alderwitch

Phantom nodded her agreement to Avenger before she sank back into the ground and made her way back to the mansion once more. It was easy enough to find an empty space to slip up again and to change her clothes as she did so. Taylor pushed aside one of the velvet curtains to step around it, carefully putting weight on her heels once more. The only thing that she really had to set right was removing the Eye from her throat and fastening it around her wrist once more. That was a little difficult to do one handed and she stepped out to the rear entrance to meet Jack while she fiddled with trying to close the clasp.

Phantom needs to raise her exotic saves... <.< 1d20+3=20

"Well, I can pretty much coach Mike without actually telling him anything. He trusts me more than he trusts himself," Alex said with a fond sort of exasperation, "I wish he had more confidence sometimes."

"But she survived the whole power struggle." That much she could inferl. Considering that vampire politics usually involved a great deal of bloodshed, that was somewhat surprising. Taylor frowned slightly, trying to follow his explanation, "A reputation as a sissy? Among them you mean?"

Taylor rubbed his back gently as she held Jack. "It was just an illusion, Jack. It wasn't real" Taylor murmered soothingly. She'd seen him in many moods but never so... undone. "You didn't kill anyone."

"[Colorp#008080]No, of course not," Alex said automatically as she pulled back from the shelf to look down at Erin, "Mike doesn't care if I talk about him. You would have. Mike's dislike of talking about things isn't because he cares what people know. I haven't told anyone about your past. You wouldn't have been comfortable with it."

Taylor smiled reluctantly, "I forgot my own birthday last year. Thankfully Jackson warned me about the surprise party before I walked into it. This year I wrote it on the calendar." She looked up, curiously, "Are you close to her?"

"Oh, Jack," Taylor said quietly and stepped in to slip her arms around his waist. "It was probably just your subconcious trying to shake free of the machine."

"Let's just say Mark definately get a lot from his dad. He's got a lot of neat stories though. Its kinda wierd to go somewhere where the super hero thing is the norm." Alex said after a long and thoughtful pause, "What about baseball wit Mike?" Alex asked with curiosity and perhaps a touch of wistfulness. She wasn't exactly the athletic type.

That startled a laugh out of Taylor even as she blushed, "Its not the most practical of outfits but its all I can summon. Unless I've stuck a change of clothes in the void, its all I've got to work with. Its self cleaning and repairing at least." She placed her other hand over his, waming his fingertips between her palms. "I'd rather have asked than have wondered. It's a lot to take in and I'm not exactly firing on all cylinders." After a moment she asked curiously, "Just how old are you?"

Taylor's eyes closed but she didn't pull away from the gentle touch. That hurt but she gave him points for not providing some pretty lies. If she had him in an honest mood, she might as well ask. "Were you telling me the truth when you asked me out? Was it for the reasons you told me?" Taylor asked, her voice perhaps a little husky with emotion but the dark eyes she lifted to his face were blessedly dry. "What is this, to you?"

"Something new, please." Taylor suggested, feeling confident enough in the hip throw. She glanced at Stesha, "Do you know anything about gun safety? Chances are good that eventually you'll deal with someone whose got a gun. Knowing how to put the safety on or eject the clip can make a huge difference"

The ribbing didn't phase Alex in the slightest. She scooted out of the car, "What about teal? That's like blue! Ooo, or aqua." Alex headed over to the brochure rack first, determined to see all of the options.

Alex giggled at the pun as she joined Erin for cleaning the shelves. She floated up to work on the higher shelves while they chatted, "Help yourself to them if you'd like. You know donating the stuff to the school isn't a half bad idea. I'm sure the shop classes could use more spare bits."

"That's nuclear fission, alright." Alex supplied helpfully. "But that's a highly unstable and explosive reaction. This is more stable than that. Granpa wants to switch the thing over to run off Dakan power crystals, though, because of concerns like that. After all, this thing was built in the 60s, so this isn't all cutting edge the way it once was." Alex pulled up a chest harness thing and sorted it into one of her many growing piles, "If you want any of this junk, let me know. Its not like we can do a yard sale with it or anything."

