Gizmo
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Pausing in her hair brushing for a moment Winifred reached over to turn on the reading lamp on her nightstand when it became clear that Robin would just as soon have continued to conversation with only the faint illumination of the digital alarm clock. "Sleeping habits are so easily disturbed," she agreed understandingly. It didn't escape her notice that Robin framed the trouble sleeping as some sort of personal failing and while that didn't seem a particularly healthy attitude she could certainly empathize with holding oneself to high standards. "I've seen little enough of the fu-- the present day to accurately speak to ambient noise. Frankly everything is... 'off' by enough that it's difficult to pinpoint any one thing at times." That sounded a little too much like she was making things into a competition once she said it out loud and she coughed lightly while buying herself a moment by returning to brushing her hair. "I didn't have a subject in mind, precisely, but we're sharing a room like sisters, it seems as though we ought to be able to at least carry a conversation now and then," she proposed with a rueful smile that made it clear that this wasn't necessarily her forte, either. "Uhm. Things are going well with your... suitor?" Winifred wasn't sure if that was the correct term any more and regretted venturing into the potentially tricky topic almost immediately but Smith was one of the few things she actually knew about Robin.
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October 18, 2015 Summerhill Street Farmer's Market Only a two block stroll from the Espadas School, every Sunday farmers from the area surrounding the city along with more local bakers, brewers and others set up stalls to sells their wares along either side of the winding path that could somewhat generously be characterized as a park. The fountain in the center of the market hadn't had working water in years but the trees provided pleasant shade and the benches were kept in good condition. The main draw was in-season produce but there were homemade jams and preserves for sale alongside fresh breads, beeswax candles next to knitwear in time for the cooling weather. The bustling path was full of West Enders looking for bargains and loud with the sounds of haggling. "I want to grab some apples, corn and sweet potatoes for sure," Erik was explaining as he led the way, having finally relented to the season and put on a light sweater under his wool-lined jacket. With a pair of reusable shopping bags stuffed unceremoniously stuff into his jacket's pockets he was already craning his neck to see what was on sale. "Other than that, what were you thinking?" After another playful conversation about whether or not Talya could actually manage an uneventful grocery shopping trip he'd agreed to let her take the lead in gathering what they needed for dinner that evening. It had quickly become clear from the way he animatedly talked up the market that he was taking this as an opportunity to show the blonde Englishwoman around the neighbourhood where he'd been born and raised as much as anything else.
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"Mmh, no, thank you. I'm quite awake now myself," Winifred replied, stifling a yawn that somewhat undercut her assertion. Realistically going back to sleep probably would have been smarter; the consequences when she was poorly rested and tetchy were somewhat more severe than for most people but it rankled her to be treated like a glass doll. Perhaps more like a glass beaker filled with a combustible liquid, she mused silently as she set her cane aside and reached for her hair brush instead, part of the pack of toiletries they'd each been given by the school. Running it through her long hair starting with the right side she squinted to make out her roommate's silhouette in the dark. "I wouldn't wish to keep you from it but... we could talk, if you'd like?" Robin had been uncommonly kind to her since their meeting in the museum, particularly with regards to patiently correcting some of the Victorian's social faux pas and Winifred rather thought she owed it to the other girl to at least offer. "Something is bothering you?"
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A murmur from the bed on the other side of the room suggested that she'd been less than successful on that count. Unlikely as it was Winifred had some to Claremont with even fewer possessions than Robin but for someone who was so exacting in the presentation of her appearance she'd proven to be much less tidy about her living and working space. One wall was very nearly covered in sheets of loose leaf paper filled with notes and equations in the time-displaced alchemist's immaculate handwriting while the ever-changing pile of books at the foot of her bed consistently remained at the maximum number a student was allowed to check out of the library at one time. Sitting up in a shapeless cream coloured nightgown with brown trim, the shorter girl reached about groggily for a moment before finding her cane and raising it like a club in both hands, looking about the darkened room with mussed black hair in her eyes. "Robin...?" Even half-asleep Winifred kept her voice level and precisely enunciated but her roommate had gotten a good enough idea of her baseline tone to recognize a note of muted alarm in the call.
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Reagent Notice check vs DC 25: 1d20+5 20 Survival Check vs DC 20: 1d20 2
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From Erik's expression he seemed to mainly be burdened with an overactive desire to punch someone in the face. "I'll talk to Chris about it," he promised quietly, not wanting to jump to any conclusions right away but obviously perturbed. He'd gotten into trouble for flying off the handle at Claremont kids without getting the full story, he didn't want to repeat the mistake with the faculty, too. "He was there a couple years longer than Ellie." It occurred to him that if anybody at the Academy was messing with kids with traumatic histories the person he really ought to talk to was Erin White, but somehow explaining the circumstances of his sister's girlfriend's chief of security who had violent reactions to the undead seemed like a tall order for an offhand comment. "She's a smart kid, she'll pick it all up quick enough," he opined a little more loudly, waving to Raina as she left. "See you next week."
