There is a boulder-strewn stream somewhere high in the mountains. Swift-flowing and shallow, shaded by everygreens, flush with snowmelt and higher now than it is any other time of the year. The sun is out, and the sun is bright, and the air is cool enough that there is a hint of a chill in the shadows, that dissipates entirely when one is draped on a sunwarmed rock, soaking up the solar radiation.
Sera is draped on a sunwarmed rock that projects over a quiet pool where a noisy waterfall churns over wall of tumbled rock and debris. She has a beach towel folded under her head for a pillow, hiking boots off, socks tucked into the empty boots. Mud smeared on the boots says she has been hiking and the drying bare footprints on the boulder says that she has been swimming too, or at least dipping her feet into the pool. Now, though, she has stripped out of her cut-offs down to her bikini bottoms and (we must be honest) out of her bikini top to ensure, you know, an even tan, and is laying back with sunglasses over her eyes and some mushroom tea humming through her veins and a canteen of water close at hand.
Alexander
[Per+Aware makes it easier to bump into people in interesting places]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )
Alexander
Either most of the Awakened in the city aren’t aware of some of Alexander’s favourite ways to spend time, or they just don’t share them. He loves taking the chance to just get away from everything now and again – just him, his gear, and the mountains. This isn’t a new thing, either. Seattle was never short of remote places to disappear to, sometimes for several days at a time. Today, though, is for a shorter stay. He’s hiking, so the pack he’s lugging on his back is relatively small. Relatively. For an area where the weather is so changeable, especially at short notice, it’s always a good idea to be prepared.
But the weather – at least for the moment – is fine. Which means the gaiters and other waterproof gear is stashed away. Instead, Alexander is working his way through the landscape in hiking trousers – legs unzipped, turning them into shorts – a black technical tshirt and a well-worn pair of blue-under-the-mud walking boots.
There’s something else in the air up here, though. Not the traffic fumes and other clogging pollution you get in the city, it’s too far out for that. But something that announces the presence of someone, someone who he recognises. That enthralling sense of viscerality and liminality pull him in a slightly different direction to that he started. It pulls him to the opposite side of the pool to where Sera is lounging. “We must stop meeting like this,” he calls, just before realising her dress – or lack thereof. He turns to look elsewhere. “Um, hope I’m not interrupting.”
SerafÃne
(Does Sera know that Alexander is embarrassed by her lack of clothes? Awarempathy.)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 4, 4, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
SerafÃne
He has a glimpse of her bare feet and her knees, golden in the sun. Maybe the glint of her glasses from the angle on the rock. The toed-off hiking boots, little white flags of her socks stuffed into the muddy brown leather so from that first glimpse, well - he can easily and naturally assume that Sera is simply sunning herself.
Then she lifts herself up to her elbows, long blond hair swinging from a loose ponytail as she props herself up and looks across the reflecting pool at the police officer in his hiking gear. Sera is wholly unself-conscious about her demi-nudity and perfectly comfortable and she smiles back at Alexander and lifts up a hand and waves and the smile - well, from a distance, when one is uncomfortable as Alexander seems to be, what can he tell about the state of her smile, the complexities of it? - so the smile is simply a smile.
Then Alexander turns away and there's the shadow of movement in his periphery. A moment later,
"You can look now."
It's true. She's pulled a t-shirt over her head and is pulling her hair out from beneath the collar even as he turns. "What are you doing all the way out here?"
Alexander
The thought wasn’t that Sera might be occupying herself with someone else, more that... well, semi-naked women don’t usually appreciate random men turning up unexpectedly. But however little Sera is bothered by her near-nakedness, it certainly makes Alexander uncomfortable. He’s not a prude by any means, and it’s certainly nothing that – in general terms – he hasn’t seen before. And given Sera’s usual clothing, it’s nothing he hasn’t seen most of anyway. As fine as the line between her dress and decency tends to be, it is still a line and one that he’s comfortable is – generally – there.
Alexander looks up when she says that it’s safe, looking rather more comfortable than he did before. Embarassment quickly fading, he smiles back. “It’s my backyard. Well, kinda. I like getting out here and away from the city now and again.” He looks down and starts picking his way around the pool to where Sera’s sat. “How about you? I didn’t realise you were the outdoors type.”
He nods at her boots, grinning. “No heels today?”