"The teleporter runs off of several of these coils. They've got some sort of fission reaction in them from what I gather. The fourth coil though is a little quirky and Grandpa's worried it could blow if we ever really taxed the machine." Alex explained as she slipped the coil into something that looked a lot like a thermos for safe-keeping. "But he doesn't have a lot of them kicking around anymore and he doesn't want to have to buy one. Super science is a lot more expensive now that its not so experimental. Apparently its a real money market these days."

Taylor tipped her head back to look at him. Giving up on the movie, she shifted her legs accross his lap so that she could see his face better. After a moment to gather her thoughts, she realized that she had a lot of questions, actually, "Were you ever going to tell me?" Finding out in the heat of the moment she really didn't think had been a planned action, "You do set off my sixth sense as something magical but I never tried to divine what you were. I have to cast spells to get anything specific."

Reflex, then Fort: 1d20+3=11, 1d20+3=22

Taylor nodded, processing that. She was grateful to move off the topic of family. She'd already cried once tonight and once was more than enough, really. It was clear from the way Jack spoke about his, that his was gone. "No one else does? No one else from the Knights is aware of it?" She didn't have the emotional energy to dredge up any temper over the subject. "Anything else I should know?"

It only took Taylor a few minutes to put the turtleneck and jacket away. When she came out of the bedroom, she'd discarded her shoes and her steps accross the floor were muted as her socks made little noise on the carpet. "No, but I imagine whoever did follow me was not the person I spoke with tonight. He was trying to hide inside Stesha's hall plant when she opened the door. I'd have noticed him." Taylor gave Jack a quick but complete description of the man who'd shown up on Stesha's doorstep. She reached up to touch his cheek, tracing her fingertips over the taunt muscle in his cheek, "Jack, what happened?"

Taylor went quiet as she cuddled back into him, no longer really seeing the movie. Instead her thoughts went back to her time training with the various mystics and wisemen summoned by Heshem and the endless, endless days. "They never told me," she said finally, "I don't know how long it took in the void for Heshem to rework the very fabric of my being. I don't know how long I spent after that learning. Long enough that my anger faded but not long enough for the despair to. I asked to go home. I begged. When it didn't work, I swore I'd never beg again. Am I grateful for the time that I have now? Very much so." Taylor threaded her fingers through his and her hand tightened on his, "I also know how keenly it will hurt to lose them again."

Taylor shook her head as she said quietly, "I'm not this dimension's guardian. I'm the guardian for all of the dimensions. There are other Taylor Chuns. There is no other Phantom. When I, well, became what I am now, I was ripped from the fabric of Earth Prime. This is no more my home than any other world, not in a cosmic sense at least." Shaking off the slight sorrow that tinged her tone, she gave a very brief over-view of the cosmic order, "The guardian of Prime is its master magus, empowered by the Modorus. Heshem's one of that trinity and She hand picked me to run between the worlds and set things the way they're meant to be. Sometimes its moving things, sometimes its moving people. I could exist anywhere, really. I choose to live here."

"You okay?" Alex asked with concern. Once she was sure that Erin was fine, she answered her friend's question with a calm, "I haven't informed them of my time with Granpa. My mother's not yet emotionally ready to face her father. It would only further the rift. Once I'm more certain that her reaction will be less reactive, I'll let her know the current situation. She's still processing my own super hero activities." Alex carefully cracked open the case that had jolted Erin and with triumph removed a blue glowing coil, "This might work, I think. Mother has a lot of unresolved hostility over her own mother's death and that makes it very difficult to face the world with any real objectivity about these things."

"I think it has to do with my mom walking away. I kinda get the impression that she left when my granma died and granpa hasn't touched any of this since. Well, till now." Alex said with a small smile. She was continuing to sort through things, looking for the aforementioned coil.

"Kinda." Alex agreed as she fiddled with some cylindrical device, trying to see if it still had power, "Granpa was a bit of a techie. I mean, he started with making his own trick arrows and then it just sort of evolved from there. It was more of a do-it-yourself thing when he started. So when he came accross something that might prove useful later on, he kept it. He's a packrat that had access to neater stuff than most. Instead of old newspapers, he's got gadgets." Alex finally found the on switch and the device petalled open. Quickly she depressed the center button and closed it up again, putting it in the smaller pile of 'still does stuff'.