November 2nd, 2016 - Jhor, Backlash, and a Bird (pt. 1) [Doc]

Margot
Midday on Halloween, Margot had tossed a backpack into the passenger seat of her car and driven off.  She hadn't announced where she was headed, but if asked (and if not, at around sunset on her own accord) she explained that she was going to stay out for the night and be back the next day.  It wasn't until deep into the next day's evening that her headlights flashed in the driveway to announce her home.  She'd come through the door in a hoodie and warm flannel and jeans, the boots she left at the door streaked with mud.

"Impromptu camping," she explained with self-consciousness trademark to 19-year-olds, and promptly excused herself for a shower, something to eat, and bed.

The following afternoon was bright in Denver city, but this close to the mountains the sun was already tucking back behind the tall peaks of the mountains, casting shadow across the property and those that surrounded them.  Margot had not enrolled for a fall semester at the university she'd come west for in the first place.  She had found a part-time job at a bookstore not too far away, and when not there ample time was spent reading at home.  No different than any other day, Margot was to be found in one of her handful of common haunts in the home.

This time, she was out back on the patio, dressed in a heavy red sweater from the university she no longer attended, hood up over her head.  They'd come into the possession of a simple iron patio set from a discount store, and the witch was settled in one of the four iron chairs.  There were two books stacked on the table beside her, spines familiar enough to their owner as they were borrowed right from Doc's own shelves.  She was studying Correspondence, concerned about wards and shields, commenting analogy of bows and arrows and how the shield was needed against them.  The book in her hands, though, was one acquired independently.  A plain green hardcover, soft with age and time spent snug on shelves, stacked in boxes for a time too.  there wasn't a title or author on the cover of this one.

Beside the books was a small stone bowl with a couple of tiny bleached bones contained within, among them a delicate tiny bird's skull.

Doc
Much like a cat, Dr. Sepúlveda comes and goes as he pleases, and doesn't tend to stick around unless he wants something from one of the two of them, or there's something particularly interesting in the general vicinity that gives him an excuse to come poking around where he isn't necessarily wanted.

He wanders out the backdoor wearing a cardigan overtop the scrubs that announce he's come home straight from work, his hair a mess and his glasses somewhat smudged, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. One eyebrow lifts as if to say The fuck you doing out here? but doesn't actually give the remark voice.

Without speaking or lighting the cigarette, he continues his shuffling over to the table, where he pushes at the spine of Margot's open book with the pad of his middle finger, holding it at an angle as he reads the title. Then he pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and turns his attention to the mortar and bones.

Must be Wednesday already.

Margot
Dark and heavy eyebrows had been hunkered down like miniature storms while she read, focused intensely on the topic on the page.  To her credit, she didn't startle hard enough to spike her adrenaline and blood pressure like she had been prone to doing less than a year ago when the back door opened to let Sepúlveda outside.  She glanced up to him, brows rising on her forehead in interest.

The fuck you doing here? the look said, but the mouth didn't.
The face she made in return was the Dude I live here that a statement would have had in return.

Wordless, he paused before lighting his cigarette to check her book.  She looked down at his hand, then up to his face while he read small faded lettering along the spine that said Transmutation: The Five Elements.  When he was finished reading and moved on to peer at her macabre toolset, she pulled her feet up to wedge her heels on the edge of the seat and settled the book open on her knees.

"Just a bit of light reading."  A lame joke if ever one had been.  Margot shook her head at herself and looked over to the little partial skeleton looking like it was spun of sugar, so small and fragile it looked.  "I thought I'd give them a try.  Bones and meat are what's left when Life turns to Matter anyways."


Doc
Just a bit of light reading.

"Hah," he says with the cigarette still between his lips, then removes a Zippo from his pants pocket and introduces flame to tip.

Once his cigarette is lit he considers what's left of the animal bones, then considers his student's face. A deep breath through the Lucky Strike's filter, a sullied exhale. He holds the coffin nail out to Margot.

"Hold this."

On that note he steps back and goes back into the house, leaving the door open behind him. She can see his darkened figure in the window before it disappears into the pantry, and a few moments later he's back out on the porch with a vial in his hand.

"Tell me what you've learned from your light reading," he says as he takes back the cigarette and plunks himself down in a chair across the table from her.

Margot
Margot wasn't a smoker of cigarettes herself, but when passed the cigarette she held it without looking too offended by its smokey presence there.  Totally didn't know how to hold a cigarette if she wanted to actually puff on it, though.  When he came back out she handed it back and curiously regarded the vial he'd brought along with.  She had a pretty good idea that it would be a cool component for his craft, but the point of altering matter could be proven just as well with acid, and wouldn't that be a just the kind of dark thing to laugh at?

When asked about her light reading, Margot caught herself before she had a chance to sigh (be thankful you're still getting advice and not scratching around in the shadows) and picked up a bookmark from her chair to mark her spot.  The little green book was set atop the other two, making the start of a slightly askew stack.

"Aside from Energy and Life, Everything is made of Something.  Science thankfully came along and explained this with atoms in the past hundred and twenty years.  Anyway, if you can break it down enough, you can transfer Matter like you do Energy-- from one form into another.  Or you can just stop at step one and obliterate something completely."

Doc
By now the kids have come to the same dichotomous conclusion: that if Doc really did not want them around, they would sure as shit not be sharing a house that had once been a hotbed of inbred cult activity, and that the man truly cannot turn off Teacher Mode.

He is very close to becoming a Doctor of the Society of Ether. Right now he is a Professor. That in and of itself is a telling designation. In addition to taking on mystical students, he has interns in the morgue now. Like, actual interns. And he was a father for seventeen years, before his son died and his wife died and his relationship with his daughter died. It will take more effort than he is willing to exert in order to be a peer to another person and not a superior.

To his credit he does just sit there and listen to Margot as she tells him what she's gleaned from the book. This is his affinity sphere, the center of his universe, and he just sits and smokes for a moment.

"Yeah," he says, wedging the cigarette back into his mouth, "but obliterating things isn't as fun as transmutating them."

Margot
A grin curled on the freshly-initiated Verbena's face.  "I think that depends on who you ask."

Watching him smoke had her considering going upstairs to grab her own tools with which to smoke.  She decided against it for now, though, not wanting to break away from a lesson in the works.  Instead she settled for reaching over and casually fiddling with the edge of the stone bowl.

"I agree, though.  Destroy something and it can't help anyone anymore, but alter it and it could be to your benefit instead.  Or somebody else's detriment, given the situation."

She tapped the pad of her pinky lightly on the bird skull and frowned thoughtfully.  "I'm feeling out how to make something so scientific as atoms and make it mesh with my... less-than-scientific craft."

Doc
Sepúlveda somehow manages to look as if he just sat down for the first time all day and has more energy than both Margot and Ned put together at the same time. A weariness in his physical body that hasn't reached his mind. Electric interest in his eyes. His cigarette is dwindling at a rapid rate. He tips the ash into the mortar and blows a huge gray breath into the clear sky over their heads. It's amazing what a bit of distance will do. They can see the stars at night out here, but not in downtown Denver. At night the skies are pink, brightly so when it's cloudy.

"You say the word 'scientific' like it's a bad one," he says. "What's the matter, Andraste going to beat you with her chancla if she catches you?"

Margot
"Nah, nothing like that.  More like trying to put vinegar in an engine and trying to make it run."  Of course, it could be argued that a Mage could make that vinegar have gasoline qualities enough to actually burn in the engine, but that argument could be made about anything when it came to Mages.  They were the reshapers of reality, after all.

"Everything else I do is base, because it feels that way.  And it's the...," she gestured vaguely around her middle, encompasing belly and chest in the motion both.  "..the gut feeling there that makes the magick work.  I apply what I know up here," now tapping her cranium.  ", and the two work together, but I can't make magick run on my brain alone."

Duh, Margot.  She looked at the cigarette ashes in the bowl, powdery gray snow atop the tiny knob of a bone's end.

"Anyway, I'm not there yet.  I'll get there."  Beat.  "My friend Will made a piano.  I want to hollow out the side of a mountain."

Doc
"Great." Exhale. "My apprentice is growing up to be a cave witch. This is going to go over great at the next Symposium."

It sounds like a joke. HIs delivery is so deadpan half the time it's hard to tell if he's trying to be funny or if he's truly lamenting the fact that his reputation stands to take a further pummeling. In either case he considers the lifespan of the cigarette, then the bird bits in the bowl. To which he adds the promethean fuel in the form of the cherry, stabbing it in without extinguishing it.

"This," he says of the vial, whose contents are orange, "is designed to return a thing back to its natural state. It'll patch up a hole in a tire, or a wall, or an animal's head. If I add this--" He rummages another vial out of his cardigan. Its contents are purple. "--then I can make something organic into something not-organic. Hypothetically."

He says this because wouldn't it just be his fucking luck to get backhanded by paradox while attempting to demonstrate a relatively simple rote.

[matter 2: sup bones, you look like you want to be a six-sided die for a minute. lol this is vulgar af but he's done it before.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Margot
"Well it's not like you can help it."  Margot frowned a little, quick as ever to skim over what could be a joke to find the potential seriousness beneath.  "I mean, Magick comes from the Avatar, and we don't mold them to our wills.  It's quite the opposite way around."  The witch twisted her thumb into the edge of the table, hand idle near the bowl as Doc disposed of ash and ember alike-- two elements that she worked with in her craft herself.  Intentionally placed?  Probably.

Eyes followed the orange liquid, the mind behind them following the explanation presented along with it.  The purple as well, when its turn came.  She looked down to the bowl and bones again, expectant of what was to come next.

She wanted to ask what he planned to do, but knew she'd see soon enough so she kept the question to herself.

"Isn't that restrictive... needing very specific formulas and devices for very specific tasks?"  This question she asked instead, quiet and with the same suspense of someone testing a step on springtime ice.

Doc
It is the purple liquid that the Etherite adds splash by splash to the mortar, stopping once or twice to stir the mess around with the sizzled end of his cigarette before returning the dropper to the vial and the vial to his pocket.

If it weren't for the whole drinking to forget thing, he might have reminded her what a bind he was in the time Oni caught up to him and fused his wrists together behind the pipe in the basement of his condo. He had had to talk Margot into rushing upstairs and grabbing his medical bag from its place beneath the sink. Of course he played it off like if the kids hadn't been there the whole affair would have gone much more smoothly. But there was as much a chance that it wouldn't have, and then what the hell would he have done.

He does not remind her of that incident. He just looks at her over the rims of his glasses, then tips the mortar over to let the die fall where it may.

"No," he says. Next question.

Margot
As it so happened, the Oni Incident was exactly what Margot was thinking of when she asked the question.  She contemplated how others with different, more flexible paradigms could have adapted to the situation.  Considered how she or Ned would have faired today, when they knew a little more than just how to sense, how to know.  Now that they knew how to do.

She had met his eyes while he peered over his glasses at her, her own gaze wide-eyed and owlish as it so often was.  Seeing his hand and the bowl move in her peripheral had her looking back down in time to see the bone-white dice come tumbling from the mortor in the place of bones, ash, and purple solution.

Her eyebrows hopped up and her mouth pinched into an expression of a person painted impressed, albeit casually so.  She moved her hand to pinch one die between two fingers ad pick it up to examine it with sight and touch alike.

"I can see why you don't sleep.  If you need to make everything you use, that's a lot of preparation.  How long did that take...?"  She gestured to the orange vial that hadn't been emptied.  "Or that mind-radio you have?"

Doc
Time and Andrés have always been two ships passing in the night. He was scatterbrained as a young adult, and sleep was one of the first things he learned to live without. Without Mind and its proper application, the combination of college and a newborn baby and a partner who was prone to disappearing into the woods for days if not weeks at a time would have made him lose it. As it was he graduated summa cum laude and went on to attend medical school at one of the most prestigious universities in North America.

Now he's cursed. It is becoming obvious to him that he is going to have to struggle mightily to reach an understanding of how to control Time, that he will have to make sacrifices that he is at this moment not willing to make. What's left of his sanity, for example. As of late, he has been having flashes of insight, déjà vu in which he does not believe.

