Serafíne
Connie wins a mocha.
For the rest of
the table, Sera orders a couple of French presses full of
something-or-other. Ethiopian harrar and something from Costa Rica that
may or may not have been processed by being consumed and then shat out
by rare birds. Sera gives the barista grinding the beans the same
glazed-eye look with which she might favor Patience when Patience talks
about... well, anything, as the dude starts to explain to her the
nuances of cultivation, shade plants, animal shit. See? It's
interesting, he's fucking passionate about it, and she has no idea what the hell he's talking about and can't be bothered or maybe doesn't bother pretending she's any smarter than she is.
Sera
orders enough savouries and pastries to choke a horse or at least a
miniature horse too, because why the fuck not, and pays with an Amex and
scrawls a signature and leaves, preemptively in that scrawl, a rather
astounding tip given that 68% of her wardrobe came from a thrift store
(though 32% was likely from that boutique down the way where the pieces
are displayed like Rodin sculptures) and comes wandering back their
direction (eventually) with a French press and a fistful of mugs,
followed by a tattooed derby-doll with a tray full of snacks and
desserts and Connie's mocha, too. Rich and frothy and fragrant.
These
things are distributed like the proverbial loaves and fishes and then
our heroine takes a seat and turns it around and realizes that her skirt
is too tight to sit like that so she turns it back around and: if there
is a seat available next to Connie and across from Kalen, that is where
Sera sits.
She gives Kalen such a direct and swimming look,
across the table, the sharp curve of her crawling mouth all..
delicious. Yes, delicious. Glances at Patience,
"You should try the harrar. Tastes like fucking blueberries."
then back at Connie. Reaches up and lifts her sunglasses off her face.
"We're not in the circus. You really don't know how or why we found you?"
Connie Mihailovich
There
were no lions, tigers and bears in suburbia. Sure, they visited, they
waved to the crowds but in the mid-eighties, notably before she was
born, they’d faded out much like spandex and neon wrapped around a
Whitney Houston tape.
Just a lot of windex, feather dusting, and yelling in Serbian.
“I’d
be in the audience,” She says, nodding. “Always in the audience,”
Connie adds subtly into the frothy sweetness of her espresso laden
chocolate syrup with a dash of milk. Gods love that blabber mouth at the
counter, whatever his name was, she offers a quirk of a brow to
Patience followed by a slight lifting of the left corner of her mouth
and she shrugs.
“Eventually, regardless of how much coffee or
caffeine anyone has, we all crash at some point.” For a few hours, or a
day, or two days, maybe if you’re Constance that is.
Meanwhile, it
appeared to her that Sera was in some kind of blissful retreat into her
coffee, that is until she bashed reality in the head with a bitchin’
question. Constance snorted into her mug, the contents protesting in a
spray of warm, chocolate stained foam, and regarded Sera with more than
curiosity now. Scalding awareness melded over her like a second skin and
it took hold of her, the longer she looked at the woman.
“What is
this, like, pranks and pastries?” Haha, haha, haha. Awkwardly she sets
the cup down, belatedly worrying that maybe she shouldn’t have had a
sip, and cautiously blue eyes move from Sera, to Kalen, and finally to
Patience.
“You guys are.. you know, I’m just..” Wagging her finger
at them like she just can’t quite make workable sense of English
Constance is officially, everybody note, officially weirded out. Sera
could have admitted to loving Alien Faeries from Unicornia and she might
have seemed a lot less edgy and out to get her soul sounding as she had
just then.
“Look, realllly funny, um.. I’m gonna go now, okay? Alllright.”
Had
she brought anything else? She’s standing before she relinquishes her
hold on the cup she’s so recently been offered and it clinks down hard
in protest against the table, sloshing a little bit of that precious
liquid over the rim.
Serafíne
Reflexive awareness-as-empathy on Connie.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 6, 6, 6, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 6 )
Patience Mason
Patience
picks up the offered drink sniffing at it curiously though she
certainly doesn't seem off put by the idea of something other then what
she ordered. In truth it almost makes her seem reminiscent as she wraps
her hands around the cup feeling that warmth, drawing in the aroma
before taking a sip, considering it, and then taking a further drink
despite the heat.
It would seem such things do not bother Patience Mason.
