A grain of salt

[Emily Littleton] (( I spy with my little eye... diff 4 ))
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 7 (Success x 1 at target 4)

[Emily Littleton] January is giving way, breaking down beneath their very footsteps and fingertips. It is receding into the nearness of February, making way on Winter's doorstep for self-scared groundhogs and the hope of early spring. The University campus is alive again with the timeless toils of many a student, scholar, and faculty hoping to impart in these precious short years some modicum of wonder, common sense, and elevation to the young minds they encounter. Beneath the engineering building, in a thick-walled basement room, Emily works amid twinkling LEDs and exposed PCBs.

Jarod would have had to call the lab extension, a number she left with him awhile ago. Before they had fallen into a comfortable pattern of being near each other without needing to say much, needing to do much more than breathe. She'd written it beside her cell phone number, said something nonchalant about it being her second (or third) home, and in the intervening weeks she'd pointed out that her cell had limited reception in the catacombs and depths.

There is no one else in the lab when he calls, but it still rings twice before she can pick up the phone. She answers with the department name, and her last name, in a distracted tone. Something chirps in the background at regular intervals, a decidedly inorganic sound, and Jarod has less than Emily's full attention during the call. Perhaps it is frustrating, perhaps it is expected.

She tells him that she's in the middle of something, but she'd be happy to call him when she's through. And she's distracted enough to not side-step deftly when he suggests he might just want to see her lab. There's an mmm-kay and a quick suggestion on where best to park without acquiring a ticket, a round about (but oddly direct when executed) set of directions to her building, and then down into the concrete walled hallway that leads to the lab.

In the beginning of her work here, Emily had to steel herself against the feeling of being swallowed up by the ground each time she went to the engineering lab. Falling below the plane of the Earth was a special sort of aggravation not at all unlike suffocating. Now she somewhat relished the isolation of it. The sound of footsteps in the hallway was loud enough to chase away any lingering fears (echoes) and being cut off from most of the immediacy of text messages and mobile phones helped her focus.

The door to the lab had one of those RFID card scanners on it, but it had been defeated by a cleverly placed trash can that propped the entryway open. Emily sat within, perched on a lab stool and focused intently on a contraption on the heavy-topped bench. There was an open laptop, connected to a bare board with clumsy looking components on it (not the micro-sized beautifulness of production boards). A multimeter. A schematic pinned to the wall (and perfectly level, for that) with push pins.

But Emily was not looking at her tools. She was not looking at the measurements she was supposed to be making. She was looking at the traces and components, through them, with a slightly unfocused expression. Around her thrummed the same familiar heartbeat of Home, home, home, twinned and intertwined with a growing sense of Reverence.

[Jarod Nightingale] Sooner or later, Emily and Jarod were going to have to come to terms with that they were to each other. Placing definitions on relationships was something that the Verbena found rather distasteful, and as a rule... he avoided it. Still, there was relationships of the sexual variety, and then there was the responsibility of a Disciple to take proper care of an apprentice (even if she was not, officially, his apprentice, because they'd never truly discussed it.) Emily was an intelligent girl, with a good instinct for self-preservation, but sooner or later she'd need to learn more than the few little tidbits of information he'd been tossing her way.

Sooner or later, he was going to have to actually teach her something. Jarod had no idea, of course, that another of Chicago's mages was presently trying to step in and do this for him, and maybe that was for the best. Regardless of said ignorance, he was going to try and rectify the situation. So in his usual fashion of appearing in people's lives seemingly at random, Jarod picked up the phone and dialed Emily's number. It wasn't until he tried her at the lab that he actually received a response, and though Emily seemed a bit distracted, this did not deter him from suggesting he meet her there. At the least, it would satisfy his curiosity.

It was about half an hour later that Jarod's footsteps could finally be heard outside in the hallway, and when he got to the propped open door, he pushed it open and stepped neatly past the trash can.

"So this is where Emily Littleton spends all her time these days."

