Ned
He'd invent her to an intersection somewhere in the hip and trendy landscape of Hipster Denver. Where artists go to meet groupies goto meet posuers goto meet business folk destined to make them famous for being weird.
The restaurants and the landscape don't provide very much in the way of comfort for Mages, mind you, given the mind-bending reality altering descriptions they can make out of seemingly thin air, but there is one thing Ned's been meaning to explore while here: Graffiti.
It's one of the last holdouts beyond corportate/sell-out standards here in the Sante Fe world, outside of the street performances and hellbent subtexts of slam poetry soap boxing going on. The alleys serve as a backwoods farm of colour, brightness and expression that seamlessly flows from one mural to the next (with the occasional haphazard tag from some would-be nobody trying to defame the beauty and adding to it's flavour). One can go for several blocks in the labyrinthine district and discover all manner of imagery that boggles and disturbs.
Ned's waiting at the mouth entrance to one such tunnel of art. A swathe of varied greens, depict a vast jungle going in, filled with the caricatured presence of several creatures and monsters hiding in the black and behind the trunks of the twisted, bramble strewn rainforest painted on the old brick and concrete.
He's wearing a pair of loose black jeans and a simple dark green t-shirt. His hands are in his pockets and his shoes, blue converse are in need of replacing soon, if the broken seams and slight lopsidedness of his heels is any indication.
Margot
It wasn't that she'd been out of touch, really. Texts here and there, but not much else. The arrangement to meet was accepted without much delay, no clear hesitation. Why would she have reason to decline?
Margot approached on foot from whatever street parking around the corner she'd been able to find. She'd dressed in white sneakers (scuffed but not in so much disrepair as Ned's), a pair of gray shorts and a bright yellow tank top. Plain brown hair ponytailed, face bright from the summer (heat and mild sunburn speaking of recent time outside both). She'd smiled and raised her hand in greeting when she'd spied him, and approached with one hand in her back pocket and the other on the thin strap of a small purse at her hip.
"Hey," the same inspired first word as always. She'd looked from him to the aisle of street art he stood before, and didn't hurry with viewing the gauntlet from her current vantage.
"Dang." She sounded impressed, appreciative in the initial review. It had the simple finality that it sounded like she was probably going to leave her reviewing right there. Sorry Ned, the interest in graffiti wasn't quite shared with the witchling. "That took a lot of hands or a lot of time. Maybe both. Figure that was a coordinated effort? Professional artist, maybe?" Ah, the familiar awkward prattle of a girl who didn't really know what to say.
Ned
"Something like that. Sort of put me in mind of our collective group of peoples-" Ned glances over when she offers her greeting and just...smiles. A brief, quick thing before his study returns to the 'jungle' before them. Without waiting much beyond Margot's initial assessment he marches into the alleyway, hands still in his pockets, the dark of the tall walls climbing down over his shoulders to blot the fading rays of the sun out.
From in here, things are decidedly more menacing, surreal and in depth. The perspective of the jungle is at once encompassing and alienating. Meant to heighten or exacerbate the sense of 'you don't belong' the various eyes and creatures between the tree trunks and dark, stare at them in that same 'The eyes are following me' sort of way, while the canopy of leaves is alive with the occasional shadow or silhouette cavorting across a tree limb.
"Dozens of possible hands turning artwork into mastery, into fluid delivery, all under the noses of law enforcement, society, civility and propriety. A truly magnificent interaction that is here to be seen but...largely ignored by the population because alleys aren't where civilized people live. They aren't where you're meant to be or go. A lot of similarities here, really."
He continues wandering down the alley, carefully side stepping or moving around detritus and garbage on the alley floor.
"How've you been holding up?" Frank and obvious, is Ned. Margot's one of the few he'll mince words with but not by much.
Margot
Her legs were shorter so her steps didn't fall exactly in line with Ned's own, but Margot walked along evenly paced through the tall murels of jungle trees and brush and shadow. As the trees extended over her head and swallowed the space behind her, Margot had the distinct impression of having marched into a tight space that wasn't quite meant for her. Other things in the world would have called this their domain. She'd watched the walls and observed the depth and layers of shade as they went.
