Echoes
Hello and good eeeeevening! *spooky voice*
1: This scene will be creepy and sad but not so terribly dangerous.
2: If you could both pm me with any potentially relevant merits and flaws, that would be cool.
3: No posting time limit. (I mean, you know, within reason.) I think we can probably get this scene done at a reasonable hour.
4: As always, I am here for questions and concerns. So if you have one, let me know.
5: Have fun! Mwuhahaha!
Echoes
It was a cloudy evening in Denver. The sky above Washington Park was darkly veiled. Even the brightest stars were little more than distant pinpoints, and the moon was shrouded in mist. When Lucy and Elijah arrived at the park, they'd find it mostly empty. A long stretch of grass and trees and now-hibernating flower beds was laid out before them, still and quiet apart from the sifting of dry leaves. It did not precisely feel ominous (not to these two - Lucy the Dreamspeaker and Elijah the medium,) but it did seem just... a little bit haunted. There was a feeling of whispers on the breeze.
But then, October evenings often felt this way. It was the nature of October.
Elijah
"So," he announces, "I met Delilah."
He didn't spend much time hanging out with Lucy, which was of course a fact that he was needing to remedy. It was occurrence that was he had intended on remedying. She was enjoyable, and honestly the last time Elijah had been really hanging out with Lucy was when he and Alicia and Sally had broken into an amusement park. The park felt quiet, haunted and haunting but enjoyable none the less.
It was october. Elijah had a fondness for October. A joy for the season and it felt… just a bit haunted. Just a bit strange. Just a bit of time where everyone felt the way that he felt every day.
Lucy
It started with a text, one to the other. It ended with a trip to a nearby ice cream parlour. It is a little bit of a walk from Bonnie Brae to the park, but Lucy was up for it if Elijah was and so they walked to this place, chatting amiably.
She seems a little off tonight, does Lucy. Not in any terrible and easily pinpointed way. Just...thoughtful. Contemplative. She is dressed in a tank top (Fortes Fortuna Juvat, perhaps that is appropraite), black pants with many zippers, and her black knee-high boots. They are talking amiably about this or that when Elijah announces that he met Delilah.
One moment Lucy is happily eating her ice cream, the next a sudden burst of air from her wind pipe creates an opening whereby the ice cream tries to be eaten by her esophagus. Cue coughing fit.
When she manages to collect herself, she wipes the back of her hand across her mouth and...keeps it there. "Oh?" she asks, trying to sound nonchalant and failing utterly.
Echoes
They'd been to get ice cream. Elijah mentioned, casually, that he'd met Delilah, and a moment later Lucy found herself fighting off a coughing fit. The sound of her coughs echoed around the park, slightly marring the sense of eerie calm that had greeted them. Once she'd managed to dislodge the ice cream she'd inhaled, the quiet returned, creeping back in like a delicate fog.
As they walked through the grass, a gust of wind brushed past. Colder than the rest of the air (like a breath of frost.) It rifled through Lucy and Elijah's hair and crept over their skin.
There was that gust: sudden, biting. And then nothing. Silence.
And then? Something that fell only on Elijah's ears.
Lucy
[that was cold like me, murr? awareness!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Kiara
It was a terrible night to be out running. Cool, cloudy and with the creeping foreboding only October could muster for Denver. Of course, things as trifling as weather had never stopped Kiara Woolfe from doing whatever she desired before and they surely weren't going to begin now. The svelte figure was cutting a track through the park, her sneakers kicking up gravel and her breath puffing out before her.
There was the tinny sound of music coming from earphones, and while most women might have shied away from the practice of running after sunset, there was no coincidence to the fact Kiara was sticking close to lighted areas, falling into step with the lit pathways that veined throughout Washington Park.
Elijah
She chokes on nothing, and Elijah grinned. Caught the look on her face and made a decision at that particular juncture. He thought of Delilah- all dawn-kissed and the morning to Lucy's evening. He does not know the nature of what they are, only that they are close. Only that they share things, and how amazing it must be to-
He stopped walking. There was something over his left shoulder and he did turn. He turned and noticed that there was nothing there. His brows furrowed and the young man took a second to pat himself down. He had a jacket on, not entirely accustomed to the cooling temperatures but there was something cool there.
