Legacy [attn: Jamie + Court]

[Howl]

[Continued from Friday's scene.]

Annie stood at the open kitchen door and watched the Singer and the Dreamspeaker take in their new surroundings. For each, the experience was one of reverence and awe. One could not help that response, in the presence of the raw power of creation. It was a heady thing, to be near a node. Even Annie managed a soft smile, though she remained where she was.

"You can use it, if you like. If you treat it with respect, Callisto won't hurt you." If Pan happened to look at her in that moment, Annie would nod in Shoshannah's direction, indicating that she spoke of the same spirit guardian that presently seemed to have the girl so fascinated. "When I was a kid, I used to soak in there until the heat made me dizzy."

Across the grass, Shoshannah approached the treeline, speaking to the creature her second sight had revealed to her. Pan and Annie would see nothing, of course. Not unless the guardian chose to reveal herself to them. But Shoshannah would witness the great bear undertake a slow, luxurious stretch, its white fur gleaming in the penumbra's silvery light. It yawned lazily, revealing rows of dangerous-looking teeth. If it understood her, it didn't speak back, but once it had had its fill of stretching, it got to its feet and lumbered toward her. The spirit was larger than any true bear (the top of its head easily touched seven feet,) and its eyes glowed like twin stars. Stretching out its neck, the bear touched its nose to Shoshannah's head and blew a gust of breath into her hair.

She wouldn't feel it as one normally would. This was like being touched by a ghost. The barest brush of an unearthly presence (she could feel the bear's power even across the gauntlet) and then a delicate puff of cold air.

Then the bear ambled back toward the trees and disappeared into the woods.

[CourtCat]

In truth, there's not much that Shoshannah feels the way one normally would - with no effort of her own, she straddled [shadow] worlds from the moment she was born, and Awakening made that both easier and more difficult at the same time. It hadn't stopped the ghosts from coming to her; in fact, it was quite the opposite if anything. It had, however, made it more difficult for her to understand what they were saying, to know what they wanted from her.

In time, she'd been told, she'd relearn that particular ability - and improve upon it, to take it past her wild imaginings.

Now, though, she stands in front of a giant white bear, unflinching in its beauty, size, strength, and smiles when it breathes into her hair. If Padre could see it, he'd likely know it was the truest expression of what she thinks or feels that she's exhibited since she landed in his lap - but the moment is a private one, between her and the node's guardian spirit. She doesn't turn until it's gone past her range of vision, and when she does, there's a quiet sort of comfort (and reverence too) that seems almost foreign on her.

".....I like this place," is all she says.

[jamie]

He could hear the energy in the place as it sang from the spring. He could stand so far from it as he was and feel the warmth of it though he did not do as Annie once did and soak in it. If he walked right up to it and sat a while beside it he could breathe in the mercy and the truth of it but even if he walked right up to Shoshannah he would not see what she saw.

Though he could not see it that does not negate it. He could see her. The priest stood back with Annie and watched her. Repeated the spirit's name so he would not lose it.

And he could not see Shoshannah's face any more than he could see the bear-spirit with whom she communed but the ablated hardness when she turned from the departed scene behind her took a measure of tension out of his frame. In all the weeks she has stayed on the first floor of the rectory and performed odd maintenance tasks around a church where everyone is afraid of her the priest has seen in her little of either warmth or wonderment.

With the tension gone came contrition, her discomfort not so obvious until it had gone.

"Good," he said. "Maybe we should ask Annie if it needs a keeper."

Part joke, part sincere consideration.

[CourtCat]

An eyebrow shooting up over those painfully piercing (flaying) blue eyes is the only visible reaction to this; when she speaks, Shoshannah's voice is the same cultivated indifference it shows when it's not overtly ill-tempered, though the latter is more common than this. It's not the first time in the girl's relatively short life that something similar has happened, after all. "Maybe we should," is a simple response, except when it's not.

Except when tension and sullenness are spilling back into her posture so quickly that the existence of that warmth and wonderment might be questioned, forgotten.

It seems like forever that she looks at Padre like so, but it's a few scant seconds before she's turning to Annie. "Does it? I mean, who else is here?" There are a lot more questions than two in this - for Shoshannah, arrangements even remotely like this have long been a complicated thing.

[Howl]

"No one." A bit of the roughness returned to Annie's voice and posture when she said this. "They're all dead. It's just me - and the two of you, now. And I don't plan on staying here any longer than I have to."

She lifted off the door frame and crossed her arms loosely over her chest. The breeze rustled through her ginger-blond hair, leaving it to hang in limp strands around her face. "If the girl wants a job, there's plenty to do. It's a big property." Annie left the door open as she moved back inside, calling to them over her shoulder, "I suppose I should tell you I'm with the Verbena. Can probably guess where your affiliations lie, but why don't you go ahead and tell me anyway? And come on back if you're not gonna use the spring."