[Emily Littleton] This is a neat place, a place where order reigns and chaos only dabbled. There were places to put one's tools, and open-ended cubes with ergonomic chairs for doing one's desk work. There were clear expanses of bench tops, and leveled stools to sit on, and only localized sections of disorganization when things were afoot and there was work to be done. It is a calming place, for people like them.

Emily's cube is visible from where he stands. She is working at a bench, but over to one side, at the far end fo the row of cubbie-shaped workspaces, he can see the small section of Chicago that she called home. Here, unlike the half of a rented room in which she (usually) sleeps, there are pictures from various places. Here there is a hand-drawn nameplate in bright autumn colors (with a set of what might be Chinese characters to one side). There is an electronic kettle perched atop her filing cabinet, and a tea cup quite like the ones at his apartment. Three small glass canisters with loose leaf tea.

There are little whispers and clues about her, here, where it is safe(r) to share them.

Emily must have heard him come in, but she is a little slow to turn around on her stool and face him. She blinks a few times, and the grogginess she evidences is quite similar to waking up in the early morning, blinking away the morpheus from her eyes. It is a momentary disorientation that he knows well on her features, but others might shrug off and think she had been day dreaming. Emily scootches off her lab stool, and grins when she sees him.

"Welcome!" she says (Hail, and well met! [this is how we great friends in safe places]). The British tones and more American sentiments vie for dominance in her accent. "You found it!"

Slowly, as if a barely-heard whisper is drawing to an end, the sense of Reverence begins to fade. It unravels around her and dissipates.

[Jarod Nightingale] "Yes, well, I can generally get myself around well enough, given a decent set of directions." Jarod's mouth quirked into a lazy half-smile as Emily left her seat to greet him. He seemed rather relaxed, but then he often did. Jarod tended to walk around like a housecat who was always mildly curious about everything around him, but never so much that it required him to leave his state of calm repose.

Now he was looking around Emily's workspace, noting the look and feel of the room, and of her desk. Whatever he thought of it, he didn't say. Instead he merely pursed his lips together and made a soft hmm sound.

(The Verbena, exploring an alien planet.)

"So what are you up to in here?"

[Jarod Nightingale] [Per+awareness]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 3, 3, 5, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Emily Littleton] Of course he didn't say. This was Jarod, after all. Between the two of them, they could make a career out of not saying what needed to be said at any given time. It wasn't avoidance as much as a finely honed sense of what was and wasn't necessary to divulge. Or a self-protective quietness. Perhaps.

She was more changeable than he. He was the quietly slumbering world under a bedding of snow and Emily? In recent weeks, Emily had been more like the sweep of the tides. Perhaps not quick to change, but occasionally violent in her breakings. Now, though, she seems comfortable in this alien space. He explores, and she doesn't not intervene to hide anything from him, or distract him.

He made that nondescript sound and her nose wrinkled a bit, perhaps in annoyance. Emily did not make any move to hide it from him, either, which was out of place in their interactions but perhaps forgiveable. They had been getting closer (close enough to kiss) over time.

"I'm trying to find a fault in my design," she said, with a bit of a shrug. These things happen, it seemed to say. "I'm sure of my math, but something else is going on... I suppose that's why it's called research."

Emily stretched upwards until some knot at the base of her spine gave way, and then let her arms fall down by their sides. she regarded him quizzically for a bit, then asked openly, "... So, what's important enough to bring you out among us mere mortals?"

There was a wry twist to her mouth as well, but a knowing one. Campus was far from empty, and Jarod would have had to endure at least a few overlong looks... if not more, to find her here.

[Jarod Nightingale] Jarod was used to getting looks like that. He'd long since learned how to ignore them when he wasn't in the mood to take advantage, and likely that was precisely what he'd done as he walked down the sidewalks and hallways, past curious and interested students. This was the first time that Jarod had ever been in this particular building, but he'd been down to campus once or twice before.