SerafÃne
No heels today? Alexander asks and Sera gives him the smallest of quirks. This little comma of a half-smile that curves beneath her sunglasses and has her gaze seemingly steady on his face. The sun gleaming across the curve of the lenses when she moves her head.
"Wouldn't that be insane?" she tosses back to him, still smiling, a mild note to the expression that he may not be able to place until he is closer but, oh. Lovely.
Then a little shrug. "I don't know what the outdoors type is. But weren't we camping when I found you?"
She lilts her head in a general direction opposite of the one from which he has come. "Renting a cabin not far from here. Spent some time there this time last year. And I don't know," a one-shouldered shrug, still just lounging there on the rock. "I felt like coming back."
Alexander
Alexander shrugs out of the rucksack and lays in on the ground before perching on a rock. He looks down at the pool, considering doing a little foot-dipping of his own.
“What isn’t insane these days?” he asks before shrugging. “Although that would be particularly insane, even if you can put a broken ankle back together again.” She had already demonstrated her ability to heal, so surely a little thing like a broken bone would be easy to fix? There’s a mental shrug; not something he really has to worry about. Not yet, at least.
“This is outdoors, I guess.” He gestures around them. “Away from buildings and roads and people and traffic. Escape, I suppose.” She nods in the vague direction of the cabin. “Are you on your own out here, then, or is Dan staying with you?” Dan seems the most likely candidate, given that he’s usually nearby – or at least easily contactable – when Sera needs him. “How is he, by the way? And.. Sorry, I’ve forgotten your friend’s name. The one who bakes.”
SerafÃne
"He's around." Sera murmurs, of course he is. He's always around, somewhere on the fringes of her life, ensuring that she eats, sometimes, that she drinks, sometimes, something other than alcohol. There to hold her hand when her trip goes bad and her body when it is shaking. Or just to hold her. Then, "Dee," she supplies - the friend who bakes. "Naw. She's in Denver. Doesn't really know about this place.
"Or, us really. Magic, you know? I think she's starting to get it, but there are an awful lot of things I can't really share with her, just on that level. For her sake and ours."
The briefest pause, his reflection gleaming back at him from the lenses of her glasses.
Then, "Anyone ever tell you how we got the chantry?"
Alexander
Alexander considers things for a moment before bending down and starting work on his boot laces. “Tell Dan I say hi. And Dee, too.” He smiles as he makes the request. The memory for names may be lacking from time to time, but those of the two of them keeping an eye on him after his less-than-pleasant Awakening are very much there.
The laces loose, Alexander levers one boot off and then the other. “So how does that work with Dan, then? I don’t feel the same kind of thing around him as you or the others. Is it like… The Hermetic thing of training people before they wake up?”
The boots come off, the socks follow, and Alexander turns to rest his feet in the pool. The water is cold, but pleasant. He shuffles a little to get comfortable on the rock, looking back at his reflection. But there’s no attempt to look through it, not here and not now. “Not really. I know we’re kinda borrowing the place from someone who’s out of town. Beyond that..?” He shrugs.
SerafÃne
"Dan's known about us since before I met him," Sera tells Alexander, this quick flash of affection cresting the curve of her mouth. Absent and present, somehow, both at once. "I guess it's a bit like that Hermetic thing, but it's not the same. We're not that fucking formal, and he's just -
"We're just tight, you know? And he knows and he believes so I can do things around him and with him that ordinary people wouldn't understand or believe, which makes it harder and more dangerous. Consor's the word. Friends and lovers and allies who are alive to magic, but not precisely awake. Not the way we are.
"Pretty sure I couldn't get by without him. I'd probably forget to eat three weeks in a row and I'd never clean my goddamned room."
Sera's smiling then, though Alexander is now turned away from her, feet in the churning pool of water, dark with tannins from the pines dotting its course, and he cannot see the tinge of - call it melancholy - that lingers in the curve of her mouth.
"You wanna hear the story?"
Still, that hint of melancholy does manage to inflect her voice, when she asks him whether he wants to know more.
Alexander
[Aware-empathy, do we notice the change in tone?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
Alexander
Alexander turns on the rock, feet still in the water but moving so that he’s lying on his front and facing Sera on her rock. “How did you meet him? And how did you both figure out what the other was?” He laughs a little as she says she’d probably forget to eat. “I’m pretty sure the others around here would prod you now and again if he wasn’t. Although maybe not so much about putting your used laundry in the basket.”
