kindling. [grace, serafine, dan, river, samir]

River
It is twenty-nine degrees outside. There is a light snow. There's a gentle breeze and it's starting to look a lot like an actual winter and not the kind of winter that people from southern California are accustomed to.

If winter is going to happen, they're going to do this right.

River's actually an old pro at setting things on fire in the most mundane of senses. She was the one who was in charge of the camp fire as a kid and she spent good chunks of her formative years burning various and sundry things outside in what she later determined was just what one did when you got cold and were bored and you didn't have an actual stove to cook dinner on. It's just a thing.

There's a ring of stones and pinecone-and-"you're late on the rent" notice kindling and whatever the fuck else one needs to start a fire. Text messages were sent out (recreating the Salem witch trials with marshmallows, want to come hang out?) and bags were set aside.

River took a hit off her flask and put it back in her gigantic purse. Exhales. Watches her breath take to the air. Tosses a sacrificial marshmallow on the pire to appease the camp fire gods.

GraceGrace found out via Samir. Hanging out in the outside when it's below freezing isn't at the top of her list of great things to do, really. It's a good thing she likes Sam.

So she shows up, dressed in two pairs of jeans, her grey zip-up turtleneck on under her coat. Maybe overkill for 29 degrees, but you never know.

"Oh, nice. Fire's already started," she says, and rushes over, pulling her hands out of her pocket and warms herself at the fire.

"How's things?"

Sam LakhaniSam has been here for a few minutes by the time Grace arrives. That tendency of his to hemorrhage out of other folks' awareness is a pain in the ass sometimes. If he's going to be hanging out in the park when there's snow and it's colder than Hell then yes. Yes he did bring a bong inside of a backpack onto public transit.

The things he does for River.

He hasn't busted it out of his bag yet but it's sitting on a picnic table bench and unless he has a fully assembled clarinet in that thing there aren't a lot of objects that could drape the canvas like that.

"I told her we should wait until you got here to get it going," he says. Just because he's taken another step towards ascension doesn't mean he's going to stop busting Grace's balls.

SerafíneYeah, sure, alright, okay, thanks winter you fucking asshole, it is twenty-nine degrees outside and snowflakes are falling or not so much falling as drifting and drifting is okay too but: cold right?  November and we've still forgotten how-to-be-in-the-cold, the things it does to us, body and breath, skin and blood and bone.

She must've forgotten.  Little black dress that pretty much covers her ass and not-much-more.  Long (the suggestion of length, the illusion of height) legs bare except for ripped fishnets and black heels wrapped in sharp metal studs, leather jacket framed in studs, zips, a marching line of oversized silver safety pins down the center of the back holds the damn coat together and suggests the elegant symmetry of a bare spine.  So: not made for warmth any more than anything else she's wearing.

She doesn't seem to notice the cold though, or maybe each minute without shivering is another big fuck you to the cold front shivering flurries down over Denver at the moment.

--

Didn't get a text about a fire.  Has: about a bazillion texts she has received and not returned but for god's sake her phone is working again which means every time it buzzes she can slip it out of her pocket and glance down at the screen and feel: alive, connected, earthbound, and strangely free.

--

And she's walking on the arm of a tall guy with blond hair and a trimmed blond beard and she's wearing those heels and he still has several inches on her, but there they are, walking together like old, old friends, this animated discussion back-and-forth between them.  Coming from the city, circling the lake like it's a shortcut they know rather than a place-to-stroll.

Serafíne(Awareness)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 6, 6, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne(Awareness -3)

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Ihsan GhaliIhsan was sitting nearer to River than anywhere else, with a blanket spread out on the grass beneath them both.  She was from Los Angeles-- Southern California.  She had been experiencing heat waves and drought for most of the time that she'd been in this country, and she'd spent the majority of her life in Cairo before that.

Ihsan didn't like the flurries because they made her chilled.  She'd traveled, she'd experienced cold before, of course.  She would just probably never get used to it.  So she was bundled up with wool socks under her calf-high black boots, in dark jeans and a black coat.  She wore a hat on her head and her hair was out in curls (flat, curling ironed curls) beneath it.  No scarf, at least.  No gloves either.  She was warming herself near the fire, waiting to be able to shed the hat and open the coat.

She was leaned forward, toward the flame, reading some document or another off the screen of her iPhone with an expression of content-but-mild-boredom on her face.

When Grace arrived, Ihsan looked up and smiled fleetingly for a greeting to her.  "Hey there, Grace.  How are you?  Any more murders for me to investigate yet?"

Because who the hell was eavesdropping on them out here, after all?

Kiara[Spidey senses roll.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

GraceGrace squints at Ihsan. "No. I heard, finally, that your 'investigation' turned out well in the end, though. Good for you." There's a bit of exasperation in her tone, but she really means that last sentence. It turned out all right, at least.

"Oh, Sam, there you are," she says to him, gives a little wave. Truth be told, she didn't notice his presence until he spoke. Samir is like that, the fucking ghost... She moves over toward him, sitting on the opposite side of the obvious bong. At least there will come some good out of communing with nature or whatever the hell it is they're doing.

Grace can commune with some nature in the form of weed...

KiaraSo, here's the thing.

Kiara Woolfe, daughter of nature and walking manifestation of Spring (or so her presence feels like, so much pulsing, writhing life) actually rather enjoyed the coming of the cooler months. Less for the stagnancy of them, the way the world felt as if it slowed, preparing to enter a chrysalis before re-emerging on the other side of the dripping frost but for the progression of them. It meant change was (should always have been) coming. It meant that despite whatever happenings in the greater scheme - nature was not fooled, or halted.

She would (had to) find a way to survive.

Pattern and purpose to the cycle. An evening like this, after everything she's recently endured, felt cleansing. The air was crisp and flakes of snow are drifting in the air like a promise - landing only to melt in the Verbena's wild dark hair, the waves of which are loose and curling around her shoulders; over the (faux) fur lining of her coat. Hands folded into pockets, dark jeans and boots and that mouth, as ever, painted a brilliant, stark red.

She must have been sent an invitation - or perhaps River simply conjured her with the fire and mention of her ilk via text. Kiara Woolfe, a lean apparition leaning her weight against a tree with her eyes on the fire.

"If you're going to be faithful to the trials, that fire needs to be twice as large." Her voice curls out after a beat. "I could speak in tongues, though." A waspish tease. "To get things rolling."

River[I totally notice people and resonances. Per+aware]

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

RiverRiver has planted herself near Ihsan and, on occasion, gets up to poke the fire and check to make sure said sacrificial marshmallow knows it is in a place of honor- you must burn so that others after you may be delicious. Thus far, she's been pretty happy to just be around people, hair shoved under a hat and her coat isn't pretty but god damn it, it looks like the kind of thing that you would wear if you're going to go out and wander aimlessly through the wilderness.

Laughs when Sam pokes at Grace. Tries to laugh a little less at the bits of exasperation in her tone when Ihsan mentions wanting another murder investigation to paw through.

Then? Kiara is there- someone River hasn't seen in awhile and she waves- fingers uncovered but the rest of her hands seem pretty well shielded from the weather in what can only be described as mittens having an identity crisis.

"I tried to come up with something witty to say to that, but I've drawn a blank," she offers, laughs anyway, "nothing makes marshmallows tastier than the gross misappropriation of justice?"

And, with that, she offers Kiara a coat hanger.

Sam LakhaniIt's too cold for him to even think about sitting down. He may or may not have thermals on underneath his street clothes. He has swapped out the leather jacket for a peacoat and has a ski cap tugged over his hair. His fingerless gloves have a mitten-type option in the form of flaps. It's difficult to strike a lighter when you can't feel your fingers but it's even harder with wool covering your thumb.

"You should," he says to Kiara regarding using glossolalia. "Speaking in tongues is metal."

Ihsan Ghali"Thank you," Ihsan answered Grace's congratulations in working with River and Mike to bring down the Nephandus that had been melding people into two and triggering a murdering spree from someone entirely different, in a surprise twist ending.  She smiled and seemed pretty genuinely pleased with herself, then skewered a marshmallow and put it outside the reach of the fire to toast slowly.

Where this bundle of Mages sat must have felt like a goddamn magnet to other magical forces out there.  That many rifts in the hard laws of "reality" would make some waves for sure.  It was astounding that they hadn't brought trouble down upon their heads already (knock on wood).

Ihsan pulled her hat from her head and smoothed her hair with her palms, then unzipped her coat some to show the top of a charcoal colored shirt.  The fire was warming her and the boots and wool socks were starting to feel pleasantly toasty.

Like the marshmallow.

River"I thought I was speaking in tongues once, but then it turns out I apparently knew Sanskrit at one point," she said with a shrug, as though this is a completely... no, she knows this is not a normal thing for people but she passes it off like oh, yeah, sometimes you just remember crap from a past life and have no idea why you know how to do something. Just roll with it, NBD. Sigh. Chakravanti problems.

Grace"I thought yelling while you're simultaneously trying to clear your throat was metal. The things I learn..."

Yes, this many Mages might be a goddamn magnet. If so, let them come. There must be a few more royally stupid things out there who'd like to shove shadows down her throat or something. They could have an actual burning. Fun for the whole family.

Well, okay. Maybe not fun.

She laughs at River, thinking that's a joke she just made. Who doesn't know jack shit about past lives? This Elite.

"Hey, Kiara."

KiaraThe Verbena is still standing off a ways when River holds out that coat hanger, her lip curled up at the edge in a smile that verged on a few things but her eyes: they seemed wholly honed in on her. Watching River with a sudden, total, focus as if by staring long enough she'd be able to tease loose a beat on the other female's mental state.

This is the first time Kiara Woolfe has seen her since news came of Farrah's demise.

It's there, somewhere, in that look and the slow, stretching beat of silence - on the tip of her tongue, to say something of it. A heavy awareness lingers as the brunette eventually kicks off her leaning point and moves into the gathering proper. Ihsan receives a lingering tick of Kiara's eyes as she makes progress and comes close enough to receive the coat hanger.

"Thanks." She accepts it with, and studies River's face again, the firelight drawing gold patterns over the Verbena's neck. The warmth melting snowflakes in her hair. Then there's Samir - and there's Grace and the latter gets a quick, bright smile, but the former -

The regard lingers there.