Assuming they followed her, she'd lead them into the kitchen and point to a couple of doors along the wall. "That leads into the garage. There's tools and such in there, and a riding mower for the grass. The other door goes to the office." From there they moved into the dining room, where two long, sturdy wooden tables sat end to end. There were chairs enough for 12 people, though surely there were typically fewer than that living here.

Annie showed them the living room, the upstairs and downstairs bedrooms (sparsely furnished and cleaned in preparation for guests) and bathrooms, the workout room, the rec room (which was set up with a tv and a couple of gaming consoles) and finally the basement. There was a special lock on the basement door that required a code, a fingerprint id and a retinal scan. Annie pointed to the door and said, "That's the library. I'll take you down there tomorrow, if you're still here."

Then she paced over to the white sectional in the living room and sat down, making herself comfortable. "Alright, conversation time. I got questions for you, you got questions for me."

[CourtCat]

"Nothing comes for free, of course I'd work." It's scoffed with the balance of arrogance and insecurity that is youth, and given some added oomph by the girl's general aura; at her best, Shoshanna is eerie and uncomfortable to be around. Now, figuratively chilled as she is, she's worse. And that comes even before she offers, "Dreamspeaker. Most people get it by the second guess." Obviously by 'most people' she means 'most Awakened'.

In the process of the tour, she's soaking everything up; she's bright and inquisitive, a proverbial sponge, and sees things that her elders don't by virtue of both rote and different perceptions. For questions, though, she lets Pan take the lead.

[jamie]

She could guess. She didn't, and he didn't force her to. After Shoshannah gave up her own he said, "I know this is going to come as a shock, but I'm in the Chorus."

Through the tour the priest kept his thumbs hooked into his belt loops, kept silent. He had taken no vows to do so but until they came to settle in the living space Pan said nothing. His eyes traveled where Annie bid them and wandered sometimes to read the depth and character of a room but save for the questions he had asked and she parried in the truck none come until the Verbena has sat herself on the sofa.

Now he stands in the doorway between two rooms and leans a shoulder and hip against the frame. His body language does not pit him as fearing closer proximity but she has the aura of a feral horse. Instinct tells a man to stay back from creatures liable to go wild on him.

"Why don't you go first?" he asks.

[Howl]

[Note: I ended up making some adjustments to the layout of the house while I was doing the floor plan, so I made some quick edits to my last post. Basically, if anyone notices any contradictory statements, just go with the floor plan (which is now posted on the settings page.) The floor plan is accurate. My brain - not so much.]

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Annie did have the aura of a wild horse. She didn't feel like someone who would have grown up in a house like this. The landscape was right, but the chantry and the land it sat on (she hadn't made clear the exact size of the property, but given the lack of civilization within close eye-line it had to be a decent size plot) were obviously worth more than the average family could afford. Whoever had built the place came from money. Hell, the truck had passed a gated community on the way out here.

But Annie didn't seem like she came from money. She seemed like a woman who belonged on plot of rough, scrubby farmland in the middle of nowhere, standing in front of an aged porch with a shotgun in her hand and a feral look in her eye, growling at a trespasser to get the hell off her property.

Then again, she certainly wouldn't be the first rich kid to reject her old life and go claim a new one. And maybe the story was actually a lot more complicated than all that. But they hadn't asked for her story - not yet. They waited for her to ask the questions, so she did.

"Alright then. I take it the two of you haven't been in Denver long, or you'd know a bit more about what's been going on. You ever met a man named Jai Khan? Euthanatos? Or maybe my brother, Ja-" she cut herself off, snapped her jaw together with mild irritation and corrected herself, "-Apollo."

[jamie]

As she speaks Pan comes away from the doorframe he had been holding up and sits down on the sofa near but not next to her. He keeps his back straight and his feet flat on the floor, knits his fingers together to rest them in his lap. Shakes his head when she asks if he's ever met a man named Jai Khan.

The Chorus and the Euthanatoi don't share such discordant beliefs but men like Father Echeverría are not so inclined to admit things like that.

"No," he says, "I'm sorry. I moved here a few years ago when my congregation split up but I never met anyone named Apollo." He pauses. "How did he meet Jai Khan?"

[CourtCat]

It's amusing, perhaps, that the eighteen year old girl who's spent the last almost-two-years on a camping bike tour of the southwest US and Mexico fits into this house better than the girl who grew up here; Shoshannah may (does) bleed anger and defensiveness, but it's clear she's at home with nice, pretty things. (Annie's not the first rich kid to reject her old life and take a new one, indeed.) She doesn't sit when Pan and Annie do, but instead wanders the room touching everything - not picking up or moving most things, mind, just touching. Absorbing it all, as she does the conversation that flows around her. As she's met few people in this new town she finds herself living in, she has little to offer . . . but that doesn't mean she won't say anything if she has something useful.