Last month, he confided in Penelope that his greatest fear is snapping and becoming a Marauder, except for 'fear' isn't the proper word for it. He is taking more cautious measures than he would without the kids in his life, perhaps, but he still has an air of fatalism about him. Like he knows the day he finally manages to rewind Time will be the day the rest of the community ceases to recognize him as him.

There's more than one reason why he doesn't sleep. His industriousness is one of them.

"Not that long," he says, like she's the one being ridiculous, then holds his bony hand out for the die. "The mind-radio was just a busted microwave I turned into a brainwave amplifier, it's not like I built a particle accelerator in the backyard."

Margot
"Yeah," she agreed with a faint frown.  "That sounds totally easy..."  The sarcasm was there plainly, but even as she spoke she considered how the device was already set up to make use of waves.  You just had to alter the origin of those waves and let the microwave's technology do its wave-sending thing.  Or so she figured, she wasn't the single most mechanically inclined human on the planet.

The die was dropped into the palm of the good doctor's thin hand, and her own hands came to settle like small stones on the tops of her bent kneecaps, over which she continued to survey him.

"I suppose it wouldn't be more different than when I get my salts ready..."  He'd seen more than once before, while Margot's immersed in her studies at the dining room table or holed up in the library upstairs.  Either in a bowl or vial or paper envelope, in a variety of colors from chalk white to brilliant pink and red all the way through the scope to black as charcoal.

Perhaps it was an energy put into the air, that worry over Maurauderism.  Margot's face slipped into a faint frown while her mind went down its own path, and at a certain junction along that track she spoke up once more.

"Nick was warning me about unraveling things too much.  Made it seem like we're only really supposed to be creating, and every time we take something apart instead it pushes us that much closer to going... off."  She glanced up at him, and what would have once been a cast of anxiety was now a calmer uncertainty.  Puzzling, trying to figure out the rubix cube rather than panicking over the numbers falling off the timer.  "Andraste commands War, and I can think of ways to battle without simply unraveling everything to its base.  But... I don't know, it seems..."  The scowl deepend while she struggled to find the right words, and in a pattern that was classic Margot she found them by starting a new sentence with a better organized thought.

"I know that a Chakravat would know about this well, given how they deal so closely with death, but he made it seem like destruction is a bad thing, and I'm a little worried because that feel, the direction I have, it doesn't feel like a lot of creation."

Doc
The second Margot says Nick's name, whatever vestiges of good humor were on the Etherite's face drain away like the dregs of bathwater down a pipe. He reaches into another pocket and removes the flask she has to have known was there all along. Much like his madness, which persists in spite of variables like the weather or his diet or his company, alcohol is never far from his person. A long quaff pours down his throat, and he stifles a belch in the back of his wrist, but he's listening, as much as he ever listens.

Andraste commands war. Yeah yeah, he's heard that one before. The cap squeaks as he twists it back on, and the metal clatters against metal when he sets it down instead of tucking it back into his pocket.

Such a huge sigh for such an elfin man, and he sits a moment tossing the die back and forth between his palms as he considers the bones of what she's asking.

"There's a difference between ending a thing's life and destroying its pattern," he says, and a bit of an edge comes into his voice. He even shifts in his seat, sits up straighter. "At this point in your initiation, you should not be using Prime to attack other things, even if it's in self-defense. You understand why?"

He assumes she does not understand why. Time for a practical demonstration. That's what the orange stuff is for.

[life/matter/prime 2: do de doo turning the die into a bird. vulgar af, needs at least 4 successes to work, is not a practiced rote.]

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

Margot
"Because if you simply remove something from the Universe, it notices in a bigger way than when you just change something.  It leaves a... vaccuum, if you will, and when that vaccuum fills it backdrafts Paradox up your ass."

Her eyes followed the dice in his hands, but that didn't mean the heavy frown or straightening of his posture went unnoticed, nor did the fact that Nick's name seemed to be one of the functions in the trigger that was pulled for this shift in tone and summons of alcohol.

"It's safer to just kill something that's attacking you.  It's not always that simple, and it's almost always a mess to clean up later that could come back to bite you at any time."  She didn't say so explicitly, but this was Margot confessing worry over her and Ned's crimes over the past year.  The murder of her brother and arson that followed to hide the gruesome, supernatural evidence.

"But ending something... it's a pretty surefire way of keeping it from killing you first."

Doc
Rather than placing it back in the mortar for this demonstration, Sepúlveda sets the die down on the tabletop, harder than he means to, and begins titrating the orange goop, carefully depositing a droplet in each divot.

"So is shooting something in the face a pretty surefire way of keeping it from killing you first. It also doesn't result in the universe kicking your ass so hard you spend the rest of the week picking its shoelaces out of your teeth."

[focus, doc, arguing just increases your diff. +1, extending.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 8) ( success x 1 )

Margot
"No..."

Margot was watching his careful hand and the focus while he worked hard on making the dice do something entirely different.  Her words were gently spoken enough so as not to disturb his concentration too badly.

"But bullets are tracable... although I suppose one could just make it so they aren't, and use magic for that instead."  She considered this, contemplating the practicality of a gun, but something (no doubt her Seeking, and the ancient roots of her Avatar's origins) kept the bow and arrow as a possibility on the table instead.  And let's not forget Ned's sword-or-machete-or-whatever idea.

Doc
"Your concern ought to be with staying alive right now, not... not living out an episode of Law and Order, that show--"

The die is slowly changing both shape and composition, becoming more oblong, becoming translucent, like an egg whose shell has not quite formed yet. In the absence of strong light, Margot cannot make out its contents, but if she were to hold the thing up to a lamp at this stage in the transubstantiation, she might see an avian embryo inside.

"--that show isn't even remotely accurate. Did Nick tell you Nephandi happen when your proverbial insides get all gunked up from destroying shit willy nilly, and one day you decide walking through the Caul sounds like a brilliant idea? Next thing you know you're shopping at Hot Topic and covering your testicles in goat blood--"

[srsly. focus. extending one more time pls to not fuck this up.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 8) ( success x 1 )

Margot
The metamorphasis from bones to dice to egg was an interesting one to follow, and those sharp hawk-hazel eyes locked in to watch the work unravel.  The effort was clear, Doc was focused in carefully on what he was doing even while speaking about Law and Order nonsense and how Nephandi apparently may or may not come to be.

"Well," she said in that same quiet-careful voice of respecting focused quiet.  "I'd have to get hold of a pair of testicles first, but as a Nephandi there probably wouldn't be many qualms left in just taking some."

But what did Nick tell her?

"Not quite.  It seemed more like a tally system than a tainting of the spirit.  Like, you only get 'x' number of sins before you're damned for eternity."  A hand lifted to tuck under her hood and scratch lightly at the back of her neck.  "He sort of left out the middle ground, the path on the way there.  Jhor, I remember the word being.  I don't know what its weight feels like, though."

Doc
"Anybody who deals too much with destructive forces can turn into a morbid-ass serial-killing shit-lord that has to get put down, but the Chakravanti are the ones the history books like to talk about when they talk about Jhor."

With a final pattering of liquid on the egg's surface, the keratinized substance cracks, and the pieces of the shell reform to be absorbed by the meat and skin of the new-formed creature, which huddles damp and small on the tabletop. Its talons flex and contract, testing out their prehensile strength, and though its eyes don't open, its beak does in order to emit a weak cry.

Sepúlveda looks down at the creature with a blank expression on his face. A slight flaring of his nostrils betrays the disgust he feels, having created something for the purposes of destroying it, but then he'd done this before. It was different when it was his wife's dismembered corpse. Maybe it isn't disgust he's feeling. Maybe he's just remembering.

Whatever.

"It's not like... like golf, or bowling, or whatever." He stands up. Whatever he needs for the next part of the demonstration is still inside. "There's no tallying. Keep an eye on that thing, would you?"

The creature isn't going anywhere. He did not imbue it with sentience. But it doesn't know that. It just sits there, quivering and making that rusty chirping noise, as Sepúlveda swoops back inside again.

Margot
Already wide eyes became impossibly wider to watch the dice become an egg, which soon solidifed itself and cracked to give birth to an ugly, damp, squacking and blink little bird of some kind.  She might recognize its species were it grown, but in this state it was fairly impossible a task.  She'd created life before too, but it was never anything so complicated as a complete bird.  Insects were simpler, their organs and systems and brains not difficult to put together.  Diseases, she'd learned, were even easier, but a more dangerous gambit in the scheme of things.

"So it ebbs and flows," she mused when Doc explained that Jhor didn't come with tallies.  He asked her to stay and keep watch of the wretched little animal, and she'd glanced up at Doc, then nodded and went back to looking with fascination at the ugly creature on the table.

By the time Doc had come back, he'd find that Margot had moved the creature.  No longer was it sitting on the cool iron, but nestled within the bowl of stone itself, which was now lined loosely with thick-knit black wool.  Closer investigation would prove it to be a dusty large beanie that Margot had stashed in her hoodie pocket for when the chill really settled, but she apparently determined that the bird needed it more.

She'd glance up when she heard footsteps coming through the door again, but promptly looked back down to the bird when assured it was just Doc returning and no intruder or danger.  She was leaned forward with one arm down on the table, her chin rested on her forearm for comfort while she carefully and closely observed the bird.  It hadn't bitten or snapped at her when she'd picked it up and re-nestled it, nor when she tugged the beanie up so it bunched on the sides.  While Doc approached, she was learning that it wouldn't snap when she stroked its ugly knobby little head gently with the pad of a small index finger.

"How does it work, creating life on a level like this?  I mean, does it need to have Mind installed like software, or is that part of the biology?"

Doc
"Think of it as more of a facsimile of life and not the 3D printing version, eh?"

If he had any feels left in which to be hit, the sight of Margot making a nest for the damned thing would have hit him right in them. It reminds him of the time the kids, ages six and fifteen, found a litter of feral kittens in the backyard and he, in turn, came home to find them feeding them. They had gone to good homes, in the end, but not before Andrés had considered putting them in a cardboard box and leaving them in the parking lot of the Miami-Dade County ME's office.

Nothing makes him want to throw up like children and small animals. He does not throw up. He takes another swig off his flask and picks the creature up by the loose skin on the back of its neck. It squeaks with no more conviction than it has been this whole time, its translucent talons grasping at nothing. When he puts it back down on the table, Sepúlveda scowls at the slime left behind on his fingertips, which he wipes on the thigh of his scrubs.

"I'm not going to go through the trouble of granting this thing sentience when I'm going to obliterate it two minutes later. What kind of monster do you think I am?"

There's the death ray Ned keeps referencing without ever having seen. It looks like a laser pointer.

[life 3/prime 2: bye bye, birdie.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (3, 4, 5) ( fail )

Doc
[let's try smacking it on the table]

Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (1, 3, 5) ( botch x 1 )

Peek
(Ahhhhahahahahahahaha)

Margot
"Huh," is the only real response that Doc got out of Margot when he described the ugly birdling as a fax instead of a replacement.  Her brow flexed with quiet protest when the little critter was picked up unceremoneously by its skin, while she'd taken care to mind the frail little talons and bones when settling it in.  She didn't mind the muck left on her hands, and the beanie could be washed.  The thighs of her jeans were marked where she wiped her hands off, though-- she had the same idea as Doc with his scrubs, only without the apparent disgust.

When it was revealed he planned to destroy the thing, Margot's face turned to a cast of disappointment, but she wasn't heartbroken and offered no protest.

"Oh," she said flatly.  "I... guess that makes sense."

A pause, and then:  "Well I'm glad I didn't decide on a name for the little guy."  Her eyes hopped from the bird to what appeared to be a laser pointer, and how Doc's thumb touched at the button that would make it go.  "...That's your death ray?"  She couldn't help the grin, or the pop culture reference when she added quietly:  "It's like the noisy cricket."

Doc
"... huh."

This, he says, after pressing the button that's supposed to make a laser beam emit from the device failed to provoke any sort of response. He frowns and glances down at the thing, holds it up to his ear, rattles it like to check for loose wires, then smacks it hard against the side of the table. That usually works.

It does not work this time. It does not work at all.

[rolling for backlash. he had 8 paradox before that stunt he just pulled, now he has... uh... 12.]