"Someone's coming," he said as he looked for his pack of cigarettes, "or he's already here."
Lucy
Elijah stops and then Lucy stops, looks at him first over her shoulder then turns to face him more fully. She only looks at him a moment before she shifts that gaze to the nothing near him, brow furrowed, curious.
Then she is pulling her shoulder bag forward, which clatters and clinks a little oddly - too many pens maybe, or something. She is rooting through it, careful not to spill what little remains of her cup of ice cream, searching for something when Elijah says that someone's coming.
"Uh huh," she says and then, "hah." She has her lighter, that long thing silver thing that looks like a skinny thing of lipstick. It isn't lipstick, though Lucy's lips are painted dark tonight and that could probably use a touch-up after eating.
There is someone coming. Someones, actually. Someone dead is nearby, but someone devouring and rejuvenating is drawing nearer. Lucy will have to trust that this newcomer is not part of the problem. She flicks on her lighter, the candle burning high, and says a silent prayer.
Dusk Handmaiden, show me the unseen.
[Spirit 1: Find the Spirit, diff 4-1 (practiced)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 3) ( success x 2 )
Kiara
Someone's coming.
Kiara's footsteps don't falter as she rounds the bend and grows nearer to Lucy and Elijah. To one, her essence is not unfamiliar, to the other, she is a stranger. This night however, not a ominous one. A lighter is flicked on and as she catches sight of it; of two figures the Verbena's footsteps do slow a little, she turns her head, squints into the inky darkness and, after jogging on the spot for a moment, weaves a little closer.
[Awareness, hello out there?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Echoes
Whatever Lucy saw when she invoked her silent prayer, Elijah and Kiara were not yet privy to it. Kiara approached the group at a fast clip, running up the trail nearby. Her earbuds kept her from overhearing whatever it was that the others were saying to each other, but she felt a brush of that lingering chill on the air.
And Elijah? He might not presently have Lucy's sight, but he could hear. (He always heard them, whether he wished to or not.)
Kiara
[*sweeps her post after STs*]
Echoes
[Something is there with them. Something spectral and cold. Kiara will catch a breath of it on the wind as she runs. The closer she approaches Lucy and Elijah, the more noticeable that sense becomes.]
Elijah
[Spirit 1 - Can I see who is there?]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Elijah
They were always there.
He remembered being young and being impressionable. he remembered thinking that his parents believed wholeheartedly that he just had an active imagination. That he just heard things that were fabrications in his own mind that became hallucinations because what else could the voices be other than a figment of an ill mind.
Elijah found his cigarettes, and the young man took a second to light up, a second to inhale and take it all i. He inhaled deep and long before he exhaled.
"Who is Jack?" he asks quietly and intently.
Lucy
Lucy looks and Lucy Sees and as she Sees the air around her grows colder, gelicide crawling over the pavement and brushing against toes. Suddenly the October night feels a little more frosted, the air more bitterly cold.
"Elijah," she says, eyes on the man who shouldn't be there. Before she can describe to him or advise him or any other such thing, Elijah is getting out his cigarettes and Lucy, aware, feels the tumult intensify. Together they are the swirl of the snowstorm, the bite of it threading, stitching its way into the skin, seeking out the bone. Lucy can't help but smile. Didn't she tell someone earlier that none of them were helpless?
"I don't know," she says. She looks away only long enough to see the newcomer hesitate. Definitely another oracle. Mage. Whatever. When she starts to come closer Lucy lifts her chin and seeks her out, then lifts it in a jerk, a come hither upward nod.
"Excuse me, sir?" she asks, striding toward the man. "Are you looking for someone? Maybe we can help?"
Kiara
For as in touch as she was with the earth, Kiara had long understood there was more to what dwelled on it, to what existed beyond simple sight and sound than many understood. She was a Life Mage by design, a Healer by calling but she felt and understood that the Goddess granted visions of things beyond for specific reason. A greater compassion for life could only be reached when one understood the trappings of different spheres of existence.