He’s silent for a moment when Sera asks if he wants to know more. Part of him does, but he does pick up on the melancholy. He considers her face, striking in the light, considering. “Only if you want to tell it.” There are plenty of others to ask about what the history of the place was. If Sera doesn’t want to – or wants to talk about something else – then he’s leaving it all down to her. Given the help she’s given him in the past, he’s ready to give her all the time in the world.
SerafÃne
This quick, supple little shrug. Quiet, in this too. "I went through some shit overseas. A friend of a friend got me back over here. Somehow Dan ended up with the job of looking in on me. Just, you know, this string of mutual acquaintances, right? So we always kinda knew."
Her frame rather darting beneath the somewhat oversized t-shirt she pulled over her head when Alexander stumbles upon her sunbathing nude or nearly so on the rock. Her hair is golden, catching the light, but she deliberately allows all the dark roots to show, and the soft fringe of her sidecut is never, never dyed.
"I don't mind sharing."
And she doesn't mind sharing. Some part of her wants to share; that has to be why she broached the subject. That is also the reason she's been out here so much over the past few weeks.
She leans back, Sera, braced on the palms of her hands, eyes closed, soaking up the sun. Then lowers her chin and meets Alexander's gaze and gives him this wry, lovely little smile.
There are already tears in her eyes but the dazzling contrast between sun and shadow makes them difficult to discern.
"The first mage I met in Denver was Pan. Felt him outside his Church and went in, you know? Couldn't see him - but I knew he was in the confessional, hearing confessions, and I hate churches so I went in and decided to fuck around with him and asked him to make out, among other things.
"Turned out he wasn't the kind of fucking dick I thought all priests were required by law or the goddamned pope to be.
"But neither of us knew this place was here.
"A few days later I had this dream, about a girl alone in a world that had distingrated into little more than ash. Everything was ruined. Everything was a ruin, and she was standing in the center of this radial circle of graves and there was a man there, fucking dark, right? But compelling in the way people like that can be, and he took her hand, and he led her away, and she looked at me in the dream, just crying, right?
"And she asked me for help.
"Her name was Leah. When we tracked her down, we brought her out here."
Alexander
“I guess I can see how you guys ended up so close.” From what he’d seen, it almost seems like Dan’s the older brother looking after his little sister. But then it’s not unlikely that their relationship extends to the physical as well as the mental, and then the comparison falls apart. Alexander is happy to know that he’s there and taking care of her, though.
Where Sera’s appearance may be a lot more planned than her easy-going nature suggests, Alexander’s is pretty much what it appears to be. A few days’ worth of stubble covers his jaw and his short, dark hair has been gelled and brushed back. His eyes are uncovered and interested as Sera begins the story she wants to share, while he stays quiet and lets her talk without interruption.
The mention of Pan, though, gets his mouth pulled a little tighter. He’s aware of how highly some of the others in the city regard the man, but he’s still somewhat dubious. But, then, is a fleeting encounter really enough to build an accurate opinion of a person? Probably not, but then first impressions do tend to colour opinions quite strongly. That he may not be a complete ass holds hope for the future…
There’s a pause in the story. “What happened to her? Or was that what was going to happen to her? I’m not sure how those visions and dreams work. Who was the man?”
“Where’s Leah now? I don’t remember anyone mentioning her name before.”
SerafÃne
"I don't know how they work for other people," Sera supplies quietly, watching Alexander in the shadows. "For me - well, I've had them since I was a fucking kid. Long before I woke up. There were just things I would know. Things I'd see before they happened. Things I'd remember that I never should've known.
"All wrapped up in metaphor and who the fuck really understands metaphor, or maybe who the fuck really understands metaphor better than a four year old.
"When I had that dream, all I knew was that it was real, and it lingered, and it was important, and that we were all in danger, but she - especially - was. From the man in my dream.
"He was Fallen. Nephandi. Gave his soul over to god-knows-what in exchange for power, and was absolutely intent on bringing all of that suffering back into the world.
"Everyone said she was too. That she was born that way. They call it Widderslainte - someone stitched to an avatar that has already Fallen. Fuck if I know if it was true.
"But it turns out that a helluva lot of people knew about Leah. The Techs - you know about them, right? and our side, and of course the Fallen. They were hunting her.
"They had plans, see."