"I'll keep it mind for a party trick later." She looks at Samir for another moment, then drops down to her haunches and her eyes return to Ihsan. "I don't believe we've had the pleasure yet."

Kiara[Ahem. "keep it in mind," tyvm typo.]

Sam LakhaniJust about any other person looking at him the way Kiara looks at him would normally have him wondering what the hell she was staring at. But Kiara is Verbena and he knows what she's staring at besides. His resonance is noticeable now. He is more of a presence than he was the last time they saw each other.

Granted the fact that she is Verbena means she could be staring at a pissed-off spirit hovering behind him or a blight on his aura or something and he wouldn't know until she said something but Sam has a pretty good idea what has her attention.

He throws up a set of rock horns with the hand not holding onto the backpack and drops into a crouch by the Chakravanti as Ihsan and Kiara get themselves acquainted. Time to light this sucker.

Ihsan Ghali"No," said the North African woman to Kiara.  She'd watched the woman as people answered to speaking in tongues-- how it was metal and could be confused for Sanskrit.  Ihsan was busy regarding the new dark-haired woman with the bright red lips.  Watching her like a lion-- relaxed and assured but watchful none the less.

"I am Ihsan."  She smiled and lifted her hand to show her palm in greeting.  Hey, that kind of a wave said.  Her accent was dense and interesting, different to an ear that's grown accustomed to the Western United States especially.  Still, she spoke clearly and had a strong grasp of the English language.  She wasn't that difficult to understand.

The marshmallow was brought back and tested with a squeeze of her fingers.  It was a little underdone, but apparently that was how she liked them, for she plucked it with her fingers and popped it whole into her mouth.  She then pulled her hat back on and zipped her coat back up and rose to her feet.

"I'm going back to make a run to the store for hot dogs and buns.  Anyone wanna come with me?"

And whoever did or did not want to come with, so it would be.  Ihsan was set on getting hot dogs and returning later with brats instead ("yes, hot dogs, right?").

[Sorry, but I need to roll out early.  Bedtime comes quick when your alarm is set for 4:30am]

GraceOh, nice, Sam. Abandon Grace over there. Whatever. She looks over at Sam and River and gives him a little smirk.

Well, she knows how it is.

She turns her hands back and forth to the side of the fire, trying to warm the cold side (which is, of course, the side not nearest the fire at that second).

"Hot dogs too? Awesome," she says to Ihsan, but doesn't move to get up. Not going with.

RiverShe has good days, and she has bad days. There isn't much of a baseline for Kiara to work off of but today? Today seems like a good day. She seems alert and engaged and content to be aware of people. She hasn't punched anyone at work (in fact, she still has a job. The other dancers at the Diamond Cabaret are convinced she must be sleeping with the hiring manager, but realistically River came up in a couple of very positive Yelp reviews. She's a classy lady; classy ladies change the atmosphere enough that you attract clientel who spend more.)

River concludes that Samir is close enough to lean on for a minute, and so she does- it's a momentary breach of space until she realizes oh fuck, Samir is lighting stuff and she stops attempting to assert her manifest destiny on his space.

There is, however, something that stuck on her senses. Brows knit for a second as she remembers that there's a presence that she can't actually place.  Though, in the way, she does happen to place its source and finds-

"I'm gonna yell at people," she warns. And then, does raise her voice enough that it carries-

"Dan! Tenemos malvaviscos! Come say hi!"

Sam LakhaniLiving in a trailer by himself in the middle of goddamn nowhere must be doing him some good. A few months ago River would not have leaned on Sam. A slew of variables make today a different day than one plucked random from several months back. He doesn't seem like an individual who would react strong to unprovoked physical contact.

Ihsan takes off to go buy hot dogs and Sam doesn't offer to go with her but he does hand her a twenty out of his billfold before she leaves. Then River is leaning on him and he goes still a moment with the novelty of it. But then she pulls away again and he goes back to packing the bowl.

I'm gonna yell at people.

"Uh oh," he says before he plants the bong in the dirt and covers his ears with his gloves.

KiaraI am Ihsan.

That ignites a flicker of recognition. Apparently, the name meant something to the brunette and she returns the greeting with little nod. An affirmative sort of gesture. Kiara's eyes follow the other woman when she rises to her feet and makes her declaration of a store run. The coat hanger is still being held between Kiara's fingertips, her nails are painted the same shade of red as her lips.

The firelight reflects in the varnish as she twists the wire hanger around in her grasp.

It's a habit, perhaps, watching other people. It's certainly one that the brunette seems to be making an attempt at, the way her dark eyes follow Ihsan and then return to Samir long enough to catch the gesture he makes, long enough to witness the way he positions himself by River.

The way she leans into his space.

The Verbena's gaze drops away, then. This brief constriction of her brows and she drives the edge of the hanger into the hardening earth below, wedging it there as she rises to her feet. Drawing the hood of her coat up so her features all but vanish beneath the furred lining. "I'm going to make a quick circuit for more kindling. There's bound to be some leaves around here.

I'll be right back."

Hard to tell what the pagan's expression is in the moment before she starts moving again, leaning over periodically to kick up leaves being buried by drifts of snow. Shaking loose the less saturated ones.

Sam Lakhani[challenge accepted]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 4, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Kiara[I have a mighty 3 dice now. What? I'm inscrutable.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )

SerafíneOf course she's caught by the wild tangle of resonance surrounding the slow-growing (probably illegal but hey: world of darkness) campfire down by the lake and of course she stops, hooked (fish hook/open eye) right? and sometimes it makes her want to breathe: in and in and in and in like she could inhale the world, feel it bubbling in her lungs.  Tonight, instead, she feels skewered like those marshmallows on that coathanger and that hook is an odd little interregnum in their coming-from-someplace and going-to-someplace, an arrest, if you will, an institial moment that feels quite as between-things (places, deeds, names, definitions) as she does. 

It's a long-ass walk cutting through the park and the sun has set and the sky has that pillowed, shifting, dead-orange tinge from all the ugly lights reflecting off the close-cropped clouds, the fitful swirls of snow and in the midst of that walk is an exchange between them, all statement and query.  Her statement; his query evidence in the way he pauses and glances down at her, face on to her profile, sharp against the darkness.  Maybe it is that turn of his head that catches River's attention.  The beard and hint of tattoos on his ungloved hands.  Some lumpen shadow at his back that will resolve itself into a guitar case when he gets closer.

Which he will soon.

Because: River warns that she is gonna yell at people and then she yells at people and Dan lifts a hand by way of greeting (open palm, mildly ironic twist of his mouth) because what else can he do?  Drops his mouth to her ear and bumps his forehead against her temple as he does so: so familiar, so close, so careful with her right now.

--

Takes them longer than you might think when they leave the path.  Four inches of melting slush on muddy ground that has not yet been settled into a solid winter freeze and, you know, heels and bare legs do not mix very well but whatever.  She's solid on those long legs.  Knows how to walk on almost any surface in those heels, but here and there, he gives her a hand.

"Hey folks," Dan, when he gets there. Just a glance and a flash of his palm, as his attention returns to the girl-who-yelled, his mouth curves wider. "River."  And his attention hangs there for a lingering beat.  "I don't think you've met Sera, have you?"

KiaraWhat is Kiara Woolfe thinking ... doesn't have an easy answer. There's no doubt that something about the apparent closeness Samir and River are displaying (if you could call it that) is partly the reason why she's excused herself, given herself a task that takes her away from the display of intimacy.

Partial discomfort? Partial surprise - something is nettled there in the way she observes them after she stands up and draws her hood. It's tangled up with some degree of sympathy (for River, no doubt, with the way she was watching her when she showed up).

There's things on the Verbana's mind she's not inclined to share. At least, not with the present company.

Grace"Hey, Dan," Grace says, through the fire's heat. He's a wavy-lined Dan to her. "Hey, Sera."

She smiles with her eyes at the newcomers to the circle of fire, but then returns her attention to the flames.

"You going to play for us?" she asks the fire. Obviously it's more for Dan than anyone, but who knows. Maybe she really does mean to ask the fire.

Sam LakhaniLast time Sam saw Sera and Dan he was in Quiet. Which means the last time he actually remembers seeing them was at a house party. Which means he was stoned when he showed up and not in much better shape when he left around three o'clock in the morning.

Something in Kiara's gaze has him checking his own expression. He lowers his hands after River has yelled about marshmallows to the Cultist and her consor and lifts one to wave but it's an awkward sort of wave. A not-knowing-how-to-act-in-this-situation wave.

The bong is packed and ready to go. He is not the first one to light it. It sits like an offering beside the fire and then Sam stands from his crouch and takes a few steps back from the circle to light a cigarette.

River"I have not," she carries things like she is used to carrying things because, well, this is just another social situation and River is a social creature. Sees a man with a guitar and his friend who is a spindly but striking creature.

She offers them a coat hanger, like this was a worthwhile offering.

"I told everybody that we were reenacting the Salem with trials with marshmallows, but I don't actually know how to hang a marshmallow so, uh, morbid joke completely lost."

KiaraShe does, in fact, return after a while with a handful of leaves cupped in her hands (trust the earth witch to deliver on such a promise) and carries them dutifully to the small fire; dropping them in a drift of crumbling pieces into the flames where they are greedily consumed and send up the vague, earthy aroma of foliage as it crackles and curls in on itself.

She's brushing her hands off when Dan and Sera make their approach and the Verbana's dark eyes, dramatized more-so by the liner she's applied to them turn to regard both, her hood pushed back far enough now that strands of dark hair are visible where they slither and curl at her neck, the thick waves of it half tamed by her coat.

"Good to see you, Dan. Sera." The latter's name offered with this quiet, delicate touch of meaning. The Verbena's supple mouth pulled into a little half-curl. She tosses the last handful of leaves toward the fire and and nudges at a stray, escaping one with a boot. Urging toward its demise.

A flicker of some darker, answering humor dawns in the Verbena's eyes as she watches the flames. "Burning them alive has always been a crowd favorite." There's this tiny shadow that falls over Kiara's face as she turns it into the treeline, as if searching for the source of a noise.

