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! ]]