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"Mmh, well that won't work," Set objected in a light, singsong tone as he leaned forward from the back of the couch toward Huang's hand. "I was planning to make things up to you; one of us will need to simply relax and enjoy himself." Remarkably he managed to keep a straight face through the whole sentence, giving the taller teenager a serious look that suggested that they needed to deliberate the issue with the sort of even handed intensity of thought usually reserved for international peace talks. "Rock paper scissors? Best two out of three wrestling?" As he mused aloud the godling shifted one knee up and over so that his leg crossed the dhampir's calf.
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"Eh? Where-- ah! You're counting from the origin of my worship on this plane!" Set exclaimed with sudden realization after a moment of eyebrow raising confusion. She let out a bubbling fit of melodic giggling, the vodka beginning to her system. "I be not six thousand! Well. I suppose one could measure things that way, tis not incorrect." She hummed as she considered the idea rocking back and forth slightly. "But time in Heliopolis does not work as time does here nor are gods immortal in the sense that you be immortal, Dimitri, nor you, oh honey hued hostess! A millennia old vampire, what a thing that would be! He would have to begin forgetting, I imagine..." Momentarily distracted by that imagining, the redheaded godling shook her head hard enough to send her dreadlocks flapping about. "You continue, you... accumulate! Gods may wax and wane, may change but we do not grow. Why do you think I--" She froze in the middle of gesturing to herself from head to toe, realizing she was about to get into a line of conversation she didn't really want to have. "Ah. Ahem. More water, mayhaps," Set decided, taking a long sip from the bottle. "Regardless! I'm two as much as I'm six thousand should that make you feel any better, old man."
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"I reserve the right to maintain Plan B for Bludgeoning," Jill muttered darkly, respecting the concerns surrounding her demonstration but thinking that the more cautious members of their little group needed to respect her desire to smash something. She turned around say something no doubt bitingly clever to Spellbound only to instead come out with, "What the @#$% happened to you?!" Staring at the other woman's heavily pregnant belly she raised both arms in vaguely directed outrage, turning to look at her girlfriend and Liz's employer. "Did you know about this?" Admittedly, it had been a while since she'd seen Geckoman's partner; it wasn't unusual for Liz to beg off attending the 'family' events Chris was roped into and Ellie hadn't been spending as much time at HAX in the past months since it was a lot easier for the head of a technology company to take the afternoon off to visit a hospital than it was for a rookie EMT to get out of work early. Still, it seemed like something that should have come up in conversation!
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"That's the business model, Dora," Erik agreed, waggling his eyebrows conspiratorially. "If you've got any friends you think would get something out of it, bring them on by, for sure. We're not necessarily set up for every, y'know, 'special circumstance' but as far as hand-to-hand or weapons training goes I guarantee we run circles around whoever your PE teacher is." That was a pretty bold statement considering he knew enough about Claremont to know they had some top talent on staff and little enough to have no idea who might be teaching the gym class Raina was so eager to get out of attending but he'd never lacked for confidence. Besides, no point in talking up the competition. "Just don't burn off Talya's hair, that's all I'm asking."
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Jack grinned, a bit of a wild edge to the expression. He wasn't sure if running into a couple of House deserters in the middle of nowhere and nowhen counted as lucky but it sure was a hell of a thing. "Hermano, we are copacetic. Anybody with enough sense to leave those chuckleheads behind is alright with me." He folded his arms as Achille explained the situation and where he suspected Steve might be held prisoner. "No worries about getting killed, our friend's a tough customer." He wasn't even going to entertain the idea that they might be too late to save the emancipated omegadrone. "Fortunately we've got some experience dealing with the sort of guys who like to call themselves 'masters' of anything.Where are the townspeople being held?"
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Erik groaned loudly and buried his face in Min's shoulder, unable to meet anyone's eyes while Ellie burst into raucous, very nearly falling out of her seat while she gasped for breath. Once she'd calmed down enough to see straight the young woman studied the stoic cyborg's confused expression long enough to determine that the innuendo surely hadn't been intentional. "Aw, Steve, buddy," she sympathized not unkindly even as she struggled to keep her lips from quirking into a grin. Leaning over around the corner of the table and cupping a hand around her mouth she quickly whispered a brief explanation, pointing out the visual metaphor that had so far escaped him and letting him fill in the rest of the blanks for himself.
