera pops a dumpling into her to prove it, then puts the container down, chewing the fragrant little morsel as she surveys the remainder of the feast.

Then back up to Grace.

"About the movie.  Back when we had that council, I said I'd - "

Sera offers Grace a spare, half-shouldered shrug by way of explanation.

"I don't really have the energy to even think about it, right now.  Much less do something.  So I'm not going to ask.  But if you really need me, Grace - "

Grace Evans
"Sera, no. Do what you need to do. I'm getting back involved because... because it helps. Gives me something to focus on, you know?"

There's a brief moment in that interim where Grace is certain that Kalen hasn't left. But she watched him leave. Noodles get chewed like they're a help to whatever cogs are running in her brain, and she looks around the room. And then, just stares at the stuffed lion on the table.

She raises a brow, and puts the carton and chopsticks down so she can pick up the toy again. Then, she takes a big sniff of it, like that's the most normal thing to do ever. It smells like rain. Like lightning. It feels, just a little, like the oncoming storm. In Kalen's absence, it stands out a bit, that in a way, he hasn't left.

Serafine
The truth is, Sera doesn't know.  She has never required anything to focus on, except perhaps herself.  Her pleasures, immediate or passing, her passions, temporal or entrenched.

And now, these nights, just Sera.

Nothing else.  There's no room for anything else.  When she curls up in bed, along, the house quiet all around her.  The little sparks of life, the quiet settling noises.  Fucking Rick's fucking snoring, which has its own weird rhythm - when she curls up in bed and pulls the covers tight and closes her eyes, her whole body starts to shake, no matter how much she steels herself, stiffens her muscles against it.  Sometimes the spells are passing and she drifts into her dead-to-the-world sleep with a merciful swiftness.  Sometimes she cannot shake them for hours.

"When I said need, I meant need.  Need, not want.  I just wanted you to know."

Then Sera's eyes cut down to the stuffed lion as Grace picks it up.  Sniffs it like that.

"He consecrated it," Sera tells her, quiet.  "Imbued it with his essence.  He can find it again, easily, if he has need.  Sometimes it happens anyway, we just accumulate on the things that are close to us, like  silt at the mouth of a river.

"But if you can see the magic in the world.  Watching the tapestry as it folds and unfolds, you can do that, too."

Grace Evans
"Oh... " she says, a little bit of that old wonder in her voice. But there's another thing too. A question of why?
Is this some kind of tradition for their kind, to give friends objects inscribed with their essence? Like a monogram written in the background. A watermark. Or a digital signature.

Yeah, so Kalen's entrusting her with his private key? Something like that? Maybe she'll have to take a look at it, really look at it and its encoding. Later.

For now, she just holds the stormy lion on her lap. It's a special gift indeed then. Maybe even one with a use after all.

She'll bother Sera to eat more, because she cares. She'll bother Kalen some later because he just gave her a piece of who he is, and she wants to know the significance, and wants to know why he didn't tell her that. But right now? It feels almost normal again. There's Sera, teaching her something new. She's studying in the library. And the safe feeling of being underground and locked away and warded -- that helps too.

"I think I'll put it... on my desk. Would look good there," she says, pretending at normality.

"And, if I need you... I know you'll be there. That wasn't ever a doubt."