"Or so I've heard."

Serafíne"Hey Grace," Dan-to-Grace, through the flames.  This quirk, like a smile but checked a bit, framed by the beard.  "We could, if you wanted.  Couple songs, maybe.  We've got a gig though, so we can't stay too long.  Sort of a welcome-back thing for Sera, so it'd be pretty shitty if we didn't show.  Any requests?"

--

Dan didn't see Sam when Sam was in Quiet.  He was waiting in the van, engine off but still ticking in the heat of the day.  Watched her leave and come back and knew something was hanging over her when she climbed back in the passenger door.  Didn't know how bad it was until she collapsed.  Took him forever to scrub the blood out of the upholstery, but he managed it.

Dan gives Sam the self-same quirk-of-a-smile-thing that Grace received and there's nothing awkward about it.  Something: prompting, quiet, solicitous in the way he handles Sera in the moment though, cutting a lashed glance down at her profile.

"River this is Sera.  Sera, River.  So, now you've met."

Sera takes in this: bright, crisp inhale then.  "Hey."  And it is all very, strangely self-contained, though River has no real context for this, but maybe she's simply: stoned, already, somehow.  When Kiara returns with her promised leaves, something a little more animate: warm, less constrained gets woven into her name, "Kiara."

"What about you, River.  Any requests?"

That's Dan,  he seems to think music is necessary right now and he's letting go of Sera long enough to lift the guitar case over his head and shoulders.

Sam LakhaniAs he traipses further from the fire he puts his back to it and the people around it. He meets Grace's gaze quick and continues his traipsing. They're all sitting around a fire that is giving off a good amount of heat and no small amount of smoke but he wants to keep his carcinogens to himself. What a guy.

He ends up over by Grace again anyway. She's the furthest away from the fire and she's sitting down and he's taller than her when she's standing up.

"You see that thing on Jitbit," he asks, "about the guy who would write cron-jobs for anything that took him more than ninety seconds?"

Grace"Uhhh. No? Sorry. I'm terrible at music-y things," she says. "Something you like."

Her favorite 'song' at the moment is a guy screaming at people to install Gentoo over a throbbing beat, and there's no guitars in it. And if there were, you couldn't play it without a computer.

Samir saves her by talking nerdy at her. "Nope. Sounds fun though."

River"Ukelele anthem!" because something with four chords was totally worth Dan's prowess as a musician. She has managed to piece together though that the bearded man is to music what she is to dancing.

River has made her way over to the communal bong, started on with the necessary prep work because she has no problems being the first person to take a hit for the evening.

"I have full intention of getting ripped and asking people to dance, so- does that inform your decision?"

Sam Lakhani"You need to get a coffee maker with an SSHD. Then you could figure out how long it takes you to walk from the library to the kitchen and, like, have it start brewing and then wait before pouring it into a cup. The guy called it fuckingcoffee.sh or something equally poetic."

It's way colder over here than it is by the fire what the fuck Grace. He finds it difficult to bitch about the cold after the other night though so he digs his smartphone out of his jeans pocket and starts tapping buttons.

"Hang on, I'll send it to you."

KiaraShe moves a little closer to the Cultist, Kiara, her hands finding her coat pockets.

It's a dark navy form fitted thing that hugs in around her narrow waist with a zip and a hood that's lined with a mottled fur trim along the edges and sleeve-ends. The lining was synthetic but it cast the brunette with that twinge of something a little wilder none the less - something she seemed to be manifesting tonight. A certain aloofness in the way she held herself away from the others.

Standing rather than sitting as if her presence were as limited as the two en route to a gig.

She's watching the fire again, the pagan and there's something to that, the way the flames licking and curling into the air, the smoke and the tiny snaps and pops of burning debris, contain and hold her focus. They spoke enough of the Spirit Mages to allow for some assumptions to be made regarding the distraction of the Verbena. Perhaps she was meditating on the way the fire feels to her or senses some fluctuation in the Park itself.

It's the stillness, though. That makes it singular. Her eyes don't leave the fire to comment wryly: "As long as it's not Kumbaya."

SerafíneEmpathy + Perception - aloofness?  Empathy Spec: Seeing Past the Mask.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne"Couldn't even begin to compete with Amanda Palmer."  Dan tosses back to River with another supple, subtle expression rising to the surface and sinking back beneath.  "Plus I misplaced my goddamned ukelele somewhere between Raleigh and Denver - "

" - you left it in fucking Macon," Sera interrupts and Dan isn't expecting that and he cuts a sort of searching glance back down at her face and she's giving him a mildly pointed smirk that subsides as quickly as it arose in the first place, dark eyes cutting away from him.  Lingering on Kiara as the Verbena circles the fire and starts watching the flames: that singular stillness.

"Apparently I left it in Macon, which isn't between Raleigh and Denver at all.  Point is: never replaced. Closest I have is a mandolin and that's back at the house.  How about a country song, since we've got a bonfire.  Ever heard of Jason Isbell?"

GraceGrace pulls out her own phone, and now -- true to stereotype -- the two Mercurial Elites of the party are staring into their phones in the great outdoors, communicating to each other with them while the rest get all sociable.

And it's about a shell script named fuckingcoffee.sh.

It is fucking hilarious though, and has Grace laughing at her phone. "Ohh, man. Kumar-asshole.sh. Lol," she says. And yes, she actually says the word lol as if it were one. In-jokes are a thing over here.

"He had a cron job for hangover excuses. I think I want to try that. Not that I need to call in at work, hah."

Sam LakhaniBy the time Grace receives the link Sam has moved onto other things. On his phone. They are living the dream over there.

"Yeah but still. You see the words 'vampire' or 'Washington Park' or 'police' on Ginger, you can just have that bad boy fire off and not have to deal with it."

He's joking. Hangovers aren't an excuse when you're BFF with a Verbena.

KiaraThere's clearly something on Kiara's mind. A certain ... it feels like the lingering aftermath of something. An emotional bruising she's nursing. Some unspoken trauma. There's almost an edge of something sharp and dismissive in the things she says tonight. The humor is there as always but it's flavored with a sort of punctuation.

She looks as if she's deliberating on whether or not to stay. And as if looking into the campfire is soothing to her, for whatever the reason. Unsettled, edgy. The impression that Sera is getting from Kiara Woolfe right now is that whatever is on her mind, distracting her, provoking a sharper tongue - it's not anything she wants to discuss.

At least, not here. Not with the gathered.

RiverShe's holding her breath while he's talking, nods. Pays attention because, no, one can't compete with Amanda Fucking Palmer. No, she has not heard of Jason Isbell and eventually she exhales. It's a long, slow breath like meditation because why the fuck shouldn't getting stoned be like meditation?

"We lived outside of Macon for two months during peach season," River clarifies, "you would think that I would have picked up something about country music in Georgia but it was all Willie Nelson."

Which is weirdly appropriate.

"So, you guys are in the same band?"

GraceGrace snorts. "Yeah, that's what I need. A 'Handle Emergency' cron job. Just fire it off, and it will do everything that takes more than ninety seconds."

Which, you know, includes taking care of whatever the latest thing to happen in Washington Park is.

"I have never heard of Jason Isbell," she says, into her phone. If anyone were thinking she wasn't paying any attention...

Serafíne"Willie Nelson is kind of a badass," Dan tosses back to River as she is getting high.  "He did this cover of Pancho and Left that is one of the most perfect things on the planet.  If that's what you took away from two months in Georgia outside of Macon, you could've done alot worse."

--

There's work to be done.  Like, you know: tuning.  The overtones of fingers-on-strings, that strange, patterned language, the internal tones as he listens to the acoustic he was carrying-through-the-park and it should've been an electric but: maybe magick?  There's a fire and no outlets and Sera doesn't even really quite understand that she knows Forces magick and she has been capable of it for two fucking years.

"Afterparty at my place," this to Kiara.  Supple, subtle thing, the invitation a coil of smoke from the strangely-reserved creature.  (Maybe: to River she will always be like this: first.)  " - when the bar closes.  Two, two-thirty? You should stop by."

--

"Yeah, we're in the same band."  Dan, to River.  "Don't usually do country but he's a killer songwriter and we always have a few off-the-wall covers up our sleeves."  Glances sidelong at Sera.  "Elephant, then Super 8?"

"Fuck, Dan, that's like tearing someone's heart out, shredding it, then smoking a bowl of the remnants, getting so stoned you wander into traffic and figure out how to make the stars shut down."

He favors her with a quick, quiet smirk.  Likes that spark of animation in her eyes and voice.

"Used to be with this band called the Drive-By Truckers," Dan-the-hipster tells Grace.  "It's more alt-country than country.  He doesn't sing about how sexy girls are when they hang out in trucks or how fun it is to hang out in trucks and get drunk in corn fields so he's probably not gonna get on commercial country radio."

Serafíne(Hey I can has dice.  Dan - guitarishness?)

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne(This is for mah next post, and oh Dan.  :(  Sera: singing?)

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

Sam Lakhani"You do. You need this so hard."

Break from reality over. Sam shoves the phone back into his pocket and wanders back over to the fire. That's where he left the bong and his backpack anyway. When he comes to stand beside River it's almost as if by coincidence. It's easy to forget he exists when he isn't talking.

"Hit me," he says and holds his hand out for the bong.

KiaraIt's been lightly snowing tonight, as if the weather hadn't quite settled on what it desired but the drifts of it come down, every so often. Can't penetrate far where the fire is of course, melt before they're close to that emanating source of heat but they find placement in hair, on sleeves. Kiss the edge of cheeks and it's after one of these finds Kiara's that her fingers emerge from her pockets and she sweeps a hand up.

Suddenly alert to the surroundings, tipping her chin up to stare up at the dark skies, at the clusters of trees. Touching her face as if she'd forgotten, momentarily, where the source was of the sudden dampness on her face.

She brushes it aside and turns her face, just slightly, at Grace and Samir's conversation. Her attention captured by the mention of vampires, by Ginger and Washington Park and handling situations. The Verbena's eyes drop away and she bends down to find a leaf, lashed to the side of her boot, pasted there by the snow. Squats there and peels it off, carefully uncurling the edges.

