(Scene will take place next week(ish) please to be understanding, it is open and if you need a reason to join either look at the Ginger updates or let me know and I will give you one! There is some storyline info to be imparted here and perhaps more to be done. I will try to post more tomorrow with an outline of what Sera will share but wanted this here in case you guys wanted to post in before she starts.)
Some morning some strange stupid ordinary morning; sunlight or maybe shadow-fall, dark clouds, the strange anemic light of a clouded wintry morning and a jeep (circa 1990s) with Colorado tags and nothing else to distinguish it pulls up outside a certain luxurious home set away from the others on its own acreage. Normally they'd come bearing gifts today there are no gifts. Gatorade and an acid hangover and a Sera and a Dan. He was able to sleep, a bit. She wasn't. Still has that jittery rawness that comes in after a certain kind of rush, sick-ache in the back of her throat, her head, her body. Sick-ache elsewhere, too, someone underneath her skin, enough that he has to coax her a bit down out of the Jeep's passenger door. Pulls her into a hug and kisses her on the crown of her head and she curses beneath her breath, resists because something in her was meant to resist.
They head inside. Sera and Dan find Annie and have a talk with her. Then maybe all of Trinity. Dan puts tea and coffee on and starts cooking something potato-y. Sera curls up in the kitchen while he cooks. She expects, hopes, that other mages will start arriving soon.
[OOC Note: If you are known to Grace yet (Except Alex, because she thinks he's mad at her and will instead tell Kalen to do it for her), you will get a text message at the very least with some nonchalant message like "What's up?" or the like, since the original Ginger message said that people should "Check on their friends and family". She knows Pen and Nick don't have Ginger yet, so would not follow that up with a line about having "Spoken to Ginger lately?" but the point of all this is to make sure that everyone she knows knows about the meeting. Sorry ALL YOU FREAKING NEW MAGES WHO ARRIVED WHILE SHE WAS IN AUSTRALIA. You get nothing. ;_;]
[[
Addendum OOC Note: Rolls for that Corr ward
Grace @ 12:06AM
[Making a Corr ward about herself! Corr 2, Diff 5 - 1 for taking time.]
Roll: 3 d10 TN4 (5, 5, 9) ( success x 3 )
Grace @ 12:07AM
[Extending, with WP!]
Roll: 3 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 7) ( success x 1 )
Grace @ 12:08AM
[With Actual WP!]
Roll: 3 d10 TN5 (3, 5, 6) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Denver @ 12:20AM
~♥~ Welcome to Dedicated Dicing Den, I love Vesta. ~♥~
Vesta @ 12:20AM
[Witnessed!]
]]
Of course, Grace attends, but not until after she has texted everybody to check on them and generated a somewhat solid ward about her to keep the sneaky spies out. She knows all about that sort of thing, being a sneaky spy herself and all. The wording of that IMPORTANT message has her unnerved. Not too many things are of the type that can't be spoken of on Ginger. One of those things is the War.
She really vanished to Australia for almost a month to relax and try to forget anything that had to do with the return of the Technocracy (and Vampires and a band of Stupid Wizards) as an actual, pressing threat to everyone's continued existence. It wasn't fear that drove this, or avoidance (as if Australia were some mythical land without Technocrats, right?). It was preparation. In order to stand up and keep fighting, you have to occasionally indulge in self-care. For Grace, this meant doing a lot of penguin-watching. In other words, she had expected such a call to go out, in just such careful language for quite some time. Preparing for it only makes things slightly easier.
The first thing she does upon arrival is try to find somebody who will tell her, right now, what is actually up. What has changed the precarious balancing act Denver's been going at for months now? So of course she wanders into the kitchen. There was mention of breakfast, after all. Someone is cooking. Aha, that someone is Dan...
"Dan. I love a good breakfast potato and all, and I love you for making them," she says, and then turns her attention more toward Sera. "But what's going on?"
