Kalen Holliday
[Nightmares]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 4, 4, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
Demiurge
Alright before we get started! Here is what you can expect from this scene and what I need from you guys to make it awesome.
1:
There are two parts to this. The first is a group intro to kick off the
story, then there will be a big transition post from me, at which time
Kalen and Ian's involvement will no longer be required and this scene
will become ALL SID.
2: Do anticipate memory manipulation.
Although I will say that it will not be especially traumatic or invasive
in nature. Nonetheless, if that bothers you (it is an understandably
sensitive issue) you still have time to back out before we begin.
3:
On that note, once we pass the point of no return on this scene, your
character will be neck-deep in this SL. So be prepared for that and
again, if you feel iffy, you can change your mind any time before that
point.
4: There will be combat in the second half of this scene, just FYI.
5:
There's just a couple of us in this one so I don't think we need to
worry about time limits on posts. I do, however, ask that we stick to a
posting order. If I have nothing to add and want you guys to keep going,
I will let you know. And if you want to make an extra post quick before
I finish typing something, just ask (and I will probably be fine with
it.) I just prefer that everyone knows whose turn it is to post at what
time.
6: If anything happens that you find triggering or
upsetting, let me know. That probably will not happen in this scene, but
this is just a general policy. Your emotional well-being is important.
<3
7: If you have questions about anything relating to the
scene, whether it be dice mechanics or narrative or whatever, please
feel free to ask. I may not respond right away if I'm typing something
or answering another question, but I will get to it as soon as I see it.
If you have a question about something unrelated to the scene, I prefer
it if you save it for another time when I am not actively running
something.
8: Did I mention 'have fun?' Yes I think I did. I will say it again anyway.
Demiurge
It
was barely 10pm on a friday night. Early enough that the club crowd at
most of the popular night spots were only just starting to filter in.
The air outside of Infinity, LoDo's newest (and hotly
anticipated) nightclub had a sense of electric anticipation as people
lined up outside the door, waiting to be allowed entrance. It was
opening night. None of them had been inside this place before, but the
word on the street hinted at state of the art technology.
Want to go dancing?
Ian
and Kalen came together, meeting in the parking garage nearby. When Ian
got out of his car, he grinned at Kalen like their awkward encounter at
the lake hadn't even happened, and threw his arm around Kalen's
shoulder companionably as they walked out onto the street. "You look
nice."
An off-hand compliment, but a genuine one nonetheless. Ian,
of course, looked gorgeous. He had on a black t-shirt and tight jeans
that gave off a shimmer where the light hit the fabric (the wash had a
space-age name that Ian would claim not to remember. Moon-something.) A
couple of leather bracelets adorned his wrists, and he played with one
(it was blue and had a steel infinity symbol braided into the leather -
how appropriate) absently while they stood in line.
Sid Weston
Sid
is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the people already waiting in line to
get in. She is not alone, nor is she with a gaggle of females of an
appropriate clubbing age group. She is, perhaps also surprisingly,
among a small number of her coworkers. There is a trope that says that
scientists are nerds who would rather lock themselves into their labs or
in a library. They don't go to clubs, they don't have fun like the normals do.
This
is, obviously, not true. Also, Sid is the only scientist in the
group. There's Don and Dawn from Accounting (good luck calling out to
either of them ever, they don't answer to their last names), and then
there's Alice from Human Resources.
And then there's Sid. She's
wearing a sleeveless cream t-shirt with a scooping collar that can't
help but expose the line of her cleavage. Her skirt is purple and
black, the pattern like some far off nebula in a distant corner of
space; it is light and loose, shifting and swaying with every movement.
Her shoes are black ankle boots, and she's wearing black black
knee-highs. Her hair is down and the only accessory she has on is the
necklace she wears. The pendant is round, a little larger in diameter
than a quarter, with a design of yellow and orange and a bit of green
(for those who know what they're looking at, it's a solar flare). Her
hair is down, spilling over her shoulders in a tumble of dark red
waves. The keen eye can see the tattoo inside her left wrist, perhaps
the long straight scar on the outside of that same forearm. One doesn't
have to have the eyes of an eagle to see the ink on the backs of her
forearms, though. The black stands out stark against her pale skin.
