Riley Poole, where are you going?

[-flicker-] It's a clear, warm and breezy Spring day and Riley's Geek Squad shift is just winding down. There'd been a rash of mysteriously unplugged cabals, virii resulting from clicking pop up ads, and a genuine plea for help from someone trying to run a 32-bit only program in Window's 7's XP-64bit emulator. Riley'd even had to break out her google-fu on the last one, but every last call got knocked out with a pleased Thank you from her customers.

Late in her shift, Papa Poole had texted her with a request.
Can you pick up a package for me? [Address, shop name]

It was a little out of their usual stomping grounds, in a section of town that isn't Riley's home and might even flummox the native Chicagoan a little. But that's what google maps on her phone were for, and Nav Systems, and GPS, and even plain old paper maps.

It's quitting time, Riley Poole. What are you up to next?

[Riley Poole] Plain ol' paper maps. Riley actually has one of those in her car, a whole collection of them in a spiral bound atlas of Illinois. It's permanently opened to a detailed map of central Chicago, and she keeps it just in case. Riley was never in Girl Scouts, she was too busy taking apart her old Atari or trying to teach herself coding languages for that, but she is usually prepared. Because technology will glitch, or it'll short, or something, and the last thing she needs while trying to get from one end of the city to the other is for her navigation tools to die on her.

The paper map is left alone, however. Riley pulls out her android phone, finds the google map app, plugs in her destination. This is while she's still in the Best Buy parking lot, as she stands outside of her Honda CRV with the door open. She plugs in the destination and while that takes point-whatever seconds to load, she slips on a pair of track pants and slips out of the wretched uniform shirt. Her tie - a real one today - is loosened and the top couple buttons of the work shirt undone, then she climbs into the car and starts him up. Him. His name is Bill and he is her pony.

She's taking her hair out of its clip and running her fingers through the long wavy mess of it, frowning at the map directions on her phone. That's a bit out of the way, but then, it's not the first time she or her father have traveled outside the normal area.

[-flicker-] The Droid comes up with a reasonable route in a split second. Technology is wonderful. Riley and Bill will have to swing out of their way, but it's not too far off-grid for their usual adventures.

The shop even pops up on the map with the address her Dad had given her. No last minute course corrections for bad data, or a shipping address instead of a store-front. All seems well and good, and no one's running out of the store just yet to ask her to take one more trouble call or fix one more digi cam's full memory card.

[Riley Poole] They damn well know better than to come try to grab Riley after she's clocked out. Occasionally, some new person has to learn the hard way that you do not ask Riley Poole to come back into the building after she's clocked out. You do not chase her down and ask her to take one last service call. When Riley Poole steps outside the Best Buy, she no longer exists.

She shuts the driver's side door, flicks on her headlights regardless of the amount of sunlight, and she's off. Looking for a shop she's never been to. The phone is placed beside the gearshift, where Riley can casually flick her eyes to it without really needing to take her eyes off the road for an extended period of time. The directions are followed to the letter, with the Virtual Adept keeping an eye out for landmarks in case she wants to come through this way again.

[-flicker-] It's easy-going at first, early enough that traffic has not built up to fever pitch. But what technology cannot, yet, account for is unplanned road closures, the construction detours, the asshat in the Prius that somehow manages to cut her off (how is that even possible, they can't accelerate for shit!) and force her into a right turn only lane, which makes the Droid recalculate her route.

It's a game of circle-round and three-rights-make-a-left until she realizes she's not ending up where she'd meant to go. The phone was blinking at her with that ubiquitous hourglass (recalculating, recalculating).

To make matters worse, Bill's your seat belt is not fastened chime starts binging. Repeatedly.

[Riley Poole] [Short Fuse]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)

[Riley Poole] This. Is. Frustrating.

Riley's in a place she's not familiar with, her gadgetry isn't working, and people driving like dicks.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

She can't very well close her eyes to try and focus herself, not while she's driving anyway. The short-tempered Italian is vaguely irritated by the turn of events, but not so much that it affects her ability to think rationally. And thinking rationally means pulling over into that shopping center parking lot and consulting that spiral-bound atlas. Which is exactly what she does.