Emily wrinkled her nose at him in irritation, and Jarod flicked his eyes up just in time to catch it. Rather than apologize, though, he simply smirked, as if he found her disgruntled reaction to be slightly amusing. (Or maybe that was something else, and not him, entirely. It was rather a good thing that Emily could not hear the things that went on in Jarod's head, sometimes. Particularly now.)

"A shame I can't help. Engineering was never one of my subjects. Or math, for that matter." (Well, beyond the small bit that everyone had to do.) "Sometimes I think we come from two completely different worlds. But then... there are always those things that surprise you about people. The little details that make them human." He was musing aloud, now, and let the thought trail off in his own head.

"I thought about what you said to me last time. About your avatar. It wants you to learn? So I think I should teach you. Before someone else does it for me and bungles the whole thing up."

[Emily Littleton] "Ah, well, yes then," Emily inserted a quiet sort of agreement into Jarod's opinion on her strengths and weaknesses. She didn't mention that it had surprised her to learn than he translated books, when he wasn't modeling. That was neither here nor there, and would likely bring up a different upsetting topic. Instead she added, "Well, if you ever need something taken apart and put back together... that's me. Or, I suppose, help with your computer." But she'd really rather not.

Emily shrugged a bit and let him muse. Right up until he brought up her Avatar. She caught the inside edge of her lower lip with her teeth and shifted, bring her arms across her torso to hug against her. It was definitely a defensive posture.

"Now that's... eerie. Do you all have some sort of bulliten board I don't know about?" she asked, and there was a little burr to the edge of her tone. To most, it made her sound a little more British. Jarod would be able to separate it from the accent entirely. And she was addressing him as part of the collective of something greater, a collective to which she did not belong.

Emily's mouth set into a thin line. "Because I just had this conversation with Wharil this afternoon and I do not want to chat with my Atman, thank you very much. At least not today."

There was a stubbornness to the set of her jaw, the glint in her eye, the way she kept the space between them separate and clearly defined all of a sudden. Emily had drawn some sort of intangible line in the sand, either earlier with Wharil or here now with Jarod. And she was not beyond defending it, however misguided that defense may be.

[Jarod Nightingale] There were many parts to Emily's argument, just now, that Jarod might have latched upon to either respond to or take offense at. Perhaps amusingly, that thing was not her prickly dismissal of his suggestion, but rather, her use of the term Atman.

In fact, he actually broke through that barrier of calm perfection enough to show a wrinkle of displeasure on his face. Something like a mix of irritation and... worry.

"Emily... if you want to go talking to other members of the awakened world, I would highly recommend taking the things they say with a grain of salt. Especially if you want to talk to a Euthanatos. Unless, of course, you have designs to spend the rest of your life as a glorified assassin. In which case, be my guest. Personally, I'd rather study life than death. It's a lot more interesting, and it has a lot more wisdom to impart."

He took a breath, then... and somehow managed to smooth over the anger that had begun to surface in his voice.

"Anyway, no, there wasn't a bulletin. And no, I wasn't planning on suggesting you have a conversation with anything but me."

[Emily Littleton] There was a lot to process in what he said, so many layers to it. But the first thing that hits home is that Jarod is not telling her to do something, not laying the responsibility for her piece of soulstuff at her feet and charging her with anything more than a conversation. It's enough to make the rigidity in her form and features faulter, fade. Emily's jaw unclenches and the haughtiness falls from her eyes.

"Thank God," she said softly. Emily took a few steps back and perched herself back on the lab stool once more. She reached up to press the fingertips of one hand in to her temple, closed her eyes, and exhaled heavily.

The space between them no longer thrummed with that enforced boundary. Her resolve and separateness had softened. In the seconds that passed, Emily tried to wind her mind around the rest of what he'd said. The assassin bit, that bothered her.

"I ... don't want to kill anyone," she said, looking up to him at long last with naked concern. "I..." her expression darkened, pained a bit, and she looked down at her hands again. Closed her eyes against a memory she had had to drink down just earlier in the month. "I don't think I could do it."