Dice: 12 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Doc
[soak it, dummy]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Doc
The death ray emits not a friendly little red laser beam but a flashbang of light, bright enough to force Margot to look away or shield her own eyes and hot enough to make Sepúlveda yelp and drop the thing. Dropping it didn't do any more damage than had already hit him, but he does trip over the chair and cause a mighty crash as he hits the deck.

It's not called 'burning Paradox' for nothing. It doesn't take off his hand, but it still hurts like a bitch.

"CHINGA TU MADRE," he says.

[[ The exciting conclusion will be found in the next scene! ]]

October 24th, 2016 - TBD [William]

PLACEHOLDER

Mid-October, 2016 - Nihm's Garden [William, Nihm (NPC)] [ST'd by Harv]

PLACEHOLDER
One day we'll finish this scene, I promise.

October 10th, 2016 - Sticks and Questions [William]

Margot
On a Monday evening, Washington Park wasn't very populated at all.  By now the family daytime traffic had come to a large close, children whisked home for dinner.  The paths boasted runners as it did any time of day, but they seldom stepped off the park or took the headphones from their ears.  Out in the space off path, where it was grass checkered with enough trees to please the eye, Margot and Will dueled with sticks.

To their credit, the sticks were good ones-- extra twigs and dead leaves snapped away, the width not too narrow, the limb not too heavy, the length snapped down comfortably.  The petite girl had a distinct disadvantage with length of reach, but she was quick and alert and had been practicing hitting things with the pointy end of a weapon as of late.  She was dressed in a pair of skintight black athletic capris with a pair of simple white tennis shoes and a gray lightweight hoodie that was zipped to the chest.  Her hair was ponytailed back sloppily (done with a quick rake of the fingers and on-the-spot snapping of an elastic off her wrist).  Her form could use some work but when her stick snapped against Will's the vibrations down to his handhold warned that it'd sure smart if she ever caught his fingers.

"Okay, my turn," she said, mid conversation, while they stepped back for a break.  She scrubbed the sweat-damp palm of her hand on the hip of her pants and examined how her hand was impacting the bark of the stick where she'd been holding it.  "What's the weirdest ritual.. or rote, I suppose, that you've done?"

Questions.  As great a getting-to-know-you game as any.

William
There weren't terribly many people here. They all had things to do save for these two mages who were standing out in the grass, poised and ready to take out their grievances upon each other with sticks. or to play at being a knight. Or they were just preparing to become super heroes. Who really knew what they were doing, other than playing with stucks.

Good sticks, too. What he had in advantage for reach, Margot made up with by the fact that she was faster than he was, and just a little quicker on the uptake. He's faster than he was, though. More precise and a bit more aware of his body and how it moved. They stepped back for the break, William's right hand still feeling a little like it'd held on to the hand grip of a motorcycle for too long.

"Weirdest ritual- my housemate Holly and I met up a couple months back before she had a big diplomaticx deal to go on; it's what our House does. We meddle in the affairs of mortals when we aren't supposed to and we're diplomats. It's a thing." He continues on, "andway, she was going in and one of the people she was working with tends to bowl her over, so she was looking for a mental empowerment ritual to keep her head in the game and to not get ruffled. Holly has this huge sense of propriety, so we cast a circle, got all ready, and then had a three hour conversation that consisted of asking her the most embarassing personal questions for three hours in the language of the angels."

Margot
While she followed his story, Margot scrubbed her hands together next to take the motorcycle-tingle from her own palms.  She looked lost somewhere in the middle, where he'd given an explanation of how this Holly person was seeking mental fortitude and why, but came back around when he wrapped with an explanation about questions and the language of angels.

"Latin?," she asked in an effort to guess the language of angels.  Almost immediately after she shook her head.  No, of course it wouldn't be.

"That is pretty weird...," she admitted, and grinned a little at him.  "You think we'll get three hours of questions in if we're using English and sticks instead of circles and Angelican?"

It was his turn, but he'd already figured out that she pretty much never reminded him of that.  He'd already gotten her to blush twice, it was easy enough.  As to whether it was so easy that the fun had already been taken out of it or not was up to Will.

William
"Yeah, but I'm not going to intentionally ask you how your last seven periods were. It's not going to be that level of personal and awkward," William laughed at it, he had to laugh at it because it was laugh worthy. He took a second to stretch out his shoulders.

"Okay!" He says, content with his stretching and he looked back at margot. William changes hands, just to see if he will have any trouble doing this with the opposite hand. Why not? They had sticks, it wasn't like he was going to loose a finger, right?

"What is the most boring thing you have ever done with magick?"

Margot
[Round 1: Stickfight!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )

William
[Dex+melee: I am totally getting good at this]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (6, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

Margot
The girl blinked once but the grin didn't fade away at the mention of a period.  He's seen her wear t-shirts with feminist catchphrases across them at least once before, so of course she'd be all about normalizing a period.  That one at least managed to leave her cheeks just as pale as they'd been before.

"How they were?  That question has to have the same answer, overall;  'shitty'."  She ran her hand over her scalp to brush loose hairs back into place with the rest, even though she knew they'd only fall down once she started moving again.  She eyeballed the flat part of the stick she'd been holding and wished she cared enough about keeping it to wrap a handle out of leather; then it'd be way more comfortable to hold.

"The most boring thing?"  She thought about it for a moment, really seemed to be combing through an inventory of events and spells she's cast.  Her eyebrows screwed together and she looked thoughtfully up into tree branches as she recalled, tapping the bottom of one sneaker with the end of her dueling stick.

"I did a quick-sort of measurements across the house that the Doc and Ned and I are making ours.  For the Home Depot run."  It made picking up the bitch work of measuring everything immensely easier, though.  Doc and Ned had been arguing the semantics of something related to Matter and how it could interact with the world, as she recalled it.

When she looked back down she found Will at the ready, and so lifted her weapon to meet his.  She'd felt pretty confident up until this point, so little did she know how badly she was about to get whomped by the tall blond guy.

William
"Actually, no," he said with a degree of surprise, "Holly said that they were surprisingly light and relatively cramp free. I'm pretty sure she actually used magick to avoid having horrible periods. It was pretty impressive all things considered. She did explain how a Diva cup worked, though, which really confused me but I figure if you're going to use mestrual blood as a ritual tool that's really the way to go."

He nods at that, appreciating of the practicality of it all. He took a stance once she said that she had finished answering the question. He's got a dumb damned grin on his face, but he always seemed to have something that came naturally to him there. William was most himself when either smiling or grinning like he's gotten away with something, because all things told he usually was getting away with something. At that moment, he was getting to have conversations and play with sticks and enjying the beginnings of autumn.

She readies herself, and she had been confident up until that point. William had seemed a little cocky, but he was always cocky. William was nothing if not himself and in the moments before their actual round two or three or seven, he wasn't full of bravado. No, there was a degree of calmness and confidence that said that he was comfortable. He was ready to use what it was that he knew. He even takes the first strike.

It isn't hard but it is certainly precise, a touching of the would-be swords that is more tesing the waters. Margot moves as she had before, making up for the differences in size with her superior mobility. William moves himself like he's getting a feel for how she moves, looking for the patterns that she follows. Listening to the things around him. Focused on nothing so he can take in everything- the way that her shoulders move, the way that her footing is even and balanced

Right up until the time that she lunges too hard, when he had parried every blow that had come until the last blow that should have knocked the stick out of his hand and he sidestepped, easily. He moved like this was ballroom and, as though this were a waltz, it took three steps in rhythm before he ended up behind her and stuck his imaginary sword between her shoulder blades.

Didn't apply a lot of pressure, just enough to let someone know that he was behind them and, yes, had attained the upper hand.

"I made a piano in my living room because I didn't want to figure out how to get it into the apartment."

Margot
This Holly girl saved her menstrual blood for rituals, apparently, and Margot's expression turned to one of consideration.  She couldn't deny the practicality, but even as she was considering how she could work it into a ritual herself something in her gut twisted and turned.  There was a sense of revulsion and rejection deep in her core, tied to something basic and magickal.  Her head shook, and soon they were touching sticks and 'fencing' once more.

This time around when she lunged in to tap his center she found herself stumbling forward with momentum that had nothing on which to stop.  After a few steps she came to a stop, but not before she felt the strike between her shoulderblades.  A sting, particularly because he'd found the edge of a vertabrae, but she doubted that there'd be much of a bruise left behind.

She turned around, stick held casual to her side and pointed down to the ground.

"Piano?"  She blinked, then grinned some.  "That's smart.  It feels slightly... I don't know, disrespectful?  Wasteful?  To use magick on such day-to-day stuff like arranging the house or taking measurements.  To me," she apparently felt the need to clarify this part specifically, based on the tonal shift, "not like it's not allowed in my Craft.  Maybe just some weird reverence thing when it comes to Gods and Goddesses that I have to get past."

Next question.

"How close or far away do you think you'll make your life from the human world?"

William
"My landlord has no idea how I got a baby grand in the apartment. I have a feeling that, if I move, I'll just break the thing down for Quintessence and call it a day. It's probably wasteful, but I don't have a patron to answer to," he shrugs.

There was then the question of how close or far away he would be from the human world and he doesn't have a hesitation when he answers, "I will likely always be entrenched in the human world. Close enough to live and influence the world, but not close enough that I can't escape. What House Jerbiton is tasked with, when I said that we meddle, it's that it's our duty to represent and make people aware of and receptive to Hermetic ideals. It's a fight against the mundane- letting people be receptive to the idea that your Will can change the world and any number of subtly nuanced things. It's like... being a part of the effort to keep our craft from dying in the eyes of humanity. It's a weird balance between mediating in the magickal world and challenging the mundane world to be more than it is."

"Counter question: what is one thing you wish you could change about magickal society?"

Margot
"So you're like a missionary of being open-minded."  She considered that for a moment, then her small mouth twisted into another grin.  "That sounds fitting, actually."

The stick tapped the toe of her sneaker now.  He was noticing her repeat patterns in this duel, and so knew this to be her 'ready to go' tell.

That tapping stopped with the question he posed.  The grin faded away, and the more she thought about it the more serious she seemed to consider it.  If he were patient enough with her, she'd take a full dozen seconds before finally answering in that pausing and thoughtful manner she so often had.

"I think... it'd be the groups here and there that worry about lineage.  That's kind of worrying as an element anyone would consider, you know?"

William
"I could give two shits if people become Hermetics or not- it really isn't for everyone. My first mentor actually bailed on the Tradition-" nope, totally not irritated about that "-but so long as people are willing to question, we can still move forward."

She tapped her toe, talks about lineage and how people are obsessed with it. He takes a few steps away, takes a stance like he's ready. Nods along with her response like he agreed. He's got a nontraditional apprenticeship. He referenced his first mentor in a tradition that thrives on structure. Has probably talked to Margot about some of the weirder things about his first mentor and maybe about how his apprenticeship had gone.

William was the one who picked the Order. The Order didn't choose him. He was the one who sold them on the concept and they've not regretted it yet.

He nods, ready.

William
[Again!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Margot
[Again!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Margot
Something to be said for Will and Margot-- they were both putting a good and serious effort into this play-fencing thing.  For most children playing at knights was just for fantasy of grandeaur.  For Will and Margot it was genuine practice for self-defense.  Possibly even a good offense in some situation one day too.

The sticks went up and tapped once more, and this time the pair came together in good form alike.  Will accounted for Margot's repeat actions, and even accounted for her correcting herself on how she was caught last time.  However, she proved a little too fast once more (naturally fast, where Will had to practice and work and grow toward his finese) and knocked his stick out of the way.  The end of the stick hopped off the parry and tapped the side of his neck (didn't strike, didn't whip, but touched).

She breathed quick for a few moments while catching her breath (quick, but she was starting to wear out already), then dropped her stick down and stepped back from the young Hermetic man.

"...I don't know how long I'll stay in a city.  Probably as long as Doc and Ned and I keep together.  Nihm's kind of got the right of it that way, I think, but I'd be more inconspicuous than having a mansion on the mountainside.  Maybe more like a cottage out in the trees, all warded up against bears."  She smiled a little, like she genuinely liked the idea.  The daydreaming didn't last long, though, for soon she was looking back at Will with a playful glean in her next comment.

