To Friendship [incomplete]

mars
Timey wimey stuff; earlier in February, but after their dinner party; when does the dinner party happen? Timey, wimey, wimey stuff. Vague, vague, convenience.
Text: Hello Sepúlveda, Pen here.
Sepúlveda
Timey wimey stuff. One can hand-wave away a lot of particulars when one is dialing a Mad Scientist. They're scatterbrained. Says it right on the tin.
Takes him several minutes to respond. May be up to his elbows in viscera.
Pen! Acute accent over the u! Thank you. What is up?
mars
Text: Naturally. I spell things proprly
Text: Damn it.
Text: Care to get together today?
Sepúlveda
Yes I do care to. Where?
mars
[urgh, let's see. RIDDLE-MAKE. wits-for-cleverness + enigmas.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
mars
Text: Here's a riddle. If you get stuck, I'll give you a hint.
Text: [a very clever riddle denoting some fondue restaurant outside of Denver]
Sepúlveda
[oh for christ's sake woman]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 7, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Sepúlveda
[no fuck that. intelligence instead of wits.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
Sepúlveda
I won't get stuck.
Bold words from a man few would term as bold unless they knew him and then they would reframe the boldness as insanity. Pen already knows the rumors and they know them for true. The Scientist has respect for Death sure but something happened to him when Death shrugged and took his wife thinking he of all people would understand.
Resourceful. One could call him that. Inventive sure. Clever. Penelope lays down a riddle and he follows it...
mars
...To the Melting Pot in Littleton.
Penelope found the Melting Pot not because she likes fondue, but because she likes forges and metal and, yes, melting pots; it is an appealing name to an alchemist and a Matter mage, somebody who works with fire. The restaurant is often reviewed as an elegant and romantic place to go out: historical building, a lot of brickwork and Romanesque arches, even inside. Deep and spacious booths, given privacy by heavy curtains, this vague feeling in them of being in one's own private train car back in the days when travel by train was the utmost.
And when Sepúlveda arrives, she is already waiting for him in the lobby: this ardent, daring, resplendent creature -
(Awe and [Glory] Terror)
the modern-day Magus, rose-tinted sunglasses perched low on her nose, red red red hair braided in a coronet bangs falling over her straight slash of eyebrows, a leather journal in hand which she is writing in until she senses or sees Sepúlveda, and then an up-glance and a smile.