They look like feathers. Like wings trailing down but stopping just at
her elbows.
She has out her phone. She is looking at her phone
and she is paying only cursory attention to the people she came here
with. Truth is, she intends to lose them the moment she steps through
the doors. She intends to lose a lot of the things weighing her down
like shackles and chains when she steps through those doors.
How
different she is from a year ago. A year ago she followed fretfully
behind someone else, hand clutching at a shirt to keep from losing them
in a crowd. She was quiet and fearful and so many other things and now?
Now she looks restless, shifting her feet where she stands (stamping
them, almost, like some wild inhuman creature, like an animal waiting to
step back into her forest).
[passive awareness]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 7, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )
Kalen Holliday
Kalen,
who is, at least in contrast with Ian, markedly less pretty and less
graceful, laughs at that. He is wearing grays again, gray jeans that
are only snug to the thigh (because have you ever tried to kick someone
in fitted jeans? It can be done, but why?) and a silvery
tee-shirt that has just a hint of a purple tint to it. It makes the
fact that his eyes are green a little more apparent, though they still
barely register as having color until you get close to him. He has no
illusions about which of them is prettier, and he's already claimed he's
going to use that to his advantage in a tactical sense so no one will
notice he's horrible at dancing.
If Ian doesn't want to address
the night at the lake, so be it. As if there has never been anything
else to what they do, Kalen leans, lightly and briefly, into Ian when he
drapes an arm around his shoulders. He doesn't stay like that, but he
doesn't shrug off Ian's arm at all. He only has so much willingness to
surrender things like balance with so many people here on the street.
"You should be glad I won the argument about the eye liner. So unnecessary...."
His eyes sweep over them, not so much suspicious, but Kalen is wary. This
is a relatively calm survey. It isn't as though club openings are
generally demon summonings in disguise. But leeches. Some of them like
nightclubs. Predators more mundane in nature too, really. They make
for good hunting grounds.
[Awareness]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
Demiurge
[Awareness for Ian]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
Demiurge
"Eye-liner would look a bit dramatic on you." The look Ian shot Kalen was wry and slightly teasing. "You're so pale."
Ian
wasn't wearing eye-liner either, but it certainly wouldn't have been a
stretch to imagine him with it. There were enough pictures to be found
of that nature if one simply googled his name.
The crowd outside
the club was mostly of the more mundane variety. Apart from Ian, Kalen
and Sid, there was no hint of unique resonance to draw the attention of
the aware. Nonetheless, the three of them were more than alert to the
presence of each other, and it didn't take long for Ian's eyes to land
on the back of Sid's head. On her hair - red enough that she was
difficult to miss, even in a crowd, and even if he hadn't sensed her
halfway up the street. She was an unfamiliar entity to him, and he
tipped his head lightly in curiosity and asked Kalen in a low murmur.
"You know her?"
The progression of the line was not nearly fast
enough, but it did finally begin to move. A man and a woman stood at
either side of the doors, checking IDs and nodding people through. The
cover fee was waived for opening night, so when Sid and her companions
reached the entrance, they had only to prove they were of age (which
clearly they were.) Inside, the building opened up into a spacious,
two-story room. The main bar lay to the right, sleek and modern and
finished with black glass and tall stools, but most of the first floor
was dedicated to the dance area. A DJ was set up on a low stage at the
back wall, and once the doors opened, a steady feed of trendy electronic
music began to play over the sound system, permeating the air and
vibrating through the floor.
And the floor was made of that same
black glass. Dark and liquid-shimmery, like walking on water. The walls,
too, were coated in dark glass plates. And once the music started
playing, streaks and whirls of color began to dance across the panels.
The images shifted with the music, sometimes abstract, other times
identifiable as fire or water or some other specific image. A flock of
white swallows soared around the room, up over the ceiling and down,
dancing across the bar before they disappeared.