The body mattered, this mortal coil, but life did not lay trapped inside the cage of a physical being. It was everywhere. In the trees, in the soil, in the roots and leaves decaying on the ground underfoot. There's something with the two figures in the distance. She knows the imprint of Otherness enough to have it stall her run, to detach her earbuds and bend, for a moment, to stretch her muscles. She straightens and begins to move toward the other two.
The hair on her arms stands on end, her eyes flick upward to the moon, growing full with every passing night, nearly obscured tonight by the cloud. The Dreamspeaker notes her approach and if she's not mistaken, it appears that the brunette's lips are moving in some sort of private chant.
"Crescent one of the starry skies, flowered one of the fertile plain, blessed one of the gentle rain, hear my chant amidst the night and grant me open to your mystic sight."
[Spirit Sight, can we see what's going on? (-1 practiced)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 6) ( success x 2 )
Echoes
Who is Jack?
There was a pause, and that spectral chill grew stronger. Beneath Lucy and Elijah's feet, the grass frosted over, sparkling in the dim light. Lucy approached the source of that chill, and she, gelidus as she was, felt as much a part of that cold death as whatever ghost or spiritual echo had chosen to visit them that night.
Are you looking for someone?
Kiara sensed what the others already knew was there, and as she drew upon Lucy and Elijah, the quiet chanting of her voice joined theirs. She saw him too, now - this ghost in their midst. All of them heard him when he spoke.
"My dog. I'm looking for my dog. We were running together. I thought I had him..."
The voice trailed off.
"Didn't I just have him?"
Echoes
There in the shadows cast by Lucy's small, bright flame, was a man: pale and incorporeal. There and yet not there. He was tall (over six feet) and of mixed ancestry - asian and caucasian from the look of his face. Perhaps oddly, he seemed to be dressed for activity. His bare chest was muscled and athletic, and he wore a pair of running shoes and black drawstring sweatpants.
He wasn't running though. Instead he stood before the group with a confused, worried look in his eyes. He turned to take in the expanse of the park, looking in all directions. When he moved, his body shimmered like shadows and moonlight.
Elijah
Didn't he just have him?
He shook his head, slow because he… he had to say something. Elijah swallowed, something hard that stayed in a lump in his throat. There was a ghost in his midst. They were running together, and then-
"Were you running just now? What does your dog look like, maybe… maybe he got picked up?" The voice trailed off, and Elijah found himself trying to finish his cigarette for a completely different reason.
Lucy
Didn't he?
Lucy gives him an apologetic look. "I don't know, we haven't seen any dogs around." She watches him, and she thinks. If his last business is finding his lost dog...is that something she can find out here? Probably. Bending at the knees, she lightly lowers to a momentary crouch so she can set down her ice cream cup. When she straightens, she shakes her long, dark pink hair back off shoulders that are nearly bare despite the cold. That's alright, though. Cold doesn't bother Lucy like it does regular people.
"If you want," she says, glancing sideways at Elijah, "I have a Gift. I can try to look backwards and see if I can see what happened to Jack, and we can find him that way."
Kiara
He's a runner, is the first thought she has, second only to, I know that kid. The one with the cigarette lit between his fingers that looked about as unnerved as you could expect someone to be when confronted by the very real reality of a ghost. Kiara's dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her skin is still sticky with sweat from her run and the longer she's stalled, the more the chill seems to creep over her.
"Hey," she greets both, slightly breathless. Her voice quiet in the moment, her eyes on the incorporeal figure fretting for his lost dog. "Kiara." A name, she nods at the ghost, offers quietly. "Maybe we could try calling the dog. It might be nearby." She scans the periphery as if expecting a dog to come rushing out to greet them. "It might be disorientated itself."
Echoes
"He's a husky. Black and white. Blue eyes." There was a gnawing panic growing in the man's voice now. He darted across the grass, disappearing and reappearing like smoke and fog. "Jack! Where..."
And then he stopped, staring directly at Kiara. The air got colder. And colder.
It felt like winter now. The mages' breath grew visible on the air.
Shaky. Quiet. "...No. Keep her away from me..."
And he began to drift backwards, but he did not run. Instead he hovered, frightened, about 20 yards away. Lucy offered to help, and perhaps that was what kept him present. The man looked at her and frowned in confusion."If you can help..."
