[Just cuz! Awareness.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
Kiara Woolfe
The last occasion Nicholas Hyde had to hear from the Verbena known as Kiara Woolfe was through the medium of a certain feathered spirit they both knew. One that had arrived, demanding his attention and battering at his window, in the wee small hours of the morning to deliver a simple message: the mission had been successful and Alexander had been retrieved.
Few people had seen Kiara since in the days that followed. Grace was among the few and perhaps that was intentional. As successful as their retrieval mission had been, it also hadn't been without cost - for the brunette, that cost had been personal as well as magickal. Reality had not gifted her with a physical disguise without taking its retribution in return.
When Nicholas does hear from her, it's the invitation to join her at a tiny café buried in LoDo called Little Owl Coffee. A traditional Italian-run establishment hidden inside the so-called SugarCube building on its first floor, the establishment tucked away with its limestone floors and speckled marble walls. It's late enough in the day that traffic is spilling out into the streets and most respectable office workers are pushing toward the last handful of hours before liberation frees them from their office blocks and corner cubicles.
Unsurprisingly, the café the brunette has chosen is nearly empty, she's situated herself at one of its few tables; stirring a teaspoon around a cup of steaming (black) coffee and scrolling through something idly on a phone. As ever with the Verbena, she was dressed in absolutes. Black jacket and boots; silver adorning her lobes, fingers and neck and a bold red shade of lipstick painted over her mouth.
Her eyes were lined with black pencil and her long hair left out; casting her appearance, as ever, into something shy of wild. Some sprite of nature unleashed on an unsuspecting population. Glimpsing her now, she seemed the least likely creature to ever have been capable of infiltrating somewhere as sterile as a Union lab.
Nicholas Hyde
[Awareness, too. Why not.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )
Kiara Woolfe
The sense that Nicholas gets that tells him the Verbena is close is: a surge of rejuvenating energy, coupled with a low pulsing, as if his heart were beating loudly in his ears. It's the sensation of Spring; of the rebirth of a cycle; the regeneration of hope and life.
It was also, depending on whether or not he'd been introduced to the city's current Chantry, the same sense that its Node gave off; the hot springs thrived with the same energy. Being in Kiara Woolfe's near proximity was setting foot into nature; breathing in the first sweet scents after a storm.
Life, by any other name.
Nicholas Hyde
Nicholas had texted Kiara once, in the gloaming light of first dawn, to let her know that her message had been received. That was all: to say more would have been to defeat the purpose of sending Crow. Word had gotten around, so perhaps Kiara can extrapolate from that, enough to know that Nick and his wife did indeed pass the word along.
When he hears from her again, he gladly accepts her invitation. He is in fact one of the professionals currently filtering out of buildings, back out into the streets and re-entering daily life. Nicholas hasn't been in Denver for very long, and things like coffee shops and SugarCubes are things he is still in the process of discovering. Each person he encounters in Denver brings him something new.
Kiara can feel his approach before she can see him, and Nicholas: he's the quiet hush of first Spring dawning, he is the hallowed hills and barrows of a distant country, or the deepest reaches of untouched wood; he is Old Roads and a whisper of things that are secret, and sacred. He absolutely does not feel as though he belongs in a city at rush hour, and yet here he is.
His cheeks are red because he walked here, his curls windblown. He notices Kiara, too, before he sees her; it's evident in how quickly his eyes are drawn. "Hey," he says, and there's this friendly sort of regard for the Verbena as he steps over to her, unbuttoning his grey overcoat as he does. Beneath it he is wearing a striped blue buttondown and light grey dress pants; tasteful if unremarkable professional clothes. There is a hospital badge clipped to the lapel of his shirt, which he unclips and stows in a pocket as an afterthought. "I'll be right back, I'm going to get some coffee."
And minutes later, he will return, a steaming (black, with cinnamon) cup in his own hand. He sets it down first before he seats himself at the table, and he has spared a look for her. "I'm glad things went all right," is the first thing he says after.