"This next question better be a good one.  I need a breather anyhow."

William
Didn't whip, didn't strike, just touched. Had they been playing with steel the impact would have been the same. Enough to let him know that she would have gotten the upperhand and all it does is make him pause, make him grin with delight for her victory, and step back. Stick goes down, at his side, no longer a threat. As if the stick had been a threat at all, but anyway.

He wasn't worn out yet. Still stnading calm and comfortable and like he could keep going if the need arose. He might not be as fast or finessed as Margot, but he could do this for awhile if the need arose if only from tenacity and sheer him-ness. You don't abuse your body like Will used to and not walk away with the ability to endure some crazy shit.

"Nihm's totally on to something. Henry lived in the middle of nowhere with this cute little house with fucking gutters for days," he said with a groan, "I swear, he intentionally made his house dirty. My life is nothing but a series of eccentric old men the likes of whom I inevitably become fond of."

But, on to the next question. And it better be good.

"What about your own magick terrifies you the most?"

Margot
She had asked for a good question, and one he delivered.  She took her time thinking about it, making it clear she would be doing so by making the occasional thoughtful 'hmm'ing sound to extend the time she'd take.  As she pondered she tossed her stick gently aside and lifted both hands to untie the elastic from her hair.  The band snapped home around her wrist and fingers combed her hair back out.  The sun had dipped below the mountain range to the west an hour ago and the dusk had deepened enough that the lamp posts lining the running paths had just switched on.  They drew Margot's gaze and reflected as pinpricks in the centers of her big wide eyes.

"I think...," she started, steady and deliberate in her phrasing.  "How rooted it is in war, and in violence.  I've never been a violent person but...  I'm not really afraid of it."  She glanced back to Will's face, met his eyes for a second then dropped her gaze elsewhere a moment later.  "It feels powerful to cast, like there's strength and war in my arms and fingers, and that's... thrilling."

The deepening of autumn's earlier evening helped obscure the effects of her blush some, but even so it crept noticable from her ears across her face.

"I guess I'm afraid of either getting swept away by it or not being able to keep up with it."

William
He watches her. Not lecherous, not lustful, not disdainful- he just watches and nods along like listening to her were the most important thing that he could do at that juncture. Margot Travers was interesting, and this was a big question and an important one at that. She manages to fire back, but the importance there that he notes is that she doesn't answer immediately.

William is willing to wait for the appropriate response, the one Margot decides is right. His eyes are green, intent and not without their own intensity but not booring into her like he plans to dissect her every word.

"Like you may be lost in the enormity and totality of it?"

Margot
She shook her head at the question.  That he'd listened openly and engaged with a clarifying question had reassured her.  Though Margot's essence was grisly as its most basic block, and so had always been a bloody thing, she'd often found herself self-conscious of it.  The cloak of war's gore was sticky and uncomfortable and took a lot of confidence to wear.  She was only just resolved to learn to be a warrior for the Warrior Goddess in faithful exchange for her magick, so she still felt a lot like the cloak was ill-fit and consumed her and dragged noticably on the ground when she walked.

"More like I'm afraid of what happens after I march into the first real battle.  If the War tastes as good as it feels in my craft, what might I become if I love it too much?"

She frowned for a moment at the thought of it, worried suddenly that the statement had been too heavy, and tried to cover by pressing down that particular conversation's trail in another way.

"But Andraste's got domain over more than war.  Who knows, She may have me walk down another one of her paths, and who knows when."

William
"Are you willing to embrace that if war fits too well?" he asks. "I think that the best way to know that would be to know what it is to be in battle whether it's physical or social. The battlefield changed in the modern age- does she want you to take up the sword or weild something less literal?

"I think... that people fail to realize and are afriad to admit that we have never been truly at peace, just in a state of lesser war. That the term goes from physical to conceptual," he inhales, slow and deep and shakes his head, "I'm  filtering a lot of this through having dealt with my old mentor and Grace and people who say things we don't want to provoke a war like we've not always been in one in some form or fashion. Our existence, the fight against reality to be what and who we are is a war against our most fundamental being."

William is rambling, realizes he's rambling and, instead, puts the stick down in favor of stretching.

"If war is who you are, at its fundamental level, I would try and embrace that for all of its definition."

Margot
"I didn't figure that I had much of a choice beyond embracing it."  She stated this with a matter-of-fact tone, like she found the fact to be obvious and the thought of resisting it hadn't ever occurred to her beyond long enough to be immediately dismissed.  She watched Will stretch, gaze watchful and curious but not much more, and jammed her hands into her hoodie pockets for the time being.

"I know some magicks and Avatars are questionable things, but mine isn't.  Some are distant, but I feel Her in my bones and the back of my brain and sometimes I wonder if she's not just seeping into my day-to-day life here and there too.  What she is is what I'm going to be come to get me and guide me on the way there."  She screwed her face up in trying to explain that.  This was a Mage with an observer's grasp of Fate alone trying to explain how it applied to her very core.

After a moment she cleared her throat.  "Okay, okay, my turn."

"Whaaat... is...."  She'd clearly jumped on her turn to ask a question just to find something else to talk about, but realized that she had nothing prepared.  Her mind scrambled back through to a default round-the-campfire kind of question, and what she landed on was a question summoned of stumbling social awkwardness.  "...the weirdest place you've had sex?"  Followed by an immediate slapping of her palm to her own forehead.  God damnit, Margot.

William
"A-ha! That is an easy one...." a beat passes, "actually, no, this is a hard one. I have a weird definition of weird. I almost had sex next to a serial killer's grave, but he was fucking there and it is not fun to be a medium in Louisiana and nothing is a bigger boner killer than having a disembodied dead guy."

"I would have to say the weirdest place, though, was the bathroom at the county court house, tied with the ritual closet at a frat house," he nods, definite. He has decided that this was, by far, the strangest place that he had sex and William looks the kind of satisfied that only comes when you're convinced you gave a good answer.

He has to take in her awkward look, the immediate face palm.

"Same question: what's the weirdest place you've had sex?"

Margot
"You what?"

She sounded genuinely shocked when he spoke of nearly having sex next to a grave.  He either nodded or confirmed before continuing on to the part of the story where he explained there was a dead guy watching from across the Veil, and the shock took a different kind of palor on the recently-initiated Verbena's face.  The hand that had been on her forehead dragged down the side of her face to rest on her cheek instead.

But no, that wasn't the weirdest thing, the weirdest was the courthouse for a ritual.  She made a face, wasn't sure if she was more baffled by how the latter was more weird than the former or by how he was comfortable enough with the idea of banging in a public restroom to do it.  Before she could ponder too hard the question rebounded upon her, and the cheek under her hand bloomed hot with embarassment that she tried to keep out of her voice.

"Oh, no, I've...  I'm not the adventurous sort, never anyplace weird."

She didn't exactly want to come out and say that she'd only ever had a boyfriend once before but given how she waved her hands in front of her and kept her answer dismissive and short she may as well have.

William
"I totally get the impression that after I told you I almost had sex in a graveyard in high school that I should not give you ideas about how to be sexually adventurous. My knee jerk reaction was hey! Let's go have sex! but that would totally make it weird."

He grins, playful. Clearly joking. Probably joking. Hopefully joking?

Margot
[>_> How joking are you? Perception + Empathy]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )

William
[He's probably joking somewhere between fifty and ninety two percent? She thinks?]

Margot
Margot eyed Will suspiciously for a few good long moments.  Was he joking?  She was pretty sure he was.  But not entirely sure either.  It took a short while but ultimately she went 'hmmph' and glanced around.  She found someone running with their dog on a distant trail but beyond that the park was going still.  On the ground not terribly far away was a tote bag Margot'd brought along with her, and she turned to walk over and then crouch beside it.

"There's plenty of other things to be worried about besides who to sleep with right now anyways," she said with the mild uncertainty and curiosity of one unpracticed in discussing such things openly, and pulled her phone from the bag.  She had one text, checked it, fired a brief response, then stood back up with a bottle of water in hand.

"Although, I suppose someone who uses sex as a part of their rituals would argue the exact opposite..."  She took a deep drink from the water bottle before walking back over to Will to offer him a drink as well.

William
"You have to be on the same page if you're using sex for ritual purposes. It's different if you're going high ritual versus low ritual and it adds another layer of complicated and bah. Frankly, I'm not going to have sex for ritual again for awhile unless it becomes absolutely necessary or that's the best way to go about it. It's probably one of the few instances where getting off too early could literally be the end of the world," he has to laugh about it, though. Takes the bottle with a nod and a tip of the top. He takes a draw from the bottle before handing it back over to her. William goes to collect his things. Wallet, phone, jacket. All checked off.

"At that point it's like having another person to do rituals with, anyway. If sex magick is your thing and it's the other person's thing? Man, change the world. Fuck like bunnies. Frankly, people have enough problems with Hermetics that it throws off my regular game..."

A second passes.

"Wanna go grab pizza? I'm pretty dang hungry and I'm having a lot of fun asking you a thousand questions."

Margot
Margot had an uncomfortable stitch between her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth were tight, but she did seem genuinely curious and interested in William's insight into another aspect of magickal ritual.  She hiked the tote straps up over her shoulder and tugged the hood of her hoodie up against a soft but admittedly cool breeze that was beginning to rouse.

When she spoke again her voice was quiet with contemplative confession.

"When I was reading about Andraste a lot, after I first figured out who she is?  I learned that her people prayed to her for victory in times of war, for foresight, and for fertility."  She sounded afraid of the very notion.  "I'm learning war, and I've picked up on Entropy, but..."  That uncomfortable twist to her mouth looked outright worried, and she tugged the drawstrings of her sweater so the hood scrunched to hug her crown.  "I think those rituals are going to be strange."

She spoke like it was an inevitable she saw on the horizon, some kind of milemarker on a map of accomplishments that her Goddess wanted completed before setting about... what?  Destiny?  Duty?  It really all depended on who you asked.

An invitation to pizza lifted her gaze and the corners of her mouth once more.  "Yeah, that sounds alright."

William
"You can always work in the symbolic and then work your way into the literal if and when you are comfortable. It opens you up to a whole different realm of possibilities- honestly you could probably also get a lot done via masturbation it would be like an assertion of oyur own personal power, but it all really comes down to becoming comfortable with yourself and then being comfortable enough that other things follow."

"And sometimes, yeah, it's weird. It's weird when you look back at it? Like with any ritual, when you're in the moment you're in the moment. You can't break away, because if you lose focus and you lose your comfort with the places that you are there's a good chance that you'll have wasted all of your efforts for nothing," William slipped his hands into his jacket pockets, pats his wallet with one hand and the phone with the other. Everything is right with the world.

He's willing to talk about ritual the rest of the way, or to give Margot shit about various and sundry things like being short and well on her way to being a travel sized War Goddess. Overall, he seems just happy to have the company.

October 9th, 2016 - Helping the Newcomers [Nick, Caleb, Olive]

Caleb
Someone was having an adoption event at the 16th street mall. It was three shops down from a starbucks in front of a place that looked like it used to be an army recruiting station that was turned into a high end sandwich shop. It was flanked by a book store and a place that sold bikinis all year 'round.

Or, at least, Caleb was pretty sure those were bikinis. He wasn't completely familiar with the ins and outs of women's underwear but, frankly, very few people understood the nuance of fancy undergarments. His creator had never bothered to actually explain what the purpose of a bra was in that he would never actually have to wear one and the likelihood of encountering one within his lifetime was remarkably slim. So! No time to really think about underthings and, instead, it was time for people to either loiter or avoid the hoard of cocker spaniels and chihuahuas and pit mixes that were there.

The place smelled like dog food and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee as wave after wave of people toting pumpkin spiced everything came through. The pedestrian traffic was slowing down and then speeding up and going with their own little flow of the universe.

He'd picked up his things at the PO box, held a stack of applications in hand and stood, awkward, at the edge of the mass of barking, wiggly, dog-smelling dog things there.

Olive
[awareness, ho!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

Olive
Across the street from the pet salon is a clock, towering atop its verdigris pole, and beneath the clock is a flimsy metal table with flimsy metal chairs. At this table sits a girl. More about the girl and less about the clock.