"Appreciative
Sera." She says with a nod and a raise of her cup. "This particular
distillation is of considerable and beneficial note, reminiscent of
distillations previously ingested thirty six point seven three one solar
cycles prior to this specific temporal framework. I recognize this
particular amalgam to be concurrent with a particular localized and
cultivated tea extract from the eastern geo-political provinces of the
peoples republic of China."
She says this, and then she turns
towards Connie as Sera inquires as to why Connie thinks they had all
come to her in such a manner, drawn to her like friendly magnets and
listened as the woman responded in kind.
"Your direct personage
bares many attributes Connie, direct concurrent visual and paradgmic
blindness is not counted amongst those currently active. You are acutely
aware...." She looks at the others for confirmation.
"It is plain as a two dimensional plane of colour reflective material."
Serafíne
Do-di-do can this work a bit pls pls? (Explanation later, will use to guide my post.)
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 6, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Ian Lai
[Awareness, word]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Kalen Holliday
Kalen
looks between the three of them and his eyes widen, just fractionally.
"Seriously?" That question doesn't seem to be directed at any one of
them in particular. It is likely directed at the universe. The
universe has a thing for dropping unaware Magi practically in his lap
when he's sleep deprived.
It is horribly inconvenient. At least the last one could hardly be described of as difficult.
It
is probably best he not joke about kidnapping this one. "Hey. Stay,"
he says quietly. "That was kind of weird yeah, but...you know...we're
like circus people. Beside which point, I'm going to take a wild stab
in the dark that your life got a little weird before we showed up
anyway. Please sit back down. It would be a shame to waste such
excellent coffee."
Serafíne
"Oh my fucking god."
Sera looks like she's just
discovered a new goddamned drug and the new goddamned drug is
delicious. Connie's freaking out and Sera's blissing out for just one
goddamned second, closing her mouth an inhaling as she looks,
once more, quite directly across the table at Kalen. Sera does not
quite understand that he's freaking out over all the newly awakened
wandering around the city, a city and a world without stair-gates and
baby-proofed locks over the doors hiding the darkest things their world
has to offer. She's just pleased. She's just looking to share that
pleasure with someone or something and right then, just right then, it is Kalen.
Then,
see.
A stutterstep.
This
tangled sort of pounding of her heart. The hard slam-and-slosh of the
mocha against the table top and the leading edge of Sera's gaze rising
to follow Connie right on the cusp of an inhale that has Sera breathing
in all of that some thing.
And Kalen speaks Sera's holding
her breath. Sera's holding her breath and she's holding something else
right now, too. Holding it against her breastbone, holding it beneath
her chest. Holding it between her teeth.
Her eyes are on Connie
all awareness, fascination. A blistering, gut-wrenching sort of love
for all the many things that belong in places like this one: between sleep and waking, see. Her tongue is against the roof of her mouth. Just the tip of it, see?
Serafíne
(And: extension?)
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Connie Mihailovich
[perc; intuitive + awareness; motives]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )
Ian Lai
Here's
the thing: Ian didn't drink coffee. Not regularly, anyway. He didn't
really eat baked goods either. But there were other reasons for
venturing into coffee shops, and today that reason happened to involve
the fascinating swirl of resonance (some familiar, some not) that led
from the shop door like some kind of neon sign that said: Awakened inside.
It was a difficult thing to ignore.
So
he paused outside the shop, his head tilted and his eyes sharp, like
he'd just picked up some fucking fascinating sound or scent. Like maybe
he was trying to decide if he wanted to follow it to its source or walk
by and let things be.
He reached out an arm and opened the door.
Just
in time to feel that pulse of visceral energy as Sera worked her
effect. Just in time to see Kalen try to convince some girl that Ian
didn't know to stay (she felt young, the girl, so new that she had to
have been feeling a little overwhelmed.) And for a moment after he
stepped inside the shop, Ian regarded their table like he was watching
some kind of play unfold.
He didn't wave or say hello.
Then he walked to the counter and ordered some black tea.
Connie Mihailovich
An
overabundance of feeling is just as bad as the rush of adrenaline that
follows in its wake and even though Patience seems kind enough, and
unwilling to torture her as near as she can tell, in the immediate it
isn’t quite enough. Had it, maybe, just been her who asked she might
have been less skittish.