She listened as Ned mused on the idea of an underground organized movement to make sure art existed only for it to never be appreciated, apparently content to do so for the time being. To her credit she didn't pause or lose step when he switched gears to ask how she'd been doing instead. Her eyes dropped from the foliage above to find his face instead. She took a moment to consider her answer and grimaced just a little as she did, probably without realizing it.
"By not thinking about it, mostly," she admitted, and looked quickly forward again. "And by keeping distracted... busy, that is. Murders and mysteries." She'd glanced back with a small (but certainly not shaky) grin. "You know, standard passtimes."
Ned
"At this point? Yeah they are, Nancy Drew."
Ned, for his part, wasn't uncomfortable. He didn't even seem to register Margot's own sense of anxiety, not like he used to anyway. The description and design of who she was and how she operated was as familiar as his own methods but much like that eventful day that he'd wandered into her Marijuana Hutch looking to score some weed on someone else's expired prescription, his attention seem wholly devoted to somewhere and something else. As if the lifestyle and recognition one put into discomfort was no longer a requirement. Just like being civil, proper or organized within society wasn't anymore.
"I'm pretty sure you don't reach enlightenment by avoiding yourself."
Margot
She sighed quietly and lifted a hand toward her face. Touched her brow with her index fingertip like she wanted to pinch the bridge of her nose with the middle and thumb, but corrected course and instead swept her hand up over the crown of her head to smooth back hairs gone stray from the elastic.
"No, you don't. But...," she hesitated, because she certainly was going to. This was her pattern, the pause before the drop, the half-finished sentence and the rewrite and reconsider of what she was about to say. Perhaps it was good that she never learned Time-- she might rewind and agonize over flubbed introductions and poorly stated defenses for veritable years (not that they would matter at that point, would they?). A breath was puffed, and she looked back up toward him. The grimace once more, but this time around her gaze stayed steady.
"I wasn't really just avoiding myself." A few second passed, a time during which she looked at him directly and significantly, but then she swallowed and fussed with the strap of her purse and now broke gaze away to the aforementioned purse strap-- or more to the point the frayed thread that she'd found.
"I suppose if you look at it harder it reflects back upon myself all the same. How I... reacted. And still am. How easy it was to choose a side and how I'm still not budging from that side even though I feel like fucking retching because the image might never stop being so vivid." One or two tears this time, unaccompanied by hiccups or sobs. Something to be said about callousing against familiar pains.
Ned
"Not meant to forget, you know."
He scuffs his converse into the alley and the scene around them has changed some: Creatures have given way to phantoms and music. Jazz singers, late and legendary and largely unknown in their renditions, spit and summon notes from various instruments and microphones, exaggerated hips and lips and mouths all speaking to the extremeness of their joy and love for the music. The jungle is still there, but hidden in the narrow buildings and winding streets. There isn't a corner or angle here without some rounded, comfortable, cartoonish safety to it, even if the imagery speaks of good times, devil drink, smoke and whiskey.
"The imagery stays with you, because the normal method of dealing with our crap is to bury our heads. Tuck into some comfort and feel better about ourselves by reaching for the nearest set of 'luxuries', like television shows or entertainment socials or blackout drunk saturdays. All of them are designed to escape the trauma and emerge as..." He shrugs, head shaking off a word for it that just doesn't seem to matter much anymore.
"We're stronger, bigger and braver than we were before the awakening. That also means the problems, situations and circumstances of who we are, should reflect those elements. Dealing with them requires better than a tub of ice cream and a binge fest on Hell's kitchen." He quirks a smile, though there's little humour in it.
The Jazz singers continue to lament and parade around them, even as the scene dwindles to a further away scope, where musical notes, hover like giant clouds over a sprawling urban city, ballooning over civilization.