"They're amazing. You should hear them play a gig sometime." This, almost absently to River at her question as the Verbena twists the leaf around, sets it open on her palm and curls her fingers around it. Finds the other woman's gaze through the flames. Holds there a beat.

Pulls up, opens her fingers and crumbles up the leaf, smears it over the flames. Glances at Serafine as she offers an after-party at Corona Street. "Yeah." Those red lips quirk, give over to one of her smiles, the pagan. Flash of teeth. Curl at the corner that makes it that side of crooked.

"I'd like that." She doesn't offer more, say they should talk. Just - studies Serafine's face for a moment as if committing it to memory and then returns her eyes to the campfire.

GraceGrace follows Sam, her face still stuck in her phone though. Light from the phone paints her face with blue, battling it out with the fire.

Well, maybe she won't be their chaperone or anything. Grace just wants a hit.

"I don't even know a thing about commercial country radio. Girls hanging out in trucks?" she shrugs. Whatever, to that.

River"I'm not a pretty crier," she tells Dan and his cultist-friend, "Sam and Grace can attest."

And it's true. though she isn't sure if Grace has seen her cry from underneath the mountain of blankets beyond the little giggling whimpter of a happy ending amidst the zombie apocalypse. River is pretty committed to her makeup staying on tonight, though, because it's cold and her face can feel it and somehow being freezing bakes on your foundation.

She's standing, has the bong in hand and hands it off to him like this is some sacred rite- like this was the passing of the Olympic torch instead of, you know, just hanging a guy a bong and calling it good.

"And hanging out of trucks and getting drunk in corn fields is fun if you can find a cornfield... does colorado have corn fields?"

Bonus points if it's not your corn field.

SerafíneSera isn't wrong about that pairing of songs and Dan needs space to move to play and she steps away from him, careful in her ridiculous goddamned heels but god she can move in them, even on the spongy, half-frozen ground.

The cold, the goddamned snow mean that Dan's bare fingers are stiff as they skim over the strings but he pulls the first evocative chords out of the instrument and there is something quite remarkably intimate about the way they balance each other; about the way they watch each other, rhythmic, familiar.  This point where she takes in a breath like she's about to join him, but no, and he just repeats those opening bars, eyes on her face, the dance of reflected light in her eyes.

Elephant starts off all-quiet, reflective, nostalgic, but you get pretty early that the song's as close to a requiem as you can get for someone still alive.  Unsentimental, ("If I'd fucked her before she got sick / I'd never heard the end of it") clear-eyed - goddamned sad.  Sera sings it alternately watching Dan's hangs and staring into the fire and when her voice is supposed to soar, goddamned, it soars -

We'd burn these joints in effigy,
cry about what we used to be,
and try to ignore the elephant somehow.

I buried her a thousand times,
giving up my place in line,
but I don't give a damn about that now.

--

River is committed to keeping her make-up intact tonight but by the end of that there are tears in Sera's eyes and on her cheeks, and both her mascara and her eyeliner are waterproof but there's the eyeshadow too, which isn't.  Maybe it just adds to her rock-star vibe and there's no time to dwell on the chord that strikes up in her or how deeply and feelingly she sings or whatever is happening in her or anyone else because: Super 8's a honky-tonk barn-burner and yes, River, you can dance to it.  You could probably take off all your clothes to it, and there's not enough time to catch your breath between them:

Having such a sweet night
Audience is just right
Drinking like a pirate do
Don’t want to sleep yet
Buddy it’s a good bet
I’ll raise more hell than you -

And the song keeps going.  There's paramedics, pedialyte, and maybe a defibrillator. Haven't we all had nights like that?

So, yeah.  That's the impromptu concert.  When it's wrapping up, Sera-and-Dan aren't hanging around for hits from the bong, they're packing up.  Have somewhere to be: and soon.










Serafíne(The songs:

Elephant:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg1oYRo9yVk

Super 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fr2Gv3HyqA )

River[I'm totally good. Manip+sub]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )

RiverShe's a good audience member, though halfway through the first song she determines that she's going to need a second hit. There's silence, because she knows it isn't polite to applaud but eventually she does because it was really fucking good and she can appreciate a good performance regardless of the responses that it provokes out of her.

"Go have fun!" is what she says out of haze, eyes back to the fire for a moment.

Kiara[Per + Empathy on River: is she?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

KiaraMusic has that way about it, of course. Good music can lift you. Inspire you. Tear you to pieces with nothing more impressive than the slow build of a guitar, a note sculpted and held. The Verbena's been witness to Serafine and Dan performing before - she knows they're that good.

She'd said about as much to River, only moments before.

Music has that way and at some point during the first song the Verbena's dark eyes place River's face again and she watches it; watches the way the firelight plays over it. Watches her the way she had when she first turned up, leaning against that tree in the shadows as if she were an interloper rather than one of the invited.

Whatever Kiara Woolfe does or doesn't see it takes until the end of the song for her to look down, to tip her chin down and draw her hood back up and bury her hands deep into her pockets. She's not inscrutable, the healer. Not accustomed to trying to be, to concealing whatever thoughts or feelings skim across her face.

She's only beginning to understand the ways she can protect her own mind from infiltration.

So maybe there's that glimpse before she draws it up, after she drags her eyes from River's face, where that's clear. What the music does to her. How it presses down on that bruise she's wearing, however deep it runs, however she's attempting to disguise it. A twist across her mouth, a haunted quality to fine dark eyes.

She stands there, hood drawn while the second number happens. That stillness settling back in. She doesn't applaud at the end of it but she does draw her hands out of her pockets, does move to press a hand against the Cultist's shoulder as she makes some bid for departure might not even understand how to articulate.

"You sounded great." She affirms and there's this brief glance back at the gathered. "I've gotta go guys. I'll catch you later."

SerafínePer + Empathy, River.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 10) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]

River"See ya," she says. Smiles and gives a wave and she seems fine. She seems fine and of course she is fine, because River has never given any indication that she is not anything other than fine, even when she has to turn off large portions of her brain to keep up the ruse. She is committed, you see. She is committed to any number of things, but right now she is committed to the idea that she is not going to be emotionally wrought over the fact that there was a song that moved her in such a fashion that she's waxing close to nostalgic.

She wears it well, that denial. She wears it like it's a shield and she carries a sword and in some other life she was some brave gladiator. still is.

she'll process later.

"Graaaaace," she says, offers her a hand, "do you know how to tango?"

GraceGrace gives River a squinty-eyed look, and then makes a grab at the bong. Tango? The fuck, River. Going to break the poor woman. She takes a hit, holds it, lets out a smokey, creaky "No."

But still, she adjusts herself, hands the bong over to Sam, and stands rather stiffly as she holds her arms out -- one of them positioned like it might hold on to somebody, the other in the air above her head like it might be holding another's hand.

She's never really cared about looking ridiculous, Grace.

"Show me?"

RiverRiver looks at Grace and the look on her face can only be described as delight. She steps in, holds her up arms and preens like she's an instructor because, at her core, she can be an instructor of sorts. She's a good enough that she doesn't seem to have a problem.

She beams.

Moves her arms down a little.

"This is probably going to come up again with me. Just for reference."

Serafíne"Stop by later, yeah?"  Sera to Kiara, as Dan is packing up the guitar.  A longer glance at River, then, sharper.  This almost bruising awareness about her that gets honed in that moment until it gleams, and that's what she was made to be right there, bright, aching, in the moment.  A hitch of awareness that hooks, catches, dissipates.
Lovely as the edge of an ever-elusive rainbow.

--

Had she been aware of recent history, she might not have chosen that song.  She wasn't.  Isn't.  Couldn't've gotten on Ginger if she'd wanted to: her phone didn't fucking work.  Dan checks it anyway and he couldn't see her, and he kept it up but mostly he was looking for anything from anyone about her.  No dice.

All of that etches the air around them.  Frames out both the intimacy of their interactions and that strange reserve that Sera breaks out of only in these odd flashes of awareness.

--

"You should drop by too."

And she could be saying that to anyone or everyone, but she's not.  Mostly, she means River.  Unspoken in there: no more sad songs tonight.  "The Edgefield."

And off they go.

she's not okay. [serafine, elijah, dan]

Serafíne
Thursday late night: a few galleries still open, sure.  This opening or that charity function, the warmth of the sunlit day fast fled but anyplace with a patio has gas-flame heaters going to extend the useful life of their outdoor spaces well beyond summer.  Pedestrians aplenty though at this hour most of the people slipping out of the odd gallery or restaurant still open are not heading out to bar-hop, but are heading home.  Taxis hum on the corners and the bars are still - not crowded, precisely, but pleasantly full and life pulses up and down the street.

The Stone Pony had one of its signature Low-Dough Local Shows tonight and is more crowded than most.  There's even a fresh-donut food-truck (WARD'S DO-NUTS) parked in the empty lot across the street, which is hard to resist after a night full of drinking.

Out on the sidewalk in front of the bar, a certain creature sits.  Legs drawn-up to her torso, one arm loose around them.  Cheek resting against the apex of her knee, eyes kinda-mostly closed, she has had enough to drink and/or smoke that she is in that drifting phase, but periodically brings a spiced cigarette up to her mouth (sideways, pointing on an upslant, away from her golden curls) and takes a drag.  There's a dog curled up on the sidewalk at her side.

Folks leaving the bar to head across to WARD'S DO-NUTS walk around her without really looking at her or acknowledging her, but folks do that all the time with strangers sitting on the street.  Avoid eye contact, refuse acknowledgment, ignore, ignore, ignore.

ElijahIt had been a running of the gauntlet, really. He had intended on talking to Yvette today but found that she was conspicuously not at work and doing whatever it was Yvette did when she had a day off work. Nobody at the gallery knew whens he was coming back,; Elijah presumed she got fed up and quit. Shrugged it off, lacking some vital information to follow up on. It was the first few moments that he hadn't spent glued to Jenn today.

She was scared; he couldn't stop apologizing. We digress.