Kalen, he’s got that
pretty-kinda-white-boy-face that says ‘easy now’ like she’s supposed to
take him at his word when the girl on his arm, or rather at his side,
appears to have discovered pure unrefined heroin in her coffee.
Almond
shaped eyes widen just a little and she’s frozen, in a moment, where
deviation sets before her one path of her own choosing and another
created by another. As if, perhaps, she’d been snagged on a hook that
had always been there, waiting for her, or had it appeared when she’d
chosen to leave? Constance certainly wasn’t the person to ask, or even
comprehend, because in all truth she had no idea what the hell was going
on right now but Kalen says stay and she shakes her head ‘no’.
Still
it’s as though her feet won’t move. She repeats the command, inwardly,
and light eyes find their way to Sera and she isn’t at all sure what to
say.
On one hand the whole damn shop seemed to be busily bustling
about them and she stood, gaping at the others, having chosen to go but
not at all comfortable with it. Her feet move, she relinquishes her hold
on the chair she’d so readily vacated, and without further adeu the
slender woman bolts for the front door like a foal that’s just
discovered a hole in the fence. It wasn’t like she thought they’d murder
her right then and there.
What could they have done?
Patience Mason
"I...."
Patience was about to say something, about to speak further on this
particular revelation when she see's the excitement on the others
features, she understands what they see, the newness, the utter
potential and possibility contained within this newly discovered magi.
She knew the feeling well, felt it quite keenly.
But her features
draw up a mournful look, akin to loss or regret and she drinks down half
of her cup before she moves to stand. Her gaze falling on Connie as she
runs for the door, the woman calling after her. "Interpret and
accumulate sufficient data in this temporal frame Connie, The number of
relative high priority personage schismatic decisions will increase by a
factor of five, do not precipitate an over extension or exertion of
your personal relativity prior to proper thesis stress testing." She
tries to get it out quickly, before the woman is gone...but it likely
fails.
She then turns to the others as she steps out around the
table, that look of mourning still present on her features. "Please
actualize a coarseness of relative non-existence, such individualized
personages should be permitted total control of their algorithmic
direction and directive, given that each of your personages are more
likely to actualize upon Connie's bio-structure before my own." She
started to move then, following the other woman out, but not with the
intention of chasing her. No she heads in the other direction...her
features perplexing and uncommon, at least for those who know her.
Kalen Holliday
Kalen watches her leave.
What
could they have done? Perhaps he should just keep Grace or Ryne on
hand when he goes out into the world. Like puppies. 'Look. Can I
really be so bad? See how cute they are? How harmless? See how they
trust me?'
He watches Patience follow. Turns to Sera. "That went
well. Which is oddly reassuring. The last time I found someone he
followed me home. I didn't get to keep him. This one...at least I
won't worry about her and strangers with candy."
Serafíne
Kalen, see. He's all easy
now and Sera thinks that that might work. And Sera's in two places or
three. She's a little bit drunk and a little bit high and a little bit
translucent. She's feeling the world beneath her and around her and
inside her and here here here is her heartbeat.
Connie stands.
Then the world just stops.
It just fucking stops.
Connie's
heart is beating and she is standing in place and there's her hand on
the back of the wooden chair and there is the table and there is the
slowly-melting foam in her now abandoned mocha and there is the line in
which Ian Lai is now ordering a black tea and the world is stopped.
Everyone, everyone, everyone seems frozen,
except for Sera, and Connie. Connie and Sera.
There's
this echo beneath their breath; it is a deeply strange sensation to
stand in a moment carved out of time. There's no noise around them; all
of that is literally turned the fuck off.
"Do you ever
feel like you've woken up, just a little bit earlier than everyone else,
right? They're all sleeping; and you're in the house and it's the
house you've always fucking known, and it's quiet. Oh, everything's
quiet so you slip out from beneath the blankets and you pad down the
stairs and outside, everything's quiet too. The sun's rising, but you
see it differenly. Like you know how it works, and that knowledge is somewhere inside you, wrapped around your bones.
"You feel it like a song, or maybe a pulse or a beat or a something.