[OOC: WE'RE ALL SCREWED
]
"Alexander was kidnapped by a technocratic agent." It is Dan who answers Grace, his voice low and steady over the sizzle of peppers, potatoes, onions. Sera's tired, quiet. Still the suggestion of hallucinations at the edges of her vision from the drugs she took to access Lakashim. Feels so strange to be back, anchored in her body, in a solid room. "right from his precinct, a few weeks ago. He didn't answer some texts or return a call, so Sera scryed for him. Thought he might've gotten lost or maybe hurt, hiking or whatever. When she couldn't locate him in the here-and-now, she searched for the last time she could find him in the timeline."
The consor looks up from the mildly meditative work of cooking.
"Let's see who else shows up. Probably best if she doesn't have to repeat the story too many times today, you know?"
Grace's eyes go wide and stay that way, before she raises a hand to her mouth, and those eyes start darting in different directions while she thinks of what to do. She knows people to talk to. She can hack the enemy. She can do things, and she wants to do them all right now immediately, except that nobody else knows.
"Oh."
Words just aren't the best, most easy thing right now. Her insides are churning too much. Wide, searching eyes find Sera, and she approaches slowly, reaches out with her arms. Sera may be still hallucinating at the edges. Maybe this might seem like one -- Grace willingly hugging another person? But yeah. Yeah.
Nicholas is in attendance, perhaps with Pen in tow.
He hadn't had occasion to go out to the chantry yet - though perhaps this is not exactly true. He has meant to go, in the way people mean to check out the cool art museum right across the street for months and months after they move in; and yet things have a way of coming up in the life of a busy mage. He is with Pen again! They have a new place in a new city! He has a new job! He is meeting new people! There are rumblings about Technocratic presence from everyone he has spoken to! So: chantry is on the backburner.
The smell of cooking breakfast and brewing coffee greets him, and his stomach rumbles. The sight of Grace and Sera, both among the few new people he knows, brings a slight smile to his face as soon as he has followed the sound of voices into the kitchen: there are hugs happening. Nick does not yet understand that the context of the hugs is terrible and potentially tragic. Dan he does not know: he catches the man's eye in one of the moments that he looks up from the stove, and nods to him.
It does not take him long to figure out that Sera is minimally responsive right now. His expression becomes concerned, questioning, as he looks between the three people present. He says nothing, preferring to take context from what they are doing; there is, after all, the tacit understanding with meetings like these that things will be explained.
The front door opens and closes with a hushed urgency. As if even in doing this much, it was trying to play tribute to the reason for their gathering together like this. The sound of buckles and leather and boots and that sudden flutter in their bellies. The swoop and flush of inspiration anew; the bloom of hope - that's what the Verbena felt like, you know. That all was not lost because here, nature was still thriving. Here in narrow shoulders and a slim figure with long, wild hair as dark as her eyes.
She cuts an impressive sight, the Verbena known (and to a few, unknown) as Kiara Woolfe.
She's dressed in black boots that don't quite reach her knees and jeans and a flowing top; the material looping and gathering at one hip so it falls over the other; hangs against a shoulder. There's a rattle of jewellery that accompanies her - lips made up with a bright red shade part a little as she reaches the gathering; hand to the doorframe.
Overheard, perhaps. Some of that last.
"Sorry I'm late." She has eyes for Serafine, the pagan. They flicker over the others, though. Pause on Grace, Dan. Nicholas (and Pen) warranting a hitch of her eyebrows. Uncertainty. Surprise. She's somehow always surprised by newcomers, as if Denver should somehow have been impossible to discover.
Well, Grace is reaching out to hug her and Sera, who is now seated on a counter or a table or a stepladder, which is to say: seated, but seated on something that is definitely not a chair, opens her arms. What else would she ever do when approached with a hug? She smells likes cloves and ash and snow and orange juice (orange juice!) and the morning-after fumes of a long, long night. Dan might've napped while she was scrying, but Sera has not been to sleep.
Hell, that's usually the case if she's up at this hour: it simply means that she has not yet been to sleep.
