The parity of souls

Serafíne
The afternoon is positively balmy.  Nearly fifty degrees, with a cold disc of late January sun gleaming like a lozenge through high gray clouds.  Warm as it is, there is something in the air - some damp chilliness - that warns of dropping temperatures, cold rain, ice and snow.  Some lick of mountain air, some tongue of frost on the wind.
That gray light has a watery, painterly feel, especially so late in the afternoon, but there's still enough brightness that a certain creature's enormous sunglasses do not look wholly out of place, at least, not until she heads inside.  Sera walked here.  She's only been up for a couple of hours, max, and has somehow managed to get herself showered and dressed and out of the house while the sun's still in the sky.  Accompanied today by a tawny, brawny adolescent dog who probably should be on a leash, and isn't, but walks pretty companionably at her side right up to the 'dog parking' station outside the store.  There Sera crouches down to Sid's level and unloops a lead from around her shoulders, attaches it to Sid's spiked black leather collar, and in turn hooks the lead to one of the 'dog parking' hooks before straightening and disappearing inside.
Doesn't bother taking off her sunglasses, Sera.  Not even while she's fiddling with her phone and trying to claim and steer a cart and remember what the fuck she wanted and navigate, you know, the store.  Strangers can be forgiven for assuming she's Somebody or maybe that she's Nobody.   She has that feeling about her, and this combination of a strange and dirty glamour and a learned helplessness with ordinary things like Shopping for Groceries that reads, absolutely, like celebrity.  Or: conversely, like a refusal of all the rules of ordinary life: turn on, tune in, drop out.
Nicholas Hyde
For many people, this day is the extension of the weekend.  Many of them did their shopping earlier in the day and are now at home, gathered around their kitchen tables or sitting in front of the TV.  They've scented that shift in the air, the biting chill in the wind that means that they should go home and stay there until responsibility forces them to come out.
Hospital staff, on the other hand, are used to not getting the same days off as the rest of the world.  People don't stop getting sick or stop dying on holidays.  Nick, new and therefore the low man on the totem pole when it comes to requesting days off, was therefore at work today.
Wandering somewhere between the scones and cinnamon bread and the far healthier, more practical produce section, a head of dark curly hair and its owner can be seen flitting about.  He is not harried, but like Serafine, seems like he might be just a little out of place in such a setting.  Business casual dress and a dark green puffy jacket do very little to offset the somber set of his eyes and mouth, or the way in which the air around him seems a little more still, hushed even.
He picks up a bell pepper and examines it before dropping it into the basket hanging off his arm.  A little far away at the moment, perhaps, detached from the physical - or, as his coworker would name it, "not being mindfully present."
[Wits + Awareness: Too spaced out to pick up on weird stuff?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )
Serafíne
Per + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
Serafíne
Our Sera has managed to wrestle on of the little red carts out of their holding area and is piloting it with her forearms and one foot braced below on a crossbar, hop-steering while she texts one of her housemates to try to figure out where she can find the two or three things that were missing from her house when she woke up.  She isn't used to waking up to a not-properly-stocked fridge, mind.  She is used to waking up to whatever she wants whenever she wants it.  More properly: the electric kettle put on by not-precisely-magick when she first stirs, and her Darjeeling already steeping when she stumbles down the stairs.  I mean, sometimes she finds herself stiring her own eggs in a seasoned cast-iron pan with her hair a mess, her body still warm from sleep, her hangover a throbbing, solid presence in both temples, watching the whites string themselves to solidity over and over again but -
- well, neither here nor there.  Today, though: no tea (or rather: not the kind she likes) and some note about a list and here she is and here someone else is, too.  That assertion of resonance (Hallowed) so bright and immediate and new and she feels it, somehow, in the center of her spine, behind her eyes, beneath her breast.
That empty red cart becomes a mage-seeking missile of sorts.  Not at all shy, Sera pilots it straight for Nicholas.    Glances from the pepper in his basket to his profile, and back again.
"I have a whole fucking list and no idea where any of this shit is."  She says and it's one of those moments where she couldn't possibly be speaking to him except she is: clearly one hundred percent speaking to him and also: the way she feels.  None of this is a coincidence.  "Wanna help me figure it out?"
Serafíne
Visceral, enthralling, unbridled, incandescent: Sera feels like the beginning of a night you never want to see end, like the last catch of a breathone takes before plunging off a cliff, like the sensation of falling turning into flight, and the filament of flight bursting into flame.  Or perhaps not bursting: but something else, brilliant, a constant, consumptive glow.
Something else, too: beneath or around or above or perhaps adorning that, not intrinsic to her but localising somewhere in or on or around her: this sensation of warmth, utter warmth, and flight that absolutely meshes with the bright, addiction, gut-wrenching sense of freedom she carries with her: sun-drenched, and soaring.
Nicholas Hyde
All of Denver's resonances are new, to Nick.  New enough that they could get lost in the background, drowned in the whirl of new sensations and sights and sounds, were he not feeling particularly attuned to them today.  Work has left him reflective, as it so frequently does, each day an eight hour meditation on the nature of life and death.  He experiences that katabasis each morning and afternoon with each of his clients, immerses himself in the sacred before emerging again.
He is silent glades, falling snow, the deep breath a person takes to steady themselves and take strength.  His energy is not near so overwhelming as Serafine's, and yet there's something a little eerie about him all the same.
Nick's hand is just beginning to wander toward the onions when he glances up, his breath a sharp thing that within seconds he levels out.  He senses this, something like elation, something like consumption, before he sees Serafine, and so he straightens and turns just in time for -
I have a whole fucking list and...
Nick's appraisal is quick, and obvious enough for it to be clear that he is not a man easily caught off guard, but perhaps is a man slow to respond.  "Sure," he says, dropping the onion into his basket alongside the pepper.  Then, wry, "I'm not sure how much help I'll be, but Trader Joe is the same anywhere you go, I guess."  He extends a hand.  "I'm Nick."
Serafíne
"Hi Nick.  I'm Serafíne," the creature responds, reaching out to take his hand in one of her own: right to right.  Mind, she has to juggle the iPhone she is cradling in both palms to do so, but,  " - you can call me Sera."  This quick, curve of her mouth that is perhaps too responsive to be wry.
Her hands, well: they are limned in a close scrawl of tattoos.  Script of some sort: names and dates perhaps, largely unreadable except for the flash of black ink here on her wrist, framing her palms, etched into the narrow space between her fingers.  She's wearing a perfectly stereotypical leather jacket that has this very-well-worn quality to it over an unzipped black hoodie over, in turn a - something? bra, or bustier perhaps, or halter or crop-top that covers just enough for modesty and otherwise: skin skin skin.  Denim cut-offs and fishnets and combat boots just as well-worn as the leather jacket complete the ensemble.  An old bronze ring on her right index finger imparts that other sensation, which is with her but not of her, of drifting on a thermal, basking in the sun.  Still: her fingers are objectively cold.  The day is comparatively warm, sure.  She's dressed ridiculously.
Doesn't seem inclined to stop talking, either.
"I was just gonna get some milk for my tea but then everyone started texting me other shit that I should get.  Jicama and aracini balls and what the fuck are aracini balls and creme fraiche and some other shit.  Cookie butter and dog treats and bacon."  All of this she is half-reading from an exchange of texts on her phone, dark blue eyes darting to the screen, then back to him. Trader Joe is the same anywhere you go, I guess. A certain sort of animal shrewdness in her gaze, then, which feels: well, deliberate.  A choice.  Oh!   "You're new in town," she almost, but not quite, crows.