"Anything. It's different for everyone. But, see - you know, you just fucking know, that you're seeing and tasting and feeling
the world that's brank spanking new, and it's real and surreal and more
real than anything you've ever known, but somehow almost everyone else
you know can't hear it, or feel it, or drink it, because they're still
back in the house, in their beds, curled up,
sleeping."
Somehow Sera is standing up. She is
standing up, and the world is all frozen, frozen around them. And
Sera's smiling, and god she's striking, passionate, full of conviction.
"Kalen
once told me that sailors used to go out to sea, in these fucking
boats, right. Ships or whatever, just hurtling into the ocean, all this
endless fastness, with nothing to guide them from port to port but
their trust in the stars. That's a kind of magic, you know? Finding
your way from here to there just by the changing light in the sky.
Easier to manage when you have someone else to talk to who's trying to
do that, too.
"I'm around. When you're ready, you'll know.
"Come find me."
--
And time, see: Time: Ian and Patience and Kalen and everyone else in the whole fucking place starts again. All around them it just clicks back into place, like a key, in a fucking lock.
Sera lets it, and Connie, go.
And she sits down heavily, just waiting waiting for reality's backblow.
Serafíne
Charisma + Expression: do I talk good?
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )
Serafíne
(So... okay, but not spectacularly.)
Now: Paradox.
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Serafíne
Soak.
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )
Ian Lai
The
jeans he had on today were tapered skinny and dark blue with a faint
sheen in the finish that made them look almost satiny. They trailed down
to a pair of dress boots (ankle length, black leather) and up to a
fitted black t-shirt. His left wrist had the same leather and steel
bracelet that Sera had seen him in on their last encounter, and on his
head sat a black and white baseball cap that, as a completion to the
ensemble, just made him look so unbearably fashionable that you almost wanted to hate him for it.
(To be fair: he looked like kind of an asshole.)
And
there Sera was, having this beautiful fucking epiphany in the little
bubble she carved for herself and for Connie - out of time and in a
place where no one (including Ian) could see.
He felt it
though. Felt the unfamiliar ripple of... something. And even though for
him no time had passed at all, the tic made him pause. Made him blink
and frown slightly as he paid for his drink. Then he walked over to the
table where Sera and Kalen still sat with their coffee and food.
And he regarded them.
"I take it you two know each other."
Kalen Holliday
"Oh,
hey, kitty-cat," Kalen says absently. "You'd be correct. Would you
like a pastry?" He nudges the pastries perhaps an inch closer to Ian.
"I hear the chocolate croissants are incredible here."
He looks back over at Sera. Curious. Perhaps a little concerned. Perhaps.
Serafíne
Here
it comes; a ringing backhanded blow that makes her reel and sets her
ears ringing. This snap-crack-boom she feels in the back of her teeth,
in the fine, delicate bones all labyrinthine in her inner ear.
Everything slamming home at once, like the rush back into ordinary time
from hyperspace and she knows she knows she knows she shouldn't do
things like this, doesn't she?
Something wet on her right ear.
Sera can feel it all niggling, then she reaches up with her right hand
and her fingers come away a bit dark and damp. It isn't much and it
isn't bad but that blow is still ringing in her head and Sera takes the
tail of her flannel and uses it to daub away the blood. She glances at
Ian, up-and-down, but does not quite register him fully.
Not yet. Not entirely.
Her attention swings back to Kalen. Sera swallows and her throat feels strange and dry and then she smiles. See? Smiles, all golden.
"Did you just call him kitty cat?"
Oh that is delightful.
Ian Lai
Kalen
called him kitty cat, and Ian didn't respond, either because he didn't
care or because he was used getting that kind of shit from people or
because he was just... above it all (hah.) And Sera thought it was
just... delightful.
Ian pulled out a chair and sat down, ignoring
the entire exchange. He glanced at the pastries that Kalen pushed his
way and shook his head. "No thanks."
He had his tea though, and he
pushed the pastries out of the way so as to make a clean spot to set
the mug down. It was still scalding (these places always kept the water
too hot,) so he let it rest. He eyed the bit of blood that seeped out of
Sera's ear with a vaguely curious expression.
"Having fun over there?"
Kalen Holliday
Kalen reaches out to touch the inside of Sera's wrist lightly. Briefly.