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"Oh no. I've had barbecue made by a speedster before," Erik objected, shaking his head as he headed over to the the grill. "Not everything is better faster, Mixtape. Maybe if we want the whole cooler's worth ruined in record time." Harsh words aside, the younger man's challenging smirk made it clear that this wasn't an actual accusation so much as an opening salvo of well-intentioned banter. Beer in one hand he peered over Richard's shoulder into the cooler. "Is this all local?" he asked Stesha, turning to where the florakinetic was dealing admirably with a fussy infant, Mia having gone from crabby sounds to giggles in short order. "It's good to be queen!"
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Grue Arcane Toughness Save vs DC 27: 1d20+7 16 These are minions, so that's a knockout!
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"Maybe leave the part about theft out when you're selling it to the headmistress," Erik suggested with a shake of his head that said that he wasn't even going to bother trying to talk Talya out of that questionable curriculum. Realistically he knew he'd gotten a fair bit of mileage out of breaking and entering skills - although his technique tended to involve a lot more breaking than the finesse of the Englishwoman - but that wasn't something Raina needed to know. "Somehow giving you access to fireballs seems redundant," he added affectionately, walking over to retrieve the padded staff from their student before she managed to bean herself on the head with it. "We are supposed to be setting a relatively good example, yeah? Eat your vegetables, look both ways before crossing the street, so on and so forth."
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"Oh sure, I was walk through your door just as easily!" Kimber assured Jessie agreeably, perhaps misunderstanding the specific way in which her incorporeal antics might be unsettling. "I wouldn't want anything to get broken!" Floating high enough into the air to survey the kitchen as a whole more easily, she rummaged through the drawers telekinetically, odds and ends rising into the air where she could see them before returning to their places until she found a pad of paper and pen as requested. They flew across the room to land in front of Jessie, the pen quickly dancing across the paper to scrawl an enthusiastic smiley face across the top of the page before dropping down. "Puzzle are the beeeeest!" the phantom enthused, hovering lower with a big grin. "Indira likes the three-dee ones better, like the ones where you have to figure out how to take them apart and put them back together? I like ones with pictures, though."
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Sizing up the situation as she arrived along with the rest of the team, it took less than a minute for Jill O'Cure to start feeling the impatience as a prickling itch on the back of her neck. She wasn't particularly good at standing around and waiting on the best of days but running on near empty and having just having had to explain to her mother that her brother and their friends were missing, possibly abducted, she reached her tipping point in record time. "Blocking it, huh?" she mused tersely, raising both hands and forming a shimmering blue sphere of bioelectric field the size of a softball between her palms. "Let's see if we can't fast-track the trial-and-error process here." With a mote of applied concentration she launched the ball forward like it had been shot out of a cannon, hurling it toward the portal. The barrier it struck seemed to flex and ripple like a trampoline before bouncing the sphere back. The metamagi let the construct dissipate as it began to return. "So. Bigger wrecking ball?" She was aiming for sardonic but the hard edge in her voice was obvious.
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"Doubted you could keep your fangs to yourself? Where would they get such a notion, hmm?" Set mused with exaggerated thoughtfulness as he slid onto the couch next to Huang with a fluid grace, tucking his shoulder under the taller young man's raised arm. His left hand went unabashedly to the dhampir's chest, fingers players and tracing the lines where his pectoral and abdominal muscles met. "A few crude words be not enough to do more than irritate a god, fortunately," he assured his host, downplaying how upset he'd been after the confrontation with Huang's father and the vodka-fueled worrying that had followed. "Were you concerned, then? Feeling... territorial?" The godling somehow managed to shimmy even closer, looking very pleased with himself and with Huang.
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"I...?" Ellie struggled against the mental inertia as her simmering ire was abruptly rerouted into a hitherto unknown direction. She did make an effort to parse Min's request well enough to reply to the white haired woman but found herself distracted from the question of closet organization. Turning to her brother instead she place a hand to either side of her head, willing the situation to make sense. Erik didn't seem at all surprised by his wife's warm show of affection for Talya, although he seemed to be having some trouble not laughing at her own expression. "So they're, what, friends with benefits, now? Like... swingers?" The last word came out oddly, a weird bit of dated slang that she'd never expected to actually use in a serious context. "How did that...?" Erik couldn't help letting out a short laugh at that, the combination of the ridiculousness of the stilted conversation and the relief of having things out in the open hitting him in a rush. "It's not a 'them' thing so much as an 'us' thing, hermanita," he clarified, moving the half-step necessary to put a hand on the small of Talya's back and giving her a rueful smirk. "Min's just better than me at cutting to the chase. And it... just sort of happened, but it's good. It's working and-- It's good," he repeated, giving the younger Espadas sibling a shrug that told her he understood exactly how strange this was and that he was right there with her in terms of bemusement. More subtle was the unstated plea for support and understanding that he was too proud to voice aloud. Working her jaw for a moment, Ellie straightened her back and squared her shoulders very slightly before turning looking back at the blonde Englishwoman. "Right, well. She's right, obviously. You're all busy people, it just makes sense to have some of your stuff where it's more convenient." There was a note of bluster in her voice, obviously compensating a bit for her continued surprise and confusion but she'd obviously made her decision about how to take the news.