She, like so many of the youths trawling the place as they kill time between brunch and going out, is dressed in a manner that either oozes effortless cool or homelessness depending upon the age and temperament of the observer. Knee-high shit-kicker boots and striped board shorts that look like men's boxers from a distance, a plaid shirt underneath an old leather jacket and braids for days. Eyes behind sunglasses in spite of the cloudiness of the afternoon. She's reading a battered paperback when along comes the boy from the bookstore.

At least, it feels like him. Hard to pinpoint which one is him when there are so many dogs and coffee drinks around but Olive kicks her boots off the opposite chair and pockets her paperback and moseys across the street to investigate anyway.

Caleb
[Awareness?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Caleb
He's got an application from that bookstore. It's printed out on marbled paper because the staff had just run out of copy paper when they had a massive staff turnover and really never ran out of copies. Two years later, they were down to the green marbling instead of the creme paper.

He's got a beat up, olive-drab jacket. Tennis shoes that have walked quite a ways but at least the jeans and the polo are clean. He's wearing a belt. He's wearing glasses. He looks like a chemical engineering major- pleasant but awkward and probably a bit like a nerd but not in the way that was chic. No, he looked more like an employee at Best Buy than someone who was chic.

But something does catch his attention and he's trying to shrug the backpack off his shoulders and put the papers away. Caleb begins meandering in the direction that he feels something. Heart not pounding in naticipation but, instead, approaching with the steady calmness that comes from the area around them. He finally manages to get the backpack off and put the papers away.

Olive
With the boots' help, the young woman is boosted up to average height. Without them she would stand as tall as the average American eighth grader. It's no wonder she has chosen thick-soled shoes for today's outing. As calm as the aura surrounding her, she still carries herself like she would not hesitate to throw a fist if the throwing were necessary.

It is not necessary now, and she seems like the sort of person who doesn't give a shit about much outside of now.

She moseys up alongside Caleb and cranes her neck, stands on tiptoe, to get a load of what's got so many people crowding the dog salon.

"That is the smallest dog I've ever seen in my life," she says as she returns her heels to the pavement.

Nick
There's a sucker born every minute, or so they say.

One sucker has found the only three-legged pit bull mix at the entire adoption event of among the horde of unwanted dogs and the scattering of senior cats and kittens.  The dog, tan and black brindle, a floppy-eared obvious coward, keeps trying to lick his chin.

He's dressed in a light blue T-shirt and chinos the color of a stormcloud and nearby there is a cream and brown heavy perl knit sweater that he set aside so as not to get dog hair all over it.  He is crouched next to the dog with his arm around it, and is in the process of taking a picture with his phone.  He does not think the picture will melt his wife's heart as she has made her dislike of pets clear, but one can hope.

Caleb
"Do you think they're naturally that small? Or did someone grow them specifically to be that small?" he looks from Olive, who is small in her own right but not terribly so, to the dog in question. There's a long haired chihuahua who looks to be about the size of a volleyball that seems pretty damned tiny.

Caleb dumps his backpack down beside him, standing a rather unimpressive five feet eight inches tall- he's shorter than the average american male, but not by much. He reaches down to pick it up and inspect more carefully, only to realize-

"... how do I pick this up?"

Olive
"I think you're supposed to let it smell your hand first, so it knows you're not here to start a fight."

Spoken like an individual with little to no experience with domesticated animals. Her voice is mellow, the sort of deadpan typically heard in potheads and retail workers, and she does not seem like a retail worker. Pothead, then. Or millennial. That word has become so loaded.

As she stands off to the side, she finds her attention tugged towards the fellow in the blue shirt. One corner of her mouth tugs in amusement.

Caleb
He nods like what she's saying makes perfect sense. Yes, you do not want to start a fight with the small animals. They're cute, and he has a definite desire to not anger the tiny adorable thing that he is looking at. His attention moves down the way to the man in the blue shirt and-

"Oh, hey Nick! Have you seen this?"

He looks at the pit bull, notices the three legs, "huh, that one's different."

Nick
The sound of his name, and spoken by an unfamiliar voice, jerks his gaze up and away from his phone.  Whatever he'd been reading there had brought a crinkle to the skin around the corners of his eyes, some mixture of amusement and rue.

His eyes meet Caleb's, and his smile is slow to fade because that's the sort of man he is, and seconds later it re-emerges.  "Oh, hey, Caleb," he says, with only a second's hesitation before he speaks the man's name.  The diversion is all the pit bull needs in order to seize upon the chance to lick his chin, and the eye on that side squinches shut and he is quick to close his mouth.

He pats the dog's head, gently pulling it away from his face.  "I know," he says, with obvious enthusiasm for the dog's differences.  "He seems like a good dog."  A glance to Olive.  "Who's your friend?"

Olive
That one corner sneaks its buddy in and the two of them create a full-fledged grin at the phrasing of the question. Though they just met five seconds ago she does not correct him. She lifts her eyebrows and looks over to the young man whose name she does not yet know.

As much fun as playing with puppies is, she seems to be having just as much fun watching other people play with the puppies.

"Olive," she says with the ease of passing a joint, then lifts a hand to wave. "Nice to meet you... Nick?"

Caleb
"Are you adopting a dog?" he asks Nick

He seems to log this away for future reference- that this woman is named Olive and some dogs have three legs. He wonders what else has three legs, or if three legged dogs were just uncommon, kind of like people with green eyes.

"Oh! I'm Caleb, by the way," he offers a hand, confident like he had finally figured out this handshake thing.

Nick
"Nick," he confirms, when Olive asks his name.  He reaches up and strokes the dog's broad head, which seems to go a ways toward keeping it from targeting his chin.  "Nice to meet you, Olive."

He watches the two of them shake hands, and there is a little furrow that appears, momentarily, at his brows: apparently they too have just met.  Caleb seems to be meeting a lot of new people.  Caleb seems like he's new in town, in fact.

"I'd like to adopt a dog, but I don't think my wife would go for it," he says, with a pat on the animal's muscular shoulder.  "Eventually I'll wear her down."

Margot
[May as well join the club, aware + percep]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

Olive
And shake they do, Olive's grin suppressing itself, sublimating into a close-lipped smile that even the sunglasses do nothing to dampen. Her grip is firm, her skin dry and warm, the rings on her fingers cool. Her fingernails are all painted black, but the polish is chipping.

"Hey hey," she says in receipt of Caleb's name, and when the handshake is over she pockets both hands.

To the matter of Nick's wife and her resistance:

"What's she got against dogs?"

Margot
Margot wasn't here for an adoption event, Margot was here for a pair of new shoes and a sweater that wasn't a hoodie from a university she was sitting it out from this semester (probably indefinitely, if she were to be honest with herself).  When she'd first noticed the adoption event she already had her bounty jammed into a nylon tote bag carried over one shoulder; on the way out.

She bore no interest in stopping for dogs, but could not deny the intangible wall of disturbance into which she'd suddenly walked, nor the impression and pulls-prickles-tingles-alarms in some joined place between gut-heart-brain that it caused.  Her step didn't faltered but she slowed to a stop like a car whose engine suddenly cut while going uphill.  Her head turned toward the pop-up crates and table for impulse dog adoptions, and it didn't take long at all to find the people responsible for the strange... otherworldliness, almost, that hung here.  Eyebrows hopped up when she recognized two faces in particular, hunkered down some in cautious curiosity when realizing the third person was a total stranger.

One hand on her tote bag, the other raised to gesture a small greeting as she approached.

"Hey."  Graceful as a bullfrog in her social execution, Margot looked between the three before settling upon Caleb.  "You're making friends fast," she observed, and it was hard to tell exactly how she felt about that.

Caleb
He's not too bad at this hand shaking thing. his hands are warm, once up, then down, then up and down one more time before letting go and drawing his attention back to the chihuahua. He observes it for a moment before putting his hand in. He concludes that it is safe to pick the dog up and does so.

The chihuahua vibrates, as chihuahuas are want to do, and he holds the dog much like he's holding a very large, very delicate eggplant. Both hands and a little confused.

Margot comes by and he smiles, bright and decidedly less confused. He gestures with the dog at the people, "That's Olive aaaand that's Nick and... this is a tiny dog."

Nods. Definite. He's covered all of his bases.

Nick
There is obvious pleasure, a warmth that suffuses Nick's face when he sees Margot pass into the area.  If it is also tinged with surprise, well, one never does quite get used to their kind's tendency to attract like to like when in public, which is the same no matter which city one lives in.

He straightens, though he keeps a hand on the dog's head.  It presses in against one of his legs, leans hard.  "Hi, Margot," he says.

Then, to Olive, "I don't think she has anything against them, exactly.  She just doesn't get the warm fuzzy feeling most people get around pets."  And a shrug, here: some people are just that way.  "I've never had a pet and I've always kind of wanted one, though."

Olive
"It looks like the feeling's mutual," she says, of the three-legged mutt seeking to siphon what affection it can from him.

As strange as the confluence of bodies in a public space can be, Olive seems unfazed by it. But then, Olive does not seem fazed by anything. She's swaying back and forth, like her bones prefer dancing to stillness, but her feet are planted and her attention is firm.

"Margot... is that with or without a T?"

Margot
Caleb and Nick both appeared pretty pleased to see her, and where Margot's anxious general demeanor relaxed back some in response.  She was young and nervous, couldn't be older than twenty, and was perhaps five feet tall if you gave or took an inch.  She was dressed in brown boots that laced up the ankles but didn't have terribly thick soles to offer up lift.  She wore a red-and-white checkered tunic of a dress with a chunky brown wool cardigan overtop.  Dark brown hair was worn down to her shoulders, and when she tucked it back behind her right ear it showed a glimmer of ruby streaked from the temples.

"That is a tiny dog," Margot agreed, and lifted a hand to hold a couple fingers out in front of the small canine's nose to smell.  She glanced over to Olive next and blinked big hazel eyes once before answering.  "With.  Hi Olive, nice to meet you."

And, finally, she glanced to Nick's face and down his arm to the dog whose head he'd been touching since she had spied him.  "She was nice enough to not cook Yorick."

Nick
"Maybe someone else will see him being friendly and they'll want him," Nick says, with a glance down at the dog.  There is a little furrow to his brows here: he does genuinely hope the animal finds a home, it would seem.

"She threatened to use him in some kind of ritual once," Nick says, and his voice is touched with humor as he glances over to Margot.  Then, to Olive, "I haven't seen you around before.  Did you get in recently?"

Olive
"Yeah," she says. "From Vegas. I haven't seen you around before either."

A light joke. She stops her swaying in favor of taking a few steps forward, crouching down to let the three-legged dog sniff the back of her hand.

"If I said I was looking for a place to crash, what would you guys say?"

Margot
The chihuahua trembled and sniffed at her fingertips then gave them a small nervous couple of licks.  Margot smiled and tipped her head a little as she moved her fingers to rub behind the little guy's ears instead.  Pen supposedly made empty threats about using the pet rabbit in a ritual, but Margot knew better than to believe that any such comments to be too entirely sincere.  Sure, Pen probably would use a rabbit in a ritual, but not a friend's pet.

When Olive commented on needing a place to crash it drew the little bloodwitch's attention.  She looked at the woman a little more carefully now, her boots and jacket and hair and face.  There was an impression of a preacher, almost.  She gave the impression of someone who would guide an exodus across a broad body of water on faith and calm words.

What would she say?  Margot opened her mouth but closed it straight away.  She wasn't certain about sharing any acknowledgement of the chantry with someone she met five minutes ago based on a resonance.

Finally:  "I'd ask who you knew."

Caleb
"Why wouldn't somebody want him?" brows knit together, and he looks at Nick like... like something. It's a complicated emotion, the likes of which Caleb can't seem to adequately articulate for himself. Someone may not want the dog in question- the one with the three legs. THe one who was affectionate but couldn't go home with Nick because, well, reasons.

He's still holding the chihuahua, who seemed to be pretty chill once he's concluded nobody is going to drop him but is still set on vibrate because it's a chihuauha and that is just their natural state- they're either trembling or they're sleeping.