She is always so pleased with herself when she figures things out.
Nicholas Hyde
"Nice to meet you, Sera."  Nick's handshake has the ease of someone meets new people routinely throughout the day; it is accompanied by eye contact and a faint smile, feels genuine but not practiced.  A sort of impersonal warmth.
A few of his curls had corkscrewed down over his brow when he straightened earlier, and he shakes them away now, absorbing the list of demands Sera's roommates have apparently made.  "You're popular today," he says, as she reads from her texts.  He gestures toward the waiting produce, a brief cutting motion.  "I'm getting things for dinner.  You can come with me and maybe we can both figure out what the fuck aracini balls are."
His voice has the pleasant, steady timbre of someone who talks for a living.  As he passes the jicama, he reaches down without looking, picks up one of the lumpy roots, and hands it to Sera.  "I am," he says, mirroring that not-quite-exultant expression back at her.  Nick is pleased when other people figure things out, or, perhaps more specifically, Nick is pleased when other people are pleased.  "I just got here a few weeks ago."
He idles on, pausing only to pick up a bag of tomatoes.  "My wife has been here a little longer than me.  Have you met Pen?"
Serafíne
Nick tells Sera that she is popular today and:
"I'm a popular girl," she tosses back, and one absolutely has a sense of precisely that.  Some ball lofted into the air because how the fuck could she do anything but toss that one back.  This is accompanied by a lively and thoroughly self-aware smirk as she does her hop-wheeling-forearm steer of the cart alongside him through the produce section.
He finds the jicama almost without looking.  She accepts it, rolls it around in her hands, all the trange nobby, fibrous bits of it, her sunglasses reflecting the lights in the space, her calloused, nimble fingers figuring it out.  She is: surprised that it looks like that, isn't she?  She thought it was white or something.
He asks if she's met his wife: Pen.  And she hmms over that, sharp brows coming together over the dark glasses, you know, searching her brain and ?
??
is very much the expression tucked on her spare mouth, her sharp features.  "I met," ???  "someone else new.    A while ago.  I don't -  What does she look like?"
Nicholas Hyde
"Red hair," Nick says, "and very Hermetic."
He glances down at her out of the corner of his eye as they round the corner and arrive at meat and dairy, where he points out the creme fraische.  Stops to heft packages of chicken and chorizo into the basket.  The smile at the corner of his mouth says that he is not Hermetic himself, and suspects this of Sera as well.  What are the Traditions, without a little light ribbing?
That searching expression, he notes: magi that feel like Serafine, it's rare that they don't know everyone.  Or, perhaps more appropriately, it's rare that everyone doesn't know of them.  "I was just curious.  Neither of us have really had a chance to get out much yet," he adds, his tone tinged with apology.
Serafíne
That still-puzzled threading of her expressive brows above the ridiculous sunglasses: which says that she is searching.  Thinking.  Thinking, which is something she finds much harder to do than feeling.  Feeling is easy.  She feels everything.  It's what she was made for.
They keep going.  She doesn't notice much as the produce gives way to meat-and-dairy.  The lights and the smear of strangers and the gleam of a perfectly piled-up pyramid of oranges that is more-or-less begging to be either admired or sabotaged.  For some reason, she picks up an apple and puts it in her cart.  Puts it back then because there are tiny little red bananas instead and they are fucking adorable and who is that lady there giving shit away?
While Nick picks out a package of chicken breasts and some chorizo for dinner, Sera leaves her cart beside him wanders over to the free sample station.  Takes like four or five of the little cups and wanders back over to her cart and puts three of the samples down in a row on the little shelf-seat beside her jicama, handing him the other two.  Churros: still warm from wherever, and a dulce de leche sauce.
"I think Dan and I did meet her.  For like two seconds?  Does she feel like the Song of Roland or some shit like that?  A Knight of the Round Table?  It was this holiday fair, thing.  I was just back - " a brief sense of: arrest, suspension that appears and is gone, quite as quickly as it arose.  "I'd just gotten back in town.   It was just in passing."
Nicholas Hyde
Sera wanders, and Nick's head twists around to follow her to see where she's headed.  Nick spends so much of his time in the Sleeper world that at times, when he interacts with other people like him, he has to stretch to recall that they don't behave like Sleepers.  Sleepers don't have such disregard, such forgetfulness, for social mores and the unspoken rules most people follow; they don't move with that kind of freedom.
Nick, he's still bound by all that.  For now.
"Thank you," he says, with evident pleasure as he takes up one of the little sample cups, the one with the bit of churro contained within.  His eyes crinkle at the corners at the words Sera uses to describe Pen: Song of Roland, Knight of the Round Table.  "That's her.  I'll have to tell her you said that."
The way Sera's speech gives for a moment, as though it were flexing under some weight - Nick notices that.  It's his job to notice.  "Where are you coming back from?"
Serafíne
Nick, this stranger, notices that flex, that give, that sense of - something, not precisely cessation but something-passing - and Sera, listen, she notices him noticing.  An artful lilt of her sharp chin, the gleam of her glasses turned on him, lifted up to the lights.  Something about her mobile features made still: not in alarm or sorrow or grief or anything except: in that moment, awareness.  A new consideration that plays strangely on her features.
"I was in Thailand.  Then I was in LA.  Then I was invisible," wry twist of her mouth, here, deliberate, absolutely.  It is less about surrender, more about defiance. But, well.  So is everything else about her.  "technically I was invisible when I was in LA too, but.  It was the weekend before Thanksgiving.  Maybe you shouldn't tell her, though.  I know some Hermetics.  I mean if I told Hawksley you look like a Knight of the Round Table I'd never hear the end of it."
Nicholas Hyde
Hawksley, Dan.  Unfamiliar names, though this is to be expected when one is brand new in a city.  Nick has to process this; it's not the first time he's moved across the country, but it is the first time that he's done so since Awakening.  It's different from a new job, after all - most chantries don't hold Meet and Greets.  No one gets to shadow until they know the job and are familiar with the city.  The stakes are higher.
"You're right.  I suppose I can spare you her reaction."  Though really, Nick suspects some part of Pen would be amused or pleased.  He is quiet for a moment while he chews on the churro from the paper cup.  "You said you were invisible?"
His tone is casual enough - he's heard stranger, particularly from other magi.  He makes eye contact often enough to indicate that he's not only asking to be polite, though: he wants to know.
Serafíne
Sera has plowed right through from one subject to the next because no, no thank you, she does not want -
- but he returns to it.  This rhetorical trick, right, that reminds her of Pan: his solid, perhaps even stolid persistence.  His confessor's patience.  They have turned into the frozen-food aisle, the magickal land of every appetizer, ever.  A tall woman with a clingy red-headed three-year old tosses a box of frozen happy-face potato puffs past her child, into the cart, then angles past them.  The store is not crowded, except for - here and there - the employees restocking the shelves.  But this woman Sera watches as she approaches, draws abreast, passes them.  This woman, Sera seems to watch even after she has gone.
An expression of a kind of pained but thoughtful patience present on her face.  This narrow frown that is more about searching for words, searching for precision with words than -
"To Them."   So the creature explains, with a lift of her chin towards the woman, the stranger, who has by now disappeared around the corner of the aisle.  "Paradox or something.  I was ivnvisible to Sleepers.  "Not even Dan could see me.   I mean, a helluva lot of people I know wouldn't care or notice.  Or would be like: thrilled that no one could interrupt them at the library.
"For me it really, really sucked."
Nicholas Hyde
In the land of Appetizer, Nick hefts a box of mochi into his basket, which at this point is beginning to look rather full.  He's a slender man, and he's beginning to shift the basket back and forth to either arm as his biceps weary.
Paradox.  To someone at Nick's relative level of enlightenment, Paradox is often a distant bogeyman: he has experienced it, once or twice, but not like this.  There are many things more experienced magi would be concerned about that Nick moves blithely past.  Concern about discussing such things near Sleepers, for example.
For Sera, invisibility really sucked.  "I can see that," Nick says, with a gentle furrowing of his brow and again, this second appraisal.  "You seem like you like people.  That must have been hard."  He makes eye contact again, though not for so long a time as to make her feel awkward or exposed: such admissions are difficult enough.  He is aware of that.
He looks over his shoulder at the woman who had passed.  "They can see you now, though?"
Serafíne
"Sure."

A neat, rather specific touch-back of a glance.  The quiet edge of it, the dark glint of her glasses, the sweeping angle of her brow above the curve.  She doesn't bother glancing at the shelves, or the things on the shelves, though she does seem to enjoy piloting that cart: both forearms braced on the handle, tattooed hands loose and forward, spare frame angled just so.

"I left town.  It was too - " an arrest; her brow constricts in a very precise manner that seems to signify a strange and certain interiority.  She likes words, Sera.  Words on her tongue, in her head, on a page.  Words well-deployed, but she cannot unearth a word that means all the things she wants it to mean so she hesitates, lingers, searches.  " - creepy, and lonely, and painful, not in a way that clarifies.  Leaving was better.  It didn't hurt as much to be hidden from strangers.  But being invisible to people I love, excised from their lives - "

As if to emphasize the point: her phone buzzes again.  She glances at it.  Smiles, private.  Glances back: first his basket, then his profile.

"You can put your basket in my cart if you want.  Where the fuck are the dog biscuits, do you think?  Or the jerky.  Sid likes beef jerky too."

Nicholas Hyde
Nick, he is not so invested in appearing strong and masculine that he does not take her up on her invitation to put the basket in the cart.  He sets it down, careful to nudge the things she has already set inside out of the way so he does not crush them.  He digs the ball of his thumb into his forearm, working out a knot as he processes the things Sera has said.

Dog biscuits.  "I think in this next row over," he says, taking a light hold on the corner of the cart and wheeling it into the next aisle as they reach the end of the frozen goods.

Invisibility.  There are ways in which Nick understands this; he is a man with two lives, and never the twain shall meet.  Yet what she describes is different.  "Did it clarify, eventually?" he asks, because most painful experiences do, in some way.  Though perhaps not yet - often, these things take time.  Then, "Dan.  Is he a Sleeper?"

Serafíne
They've missed the aracini balls.  Somewhere in that long row of frozen foods.  That's alright.  The housemate who requested them was making a joke, texting a joke, which flew either under or over our Sera's radar even as it made him smile/smirk in the middle of a boring-retail-afternoon.  He didn't actually believe Sera capable of doing so mundane a thing as shopping for perishables other than booze and/or edible marijuana infused chocolates.

