Sepúlveda
Come over tomorrow.
That had been the missive yesterday, the Etherite having apparently had enough socialization the last two days that he needed to retreat back to his own temporary territory. Either that or he had other plans that necessitated a break in the partying.
Either way, here they are, at Union Station. Sepúlveda meets his younger student downstairs in the lobby, which connects with the terminal of the train station, and guides her through the crowds of departing weekend tourists to the elevator that takes them up to his suite on the north side of the property.
Don't ask how much a suite is costing him a night. He has ways of getting around it, and besides, he has more money than he knows what to do with now that his son and wife are dead and his daughter refuses to have anything to do with him.
"Alright," he says, tossing his wallet onto the counter by the door as they enter. The suite gets plenty of natural light in through the windows, and the mahogany sucks it up. His bed does not appear slept in, and the sitting area where he ought to take breakfast and read the paper is overflowing with books. "What are you looking for, again?"
Margot
This was the third or fourth time that Margot had been to the Union Station now, and she was still just a little taken aback by how large the lobby was each time she arrived and looked up. Sepúlveda was not difficult to pick out of a crowd, the sense of some mystic visions told on a sheet of ice familiar enough that she could more or less just gravitate toward the essense and end up finding him anyways.
Through the busy shared space of hotel and train station and up an elevator, they soon arrived in the room that Sepúlveda had been calling his temporary home for some time now. Margot hadn't been up this far before, and looked around at the high ceilings and natural light and dark mahogany accents and felt her stomach turn just a little. She'd lived the whole of her life under a sparse budget, first her mother's and now her own.
"Uhh... I want to understand Prime more." She paused, then added. "I've got a few books about Spirit and Dimensions already, but if there's something there that stands out could I borrow it too?" She'd sounded distracted initially, needed to pull her attention away from the large suite and how expensive it all had to be and focus instead on the discussion of knowledge and Spheres. She'd brought a simple fabric tote bag along, rolled up into a tube of fabric that had been clutched in one fist. This was unrolled now and smoothed out, showing a black decal of two arrows crossed on the side. In anticipation of being loaded up with books, no doubt.
Sepúlveda
If there is any order to the books, Margot is going to have to give the piles a good looking through to make sense of it.
He has arranged them in four piles near hip-height, so that they almost but don't quite reach the windowsill. They do not appear to adhere to subject or reading level. A few of them have titles that aren't English. More than a few of them look more like thick academic texts than esoteric tomes. Hands on hips, he considers the array before them, then drops into a crouch and starts reading the spines.
"Tell me what you know about Prime already."
Margot
The day was tremendously hot and Margot had dressed accordingly in a pair of dark green jogging shorts (a tribute to the 1970's, a time she knew nothing about) and a white tank-top declaring 'empowered women empower women' within the design of a female silohetted head bust. She wore ankle-height socks and white sneakers and smelled like a whole lot of sunblock, for the sky outside was harsh sun, bright blue, and not a cloud in sight.
She looked curiously on at the books, leaned forward with her head tipped sideways to read spines as well, but not crouching or kneeling down to join him in sorting through. Her voice was quietly distant, for she spoke while reading as well when she answered.
"It is the building block of everything. A particle, if you want to look at it scientifically, or an essence if you want to look at it more mystically. It's an energy as well. It makes up Magick and Quintessence, too." Remembering when he'd summoned up pure quintessence to show them, she added: "White-gold molten plasma."
Sepúlveda
He picks up a book that looks like it has more to do with Matter than with Prime. Flips it over and hums as he flips through it. Humming doesn't mean he isn't listening. By now Margot knows even if he were doing something else he could repeat back everything she'd said since she stepped off the elevator.
"How does it relate to, say, natural forces or nonhuman entities?"
Nonhuman entities. Spirits. Same difference.
Margot
She raised an eyebrow skeptically at him to hear 'nonhuman entities' as his substitute for spirits. Gradually went back to skimming spines before answering.