Not and keep the quiet sense of Reverence she had had when he walked into the room. Almost as an after thought, Emily turned enough to reach over with her left hand, type a few things into the keyboard of the laptop and close it. Then she turned back to him, somewhat quieter and more settled, and said quietly, "I'm... sorry. I shouldn't have snapped at you like that."

[Jarod Nightingale] I ... don't want to kill anyone, Emily said, and her voice sounded pained. Her expression was much like what anyone's would be, when faced with such a brutal reality, and for a brief moment, Jarod had the urge to close the space between them and put his arms around her. That may have led to self-distraction though, so instead he remained where he was, leaning against a desk with his arms folded across his chest.

"You might have to. Some day. To keep yourself, or others, alive. Killing is a necessary part of survival. But it should not be done... to excess. And if you can avoid it, then all the better. Life shouldn't be wasted. Especially not yours." He paused to take a breath. "And I hope very much that you won't have to hurt or kill anyone for a long time. Because it's not a pleasant experience. It stays with you."

He sounded like he was speaking from experience.

"Anyway, you don't need to apologize. Just try not to make assumptions where I'm concerned. Actually... I was going to ask if there was anything in particular you wanted to focus on learning? If not, I can decide for you. But... it's for your benefit, after all, so you should have some say."

[Emily Littleton] There it was. An understanding. Jarod had probably taken a life in his time. And would likely do it again, for the right reasons at the right time. Emily was left to decide how she felt about that, and weigh it against the very real knowledge that if she had been able to, once, she would have done the same to survive. It wasn't something she liked to think about, and it wasn't something she would openly admit, but she had been pushed to a breaking point once before and she knew what it was like to know you weren't going to see the other side... and yet wake up into a new morning anyway.

It is a solemn space, the lab. In this moment, it is the seat of some important conversations, some nascent but developing boundaries. Jarod is on his side of the room, and in this moment he is not her lover or necessarily even her friend. Mentor. Apprentice. This is a strange balance for them to strike so formally and Emily is not sure how to carry herself.

"I have been learning what I can. Talking to people, asking questions, especially about what has happened lately. Kage, Ashley, Wharil, you... you've all helped. I've thought about talking to Charlie, some, because a bit of what he says sounds familiar from living in China." Emily shrugged a bit, and for all her disclosures she seemed a bit withdrawn. "Enid and I don't talk about this. Jon's given me his card, and I think he teaches one of my seminar courses this term."

It might surprise him how far she'd worked her way into the community in a few short months, how many directions she'd been willing to explore to get her feet grounded in what she was becoming. Emily didn't seem to think much of it, beyond that this was an ultimately frustrating research project and no one used the same vocabulary words.

As to what she wanted to learn... "Wharil and Kage both told me to focus on the feeling of things. I think he called it Awareness. I've been keeping a journal," she didn't point it out to him, but it was good to know that these things (secrets) were being documented somehow. "And Kage showed me..."

Here's the shift. Emily's expression filtered through a flummoxed look (How do you describe...), to a fondness (Something lost... [something remembered]), to a quiet sense of awe that was left unvoiced. She hung there, suspended in that quite moment for a moment before continuing.

"Kage showed me (Grace) something I thought I'd lost long ago. I would like to learn that, and what you do. These things first. Others to follow."

Emily's fingers came up to toy with the chain around her neck. They pulled the locket free of her sweater, and she wrapped her fingers around it. But she didn't not hold tight to it. Instead it was almost as if she held her breath, slightly, as if breathing might disturb whatever it was she was trying so hard in that moment to hear beyond the threads of the physical world. Then her hand slipped away again, and the expression faded. Emily said nothing to him of the Song of Everything, or the places she'd heard it as a very young child. Those were not secrets for this place, or this time, or even necessarily for him.

[Jarod Nightingale] Jarod listened to all this, and if Emily expected him to be upset... his reaction might take her by surprise. Instead, he merely raised his eyebrows slightly, and for awhile he said nothing.