Nick asks her if the pain of her isolation clarified, eventually.  Sera hums, a quiet thread of consideration at the back of her throat, beneath her tongue.  Then, shrugs, a fluid hitch of her narrow shoulders.  "Sometimes."  Which is: true.  Though not in any way that is native to her soul.   "Dan's a - "  pause.  Consideration, wry.  " - sleepwalker, you could say.

"Your wife's folks have a more formal name for it.  You're really good at asking questions, you know that?"

Oh, dog treats!  Sera is almost inclined to buy one of each and every option.  Good thing they aren't in a Wegman's or she'd never be able to carry them all home.

Nicholas Hyde
Nick, too, reaches for a box of dog treats, almost as an afterthought.  It hasn't occurred to him to remember the aracini balls.  As much as Nick seems like he'd be the sort to have a good memory, he doesn't; there's a drifting, distracted sort of quality about him.  He's a man who notices a lot, who becomes absorbed in whichever of those things happen to be the most interesting.  Usually, that's the person he's with.

"A consor," he says, supplying the formal name.  His people, too, make use of them.  This is followed by a nod, slow, as he again processes her words, as though it has lent some clarity to him.  Perhaps it has.

Sera tells him he's good at asking questions, and his response is amused, a sort of good natured crinkling of his nose and the corners of his eyes.  "I'm a counselor.  I would hope so," he says.  Then, "I'm glad maybe everything is starting to make more sense.  In as far as you can make it make sense, I suppose.  What were you doing that caused the invisibility to happen?"

Nick is aware that Paradox is often the price (everything has one) of powerful magic.  Sera, she feels powerful to him, like one of the mentor-types he'd run into more frequently in the older, more established chantries of the east coast.

Serafíne
"Mmm."  Nicholas supplies the Name: consor, and Sera affirms it: yes, consor, that sounds in the back of her throat.  Except, "I don't really like that word, you know?  Makes him seem less-than-me.  Like a privileged servant or an organ-grinder's monkey."

And a sort of sobering of her expression: an awareness, as she hears her own thoughts aloud and finds that they fit, very precisely, into her experience of the world.  Even if: that's almost precisely the way she treats Dan, isn't it, in the eyes of someone outside, looking in.

Then Nicholas tells her that he is a counselor, and he is glad that things are making sense again, and Sera's mouth twists itself into a private little smirk.  Brief, that, so brief that it hardly surfaces before it smooths out into something else, with a brighter, lilting charm as Nick crinkles his nose.  And tells her he's a counselor, and asks another question.

"I fucked up a seeking."  So, no.  It was not some Great Working, some alteration of the tracking of the spheres.  "I mean, I think that's what it was.   Maybe I fucked around with time, yeah, maybe it was this ghost-thing at Wat Umong, but I guess it was me.  The last thing I remember is this tunnel beneath the Wat.  Then I woke up in LAX and no one could see me and no one could see me and nothing worked.  Not my phone, not my credit cards.  Nothing."

Dog treats acquired, the cart starts moving again, almost of its own volition.  No: wait.  She is pushing.  Nick may still be kinda steering: there is another endcap to circle, people to avoid.    A whole aisle of wine-and-beer-and-snacks to navigate.

Huh.  Sera's mouth seams, thoughtful, makes this supple moue.  All those bottles.  "Do you think they sell gin here?"

Nicholas Hyde
Nick hesitates in replying to this, this idea of a privileged servant, because he loves Pen and he respects her Tradition, and yet - "I think that's because that is generally how the Order sees them.  But I agree with you."

He misses that private smirk, evidently, since he doesn't remark on it or question it.  Or perhaps he doesn't.  He listens to her tell him she fucked up a Seeking.  She reached, but not far enough, maybe fell - yes, he's heard of this happening to people.  "I don't think they sell gin at grocery stores," he says, his tone generously implying the slightest bit of doubt, though he is very sure that they do not in fact.  He is very sure at this point that Sera does not grocery shop on her own very often.  "But I think I saw a liquor store on the other end of the strip."

There is some consideration of the rows and rows of bottles, before he reaches for a cabernet and sets it alongside the other items in the basket.  Nick's sideways glance as Sera talks about her Seeking is curious, and he lingers on this in that quiet way he has been processing the other things she has told him.  Perhaps he would like to know whether she has gone Seeking again, whether she was ultimately successful, but these are all very personal questions to ask.

Not that Sera seems as though she would mind, but then again.  So, he switches: "Are you much involved in the chantry here?"

Serafíne
Several things that earn Nick another considering glance from Sera.  He agrees with her: about consors, the concept of privileged servants, perhaps about something as bright and sure as equality, self-determination, privilege and the parity of souls.  God, the importance of choices and the ability to make them, maybe maybe maybe.  They are walking down the beer-and-wine aisle in Trader Joe's, an employee in a Trader Joe's t-shirt and jeans with a box-cutter in a holster cutting around them and with no gin in the offing Sera seems disinclined to shop this aisle except: alcoholic ginger beer.

"Oooh."  First she takes a picture of the squat little bottles, then she texts it to someone, then she puts two in her cart, and she does all of this without a hint of self-consciousness, though perhaps with a degree of self-awareness that expresses itself in the posture of her body or the twist of her mouth.

And Nick is right of course: Sera does not really go grocery shopping alone.  She finds herself sometimes doing things in places without knowing why or how or what time of day or night it is, and that deliberate invitation to dis/orientation, to confusion, to an immediate and hallucinatory experience of the world, to feeling is part and parcel of her magick.  Almost, perhaps, the whole of it.

Simple gifts.

"That's," hmmm.  He earns, once again, the certainty of her regard.  The gleam of her sunglasses beneath the store's lights, steady, steady, "complicated.  I guess the answer is, not really, no, not lately - "

The answer feels like the invitation to another question, but there's something else forward in her expression, a sort of furrowing, and hey - there are other people around.  Someone checking them out, Nick's basket separated from Sera's buggy and - Sera, sort of humming beneath her breath even as she turns back to him while the clerk zooms through her few purchases.

Nicholas Hyde
[Awareness is important.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 4, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Nicholas Hyde
Maybe maybe maybe.  Nick: he doesn't seem generally inclined to say just what he believes.  Whatever principles he holds (as a Chakravanti, as a counselor) he holds tightly to his chest: these are things to be acted on, not spoken of.  Words are wind.

There is again amusement that limns his angular features as Sera crouches down to photograph the ginger beer bottles.  "All kinds of modern wonders in the store, aren't there?" he says.  She is taking photos and sending them to a friend, and this gives him a moment to pull his phone from his pocket, to tap out a few words and send them.

Perhaps Pen will share his amusement at running into someone like them at Trader Joe's.

It does invite another question, and Nick was about to ask it, but the sudden thrum of energy (incandescent, unbrided, enthralling - the flame that draws moths, something deeper beneath that, more primal) stops his words in his throat.  Sets him on edge even, for a moment, before he understands exactly what is being Worked in front of him, and extrapolates.  "Too intrusive?" he asks, mildly.

Serafíne
That mind/life/entropy rote:  coincidental.  -1 (using unnecessary focus)  -1 (time, the taking of)  +1 (distracted, conversation)

Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (2, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne
Here they are at the check-out counter and no buggie between them.  That has been claimed by a clerk in the standard casual uniform who  zips through the groceries, understands without asking the separation of cart/basket, and would probably comment on the number of containers of dog treats except that Sera and Nick are clearly already involved in a conversation of their own, elliptical and allusory as it may be.

Too intrusive? Nick asks, and there is a scrim of an expression on Sera's sharp little mouth.  Brief, grim, apologetic even.  Oh, call it what it is: rue.  Even, on some level, fucking sober.

And, "Naw."  Says she, quietly.  The glasses conceal some of the nuance of her expression.  The delicacy as she looks down at the moving belt.  Then up, away, past the display of spring bulbs, through the front windows to the street beyond.  "It's more: I gotta be careful, especially with other people's shit, you know?  Rumor is: all's not quiet on the western front."

Sera hands over an AmEx to pay for her things.  Digs it out of the front pocket of her denim cut-offs.

Sobriety, that's it.  It suits her ill.

Nicholas Hyde
There's a smile that Nick directs toward the clerk, an expression that lies somewhere between friendliness and politeness and wanting to acknowledge someone who probably doesn't get acknowledged as a person very much.  Then he turns his attention back to Sera, the rueful twisting of her mouth.

Nick adds a chocolate bar to the other items he is purchasing.  "That's very considerate of you," he says, of Sera being careful of other people's shit.  The way he says this is very neutral, difficult to tell whether he approves or disapproves or whether it's just a simple statement of fact.  "I understand. It's better to be cautious."

He takes in this, that all's not quiet: perhaps he has heard this before, suspects on some level that there are Things Happening.  He is married to a Hermetic, after all, the Tradition that fancies itself the leader of the others, the one that usually has its fingers in all the pies.  "Are you keeping your head down then?"

