sober

[mnemosyne]

Only in the way you want it
Only on the day you want it
Only with the understanding: every single day you want it

- Worship You, Vampire Weekend

--

City Park, once sunlit Friday morning. Early enough that the morning joggers are still on the trails and the rush of traffic is a quiet, washing hum of white noise. Shops are shuttered and kiosks just opening and the light in the east still has the pale, butter yellow tinge of dawn. Finds Sera, entirely sober, sitting on a park bench, hair still wet from her shower that morning.

Nothing to drink since Sunday-last, Sera, who spent the morning and afternoon at the chantry as her hangover receded into a fog and then a haze and then a drifting mist, and then the hard edge of sobriety she wanted to replace with -

- well, something.

So, one girl of modest height in her flat-soled Doc Marten's, all dressed down in cut-offs and a Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt older than she is, seated, legs crossed, on a park bench. She has a little bag slung across her body and inside: a vial of blue powder, cigarettes, her covered pipe, the bowl all packed. And so on. There's a bagel with cream cheese in a brown paper bag and a very large OJ she has yet to touch, deliberately. The early morning light finds the threads of gold in her hair as she waits.

Yearning.

It's just her body, right now. Just her mind. The cool morning air and the damp grass, the rough wood of the park bench behind her shoulder blades, her elbows back. It has been five days since her last drink, and five days since her last cigarette, and five days since she last got stoned, and drive days since she kissed someone, and longer, likely, since she last had sex. Seventy-two hours since she had anything but liquids and the last twenty-four hours: only water. This morning, not even that.

Just the cold blast of a shower in the morning and the chillbumps radiant up her arm and the immediacy of the day, sharp and threaded and punctuate with hunger and need and want that she cannot quite contain or encapsulate.

This is where it starts.

[Joey]

The sick. The urge. That's where I'll find him, in that ugly place he's afraid of; that ugly place he's running from.

In the last hours of night Jim sinks like a stone into the hot springs, feeling its mineral laden water pulse with life across his skin and its energy fill his pores to bursting. Finally, he rises from the water as the sun begins to light the sky all its many colors. Colors the sky gives it, colors it gives the sky, and colors they share. When it threatens to break across the horizon he bends at the waist to grab then heft the fat enamel basin full of ice water to his mouth, taking a final drink, and then lifting it high above his head, turning it to slowly pour across his body with the beginning of a new day.

Jim allows the air to dry him. He pulls on a simple gray v-neck and a pair of muted brown shorts. He remains barefoot as he walks around the chantry and down toward the the road, though he does lean down again to hook two fingers onto a pair of sandals outside the front door should they become necessary during his journey to City Park.

One bus driver does ask that he put them on and he obliges the woman's request. She looks like she's expecting a fight, but he simply smiles and nods. It's about an hour and a half's journey, taking the 116X to the 15 on East Colfax, then a twenty minute walk to the park.

Jim and Serafine are easily drawn to one another even as they deny some basic aspects of themselves. Perhaps that hunger rouses those aspects. Perhaps that denial distills it to an essence. He is addled without the muddling of chemicals. He is stoic without being stoned or dulled to blunt rock and chiseled sharper with the urges to fight against. And he is psychedelic and psychedelia in the way he views the world. Imagining how he could see it. All the possibilities without one substances' sway superimposing itself over the others.

In this moment existence is the very temptation.

We don't need to climb every mountain just because it's there. It'll leave our hands raw, and our friends on the ground, if we try.

The clarity is almost overwhelming. He is an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the world along with its before and after. He'd brought no towel. He takes off his shirt as he nears her, looking around to see if any others would come. Over his daily pilgrimages to City Park his face had become familiar, and he was use to others joining him in his asanas. One had even been invited.

In this moment her presence is the very temptation.

The sequence, a dance of smooth muscles and long holds and steady breaths, is no quicker than a flower blossoming. The vessel opens to take in the morning air. He fills his diaphragm when his core is open, emptying his lungs when it closes, each shift a growing stretch. He does not give the names, from the lotus to bound angle, as bound as his yearnings and inclinations, upon the boat to walking out on the plank. Pushed off to drift away in the water as the wind carries his exhalation of breath. The cobra consumes the frog. The bow is loosed and the pigeon falls to it. The child grows into a hero, but rides no galloping horse, instead a slow and steady camel as reliable as the one two three of Jim's breath. The camel walks through this desert of denial and does not thirst. And onward until they are finished, until they are flower to child to corpse, and he is laying on his back with only the dew of the grass to mingle with the still-steady-growing sheen of purifying sweat.

In this moment respite is the very temptation.

One trial finished and on to the next. The day expands out before them, filled with possibilities that are temptations to be faced. They walk. Though his stomach rumbles hungrily as it has for days, they are forced past brunchers brunching and washing it all down with the endless (bottomless) Mimosas and Bellinis and Bloody Marys that turn into something stronger when the man behind the bar gets that look. On to those places packed thick with with people. The kind of places they usually leave without remembering the name, but maybe not this time, not if they can keep that first drink that never happens from turning into three or thirteen and a bump in the bathroom or something slipped under the tongue or a tongue slipped onto someone else's. This whole time that vial sits in his pocket like an anchor he is unsure whether he should pull aboard or cut loose to the sea.

In this moment revelry is the very temptation.