The glass - everywhere - it was all screens. Imagine watching a movie in this place.
Sid Weston
Sid
had noticed the sense of a storm coming. It does not feel like the
intermittent showers from earlier in the day, the sort of quiet things
that spit cold rain for a few minutes before sailing on to darken
someone else's day. It is more focused. It comes with a familiar
charge, a feeling like lightning and thunder aren't far behind. This is
a feeling she more or less knows and so when she felt it she'd lifted
her head and looked back to see Kalen. Then her dark eyes shifted to
the one beside him, an unknown. But then of course he's unknown. These
days Sid's more a stranger than even the newest Awakened to the city.
Is it any wonder she wouldn't recognize the sly and elegant cat sliding
among the sheep like a human-shaped shadow?
They had not held her
attention. After the other day that might not be terribly surprising to
Kalen. So, they come upon a woman who feels like growth, like the
desperate struggle and unending happiness of life, and they see the back
of her head and the backs of one of her arms as she moves forward a
space, two spaces. At the door she shows her identification to the
bouncers (Amelia Weston, 2515 S Gilpin, so on) proving that she is well above the drinking age.
And
then she goes inside. It's easy to lose her companions. After they
check their effects they want to go to the bar, get some alcohol into
themselves to loosen their straight laces. Sid? Sid heads for the
dance area. Any hope she had of losing herself has fled her, though.
As she moves through the crowd she can't help but glance back once,
twice, just every so often to see if Kalen and his companion are there.
She is pretty sure Kalen isn't going to try to have that talk with her
in the middle of a noisy club, but he's a Hermetic and everything Sid's
ever heard about them leads her to believe they are not above finding
any time or place appropriate for a debate.
She keeps to the side,
then. Her arms are wrapped around herself, and for the time being she
watches the screens and the images that swirl and play across the walls
and such.
Kalen Holliday
There is something about
Kalen that is different when he's out like this. It shows in the way he
leans in and seems like he is already half breathless with delight to
murmur into Ian's ear.
Some things about him are not fluid, cannot
be washed away with time or rain or blood. He cannot help but be wary.
He cannot forget that the safest, most well defended home he has ever
known was reduced to smoldering ruins. Some tragedy, some knowledge,
some light cannot be forgotten. And he might be different when he's in a
space where he feels he should be teaching and protecting and being
like the fucking mystical knight he was trained to be - but this...this
is different.
This is more like a time before that. There was a
lot more time out with people then, and there have been times since when
stars and planets and fate aligned and Kalen has been tumbling into
clubs and abandoned warehouses and normally empty stretches of deserts
with tangled masses of people. With people who he has accepted not as
peers or equals but as mentors and lovers and who conjure up completely
different parts of him.
Strike a prism with light from a different angle and everything is different, even if the prism itself is unchanged.
So
he doesn't immediately take to searching out predators or exits or even
Sid. No, his eyes track colors and birds made of light with nothing
but wonder. Sure, after that completely off-guard thirty seconds of
being lost in sound and color and light he checks for where the exit
doors are and where Sid is in relation to them.
He does not chase
after her though, once he knows where she is, he turns back to Ian,
laughing. "Can I already be in love?" He reaches out to lay a hand to
lay across Ian's lips, eyes practically glowing. "Not with you. With
this." And then he takes his hand away from Ian's face.
Kalen Holliday
[To Ian]
"She's
in my cabal. But she probably doesn't want to talk to me right now.
I've been driving everyone off this week. Maybe. A little." The
tone, despite the actual meaning of the words, is light. Not playful,
because he regrets that enough he doesn't make it sound amusing, but
he's not going to focus on that right this second apparently.
Demiurge
Whatever
it was that Kalen murmured into Ian's ear while they waited in line, it
resulted in Ian giving Sid another, more considering gaze. He didn't
react to the confession with judgment, likely because he didn't have
much place to judge how other people managed their social circles. And
he let the subject drop, watching Sid's red hair disappear through the
door.