Margot
While Ned spoke Margot swallowed the lump in her throat a couple of times until it went back down and swiped at the corners of her eyes and cheeks with her fingers until the salt of tears mingled with the salt of sweat somewhere in the ruby-red temples of her otherwise resoundingly brown hair.
"It's the rule of balance-- it's not necessarily so much the truth that great power comes with great responsibility, but rather great power comes with great challenges to keep your shit balanced. If there were too many of Us running around..?" She shook her head and let that statement hang, as though she'd unlocked a minor epiphany with her own words.
"I don't really know what to make of this," she sighed and swiped another stray tear away, brushed her fingers on her shorts with a small amount of frustration. "I mean... I know that what happened needed to. I don't feel like there's any blame or forgiveness here. But it's still just... there's a fundamental level of wrong when you look in the face of your brother's killer and it's...--"
"...it's fine." She made a face and shook her head, both at herself, and looked blearily toward the changed landscape of vibrant musicians. The back of her mind wondered why she distrusted it so and still searched for beasts in the spaces of the background.
Ned
"Old ways of thinking."
He stared at the surrounding murals, not out of a sense of avoiding Margot's gaze (he'd been attentive during her part of the conversation) but more to let her swerve away and back in at her leisure. Ned was content to be the lodestone she moved back toward whenever she was ready to keep going. He swept his eyes over the Jazz singers, than on toward the musical notes, floating like clouds over a steadily dwindling cityscape. Eventually it turned into starry galaxies, surrounding cosmic entities and celestial planets wearing emoji faces, poked in the eye by an errant star or being tickled under their rings by the golden and pointed pests.
"I didn't kill Luke, he was already gone. I killed the thing he used to be so that he could..." A pause. The first frown of the night for him. "Nick and River both say that the wheel turns to give our old and past lives a chance to emerge and try again. Luke had reached an endpoint in this one. A place where he couldn't progress and may even have been damaged beyond repair if his arm was any indication. By releasing him to the Wheel again he...well...he's got a good chance of coming back clean and making right on what he did wrong and where he went wrong." It's a neat little explanation and sort of sums up the entirety of what he's learned about the Euthanatos so far. As well as the sort of comfort that can be drawn from doing just what that Tradition tends to do.
"Fundamental doesn't really exist anymore, either. Most fundamental standards are based off age and dictation. Even the fundamentals of reality are...well...not fundamental anymore given what we can do with them."
Margot
He was already gone, Ned said, and Margot made a quiet noise of strangled agreement then fell quiet while he explained about the Wheel and reincarnation and making things right in a new life and things of that nature. She slowed her pace some, not suddenly but gradually while the summary of the Chakravanti view of Balance was explained.
When he finished he'd find that she was looking at him with conflict. Faith in his words without truly subscribed belief to support it as well. A budding schism in paradigm, the first of many to come no doubt. Margot felt like she was watching it on some borderline ethereal plane, and pondered how it felt like the first crack in the glaciers that would warn of shelves breaking in the future.
Ultimately, and very un-initiately, Margot didn't take up a foil to fence and parry on the topic of the afterlife and how that meshed with their views on Reality. She just nodded and jammed her hands into the pockets of her shorts and chewed on nothing but her own worries and conflicts. When she spoke again it was quiet, and with the tone of pale-light-dawn-light exploration of a new concept, like testing waters hesitantly when she'd been invited to swim in them.
"Everything's different altogether," she agreed. "So it's better, maybe, to just embrace a clean break from the old life. Luke and my dad are already gone and Mom...," she trailed off as she almost always did on the subject of her mother and let that be its own conclusion to the thought. "Well, suffice to say I don't need to hide anything from any of them."
This, somehow, seemed to spark a thought. Something she'd intended to mention.
"Oh. You know those Apprentice murders happening out in Colorado Springs? There's been another, since when we talked to the Doc in the park that time. The details are weird."
Ned
"Mind you, that's the Euthies..." Ned's chuckling. Margot will hear the vague scepticism in his voice, though there's a part that does seem to ring with him. If anything, the depths with which the Euthanatos believe in such efforts seems to be that defining line that makes the difference between just a group of Killers and Healers, to a genuine Tradition. Fundamentals.