Kiara Woolfe
She does feel him, before she sees him.
That much is evident in the way her fingertips pause in their scrolling and she inclines her face, just so, to regard the doorway just before he steps through it; bringing a small gust of crisp air and that solemnity of his; that sense of ancient, untouched fields of verdant green earth. There's a pause where the brunette's dark eyes slip over him and then away, back to her phone's screen.
Hey, he greets and Kiara tips her chin up and properly regards him with a subtle tick of her mouth upward at one corner. "Hey, yourself." He unclips a hospital badge from his shirt and stows it away and the pagan's eyes observe this wordlessly.
Kiara didn't wear any visible indications of her profession, her attire was, if anything, on the alternatively chic side. The dark jacket disguised only a silk blouse beneath and her silver necklaces seemed a collection of meaningless charms but for a few that bore indicators of her beliefs, if nothing else. A figure in submission with their hands outstretched above them, a pendant star.
A small hunk of quartz carved into a scrying adornment.
When he returns and settles in at the table, it seems as if Kiara has readied herself for him, or at the very least, made concessions for their conversation by setting her phone down and instead cradling her coffee between her palms, her eyes on the pedestrian traffic weaving by the windows. They return to him after a beat and she offers the first true smile she has.
"I am too, for Alexander's sake, if nothing else." A hesitation, a hint of apology somewhere, contained in her voice. "I wasn't sure that night what could be trusted to send word." A curl of her mouth. "I figured if anyone would understand, you might."
Nicholas Hyde
He doesn't touch his coffee yet, either to fold his hands around it or to lift it to drink. Nick has settled into his chair, and his movements are silent too; it has been observed about him that he has an almost spectral quality as he moves through the world around him. He does throw a shadow, which, sometimes, could be the only indication short of touching him that he does in fact have a physical mass.
Nick is less at ease here than he was the other times they met. Like her, perhaps, this sort of environment was not made for him, and he even looks a little out of place here, like some fey creature in a maze of metal and glass.
What Kiara says makes him smile, though the expression is evidenced mostly by a crinkling of skin at the corners of his eyes and mouth. His tells are more often than not subtle things. "I was happy to get the visit. I was hard to wake up though, I'm pretty sure Crow had a laugh at my expense." It wouldn't be the first time.
"How is Alexander holding up?"
Kiara Woolfe
Kiara Woolfe certainly feels as if she belongs, like him, outside of these cages built of glass and steel.
Certainly, like their expedition to speak to the spirits before Alexander's rescue, she'd seemed far more in her element surrounded by rolling hills and old, towering trees. Not so much that the Verbena wasn't present or in the moment but that she seemed too vibrant a creature to enjoy the city limitations for long stretches. Kalen likened the brunette to a Lynx, a wild, prowling predator.
Beguiling and deceptively docile for its relative size and appearance but - a wild thing none the less.
The likeness was not so far from the truth. Certainly Kiara could offer turns of her eyes or a sharp, edged smile that seemed to suggest at some caged desire to react; to flex her baser instincts in response to opinions or thoughtless actions (Woolfe by name and by nature, perhaps).
Still, she seems content enough now, to sit across from Nicholas with her legs crossed neatly at the knee and ankle; considering his question. How was Alexander holding up? There's a flicker that crosses her face; a sense of some uncertain feeling toward the Orphan.
"Okay, I think." She sets her cup down. "They hadn't begun to do anything physical to him other than repair his knee, the conditioning was entirely psychological so far as we've been able to deduce." She keeps her voice soft, private. Her dark eyes venturing toward the counter idly, keeping a tab on the barista's proximity to them. "You haven't met Alexander but he was already - cautious, about who he trusted. About - being what he was.
I don't know if what he went through is going to push him in the right direction, or - " She skims her fingertips along the edge of her cup. "I know he changed, while they had him. He's gotten stronger. To go through a Seeking while in that situation, I can't even imagine what it must have been like."
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