He already has his debit card ready for the cashier, and swipes it once his items have been scanned.  The chocolate bar, some sort of caramel toffee concoction, he hands to Sera.  "Pen's suggestion."

Serafíne
Extending!

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (2, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne
The clerk smiles back at Nick.  The expression is neither cursory nor bright, but it is genuine, connected, physical: a sort of crest-and-retreat, back into studied neutrality.

--

Annd Sera, well, the way she stands - at the end of the check-out, a bag hefted out of the cart and held in hand, the picture windows behind her, framing her with the gray light of a late winter's afternoon, threading through her golden hair like (yes) a halo - looks, somehow, as if there were meant to be a chorus of the seraphim behind her, chanting holy holy holy, all burning swords and delirious zealotry and murdered children.  Still that working-of-magick in the background but: he profers a chocolate bar and she accepts the chocolate bar and grins, quick and bright, the very simple promise of her pleasure.

--

Is she keeping her head down, then?

Oh, no.  Sera shakes her head, no.  They are heading outside.  The doors swing open: as if by magick and then another set of doors ditto and the a bright blast of cold air.  She isn't dressed for it.  It doesn't seem to matter.  There's a brawny, adolescent dog in the dog parking right outside the front doors who is all sudden-alert in a way that reads as playful not business and no one else in sight.

Sera shrugs, all negligent really.  And  replies, absolutely straightforward: "I don't think I could keep my head down, if I wanted to.  Not really my style, you know?  You're not a tech, are you?"

Nicholas Hyde
Sera: for a moment, she burns, something far more intense than the manner of Nick's own Working in spite of the similarities that could initially be perceived.  Nick, see, there's something much older, more primal (before Time was recorded, before anyone cared to) underlying his own working.  Perhaps the clerk doesn't know what to make of the two of them, perhaps he feels it.

Either way, they are gone.  Out the door, their bags in hand, with the chocolate bar exchanging hands.  Nick, too, looks pleased that she has accepted.

He directs a smile toward the dog, something somehow warmer than the one he had given the clerk moments before.  (People can be less inhibited with animals; there are fewer expectations, fewer nuances.  Fewer complications.)

Sera asks if he is a Technocrat, and again, that amusement that crinkles his features could speak for him even before he has answered.  "Me?  No.  I'm Chakravanti," he says, offering up his Tradition without reservation.  Then: "Why, have they been a problem around here recently?"  Ah, but that  - Nick knows more than he is saying right now.  It's not a lie, not exactly, but there is no need for him to ask the question.  He has someone else's answer already, but he is looking for hers.

Serafíne
Sid, see, she senses shit.   The warmth of that smile with which Nick favors her, for example.    The beast is sporting a spiked black leather collar that seems thoroughly in keeping with Sera's sartorial flourishes and is tied to the wall with a leash that Sera promptly unhooks from both collar and wall.  Sid crouches, playful and experimental, in a way that suggests that she is about to tear off down the street hoping to be chased: but no.  She doesn't go far, romps away and then back and allows herself to be buffeted and caressed and adored by her mistress.  Her friend.  Sera chooses the Trader Joe's brand dog treat that most resembles a snausage and opens the box and offers one or maybe five to Sid without reservation.

There is more romping, and Nick answers Sera and Sera cants her head and he can feel her focus on him in that moment, a gleaming and reflective consideration eminant from those glasses, and then: that focus intensifies.  A beat of a moment.  Another: before she both nods and also lets go of that Working.

"I haven't had a problem with them." So Sera says, with a neat little shrug. She is already rising from her low crouch.  Sid, freed of the lead, does not venture far.  She understands complexities like traffic and stays close to Sera unless given the go ahead to let go and runrunrun.  "But I've heard that they're changing again.  Getting more militant.  Hard to know what to believe, you know?  You asked about the chantry?"

Nicholas Hyde
Nick waits while Sera favors the dog with one (or five) dog treats, holding both of his bags in either hand.  He hasn't drifted across the parking lot to head back to his car, parked at the hospital farther up the road.  He is patient, and he is not particularly in a rush (though Pen, who may be hungry, may object.)

"That's what I've heard," Nick says, as Sera explains that they've gotten militant lately.  That they're changing.  He doesn't say what else he's heard, though it's likely it's something.  As Sera said: it's hard to know what to believe.

"I just wondered," he says, in response to her question.  "I haven't really been able to get up to the chantry yet myself.  I heard there were fewer of us out in places like this than there are on the east coast.  I thought maybe you were a ranking member, the deacon or something."  Though he's aware, too, that rank and file is handled differently in many places, particularly out here where Hermetics don't carry so much weight.

Serafíne
Nick thinks that she might be the deacon or something.  Our Sera is straightening now, and she is hefting up her own backs, and here the dog at her knees makes her seem even more feral, even more mythic, right?   And there is nothing mannered about her.  You'd think Artemis, seeing the girl-and-dog and something about her profile that belongs to seekers and hunters, but: no, not Artemis.  Maenad.

Maenad, pleased in the parking lot that someone assumed she might be deacon-or-something of a chantry, and this is precisely how that expression crests: the crisp curve of her delight settling and sobering into something else, more present and complicated.  "I was pretty involved," she explains, sobering, "not long after I got here a few years ago.  Maybe a year ago, or so, Annie came back.  Brought her coterie, Trinity.  Annie owns the land.

"They keep it open, you know?

"But it really feels like the chantry belongs to them.

"And," an almost physical comma, here.  "Deacon.  I'm pretty flattered, but I don't think anyone here takes me that seriously.  They're wrong, but - "

This slash of a smile, beneath her sunglasses.  It is brimming with a distinctive and characteristic bravado.

"You and your wife should come to one of my parties.  719 Corona Street.  Door's always open."

Nicholas Hyde
Deacon-or-something: this wasn't something Nick had said with the intent to be flattering.  Though it was a fair assumption: the strength, the easy conversation, the apparent well connectedness; these are things he has come to expect in chantry leaders.  Not always Deacons, but council members even.

Still, Sera smiles, and he is pleased to have elicited that reaction.  He doesn't hide it.  Nick, he's a somber man, for all of his occasional dry amusement and the good humor that frequently underlies his words, but he still basks in the positive emotion.  There's little enough of it in the world.  He picks up on the complexity of response, too: that she was pretty involved, but then someone came back, and now presumably she is less involved.  That's the way it goes, sometimes.

"Thanks for the invitation.  I'll extend it to Pen," he says, with a gracious dip of his head.  He doesn't ask what kind of party, because he isn't sure and it might not be their kind of party necessarily - but the invitation is what's important.  "Maybe we can have you over once there are fewer boxes in our house."

Because oh, right now it's a mess: cross country moves will do that.

Serafíne
There is, indeed, little enough positive emotion in the world writ large.  And there is, also: a helluva lot of it wrapped in the spare frame of the Ecstatic with whom Nick is conversing.  Positive emotio tempered by grief and suffering assuredly, suffering of a mode that imparts both clarity and opacity, but beneath it all: this impulse to passion, to pleasure, to love, to joy.  Goddamnit, she can't even bloody help it.

In the midst of it all, though, the creature beside him practically basks in the nuance.  Favors him with a side-slung look that would seem - perhaps  - arch if he could see her eyes.  Instead; a sense of awareness, of consideration, which lingers on his profile until it seems lush.

"Mmm." Her response to his not-quite-invitation.  Which is to say, his invitation: just not-quite-now.  "Gimme your number?"



His car is somewhere in the parking lot.  between the dog and her state of not-quite-sobriety, it is easy to assume that she walked here and will be walking home.

Nicholas Hyde
This is easy enough, providing her with his phone number: he hasn't bothered to switch it over yet, evidenced by the unfamiliar area code.  Perhaps he won't; area codes mean little enough anymore, now that people move across the country and carry their phones with them, the number almost a unique identifier of where they're from, where they've been.  He provides the number to Sera, spells his last name - "With a Y, not an I."  He does not say "like Jekyll and," which he could, because that joke has been made and made often by people who were not him.

"Did you walk far?"  This, a courtesy.  Nick has been working for several years now and so the time of eternal pedestriandom is relatively behind him.  Still, he remembers.

And Sera doesn't seem entirely sober, now that he thinks about it.

Serafíne
This is a familiar, physical, entirely non-magickal ritual.  Nick offers up his phone number and his name, spells it even.  Eschews the joke he could make about it, which is for the best after all.  Sera might not get it.  Her touchstones with the ordinary are equal parts routine and archaic, and her taste in literature runs to French symbolism and lyric poetry, not Victoriania, gothic or no.

And Sera: types in his name and number and then texts him back.  ITS ME.    Why not?  There may even be a pic of Nick attached to that text.

They are parting ways, now, but: he inquires, out of courtesy, whether she walked far.

That slash of a smile again, beneath the frame of her sunglasses.  "Not far.  Anyway, Sid likes to walk.