Echoes
[Edit: Ack, that is supposed to say 10 yards, sorry. Damn typo.]
Elijah
The air got colder, burned his lungs and made his stomach knit together and ache. It hurt. It hurt a fair bit but mostly because there was a feeling of winter clinging to his skin too soon beyond the feeling that he felt with Lucy and-
"Hey, hey, just… just breathe… it's okay, just breathe, it'll be okay-" he said, hands up and he wasn't having the best of ways to keep people even. But he didn't know what to do. What to say next.
"Everybody just… y'know… stay where they are."
Lucy
Lucy nods to him, but she looks at Kiara, not so much wary of the woman's effect on the man as she is curious about it. She doesn't let her gaze linger, she has work to do, and it is easy work for one such as her. Not so much a job as it is a calling, a life's ambition, her eternal drive. Lucy is the dusk-touched handmaiden, guardian of the gate to the Underworld. She farwells the day and welcomes the night.
This is not a job, this is her duty.
Elijah tells everyone to stay where they are and Lucy turns apologetically to Kiara. "No, just you. Just for now. My name's Lucy," she says, to both the Verbena and the ghost. "I'm just going to sit..." she looks around for the closest bench and when she finds it points it out, "over there. What's your name?" She begins to stride toward the bench, which is hopefully located in such a way that she doesn't need to approach the man, threatening his personal space. Before she gets there she pauses, looks back over her shoulder at him. Voice crisp as an autumn apple she says, "And this is probably going to sound weird, but it's important, believe me. I need you to tell me what year it is."
Kiara
[Let's see if we can ease that fear of the nasty resonance a bit. Charisma + Awareness, easy there, Casper]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )
Kiara
It can't be the first time she's encountered someone (or something) that's reacted in a similar way when presented with Kiara Woolfe's presence. Her resonance was, in part, overwhelming, the push and sting of base destruction. The stripping away of matter only to reform it. The Verbana had no fear of what was, to her belief, the simple process of life. Things were born, they thrived, withered and died only to start the process anew.
A ghost, on the other hand -- she greets the fear with measured patience. She feels the cold snake over her body and raises her hands as if in supplication. "I'm not here to hurt you." It's a simple truth and she offers it out as such and remains, at Lucy's bidding, a safe distance from where the other Awakened moves to work.
Aside, to Elijah, Kiara murmurs. "It's fine. It's me."
Echoes
Kiara's words offered some small measure of calm, and for what it was worth, the man didn't run. Instead he watched her from a distance, his dark eyes wide and frightened. He didn't look like the sort of man who ought to be frightened of anyone, really. In life, he'd been strong. Tall and fit and powerful.
But he was not alive anymore (at least not in that sense) and if he was here, then something had happened to him. Something he had yet to resolve.
Elijah told him to breath. It would have been good advice, had he been talking to the living. Instead the ghost just looked at him quickly, barely registering his words, before fixating back on Kiara. She said she wasn't there to hurt him, but something about her very presence seemed to unnerve the man.
It was only Lucy's questions that seemed to pull him back to himself. Jack. He was looking for Jack. She was trying to help. After a pause, he drifted toward her. The motion seemed hesitant, and this, too, felt out of place on him.
"Jeremy. Jeremy Tran." Something about the way he said those words made it feel as though he was only just remembering them. "It's 2014."
He came to a stop a few feet away from Lucy's bench and looked back at Kiara. Jeremy didn't breath (he had no lungs, no need of air) but his chest gave the motion anyway, and his mouth parted slightly. Panting, almost. Not from exhaustion, but fear.
"I felt that before. Somewhere."
Elijah
[Int+Enigmas- do I know you?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )
Elijah
There was something that Elijah remembered. Something that stuck with him and made his attention wander and he thought, he thought quietly and his vision went foggy and distant while he thought and remembered what was going on. He remembered Sera. He remembered blood and all that it made ]his stomach turn and he remembered-
He remembered hunger.
And a missing person's report. About the healthy, healthy people who seemed to be missing. About the healthy, healthy person who should not be dead in front of him. Elijah paused. Elijah ran his hands through his hair, forgetting about his cigarette and the hot ash that fell on the ground.
