some kind of priest or something

Serafíne

Perception plus ze awareness

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Serafíne

Not even God knows why Serafíne is in the Fake Empire - an odd little shop not far from her home in Capitol Hill - on a modest Thursday evening, as dusk is settling in the corners of the sky.  But there she is, a singular creature even in hipster central, wearing tiny denim cut-offs over fishnets and heavy black boots, with an old Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt slipping off her left shoulder, long enough and large enough that it mostly covers her shorts and makes it look like she has decided, as she sometimes does, that Fishnets are Pants. 

There's a poetry section.

That's why she's here: in the poetry section, crouched down on her haunches, long (dyed)-blonde curls spilling in spirals toward the old wooden floor as she frowns at the used volumes for sale on the lowest shelf. 

And even in a place as quiet as this one, even doing no more than browsing, than window shopping, than allow her tattooed fingers to drift through the dusty old volumes of mostly forgotten chapbooks by mostly forgotten poets, she resonates, Serafíne - like someone took a bite out of the base of your spine, all hungry, then healed the wound with warmth of their mouth.

Táltos Horváth

[La Percept + Aware?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Táltos Horváth

God actually has a pretty good idea about why Táltos is in the Fake Empire. Táltos was signing a book for the owner, and Táltos was looking over a case of jumbled forgotten treasure: charms and medallions, scraps of broken jewelry, an earthquake's lapidary trove, and his tongue was curling like a wolf's behind his teeth in consideration. Táltos still has the pen in his hand, between his forefinger and his thumb, has just followed the owner out of the back in order to crouch in front of glass opaque with dust and an apparent lack of care. Apparent, because it isn't for lack of washing that the glass is so smokey, refuses to be clear, but age, all storeyed age and cheapness, and that's when he notices Serafíne resonant behind something. He doesn't notice Serafíne, he notices that blaze of her, the burn of a Will that works, and tall loud Táltos looks away from the case. He puts the pen down, and he goes to investigate, rounding a corner, felt before he is seen just as she was felt before she was seen.

He's felt before he is seen, Táltos Horváth, whose spirit candles up beguiling, not like a taking-away or a diminishment, but a tempting-into, a broadening and a joy, who feels like the Devil if the Devil were pure, whose nothing but Lusty for life, for life, for the sheer earthy elation of being godamned alive, who wants to be here. Táltos Horváth, whose accompanied by something that is not candled, is not star-bright and enchanting, who has something like a clot of shadow, dirty, harrowing him from the inside out, working its malice on whatever it is that he is. Will-worker, shaman, magi.

He's heard before he's seen too because he's not quiet. He's wearing too many charms, too much jewelry: Quiet is far, far too beside the point with Táltos.

Here's Táltos, looking curiously around the corner to see what he might find: A tall man. He is a tall man with an aristocratic Slavic nose: hawked, sensitive-nostrilled, large. He is a tall man who seems taller than he is due to a leanness, a certain gangle to the limbs. His hair is a loosed mane, right, and he needs to shave, not just the mustache that he will never, never shave, that is well-kept, but the underside of his jaw, the sides of his cheeks, where stubble's shadowing the space around the neat landscaping.

"Hey there," he says, right away, "Found anything interesting over there?"

Táltos Horváth

ooc: Hmf. "over here?" not "over there?" 

Serafíne

Her eyes are on him soon as he rounds the edge of the aisle, soon as he comes into view.  She's been watching for him as soon as the twinned sensations of his own resonance and that which is devouring it, that which is attached to him like a shadowself, like a lamprey, like a leech, all consuming mouth snarled her senses, forced itself into the back of her throat.  And she is glancing up, still crouched, two books in hand, then she's rising and rising and rising and well, Sera is not natively tall, but she has no qualms about augmenting her height,

and the boots she wears have two inch platforms and three inch heels all wrapped in beaten silver so she's 5'10" or so.  Maybe the toussled crown of her hair adds another half-inch. 

Listen, she inhales but it is a careful inhalation, and it is not deep, and it is arrested by the jolt of her awareness. 

"Susie Timmons and Aimé Foinpré - " is her response to his question, dark eyes looking up and up, her lean frame still, something still withheld about her eyes, " - the Foinpré's in French, I think.  I don't know, I don't read it.

"I know someone who does." 

He's wearing jewelry: so is she.  Not talismans and trinkets, no: a bicycle chain wrapped five times around her neck and twisted with a string of pearls.  A leather-wrapped spiked bracelet on her right wrist, and a skeletal silver hand covering her left hand.  The carpal bones spreading in an array to all four fingers and one slender thumb.  She holds the books she has claimed in that hand and spreads them a bit for his inspection, still studying him, this ... concern leaching its way into her dark eyes. 

"Are you okay?"

Táltos Horváth

"I'd like to read French too but I don't know it either. I don't know anyone who does except high school teachers."

And he inspects the books, coming around instead of just looming over a shelf like a stoop-shouldered bird. He isn't very much like a stoop-shouldered bird at all. He's straight-backed and if his skin is a little leached of colour, if his cheekbones are as sharp as an executioner's ax, if there are hollows that intimate at the skeleton beneath the wiry, still-strong musculature of tall-tall him, then so what. There have been others in the past fading like omens in an old story. That which harrows him; she can pinpoint the source. Especially after he has inspected the books she offers, his eyes alight with tactile interest, an interest which extends to her skeletal silver hand, and she has asked him whether or not he's okay. He reaches for his own left hand, tugs at a ring there, and the malice throbs like a wound, and he smiles ruefully under his mustache and perhaps a touch carelessly, shrugging his narrow shoulders while he measures out a pause.

When he answers, it's slowly: "Well no. It's an old curse. Do you feel it?" He looks at her curiously, his eyes a-snap with vitality in spite of the shadows that round them, the red-raw of them telling tales of weariness that he only feels because he has to.

"But I'm meeting you now and that seems just fine. I'm Táltos," and he offers Sera the hand that doesn't bear the ring, his right, and from his right wrist dangles a little miniature painting like something of a saint [Byzantine] impressed in a piece of bark and some copper wiring, and it glints gold like an illuminated manuscript.

Serafíne

"'Course I feel it," she returns, as if there were ever any other answer.  Something rapt about her attention, quick and alight and living on his expressive features, the droop of the mustache, the red-weariness framing his eyes.  Her own are strangely (for her) sober: not glassy, not bloodshot.  Even the ever-present, vaguely sweet scent of her burning clove cigarettes is absent from her hair.  If he were closer he'd sense that she smells like sweat and sunlight and human skin, which is her own and fine and neither pale nor dark, but which welcomes the sun when she sees it like an old, old friend.

Of course she fells it; and the furrow of her worry for a stranger does not quite leave the niggling little point between her brows as her eyes drop to the ring and measure out that malice with a kind of wariness that does not seem to extend to his person. 

"Serafíne," the edge of her smile, not crawling tonight.  Not now, as she accepts his hand, right to right hand.  Not the left, where malice lurks.  The line straight to his heart.  "Call-me-Sera.  Táltos."

Then she grins, all sudden and sure.  " - that's a weird fucking name."  Lifts her chin at the sweep of the saint framed in bark and copper.  "Are you some kind of a priest or something?"

[I swear there is more but I don't know where the transcript went D: ]