"They're a part of the everything I mentioned," she stated obviously. "Just because they live on a different dimension doesn't mean we aren't all made of the same stuff. I mean, they manage to exist in our world and we in theirs." As for natural forces, she shrugged. "The planet is made of everything and the planet causes the natural forces based on its gravity and magnetism and geothermal activity and pull of tides."
She paused, then shook her head. "I'll suffice to say that this applies to the rest of the universe, too. I don't want to start trying to speculate about alien life."
Sepúlveda
In order to extricate the book he's got his eye on, the Doc has to hold onto the top of a stack with one hand and wriggle it free with the other. He is more dextrous than he looks, with his skinny fingers and general unruliness, but by the time Margot has finished with her explanation he's got the stack returned to rights and is standing again.
"Why not?" he asks.
The book he hands her is called The Disappearance of the Universe. Its cover is tattered and its pages yellowed. Like as not someone lent this to him and he never gave it back.
Margot
Margot accepted the book and turned it over in her hands. Exampined front and back cover and the inside front pages as well.
"Because I don't really have the mental energy for that right now. I figure anything could reasonably happen out there so I'll just assume anything is possible and let that be well enough."
Sepúlveda
With his hands offloaded for the moment, he tucks his arms around his ribs and chews on the inside of his lip. Her professed lack of mental energy has him frowning. Doesn't have to ask why not, though she might expect or want him to. They went to Chicago to deal with her brother, she didn't want him involved, Ned got hurt. That's as involved as he had gotten in that period of her life without her speaking up.
It goes without saying she and Ned aren't of the same mind when it comes to cataloguing the universe. Margot has been a cautious explorer while Ned strikes the Doc as a forager.
Abrupt change of subject, complete with unhooking his hands from his elbows and beginning to pace towards the one white wall in the entire room:
"Okay, so thus far you've figured out how to sense the ether, yeah? You've got perception down, and you know you can infuse your Quintessence into objects. Consecration, I'm talking. You're talking about, now, channeling Quintessence into--where the fuck..."
He removes a marker from his briefcase and turns the wall into a dry erase board.
"On its own, infusion of Quintessence into a weapon causes it to injure not only the flesh but the Pattern, you understand, the raw stuff you were just talking about, and you can attack without a weapon. It's my understanding that this is the only way to harm incorporeal entities--" Circles and lines and some squiggly thing that may or may not be a ghost. He turns away from the wall, marker still uncapped. "Have you ever seen a body of light?"
Margot
The Doc stood and launched himself into a full professor-esque lecture on the subject of Prime, complete with plucking up a dry erase marker and taking advantage of a clear swatch of portable white board that he had set up (she didn't bother to ask why, this was a scientist, he needed a place to write formulas and lists and shit like this down). Margot glanced about, then found a chair near enough that she could sit while listening and observing still. Tucked the book into the tote bag and set it on the floor by the side of the chair before leaning forward to follow along with the strokes of marker on the board.
"So, reasonably, I could just tear away at it with my hands. But if I wanted I could, say, infuse a knife and give it to someone else to use?" She pondered this thoughtfully for a moment, then shook her head in response to the Doc's question.
"You mean like the sun, or like a god or spirit or something?" Arguably the same thing, depending on the culture, but still.
Sepúlveda
[prime 2: making a... uh... hologram. yeah. +1 diff for fast-casting.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 7, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Sepúlveda
Here comes one of his slapped-together-junk devices. It looks from where she's sitting like he's using the same doppler/calculator contraption from yesterday, but there's a trigger on it where there wasn't yesterday.
As he plugs instructions into the device, Sepúlveda says, "Yeah, you could do that. It's not going to do you any good if you're up against a spirit and the person you give the knife to can't, you know, sense spirits."
Spoken like someone who used to be friends with a Kha'vadi and then fucked that up.
Like a kid trying to take a selfie, Sepúlveda holds the device out at arm's length and points it at herself. An orange glow like a retail scanner hits his forehead, and he sweeps it down his form before aiming the dancing line at the carpet and sweeping it back up.