So, he was walking, walking because he needed the air and he's tracing back his thoughts and the words he's said. Should probably feel guilty about not offering to help but, frankly, Elijah wanted to be involved with this whole human chimera business about as much as he wanted to remove his kidney with a butter knife- which is to say, not at all. He inhaled slow and deep and tried to remember where it was that he had parked in the first place.

The walking always takes you somewhere, though, and soon enough the walking took him to a bar that he had considered going into but decided against because, well, he was working right now. It might not have looked like it, but the young man in his vest and button down shirt had actually been doing things that he had deigned to be important.

He doesn't pass by Serafine, though. Stops and sits down beside her, on the opposite side of the dog.

"You have a new friend," he said,indicating over to the dog.

SerafíneSomething so liquid about being this drunk, makes her feel like every joint in her body is made of warm, kinda melty butter, and that same looseness is evident when the creature opens her eyes and lifts her chin up-up-up just high enough to perch her chin-not-cheek on her bent right knee.  Up close she smells like burnt sugar, cloves, whiskey, sweat.  Has on this long-sleeved, high-necked dark sweater with little thumb loops at the end of the oversized sleeves, which may be the most modest thing he has ever seen her wear other than men's pajamas,

but no.  When he sits down or maybe when she moves he can see that it is cropped so high it does not cover the lower curve of her breasts, and is oh-so-slowly raveling.

"Hey."  Drunken ghost of a smile across her mouth, though its context is hard to read.  Maybe she's curled up here because she can't quite walk.  Maybe she's at the maudlin stage of way-too-much.  "Long-time no-see.  How're you?"

Then, a sort of orienting side-glance.  Oh, the dog.  Could be some random dog, right.  "That's Sid."

SerafíneHow are you Elijah?  Per + Empathy because.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

ElijahHe's stressed, that much is clear. He's stressed but he's trying to play on being normal, because he can fake some normalcy from time to time- he's done it for years. Faked being fine long enough to get out of state care. Long enough that people think he's clean when he's not. He's stressed, but he wears it well when he's being honest about it.

Up close she smells like s'mores to him. The only time he's ever really had s'mores was when people were drunk and he associates the whiskey smell with camp fires for reasons he doesn't entirely understand. Or bonfires, more accurately. He associates campfires with tea and being cold enough that his bones ached and the air in his lungs was freezing and he had loved every blessed second of it because it meant he was alive and pushing past whatever limits he'd thought he had. Work until whatever the discomfort is becomes normal. Then, redefine.

He's stressed, but he's happy to see her. The kind of happy that comes when you've missed someone and he has, indeed, missed her. Missed the smell, missed the context. Missed the textures ebcause she had a number of textures. He didn't have enough details to render her into spoken word, but some part of him now has a strange taste in his mouth when he thinks of people as art because the concept could be taken too far and-

Well, now. That evokes a completely different scent on his senses.

"Hi, Sid," said in the voice that is reserved for puppies, a little like he's talking to a baby that might bite his arm off. Then, back to normalcy, "I'm tired, but I'll be okay."

A beat.

"Taking tonight to be alone?"

SerafíneSid cocks an ear and lifts her muzzle from her paws and looks up and across Sera's when Elijah speaks to her in that puppy-baby voice.  It's a look, you know: strange little doggie eyebrows moving, something on her new spiked-leather-collar clinking with the motion.  Then she drops her head back to her paws.  Thumps her tail once or twice in acknowledgment of the greeting but it is late and she is tired and it is sleep-time even if her human pack doesn't seem to understand that that's what darkness is for.

Sera, though.  Sera looks at him longer than the dog does.  Pivots her chin on her knee as if it were a fulcrum, and reaches out to offer him her cigarette.  Awkward little movement, that - hand half-buried in her too-long sleeve, thumb and index finger pinched around the filter of the cigarette like she was holding a joint.

And if he takes the cigarette, then her hand is free and she reaches out to give his hair an affectionate and maybe comforting ruffle.  Brushes her thumb over his temple.

And he asks if she's taking tonight to be alone and well, she gives him a neat little shrug and a banked, drunken blink.   "Yeah."  Could just have slid out of the bar for a smoke, though on an ordinary night she might've done that alone or might've done that with a stranger she wanted to make out with.  "Not sure if I can get up right now.  Ever have one of those nights where you're all fuck.  What the fuck are these things at the end of my things and how the fuck do they work?"

ElijahShe offers the cigarette and he does take it, takes a drag and tastes what's there. Has a moment and he's absorbing tastes and sensations and the way it feels when smoke tries to encroach into your lungs and your brain is insisting that this is bad for it but your body is telling your brain to fuck off. He doesn't actually smoke that often, all things told. More for ritual purposes or, in these instances, when someone else is smoking. He smokes a whole lot less once he started taking studying a little more seriously.

He closes his eyes when he feels her hand in his hair. Grins just a little at the edges and exhales away from Serafine and her new canid companion.

"I'd offer to take you home, but I'm afraid you might fall off the back of the motorcycle," he tells Sera, "and Sid wouldn't fit."

It takes him a little while, though, to piece through what she just said and it makes him laugh, "I haven't had one of those in awhile, I'm kinda jealous not gonna lie."

SerafíneTruth is, she wouldn't mind if he exhaled in her direction.  She'd breathe that in, the way she does everything else.

"I have - " there's hang-time in her sentences, space-between and he can here that now, maybe see it.  She gestures with her free hand (the worn not sliding through his block locks) like the word she wants is floating in the air in front of her if only if only she could pull them out of the ether.  Oh, there.  " perfect balance.  I wouldn't fall off.  Sid's a fucking racehorse. "

He hasn't had one of those in a while; one of those nights, when she strings them together, one after another, like gleaming little gems on a hand-knotted necklace.  "S'cause all'a that fucking book-shit.   If you'd been my apprentice - "

Inhales again, all-at-once, and kinda refocuses, reaches for the cigarette because here's the deal, she wanted it back, yo.  "That why you're all stressed out?  Or is it something else?"

About ten feet down, the door to the bar opens.  Music spills onto the street, some electric blues with a deep bass line and a girl's lilting soprano floating above it as people come out into the bright, crisp night.

Elijah"Well, if you want to go home, let me know because I can take you. And I'll go slow enough that, y'know, Sid can follow. It'll be like having a one person parade or some shit," he replies.

Forgets he has the cigarette, though, and then she's talking about how he could have totally had more blazing drunk nights and epiphanies set in motion by pushing and transcending basic human consciousness into something sublime. She's plucking it out of his fingertips and once he realizes she wants it he makes a little sound of recognition, gives it up with little fanfare.

Was he stressed out about the Order, though? Or was it something else?
"The book shit's pretty relaxing, not gonna lie. I like it a lot better than I thought I would," he starts, "but mostly it's-"

a second, he hears the floating soprano songstress in the background, enough to catch the pitch but not enough to pick out whether or not he knows the singer. "You remember that thing that tried to eat Sam and me in the park back in August?"


SerafíneHe asks her if she remembers that thing that tried to eat Sam and Elijah in the park back in August and Sera makes a strange little face; straight flat brows drawn together and a note of something like she's trying to put together a dimensional puzzle on a remarkably flat surface, or is maybe simply drunk, or maybe both and she doesn't really understand which is which.  But:

"Mmph."  That noise means, no.  She does not?  Remember that thing.  Remembers Samir being in quiet, though.  Remembers - oh so distinctly - a particular branching of time that no one else remembers quite simply because she reversed and reworked it and got knocked the hell out by reality for her troubles.  So: maybe one thing (hungry-monster) explains the other (Samir-in-quiet) and that Mmph could mean as much yes as no, or maybe even go on.

Someone's holding the door open for other someones and this little knot is breaking away to head across the street to WARD'S DO-NUTS, why not.  The soprano voice lilts beautifully in the bright cold air.

Elijah[can I place that voice? Do I know it? Looking! per+alert]

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

Elijah"Well," he continues, because there's a whole story here, he continues, "once Sam was a functional person again, we went to go check some things out. Looked back at the past, blahblahblah got a lead-"

it dawns on him that talking about this out in the middle of the open air when some incredibly polite Euthanatos is looking for a person who could literally be anyone probably wasn't the best idea. Drops his voice because (given the fact that he just saw a very familiar arm attached to a bearded person he totally recognizes) and-

"Long story short, Jenn did a painting that turned out to be a Nephandus and now Henry's calling in favors and I'm trying to sell Jenn on the idea of chilling with a bunch of reality breakers out in Morrison on an extended witness protection-style vacation."

Kiara[Can we sense a Sera and an Elijah?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )

SerafíneShe's really fucking drunk.  Takes her a minute to let the loops and whorls of the story, the declensions and the allusions and all the strange little bits of code our Elijah (conscious of the public street, the story, the potentiality of intrusion) wraps this in but she's really strangely still while she follows the looping path and finally (does she know who Henry is?  WE ARE NOT SURE AND NEITHER IS SERA but this happens pretty regularly to her so it's really no big deal and also No Big Deal.
"Have you warded her?"  A sloe-drunk blink.  A beat.  "Has anyone?"

Has a few places where Jenn could stay if Morrison's objectionable.  Or if the folks out there object to having a potentially-hunted human so close to the Node, but doesn't say anything about that.  Not yet.

Meanwhile the last of the group has spilled out of the door and yeah, Elijah, you recognized that arm and the owner of that arm is starting to cross the street when he does a bit of a double-take and waves off Dee and a few friends and redirects, heads straight for the young Hermetic.

"Hey man." Dan greets Elijah when he's close.  "What are you doing out here by yourself?"


Kiara"I don't get half of what we just spent two hours lookin' at, but damn if I didn't enjoy the free food."

The voice that curls along the street is masculine; low and steady. There's a consideration to the subtle edge of twang to it. Texan, perhaps, long ago. Now it's melted and softened into something else, something that doesn't stand out so entirely against the backdrop of Denver, but still -

"Well you've been collecting dust out there in Morrison long enough, I figured - "

"Funny. You remember where Deb said she was gonna swing by?"