When she parks, she doesn't shut off her lights or even unlock her doors. She just turns on the overhead map light and draws the booklet into her lap.

[-flicker-] This is an older section of town, and the parking lot asphalt grinds a bit like gravel as Bill's tires find purchase. The spaces are slanted, each headed by a worn concrete block. The lines are fuzzy, nearly non-existant. It's a small strip mall, a few shops are closed (permanentl [space for rent]). One has its door propped open, a box fan sitting in the orifice, blowing out and not in. (Carpet cleaning day.)

The seatbelt warning is still binging away. Plaintive. Concerned. (Click it or ticket.)

At some point the repetition becomes almost meditative. Like the crappy techno music at some LAN parties. It beats out a pattern that keeps part of her mind bound up, busy, distracted. Like each (bing) thought (ding) is (bing) punctuated by Bill's incessant singing.

It's a bit harder to focus on the map grids, given that distracted. The page swims a little, as if the plane were somehow distorted.

Her phone chirps. Demanding her attention over something. This coincides with Riley finding the correct atlas page, and realizing she's farther off course than she thought.

[Riley Poole] For some reason, the chirps, the bings, even the swimming of the page are beginning to remind her of something. Something distant, past, that already happened. Something just starting to fade from memory, despite how important it is.

Riley is reminded of January, the winter, sitting at her little desk in her little room, hunched over her laptop. Following the white rabbit through the internet, discovering information, learning, Awakening. She's a smart woman, clever, intuitive. It doesn't take her long to put the pieces together.

Suddenly, frustration dissipates like steam rising, a hot surface suddenly cooled. It makes sense that she's so far off course, for some reason. It makes sense that Bill is trying to tell her something, that her phone keeps beeping at her. Riley laughs.

"Alright alright." She picks up her phone, running the fingers of her left hand through her hair before she looks at it. "Ashley says your my Avatar. Is that right?" She feels silly, talking to her phone. Not to a person on another line, but actually to her phone.

[-flicker-] Bill's binging stops, as if he's become either docile or dumbfounded. There is a long pause, and the silence of it rings in her ears. Blessed, blissful silence. The screen of Riley's phone is blank. Stays blank.

Then: That's right.

And another pause, almost thoughtful. Pregnant.

Who are you?

The words linger, sans-serif and bright white on a dark background. Long enough to be noticed, then they fade out slowly.

[Riley Poole] Luckily, anyone who might happen through this small, mostly abandoned little parking lot will likely think Riley is just talking to someone on speaker phone. She grins as she reads the text that appears on the screen, waits until it fades before looking thoughtfully at the reflection of her dark eyes in the review mirror.

"Well, I'm you, aren't I? Or part of you. Or you're part of me. I was told we're connected, anyway. If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have Awakened, so thanks for that. And good choice with the Sans Serif. If you'd gone Comic Sans I would have had to throw my phone out the window." Joking, perhaps. "If you're looking for a name, I'm Riley Norina Poole. If you're looking for something more...all encompassing, I'm a student, a tech support guru, a daughter, a friend, a geek, and possibly a Virtual Adept Mage. Does that work?"

[-flicker-] Does that work, Riley ask her phone.

It replies: Does it?

There's a moment, then the words fade and are replaced by: Work? before Riley can ask for an elaboration.

There's a thin thrum from her phone. Not quite static, but that same loose electric feel. Energy. Transferable and not quite contained. It teases her fingertips, but doesn't bite them just yet.

[Riley Poole] "It works for me." She can feel the thrum of her phone, the electric charge that tingles at her fingertips. She watches her phone warily, brow quirked.

"What about work?"

[-flicker-] What about work, what? ;)

Yes, her Avatar sent her a sarcastic winking smilie face. Or whoever was hacking her phone from afar -- Chuck? Are you out there? -- did it as a sign that she was being messed with. Just a little.

The questions came more quickly now. Almost as if someone was talking to her, aloud, rather than sending her the subtitles.