An ephemeral, almost idealized version of Sepúlveda appears there. The device goes back into his pocket.
"This comes in handy if you're trying to distract someone. Look how handsome it is." Anyway: "Now, if you want to consecrate another person, that other person will take on your resonance and be able to, I don't know, cross the gauntlet with you, even if he doesn't know dick about the Umbra."
Margot
A good student was a quiet and observant one. Margot found herself wishing desparately that she had come prepared with her notebook and pen, but was sitting still and absorbing without writing instead. She could transcribe what they were discussing later.
Curiosity piqued in her face when the device's orange light started scanning over the doctor from head to toe. Eyebrows hopped up on her forehead in surprise when a duplicate of his exact image was left behind in the air after he stepped away. She stared at it and nodded while applications for such a trick were beginning to print themselves in a list in her mind. She had a pretty good picture in her mind of setting up a decoy in her bed when expecting an attack, letting it serve as a trap.
"I suppose if you're trying to make a quick escape that could be a good plan. Gotta be careful about that, though," she said with an air of caution-- "sometimes what you could run into on the other side is way worse than being caught by what's chasing you."
Sepúlveda
Sepúlveda goes from looking somewhat engaged in the exchange of information that's occurring to an absolute deadpan. This is what it looks like when he isn't saying the first dickhead retort to come into his head.
He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and kills the holograph.
"Live another twenty years," he says, "and then come talk to me about being careful."
Cap back on the marker, he drops it back in his briefcase.
Margot
"Will do, Doc," Margot said compliantly enough, and let her eyes and head drop to follow the marker's path into the briefcase. Taking this as a cue that the diagram session of this lesson was over, the blood witchling found her feet and roamed her way closer to the book tower and the window once more. This time she leaned toward the glass to peer out onto the street below.
"Hey," she says abruptly. "Can I ask you a question?"
She probably gets something sarcastic, perhaps even a negatory in response, but Margot pushed ahead with the second stage of the question all the same.
"How long are you going to stay here? I mean, it's not really the most sustainable place to be, is it?"
Sepúlveda
This is what Margot gets for having a confirmation bias: not only does she not get a sarcastic response, but he actually sounds as if the prospects of answering another question was filling him with good feelings.
"Of course," he says as he lights a cigarette.
And then she asks that question. He exhales so hard she can practically hear the appeal to a Messiah in whom he does not believe, and he rubs at his temple with the ring finger of the hand holding the cigarette.
"They do my laundry for me," he says, "and food comes right to the door, and if they don't see me at the front desk for a couple days, they call my phone. I can make it sustainable."
Margot
"Yeah, but..."
Margot looked a little... what? Sick? It was some kind of worry-sick look, like her stomach turned just a little when she looked around at the ammenities clearly laid into the very walls and appliances and furnishings supplied.
"It's just flushing all of that money away..."
He's probably been there to recognize it-- a poor person being offended by a rich man's waste.
Sepúlveda
[empathy!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )
Sepúlveda
"Money is just a token the Mesopotamians came up with to show how much grain they had in their silos," he says. "It doesn't--"
Oh. Wait a second. Sigh.
"If it's any consolation, I transubstantiated toilet paper into currency when I booked the room. It's not real."
Margot
The confession that he was paying in counterfeit toilet square bills had Margot staring at the Doc in a very curious way. She seemed torn on where she stood on the matter of morality and practicality and outright absurdity.
"Oh," she said simply. Then, after a moment or two, nodded her head. "That's actually not a bad trick."
She lifted a hand to scrub at the back of her neck and slick little loose wisps of hair off of it and back up toward the ponytail it was supposed to be secured into. After a dozen awkward moments of quiet or so, the girl glanced back down at the pile of books. Started skimming again, and this time even crouched down to investigate more closely (eyes peeled for something about warding or banishing or exorcising).
In the nature of students and children around the world, Margot piped up with another apropos of nothing question from the quiet.