There's the scuffle of footsteps and a couple appear, meandering down the street. They're dressed a little fancier than some; suit and tie for the man, a dark burgundy dress for the female that slinked around her ankles in a swish of silk. There's a slash of red painted across the female's mouth, it might have been enough to sight Kiara Woolfe but then -

There's that little give to the atmosphere. That pulse; that tickle of rejuvenating energy. Sid may well be the first to feel it. There's that supple tremor to the universe the Verbena brings with her with all her dark hair and quicksilver smiles; a vibration against the strings.

-

Half way down the street and they're passing a bar and Kiara makes this soft, subvocal noise and unlinks her arm; turns her face into the distance for a beat. Neal's pocket vibrates.

"Deb. She's about a block up." A beat, he's studying the younger female's face, tracking her eyes toward the bar. There's a cough. He passes her back a shawl with a pointed look that doesn't quite sit on his rugged features; handsome, though. Underneath the tired eyes and scruff and the softening paunch; still a handsome man.

Built from strong stuff, that was most of those from the mountains.

"Don't stay out too late."

She leaves a little red smear of lipstick on his cheek as they part ways and it's Kiara alone, eventually, the staccato clip of her black pumps against the pavement that finds the gathering, adjusting the strap of her little evening purse over a shoulder.

Elijah"Yeah, she's covered. It's cool. She doesn't want to drop her whole life because bad shit happened. Like, I get that. I don't know when shit's going to blow over and you can't stop living your life because there's a possibility something horrific is going to happen," he sighs. Hard, harsh. Ah, that is what has stressed him out. "I've asked? But Jenn is not down with the whole witness protection spiel beyond what Mike's already done."

A beat.

"Mike's a wheel turning kind of guy," shrugs, that's all he says on the matter. "He's, like, the most weirdly honest person I've ever encountered.  Once shit blows over I'm totally buying him a bowl of pho or a beer or something."

Dan is coming across the street though and he smiles, bright, gives a wave, but it's his turn to make the puppy dog expression, head cocks to the side and looks at Dan like he doesn't quite understand what he means that he's out here by himself.

"S'just me and Sera and Sid," he gestures to the dog, "that's Sid. I think you have a new housemate."

SerafíneWHAT THINGS DO I FEEL.  (Awareness)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

SerafíneSo now: Elijah and Sera on the sidewalk and Dan closing the distance to Elijah, giving the young man a still, level sort of look that hooks his breath somewhere in the center of his body.  He glances at at Kiara and gives her wave of greeting.  Gaze snags on the retreating frame of the strange from whom she's parting, something about the set of his shoulders or -
- but no.  Dan's blue eyes drop to Elijah and he sinks into a crouch.  The sort of crouch an adept adult of some authority takes when speaking with a child in the midst of a tragedy.  Getting on his level.  "Sera's with you?"  Looks up from Elijah, searching the empty space beside him like he's trying to trace out her outline against the pitted brick wall of the Stone Pony.  Breathes out, softly.

Swears, beneath his breath.

And Sera can feel Kiara, the moving pulse of her energy, breathes that in feels it mingle strangely with her blown-out senses, breathes it in and in and in again, like maybe she'll never have to breathe the other way.  Except: she always does.

But there's Dan.  She's looking at him and can't quite look away, all snagged.  "He can't see me." Sera murmurs to Elijah.  She could shout, though, all she fucking wanted.  Doesn't have to be quiet about a thing.  "None of them can."

(Oh god, she's: drunk and god-knows-what-else and something hitches inside her like whoa.)


Elijah[Manip+sub, I totally did not just say I saw Serafine.]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

ElijahThere is this horrible moment when Elijah realizes that he can see and hear Serafine.

Dan can not see and hear Serafine. She says nobody can hear her, or see her for that matter.

Now, there is a moment when Elijah has this dawning horror that there is a very real possibility that Serafine, the woman without a last name, is very much dead and he's seeing and hearing her because Elijah Poirot is a person who sees and hears dead people. This is not uncommon. There have been instances where it has been slightly more difficult to pick voices out in a room and tell which of them belong to bar patrons and which of them belong to people who are no longer people in the strictest of senses.

Usually, when he says shit like this, people ask him if he's on his medication (he's not) and try to determine whether or not he is hallucinating and a danger to himself or others.

So: Dan gets this.

"It's just one of those nights that you feel like you're with a person, that kind of persistent idea," he says, like it's an apology, "I don't know, it feels like..."

He sighs, runs his hands through his hair but stops where she might still be making contact because he doesn't want to brush her away. He's totally not going to be the one who tells Dan that Serafine is dead. He's trying very hard to spare him that information.

Which is good, because Serafine is very much not dead.

KiaraThe Verbena arrives somewhere between Dan dropping to his haunches and Serafine informing Elijah that Dan can't see her. That she's a phantom to them. Kiara's curling the edges of her shawl around her arms; winding it through and there's a little glossy program twisted in one hand. Something about a gallery showing - makes sense.

The dress, the complicated messy updo she's managed with her dark hair; it sits with strands framing her cheekbones. The cut of it, a v neck that highlights her lean frame, there's a lone pendant around her neck on a thin silver chain; crystal, it looks. Cut into a thin shape with a pointed edge and maybe once, something like it would have been enough to draw sidelong glances.

Murmurs and certain assumptions (hell, maybe it still does in the right company).

"Hey." She greets, her heel scraping against the ground as she comes upon them. She's wearing some vaguely sweet perfume the brunette. Her dark eyes swinging down and they fix, of course, on Elijah's company. Trace over (thin air). People spill out, talking about the music and Kiara's eyes shift to them for a beat as Elijah is saying -

"What's going on?" - Sharper, that. Kiara's voice comes out a little too punctuated, she's staring down at Elijah, now. The edges of her generous mouth pinching into a frown; brows constricting.

Serafíne"I know what's going on, Elijah.  Pan explained it to me.  I just - " Dan is still crouched on his haunches, skinny jeans pulled tight across his knees, hands braced on his thighs, weight balanced, only so.  Looks tired, sad, maybe a little bit strained but he is also trying not to look like any of those things and trying not to draw too much attention from his friends (and SERA'S FRIENDS) over there chatting and buying donuts.
"She's supposed to be staying with a friend of Pan's."  Neat glimpse up then, this grimace of greeting when Kiara walks up to them.  "I don't think it's a good idea for her to be here.  Right now it's only going to hurt her."
Then he looks past Elijah, not really close to picking out Sera's place beside Elijah against the wall.  "I'm sorry."
(Sera has, in the interim, buried her head in her knees.   Sid kinda stirs but Dan doesn't notice the dog either, even as the dog gives a hopefully-comforting thump-thump-thump of its tail.)
--
Kiara asks what's going on, maybe she's asking Elijah but Dan knows what's going on.  "Sera got hit with paradox, or something.  She can only communicate with people who are Awake.  She's invisible to everyone else. "
"I should probably go."  Before more folks come over and make the whole thing stranger and harder and more terrible and more remarkably ordinary: talking about the band, eating donuts, chatting about the party at so-and-so's tomorrow night, or such-and-such's dislocated elbow at the last Derby meet, and on and on and on.  Unless someone stops him, off he goes.







Elijah"That... is so much better than what I thought it was," he looks at Dan, puts a hand on the back of his head and leans in to kiss him on the forehead. The gesture is one that bleeds off a very real, very palpable amount of tension that the young man was feeling. Pan explained what was going on to Dan. Dan knew Serafine wasn't dead, and right now this is absolute news to Elijah.

Dan explains what's going on and Elijah eventually lets go of the other man so he can actually leave, Elijah leans a little against Serafine, kisses her on the head, too, because she was there and she was alive and Kiara is there and she seems concerned but Elijah, for his part, was decidedly less stressed out because, obviously, while one of his friends was in mortal peril right now one of his other friends was very much assuredly not dead and this was a blessing.

"Sera's not a restless spirit," he tells Kiara, like this is fantastic news.

He curls in, content to stay on one side for the time being. Content to stay at Sera's side and doesn't say anything. Runs his fingers through her hair and doesn't know what to say to her. The world is passing around her, and she's an observer right now. People are moving on without her, and that is a painful place to be.

KiaraThere's this little moment where Kiara's features harden into something quite furious and angry. This moment where her spine straightens and her shoulders round back and she's got this gleam in her eyes that's all agitation. Her mouth thins into this little seam and she's staring down at the ground for a second as if she cannot for all her days quite decide what to do with that.

The anger. Not at Elijah, not at Dan. Not at Serafine, but - "Fuck." She lets out this little catch, her eyes closing and she turns her face into the distance, frowning hard.

Serafine's head is between her knees when she manages to compose herself enough to look back and then Dan is leaving and Kiara makes this tiny motion; a uncurling of her fingers as if she wants to say something to the man to comfort him because his friend is invisible, but how do you offer comfort for that. Where is the damn rule book for friends of those removed from your sight by paradox?

"We'll take care of her, Dan."

It's a quiet, futile thing to say and Kiara seems to know it. She does move, though. Wedges herself down near the Cultist and folds the edges of her dress between her knees, presses her shoulder against the other woman and says in this furious, vibrant undertone. "You're going to be okay, you know. Screw the universe. You'll be fine. I missed you."

That's futile too, but maybe it's also enough. She says, after a beat: "I have a spare room. If you want somewhere to be, you can stay there. Anytime."

SerafíneElijah kisses Dan on the brow and the older man allows it, gives this twinge of a not-quite-smile through his beard and returns half the gesture: reaching to cup the back of the young Hermetic's skull with tattooed hands.  Then he lets Elijah go and pushes himself upright.  Shares a grimace of something (and maybe anger is the right response to this bullshit, but it is rather difficult to work his way through his very real concern to something that bright and righteous.  And then there are Dee and Rick on the other side, absolutely in the dark, both kinda angry with Sera instead of for her, because for them the absence is total, is the story of Sera's semi-regular disappearances from their lives and some of the committments she makes in them: like really making a go of the band, you know, that one.

Fuck.

But, he straightens.  Says, "Thank you," quietly and simply to Kiara and turns on his heel to cross the street to the food truck and as he goes he's getting out his phone, texting or maybe calling someone.  And he doesn't want to look back, is telling himself not to but he cannot help it, as if he might someone turn his head fast enough to catch a glimpse of her and then hold her in his gaze.