"It's… I think I know what happened," he said, "I… I don't think… You were running here, or walking Jack… and it was summer. Maybe we could see what happened that summer? It's October here."
There was no finesse, btu slowly, the cogs and connections formed.
Lucy
The name does not ring any bells for Lucy. Perhaps if someone had introduced her to Ginger, but ah, wait, they have. But Kalen only put it on her phone this afternoon and damn it if she isn't ever going to open that...what is it, an app? Does it have a little icon? Of sexy lips and a telephone maybe? All Lucy knows is that it's somehow connected to a phone sex line and a mailbox and the rest is all Greek to her, or any other language for that matter, save of the language of the denizens of the Umbra. She doesn't know what it is and so she's not going to open it, and thereby connect herself to the information network that the Hermetic wants so badly for everyone to have access to.
Lucy has access to it. Kalen said she was free to use these resources or not as she sees fit and the technoilliterate Dreamspeaker chooses "Uh, what? No way."
She doesn't have a computer and she doesn't read the paper, doesn't have Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook or even Myspace or a Livejournal. She is disconnected from current events which is okay with her. She goes to the bench and she nods to Jeremy Tran who died so young and so fit, like so many before him have died and so many after him will die, because at the end of the day everything turns to dust and it's up to Lucy to guide their spirits home.
It's up to her to find Jeremy's release so that he can go home, perhaps to his Jack.
She sits on the bench, folding one leg as she does so that the ankle is pinned beneath the opposite knee so that she can face the bench before her, her bag before her opened and she reaches in to retrieve a pair of velvety drawstring bags, one much bigger than the other. She unties the larger first, listening to Elijah work through where he's heard of this ghost man before, and into her palm she pours her curved silver mirror. If someone were to touch that mirror they would find it ice cold, is smooth silver surface seeming frosted, the cold of it biting needle-sharp against the skin as it stitches the user to the metal. This mirror she sets down before her on the bench, then she opens the other bag and pours out blue stones into the mirror's surface. They clatter-tink-clatter-clatter and form a pile that holds the same frosted sharpness as the mirror. Lucy places her fingertips light upon the pile and begins to move the runes around. Closing her eyes, she prays
Dusk Handmaiden, part the mists of time for me, show me what happened here in the summer of two-thousand fourteen.
[Look Backwards: Time 2, diff 5 -1 (practiced) -2 (unique foci)=3, needs I think 2 suxx to look back within the last few months? Dropping a WP]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (6, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Kiara
Jeremy is watching Kiara with clear apprehension and for her part, the Dreamweaver does little to perpetuate what he feels creeping, clawing outward from her presence. She stands, leans her weight easily against a nearby tree and crosses her arms over her thin chest, watching with a furrowed brow as Elijah closes his eyes and talks of past summer and what Jeremy had been doing when he --
"It was recent." She murmurs, acknowledging what the Apprentice was suggesting, eyeing him with clear interest before her gaze flitted to the other in the distance. Kiara's breath was still misting before her due to the ghost's presence.
"Whatever happened to him ...," she doesn't finish her thought aloud, but instead adopts a watchful silence.
Echoes
"What do you mean, 'what happened to me?'"
Jeremy frowned as he watched Lucy go about her work, looking between her and the others. Kiara's resonance was a cycle of hunger and rejuvenation. It was all at once healing and terrifying. And perhaps that confusion was enough to keep Jeremy's fear from overwhelming him, but only just barely.
It wasn't really her he was afraid of. Perhaps the memories her resonance threatened to unlock.
"Yes, we were running. Like we always do. And he was here, with me."
Stubborn, see? There was something there. Something he wouldn't (couldn't) look at.
Elijah
There's a dawning, a knowing, that he doesn't see what comes into the past but he doesn't need to. He knows how this story ends without having to see it. He inhaled, and his words were slow and he had something to say. perhaps it wasn't his place. Perhaps he should have been more gentle, but he reached out to the rather fit, healthy former young man. There was a quiet tension there.
"Jeremy," he starts, the tone says it all. The tone says that bad news is coming, "I think… I think that someone attacked you. And… I don't… think you made it."