Then
he settles back in his chair and leaves them to talk for the moment,
attention drifting mostly elsewhere. Distracted enough that Sera
bleeding from her ear and Ian showing up after six months barely seems
to register to him as things that merit even some of his attention.
Serafíne
Ian
asks if she's having fun over there and lo, head still ringing, Sera
swings her attention back to him and there is something about her gaze
in that moment - raw and strangely vulnerable, just open, see -
that could be so absurdly arresting. Everything around her feels like
it's floating, just untethered, except for the way the strictures of
reality jerk her back here, anchored in her body, stitched into time.
Sera does not know how to answer Ian.
And
Kalen reaches out to touch the inside of Sera's wrist, the left one
maybe, where there's a shark either eating or being turned into the
handle of a pair of scissors and some portion of a rather ridiculous
array of bracelets near by, pushed up on her forearm and she glances up
at Kalen.
Her heart beats. Her heart always beats.
Then back to Ian.
Sera smiles at him. She doesn't know why, and it is a small and strange and lovely smile.
"I don't remember being that new. Do you?"
Hawksley Rothschild
[Awareness]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
Hawksley Rothschild
Hawksley
isn't watching where he's going. Hawskley walks like the sort of
person who expects others to part like the waters for his passage, and
most do, and the ones that don't -- the ones who shoulder-check him or
what-have-you and mutter asshole under their breath at his back
-- hardly garner his notice. He is checking his messages again because
stupid Grace hasn't returned his stupid text about getting stupid drinks
tonight which is stupid because ...well.
Because he decides it is.
No
drinks with Grace, then. He puts his phone away. He goes into a bar
anyway. It is next door. Into several drinks he lifts his head, sudden
and then going oh my god that was too fast and keeping very,
very still for a moment. It's as though he's listening for something,
but it's not listening. A warmth that is not tequila or vodka spreads
from his belly up through his chest and down into his groin, through his
arms and his legs. He breathes it in and slides off his barstool.
He's already scrawled on a receipt for them. He makes for the door, and
then to the cafe next door, pushing open the door to the
cafe-next-door, dragging his pale eyes around until they fix on Sera.
Ian Lai
Did he remember being new?
Ian
couldn't have been older than 23, 24. Right now, with that hat, he
looked closer to 21. Some people might have said that he couldn't have
known anything but the feeling of newness. Of youth and beauty and
clothes that still smelled like he'd just pulled them off the hanger in
some department store. Of neon lights that seemed to go on forever.
But the young always imagined themselves to be old, didn't they?
(He remembered.)
"Not sure if I ever was," he offered quietly.
The
door opened. Someone else entered. Ian felt it more than heard it (that
was a lie, he heard everything,) but he didn't turn around to look.
Instead he leaned back in his chair, lounging into a relaxed pose.
"Kalen looks like he could use a nap."
Pan Echeverría
[I LOVE AWARENESS]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )
Serafíne
"Everyone is," returns Sera. Is not was
and she doesn't imagine herself old or anything; some nights every
single molecule in her body feels new. Every organ and every cell and
every stray electrical impulse: constructed again from something like
scratch, by a deliciously active imagination. Her dark eyes lift over
Ian's shoulder, but her attention is still somehow with them, "I think I
freaked her the fuck out. You know? I just assumed - " An expansive sort of breath, all in, all-in.
"Kalen
can always use a nap." There is quiet affection in that and quiet
concern for whatever it is beneath his skin that drives Kalen from
sleep-to-waking night after night and quiet awareness and quiet quiet
quiet,
"You two know each other?"
This look drawn from each to each, but the question isn't the question that it seems. It's a different one.
It sounds like you two know each other EYEBROWS RAISED. Like: Kalen are you already cheating on Adam?
And
Sera's attention is still on whoever-is-behind-Ian's shoulder, and that
is Hawksley and it is kinda fixed right now, his sudden appearance
feels all surreal and lovely and if he's real she's going to make him
come over and kiss her or something with the power of her mind, yo.
Kalen Holliday
"I
always look like that," Kalen says absently. He doesn't even bother to
follow up with, 'it's exhausting to be this awesome,' or some other
little verbal spar for Ian. His heart wouldn't have been in it even if
Hawksley hadn't just walked in.