And they do. Somehow. Jim is not unmoving, not unblinking, but he manages to find enjoyment in the press of others. In the music without dancing. In the company without passion flaring like a bonfire. Manages to push it all down, though the temptation is there. He does not wave down the bartender. He refuses drinks even as they are pushed his way. Instead he finds the emotion in the eyes of these revelers as the night wears on. As they find themselves suddenly in one place and then the next.

In this moment life is the very temptation.

These shining and clear-eyed diamonds stumble on into the night. Face their crucible and their gauntlet. In their existential fast they find sustenance for its own sake. For their own sake. These moments and these many yearnings coalesce into one. There is a very real fear that it could be like this forever. But he overcomes that fear. Would that really be such a bad thing?

In this moment temptation is the very temptation.

And he smiles. And he laughs. And he sees.

[ Rolls below. Serafine did have all the spheres of the effect just not all the dots. I'm not sure if the one success she can grant by acting in concert with Jim is rules as one for each round of an extended effect or one for the entire effect. That means this could be either ten successes or thirteen successes. Depending on how many it ends up being some will be spent toward making the scrying subtle. They are seeking out Byron and minds effected by the charm. ]

Round 1

Serafine
Sera's part in this is: Correspondence 1 / Mind 2 / Time 2 / Prime 1
[So: Difficulty 5, -1 for taking time. Not sure if the -2 for her merit applies]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 8) ( success x 1 )

Jim
[ Correspondence 2 / Mind 2 / Time 2 / Prime 1Coincidental + 2. Difficulty 5 - 1 for taking his time and - 1 for sympathetic magic in that they have the vial. Final difficulty is 3. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 4, 6) ( success x 3 )

Jim
[ Also beginning an extended willpower roll to avoid vices and tempation. ]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

Serafine
[First WP roll to avoid vices and temptation]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8) ( success x 1 )

Round 2

Jim
[ Extended effect roll at + 1 and - 1 for spending a Quintessence. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 1, 5) ( success x 1 )

Serafine
[Correspondence 1 / Mind 2 / Time 2 / Prime 1. Extending. Difficulty 5 -1 for taking time; -1 for sympathetic magic, +1 for extending]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (3, 7) ( success x 1 )

Jim
[ And another extended WP. ]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Serafine
[Another extended WP]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Round 3

Jim
[ Extended effect roll. Spending another Quintessence to maintain the difficulty. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Serafine
[Correspondence 1 / Mind 2 / Time 2 / Prime 1. Extending. Difficulty 5 -1 for taking time; -1 for sympathetic magic, +1 for extending]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 9) ( success x 1 )

Jim
[ And WP again. ]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Serafine
[Third extended WP roll]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

Round 4

Serafine
[Correspondence 1 / Mind 2 / Time 2 / Prime 1. Extending. Difficulty 5 -1 for taking time; -1 for sympathetic magic, +1 for extending]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 5) ( success x 1 )

Jim
[ Extended. And another Quintessence. ]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (4, 6, 10) ( success x 3 )

Serafine
[One more WP roll just for the heck of it.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 3 )

Jim
[ Why not? WP. ]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )

jamie
SO IT HAS BEEN WITNESSED SO SHALL IT BE DONE

[mnemosyne]

They start with yoga. With fucking yoga at dawn in the park. Jim does this regularly, fills his body with his breath, opens his core, stretches from asana to asana and gives no directions and offers no names and strangers who-are-not-strangers come and join him, because this happens too: and they share the movements and the moment and the rising sun and the breath of the wind and the dew on the grass and that feeling of emptied oneness, stretched out, open to the world at the end, just breathing.

You guys, Sera looks ridiculous doing yoga. She is wearing denim cut-offs and has that Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt and a fresh pair of fishnets and heavy black boot in the middle of July and athletic and lean though she may be (more than lean now: closer to starveling than lean) she has never, not once in her life, done yoga.

But what the hell.

She tries it, see? Laughs when she fucks it up, though her laughter is quiet and mostly inside herself because there's this knot of tension and this first trial is the hardest for her today, as it moves on and on and she grows more and more sharply conscious of her body, and how it moves, and the morning light, and she wants -

oh, she wants.

--

The night moves on; it is so very different for both of them. Jim finds enjoyment in the press of the crowd, in the pleasure of strangers, in the gleaming eyes of the people all around them, opening up from libation, movement, liberating themselves from the mundane for an evening, losing themselves in pleasures the Ecstatics - who so often lose themselves, whose Work always seems to involve that sort of loss, those things that make them slip-their-skin: and he fears that it could be like this forever, as he would, mindful of every moment, and he wonders Would that really be such a bad thing?

(Yesyesyesyes. - is Sera's only answer to the question she doesn't bloody well hear. Yes. And yes and yes.

Also this: yes. For fuck's sake, yes.)

They are so alike.
They are so very different.

The night is so sharp for her, so stark - see. She finds no genuine solace in the pleasures of strangers, in the press of the crowd, in the light gleaming in their eyes, in the furious energy of a dance floor or pit, in the glassy-eyed revelry of these lawyers and baristas and truck drivers and nursing students, in the clink of glasses, in the invitations extended, extended, and turned aside and deferred. Each serves to make her own desire and her own denial all the more keen, all the sharper and it is a physical thing that she is cultivating and it has a sharp and silver tip and a long half and she's pushing it through her skin like a needle and her heart like a spear and it is bright and lovely and painful and it opens her up from throat to belly as the night moves on,

but still, she finds him,
and they Work.