Somewhere in there she kinda - rouses, right? Contact is so very necessary for the animal-in-her, and she presses her nose into Grace's hair. Something strangely bracing about the solidity of that contact, of her spare frame and the strange, undeniable strength if not of her frame, at least of her resonance. The promise of: magick beneath her skin.
--
Dan, cooking. He's a tall, skinny guy with blond hair and a blond beard and tattoos covering his arms. He's wearing skinny jeans and a plaid button-down with the sleeves rolled up his forearms. If he started yesterday evening with a bow-tie, he has since untied it. Gives Nick an appraising glance: up and down, you see. Just so, while still somehow managing to attend to the peppers, onions, and potatoes in the sautee pan in front of him.
"You must be Nick." With a glance, you know? Sera tells him everything. A quick smile, crisp and warm framed by the beard, and then: an apologetic shrug with a glance at the pan in explanation. "I'd offer you my hand, but - "
They're kinda full.
Then Kiara joins them, and Dan is pouring breakfast onto both a plate and a platter, and says, "Kiara. Have you met Nicholas or his wife, Pen?" Deftly making introductions all the while. "There's a loaf of ciabatta warming in the oven. One of your want to grab it? We can sit in the dining room and we'll fill you in."
As Sera disentangles herself from the unexpected Grace-hug, Dan steers her toward the Gatorade in the fridge. Electrolytes or something. Sera makes a face and grabs both Gatorade and whiskey, which Dan helpfully points out sounds like the world's most disgusting combination. Well then: Sera will put it in her <i>tea</i> and just skip the Gatorade, anyway. Who says it works? She thinks it's a myth. She prefers: magick, anyway, when the time comes to heal her hangovers.
--
(OOC: you guys can post back or not. I will get Sera's story about in my next post!)
Kalen has been, also, in Australia.
He was, briefly, back in Denver to meet with other Hermetics. Stopped off in Santiago on his way back to Grace and penguins. There are pictures from those first few days, before he told her what he knew about the coming war. Not that she would not have known. There are many people in the world that Kalen will hide from and lie to when it suits him, but Grace is not among them.
Sun or no sun, Kalen is still pale. There is a little dusting of very faint freckles over his cheekbones. His eyes are, if anything, more haunted than when he left. Kalen Michael Holliday is as terrible at vacations as he is at being Flambeau; though, one of those is a more recent development than the other.
He is quiet as he surveys them. There are no warm, excited greetings. A faint dip of the head to each of them, and then he is getting coffee. He holds Grace's eyes perhaps a few seconds longer than anyone else's and he brushes against Kiara as he slips past her, and in that this is unlike the grim and withdrawn creature he was when he first arrived in Denver; still, this is Kalen a little guarded, and a little quiet, and entirely reminiscent of what he had been haunted.
[Sorry I'm late.]
Once Nick is there only a little longer, people he does not recognize (as though he'd recognize so many) start to filter in. He is standing near Grace and Serafine, his arms folded across his chest, his limbs loose in a way that belies his actual feelings about this meeting. See, he's picked up on the fact that Sera has been up too long, that there is some whisper of a Working that she wears in her hair, wound around and beneath her skin. These things in conjunction with a meeting everyone is invited to: they usually mean something.
Dan, the person who is in front of the stove, catches his attention with: You must be Nick. The Chakravanti appraises him then, perhaps searches his memory and the relatively few conversations he's had since arriving in Denver, before returning with, "You must be Dan."
He goes to grab the loaf of bread that is warming in the oven, after a momentary pause to cast around for a mitt. As much of an impressive (foolish) entrance it might make to grab it barehanded with nothing but magic as a barrier, Nick is not that sort of mage, in any sense. Mention of Kiara's name draws his eyes to the woman that entered shortly after he did, and there's a glimmer of recognition there.
The bread he sets on the counter, close enough to Dan for convenience but not so close that he'd risk inadvertantly burning himself on the pan. "Hello, Kiara. And - ?" This, to Kalen.