His pale eyes track toward the
door and suddenly the air tastes like summer and sunlight and flight.
His eyes close for a breath. Two. Three.
He reaches out for Sera
again. Squeezes her hand. "Hey, are you-" And he's getting ready to
leave before he lets himself get lost in Hawksley's Resonance. Because
he's back to the mood in which he implored Galowglass to come out to
drinks because he needed certainty and failing his, Gallowglass' would
do.
Fuck, he still hasn't broken it to Sera that there is nothing
going on there, however cute she thought they were. Does she even
remember? Oh...there is that look. Perhaps she does remember.
"We met once. Months ago."
Hawksley Rothschild
He
looks like he's smirking. Then he's smiling, and it's something else,
and then it's gone again. Hawksley has a glassy brightness to his eyes
that is either predatory, aquiline or drunk.
Mostly drunk. A little drunk! He would insist. But drunk. And then he saunters, because that is how men like him walk,
of
course he would say there are no men like him, and he would be
correct. Just like he's correct when he says he is already a god, and
correct when he says that yes, he is a king. So: sauntering, even
swaggering, he comes in, and yes he may see Kalen reaching for Sera like
two or three or a dozen times in like ten seconds dude take it down a notch
but maybe he doesn't notice that at all! He is, after all, drunk. He
is smiling, and that doesn't stop. And then he comes up to their table.
Grabs the back of a chair from another table. Drags it back, swivels it around, drops into it. "I,"
he begins, sagely, interrupting-ly,
"am
buzzed as fuck." He swivels his head around, from Sera to
guy-he's-seen-once to guy-he's-never-seen, blinking slowly on the last.
"Sera," he whispers audibly, without looking at her. "Don't make any
sudden movements. But I think... we're not alone."
Ian Lai
"We met at a white party."
As though that wasn't going to give Sera exactly the wrong idea (or the right one?) It didn't matter to Ian. There could be no wrong impression with him. Impression itself was the point, not the accuracy of it.
Hawksley
invited himself to their table (not at all unlike how Ian himself had
done, though perhaps a bit louder and a bit less graceful.) And now Ian
did turn his gaze to regard the other man, dark eyes trailing over
Hawksley's form with a kind of lazy interest, like maybe he wanted to
fuck him or eat him but not right this very moment.
He didn't bother with a greeting. It was that kind of gathering. People came and went.
A few seconds later, he picked up his mug and took a drink of his tea.
Richard
[i wanna roll awareness too!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 7, 8, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )
Serafíne
Sera
squeezes Kalen's hand back and is he asking her if she's okay? Maybe
that's what he's asking her. Maybe he's asking her something else.
What she says to him is,
"She's gonna be okay."
Conviction,
all of this fucking conviction is all wrapped up in her body and written
into her bones. Connie will be okay or she won't. Those are the
options and they're open to us all.
Then, Hawksley who has not kissed her, drops himself into a chair all backward like she wanted
to do way-back-when until she remembered that her skirt was too tight
for that shit and she had to turn the chair around and sit in it
normally instead.
"You're adorable when you're buzzed as
fuck. That's Ian. That's Kalen." Indicating one and then the other
with a tip of Sera's golden head.
"They met at a white party," a
cut of her gaze back to Ian, and she wants to know, "did it involve
foam?" Sera is just assuming that it did. Lots and lots of foam.
Then,
all confidentially to Hawksley. "You missed Patience. She was talking
like a robot still. But she knows my name, so I understand her when
she says that."
Richard
With spring finally on the
advent, all manner of people wander the streets of downtown Denver on a
Friday evening. Richard is not the only tall fellow on the streets.
He is not the only one shouldering one of those enormous hiking
backpacks. He is not the only one wandering around in sturdy
trail-sandals, and he's far from the only one stopping off at a cafe for
a drink. He's not even the only one wearing that three-week-old,
my-electric-razor-broke-for-good-in-Calcutta-and-i-couldn't-be-bothered-to-buy-a-bic
beard, or those i-pulled-an-all-nighter circles under his eyes, or
thrice-worn clothes that could probably do with a good washing. Or
five.