Sepúlveda
"Fondue!"
This is how he greets her. They can feel each other perhaps before they see each other and so can everyone else in the room. She is a dazzling imposing wonderful woman fair skin and copper hair and he -
Well. She knows him. Has known of him for a time but knew his wife better than she knows him. Eloise and Andrés the same height she assured of herself and anxious in socialization but charming and humorous and witty. Effervescent. Easy to see why Andrés would love Eloise and not hard exactly to see the reverse but one would have to know Eloise to know why she would love Andrés.
He feels like the reality one has to face when buried under an avalanche. An icicle drawn up the length of the spine. The end that awaits us all. No reason for him to feel like this other than Sepúlveda is a brilliant scientist cursed with free will.
And here he is.
"That's what you meant by 'golden shower'!" He is teasing her. He does not greet her as he had when she was a guest in his home. Comes to stand in front of her and waits for her to stand and that is that. "What's the occasion? Who's buying? I'll buy. Where's Nicholas?"
mars
Fondue! "Indeed!"
He is teasing her, and Pen is duly teased; or at least incited into this sparking half-smile, something reserved but easy. Pen's reserve has always been the reserve of somebody who is self-assured, arrogance in check (at least, acceptably maintained). Pen joined a proud House, after all.
"He is at our table, that is very generous of you, and the occasion is warning or warning minus ning or, hmm, just a spreading - " fucking poets " - of information. Come on, this way."
And Pen leads Sepúlveda through the arches, down some stairs, twist and turn until a room which is empty and has some of those train car booths, and a certain dark-haired Euthanatos. As she shows him the way, a quick laugh.
"It is not perfect, but like a slant-rhyme, no? Golden shower, Danae, bronze pot, Danae to Pasiphae to cow to milk to cheese; voilá!"
crow
There are many places that people frequent in which Nick feels, perhaps, a bit like the proverbial square peg in a round hole.  His very presence has a weight to it, something quiet and still and perhaps vaguely melancholy, like the way moonlight casts across the floor at night or a hush settles over a crowd at a vigil.  In a hospital, he makes this work in his favor.  In many other places (here) he simply gives a sense of detachment from everyday life.
He is sitting in the train car booth, and he is staring at nothing specific.  There's a conversation happening a few booths over that is of slight interest to him, in the way that snapshots into the private lives of other people are interesting, and maybe he has an ear turned toward that.  There are times when he too looks something like a painting, some slant woodland creature glimpsed through the trees perhaps.
The other two draw near enough that he recognizes their voices, and it pulls his eyes back out of the ether (how appropriate) and toward their approach.  He raises a hand in a lazy wave to Andres, and the fact that they are smiling and laughing brings a smile to his face too.
He makes room for them in the booth.  "Hello, Andres."
Sepúlveda
"Zeus was a real cabrón, wasn't he?"
The two Disciples come into the chain restaurant do not feel as though they belong there either but belonging and not belonging isn't anything their kind tends to worry about. Not when they reach the point in their enlightenment when they can warp others' perception of reality. When they can reform matter and do so so subtly that the Sleepers don't even notice let alone question it.
Their resonances are noticeable. Nick will reach that point one day. In the meantime he hears their approach and he looks at them as they reach his booth and he waves. Sepúlveda lifts his eyebrows in receipt of the wave and holds out both his arms as if to say Hey what's up holy shit you're here too but he does not engage in exuberant displays of greeting as he had at the dinner party. This isn't his house. It's a fucking restaurant.
He's wearing scrubs underneath a woolen winter coat. His glasses were fogged from the cold outside but now they are not. His shoes are respectable Oxfords. As he shrugs out of the peacoat and hangs it up on the outside of their booth those in attendance can glimpse the wedding band still adorning his left ring finger.
"Nicholas, hello." Pen has enough time to decide if she's going to sit beside or across from Nick in the booth. Sepúlveda doesn't care. He will take up the other position. Rest his forearms on the table and knit his fingers together. Hold out his thumbs as he asks and return them to resting as he concludes the question. "What are we celebrating tonight, eh?"
Surely they have no ulterior motive.
mars
The booth is the kind with hooks for purses and coats on the outside, opera-house balcony style, just within the heavy red curtains. Rather than sitting, Penelope stays standing. Easy to stay standing, balance evenly distributed in a way that connotes an easy relationship with physical exertion and athletic grace, though in truth Pen is not nearly as athletic or as honed as she wants to be. That goes for every aspect of her life: there is so much, always, to catch up to; it has only gotten worse since she Sought and found herself coming up resplendence as well as ardent and daring. She worries about it when she allows herself to worry, occasionally goes sleepless because of it.
"Friendship," Pen says, due consideration and then a lingering; an almost pleased quality to the expression in her eyes, but not quite. Her enthusiasm sheathed right now, see. "I'm going to go get our waitress," and she slides a menu, heavy leather thing, towards Sepúlveda.
"You two chill; I'll be right back."
Pen is, yes, the kind of person who will not wait for the check to be brought, but will track down a waiter or waitress and tell them to bring the check now and then wait until it is placed in her hand.
mars
[ooc: why yes, that post did allow jess to delay deciding where her character prefers to sit, while at the same time excusing her for a round. mwahaha.]
Sepúlveda
[you piece of shit <3]
crow
Nick clearly recently arrived from work.  He stayed late today; perhaps he was only summoned by the suggestion that they meet the Etherite.  His shirt is purple, wine-dark; his watch is silver with the small gears within exposed and ticking along.  There's an elegance in the simplicity of it, though it perhaps gives some insight as to why he has been suspected as a Technocrat, repeatedly, by people he has met since arriving.
Pen says: they're celebrating friendship.  Nick's eyebrows, expressive as they can be, lift just slightly, and his eyes turn toward Pen to watch her as she goes to find the waitress.
"I'm glad you managed to find us," he says to Sepulveda, with a rueful sort of acknowledgement that indicates that he is quite familiar with his wife's penchant for riddles-for-directions.  "Have the apprentices been keeping you busy?"
They're good for that, apprentices.  Nick cannot imagine having even one, and he is perhaps privately amazed at the other man's ability to teach two of them.
Sepúlveda
Friendship.

The Etherite's eyebrows lift up. His eyes slide from Pen's face she still standing over to Nick who is across from him. As if they've both found themselves wandered into a conspiracy. One hand releases the other to accept the responsibility for the tome and he handles it with as much care as one would a book of spells except for he is a Scientist. He does not believe in spells.