"Don't sleep at the botanical gardens," he tells Olive, "I've been informed that you are not allowed to do that."

Exasperated by that, it would seem. How dare people not let him sleep in public parks!

Nick
Caleb's question, an innocent thing, brings a little smile to Nick's face.  He can read whatever complicated emotion is there on Caleb's face, writ for him to see: Caleb might not be able to articulate it for himself, but Nick might well have been able to do so for him, were he so inclined.  "Some people are more likely to go for puppies or for the flashier dogs," he says.

"There's a place that's willing to let you crash for as long as you need," Nick says.  "It's kind of a drive, though.  A little ways out of the city.  Do you have a car?"

Another look, now, to Caleb.  "Are you...did you try sleeping in the botanical gardens?"

Margot's statement is a wise one, or was, and Nick catches her eyes now and there is a little point that has appeared between his brows.

Olive
Do you have a car?

"Nah," she says, like it's no big deal. "I have a bike."

She scritches the mutt under the chin and behind an ear, then braces herself on her knees in order to stand.

"I don't know anyone yet. It's cool." A shrug. "Soon, I will."

Margot
The answer from Olive was innocuous and caused a small stitch between Margot's heavy eyebrows.  She glanced aside to Nick, who had mentioned the 'place' outside the city, held his eye for a moment when they met, then shrugged and looked over to Caleb next.  She made a face at his comment about the botannical gardens, but didn't appear too surprised.

"They caught you, huh?"  She asked him with a small shake of her head and took her hand from the small dog he was holding, switched her posture so it was more open to the group as opposed to standing facing Caleb's front for the sake of dog-pets.

"It's a bit of a haul on a.. bike."  She almost said 'fixie', don't be so judgy Margot not everyone dressed oddly was a hipster.  She scowled, caught between a social wall and the hard place that was Paranoia, and there was muted reluctance in her voice (read: duty) when she said:  "If you need a ride I could probably help out...  I know where it is."

Boy, did she know.  It was beamed directly into her brain not so long ago.

Caleb
"Yeah, it's unfortunate because it's really beautiful and peaceful, and if you couldn't sleep by a pond with a water fall and smelling some amazing flowers, wouldn't you?" he answers both Nick and Margot's question easily enough. Listens to the rest and manages to offer some reply to them all.

Olive says she doesn't know anyone yet, so it's cool.

"Annie dropped me off out here- it's her house? But she has a hot spring and a gigantic library and-" he stops because he seems to remember that he needs to leave something out "-and she has a weird love of buying groceries."

Margot can attest. Or probably can attest. The chantry seems to have an obscenely well stocked pantry now.

Nick
"I would definitely sleep in a botanical garden if no one were going to chase me off," Nick agrees easily.  He absently gives the dog's jaws a rub at the hinge, where the heavy muscles bunch.

"Oh, so you know Annie already."

There's a glance to Olive, now, who only has her bike.  "I can drive you out there if you'd like.  It sounds like Caleb has already been."

Olive
No hesitation in her answer, no paranoia. She is quite a few years older than Margot but she can remember being nineteen. Does not know Margot is nineteen, but her youth persists in spite of the red shot through her hair, the furrow dug between her brows.

"It does," she says in agreement. "I would like that, if you're sure it's no trouble."

Margot
Botanical gardens did sound like a nice place to live, but Margot figured herself content enough where she was.  Sure, the basement and library still held some mysteries and probable hazards, and there were probably subterranean chambers that she'd yet to even discover.  But she liked the clawfoot tub in the little tile bathroom, and the muted calm colors of the old faded wallpaper in the room she'd claimed as her own.  A waterfall sounded nice, but a bed and roof and kitchen with a coffee maker were even more luxurious.

She pulled her phone from a pocket previously lost to the bulk of her cardigan and glanced down at it, checking the time and date both and figuring in future plans.

"It's not that far out by car," she assured Olive, and locked the screen on her phone before dropping it back into the pocket from whence it came.  "By bike would be another story.  Plus not so safe."

There was a pause where she looked blankly at the woman in the board-shorts-that-she-could-have-sworn-were-mens-underwear, and then realized after a beat that the conversational ball was in the middle of the fooseball table.  Her version of bumping the table was to jerk a thumb over her shoulder and blink.  "Did you, uh, mean from here?  Or another time?"

Caleb
"Oh, yeah, she's really nice she-" he looks back at the dog with the three legs, who seems to be incredibly friendly and seems to also be getting a little more love than he had been before.

"We should go. We can all talk and it won't be weird and we can show you the hot spring," he gestures from one side to the other, which makes the chihuahua look a little confused before he puts it back into a comfortable position near his chest.

"What's it like having a bike?" he asks Olive as he nonchalantly puts the chihuahua in an inside pocket.

Nick
Margot appears to be rising to the occasion, helping the newcomers find their way to the chantry.  Nick is looking down at the dog, and if he is smiling to himself, well, who doesn't like to see apprentices come into their own as experienced members of mage society?

"Are you living out there with Annie?" he asks Caleb, with a glance up to the other man.

Olive
What did she mean:

"Either. Both."

Olive makes an attempt at smothering a laugh when Caleb tucks the little dog into his jacket pocket. A fist pushed against her teeth and her teeth latched onto her lower lip, nothing so obvious as to glance to make sure no one is looking at them. Maybe people are looking at them. It doesn't matter. They are a group but there are other groups just as large as theirs, louder. It's a Sunday. Sundays bring out groups.

What's it like having a bike:

"Like being able to fly. It's amazing."

Margot
"Caleb, did you need a ride back?"  Margot glanced back over to him.  If Nick was humored or proud of how the bug-eyed little apprentice was now corralling newcomers and seeing them someplace safe, the witch-girl missed it.  The last (and first) time she'd met Caleb he was still mastering an understanding of the handshake and was happy to share that he came out of a bunker in Moab and didn't know much about the real world.  The exasperation mingled with concern was akin to watching someone puppysit for the first time.  Responsibility and how it could straddle the line so closely with guilt was not an unfamiliar concept overall, but new when directly applied to the world of Magick.

They could all go, and Margot shrugged one shoulder.  "I don't mind, I suppose, but I wasn't--," whatever she wasn't was put on hold for a moment, as she was interrupted by a chirping ringtone on her phone.  She tugged it free from its pocket again to glance at the screen before finishing her sentence.  "--planning on sticking around.  I gotta take this, but--"  She glanced to Caleb and Olive both, to Nick questioningly as well, and raised the phone to gesture out toward the double doors up the way that spilled into a parking lot.

"I'll meet you guys over there, huh?"

She smiled and waved if there were any declines-- most likely Nick, less likely Caleb, then put her phone to her ear as she turned and walked away.  They'd hear the "Hello?" of greeting, but everything else was washed away by distance, mall chatter, and a yapping dog.

October 2nd, 2016 - Straight Outta Moab [Caleb]

Caleb
The downtown aquarium is a pretty decent place, all things considered. They had fish, which you couldn't really ague with since it was an aquarium and these sorts of things were supposed to have fish. It was kind of a duh thing, really. That aquariums had fish.

Caleb figured that an aquarium would be a place full of water. From the Latin aquarius, for water. And on the motif of the English vivarium.  A place to keep pets. He determines that this is, obviously, a place to keep water pets. He couldn't think of any water pets that would make sense, but it was worth checking out.

He stood awkwardly at the front, waiting to see how to go about getting in. Nobody really noticed him, presumed he paid for admission when he walked in with backpack in tow and off to some exhibit about coral reefs. It was whatever struck his fancy and, at that junction, colors were what struck his attention. The young man headed off on his way there. He's not particularly tall, nor is he particularly short- a couple inches off of five and a half feet tall. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Glasses, which he had pushed up on top of his head in favor of looking at the swirling colors and dancing blobs of fish that came when you were supposed to wear glasses and decided nah, I'm gonna forget about this and you do.

Clothing was boring and unimportant. Jeans. Jacket (which was not denim, but rather something from an army surplus store) and a tee shirt that looked a little like a hand-me-down.

Margot
The aquarium was dark and cool, a good reprieve from the burst of summer-like heat that invaded this first weekend of October.  Margot had brought herself alone today, wanting to clear her mind and ponder.  As she went from display to display she contemplated the Matter of water, the meaning of water, the mechanics of gills and webbing and whether she could pull webbing between her fingers and toes to make herself swim better (when would you ever need that, Margot?).  She considered the essense of Mind itself, and enjoyed how cute otters are for a fair amount of time as well.

When she'd stepped out from the 'exit' path of the aquarium path and into the gift shop/lobby/re-entrance area, the little Blood Witch squinted some against the light flooding through the entrance and gift shop windows.  Her dark hair was left down to her shoulders today, tucked behind the right ear but not the left.  She'd dressed in a loose-fit white tank top, bright violet jeans, and black-and-white sneakers.  There was a tote bag over one shoulder and at her hip but not much else.

She'd stopped to check her phone, look down and answer a text message.  Even though she was only stationary for a minute, already the impression of death and gore began to ebb into the air and unsettle the more sensitive here and there in passing.  They'd chalk it up to nothing, but Caleb may know it for what it is.

[And maybe that'll go both ways?  Perc + Aware!]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 4 )

Caleb
[totally rolling per+aware because Jess said the sheet looked good]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Caleb
He stopped. Brows knit together and he pushed his glasses down from the top of his head. There was a moment of contemplation there, the general stop and evaluate that came with a new and interesting sensation. He presses his mouth into a line, then a pensive frown as he turns around. Slowly.

It didn't feel like danger, but rather the aftermath of it. He turns and finds his attention on Margot with her dark hair and her violet jeans and her bloody, bloody countenance. HIs eyes are not wide, and he seems to have some indeterminate ethnic origin that comes down to maybe from here or maybe not nobody really knows but whatevs.

He cocks his head to the side, just sort of stares. No, wait, not sort of. He does stare.

Margot
Tinkerer.

The word came to her like a revelation, and she had the sense that it was whispered in her ear by someone unseen.  No, she knew who; her Avatar, Andraste, giving direction and watching as her little Right Hand was grown strong.  One day ready to hold the Sword, but not quite there yet.

Forgettably hazel but noticably wide eyes blinked in surprise and her head lifted, the phone held in front of her still but momentarily forgotten.  Her head did not twist around to seek a source, but twisted sure and certain and steady to Caleb.

He stared.
She Stared back.

With already owlish eyes, surprise looked remarkably apparent on Margot's face.  It took her a few seconds, but she blinked and glanced nervously around, like she was worried somebody else was going to appear from the woodwork behind her as well.  When it didn't happen, she looked back over to Caleb with no strong effort made to hide the caution on her face.

The left hand parted from her phone and raised in front of her with the palm out.  'Hey', it said.  'Who the hell are you,' it tried not to say but kind of did anyways if you looked close enough.


Caleb
Hazel meets brown. Just brown. Maybe dark brown, not light brown assuredly but certainly definitely brown. His hands stay in his pockets, backpack stays over one shoulder and the world could pass and he probably wouldn't have noticed. He just... looked at Margot. She looks at him, raised a hand to say hey and he perks his eyebrows up, makes a tentative approach.

He's not a creature with guile, this one. Everything going through his mind written so clear across his face, like the concept of deceit was one he had never truly learned or never truly been taught. You don't ever really ever learn it outside of necessity, and perhaps he'd never had the need for it. But the look on his face is one of concern. Looks her over like a medic would look over an ailing patient.

Caleb drops his voice- a baritone with the kind of clarity that should belong to people who read audiobooks for a living, "are you okay?"

Margot
Margot couldn't yet be old enough to drink, and looked petite from a distance but that was thrown further into perspective when Caleb closed distance.  She'd tucked her phone into her back pocket and straightened her posture, spine straight and chin up, but even a man of average height like him had more than half a foot on her, and several inches in reach as well.  The caution was there as well, but it relaxed back some when she notice the knit of concern on his brow.

Are you okay? he asked.

The question took the bloody-demeanoured girl aback.  Dark eyebrows hopped upward and she glanced hastily down, checking her front and arms for signs of damage.  "Uhh... Yeah, it looks like it," she answered slowly and looked back up again.