--

Kiara wedges herself down between Sera and an adolescent dog with a spiked-leather collar who was laying down but sits up and puts her chin on her paws as Kiara sits.  Thumpthumpthump goes Sid Vicious' tail.

Sera sits there, her shoulders move like bellows, but without the regularity of tears.  Those are just great-big-breaths she is taking, maybe to steady herself, maybe to feel her body open up, maybe because they make her ribcage seem like it is being pried open and she would rather feel that physically than the other way it sometimes happens, the cracked ribs and the marrow within.  Or maybe she's doing that to try to keep from throwing up.

And she finally lifts her head from her knees, hair sliding through Elijah's fingers and she gives Kiara this quick tight smile of gratitude.  Oughta say screw the universe, I'll be just fine right along with her but she can't say either.  She is: a hungry ghost of a thing, and she wasn't made for silence, or anything like it.  "My phone doesn't fucking - "


One of her arms unfurls from around her legs, she makes a loose gesture, "work."  No selfies.  No texting.  No Ginger, no nothing.  "And I don't - I don't even know where you live."


ElijahHe's there, and he's trying to process, can't imagine what this is like for Dan. Can't imagine what this is like for Dee or Rick, either. Because they have no idea, just know that she isn't there anymore and doesn't know what they know about what but he presumes the answer is nothing. He presumes the answer is nothing and it doesn't drive a complete wedge in Serafine's friendship with them.

He doesn't know what to say. Doesn't know how to say it, either, only that he is glad she is alive. Only glad that she is a presence, even if it is a presence that is stuck between the worlds.

A second, then?

"You know, I could text people for you if somebody else can make your phone work. You just... y'know... gotta get people to do your communication by proxy," he says. Leans a little into her but then realizes that's not enough independence.

"We can make things work out."

Resolute. Because, if he said this, it obviously can be willed into being. They can make things work out, it would just take time.

KiaraThere's a cat on the second floor of Kiara Woolfe's apartment building that follows her on occasion. Sees the brunette passing and uncurls itself, stretches and arches its spine and slinks along with a chiming bell as its herald to wind around her legs when she passes. Sometimes, it happens. Other times - there's a dog walked in Washington Park that nearly threw itself at her; frothing and snarling.

They sense it, sometimes. What she is, that delicate twinge to the order of the universe. Sid, like the cat on the second floor, sits up and pays attention - Kiara's fingers reach out and ghost over his head, her fingernails scratching behind an ear.

There's a flash of a smile at Elijah over Serafine's head; bracketed in there between the pair of them as she is; a sliver of gratitude. A little indication of her approval, because: "Well that's just plain rude." A curl of amusement, a husk of wry humor in the pagan's voice as she unclasps the little purse she's had with her all night; the outside glitters with tiny black beads and inside there's a fold of notes, a credit card and a few loose dockets for who knew what.

She extricates a pen, Kiara. Uncaps it with the lid held between her teeth and scribbles down on the back of a take out receipt her address. "817 17th St, Bank and Boston Lofts. Apartment ... 422." She shakes it out to dry the ink a little and then holds it out to Serafine, her dark eyes roving her face.

"Whenever." She lets her gaze tick past her to Elijah and her mouth curls a little, because: has she seen Elijah since they'd returned? Days bleed together and its disjointed and odd to her, not a student of Time, but: she loses track.

The when, the where. "Hey, kid." Soft and easy, as if it were any other night and she'd caught sight of Elijah in a crowd. Never mind the universe.

SerafíneSera bumps Elijah back and doesn't really say much.  Pressure there, acknowledgment, awareness.  He's so damned optimistic it makes her spine feel brighter and she could tell him that it's not the same, because it isn't, but he says it so resolutely that she doesn't.  Somewhere in the middle of all this she turns and cups his head and kisses him firmly on the temple like she's comforting him not the other way around.

Then Kiara is scribbling out her address on a receipt, waiting for the ink to dry, handing the piece of paper to Sera who is drunk enough that she has to do a single and then a double-take as her focus narrows and then zippers open and then folds the receipt very, very neatly and lifts the fraying hem of her raveling cropped top and tucks the address into her lovely little black-lace bra.
Drifts for a while, after.
--
Not much later, a cab or maybe a solid and non-descript mid-price sedan pulls up.  Luxury brand, probably, but not the sort one notices.  The sort one doesn't-notice.  The street is mostly empty and that's a no-parking zone right in front of them but it's late.  No meter maids out.  Doesn't matter that he's double-parked in front of a fire hydrant.  A man Elijah knows, whom Kiara does not yet know (methinks?) gets out of the driver's side and circles the car.  He's tall(ish), mid-30s, pale skin, dark hair.  Greets Elijah.  Greets the dog and she knows him enough to stir-to-life when he comes around.  Introduces himself to Kiara, not formally because they are out in the open, but conveys enough about himself that she can guess his tradition and rank from his words, demeanor, and resonance.

Offers Sera a hand-up and she takes it and she doesn't wanna go,
but she does anyway.





ElijahHe waits until she goes, as though he can't quite process anything but wanting to be there with her. Doesn't know that she doesn't think this is the same, that she feels so apart, that she's aching that the world is passing around her and she can't touch any of it. He doesn't know what that's like, but he can imagine, does know from stories what it's like for ghosts. What it's like when they experience that second death- the one that comes when all of the people who remember you are starting to pass on and you fade from stories. Cease to be, drains your passions and leaves you there.

He doesn't envy the dead.

He looks at Kiara, grins something playful, "hey, you don't glow in the dark anymore. I'm a little disappointed, honestly."

KiaraShe watches Serafine go, Kiara, with this complicated little expression.

There's concern there of course, but something else fractured in it. A splintering of regret and uncertainty, a lingering consideration that doesn't quite abate even after she's inside the sedan and the mystery man climbs out and introduces himself. She looks at him but the focus is fleeting and brief.

A smile that doesn't reach her eyes, a long pause after the car peels away and she looks after it; evening wind rustling and winding loose hair around her shoulders; over a collarbone. There's music throbbing inside the bar, it sounds vaguely like a promise and a threat; the dull repetition. Like the distant boom of thunder that predicts the storm; the static gathering in the air.

Hey, you don't glow in the dark anymore, she laughs and scoots across with care until she's closer to him; until her shoulder brushes into him and she's pushing against him in a bid to unsettle him. "Shut up." She smiles and twists the program around in her fingers until the smile wears thin and dissipates, cants him a neat little look over her shoulder.

There's a faint sheen of glitter to the gold eye-shadow dusted on her lids tonight. It makes them sparkle. "How are you, Elijah?" She breathes out in this quick, sharp little exhale. "What's going on." It's the second time she's asked that, tonight. She sounds less agitated this time, though. More - resigned, now. To the awareness that there is something.

There was always something and perhaps in the wake of Sera - it feels far more conclusive.

Elijah[This is me. This is me making us inaudible for other people. Forces 2: Shhhhhhh.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (6, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

ElijahShe pushes against him and, melodramatic, he leans to the side as though he is off balance. lets out a sigh as though this were a big upheaval, as though she had toppled some great and powerful stone figure. He laughs, because at that moment there is delight. He leans back into his old position, back into something that he is comfortable with.

She splinters to regrets, you see. Elijah knows regret pretty well, tries not to live with it but there's a young woman whose name he almost equates entirely with regret. With longing. She was gone and he was still here and he could be fine with that but occasionally things remind him of Alicia and he is reminded of the fact that he is human. That he makes mistakes. He's been looking for paintings and talking to gallery owners and making up excuses as to why his best friend can't make a gallery opening because he's scared and it's his fault and-

exhale.

Looks up. Talks to himself for a second.

"There is a silence where hath been no sound,
   There is a silence where no sound may be,
   In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea,
Or in the wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
   No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,
   But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
   Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,
   And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone"

Exhales and something releases, lets go, and the world around them seems... quiet. For now, at least, the world is quiet. For now, they could probably yell their damned heads off and nothing would happen. There's a problem with a person who could literally be anyone. Elijah isn't privy to letting his conversations be overheard for the time being.

"Remember that painting I posted on Ginger? The one that I asked my room mate to do and it was beyond fucking breathtaking?"

He knits his fingers together, gets comfortable because he's going to be here for awhile and he hasn't quite gotten the urge yet to go home because he's going to spend the rest of the night trying to ward the ever loving shit out of his apartment, work on contingencies and defenses and anything that would work as self-defense. He has someone to protect, and while there is something to be said about being a protector there is also something to be said about not putting people in situations where they will need to be protected. Perhaps, guilt. Perhaps.

He couldn't have known, neither could Jenn. They had all been operating under false pretenses.

"Anyway, turns out that whole thing isn't vampires, it's Nephandi and the guy who came and picked up Sera is dealing with it," he exhales, "I thought the whole thing was handled so, like, it didn't dawn on me that Jenn should have just trashed the damn thing and it would have been fucking wrong to ask her to do that anyway, she created a fucking masterpiece. I was pretty fucking sure Kalen said that the issue was handled and taken care of."

Shrugs.

"I should have followed up. Nobody knew, I can't be angry about that."














KiaraIt's a lot. Elijah spills out information and some of it the woman beside him can piece together; slot into some impression like pieces of a jigsaw. This connecting to that, slivers of information digested on Ginger. Visitors in town, a murder that would happen again, shapeshifters being hunted and the Fallen Ones.

(Not vampires, which must, to some tiny degree, be a blessing. But. Oh.)

It's a lot to process and the Verbena settles there beside him with a shawl half fallen down her back and her legs neatly crossed at the ankle. There's a ring around one of her toes, the nails all painted a shade to match the lipstick she wears and it's this thing she does, the pagan. Wears the clothing of some elegant city swan but lingers in the truth of what she was. Offers the hints, you understand, of something else. The pendant around her neck, the ring.

The little way she checks when Elijah starts to speak because - it's one of those nights, again. They aren't quite like the others spilling around them from the bar, meandering across to the vendor on the other side of the street. Not quite, though they do a decent job at pretending.

(Woolfe in Sleeper's clothing, indeed.)