A few minutes later, the two of them finally made it inside,
and although Ian's reaction to the club was less outwardly enthusiastic
than Kalen's, it was clear that he approved. His eyes tracked the
movement of images on the dark panels with pleased appreciation.
This
was not a club for people who wanted to sit on couches and drink wine
(though the second floor did host a selection of more comfortable
seating.) It was a club for people who wanted to dance.
Ian's lips
parted slightly beneath Kalen's hand, his breath warm and familiar
against Kalen's fingers, and he raised an eyebrow at Kalen's phrasing (can I already be in love?) but he knew what those words meant - and what they didn't.
"Thanks for clarifying," he said in a dry, lightly amused tone.
No
one was dancing yet. That was the thing about clubs. There was always
that point early in the night when no one wanted to be the first person
on the dance floor. Here, the delineation between the dance floor and
the rest of the club was a bit fuzzy, and a number of people had begun
to filter towards the stage where the DJ stood, testing out the
reactivity of the floor panels with delighted expressions as light
bloomed elegantly beneath their feet.
A few of them swayed a bit or bobbed their heads. But no one was really
dancing. So this is what happened: Ian broke away from Kalen and jogged
to the center of the room. Then he turned around and beckoned first
Kalen, then Sid (if she chose) to join him.
The song changed. Phedre's In Decay
started playing. Upbeat and a bit macabre. And Ian started dancing,
because he did not mind at all if he was the first one. He usually was.
[Dex+Performance]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1
Sid Weston
Not
all that long ago, if a stranger with resonance hanging around them
like a cloud beckoned to Sid like that she would have - well she would
have left before she even got through the door. Head bowed, shoulders
hunched, and a desperate hope that her posture plus her attempts to play
down her appearance would mean she would be forgotten.
Tonight,
Sid is watching the images on the screens when someone else asks her to
dance. It's Dawn from Accounting, Sid should have known she'd be found
quickly. Maybe she did. One doesn't "hide" quite so plainly in sight.
Sid shakes her head, leans over to the woman to say something close to
her ear - her quiet voice wouldn't be heard otherwise. Dawn gives her
an uncertain look. Sid nods, lifts her gaze past the woman to where she
can see the rest of their group hanging around, watching the people
rather than the screens. Dawn looks back over her shoulder, looks back
at Sid. With a disapproving shake of her head she turns and walks away.
Sid watches her go. She should feel bad but she doesn't.
The
song shifts and she looks back to see Kalen's companion beckoning to
her. She does not frown and she does not shrink in on herself and
scurry away. Her gaze shifts to Kalen, watching to see what he will do,
what he does do. Her expression can only be described as blandly
curious. Like she's watching through a microscope to see who a
biological substance reacts to an unfamiliar chemical agent.
That doesn't mean she doesn't move to the floor to dance. It just means she doesn't go over there.
Sid slips through the crowd to some corner out of the way, someplace
where people are only just starting to get into the groove and start to
move. Closing her eyes, she lifts her chin and it seems for a moment
like she should be shaking out that mane of hair, a set of massive and
widly branching antlers lifting up with her head, bits of green things
tangled in their deadly points.
But no. Wait. There are no
antlers. She is just a woman (just a woman?) in a crowd of people,
losing herself to the rhythm for a little while.
[how does Sid fare? dex+performance!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Kalen Holliday
They met in a club, Kalen and Ian. They met in a club and they drank incredible Scotch and they did not dance.
Kalen
could not dance then. Could not find some socially acceptable ways to
be writhing and alive and twining in and out of someone else's space
until there was only one pulse between them and it was dictated by the
sound that framed them. Until it seemed like there was something
intimate and whole and holy about him and them and the whole of the
cosmos. As though everything could be cradled, suspended, and
transformed by the sound. The ritual. The surrender to something
primal and communal and perfect.
Even when they are falling down. Even when the world is falling apart. Perfect.
And
so he comes to join Ian, to slide into and through his space. He'll
join Sid too, if she comes close enough for him to read an invitation
into it. Will join anyone who comes close enough. He drifts back to
Ian often enough. But he doesn't have any desire to be nailed to his
side. He wants everyone. Everything. All the things.