"Why do you--," but then it occurred to her, and realization dawned momentary on her face before she frowned softly and shook her head.  "Oh.. no, that.  That's just... normal for me.  I'm fine."

Caleb
She's okay.

She says she's okay, and there he is with his hands in his pockets, which come out long enough to rest at his sides. He gives her a look, too, but it's not lecherous by any means- again, as though the concept of staring at women lustfully had never occurred to him. He looks at her the same way he'd been looking at the fish. Now that the concern is gone he seems... delighted?

Perhaps delighted, or perhaps intrigued. He doesn't reach out, though- Margot has a sense of personal space that he does not invade- having learned that lesson already that you can't reach out and touch people randomly. That'sa something he'd learned before being released into the world. Keep your hands to yourself. Don't eat anything that you're certain isn't food. Don't take things that aren't yours.

"Okay," he replies. Not incredulous or warning that thought away. He says it like he just accepted it, incorporated it into his paradigm as the young man nods. "Good, I don't know any doctors here to help if you weren't okay."

A second.

"How did you get that way?" cocks his head to the side, curious.

Margot
The question was forward, in Margot's own opinion, but really more because of the circumstances of her own Awakening.  They were traumatic for a number of them, and hers was a prime example of that percentage.  Not to mention the fact that they were standing around in a less-than-empty lobby.

"That's tricky to answer in public."  Her mouth pressed into a thin line, thoughtful and curious and still just the teensiest bit suspicious of this stranger.

"Uh, let's back up."  Rather than taking a physical step back she instead stuck out a tiny hand with dark violet polish on the short-clipped nails.  "I'm Margot."

Caleb
"Oh."

Let's back up, she says. Tells him that his question is tricky to answer in public, and seems... well, he doesn't know how she seems, truth be told. He looks at Margot like she is an unsolved slide puzzle of a cubist painting; the pieces fit together in a way but so many of them just work in other places and he doesn't seem quite clear on where to slide them.

He looks at her hand, there is a delay and he reaches out to trake her hand. Holds it for a half a beat before his brows raise and a lightbulb goes off over his head and he shakes it. Up down. Up dow, let go and return your hand back to its place. His hands aren't smooth; he feels like he's probably accustomed to some kind of manual labor. Has a firm grip but lacks some finesse.

"I'm Caleb," a second, "what made you decide on Margot?"

Margot
A pronounced eyebrow raised curiously at the delays in Caleb's handshake.  She squeezed his hand and shook along with, then brought it back to hold onto the strap of her tote.  The left thumb caught into her vacant belt loop and she furrowed a frown at his next question.

"Uh, what made you decide on Caleb?"  She shook her head.  "It's my given name."

She paused and watched him for another couple of moments like she was trying to figure him out.  Apparently she couldn't, because she asked him in a low voice suggesting that she didn't want to be overheard.

"What's with you?  Are you okay?  You seem like you're..."

She trailed off while hunting for the word, surveying him for a moment more before deciding:  "Lost."

Caleb
"I read a lot of Christian mythology, and I really liked the characters Caleb and Joshua, plus it means bold, and dog. Dogs are considered loyal symbolically so I figured loyal and bold were good traits to remember to embody," he said with a shrug, conversational and calm and like this was anormal string of conversation. Asking people why they have their names and what they think of them.

But she's dropping her voice and he knits his brows together. Doesn't move, doesn't push forward into her space but does drop his voice to match hers in volume.

"I haven't been around a lot of people... am I doing something wrong?"

Hands come up, brows raise, "if I am, I'll stop."

Margot

It seemed much of what Caleb was doing was going to make Margot stare.  From his explanation behind choosing his name to the polite explanation that he wasn't accustomed to being around people, the petite college-aged girl's expression didn't change by much.  There was a slow shift, though, a sliding scale between caution and concern that started to tip more toward the latter.

The inquiry as to whether he was doing something wrong was answered with a shake of her head.  "No, no, you're alright."  Her gaze dropped to his hands raised to portray harmless intent, and she felt the urge to push them back down again but instead jammed her hands into her pockets to keep them to herself.

"When you say you haven't been around people... what...?"  The question wasn't fully formed, and she opted to let it die in the water right where she'd left it.  A brief glance about preceded her jumping into a completely different question instead.

"Hey, look, you seem a bit... new in town.  Can we walk and talk?  It's less obvious than hovering in the lobby."  She lifted one hand from her pocket to jerk a thumb back toward the entrance of the aquarium walkway that led patrons through to see the living exhibits.  "Were you just about to go in, or on your way out?"

Caleb

He watches, stands, and let's her finish thoughts. All of them- he doesn't seem to have the need to interrupt and, instead, waited on the figurative baited breath to determine whether or not the question was going to go in some direction he wouldn't have expected (they're all questions he doesn't know the eventual end goal of.) 

She tells him that he seems new here, and it is a statement taken at face value it would seem because Caleb's response is to nod in agreement and concur that yes, her assessment was correct. He is new. New is the best approximation and most accurate word that one could use to describe the not-tall-not-short person standing with Margot. 

"I can always come back," he tells Margot, "the aquarium isn't going to disappear; let's walk."

A second passes while he muses, walking and talking instead of standing or doing one or the other makes him-

"Where do you want to go? This talk requires... privacy?" A question, a confirmation that he understood her and picked up on the actual intention. The subtext- something that is so hard to really understand. 

Margot

Caleb's answer made it apparent that he just arrived, but he sounded sincerely content with the idea of leaving early.  The aquarium isn't going to disappear, he assured her, but her mind was busy churning concerns about money wasted on a ticket that couldn't even be used.  It was there, that worry about someone's wasted dime, etched into her forehead as she looked ponderously at the relatively nondescript looking man, but only for a moment.  Another thought occurred to her in a mental voice that was firmer, deeper, and scolding.  Why did you notice him?  Why did he notice you?  Isn't that more important than ten dollars and some fish?

"Alright," she agreed, and started walking toward the double glass doors marked as an 'exit' on the opposite side of the gift shop/lobby than where patrons came in to buy tickets.  He inquired about privacy like the entire concept was a mystery to him as opposed to the situation itself, and this earned him yet another of those curious 'trying to figure you out' stares.  She held the door open to pass through first and made sure her fingertips stayed on the door long enough to keep it open for him to pass through as well.  Out on the sidewalk it was hot and the sun was blazing and Margot was glad for the loose cut of her tank top when the breeze touched her sides under her arms.  She reached into her tote to pull out a pair of plastic sunglasses and put them on.

"Well, a relative type of privacy.  The kind that comes from not being overheard.  I don't care about being seen, but..."  She shrugged, tucked her hair back with the arms of the glasses behind her ears, and nodded her head to start walking forward along the sidewalk in front of the building.  She was going to be perfectly content to make a lap around the block if he was letting her take the lead.  That would be a good place to start, they'd get some time to talk without losing distance between themselves and their vehicles (assuming this guy even drove a car, which was becoming more doubtful the more she spoke with him).  If they needed more time they could go up another block and double back later.

For now, though, her sneakers were quiet on the cement and her voice was quiet without sounding meek.

"Well, the questions that we're asking, the answers and subjects just aren't meant for every ear.  Like what drew your attention to me and mine to you.  We can't very well come out and say 'Oh!  A fellow Worker!  I felt you across the room, nice to meet you!', y'know?"  Her eyebrow raised here, skeptical and feeling through unfamiliar waters.  She's never been the one to do the explaining about magick and its soicetal trappings before.  "I mean, you do know, right?"

Caleb

He observes everything on the way out. He looks at the fish as they go away, at the ceiling for a moment and at the faces of those that seem to just part and flicker away to do whatever it is that they normally do. He's just a piece of the scenery, this one, with a second hand coat and a pair of glasses that are surprisingly clean and well cared for. They're perhaps a little surprising given that everything else seems second hand and those? Those are new, or at the very least of a quality that they aren't going to fall apart at a moment's notice

Caleb observes as they step onto the concrete pavement, the way that she holds the door as he reaches for it but she beats him to it none the less, "I'll get the next one," he says, like he's certain that there will, in fact, be a next door. That this will just be a series of doors to open and courtesies to repay. But it is walking with them, and he continues along on his way. 

It takes a second or two to modulate the walking so that they're going about the same pace. Margot is short. This takes a little doing, but he doesn't seem to have problems. He observes her, takes in the details but does not adopt a different sort of posture. He does not mold himself to trepidation because... well. There could be many reasons as to why he does not. It's warm outside, but he doesn't take his coat off. There's sunshine and the sidewalk is hot and the ky around them is bright bright bright. 

"I've been told that when discussing matters of the metaphysical you need to be discreet," a complexity in speech perhaps unexpected, a pattern of speech that seems to come about by rote only, but Caleb continues, "I..."

He frowns. Brows knit together before he inhales and-

"Is it... natural.... for there to be so many people who can't be privy to these things? I know you need to be discreet but... it's so empty here."

Absolutely baffled, tone only muddied by the sheer nature of its question unspoken. 

Margot

"It's natural here anyways..."

She would be watching him with a face full of curiosity and confusion every step of the way, but she was already aware of how much staring she'd done.  Enough so that she observed the style of his haircut, the quality of his glasses against the rest of his clothing, how open his face appeared to be with emotion and thought.  It could all be a clever ruse, but she was aware that literally everything could be a clever ruse and that was a rabbit hole that was worthless to chase down too far.  In lieu of constant staring Margot settled for looking naturally forward while they walked and stealing glances here and there as appropriate in the conversation.

Like here, where he paused and frowned and inquired about how surrounded by Sleepers they were.  She was raising an eyebrow at him yet again, looking more worried about the situation as a whole now than she appeared concerned or cautious for her own safety.

"....Most of the world is still Sleeping.  The vast majority of us, thousands of times over again, remains asleep for our whole lives.  I've heard say that everyone has the potential of Awakening, but that potential must be really hard to tap.  Except for where you come from, apparently."  She looked forward again and jammed her hands as deep into the small pockets of her bright purple pants as they would allow.  "Which is... where, exactly?"

Caleb

"That's awful," he says, and makes it sound like that really is awful, "everyone can wake up, everyone has the potential to... but... do they even know that's an option?"

That seems to be a larger question- was the world ready to know they could wake up? Was the world ready to know that there was a terrible and beautiful world full of potential out there for them? Was the world genuinely ready for everyone in it to have the ability to shape reality into being what they want it to be? 

What a wonderful and horrifying notion. One that requires humanity to have much greater rein on their impulses than they have demonstrated. 

But! Where is he from, and that makes him think again, and really think on what should be a pretty easy question. Upon longer glances more details are memorable. His hair is longer on top than it was on the sides, mostly dark brown. On longer inspection he looks vaguely Asian and surprisingly solid. Athletic, even. 

"Fifteen miles outside of Moab, Utah," he finally responds, nods. Yes, that is a satisfactory answer. "This is my first time... you know... out in the world."

Margot

"I don't think everyone should wake up," Margot said with a shake of her head.  Caleb sounded as though he pitied the Sleepers, but Margot herself distrusted the masses.  Crowds of humans were historically known for wrecking everything in their path, including their own structures and societies.  "Reality wouldn't be able to withstand so many people hacking away at it."

As to where he was from, she glanced up toward the golden-bright leaves turned in the trees lining this part of the street they walked.  Placed Moab on a map in her mind, then looked curiously back to Caleb yet again when he confessed that this was his first time, you know, out.  It had taken him a few moments to adjust comfortably to her short-legged gait, but it slowed a little more now while she worked to make an understanding of this magic-touched fellow's background.

"...But you're in your twenties," she said flatly (read: insensitively).  She blinked at him and canted her head a touch, lifted her right hand to grasp the straps of her tote and rest it there.  "I mean, you have to have gone out into town or done little league or something, even if you were homeschooled."

Caleb

She tells him that this makes no sense, which makes him tilt his head to the side like a confused golden retriever. She says it with a flat tone that seems to make him look a little more confused than he had originally been

Little league. Going to town. 

"Oh! I did go to town a couple times," like this was some massive aha moment for him, "but it was a short trip. We didn't ever really need things so we never went." Magical. Makes life so much easier- no doctors. No grocery shopping. No clothing shopping or mending to be done. 