"My Avatar and I tend to view it a bit less...fatalistically. It's more like a puzzle, really and each time the part of you that's Forever because...let's face it, the Doc's experiment with Prime is evidence enough that some part of us continues on and returns to the Pattern, regardless. Each time we go back to the pattern and re-emerge individually, more pieces of the puzzle have come together and we get a chance to explore what's changed and altered. Sometimes that means disassembling a part of the puzzle we've been hammering and forcing into the wrong configuration. Cause of frustration or depression or... well a lot of things really. Take it apart and start again. Fresh view but...only one a section you weren't getting the last time around." He snaps his fingers.
"That's the awakening. Puzzle pieces enough to come together to actually get a sense of what you're building. The image from all the thousands of pieces you've got scattered in front of you. We've got a glimpse of it and it's going to take more and more pieces, decisions and choices to really...figure it out. What the picture is, genuinely, in the end."
He's smiling again. A small but ideal thing. The pictures have gone from cosmic to abstract. Slashes and swathes of colour, layered heavily over one another, giving the walls a bent, wobbling and discombobulating effect. Ned puts his head down to avoid the dizzying array.
"More murders." He frowns. "I've been studying and learning more about the Euthies, I'd almost forgotten. Grace sent me some information on the subject. Something she'd been meaning to inspect. I told her we'd be looking into it more as well and we could all get together." He hums. "Think it's about time we start exploring that avenue. What was so weird about it?"
Margot
Further depth into Ned's personal take on The Circle was provided, and the further he expounded the more relaxed Margot was with the subject. She didn't quite agree with it, of course-- she didn't think in terms of puzzles and pieces but it was familiar jargon to her ear. This sounded more like Ned than talking about healing and returning souls to the fold so they could be reincarnated better. That sounded more emotional. Like another Euthanatos that they knew.
All ideas were inspired somewhere. She was just relieved to hear that he wasn't going to try grasping somebody else's reins, and was instead applying a technique (philosophy) to his own.
As for the murders...
"Well, they found the body with a gunshot wound, but when the reports came back from the autopsy it was determined that the bullet wasn't the cause of death; exposure was. Hypothermia, specifically." A heavy eyebrow raised suspiciously at the circumstance, and she expounded one step further. "In June."
Her eyes widened briefly as something occurred to her, then with a brief glance over her shoulder, as though suddenly suspicious of being followed (though certainly they weren't). "It's August, now. There's gotta be a July victim that they haven't found yet."
Ned
"Well at this point the impossible isn't really an option anymore given what we can do and what others out there are probably capable of as well. At this point, the bullet itself might well have been the cause of the Hypothermia though how someone would attach that level of..." He's considering, his newfound knowledge and information about Forces pushed to some credible recognition.
"It'd be like delivering a booster shot. I could see someone pulling it off with Life as well. Flip the internal body's temperature or just turn it off entirely. Bullet is the delivery mechanism for whatever is being done..." A pause. A frown. "Which is somewhat in line with Euthanatos concepts." A pause. Ned's eyes are darting back and forth rather furiously, having paused in place to examine something he can see in his mind.
"Given the killing and what Nick's explained about Jhor...a sort of...Death-taint-" His hand wiggles vaguely over his head "-type quiet the Euthies are prone to falling into where you fatalistically begin driving into 'end it all' sort of perspectives. You can't stop yourself and rarely see anything but that fact. It may be a former Euthie but the pattern of it is...."
Another pause.
"The weirdness. Nick mentioned to me about Marauders as well. How they can subvert and disturb reality to the point that Paradox just...doesn't even want to bother anymore." Ned's staring ahead at nothing at all. He shakes himself a moment and turns to look at Margot with that familiar crinkle between his brow.
"I think we better start looking into this in earnest. Do you think maybe you've got it in you to summon the Spirits of the Dead Victims? We could use some eye witness accounts of what happened and maybe what this fellow looked like."