He didn't know what to say, normally this seemed easier, but it still stuck with him.
Lucy
If only Lucy could gasp, cry out, cry, vomit, move. But she is locked in the vision, her eyes on the past with her body unmoving in her present. Her hands are rested on her knees, her eyes rolled back with her face upturned to the sky. Sightless.
But not really.
Because on the other side of the mists of Time she Sees everything. Sees the horror and the swift and terrible brutality.
It takes a few minutes, but finally the vision - her Avatar's power - releases her and Lucy can move. She gasps, groans. Then the bile rises in her throat. It's one thing to deal with the spirits of the dead. It's quite another to see how they got that way. What she Saw...
Lucy claps her hands over her mouth, rises, scattering her mirror and her rune stones in her haste to get up and find - no, to get to -
She runs for the edge of the path, for the grass, and she drops, not caring that her touch will sear the blades, cover them with a frost that blackens and kills it. On hands and knees, Lucy, kind and sweet Dreamspeaker, throws up into the grass. The sounds she makes are awful. Choking sounds, coughing sounds, and in between them sobs. She continues until her stomach is completely empty, of lunch and water and ice cream and whatever else she'd had today. Continues a little more as she continues to wretch, stomach heaving nothing. She sucks in air in gasps, lifts her hand to her mouth to wipe away the spittle. Sitting back, but head dipped forward, hair a dark pink curtain that hides her face, she says,
"I'm s-sorry," and her tone is miserable. "I'm s-so, so sorry." With a mighty sniff, Lucy tries to pull herself together. Which of course isn't possible, not without a shower, a fierce scrubbing, and perhaps a few more days to cry into Delilah's shoulder. She looks back, and there is spittle on her chin, vomit in her long hair, some splattered onto her hands. Her face is a ruin of her dark and thick makeup, streaks of black running every which way down her face. Her nose continues to stream. But oddly, her skin is not flushed. But that's not really so odd, Lucy's skin will never flush again.
"I'm sorry, Jeremy. He's guh- he's gone." Her shoulders hunch with the effort of holding back, no no no don't fall apart, you can do this, this is your duty, this is your life. If this is a trial of the handmaiden, then she has to prove herself worthy. Has to be strong. "It was terrible. But I promise you," she struggles shakily to get to her feet, but her legs, see. Now that she's here and knelt they don't want her to get back up again. Those legs that are so strong, so powerful, have sent her soaring through the air or twirling endlessly in place, they are weak as a newborn fawns. "I will find you justice. For both of you."
Kiara
Kiara's content to stay where she is while Lucy works, while Elijah tries to find the words to break to a ghost the raw truth -- how did you find the words to tell someone that they'd died? -- but when Lucy jerks back to the present, retching, struggling with her vision, it starts Kiara from her resting point. She's moving toward the other Mage without thought.
Guided, one imagines, with a deeper recognition of need. She stops when the other woman struggles to speak, Kiara's expression one of evident concern. "Are you alright?" She looks to Jeremy, then to Lucy. One might wonder exactly who she's addressing considering current circumstances. Her eyes track to Elijah. "I think she needs help. I don't want to -- " Kiara considers her position.
If she moves any nearer, its very probable the ghost amongst them will flee.
Echoes
I don't think you made it.
He's gone.
Jeremy looked at Elijah, and for a moment he seemed almost angry. Angry as any person might be when told that they were not alive despite their own assumptions to the contrary. But then Lucy came out of her trance and ran to vomit in the grass, and Jeremy's expression went from anger to concern.
He approached Lucy where she knelt in the grass. Where the echo of her resonance caused the green to wither and die beneath her. But he stopped a few paces away, silent and still. He wasn't looking at Kiara anymore. He was looking at Lucy, who told him that his dog was dead. And that she would find justice for them both.
Jeremy opened his mouth, but no words came out. Suddenly he dropped to the ground, landing on his knees with a shout of pain. When he looked down, a hole opened up in his chest.
Lucy hadn't seen this part. The part where Jeremy died. The part where his heart had been ripped from his body.
But she saw the scar now. They all did. Where Jeremy's heart should have been, there was just this red, gaping hole. Other wounds opened up on his flesh. Blood dripped down his arms as the skin peeled away. Bite marks showed on his face. His neck. His chest.