Aside from the wedding band Sepúlveda does not wear jewelry. One would think he would at least wear a watch but he hasn't been late to anything yet. Sometimes one is better off not knowing how Etherites do the things they do.

"Ay, ay ay," he says to the matter of the apprentices. Takes a shock of hair near his temple and holds it up by the roots. It is no grayer than the rest of his hair. Most of the silver among the black is in his beard truth be told but when the light hits it a certain way. "One of them alone would make my hair fall out. The two of them together--" He releases his hair and opens the menu. Gives it a cursory glance. "It would be easier, Nicholas, if they had any interest in Science, but they came out of the box with their own ideas about how the world works, and they're committed to these ideas, so all I can do is try to keep them out of trouble long enough for them to find their own tribes." Who is he kidding. He's just going to get wine. He claps the menu shut and knits his fingers together again. "Busy. Yes. Like toddlers."

crow
They may in fact have wandered into a conspiracy of sorts; Nick's eyebrows had elevated briefly when Pen said it, and as Andrés' eyes catch his own they lift again: a sort of shrug using only his face.

As the other man grabs at his hair, Nick smiles; some of the turns of phrase Sepúlveda uses are familiar to him, if mostly from childhood.  "How did you end up deciding to take them both on, anyway?"

Nick had somehow finagled a glass of water from their waiter before Pen and Sepúlveda arrived at the restaurant; he has a sort of unassuming patience about him that waitstaff in particular find gratifying, and so they often gravitate.  "Neither of them seemed particularly science focused to me, though, you're right."

mercury
[Pen: totally still elsewhere. In case that needed to be said. Also, it is very unhealthsome to bake mercury. It is poisonous.]

Sepúlveda
"They walked into the morgue and Ned said to me that he had noticed me when I was in the hospital where Ned works and thought to, eh... seek me out."

He expels his excess energy by bouncing the heavy menu back and forth between his fingers.

"In an ideal scenario, I will find better-suited mentors for them, but... you know how kids are, like sponges, I tell them things, they soak it up, they make what they will from what it is they suck up... I have no idea what will happen. I have contacts, I think, in the traditions most suited to them, but beyond that I am a bit at a loss."

crow
Andrés tells him that Ned works in a hospital, and there is a way in which Nick's eyes catch and lock on his, even if only briefly.  Perhaps the train of thought is clear, since Andrés met Nick at an event for hospital employees.  "What sort of work does he do?"  Interesting, that.  It frequently does not occur to him (perhaps primarily because he is married to a Hermetic) that many other magi also have careers.  Then again, Ned is an apprentice still.

The pages of the menu are flapping, and the Chakravanti's gaze is momentarily drawn toward it instead.  Perhaps he considers placing a hand on it to still its rustling.  But no.  Nick can focus.

He can focus because Andrés is saying something potentially important, potentially difficult for him to work through right now.  "It seems as though you feel you benefit from having them around too, from what you've said.  Are you at a loss because you feel they want more than what you have to offer them?"

Sepúlveda
"No no, no no no. No. They are a complete pain in my ass."

He sounds sincere but he is also a poor liar. Fervent in intention but not in result. Anyone who knows him or who has known him can tell the difference between Dr. Sepúlveda actually annoyed and Dr. Sepúlveda pretending to be annoyed and the difference tends to do with the cc's of blood expended in the interim.

No blood tonight. So he is talking out of the source of his supposed pain.

"He is a, ah, orderly. At Denver General? Question mark?" He is banging doctors in different coverage systems apparently. "As I said, or he said, someone said, maybe no one said: he sensed my resonance as I happened to be in the hospital--" Wooing a cardiologist. Who Nick saw from across the room. Anyway: "--I did not his, and, ah. Yes. Here we all are."

crow
A complete pain in his ass, Andrés says, and Nick, who is sitting with his head angled slightly downward (toward the menu, still) glances up at him, and maybe Sepúlveda misses it, that flicker of a private smile.  Nick is generally a kind man, and a responsible one; this is perhaps fortunate for the people that are constantly around him.

"I'm sure you could find ways to keep them on their toes."

He listens as Andrés tells him more about Ned, and this isn't so unusual a way for them to meet; it was how he and Andrés first took note of each other themselves, after all.  "Interesting.  Maybe I'll have to find out what floor he works on and drop in on him.  I don't wander out of palliative care very often."