He is, however, perhaps the only man within a twenty-block
vicinity to combine all of the above traits. So: a group of young magi
are gathered and making friends or enemies or frenemies, and another
young man who looks like he's in the middle of a
backpack-around-the-world trip stops in for --
-- well. He was
going for a drink. Maybe a plain small coffee; does anyone order that
anymore? But he pauses, a few feet into the cafe. Months on end
traveling amongst enclaves and cadres of the Awakened, weeks on end
spent in the seat of the Tradition, and Richard has honed his sense for
such things. Vibrations in the spiderweb. Needles in the stack. That
sense of
visceralliminal
luminosity in the air; like
time itself has recently been fractured and repaired. Richard stops in
his tracks. He looks about, furrowed brow and scruffy-thick beard and
shoulders stooped under the burden of that enormous backpack giving him a
vaguely cavemanesque quality. Then, quite without further ado, he
comes over to that table of young magi. Stands there at their margin
for a moment, swinging the backpack off his shoulders and just --
pulling up a seat.
"Hello. Mind if I join you all? Tables are crowded tonight."
Hawksley Rothschild
No,
he has not kissed her. It's been days! Many of them, perhaps. He
blinks slowly at her, like he's having to slow down his visual
processing of what's going on around him. He isn't backward, though.
He is sprawling. The chair turned from one table to another, and thank
god he has the back of it holding him up because he's slouched, he's
lazy, he's thankfully propped up. He is called adorable. He smiles,
beamish and endearing, saying:
"I'm always adorable. Hi, Ian.
Hi, Kalen." He even lifts his hand, giving a tiny side-to-side wave.
He is informed that he missed Patience, he says -- quipping, without
feeling even remotely bad about this in part because he has no idea who
Patience is at first, until Sera says 'talking like a robot' which he,
unlike Adam and others, doesn't find fascinating. "I don't believe I missed that." It's droll and unapologetic.
He
can feel a lot of things in the air right then, and one of the things
he feels when the door opens again is the ocean. It's not anathema,
even to someone to whom gravity is... um. Anathema. He likes the
ocean. He likes the sky more but let's not be bigots about this sort of
thing. Hawksley swivels his head around and his eyes pop.
"It's a giant,"
he loud-whispers to Sera (and presumably Ian and Kalen), before Richard
shows up, beardy and dirty and backpack-ed, zeroing in on them.
Hawksley thinks he's frozen up like an animal but outwardly, he just
looks like a big lazy animal in his fashionably distressed jeans and
fashionably old-fashioned leather shoes and tailored t-shirt (which is
dark green and soft as powder and thin as tissue paper and makes it
quite clear that dude, he totally lifts). He only thinks he's frozen.
He whispers again, turning his head to Sera and the others, but mostly Sera, the Disciple, who will fix this. "Sera, it's a giant," he repeats, more insistently. Perhaps a bit gleefully, mingled with the mockery of terror.
Kalen Holliday
He'd been about to ask if she was okay there. Before he left her there with Ian and Hawksley.
But
Hawksley is there like some damned drunken embodiment of summer and
Sera is talking and really she and Patience are about equally
understandable to him and so instead of leaving he laughs. "There was
no foam. It was tragic." And his voice sounds amused and relaxed
enough, but it doesn't have that little hint of a purr. Really, of
everyone here, only Sera has ever seen that to know it is missing.
Heard that. Kalen honestly calm enough and amused enough for that tone
is rare.
But then Richard is one too many strangers again,
specifically one too many Awakened strangers to be at all comfortable
with his prior tra and the immediacy that had come creeping back
dissolves back into the ether. Hawksley's insistence about giants gets a
faint smile as he rises.
"Goodnight." It is not a terribly specific goodnight.
Ian Lai
"It
did if you want it to." He winked at Sera, like they were sharing some
kind of secret. But of course then Kalen had to go and spoil it by
giving an honest answer.
By the time Richard came in to join their
group, Ian had only finished about a quarter of his tea, but it was
enough to know that he didn't particularly want any more of it. He stood
up, stretching up to his full (not giant) height, and made a motion
(elegant and so very cat-like) to bow - mock-formal and playful, but
slightly impressive in its accuracy - in Sera's direction.
"Until next time."
Then, without another word, he followed Kalen out the door, leaving his tea at the counter for the barrista to throw away.