Alexander
Sera had told him before that her waking up had been a gradual thing, mixed in with load of other stuff. When your dreams are prophecies at four years old, really how much difference does it make finding out that you can change reality? “Did you tell anyone about your dreams? When you were young, I mean.” He listens to Sera’s reply, but part of his mind is elsewhere for a few moment – thinking back to a faceless man and a blood-lipped woman in white…
Alexander nods silently when Sera says the man was a Nephandi, and again when she asks if he knows about the Technocracy. He’d already had several little talks about the big scary things that it would be A Bad Thing to get involved with, and those two came at the start of all of those talks. “I thought you had to choose to become one of them? That you couldn’t be forced into it? So... was he trying to get her to make the same choice her avatar had?”
“What did the Techs want with her?” Other than asking about some of the details as Sera tells the story, he’s happy to just let her carry on talking.
SerafÃne
Here is another small divertissement: Alexander's question about whether or not Sera ever <i>told anyone</i> about her dreams. There is a certain irony in the whole of the conversation of which Sera alone is aware. To-wit, no one called her Serafíne, then. "Did I tell anyone? Fuck if I know. I was a kid, I probably didn't think it was weird. I figured everyone else knew things the way I knew things. Pretty sure all that freaked my folks out, though.
"I think my mother thought - " A brief pause. A caesura, and the mild irony of her expression settles into something else, a little more distant, a little more strange. Alexander has no idea how little Sera really knows about her own past. How distant what she does remembers seems to her: through a glass, darkly and all that.
"Anyway: Leah. The Techs kidnapped her before she woke up. They were trying to use her to draw out the Fallen, maybe they wanted to experiment on her. I'm not really sure. What I know is that some of the members of the cabal that held the chantry before us found out about it and rescued her. They took her to a warehouse in the city to try to keep her safe.
"Shelby and Will. Those were their names. They rescued Leah on their own. The rest of the cabal thought they should've just killed her, or left her in the Techs' hands.
"That she was too dangerous, that everything was too dangerous. That the most she deserved was a clean death.
"I didn't know any of them. Or any of this when it was happening, but a couple of days after that first dream I had, Jim and Sid and Mara and me met this guy Jake. Shelby's boyfriend.
"He was a consor like Dan, and he'd never been allowed to go to the chantry by the rest of the cabal, and all he knew was that Shelby had been missing for weeks. He was beside himself, you know? So we started looking for them, trying to find her for him.
"Shelby's family owned this warehouse - so we figured it was as good a place to start as anywhere else.
"Jim and I looked back in time, and saw the whole thing. Shelby and Will were watching over Leah when the rest of their cabal found them. They were in the middle of an argument over <i>what to do</i> about Leah when the Techs showed up and a fucking battle ensued. God knows what would've happened otherwise, but Leah was shot in the battle, and the trauma of the whole thing woke her up.
"You know how crazy it was when you woke up? The gauntlet all shredded, wild magic, all of it? When Leah woke up, it was this blast of destruction.
"Without even thinking about it or meaning to, she killed them all. Turned them all into Ash.
"Twelve people and a whole fucking warehouse, disintegrated.
"And someone powerful covering it all up."
Without quite thinking about it, or even interrupting the story, Sera has started to cry. A few tears cresting her lashes to fall onto her cheeks
Alexander
Thinking about it, it probably was a bit of a silly question to ask. But, then, different people have their first memories before then, others after. And given Sera’s already demonstrated ability to sift back through time and see past events... She pauses part way through a sentence. “Thought what?” He is curious to know more about this strange, mysterious woman. But if she doesn’t want to carry on that particular chain of thought then he isn’t going to force it.
But the subject does change, back to Leah and the story of how the local Awakened were introduced to the Chantry. He lies on his rock, head propped up on his hands listening to Sera. Watching her. She explains how Leah woke up so dramatically, similar in some ways to his own less-than-pleasant introduction to the Awakened world. But where his stirring Avatar tore into the ephemeral, hers ripped into the physical. Alexander looks down at the rock he’s lying on as the story unfolds, getting wrapped up again in his unresolved issues and missing the effect the story is having on Sera.
Quietly he asks, “How did you know her Avatar had already Fallen? How was Leah after that?” Partly asking to find out what happened to her. Partly to find out what could be in store for him. Of the other Awakenings he’s heard about so far, Leah’s certainly seems to be the closest experience to his.
[Do we notice? Aware-pathy] Roll: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 4) ( fail )
SerafÃne <i>Thought what?</i>
Alexander inquires, and the inquiry pulls Sera up for a moment. Not short, precisely, but out of the current of her thoughts. Out of the indefinable blend of concordance and strangeness that all such memories seem to have for her. There is flick of a glance from her, all direct, and a supple hum of consideration that opens through her body.