He wants to feel all the things. He wants to feel one with all the things.
[Does your crazy love for this get you anything like good at it...?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
Demiurge
[I'm pre-rolling this one so I know how to write this damn post. Performance again.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Demiurge
There
was an ease to the way that Ian moved when he danced that suggested
that although he wasn't doing anything overly impressive at the moment,
this kind of movement was as familiar to him as walking. As breathing.
But this wasn't about showing off. He was here for the same reason Kalen
was - to have fun. To relax. To be among all this life and energy. The
music played, and he rolled the muscles in his torso as he moved in a
circle, beckoning the others to join him.
And they did. Because
that was usually all it took to open the floodgates. One person, then
two, then ten. Pretty soon the attention of the crowd wasn't on him. It
was hard to look at any one person in particular when the room itself
was so beautiful. And each of them set off a light show beneath their
feet, until soon the floor was alive with dancing swirls of
luminescence.
Sid and Kalen may not have had the experience that
Ian had, but in their passionate abandon, they became even more
beautiful. The energy proved infectious among the crowd, and soon it was
hard to tell where one person ended and another began. Minutes passed,
and people filled the room, dancing and laughing and brushing up against
each other's patterns. Ian let Kalen dance as he pleased, and both of
them blended with the crowd. Except that none of them (not Ian or Kalen
or Sid) could ever really blend in the way the other people could. To
someone with the right senses, they stood out. They glowed.
But
see - Ian did not let Kalen forget who he'd come there with, because
when the song changed again Ian slid into Kalen's space, kissed his neck
with a light scrape of lips and teeth and tongue, and then proceeded to
fall into a series of loose, fluid motions that took him in a vivid
circle around Kalen's space, before falling back onto the floor (fire
like a tiger's eye blossomed beneath his hands,) and bouncing back up
with a snap of his spine.
(As though to say: don't forget to save the last dance.)
Suddenly,
the panels began to glow. From black to white, brighter and brighter
all over the club like staring into the face of the sun. At first, no
one paid it any mind. People cheered. They thought it was part of the
show.
Then the music got louder. It morphed and shifted and spiked into a nearly inaudible electronic pulse.
The energy in the room changed. Something was there with them. Even the Sleepers could feel it. Infinite. Omnipresent. Demiurgic. It was like the light flooding the room - so strong it was near-blinding.
A
person could not be faulted for imagining God there, in the flow of
life and energy and electronic signals that moved through the room.
Sid Weston
There
are people who look at Sid who think that looking at Sid is to know all
there is about Sid. She is quiet. Not timid, not fearful (not
anymore), simply quiet. Her presence in a room is a gentle glow, a
faint warmth. She kept to herself before and she keeps to herself now
and she is quiet and studious and such a nerd I mean come on lead
scientist at a pharmaceutical company. She could only be a bigger nerd
if she actually dressed the part (something she will never, can never
do). People like that, if they dance, they are stiff because it's
simply not something that they do. The studious quiet nerds, they don't go out to clubs and they don't dance and they don't enjoy life the way most others do.
Sid
is not most other people. She never was, she can never be. The people
who look at her don't know her half so well as they'd like to think.
They have never heard her lift her voice in song. Few have seen her
dance and fewer still have seen her allow herself to get lost in the
crowd, the music, the rhythm.
Kalen and Ian, should they look
toward that corner of the room, they can see it. Sid lifts her arms and
lowers her chin. She sheds the awkward amalgamation of Life Before and
Life Now, and she slips closer to that Life Before. She is closer to
the youthful girl who was carefree, who pissed off her fellow students
because she learned her limits and she lived just barely within
them (because grades and scholarships and awards and please god let me
get the hell out of Pittsburgh). On the dance floor she is tall and
ethereal, and she starts to lose that wariness. She sheds it like a
suit of armor and the core of her - strong and warm and a vibrantly
alive - shines forth.