"My-" which makes him stop, look at her for a second "- I don't know what to call him, but he said we didn't really need to talk to people so!"

...

"... I don't know what home schooling is. But thanks for telling me I'm in my twenties, that's good to know," genuinely grateful, that.

Margot

By now Caleb might be under the impression that Margot's default expression was a frown.  The furrow to her brow could very well be the way it was shaped by nature.  Everything he said extended the life of that thoughtful, puzzled frown.  She was worried about what she was hearing from him about his past, and by the sound of it the past was a recent one.  He'd thanked her for informing him that he was in his twenties, he'd stopped to remember how to shake hands, a gesture that would be second nature if you'd spent much time meeting people in America.

"Normally 'Dad' would fill that slot, I think, but nothing I've heard has sounded 'normal' yet, so..."  Margot shrugged her shoulders and looked uncomfortable.  She'd reached a hand back for her phone when a thought occurred to reach out to someone, but she paused and put a pin in that thought after feeling the shape of the device in her back pocket.  For now her hands came to settle together on the bag strap at one shoulder once again.

"So, when did you leave Moab?  Why'd you come out here-- just follow the highway or something?"  She glanced up to him again.  She felt a little apologetic somewhere about the barrage of questions, but really how else did someone to respond to a transplant like this?  "Is your... whatever-you-call-him having you meet someone here?"

Caleb

So there they are- two people walking and thoughtfully frowning at the things the other one is saying. One would probably assume that they were discussing putting a parent in a nursing home given they way that they seem to be in thought, then interested, and then in thought again. 

She takes out her phone, which he inspects quietly before nodding again like he had logged its presence away. 

"I left... four weeks ago? I rode in a truck for a little while, then with a pregnant couple. Then with the same pregnant couple and a baby. I walked the rest of the way- my 'Dad' -" sounds like he knows it isn't the right word but he goes with it anyway "-set me up with a PO box here. Since I have a PO box here I guess I'll stay in case I get mail?"

"Nobody is meeting me here. I guess it's nice, it's strange to travel alone though. How did you get here? Were you always here?"

Margot

"What's the point of setting up a P.O. box for someone who isn't out in the world, and a whole state away on top of that?"  Margot's scowl deepend, that thought wondered aloud and left to hang because she couldn't immediately think of an answer to that question.  "Probably to throw off your trail... but why start a false lead when there wasn't a trail to begin with?  Unless there was..."  She'd muttered the potential answers quietly enough that they could have gone almost missed.  Clearly she was musing to herself as opposed to actively entertaining the theories with Caleb.  This was made all the clearer when she interrupted herself to lift her head, blink at her walking companion, then shrug and look forward again.

"Oh, I drove out here last summer.  I came from Maine, which is where I grew up before."  Her answer was distracted, a verbal handwave of dismissal so that she could move on to what she believed to be the clearly more interesting and important subject at hand.

"So, uh, why'd you leave, Caleb?  If you didn't need to before.."

Caleb

"Oh, I've seen pictures of Maine; Stephen King sets most of his books there. But I hope that's not an accurate depiction of Maine," he replies. Very concerned at the end like he knows that demon clowns and evil fog is a real possibility. 

But why did he leave, she asks? It actually does make him look pensive, makes his stomach muscles tense and his expression flickers with brief confusion- what is that feeling? It isn't like sadness but it is close. Loss? Regret? 

"My presence is detrimental to the relationship between Dr. Shrieber and his son, and as that I lack seniority in the hierarchy I was let go."

So... he got fired from the family.

Margot

Margot gave a small chuckle, the first since they honed in on each others' resonances.  It sounded nothing like tinkling bells or a bubbling brook.  More like quiet huffs of breath and a hiccup.  "No, I never saw any rabid St. Bernards or blood-drenched teenage girls.  But then, I've never visited Derry either, so..."  She shrugged once again and grew quiet while he answered her inquiry:  why had he left?

The answer had her brow flexing differently than before; disapproval, sympathy and maybe even a flash of anger on reflex.  She didn't know this Caleb very well, but he seemed unobtrusive and pleasant enough.  He was 'let go' into the world from some reclusive bunker in southern Utah because this 'dad/Doctor' fellow wanted more time with his son?

"What...," she started asking, wanting to ask what happened, what was wrong with this Doctor person, what this detriment could possibly be, but she found them jamming up because there was a more pertinent 'what' question that was lying underneath.  She'd been wondering it for a while, but it only just formed into actual words.  Her eyes cleared and sharpened some at the dawning of what she was trying to figure out had been.  What was he?  She stared for a moment, chewing the question with her back teeth while waffling over how to ask it.  If she should ask it at all.

Her lips pressed together-- it would be offensive.  You don't just ask people what they are.  It was insensitive when the only answer could be 'a person', so in a world now where the answer held the potential of being anything certainly the insult could be worse somehow?

She gave a sigh, frustrated with herself and her inner dialogue, and raised a hand to rub at her eyelids with thumb and forefinger.  "You are a very puzzling person," she stated simply, and when her hand left her eyes she was looking up at him to ask, rather seriously:  "Where are you living, then?"

Caleb

He is completely oblivious to the fact that his existence is confusing at best and troubling at worst. He can tell, though, that Margot seemed distraught, which made him quirk his mouth up to one side and he reaches out for a moment like he was going to pay her on the shoulder, but then remembers that you don't physically comfort strangers so he makes a little face and just pats the air near her shoulder. 

"No worries, I know it can be confusing. I'm starting to suspect that my normal and your normal are different, and that's okay." Oh god, and he talks like he learned his interpersonal skills from an active listening book. 

But, she asked where he was living right now, "the botanical gardens. Nobody really notices and the plants are nice- once I get a job I guess I'll live somewhere else but from what I understand I need professional references and I don't think I know you well enough to list you as a reference."

Margot

Needless to say, his announcement that he was sleeping in a botanical garden and hiding (effortlessly perhaps but still hiding) from security failed to reassure the bloody-aura'd witch.  By this point Margot had slowed to a full stop, coming to stand on a sunny patch of sidewalk between the foliage-cast shadows of two trees.  She'd pulled her phone from her pocket again and unlocked the screen to start navigating to the contact list.  She offered a small chuckle that was a little surprising to herself and sounded a touch dark in its humors.  "I'm a terrible professional reference, you don't want employers giving me a call."

With the contact she wanted under her thumb, she gave pause to look back up at Caleb.  "Look, it's not very safe for an Apprentice to be lost in the world like this.  I'm going to call my Doc-- he's good-- for just a minute here and see... Well, can you just give me a minute?"

With Caleb's blessing (because of course he was fine with a phone call, polite and easy-going fellow that he was), Margot tapped her thumb on the name Sepúlveda and brought the phone to her ear.  She was quiet and listening for the answer for fewer than a dozen seconds, standing with her elbow cupped in her free hand and arms huddled near to her chest, turned away and looking up the street watchfully as she spoke.  The conversation, one-sided in Caleb's ears, went something like this:

"Hey Doc, I've got a question, do--...  Do we have, like, an Apprentice Helpline or Safehouse or something?"  Her hand lifted from her elbow to pinch at the corners of her eyes, appearing immediately exasperated with how the conversation was going.  "Jesus Chirst..," she muttered to herself, then spoke up, engaged with the voice on the other end of the line once again.  "What?  No!  It's a beautiful day and everyone's just fine, no one's hurt.  He's just..."  A glance to Caleb, "...lost."

The phone moved from her ear and if Caleb were standing close enough he could hear a shout through the other end-- muffled to the point of being indistinguishable, but a man's voice none the less.  She scowled and cupped her elbow once again when returning the phone to hear ear.  "He says his name's Caleb.  He... doesn't really know how to be in the world, grew up in a hole in the ground or something but, well, given the... current events..."

She trailed off, and her eyebrows raised with what was said next.  At this point the receiver moved from her ear so she could ask Caleb directly:  "Hey, nobody's looking for you, right?"  The answer confirmed what she suspected, he was on his own with nobody that he knew of pursuing him.  She seemed a little relieved at that much at least and returned to the call.  "No, he's alone.  ...Oh,okay, I can do that.  Can you text me the address?"  Another scowl at the answer she received, then a look of trepidation before she nodded even though the phone couldn't convey that through the speaker.  "Um.  Okay.  Alright, thanks."

The call ended, and Margot turned her head to Caleb while tucking the phone back into her pocket.  She had a small smile, polite with small apology.  "Okay, so there's a place we can go that's---..." Margot trailed off yet again, but this time the voice that interrupted her was in her mind directly instead of through her phone.  Or, well, there was an impression of Doc in her mind, as flashes of street signs and compass hands and tracings along a map and the visage of an estate all appeared as though through the frost-caked glass of a crystal ball.  Her eyes had gone wide, her breath had caught for a second (something like jumping into water colder than you were ready for), but within moments she was puffing the breath back out and blinking and shaking her head.  "Jesus, weird.  Sorry, uh, there's this place just outside Denver that's safe for Mages.

---------------

Doc @ 1:52PM

[int + tech: how beautiful is my fucking device?]

Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 5, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Doc @ 1:53PM

[corr/mind 2: BOOM, INSTANT KNOWLEDGE OF WHERE THE CHANTRY IS. i'm going to be a twink and say his resonance applies here. and also he's spending quint.]

Roll: 3 d10 TN3 (4, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )

Doc @ 1:54PM

[extending so she doesn't forget it two seconds later]

Roll: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 5, 6) ( success x 2 )

Doc @ 1:54PM

TADA

witness @ 1:54PM

Woop woop!

Caleb

"Oh!"

Like a catchphrase, the number of times that he seems pretty surprised and delighted by the information that he was receiving. He's lived gods knew where and it would seem that indignation was not something that was impressed upon him. Caleb nods like he knows what she is talking about- like this may be normal. 

"Are you sure how to get there? There aren't too many of those in Utah from what I know," Caleb continues. 

"How many awakened people are in Denver? Are there many?"

Margot

A small chuckle preceded Margot's reassurances.  She'd nodded and gestured for him to come along and start walking with her.  She was continuing up the sidewalk to finish their largely-complete circling of the block, headed back to the aquarium parking lot and the vehicle she'd left there.  "I'm more sure than I'm probably ever going to be, so this would be an excellent time to get going."

"I don't know how many of these chantries there are in Colorado, I really only know about this one.  I expect there's probably another further south or southeast or something, further away from Denver, but that's just speculating."  She shrugged her shoulders and continued on as she cut from the sidewalk across a patch of grass that lined the parking lot, making a shortcut to the corner in which her car was parked.  "There's maybe... a dozen?  That I know of and have met myself, anyways.  There's plenty of others that I don't know, though.  There's some apprentices and a Cabal out in the Colorado Springs-ish area that I've heard about.  So if you look at the population density of humans versus the numbers of us...," she trailed off while doing some mental math, nose screwed up a little with the calculations, and fished her keys free to unlock her car.  "I don't know exactly, but there's gotta be near half a hundred in the state when you consider that."  The car went bloop!-bloop! to announce unlocked doors, and Margot climbed into the driver's side first, and waited for Caleb to join her in the passenger seat before buckling in and starting the car.

The drive was likely interesting, full of chatter and questions and what answers the nineteen-year-old bloodwitch could provide.  She probably spent the better part of her time alternating between explaining surprisingly mundane things (like exit lanes on the left, or bridges leading train tracks over the freeway), and the rest explaining things impossible to describe as 'mundane' (like cabals and why sleepers should remain sleeping and spheres).

Eventually they'd find themselves at the Chantry, a largely rural property on a sizable chunk of private land, an impressive estate if ever there was one.  Margot seemed reluctant from the moment she pulled up the drive-- not from doubt of having the wrong address, but because she was nervous.  This was her first time visiting the place, and while some would take the opportunity to explore and catch the tour along with the newcomer Margot did everything she could to politely dismiss herself and be on her way as quickly as possible.

Though she did skip out early as she could, she made sure that Caleb was at least left with her phone number.  "In case you have questions," she'd told him, and grinned quick-and-antsy with hands in her pockets in the doorway before leaving.  "Except for in the wee hours of the morning."  Soon after that, with the crunch of tires on gravel, Margot took her leave.