"You've been busy, I see." Now he straightened to his full height and crossed the distance between them. His steps were slow and deliberate, and as he moved he glanced around at the room again briefly, as if in contemplation. When he met Emily's eyes again, he smiled. "That's good. It's good to get as many opinions as possible. Education shouldn't be about soaking up someone else's Dogma. It should be about... truth."

Truth? This from the man who had mastered the art of the beautiful lie. Odd, that word, coming from his lips.

"And truth is mutable. Difficult to pin down. It takes more subjectivity than one would imagine. The more you see... the more you hear. The more you experience, the closer you get to it." He paused again, and grinned. "But don't tell the cultists I said that. They've been trying to recruit me for years."

He took a breath, to bring himself back to a more serious tone. "Anyway, the important thing is learning to listen with a discerning ear. To pick out the truth from the fantasy. To take from things only what you need, and not what the other person wants you to have. And there, see, I finally gave you some good advice. Maybe I'll make an alright mentor after all."

[Emily Littleton] Emily listened. She listened the way she had listened to Wharil earlier that afternoon, with the full weight of her attention: mind, body and soul. It is an uncomfortable thing, to be scrutinized as carefully as those weighty dark eyes could watch another person, to see the flicker of acceptance, understanding, skepticism, and wariness all at once within their depths. To see the openness, however honest, however forced, she managed to keep.

There is a solemnity to it as well, a ritual, a purposefulness. Whatever he has said is not lost on her, and Jarod will have no doubt that she is drinking it in, digesting it, changing it and fitting in into the beginnings of her paradigm. She's done the same weighing, judging and discarding with whatever everyone else has told her as well. Perhaps not until she'd gotten too upset about one bit or another to see straight, or perhaps not before she'd put herself in over her head. But the weeding out and whittling down and recrafting of a world view is something familiar to Emily. It is something she has done her entire life, as she bounced between one place and another.

"If things don't work out, you can always blame it on your student," she said, with a light touch of their usual banter, wryness, touch the corner of her mouth and the edge of her tone. "I've been told I'm ... difficult," she admitted, "at times."

He is closer now, but this new pattern has been set and she's not sure if she should reach out to him or stay seated and mind her own spaces. Emily decides on the latter, keeping her seat and watching him openly. They do not say what mentoring might mean for the other ways they've known each other, and she is not ready to ask. Emily is rarely ready to ask such questions. So again, with the quiet, and again, with the feeling of being suspended between two polarities.

[Jarod Nightingale] "Good students are seldom easy. I certainly wasn't. The first person who tried to teach me about all this nearly gave up on me at one or two points, I think." Well, she had given up on him, in the end... but that was a different matter, and not Emily's concern. Neither was it something that Jarod was inclined to discuss. Ever.

They were close, but neither of them reached out to meet the other. Instead, Jarod glanced around the room again, briefly, and sighed.

"I don't think... I can do it here. The energy isn't right. But I want to show you, if you want to learn. Let's go to the woods again, tomorrow. And we'll work on helping you sense things. Just... you know, don't be impatient. It takes awhile to pick up a new sphere of knowledge. That's always the hardest part."

[Emily Littleton] Emily arched an eyebrow in mock surprise, and it is again one step closer to their usual behaviors. "Oh? You do not approve of my technophilic demesne?" she enquired, lightly, not at all surprised that he did not wish to exercise his will within her safety net of numbers and maths and schematics.

Emily stretched a little, again. It was not as felinesque or sensual as Jarod's early morning stretches, but her body ached to be in motion again and it was telling her that this was too long of a tense conversation. That she needed to stretch more when she went running in the early afternoons. That the stools were not as comfortable as their ergonomics suggested.

"I would like to learn. Whatever my Avatar is, it would like me to learn something more than vocabulary words. On this much we can agree, and it may be th eonly thing we agree on right now. I would like to be helpful some day, too, though I imagine that's quite a ways off from now." Emily put that thought back on the table, knowing full well that Jarod would only brush it aside again. The magi in Chicago had no real need for an Orphan apprentice, and unless they asked her to keep their cars or computers running, Emily was unlikely to be of much help to them as she was.