"Have a lovely dinner, Nick.  See you around."

Society of Ether 101

Nick
In other parts of the country, December and most of January were unseasonably warm.  In Denver, there have been numerous blizzards already, light winter snowfalls that rival some of the worst ones he saw back in Connecticut.  Inside the house it is warm, still ah, fragrant with the sharp smell of new paint and cardboard; their resonance has not had a chance to seep into the floorboards yet, hasn't had a chance to make this a place of sacred passions, of brilliance.
Nick has just collapsed on the tarp-covered couch, dotted here and there with paint, which now dots Nick here and there; it doesn't matter, he was spotted anyway.  "I'm done," he calls into the other room.  He could have just made some wordless groan; his voice alone implies his done-ness.
Pen
Penelope swans in with a tumbler of Lagavulin. Classical music is playing in the other room. Liszt, that rockstar. Her hair is up, her bangs are floofy, and she is wearing a Sex Pistols t-shirt. Just over the threshold, she looks around admiringly.
"I hope it looks good dry."
Nick
Where he'd been a puddle, he lifts himself on an elbow, roused perhaps by the sight of the Lagavulin.  Pen admires, and as Nicholas pushes himself back into a sitting position he says, "If it doesn't, let's just cover it in someone else's paintings."
He discovers, as he lifts his hand to unfluff and smooth down his hair (sweat is as bad for it as humidity), that there is a large mat of paint.  He does not have the energy for horror, only resignation.  "Either way, I think I'm done today."
Pen
Pen laughs (brightly, too) at Nicholas's expression after giving him a moment of study, and she wanders over to the couch. Sinks onto it with one knee, and offers him her tumbler. "Crow with a blaze," she says, of the paint in his hair.
"You did very good work. There are paninis in the other room..."
Nick
Nick takes the tumbler and, lifting it, scents the alcohol first before sipping from it.  He then hands it back to her and rises.  After brushing his hands over his shirt and shorts and examining the bottoms of his feet to ensure that he isn't about to track wet paint into the rest of the house, he starts to wander into the other room.  "I'm always surprised Thane didn't end up with a bird name," he says, with a sidelong glance and a smile.
He has reached the kitchen, where he reaches into the cabinet for another tumbler.  "I never told you.  I ran into the first new Willworker I've met here last night, at that party."  Implied: the one he did not drag her along to, thinking that two magi in the room would make for chaos.
Pen
"He would be Kingfisher, or Merlin," Pen says. She lingers in the just-painted room, which she did not help with, looking over everything with great satisfaction. While she is doing this, Nicholas in the kitchen will see Pen's work (Work) spread out over the kitchen table, diagrams and some shopping lists of ingredients she needs. Two china blue and white patterned plates on the counter, one with half a sandwich left and mostly crumbs, the other will a full sandwich: but what is it? Wild foraged mushrooms, sliced heirloom tomatoes, an avocado and red onion pesto with a bit of sriracha tang, and cheese: two kinds, one smokey, one creamy, dripping out of the side.
"Who did you meet?"
Nick
"Merlin would delight him, I'm sure."  Nick splashes some of the liquor into his tumbler, swirling it in the glass and (heathen) adding a drop or two of water from the sink.  Pen can't see it: his gaze fixates for a few seconds on the swirl, lost in thought, before he wanders over to the table.
He drops down at the table, and the pause is so long she could begin to think he'd forgotten to answer.  No: his mouth is just full.  Then, finally, "He's an Etherite.  Works in one of the morgues, actually."  He flicks one of the mushrooms that had fallen into a plate into his mouth, and then, "There was some sort of punch there that disgraced its ancestors and he made it into sangria.  You need to show me how to do that."
Pen
"Swift bright bird," Pen says, softly, and to herself; she is thinking of Thane.
Only comes back into the kitchen after Nick begins answering her, leaning her shoulder against the doorframe rather than coming near. Her eyebrows leap up. Works in one of the morgues, actually. Shadow across her gaze; sword, catching somebody else's movement. "That's one place to get materials for free, if you're sneaky," she says, and then:
Laughs, again. "I don't know how a Society man would do it, probably some fiddly little machine, but I can show you how a Hermetic would."
The right way, her tone says. "What was he like?"
Nick
"He had a lot of things that jangled in his pockets.  I have no idea how it would turn water to wine, but it did."  Nick has to consider her question then: he and the Etherite didn't necessarily talk all that long, after all.  First impressions are first impressions.  He chews while he thinks: he is making quick work of the food.
"Sad," he says, finally.  "But in a way where his sadness has grown into and along with him.  He's chicano.  Short friendly guy."  A pause, and he offers in addition, "It sounds like his wife died and was Verbena.  I got the impression he's here because the Technocracy destroyed a Grove that was important to her."
Pen
[Eh, chicano Etherite married to a Verbena who died. there could be loads of them, the country is huge. but Wits one jump ahead to see if she's like HUH I WONDER IF IT'S THAT GUY.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 6) ( success x 1 ) [Doubling Tens]
Pen
"Hmm."
Penelope doesn't say much more for a time, content to fondly regard the paint splotch in Nicholas's curls while she thinks about the Sons of Ether -- pardon her, Society of Ether men and women -- she has known, and the Verbena. New England is small, and eventually one knows everybody.
Nick
Nick has finished the sandwich; there are a few crumbs left, but nothing resembling any sort of vegetable or splotch of cheese or pesto.  The spot of paint in his hair, the color of the sun at twilight, has been forgotten.  He has turned his attention to his glass.  "He suggested dinner, at some point.  Had you heard about the Grove?"
There is the tiniest flash of what could be pride: perhaps he knows someone before Pen, and this is news to her.  This rarely happens.
Pen
"I don't think so. The Verbena were hit hard here in Denver, back during those good old bad days the Masters are always talking about when the War was a smoldering coal heap of burn your fingers off battlefields, but as far as I know it was some time ago. Tell me about it!"
Brief pause. "Dinner, hm? Did you like him?"
Nick
There is a nod when she talks about Back When; the war wasn't that long ago, but it still feels distant to him at least.  He did not Awaken into it.  He has a good sense of continuity, of the idea that Fate is one long thread that can be pulled forward or back, but it doesn't always assist with personal investiture.  "I don't know much about it other than that it's gone," he says, regretfully.  "That's all Andres really told me."
As to whether he liked him: "I liked him enough.  It seems worthwhile getting to know people here."
Pen
The (Enchantress, remember [gloaming around a fairy hill]) red-haired Wizard leaves the doorframe, perhaps because her scotch is finished now. Clink, as the glass hits the counter; clink, as she knocks it with her elbow in turning to face Nicholas. "You should make friends," she says, with a grin.
And then, and this, as she drops into the chair opposite him -- full of languid gracelessness, even her gestures are sometimes flamboyant as fuck. "Andrés Sepúlveda." She hasn't quite settled into the chair; the name is just a memory, her wits and intention haven't caught up with her mouth or her memory.

Nick
Pen drops into the chair opposite him; Nick has stretched his legs back in front of him, tilting his chair back onto its hind legs.  There's something relaxed and content in his expression, and paint-splattered as he is it may not be difficult to imagine him as the daydreaming child he probably was once, each teacher of his despairing and telling him he was going to fall back and crack his head open.
Mention of the man's name brings him fully present, his eyes settling on Pen with a sort of surprise.  "That's him.  Do you know him?"
Pen
[.... >.> I CAN HIDE THINGS. From Nick, anyway. HEH HEH.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4) ( botch x 1 )
Pen
[Damn it, dice.]
Nick
[Oh how the tables have turned!]
drone
[oh  my god]
Pen
"I don't, um, hm. He's not, certainly I would not say that I don't know anything about his wife's death or the abominations against the natural order of, necromancy no, I - what? I think; did you hear that?"
Penelope's gray eyes are quite wide and she hooks a thumb over her shoulder, half-turning her head. She looks very earnest in what is probably the worst attempt to lie or at least conceal be tempered that she has had for a while. "Did we get a dog?"
NoreallyNickdidyouguysgetadog? Brief pause.
"I think - are we getting a dog in the future? Because I; wait, what was the question? About Sepúlveda? No. Wait, know him? As in ..."
"What?"
Nick
[Don't laugh.  Laughing is mean.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )
Nick
"Hear...what?"
The lie is so terrible that it almost works.  Nick's eyes, amber etched in smoked quartz, even widen a little as hers do, as he follows her thumb, and then - Did we get a dog?
Nick has to suck in a breath.  He is steeling himself against what would otherwise have been teary-eyed, side-splitting laughter at her expense.  What comes out instead is a shadow of this, as he lifts his hand to grab at his lower lip, partially hiding his mouth and his smile along with it.  His eyes betray him but then again, he wasn't trying to hide it.  "Pen, are you...it sounds like you know something you're not telling me."
Pen
Wide, wide eyes. They are brilliant in color. "What?"
Bat, bat of dark lashes. Total innocence, really. Absolutely convincing.  "It does?"
Brief pause. "But the dog," and her voice gets all wandery, because she knows. She knows he caught her. She knows how terrible that was.
Penelope drops her face into both of her hands.
That way no one can see her shame, or at least she can't see her shame. Her face is very, very hot.