"That I was better off far away than close by."
--
And her eyes linger there; on Alexander. And she knows, she knows, she knows. She can taste the uncertainty, the correspondences wrapped into the substance of the question.
"<i>I</i> didn't know that." Quietly, Sera starts to explain. "I didn't <i>believe</i> that. In my dream, she asked <i>me</i> for help, and in my vision, I could see that she was just - scared, frightened. Even that - that destruction she unleashed did not come about until one of the Techs had shot her. Then she just exploded.
"Afterward she was wretched."
--
"Between the Techs and the Fallen, we knew we were in over our heads, so we laid low for a few days. I went to find Pan again, to tell him what happened, and he agreed to find Leah for me.
"By the time Jim, Pan and I found her, she was on the roof of one of the hospital downtown, suicidal. She couldn't live with what had happened. With what she'd done. With what she was doing. It seemed like all she could do was destroy things, see. And she was tormented by these terrible dreams.
"I still believed in her, though. Jim did, too.
"And I don't know that Pan believed in her, precisely, so much as he was willing to believe in our belief in her.
"The Fallen were there, too. Ready to convince her that they could put an end to her suffering by helping her embrace her nature. But somehow Pan and Jim and I managed to spark the smallest bit of hope in her, and she found it in herself to reach out and embrace that hope and turn away from them.
"There's more to it." Intensely now, shifting her position closer to Alexander, her voice fixed with a deeply felt passion. " - so much fucking more to it." Still tears in her eyes and emotion clotting her voice. The former she dash away, smiling around them, fully the way she does, the latter, well. It just underscores her conviction.
"So much work, too. She spent weeks out here with Jim. Shoshannah would come out too, and Pan, and me. But mostly, it was Jim, teaching her all this shit he knows. All this philosophy. They'd hike out here and he'd show her a fallen tree, and talk about how destruction is part of life and shit. How one can't be without the other, that there's nothing inherently wrong with death.
"She had nightmares constantly. <i>Constantly</i>. I'd sing to her and Pan'd pray for her and we'd help her sleep. And Jim was always here for her. You really oughta talk to him, by the way, he's fucking amazing.
"And in the end, whatever they'd wanted her for, whatever it was in her that had so entranced them, she turned away from it. Found a way to turn away from it.
"How is she now?" This brief, wry twist inflects her expression. "Probably fucked the hell up, but who isn't? But she's alive. She's not a living incarnation of death. She changed the world, and maybe she changed her fucking self, with her Will.
"That's what we have. Whatever it is that we have."
--
Here, another pause, which is wrapped in a cushioning awareness, an abiding empathy she cannot really shake.
"Why." Quiet, that. Quiet. Gentle, even. If he looks up he will find her eyes on him, shining, artless, damp. "What are you afraid of?"
-- [I rolled a roll but lost my cut and paste of it! Anyway: she got 5 successes on empathy for Alexander, so if you want to give any more insight into his mindset given that, feel free.]
Alexander
Oh, Alexander – how lucky you’ve been so far. The Awakened world seems to bring so much misery and suffering with it, and you’ve only just scratched the surface of the nicer side of things. If finding the remains of an Archmage who had become stranded for centuries in the Umbra is pleasant. The Message, though – helping him had been, unquestioningly, a good thing.
Death. Destruction. Chaos. Is that what he really has to look forward to?
How does anyone manage to stay sane dealing with this stuff?
Sera continues the story of Leah. How she had almost been born to continue down the path her Avatar had already been set on in a previous life. Scared of what she was, or what she was to become.
What are you afraid of?
Alexander doesn’t look up when Sera asks. If anything, the rock becomes even more interesting while he tries to work out what to tell her. Eventually he sighs. “The future.” He shifts position again, turning to sit cross-legged on his rock, wet feet leaving wet marks on the stone. He still doesn’t meet Sera’s gaze, though. “I don’t know if I can deal with what’s coming.”
And what is coming? The search for a lost mage, a spirit of decay, and an enormous amount of not really knowing what he’s getting himself into.
But the more he’s learning about his new life, the more he’s scared of what else is to come. And where it will all end.
“Where’s Leah now?” he asks, trying to get back onto the original subject. To distract himself, and hopefully Sera, from paths he doesn’t want to go down.
[...fade...]
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