Riley Norina Poole, where are you going?
Who are you?
Does that work?
Why does that work?
Where do you want to go?

Each hangs on the screen just long enough to be read, then pushes on into the next. There's a flicker to the phone, now. Its light, spilling into the cabin of the car, is not constant.

A picture: Riley's staff photo.
Another: The Geek Squad car.
Family: Papa Poole with a goofy-dad grin.
Friends: Chuck, mid-victory-dance.
School: Stock campus photo.

Her favorite dish. Her favorite TV show's lead in. Band. Video game. Flicker after flicker of little insights into who she was.

Where are you going? The google maps screen, showing her current location. A little pinned point on a colorful, clear map-view screen.

[Riley Poole] If someone is hacking her phone - and it's possible, a voice in her head suggests quite rationally - they're doing a damn good job of it. She doesn't think someone's hacking her phone, though, voice in her head be damned.

She still has that smile hovering around her mouth as she watches the words and questions flicker across the screen, the pictures beginning to flash. She's usually good at figuring things out, at intuiting what needs to go where. It's helpful when she's faced with a difficult tech question. It's helpful when her phone starts sending her messages, asking her questions, asking her who she is and where she wants to go.

"Well right this very minute I'm trying to go pick something up for my dad. But, I've gotten pretty far off course." A pause, a flicker of her own, a thought. "So let's start with that. I'm guessing you don't want me relying on tech, or even a paper map. You had me looking for stuff when I Awakened. That was Correspondence, yeah? Let's try that."

[Riley Poole] [Scan? Corr 1, diff 3 +1 (coincidental) + grid focus]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 3 (Failure at target 4)

[Riley Poole] [re-roll! diff +1, slow casting (breathe, Poole!) diff -1]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 9 (Success x 2 at target 4) [WP]

[-flicker-] Let's try that, Riley says, and reaches out with her new and untested senses. It's not smooth sailing at first, even with the grid-like pattern of city streets on her phone's display. Even with the atlas (another grid, another set of coordinates) open on the seat beside her.

The crackle of electricity builds, but doesn't reach a breaking point. The anticipation of either solid success or resounding failure does not break, just yet. The Apprentice reaches out again, feels the energy (Electric) in her pattern build, rise, crest ...

... Absolute surety rushes in. Riley knows, unquaveringly, as if she'd swallowed a compass needle, where the cardinal directions are. She can find them without the assistance of the angle of the sun, without any familiar street crossings, without the moon or stars to guide her. It's as if the tides pulled at the marrow of her bones, setting her right, aligned, with the poles of north-to-south and east-to-west.

She can tell that the parking space is north-west to south-east. That there's a misprint in the map, which is why she'd gotten so turned about. She knows how far it is from her nose to the steering wheel, how many millimeters are between her fingertips, how far she'd have to walk to reach that box fan and turn it off because it really makes no sense at all to have a fan running out in the middle of a breezy day.

Given this bit of information, it's easy to replot her course. Hell, it'd be easier to parallel park (with her eyes shut).

It lasts a full minute, locked in and certain, before the awareness of her physical place in the world begins to unravel. Dissipate.

There's a chirp from her phone. A message waiting on the screen: Well -that- works. :)

Cheeky. Cheeky Avatar.

[Riley Poole] It's euphoric, this sudden and intense feeling of knowing. For a second, maybe a second point five, she just sits there. Flexing her fingers. Looking around, feeling that sense of knowing exactly where she is. It's been so long, she'd forgotten. But how could she forget? It's like the second or third time she tried marijuana, before she stopped. The third or fourth time she tried beer. That time in high school when she worked up the courage to ask Jason Rutledge to the Homecoming dance.

Only better.

There's a chirp from her phone, and Riley does something somewhat sort of crazy. Of course, those who know her wouldn't be too surprised. She brings her phone up and cradles it against her cheek, bouncing slightly in the driver's seat. She giggles excitedly as she releases the parking brake, puts the car into gear, and goes in search of the store she needs to find. Grinning broadly all the way.