Nick
She has done one thing, which is momentarily distract him from the fact that she used the words 'abominations against the natural order' and 'necromancy' (but yes, of course he will bring it back around, gone does not mean forgotten).  Pen covers her face with her hands, and Nick leans forward, letting the legs of his chair clatter back against the hardwood, and lays a hand on her knee, giving it an affectionate squeeze.  "You almost had me," he says, because it's almost true.
A beat.  "So does this mean we're getting a dog?"  His own look of wide-eyed innocence.
Pen
Face still hidden. "Do you want one very much? Perhaps you can take care of one on a trial basis."
Pen thinks dogs smell, but she has liked a few.
"And then we can get a cat."
After she meets Red, 'cat' will become 'a cool Spirit familiar.'
Nick
"I like cats," he says, with the easy tone he often has when discussing his general vague warmth toward most things living.  His hand has moved to the side of her arm, and should her hands loosen, he'll pull one of them back into his and away from her face.  "A trial basis it is, then. I would hate to make a liar out of you."
There is conspiracy in his smile, a warmth that takes any sting out of his words.  "You were going to tell me about Andres?"
Pen
"I was going to," with a very, very generous portion of rue. Her hands do loosen, did loosen, and he can keep one of her hands if he likes -- she won't pull it back -- but she rests the elbow of the other on the table, and then rests her cheek on her fist. Pen usually wears rings, but that never seems to bother her. Her expression is set on wary, rueful dismay.
"I liked him back when I knew him," she says. "He was like a sparking fuse, kind of a dick sometimes but not a bad man. I think a very good one."
Nick
He does keep hold of her hand; his eyes are intent on her but his fingertips are absently tracing the lines of bone that splay out from her wrist.  His are dotted with orange, slightly callused, without adornment other than his ring.  "But?"
Pen
"Well..."
Pen's gaze has taken on an imploring cast, but it hardens: hot metal usually does, once it has cooled; been proper-forged.
"It is gossip. I didn't, you know how Willworkers are when they're not talking about themselves. His wife - I knew her, too! Better, actually. Rob knew them both as well." She must be off-balance if she's saying Rob's name in their house. "There was a misadventure. But ... well, she died horribly, and he -- "
"I mean, you know, I think Frankenstein is a starter textbook for the Society."
Nick
Pen tells Nick that Sepulveda's wife had died horribly; to this he nods, because he had already been told as much by the man himself.  But perhaps he's thinking of that exchange - It sounds as though you've tried.
Nick's intuition about that sort of thing is rarely wrong, even when he doesn't know the particulars.
And yet still, he is a little beside himself when he blinks at Pen.  "He used necromancy on his dead wife?  What...what did he think would happen?"
Pen
This is a deeply uncomfortable subject for Pen to discuss with Nicholas for a number of reasons. They haven't been married, themselves, for a year; only since May. Mathematics. Nicholas's devotion to the Wheel is not a devotion that Pen has, at least not explicitly, and if any Tradition is going to arrogantly flout the Laws of Nature:
well, the Society, sure. But the Order likes to command reality, forcefully.
"He didn't use necromancy, per se." Pen doesn't often get pedantic, but unsettled and off-guard she is in this moment. "He didn't want to communicate or find the future. He just, well he tried to resurrect her. And his effort did not go well, it went quite the opposite of well according to what I remember hearing."
See. Pen liked Louise, and her fingers tighten on Nicholas's. Spasmodic; sorrow-curl. "What came back was a monster, you see."
Of course he'd expect that, Nicholas. Any Euthanatos.
Nick
Pen explains, though the explanation is not strictly necessary; this is how these stories always end.  The Wheel doesn't turn as it is supposed to; Nick has made the process of helping other people accept the natural turning and pass on a part of his everyday life.
But the truth is, the subject is uncomfortable for him too.  Maybe she can't tell.  But there are things that vows frequently cave beneath, even if one knows the likely outcome; he can understand this, even if it flies in the face of everything he has been taught.  His fingers tighten back around hers, reflexively.  "I see."
And he does.  "That explains a lot.  That's a terrible thing to have happen."
Pen
"I would be quite wroth and beset if you came back wrong," Pen says, seriously.
And then, musing, "I wonder what he is working on. Did he, well. Dinner, hmm?" Brief pause. "I am not expected to cook, am I?"
There's no horror in the question. Pen is a motherfucking Hermetic of course she can follow a recipe perfectly unless gremlins get into the kitchen, but the house is far from being ready for other Magi to visit. That requires a lot of legwork.
Nick
Pen's serious voice, and her serious statement, draw his eyes to hers.  In Nick's mind, there is no other way to come back, no other possible outcome; even if there were, the manner in which it would affect the Wheel would make it selfish, at best.  He doesn't say that.  "I don't want you to ever have to experience that," is what he says instead.
At her question, he shakes his head.  "No.  I can, or we can go somewhere."  Nick can't follow a recipe, but that is mainly because he learned to cook from his mother.  "It probably doesn't even have to be dinner.  That was just his suggestion."
Pen
"Are you okay with that?"
Blunt. 'Tac nukes' they call Flambeau, as in 'all the subtlety of a.'
Nick
Nick rolls the question over in his mind.  "If it's more than gossip," he says, "he made a very human decision, and he suffered for it.  People do those things because they don't understand the Wheel.  I can't hate a man for ignorance, or for acting out of grief."
Pen
Pen considers Nicholas for a long moment, then drags his hand across the table toward her and starts like she's reading the lines of his palm.
"Do you think you'll ever dye your hair orange, Nicholas?"
Nick
She pulls his hand toward her on the table, flips it so that she can trace the curves on the inside of his palm, which is broad and deeply lined.  Tiny specks of paint cover him here too, tangled in the dark hair along his arms where tiny droplets splattered as he used the roller on the walls.  There is a laugh as she asks him, and the reply, "All signs point to no," only slightly tongue-in-cheek.
Nick sits there quiet for a time that seems far longer than it is, and if his eyes have gazed off somewhere in the distance it's not for yearning: at the moment, he is a man content right now with where he is.
They will talk about that later, and perhaps he will recall this then.
But for now, after a few moments have lapsed he curls his hand in again, as though he were bringing her forward, and grins and says, "So about the dog."  And the conversation will turn to other things, and he won't give another thought to the future, sprawling out ahead of them like still-distant mountains.

Introductory Cocktail Party

Nicholas Hyde
A cardinal rule of introverts: They are frequently lost at parties.  Even work parties, which generally don't get too out of hand and remain confined to relatively safe topics.  There's the occasional "Donald Trump is going to make America great again" filtering through the conversation, but by the time it reaches an ear it's difficult to tell who said it.  It could be anyone.

Nick is not quite hanging out by the drink table - no.  Nick is a counselor, and it is therefore expected that he has more outgoing tendencies than, say, Dr. Antwan, the epidemiologist leaning into a corner by the snacks and playing a game on his phone.  The mental and behavioral health staff have congregated, split off into small groups, and he is mainly listening to others and asking questions.  "So after you graduated, you - " "Ah. And what about - " and the like.  Small talk.

Pen is not with him today.  One magus, here alone, is sometimes innocuous enough that it doesn't set everyone in the room on edge.  It would not be the same with two, and one of them a Hermetic.
He has a beer in hand (he is driving home, and nobody wants to be the sloppy drunk at a work party) and where he stands, the conversation is often just a little mellower.  "Real talk" comes out a little more often, in spite of his efforts to keep conversation light so he can extricate himself and go home before 8.  Nick has this effect sometimes, in spite of himself.

He looks at his watch infrequently enough that he's not rude.  Nick is more comfortable in this situation than many Awakened mages would be, and yet.

Andrés Sepúlveda
The one magus is unaccompanied but that does not mean he is truly alone.

Someone mentioned earlier offhand the way it seems folks mention impending events that are of little consequence or interest to anyone else that the forensic pathologist just texted back to say that yes he was going to show up. Sepúlveda or however you pronounce his last name.

And in time he does arrive not alone as Nick was alone but with a psychiatrist. They circulate throughout the room greeting the other medical staff and almost straightaway he looks across the room as if scenting blood on the wind. A sense of consecration niggling at him.

Even the Sleepers notice the Etherite's resonance. Like a chill up the spine. Someone walking over your grave.

He is a small man. Short and small of frame. He wears a well-fitted windowpane suit and a blue maroon and white checkered tie and tan brogue shoes. After eating a handful of pretzels and procuring a glass of punch he excuses himself from a conversation that was about to happen and begins to cut a path towards Nick.

The universe wants Nick to be less comfortable than he is right now it would seem.