"If it is alright with you, I think I am going to ask Charlie to teach me some self-defense as well. He seems to need to be helpful, and maybe I would be less... anxious... if I had the skillset to defend myself, at least physically."

Ho, hum, nothing to see here. Emily's mask had slipped back into place somewhere between asking for permission and finishing her sentence. She wasn't really confessing anything, because they both knew there had been ... something ... in her past that was weighing down her mind and eating into her sleep given the recent past.

Emily sighed a bit and looked around the lab, too. It wouldn't take her long to clean up, and whatever drive she had had to work late into the evening had dissipated when Jarod started talking about magic in the middle of her quiet, safe, zone of sanity.

[Jarod Nightingale] [Per+empathy - watchoo hiding there?]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 3, 5, 7, 10 (Success x 2 at target 5)

[Emily Littleton] (( Just a long day, that's all - Manip + Subt ))
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 3, 6, 8, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Jarod Nightingale] Whatever Emily was keeping to herself... tonight, Jarod wasn't able to see it. There were more invasive measure to be tried, but... trying something like that would have been a breach of trust. So he didn't. Instead he accepted the fact that she was being a little closed off, and left it at that. (After all, how often did he project precisely the same thing?)

Instead, he focused on responding to her questions. When she asked him if he approved of her technophilic demesne, he laughed. "It's not a matter of approval. This just... isn't how I work." And because a rather dominant voice in his head was presently voicing a slightly less considerate view on the matter, he did finally add, "And you're not the only one with a little voice in her head."

When she asked if she could take lessons from someone who Jarod didn't know and had never met, he merely shrugged. "Might not be a bad idea. You don't need to ask my permission to learn something. Just be smart, and careful. And if someone tries to force you to come around to their way of thinking, just listen to your gut and tell them to fuck off."

And now... finally, he pressed forward to close the distance between them, reaching out to take Emily's face in his hands gently as he kissed her. It was a soft kiss, and nothing too pressing or needful. Reassurance, maybe.

"I suppose I should leave you be. Unless you want to come back with me?"

[Emily Littleton] There was no one in the lab to see him kiss her, or to notice the way the tendrils of stress and fear and solemnity uncoiled and slipped away from her in his closeness. Jarod had an answer to his question long before Emily's eyes blinked open again and she looked up at him with a quiet softness.

"If I go back with you, may I stay the night?" she asked, not because he'd ever kicked her out before but because she had class in the morning. And by the time they'd spent any time toether at his place, and she drove home, got settled and sleeping... she'd have not much time to rest before her courses began again in the morning. And she wanted to go back with him. But there were other pulls on her time, now.

"Otherwise, I'll get home rather late. And iIf I'm late for class, my A yi will give me another lecture about my marks." Emily's mouth twisted, fondly. "One a week is enough for me," she added. Again, the foreign word seemed not so foreign at all on her tongue.

And if he hadn't come by? There was a strong possibility that she'd have slept in the lab, on the couch in the break area or in her cube. It had happened before, mostly when she needed some sense of quiet and control over her surroundings.

[Jarod Nightingale] "Of course you can. Wouldn't want you to get behind, now, would we?"

It was an easy answer, given freely from someone who so very rarely actually invited people to spend the night in his bed. Not that he kicked them out, either... no, Jarod was very skilled at handling those sorts of things with grace and courtesy. He was probably one of those people who could break up with someone, and end up with them thinking it was their idea. (Not that he'd ever had cause to do that, since breaking up required... actually dating someone to begin with.)

Jarod took a step back and let his hands settled into his pockets briefly, prepared to wait for Emily to do whatever it was she might need to do before leaving. "You'll just have to remind me not to keep you up too late." Because he had a habit of doing that.

So Jarod waited, and then, when Emily was ready, they left together. And it was an easy thing, to slip back into something more familiar than teacher and student. To just be together, and enjoy each other, for the remainder of the evening.