Somehow, she wouldn't know she's certainly
not paying much attention, she ends up closer to the center of the
floor. She slides through the crowd like liquid fire, moving near one
partner only to slip away to the next because who the fuck cares? These
people aren't going to hurt her. She slips through the crowd,
movements loose (free like the wind,
free as a bird, people who look at her half expect those etched wings to
peel from her skin to carry her away). She does not quite reach Kalen
and Ian before the lights start to go up up up. Brighter and brighter
until it threatens to blind her.
There are people who wonder if
they are in the presence of God. Sid is not one of them. She belongs
to a Tradition that follows paths older than the Christian God. She
stops dancing but she does not stop moving. She doesn't want to be
knocked down. Squinting against the glare, she hums a note lost beneath
the music and the murmurs of the people around her. It's a note that
she can feel vibrate in her jaw. Using that as a guide, she alters her
pitch until she feels connected to the Weaving.
[so she can Watch it! Prime 1, practiced]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (5, 5, 7) ( success x 3 )
Kalen Holliday
[So,
I actually need to see if this happens to know how to finish this post. Per/Awareness|Omens|Sensing Danger Specialty Activate!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )
Kalen Holliday
Kalen is not so lost in being half-dissolved into the crowd that he forgets who he is here with.
Who could forget Ian?
Even
when his teeth are not scraping over his skin, even when Ian is not
tracing circles around his space in a way that hints at possessiveness
and something of a circling predatory great cat, Kalen knows where he
is. He can sense him the same way he can sense Sid. Tigers and storms
and stags in some ancient green space.
Tigers and storms and stags in a forest of living bodies.
Tigers and storms and stags in a forest of light and sound.
And
then the energy shifts. Something godlike and ancient to match the
forest spills over them. Spills over them like rains and tides and dawn
and shadows. Before anything else, before wariness, before he searches
out Ian and Sid, before he tries to figure out what is happening -
there are a few seconds of sheer wonder.
One.
Two.
And then his eyes open and they are wide and they are still full of wonder and he is definitely aware
but what he sees...what he sees in those few seconds is fragments of
truths that lie under the surface of the world. Like blood. Like
bones.
[Int/Occult|WP]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 5, 5, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Demiurge
What
Sid saw when she opened her senses was something out of her depth of
experience. The threads of weaving were of a variety unknown to her -
but god, were they ever beautiful. Vast and layered, a thousand streaks
of glittering light moving around and through the minds of everyone in
the room. Connecting them in a web. She felt it too - they all did -
when those threads touched them. When the mind of that faceless
omnipresent being reached out and wrapped its tendrils around their
thoughts. That touch, it felt warm. It seeped into them like the sun.
Like the light all around them.
And Kalen. When he opened his eyes, this was what he saw:
High
on the wall behind the stage, a circle formed itself in the light. An
image of two snakes: one black and one white, with red and green eyes,
biting each other's tales. A two-headed ouroboros. And something about
the eyes, the colors, the two snakes.... it rang with old familiarity.
Of childhood and stories about fantastic lands that went on forever. Of
heroes and horses and terrible storms and a wolf like something out of
the deepest depths of a nightmare. Of the line between imagination and
reality.
(Do what you wish.)
AURYN.
And then the faces
in the crowd slowly turned and looked at him, and the awe and beauty of
the moment jarred with a sharp crack of fear and old pain, like the
memories of the dead that haunted his dreams. Because those faces were
the faces of dead things. Corpses. Animated and hungry.
(Sometimes,
the dead don't stay dead. Sometimes they haunt you. Sometimes they eat
you alive. Sometimes they claim your life too - reach out and grab you
and drag you down into the darkness.)
Most of the people just
stood there, transfixed in awe and confusion. They didn't see the things
that Kalen saw. Those things were for him alone.
But Ian, he shielded his eyes from the glare and shouted: "Run!"
Because
beautiful or deadly, this thing in the room with them, it beckoned. And
there was no stopping something like this. Might as well try to black
out the sun.
It didn't matter. They were too late. The light was
all around them, washing over them, blinding them, permeating the core
of their hearts and minds. It reached in, and it took hold, and then....
Darkness.
Nothing.