Nicholas Hyde
Not truly alone - that, no.  And yet, Nick is unaccompanied in a new city.  He has been in Denver for a little less than a week, not long enough to have driven out to the chantry or have properly settled in with Pen once more after some separation.  Had he wanted a chance to prove himself to his new coworkers and supervisor, he would have gotten it this week: Nick's second day involved shadowing a coworker on another floor, accompanying the family of a suicide to the morgue while they identified the body.

This comes back to him in sharp relief, the sterile environment and the mother of the young man, who had covered her eyes and peeked out just long enough to glimpse her son's face before covering it again.  It takes him a moment to understand what triggered this memory, that feeling of standing beside the woman wondering whether to touch or not to touch, whether his coworker would frown on that because there are boundaries, a certain expected behavior: that chill up the spine, that's the reason.  He felt it there too, sensed something perhaps supernatural about it, but it was a morgue after all, and Nick was distracted.

Now, as he smiles and excuses himself from a group of his coworkers (ostensibly to go get another beer), he wishes he had paid more attention.  He turns around and there is Sepulveda, working his way through the crowd.  Nick, a man in his late twenties or early thirties with a head full of wild dark curls, has something a little wan and world-weary about him: he brings to mind empty churches, silent glades, places undeniably sacred and yet just a little unsettling at the same time.  More casually dressed in brown corduroys and a striped blue oxford, he is likely also easily identified among the "support staff," or else a young and somewhat casual doctor.

The last thing Nick wants to do is smile at this approaching stranger, and yet smile he does.  He continues to drift toward the drink table, though at this point, this is more pretense than anything else.

Andrés Sepúlveda
One man leaves the drink table and the other approaches it.

A moment of passing recognition perhaps. The forensic pathologist is also a medical examiner with Denver County. Just moved here from Miami a few weeks ago and has been learning his way around the Colorado penal code and the statutes put in place by the Denver Health Administration. On more than one occasion he has passed through the halls of Denver General to begin an inquisition before the body has left the hospital room.

Though he is small he has handsome features and a certainty woven into his spine. A sense of purpose in his walk. His black hair is flecked with salt-white and his five o'clock shadow is dusted with gray. Somewhere in his middling to late thirties and the jangling sense of attention-deficit energy is the fault of his personality rather than his resonance. Before he even opens his mouth Nick can peg him as hyperactive.

His voice carries with it a faint accent. Not an immigrant himself but the child of Mexican natives. If he speaks Spanish it is the conversational Spanish of one who never studied the language in a formal setting.

"Ah, don't look so happy," he says when their paths cross. Extends his right hand to shake. His drink has been in his left hand this whole time. This isn't his first introductory cocktail party. "Andrés Sepúlveda. You're a counselor, yeah?"

Nicholas Hyde
Another Corona having found its way into his hand, Nick turns to face the stranger.  He is edging the two of them back and away from the crowd of Sleepers, whether consciously or unconsciously.  Nick's resonance is not weak, but neither is it strong; it marks him among the initiated but not as one with extensive experience with the arcane.  Yet - he has been around long enough to know that strange magi he meets are not always his friends, particularly not in this, a medical setting.

None of that wariness has found its way to his eyes, which are tinged with a sort of impersonal warmth, crinkled at the corners.  They are the same light brown color as his skin, which manages to be rather striking in its way.  Nick shifts his beer to his left hand and, after a moment's pause to wipe the condensation on his fingertips off on a pocket, extends his hand to shake Sepulveda's.  "Yes, I am," he says.  "In hospice."

Closer to Nick, it becomes more evident that there's a small lump just beneath his collarbone, some sort of necklace.  "It's a pleasure to meet you officially, Dr. Sepulveda."  While his voice does not carry an accent, there's no hesitation in his words or inflection as he pronounces the doctor's name (correctly).  Then again, it isn't so unusual to run into Spanish speakers in Colorado, or ethnically ambiguous people like Nick.

He pauses, inclines his head, and adds, "Nick Hyde.  I think I may have come by the morgue where you work earlier this week."

Andrés Sepúlveda
"I feel you may have, yes."

Suicides don't take up much of his time. Not the straightforward ones anyway. The coroner is more than capable of handling those autopsies. Much of his time is taken up by the cases that require police investigations and he has grown accustomed to testifying in court. Wording his answers in an intentional way.

He had tucked his right hand into its pocket after shaking Nick's hand and now he's jingling something his fingers have found inside. Keys or coins or both. Sometimes it's better not to know what a Scientist carries in his pockets.

Drawing away from the group is a subconscious action for their kind. Their drifting occurs in tandem.
"You're with the Chorus, or the Chakravanti?"

Might as well cut right to the chase. No one is listening to them and if anyone is there's a rote for that.

Nicholas Hyde
There are certain magi who are so obvious a fit for their Traditions that others, particularly the more experienced, can identify them almost immediately.  Nick is one of those: the way in which his eyebrows lift, amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes a little further, says so.  "Chakravanti," he says.  There is a pause, space in which he allows Sepulveda to reply in kind.

His eyes flick, from time to time, toward Sepulveda's pocket and the delicate metallic clicking from within.  Nick has heard that the Technocracy these days is a gentler version than what was.  He and his cohort have realized themselves during a time in which older, more experienced magi are still used to operating as though their every move is being watched.  Nick heard stories in Connecticut of people who knew people who had virtually disappeared, a spy in the chantry in New York, an Adept in Boston who left wherever she was and is now permanently in hiding.  This is not the world Nick Awakened into. Still, the stories have been enough to make him cautious.

It wasn't that long ago.  Sepulveda: perhaps he remembers.  Perhaps he is just as wary as Nick of meeting a stranger in this place.

"To be honest, I haven't lived in Denver for very long.  I hadn't expected to run into anyone outside of the chantry.  Are you very familiar with the area?"

Andrés Sepúlveda
Sepúlveda does not offer up his own tradition so soon as Nick does his. Lets him explain that he is new-arrived to the city and ask a question of his own. Just before he answers he shifts his weight from one foot to the other and takes a swallow of whatever mystery beverage is in his cup.
Punch is always a risky proposition. The proportions don't follow a standard measure and the composition of the ingredients themselves are at the mercy of the one slapping the entire thing together. There's an analogy to be found in there somewhere.

"I was," Sepúlveda says to the matter of his familiarity with Denver. "Years ago, towards the end of the war. It's always been my understanding that this was a bit of a Verbena town, but I believe your people had a presence here, once, as well. I'm with the Society, myself."

Nicholas Hyde
At this point, Nick has been in a Sleeper career only a bit more briefly than he has been Awake.  His Awakening and his career are enmeshed in some ways, to the extent that should he ever have to do his Work apart from being a counselor, it's likely he'd be a little lost.  That means that he's been to a lot of work parties and events - enough to know that most of the time, some well-meaning person has cobbled together punch out of Sprite, three dollar liquor and whatever else they had in the fridge.

"I think that's supposed to be sangria," he offers, as Sepulveda sips from the dubious concoction.  Only a few sad pineapple chunks hint at that possibility.  Then, helpfully, "I stuck with the beer."

A former cabal mate, given to nicknames, had referred to Nick as Casper the Friendly Ghost.  It's apt enough.  There's a single slow nod of his head at the "once," which he processes in silence, and then again as Sepulveda offers his own Tradition. Nick asks, leaning against the wall and crossing one leg over the other at the ankle.  "So what brings you back?"

Andrés Sepúlveda
Nick stuck with the beer.

"What's life without a little risk, eh?"

As they continue their conversation the Etherite sets his Solo cup down on the table and comes to stand before the Euthanatos. Reaches into an inside pocket of his suit jacket and rifles around until he finds a small dropper bottle. Checks the clear glass and the clear liquid inside holds it up to the light as if he's checking a label. Then he doses his cup with whatever the hell is inside the vial.
The liquid morphs from a wan pink color to a darker winier red. The pineapple becomes pear.

As for what brings him back:

"My wife was Verbena. There's been talk of our friends in the Technocracy destroying a grove of theirs and plotting to start up the war again, or a war, or... whatever it is they'd care to call it." A swirl of the cup to ensure that the transmutation has taken and Sepúlveda returns the vial to his inner pocket. He lifts the cup in a silence cheers motion and takes a slug. That's more like sangria. A flick of his eyebrows and he adds, "This is where she would have wanted to be, times being what they are."

---
Dr. Sepúlveda @ 12:42PM
[matter 2: if you're gonna be sangria be sangria. dang.]
Roll: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Nicholas Hyde
One reason to envy magi who work with Matter: it's likely that their food and drink is, with few exceptions, probably always better.  Nick knows better than to ask what it is - he's encountered enough technomagi to understand that it very likely would not make things any clearer.  "Some risks are always worthwhile," he says, the corners of his eyes again crinkling with good humor.

He tips the mouth of his bottle toward Sepulveda as the other man lifts his glass and takes a swig from the bottle.  His face is expressionless when Sepulveda tells him that the Technocracy has destroyed a Verbena grove; perhaps he has already heard.  "I'm sorry," he says, and his tone is sincere.  Then, "So it sounds as though you're here on her behalf, then."