So, then: "You couldn't have known. None of us could. That thing in the park we got rid of?" She leans back and turns her dark eyes on his face, assessing; remembering. The smoldering ruin of it; mouths and gaping teeth and the stench of diseased, misused flesh. She's got these delicate, lovely hands Kiara and they'd helped dismember and dispose of a corpse. Weighted it down in a river.

She'd closed the eyes of her mentor with those fingers, stood in the aftermath of the Union's work in a forest not so far from them, too. Slid dirt through her fingertips and look in the void carved into Time itself while another Verbena wept for the lost and all she'd felt was a kind of righteous fury, because how dare they. Because they'd live enough to pay for it.

Because, Jenn didn't deserve this, either and Kiara's expression gives that over, too. Sympathy, a lick of kindling displeasure. "How could we have known." A beat, her eyes drop away. "He's dealing with it, how, exactly?" She plucks and arranges her words carefully. A thoughtful arrangement.

Her mouth softening to some brief, considerate smile. "People talk about handling things so much, have you noticed? Contain it. Put it into a box with a cute label and somehow it's .... better. It's .... " She shakes her head, straightens and lifts her fingers to the bridge of her nose. "Sometimes you can't contain it. It's not that easy. I'm sorry that Jenn's been pulled in."

She touches his hand, a brief connection.

"What can I do? I want to help."

Elijah"This Michael MacCarrick guy warded the ever loving shit outta Jenn. Like, I'm pretty sure that, for all intents and purposes, if someone tried to find her magically on a map they'd think she's in Canada or something," he said, "and frankly I care fuck all about whatever this Nephandus freaking does so long as Jenn stays a singular, easily recognisable human being.

"I met this guy and aside from being, like, not at all intimidating like the fucking Hermetics that sat on my couch a month ago- he's actually working with people. He didn't write Grace off when she was like dude, this is my city too and I'm not burding on not helping, swore a freaking capital letter Oath to the effect of I'll protect you with every bit of my being, and I really get the impression that he's been tracking this Nephandus for a long time. I don't think he's gonna stop until either said unspeakable evil is dead or he's shuffled off into the cycle again."

A beat happens. Elijah realizes he's talking a lot. Realizes he's saying a lot of things and hasn't probably given Kiara any time to process, he just went on with an explanation, and it was an explanation with a clear point- Elijah had respect for what Euthanatoi do. Has more than a vague understanding of what that entails (but not enough to really tout being an expert on the tradition, just enough that there had been courtships. If meetings had gone differently he wouldn't be with the Order and, instead, probably would have been calling Eleanor Yates his acarya instead of calling Henry his mentor.)

He takes a second, looks sideward at her and seeks her eyes. Takes in that considerate smile and he continues, "I think... that handling something is a process. It's not in a past tense. It hasn't been handled, it's in the process of becoming. It isn't enduring something- which says it is a labor, a burden to be taken. It's not fixing something, because that implies that a situation is broken or that you can even touch the tools necessary to repair it. You handle wild animals- it's either you, or it. And perhaps you find an accord and perhaps you don't. Perhaps one of you withers and dies and the other stalks triumphant."

He shrugs. Realizing that he's talking again, going on and on about what? Symantics?

"I have no clue... talk to Grace? She has a better grasp of what's going on and what isn't. Maybe beef up security at your place?"

Kiara"I don't know if there's any real way to handle the Nephandi."

Kiara speaks looking down at her hands; she's set the program in her lap; weighted down there beneath that tiny purse of hers and runs the edge of her thumb over her palm. She's quiet in the wake of Elijah's explanation, of his speech. There's so much urgent, striving belief in him and she doesn't, as she often doesn't, know how to process it.

Other than to tilt her face back at him and find his eyes and deliver a curling smile, tinged with affection and some flicker of regret. For what she'd seen, for what she's heard.

Perhaps for the whole sorry situation.

"Survive, maybe. But nature takes its course. You can throw your fury against a storm but it'll still rage on." She sits up, the pagan. Stretches out her legs and braces her hands either side of herself, her expression lingering for a beat in all Elijah had offered, painted into shades of concern and thoughtfulness. "If he's has been hunting this Fallen One that long, it must be powerful," Kiara offers in a murmur, cutting a glance at Elijah.

"Maybe the best thing we can do is stay out of his way and hope it stays out of ours."

A pause, then: "Although, given our track record, that doesn't seem likely, does it?" She smiles and leans back into him, rests her head on his shoulder, curling in. "I almost think I preferred the dragon."

Elijah"Dude, this person made a chimera out of two living people and didn't flinch at reality. I don't think powerful quite describes what I'm thinking," he quirks his mouth to the side, inhales slow and deep and decides-

"I dunno. And, y'know? I don't care, I genuinely... genuinely don't care if it's nature or nurture or whatever, the whole pursuit-of-Descent thing? Doesn't jive with me. And I don't feel like ostriching on this but I'm not gonna get in the way if someone- anyone- has made it their business to make sure that what they do doesn't hurt more people," it's a strange sentiment. Not that he has it, but that it is a conviction. That this is something he could stand behind, a banner he would not put down, and Ideal. That there is suffering in the world, that you can not be complacent to that suffering.

Especially when it's so close.

"Is it kind of fucked up that I wonder if people would have given a shit about any of this if it wasn't one of our friends that is in trouble?" he leans into her, lets the thought sit there before he smiles, something lighter, "eh, you know, I feel like Henry really got me ready to handle dragons. I should move on to something else next- a new terrifying mountain."

Kiara"You mean would we have let Michael MacCarrick hunt it down alone?" She murmurs, face half pressed into his arm; she winds one of hers around his and allows her weight to press in, there. Feels the comfort and familiarity of his warmth for a beat. "I don't know. Maybe. Can you really judge anyone if they said yes?"

She pulls back, searches his face.

"Ian told me that the Techocracy is here. That they're sniffing around and the first thing that I wanted to do, other than curse their names, was run. But I've seen what they're capable of. The way they take what they want with no regard to what came first." She looks out, beyond Elijah, then. Her expression hardening. "The Fallen Ones are no better.

They take life and twist it. They just devour everything. That's not nature. There's no process to that."

Her eyes tick back, mouth softening a touch. "I think I'd care. But I think I'd do whatever I had to, if it meant keeping people who matter out of harm's way." She reaches over and brushes her fingertips over his face; tenders them back through his hair in this ghosting, feather-light manner.

"We'll deal with this. And whatever comes next." She cuddles back in, the Verbena, folds the edges of her shawl around her body and tilts her face up; across. The vendor across the street is packing things up for the night; somewhere down the street a dumpster has overflowed; scraps of paper scatter along the gutter, some turning into a pulpy, gluey mess where the water touches them.

They'll dry there, most likely. Become a part of the streetside landscape.

Inside the Stone Pony the band plays on; or maybe it's just music, now. The door is pushed open and sound blasts out. This sudden auditory assault that Elijah's working dampens just enough that it sounds softer; translated through water.

"And Serafine, too. She'll be fine. It's - " There's this shift where Kiara presses against him. The nagging worry in her voice, low but persistent. "She's fine." The emphasis of it, her state of being might be as much for Elijah as Kiara.

ElijahThere is a moment when he just lets her stay at his arm, before he finally puts an arm around her, like this is familiar. Like this is comfortable. He knows he can't do a damned thing, when push comes to shove or any other cliche of finality, Elijah knew that he did not have the magical chops to make the big moves or the sweeping gestures. Has realized a long time ago that he has to deal in the finite and measurable.

Takes what she says and absorbs it. Thinks about it. TRies to process what precisely is there and what he has to do. He'd said as much- he gives two shits about the Nephandi. Is probably too naive to be terrified, or too brazen to be immobilized by the prospect that something may happen. Has had his feathers ruffled by close calls with the technocracy and here is his friend- telling him that she's seen what they can do and she wanted to run when she'd heard.

Kiara does mention Serafine though, how she'll be okay too.

"I don't want to run," he says, like this made it true. He didn't want to run, so the natural explanation was that he wasn't going to run. "And Serafine isn't fine right now. She has to have someone take care of her because..." he gestures, "there's a whole world full of people that she is very much a part of... that she can't be a part of right now. And I get the feeling that if someone wasn't here taking care of her, she wouldn't take care of herself.

"She doesn't ask for help, doesn't let people know if she's hurting and she expects people to just let her be this great untouchable goddess. We had a talk awhile back, about how I wanted to know her as a person and not as an idea and it was hard on her."

KiaraKiara is quiet for a long time, then.

Not a tense silence by any measure but perhaps - a thoughtful one. Elijah can all but feel the gears shifting in the Verbena's head. Turning over loose memories of the Cultist. Snapshots of moments she's shared with her, were they all surface, after all? Had Kiara ever really glimpsed who Serafine was beneath the exquisite tangle of chaotic beauty?

She can't argue with Elijah when he says that she isn't fine.

She knows it. They both do, but there's a comfort to be had in simple, useless words. Metered out as if they could somehow bolster hope; cradle a tiny cough of smoke and spark a flame. "She was in Thailand." She does offer, eventually, from her curled perch beside him. The dress she's wearing is silk; wispy soft and giving beneath his fingers; her body heat bleeding through it where she's pressed into him.

Easy, unfettered connection.

"That much I got from Dan. Whatever happened to cause .... that. She's not fine." She sighs, acknowledging his comment with a fine little lift of a shoulder. "It's fucked up and I hate that she's going through it but I don't think we can fix this for her. I don't think it works like that.

Sometimes it's harsh." She's thinking of Arionna, now. Her blindness. The cost exacted from her. "You feel like walking a lady home?" She lifts her face to smile at him; it's a bright, infectious thing. Sudden and captivating and she wields it quite so.

"I'll buy you the last donut."

Elijah"She's complicated," Elijah said, "but she's not broken. You can't get the places she's gone and break."

He smiles at that, and in that he does find comfort. Smiles at Kiara, for Kiara, because he feels like smiling. Because that is the comfort he can offer, because words for Elijah Poirot need not be hollow, and they need not lose their meaning. Everything he does now is wrapped in symbol and definition. Every nuance has a meaning beyond the meaning he's finding, every bit of being just another step towards some larger immutable Truth that he can't touch.

"And dear lady, I would love nothing more than to walk you home and for you to feed me donuts."