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XII [ attn: howl, mnemosyne, shayla & niko ]
#1
It isn't too hard for Jim to keep an eye on Jake, the Ecstatic consor of a lost Denver cabal member and Jim's adopted ward-for-the-night. That's because the crease-wrinkled faux leather couch he had promised Jake, the one in his Spartan studio apartment, is less than a yard from his disheveled bed.

To even call the room a studio is a bit of a misnomer (read: broker marketing jargon). A room with a couple of locks on a red-painted wooden door, situated on the top level of the three-story multifamily home. A home with a few walls knocked down so that its myriad inhabitants can share a kitchen, a handful of bathrooms, a front door, and the smallest back yard you've ever seen (only really useful for two things, judging by the grill and carpet of cigarette butts).

A flock of newly-graduated students' lease ran out with the onset of summer, and he'd grabbed up one of the rooms for himself. There are moving boxes indicating disparate Others are moving into the house. The distinct lack of valuables in the common area says a lot as to the mindset of those who live in such communal situations. Mara, Serafine and Sid had all been invited back to further discuss the answers-that-made-for-more-questions following his own scrying and Serafine's revelation of her visions.

If one or all accept the invitation, and either way, Jim shares a few key facts with the cluster of magi. Whether it's within the ground floor's living area whilst Jake curls up into a ball on the couch in Jim's room, or perhaps in the sparse few moments leaving Beta when the forlorn consor had been otherwise distracted.

He'd seen an empty lot covered in the piles of ash and dust that Serafine had described. Somewhere to the south of Beta. And then, more concrete answers had emerged from the swirling ether. Glimpses of Shelby's own destiny in the Eternal Moment. Yes, 12. West 12th Avenue. He is inquisitive as to the rest of Serafine's vision, what she had held back for Jake's sake. And when they part ways, he shares a telephone number and his own address, hopeful he will get the same from those members of the little clutch of Awakened that have been called together to investigate this happening.

And when they are gone, he can be found beneath a dangling lightbulb watching Jake from a chair at the retro kitchen table in the far corner of his room. The only other piece of furniture in the Cultist's living space. Or, more specifically, Jim is watching the boy's back, as he's curled facing into the couch's crevices trying to get some rest. Every now and then he looks down to the fresh joint he is rolling between knob-knuckled and calloused fingers.

Jim never makes it to the disheveled bed.

The effects of the Patron are shifting, from stimulant to the leaden blanket of sedative. But instead of crawling toward his mattress, he slips down off the chair and finds himself cross-legged at the foot of the couch, leaning back into where its cushions bunch beneath Jake's frame. He can hear the boy breathing, hear him in the kind of sleep that produces no dreams but also does little to ease the anxiety of waking. There is a flick of a cheap plastic lighter and the joint comes alive. After the first few puffs Jim matches his own breathing to the consor's. Staying close to him. Trying to offer some form of comfort, if only in proximity to another. And as the night grows darker, Jim's own avatar stirs, roused by the swell of willwork to offer a bit of mystically augmented solace to the boy.

And should Jake himself stir, at some point before the spliff is consumed by fire and lungs, he will find the burning cherry of it floating in the darkness. Politely offered his way. And hear a few words from Jim's mouth, given calmly but curiously. "Jake, tell me what you know about West 12th Avenue."

And a bit later in the night – perhaps in the wee hours of the morning – a text message is sent out. "Shelby parental units own property on W 12 Ave. Warehouse. Hit me up tomorrow. Crashing." Sent before his head lulls back into the arm of the couch, still seated on the floor near where Jake is resting.
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#2
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.
But my heart is wild and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.

- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula
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#3
And, perhaps a half-hour after the announcement that she has access to a van, two more group texts:

Found my notes. Forgot this last night.

At the end the girl said, "A phoenix can only rise from ashes."
But my heart is wild and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.

- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula
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#4
It would take less time for them to walk to Jim's place than it would for someone to go with Sid all the way back to City Park to retrieve her truck. So it is that by the end of the night Jim has not one, but two unexpected guests taking up space in his little studio apartment.

Somehow they get there. And somehow Sid has been convinced to tag along. There was a moment where the woman hesitated, looked back over her shoulder to the east, back the way they'd come. She frowned as though that might magically cause her truck to apparate from there to the club and she wouldn't have to endure whatever mode of transportation got them from Point A to Point B. Unfortunately, life doesn't work that way, not even for the Awakened. In the end the choice to go along with the pack of Magi isn't much of a choice at all. She can either go with them, or she can wait for a bus to take her back to her truck.

She doesn't take the opportunity to explore Jim's building when they get there, but escapes to the backyard, such as it is, for something resembling fresh air. She isn't alone for long. Soon enough the others join her, and the fresh air is chased out by the smoke from Sera's cigarette. This doesn't appear to bother Sid, or at least, she doesn't cough or choke or pull faces, waving her hand dramatically in front of her face like some non-smokers might. Instead she stands some small distance from the others, shoulders tense, arms wrapped around her upper body in a tight self-hug.

And so she stays, becoming neither more nor less tense as the others gather, or as Sera expands on what she'd said of her dream at the club. Sid's brows tighten as she listens, her gaze downcast. At some point while Sera talked, describing the man, the mist, the circle of ash, Sid had slowly, inch by inch by means of the occasional shift of her weight from one foot to the other, made her way a little closer to the others, so that by the end it's almost like she's part of their number. Almost. Not yet.

They exchange phone numbers, even Sid. As everyone begins making their way to the door and wherever they keep themselves, Sid remains.

Who knows why she does it. Maybe it's because they got lost together (and a couple of times apart) at the museum, or maybe she thinks he'll be too preoccupied with his own affairs or his other guest to think of harming her. Or maybe, just maybe, she's gotten enough of a measure of the man to know she'll survive a night in his apartment unruffled.

Regardless of the why, or even the how, it happens that for a while Jim isn't alone in watching over the sleeping figure on his leather couch. Sid sits with him as he rolls that joint. Eventually, she relaxes enough to start nodding off herself. An offer of the bed is made, one that she refuses with a firm shake of her head, coupled with her usual worried frown. Instead she picks a spot on the floor and sits, back propped against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees. She watches the darkened shapes on the other side of the room, listening for the boy's breathing, the dim burn of the joint floating in the darkness. Little by little her body relaxes as the smoke fills her lungs. Eventually, her eyes droop closed and her body goes slack, knees falling outward, her arms falling to her sides, her chin doing its level best to touch her sternum.

Her sleep is shallow. Sometimes, as she drifts in and out of consciousness, she hears voices murmuring in the darkened room, but she has no understanding of when or what was said.

Later, when she wakes, she waits for Jim to stir, hoping to thank him for...whatever. It's from him that she finds out about the warehouse, and from him that she gets either its address or its general location on W 12th Ave. Her mind already plotting out a series of investigative trails to follow, she heads for the door. It's only when she's almost there, hand outstretched to throw the locks and set herself free, that she remembers why she'd waited for her host to wake before leaving. Her head turns first, showing him a three-quarter profile of her soft features, her eyes obscured by the stem of her glasses. Then her shoulders turn, then her torso, then her foot slides to the side, putting the angle of her body perpendicular to the red-painted door.

The corners of her mouth twitch almost upward, but then her bottom lip disappears between her teeth and the bud of a near-smile vanishes before it can begin to blossom.

"Thanks," she says, casting a glance in Jim's direction that actually sticks to him for a few seconds. Turning away, she twists the deadbolt and undoes the chain and unlocks the door. Then she's off to the library.

Which is just a different kind of Nerd Cave, really.

[whoops, I just realized that I did actually give Sid a cell phone, so I updated my post.]
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