Andrés Sepúlveda
"Eh, that's one way of putting it. In spirit I suppose she's here, but that's a Sphere I've never had much success with."

He does not seem like a man given over to grief. Time the healer has been kind to him or else madness has been. Few of his tradition have reputations for going about Work in the name of Science and maintaining their sanity. Some lingering darkness in the way he words his answer.

Nicholas Hyde
Were Nick in session, this is where his questions would tease and prod; he is a man who picks up easily on that lingering darkness, and who perhaps has enough insight to speculate with reasonable certainty as to its origin.  He has only just met this man, however, and there's a time and place for everything.  "It sounds as though you've tried," he says.

Magi are far less predictable than Sleepers.  This, too, he knows.

So he doesn't linger.  Then, "So what do you hope to do, if they've just attacked this grove?"

Andrés Sepúlveda
It sounds as though he's tried and it looks as though this isn't a topic he's itching to discuss.

Some folks cannot help but disclose the contents of their baggage the moment an opening presents itself in the conversation. So much of it so tightly packed in too small a container or else they are just wired that way. Awakened folk have more at stake than their own contentment than does the average Sleeper but some Awakened folk never attain either self-awareness or enlightenment.

This isn't a session. They're at a cocktail party and happened to find the only other Awakened person there. More is at stake than what the two have riding under their skin and the doctor does not look as if he is any more inclined to linger than does the counselor.

"I don't think it's a matter of 'just,' eh? Why 'just' attack a, ah, symbol of... well, they claim to want what is best for mankind." Rational discussion of the opposition's mentality calls for alcohol. The Society of Ether used to belong to the opposition. They were too wild for the Technocracy. So he drinks. "Renewal, growth, healing, these are the things the pagans want. Yes, okay, they praise Old Gods and their craft is dying, pero respect for the Earth and the natural order, these are not things that threaten humanity. Holistic views are just so much a part of the Consensus as modern medicine. So even if it is a matter of 'just,' I do not understand why this attack occurred, and I wish to. This is not something I can do from three thousand miles away."

Nicholas Hyde
Nick's eyebrows arch, ever so slightly.  Words can take on so many different meanings: the "just" he had used here had been meant as to say, recently.  And yet - merely, that's another meaning one could take from what he said.  Still, he listens, and does not rush in to explain his meaning.  Nick is a good listener, whatever else may be said of him.

He, too, drinks.

"That's fair," he says, considering Sepulveda's rationale for moving closer to the attacks.  Once it has been explained, there's even a touch of consternation in him, too.  Sepulveda is right: it doesn't make sense.  "Zealots, possibly?  I'm sure the Union is like any other large organization.  It must have its renegades and reactionaries.  That much authority tends to go to someone's head."

Nick is mulling out loud; the distance in his gaze, the way he seems to have detached a little from the conversation, implies that this may be unusual for him.  Sepulveda has caught him off guard.  Still, it doesn't last long; his eyes refocus on the other man and he says, "So what do you think happened?"

Andrés Sepúlveda
It would not surprise the medical examiner to learn that he had taken the counselor by surprise. No one expects anything of any interest to happy at a holiday party and yet the collective consciousness has itself prepared for the possibility of someone having too much to drink and making a spectacle of the entire affair.

This is different. They are talking of wars gone and wars impending and it's enough to make anyone drink harder but there is restraint in the way Sepúlveda swallows down his transmutated sangria.

"If I have to think," he says and it's less a matter of thinking itself presenting a difficulty and more thinking like a Technocrat, "I would posit they chose this target to try and kill off every reality deviant they could find. Not just the grove but the chantry in the city, I hear they destroyed. It's the why, yeah? Search-and-destroy has not been their M.O. since the war ended."

Nicholas Hyde
This is true, though for Nick, this is somewhat akin to hearing an old man tell war stories.  As far as he is concerned, the War happened before his rebirth, before his time.  He is young in Awakening, even though there are people his age (or not much older) who fought and died.  This aside: Chakravanti he may be, but Nick is not a soldier.  One has only to look at him to know that.

The party moves around them, unaware of the discussion passing between two otherwise unassuming men at the margins.

"I would think it would happen everywhere else, if that were the goal," Nick says, gently spinning the neck of his beer bottle between his fingertips.  He is thoughtful.  He is also a man who is uncomfortable with unanswered questions.  "Did anyone in the city survive those attacks when they happened?"

Andrés Sepúlveda
"That's what I'd like to find out."

As clear a purpose as he'd voiced already he has done little in the way of investigating what befell the prior Chantry. Moving across the country will do that to a person if that person is not skilled in Correspondence. Time would be a useful Sphere to enable a body to accomplish multiple tasks at once but still.

His green eyes flick away from the other man's face just once as if to gauge whether they are still beyond interest. A cluster of physicians several yards away has just burst into laughter at a story one of them is telling.

"I feel it may be helpful to, eh, meditate on this, yeah? Perhaps I can jog my own memories, see if I remember anything from when Eloise and I were here last. At least a name or two."

Nicholas Hyde
As Sepulveda's eyes wander, Nick is suddenly reminded to take a moment to look too.  He seeks out his coworkers, all of whom still seem gathered in a clump away from the doctors and nurses.  Not unexpected.  He does not seem to be overly missed, yet, though he suspects that at some point he will be labeled as avoidant or shy should he stay away for too much longer.  He is, after all, ostensibly here to bond with all of them and spend more time with the department.

"That would be helpful," he agrees.  "My wife hasn't been in town much longer than I have, but I can ask her and see whether she's found out more.  Or has heard anything since she got here."

Nick has straighened away from the wall, his hand wandering into his back pocket, emerging again with a black leather wallet.  He slides a business card (Nicholas Hyde, LPC) from it with his thumb, and extends it toward Sepulveda.  "In case you need to get in touch with me.  I've heard a lot of chantries don't keep contact information on hand."  The more cautious ones, the ones that remember a time when the Technocracy was more on its toes.

Andrés Sepúlveda
"Eh, they think they're being proactive."

The Etherite studies the card for a few seconds before removing his own wallet and tucking the card into it. If he has his own card he does not choose to share it with Nick. Instead he pockets his wallet and removes his cellphone from his suit jacket.

With his eyes on the screen he asks, "Your wife is Awakened, or an acolyte?"

Nicholas Hyde
Once the Etherite has removed his cell phone, Nick tucks his wallet into his back pocket once more.  If he is put off that the Etherite has chosen not to reciprocate, it doesn't show; the Awakened are strange creatures, after all, and often wary with good reason.  Business cards feel sensible enough to Nick - they're relatively innocuous.

"Awakened," he says.  "Order of Hermes.  Her name is Penelope, have you met her?"

Unlikely, perhaps; Nick feels that he would have remembered should Pen have told him about someone like Sepulveda.  Friendly though the conversation they've had may be, there's something unsettling about him all the same.

Andrés Sepúlveda
"No." He pockets his phone. "Not yet."

A moment later the counselor's phone heralds an incoming text message. Whether he checks it right now or after he's left the party already the text comes from the 305 area code and the message body says:

Yo.

And that's it.

"Maybe we should change that, yeah? Go to dinner sometime."

This is before he's met his students. He cannot threaten everyone with the good time of hauling two apprentices along to such a social situation.

Nicholas Hyde
Nick hears the chime of an incoming text, and like any child of the internet age, he obediently reaches down and into his pocket.  "Oh, thanks," he says, upon seeing the examiner's message.  He taps at the screen a few times, pecks with a finger to type out Sepulveda's name (at least, insofar as he heard it.)

"I'd like that," he says.  "I'm sure she would too."

He returns the phone to his pocket, shifting his leg to allow it to settle.  Nick's eyes meet Sepulveda's again, and there is again that thoughtful look - appraising, reflective.  "It's interesting to meet someone else who's kept a profession, besides," he says.  Though: perhaps Nick's perception of the rarity of this is somewhat skewed, given that he is married to a Hermetic.  They are notorious for pursuing Ascension at the exclusion of all else, if need be.

Andrés Sepúlveda
"Yeah, tell me about it. Eloise didn't have a career, either. She was a real hit at cocktail parties."
Now that that's over the medical examiner holds out his right hand in an offer to shake. Meets the other man's eyes as he does so and then cants his head back towards the party.

"I'd better go rescue Melina, eh? Give me a call sometime, we can compare notes. Tell you all about how the first level of the Mind Sphere is a blessing to a med student. Ciao, brother."

If Nick has any last-second parting thoughts he is not in so huge a rush as to leave without hearing them but this may be the last they speak tonight. The medical examiner returns to his friend the cardiologist and in a few minutes they leave together. Everyone knows why they're leaving together. No one questions a widow and a widow making time together. No one in the room has an abundance of it.

Andrés Sepúlveda
[YAY WRAP]

Nicholas Hyde
[BOOM]