"Doc, do you have a gadget that protects your room? Like, from anything getting in or being taken out?"
Sepúlveda
It's going to take a bit of bravery to start going through the books with less obvious titles - or no titles at all - if Margot hopes to find anything concerning the nature of spirits in Sepúlveda's library. They're there. Even if he can't get Margot or anyone else to explain the rudimentary steps to sensing the spirit world, there are books in the piles he can crack open.
He plucks up the room's ashtray and flops down on the tightly-made king-sized bed. Feet dangle off the end and he ashes into the glass receptacle without taking care not to get gray on the white duvet.
"Yeah," he says. "It's called a keycard."
Margot
"I'm not worried about anyone getting into your room, I said anything." Margot frowned up and over to where she saw Doc's legs and feet dangling from the edge of the bed (from her vantage point on the floor by the book stacks). Shook her head and looked back to the books-- even if she couldn't determine what each of them were about she had a bibliophile's sense of just browsing to see what was there in general.
"Don't you have any wards in place? Enchantments to protect yourself and your belongings? You're living in a public place, those key cards can be accessed by anyone who can get back behind that desk. You took something from the Technocracy recently and seem entirely unworried about precautions."
He wasn't looking to see her face, but he could hear the worry spreading across her tone to picture that heavy brow knitting together in concern.
"It's a bit reckless, isn't it?"
Sepúlveda
[perc + aware: you haven't been using prime 1, have you?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Sepúlveda
Not so long ago, a girl about Margot's age stood in the kitchen of her father's two-bedroom apartment, appalled at the spartan furnishings before she felt her sanity slipping with the realization that not only had her mother died, but her father had attempted to reanimate and had had to kill her a second time. She had been prepared to yell at her parents for not keeping in communication after her mother left Tokyo to return to Miami. She had left prepared to never speak to the man again.
Naomi and Margot are two different people, but they share the distinction of being the only people who have been inside his living space and thought of his safety.
He blows out another breath and takes off his glasses.
"Don't you think you ought to be sure I don't have any wards in place before you start slinging accusations around?"
Margot
Doc's question brought a quick look of muted embarassment to Margot's face. Her cheeks started to flush and she bit the center of her lower lip, then frowned in a way that wrinkled up the bridge of her nose and glanced down when she confessed:
"I considered it, but didn't want to let any blood or burn anything to do it."
Sepúlveda
Her consternation is announced in the blood gone to her face and truth be told he doesn't derive enjoyment from putting down his students. They make it easy, sometimes, but he doesn't enjoy it. Blame it on the generation gap or the alienness of his intelligence or the chafe come from ill-fitting paradigms. Loads of reasons why they sometimes wind up in situations like this.
Sepúlveda doesn't sit up even now. He's comfortable the way he is and he can practically hear her blushing from across the room.
"What am I going to do with you two?" he asks.
Margot
After voicing the question, the Doc would feel the sheets tugging and the mattress shifting-- subtly, though, not enough impact or repetitive motion to suggest she was climbing up onto the bed as well. Rather, when he turned his head he'd find that Margot was kneeling at the bedside, arms folded onto the mattress's edge and her face tucked behind them so only the top of her nose and everything above was visible.
Wide owlish hazel-brown eyes staring watchfully at him from bare arms still pale-pink though they were so many weeks into summer (sunscreen diligence) greeted him. Before she spoke, she lifted her head enough that her mouth and chin cleared her arms at least.
"Give us shelter and guidance?"
She tipped her chin and mouth back into hiding once more, watched him for a second, then added quietly from behind her arms:
"I won't call it a cabal if you won't."
Sepúlveda
With that, he stubs out the cigarette and picks up the ashtray and sets it down on the bedside table with a thunk. Only then does he swing his feet to the floor, mindful of Margot's skull.
"Come here."
He intends to give her a side hug. She has to heed his command first. Either she does or she doesn't. Regardless, he goes on:
"I'll start calling it a cabal when you two stop being stupid."
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