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"Absolutely no summoning!" Set insisted, putting her metaphorical foot down while also stamping one actual sandal against Talya's floorboards. There had been a time when such a gesture would have rocked the entire building with divine fury; now that motion was unintentionally cute. "I skirt enough rules and edicts simply being here myself without bringing anything else over to the mortal plane." She didn't add that she wasn't convinced she'd be able to adequately control a sufficiently nasty summoning long enough to avoid getting her head bitten off in a particularly humiliating fashion. She was about to note that at least the beach had sand - the dense foliage of the local forests didn't bother Set per se but it certainly wasn't her favoured environment - when Dimitri raised a more serious point. "Ah. Well. I make no secret of my fluid nature on the internets but the subject did not exactly come up this afternoon. ...do you expect that should matter?" Set hadn't even considered that aspect of things until the Russian had mentioned it. Much of the time she didn't feel strongly about her gender identity one way or the other but just as often she did. She supposed that was sufficiently unusual in the current social climate to be a concern.
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"Oh hey, ping pong balls sounds way safer than what I was thinking, sure," Erik agreed enthusiastically and it took a good beat or two for Raina to work out that he was pulling her leg a bit. Looking a little more serious he checked the tips of the throwing knives on his way back over to Talya's side, making sure they were undamaged before putting them away in their proper place. "She's absolutely right about not relying too heavily on your powers. Most of us make out pretty well without fireballs, after all." Considering for a moment he sighed and added, "That said, I do have a friend who runs a shop that might have the sort of thing you're talking about. Silberman's Books. I'd write the address down for you but I'm sure somebody would rather look it up online." He shot Merlin a meaningful look, arms folded across his chest. He wasn't sure how responsible it was to give a disenfranchised teen a potential source for explosive arcane might but he figured Lynn would be able to tell if Raina was planning anything genuinely bad. At least this way she'd have at least a few adults willing to give her a chance.
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Wise!
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"Well that's-- what?" Ellie agreed, switching gears mid-sentence and beginning to get annoyed with for frequently she was sounding confused that evening. It wouldn't have been that strange for Talya to be moving into one of the unoccupied smaller apartments on the building's second floor - although she'd previously gotten the impression that the blonde woman was quite well off that had been a few years back and fortunes could change - especially now that she was teaching classes there but Min made it sound like she was clearing out space in her own bedroom for the other woman. "Why...?" she asked slowly, giving her brother a narrow eyed look. Letting out a long breath, Erik planted his hands on his hips. "Heeeeey, who wants to hear more entertaining underwear related anecdotes from Steve, huh? Good times? Maybe? No?" Between the big man's obvious relief that the conversation had become less awkward and his sister's accusatory glare he wasn't feeling particularly compelled to have this particular conversation just then but a glance in Talya's direction outweighed that. He couldn't in good conscience let her keep feeling like she was their shameful secret, not because he didn't want to have an adult conversation. "Okay, so... listen. This is kind of complicated but-- Actually, no, it's really pretty simple, we-- So you know how sometimes-- I had a really good analogy for this earlier, give me a second..."
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"That would be outrageous!" Kimber exclaimed and from the way she clapped her hands and rose a good foot into the air, knees passing through the table as though it were thing air, it certainly seemed to have a positive connotation. "It's even super easy for me to get down to the apartments of the other floors, I can just fly right through the floors!" Realizing a moment later that that might not be the most reassuring thought she hastily added, "But, I mean, I'd call ahead first or something, of course! I just mean if you need anything and want to hang out whenever you can just let me know and I can be there, easy! I don't really sleep at all; Indira either, which is part of why we're such good roommates, see!"
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"What? Hey, no," Erik objected, feeling like he trying to put out fires all over the room. Hurrying up after Talya he reached for her shoulder. "This isn't a 'blame' thing and even if it was I'm not about to let you fall on your damn sword or whatever." They both knew that was a bit of a double standard given his usual approach of throwing himself into the line of fire at a moment's notice but then perhaps that commonality explained part of the attraction. "Come on, we just need to explain everything to her. And probably Steve too. Ideally in a way that doesn't require actually explaining anything to either of them because this is gonna be really weeeiiird..." Groaning dejectedly he followed the largely retired thief up the stairs. "What? Hey, no!" Ellie responded to Steve's question with several rapid blinks and a reflexive step back that ended with her shoulder knocking into one of the cupboards. "Why would you-- Wait, why would you think that? Do you know something I don't?" the med student asked, eyes flicking to one side as she visibly reviewed her most recent interactions with her brother and his wife. "I mean she just had Mia, but... Oh Dios, maybe she is."