Margot
She considered his suggestion about using the bullet as a vehicle for delivering the curse of hypothermia, but nifty as the idea was she still shook her head to chase it away as a possibility. "She was shot in the head, though. If the bullet delivered the cold then she still would've probably died from the gunshot and just had the cold impact her simultaneously, or thereafter." She shook her head and tapped and pulled at her fingers while she tugged threads of memory from her all-nighter of research into the matter.
"There were bullet wounds with the other bodies too, but the evidence was tampered or mishandled by the time anyone got to it. Somebody's got to be going in and dicking around with the paperwork after it's been submitted. I just think... I think that I managed to find what I did before somebody covered it all up. I think these people are dying beforehand and the bullets are being put in the bodies to throw the trail and have fewer questions asked when the autopsy reports get fudged or misplaced. Because clearly it would be the bullets otherwise."
Ned worried that this may even be a Maurader and Margot fixed him with a grim stare at the very suggestion. She'd written 'Bad News' in red pen next to the word in the journal she'd started keeping in her very first days of sitting down with and learning from The Doc. She very much did not want to have to deal with a Maurader.
The spirits of the deceased, though...
"Well," she said thoughtfully. "I suppose so. The Realm of Dead exists somewhere on the other side of the Veil." Her brow creased. "It'll be pulling a specific person and memory, instead of pulling an idea or casting out a lure for a type of spirit." The frown deepend as she went on, realizing the logistical requirements of the task (for her). "We'll have to go out there, though, to Colorado Springs. To where the victims were found. I can't just call them into my living room, not yet."
Ned
"I figured as much."
Ned's removing his hands from his pants, eyes darting around the alley they're in. The walls are painted up to look like a crowd, applauding some show on a darkened stage, as if it has yet to begin or as if it is almost over. Perpetual applause for nothing at all. Ned's frown deepens a bit and one can't help but think this part of Town has it's own prophetic sort of interaction.
"We'll do anther Road Trip. Get whatever you think you'll need together and we can sort it out in the next few days. I've gt some more studying to do so hopefully I can bring some heavier firepower than a few extra perceptions with me." He glances at her again. "If this is one of the Fallen...or worse, a Marauder, we need to be able to tell the Doc and higher ups. Nick'll want to know as soon as possible and Pen as well. I'll get on the horn to Grace and see if any of the info. she got matches up with whatever we find."
Margot
"I'd read up everything I could find on the murders, I'm interested to see what information Grace got to you-- I'll bet there's got to be something that I missed that she's figured out already." Although in reality a small part of her rather hoped that she'd discovered more than the computer-savy mage woman. She struck Margot as a very smart person, and Margot liked to consider herself to be one as well (only with the major handicap of being nineteen).
He advised that she gather her gear up and that they be prepared to alert the Disciples and 'higher ups'. Margot was nodding along with, observing the applause around them with a tiny skepticism in her gaze that had her too wondering if the walls were being intentionally on the nose today.
"It'll need some privacy, I don't think the ritual is going to be very subtle. Summoning the dead's a spectacular thing, it's going to require some kind of spectacle." She grinned just a little and tipped her head back further to look past the tall dark brick walls and to the bright-bright slash of blue sun across the visible sky instead. A reminder of the hot summer day that they were cutting a tunnel through to speak unheard. Became quite suddenly aware of the sweat at her brow and back.
"Hopefully we don't need to worry about dialing anyone on emergency while we're out there this time around. It's just for research-- I'm not prepared to chase down things that would kill me joyfully. Vengeful spirits aren't anything I'm worried about-- if you can summon it you should be able to send it back again." Even as she said this, though, there was a hint of doubt under the cloak of confidence she was still getting used to wearing. She remembered a discussion about sacrifice and how it called upon things with which Man should never commune.
These were just dead people, though. Not Great Ancient Things. She fished her phone from her back pocket to check the time, then asked: "How about iced coffee and air conditioning? The murels have been nice and all but I get the feeling that we're being clapped off stage as we go here."
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