"They killed my dog..." he said, then he opened his mouth and screamed. The sound left a lingering, sepulchral echo as his body and his presence vanished from sight.
Elijah
This is a story about Jeremy Tran.
This is a story that Elijah only saw part of, only got to see Lucy drop and vomit and tremble and he wanted, he wanted desperately to go to her, torn between placating the dead (something he could not do) and comforting his friend. He looks from the man to Kiara and Lucy- "i-is she okay?"
Concern. Of course concern, because he couldn't help but wear concern, because he was unsure of what would come next and he stayed, and he watched, because sometimes when you are young and you are new all one can do is bear witness. It is all he could do at that juncture, see the story play out- because this was a story about Jeremy Tran. Jeremy Tran who was fit and who loved his dog like he was a constant companion, who looked for him even after death.
There was a scar there, a gaping hole where his heart used to be, in a figurative and literal sense, and all Elijah could do was watch. All he could do was bear witness to the peeled back skin, to the dripping blood, to the bite marks, the bite marks, and he thinks of all the other people who may have been missing. To the frat boy who narrowly avoided a similar fate and he will think, later, that this must be a connection. That this couldn't be the vampires Kalen was so worried about but something else entirely.
"I'm so sorry," he insists, because it's all he can do. It's all he can bear to say.
There is silence, and he looks back between the two ladies. Skin pale and breathing shallow.
Lucy
They are all of them, including the ghost, concerned for the Seer. A pretty young thing who is frost-touched, death-promised, Charon made flesh and blood and given a breath of life, but still cold. The chill of winter imbues her very skin, keeps her cold from the inside out. It is a cold that leeches warmth, that steals it as it grasps at life. A blessing, she believes, for who can say that they were touched by their Avatar? Who can say with the certainty that Lucy has the destiny that lays before her? That doesn't change the fact that her touch is a bitter, deadly thing.
Something Jeremy Tran won't find out, though Lucy tries. He kneels before her and she reaches for him, reaches through him, because she didn't ask for the ability to touch the dead tonight, to offer them what solace she could offer through physical touch. She wants to hold him, hold him up, hug him, but she can't.
She can only watch. Because sometimes even when you're not so new to this all you can do is bear witness. And so Lucy bears witness. Sees the scar open on his bare chest, gasps when she sees it, claps her hand over her mouth when the other marks begin to show. They are not merely holes, they are tears, there are scalloped teeth marks.
They are watching Jeremy Tran's death and it is so much worse than what Lucy Saw. She takes in the shakiest of breaths, and then her lungs refuse to release it. The pale young woman watches, eyes wide, horrorstruck.
She lets her hands fall finally, tries to speak, but only gets to, "N-" before the last coherent words she hears from him followed by that terrible scream. Lucy wants to be strong, she wants to prove her worthiness to the nameless, forgotten deity she serves, but Lucy is still so young. She is still so tender. Jeremy Tran opens his mouth to scream and Lucy's eyes squeeze shut as she claps her hands over her ears, trying and failing to block it out. She asked her Avatar for the ability to speak with the dead. Her hearing is not a physical thing, but a Spiritual one.
"I'm sorry!" she cries out, and then she's crying. Curling forward as a wordless wail tears its way free of her throat to join with the dead's.
And then it is just hers.
And then she is silent, save for the not so quiet sobs. "I'm sorry," she whispers, again again again. She will find him justice. She will find a way to put his spirit to rest, she has to. But tonight she just...she can't. She can't she can't she can't.
Kiara
It never got easier, bearing witness to the anguish of the dead.
Kiara's dark eyes watch Jeremy's ghostly body reform the marks of his passing and while her mouth thins and her eyes narrow against the horror of the retelling, she does not grimace, or glance away. She bears witness to that demise and when, with a scream of pain and diminished horror he vanishes -- fades from the moment and his personal spiritual limbo -- she glances at Elijah's pale face and nods once, curtly, but not unkindly.
