XII [ attn: howl, mnemosyne, shayla & niko ]

[mnemosyne]

Things happen; they shuffle out of the nightclub. Sera brings the bottle of Patron along, and somehow they all end up at Jim's studio. Sera wraps an arm around Jake when the hit the bright night air outside the close loudness of the club. The embrace is comradely, like the two of them are just holding each other up after a night of drinking, because otherwise they both might fall down. Well, no - there's more support from her side than there is from his, but it has that sort of physical immediacy, that we're all in this together density, the curve of her arm and the sweep of her jacket behind her. She presses the knuckles of her hand into the consor's upper arm now and then, and relinquishes her grip on the kid only when necessary for the vagaries of transportation, or when they arrive at the rooming house and she turns Jake entirely over to Jim.

There are introductions along the way. She gives them her name as Serafíne-call-me-Sera, which Sid and Mara have learned but which they may or may not have decided to remember, and which is new to both Jim and Jake. It is a kind of a lie, but not a large one. Sera is more her name than xxxxxxx ever was. She inhabits it whole and entire, the way she never could the other.

--

Sera hangs out while Jim gets Jake settled - downstairs in those grotty communal areas. Nothing on the walls but tobacco stained paint and the grime of past inhabitants. Nothing on the fridge but passive-aggressive notes from Jim's once-and-future-housemates about the science experiment so-and-so is growing in that container of Chinese takeout, or KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY KEFIR. She waits to see what the others do, expecting that Mara will stay through all this and that Sid will skedaddle at the first opportunity.

So she is most aware of Sid in the periphery of her attention. She does not encourage the timid woman to remain, neither trying to reassure or cajole her, nor nudging her, subtly or otherwise, out the door. Sid's decision to stay or to go will be her own.

The rest of Sera's vision keeps until after Jim has slipped back downstairs, leaving Jake to curl up on that leather couch. They're still there, Sera and Mara and perhaps (?) even Sid, the back door propped open to the night outside, the dingy, weedy backyard with all those cigarette butts.

Sera pulls out a hard-sided pack of blue-black cloves that are likely more illegal in Colorado at the moment than are the two hand-rolled joints tucked neatly in with the aromatic cigarettes. Lights one up and holds this particular smoke more in her mouth than her lungs - exhaling in a drifting cloud luminous in the spare light that cuts through the cheap, broken venetian blinds into the communal downstairs living space from the street.

And shares the rest of her vision. It has the same shape, this story: the ash, the destruction, the unending gray stillness, not even a breath of wind. The signpost and the crying girl in the center of a circle with twelve points. Except it was not precisely a twelve pointed circle, but a circle defined by twelve piles of ash, discrete and mounded and undisturbed, equidistant from the crying teenager in their radial center.

Then a cold white mist, unnatural even in the unnaturally broken dream-space; eerie and chilling. The sort that makes one's spine crawl and one's intestines seize and one's teeth ache. The sort that needles through the lungs. She is descriptive, Sera. Words come to her when she wills, and her voice is smokey, rough with the scorched sweetness of her cigarette.

She describes the man again, in more detail. In as much physical detail as she can muster, in case any of these things matter. The shape of his eyes, the charlatan curl of his smile. The chill that trailed behind him like the filthy ice-tail of a comet. The girl stopped crying when she accepted the hand he offered and her eyes - which had been bright with tears, reflective, alive with grief and fear - were ghost-white when she looked back before she disappeared.

This, too, Sera omitted from that first telling - what the man said to the girl:

Come with me. An interstitial breath, a shiver of her resonance, crawling livid beneath her skin. - and we will unmake the world.

--

After the stories are exchanged, Sera takes another shot of the Patron she purchased at the bar. Two, straight from the damn bottle. Jim receives her number for his, as do the others. Also her address which is in a neighborhood that has bent a little more toward gentrification than this one. The address is accompanied by the same standing invitation she broadcast the other night, by the way. She throws parties. They should totally come.

She takes a cab wherever she's going after. She does not appear to have a car. None of these folks have seen her near one, or driving. That is for the best.

At some point, likely the next day, after the crack of noon or whenver she wakes up and actually reads the text about the warehouse, a REPLY ALL to whoever has received the mass text.

"We have a van." Because of course "we" do. Whoever "we" are.

So: transportation, achieved.