"Yeah," she offers, looking toward where Lucy sits, sobbing, curled on the grass, undone by the glimpse of the past she'd borne witness to. "She will be." The Verbana frowns after the place the ghost had first materialized. "He said they killed his dog. Who were 'they', I wonder." Kiara moves then, folds her legs beneath her to kneel on the grass beside the other woman and sets a hand comfortingly on her shoulder.
Her touch is barely there, a gesture more than anything. "Here, let me help." She begins to collect together the discarded runes, tendering each back to their owner.
Elijah
[Per+awarepathy- can I hold Lucy right now?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )
Elijah
She's crying, she's crying, and the last thing she can do is get some words out, some sort of apology, and all he can think of to do is hold her. So, he does. He bridges the distance and puts his arms around Lucy with the sort of protective familiarity that someone who has no power over the world around them should be able to exude. He can be present, he can be present, and in that moment he is present. In that moment he is awere, and Lucy takes in the shakiest of breaths.
this isn't easy.
It's never easy.
It's never going to be easy, and this is her calling in life. And he knows, knows with every fiber of himself that has convictions that she will make good on her word, because Lucy makes good on her word. He accepts what is there, tears and wailing, and all he can do is cling to the living, protective and caring regardless of how terribly cold the living can be. No matter how dusk can take the breath away from a man.
"Things don't have to be okay right now," he tells her, strokes her hair because it's what comes natural. He mouthes a thank you to Kiara, incredibly grateful.
Lucy
Later. Sometime later. Sometime much later. After she's cried and had a shower or a bath and has curled up into the protective closeness of her sister, Lucy will be able to attempt to answer that question.
Who were 'they', I wonder.
Lucy saw, Lucy felt, Lucy knows a little bit of something.
But here and now in this moment all she can do is be horrified. All she can do is cry as the images of what she's seen reply in her mind, over and over, stopping only when warm arms wrap around her and pull her close. For a moment Lucy stops, hiccups, looks up at Elijah and for one brief second there is gratefulness as well as surprise. And then she is crumpling, curling in, pressing her face to his shoulder as she begins to cry and sob in earnest now. There is some stupid part of her brain that remains detached, tells her that she's going to ruin his coat with her makeup and her saliva as she cries. There is vomit in her hair and on her skin. The voice falls on a deaf consciousness. She will be fine, eventually. She will be fine, some other time. But right now she is not, and neither is someone else somewhere not here.
Kiara bends to collect the fallen runestones as Lucy cries and cries until finally she starts to quiet as she begins to run out of energy. Elijah can feel her begin to sag against him, her sobs losing their ferocity and vigor. When at last she can sit up she sniffles, her pretty face a complete fucking ruin. She cannot flush, but her eyes can still swell from the saltwater of her tears. There is still make up and snot and everything else. Lucy wipes sluggishly at her face. "Thank you," she whispers to Elijah.
She turns to where Kiara is, and she slowly rises up onto her knees and makes her way forward, and helps her find the rest of the stones. Lucy can feel them where they've fallen, they are almost as much a part of her as her own skin. She collects them in a handful and starts to drop them into her bag. Not their special velvety bag, just her own bag. They will clatter together as they make their way to the bottom of it, but right now Lucy doesn't care. She wants to go home, but she can't go home until she's collected all of her things.
Only when she has does she speak again. To Kiara, "Thanks." And to Elijah, "Can you give me a ride, please?" She does not think she can handle the bus tonight.
Kiara
Kiara, for her part, only lingers long enough to see that Lucy has her belongings and the boy, Elijah, has an arm around her and the means to see her home. The brunette's earbuds are still hanging, loosely from around her neck and she smiles a brief, sharp thing at the Apprentice as she gets to her feet, brushing grass blades from her knees, where they cling to the fabric of her jogging attire.
"Pleasure. See her home, okay?" This, to Elijah, as Kiara feeds one bud back into her ear. She glances, somewhat lingeringly at the place Jeremy had materialized and if she has questions, she bites her tongue on them for the moment.
"I'll see you both around."
It's not a question, but an assurance. She starts back off into the shadowy depths of the park without another backwards look, taking with her that devouring essence that had startled the ghost. It fades out, along with her footsteps.
Echoes
[I believe that is a wrap folks! Thank you all for playing!]
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