Meeting of The Minds (Severina).

[Pyper]

Being random is better than being unique.

In essence, Charles had said this the night he picked her up at the edge of the woods. She nudged up in the crevice of a tree trunk to hide. The body of the man she unintentionally killed sprawled out underneath her. His unfortunate timing had paired them both at the same street corner. Leaving a corpse behind wasn't an option, it raised questions. It made people look into things. No sewer grate in sight forced alternative means of disposal. Ones that were unconventional, the same ones she wasn't familiar with. The woods was closer, and the brush provided shadows.

She hid in the base of a tree not solely from the humans that would have stopped their travels to find a short blond standing over the body of a man three times her size. The fae rustled in the recesses of gnarled branches and dead vegetation. Ending up with a torn open throat had not been part of that night's goal. Many belonging to the Altaire had grown aware of Lucretia's draw to situations that endangered her well being. They never stopped worrying, but shock over her coming home with gouges running through her torso lost its finesse.

According to Dr. Proulx, developing a habitual set of routines aided in making concrete sense of the world. It was how he had explained it. Time schedules dictating an hourly designated activity was something Lucretia had known for years. Now she had freedom to create her own schedule and decide what things were plotted in those time slots. Lately, tinkering with projects had become increasingly time consuming; between gathering materials, which meant hunting, and improvising what pieces would suit the specific purpose she intended took whole nights. On the night Doc had alluded to randomness overpowering unique qualities, routines didn't fit into the concept. This was the night the Altaire breached the preconceived notion of maintaining strict, and predictable activities.

The snow didn't melt the way that it should have when the microscopic, intricate white fall hit her skin. She liked to bring up the sleeve of her coat to examine their designs. Someone once said - in a holiday related television program - that no two flakes were the same in their likeness. Pyper wanted to test this hypothesis herself and so from the doors to the Flats until her feet hit the rusted edges of the sewer grate, the comparison from one to the other proved the theory true. They had similarities but none were identical, not like the copies she reproduced in her home.

The maze of opened tunnels enticed a routine walk through. Under normal instances, she would end up resurfacing in Wickbridge. Tonight was about diverting from what came instinctively. Instead of heading southwest, the soft padding of her moccasins took her west. At any of the turns, she chose the one that headed north and two east turns from there. Lucretia stopped after the third sewer opening she came across, and climbed the ladder to emerge from the winding pits of Harper Rock. Zero recognition registered from absorbing the landmarks that rose up and enclosed on all sides of the man hole.

It was perfect.

[Severina]

It was a normal night for Severina.

Of course, normal is a comparative, highly subjective term. For everyone, though especially so for someone like her. It could be safely assumed that a prevalent number would wake as the sun dipped below the horizon, rouse themselves from wherever they were resting and go out on the hunt, feeling the need to feed. This achieved, they would then, quite possibly, embark on whatever business was required of them, whether that be continued hunting, exploring, general thievery or anything else that kept them occupied.

For Sev, though these things all applied, they did so in the most vague of senses. She did not so much wake up as she did go from horizontal to vertical in the blink of an eye, trying to work out where on earth she was at that precise moment. Also who she was. On rare occasions she might actually know. Feeding… well, she had issues with that. It started with trying to be stealthy enough to not get caught. When one is challenged in the height department and favours wandering barefoot, going for the throat is… tricky.

The fact that she faints at the sight of blood is an issue, also.

Nominally, she was an explorer, though that was through no design of her own. Generally her explorations involved her getting geographically lost whilst lost in thought. She simply wandered, drifting listlessly, around the city. From time to time she would end up in a location that was privately owned, locked or even entirely out of bounds. Had she the ability to reason in such a way, she might consider that this most likely made her a thief. More than that, what she considered ‘talking to her computer friends’ would be what most would refer to as ‘hacking’.

Her lack of conventionality was mentioned previously.

So it was that this night saw her wandering through the area that, unknown to her, was called Gullsborough. It had been a fairly uneventful night thus far. Her ‘computer friends’ had nothing of worth to tell her, the buildings she’d wandered aimlessly into were sorely lacking in anything worth borrowing for an indeterminate period of time. The one thing that stood out was the heavily tattooed young chap who had offered to buy some of her blood. In her mind she had turned him down gently but politely before taking her leave as quickly as she was able.

She had actually said ‘a tempest, by razor departing’. She had been smiling at the time, however, so at least there was that.

Continuing on her way, passing closed businesses and deserted parks, she began to hum to herself, sadly, tunelessly. After a while, she began to twirl as she walked, almost as though she were replaying, acting out, a scene from Singin’ in the Rain a little unsteadily. Though she was, almost always, lost in her own little world, slightly removed from what the rest of us might know as reality, she still noticed when something especially strange happened. Especially if it happened right in front of her.

Especially when it seemed as though someone had appeared out of nowhere and was suddenly standing in front of her in the middle of the road, right where she had been about to jump into a puddle that was not actually there. Trying to arrest her forward momentum, Sev slipped, flailed and consequently fell forwards.

Picking herself up she mumbled, “Camus, by storm, ivory descended.”

She noticed that the palm of her hand was leaking blood. Her eyes rolled back and she fell to the pavement once more. As first impressions go, this probably was not one of the best history had ever known.

[Pyper]

Selective blockage prevented the one with the alias Pyper from going back to the night she first stumbled onto Harper Rock from Cheyenne, Wyoming. What roads that she took had no names, and most of the time there were no roads. It meant vehicles traveled frequently enough to make their existence an almost essential for modern man treks. She stuck to thickets of closely crowded trees instead. Eventually distinctions that set one tree apart from another stop standing out and they became identical erections of growth for acres of untouched earth. The vines were the only variant vegetation that prided themselves on weaving perpendicular and forming an extravagant mileage of obstacles that tripped her up. More times, she too, found herself meeting in a belly flop across the bed of dead leaves and compact dirt. So a bud of empathy, in an obscure vestibule of her psyche, will take hold and flourish with a startling rapidity when she saw the waverer make a harsh reunion with the pavement.

Her words, they were English words but their meaning didn't reach. None of it made sense, no matter how much every individual word was dissected. She tried pairs, because together, they could have shed light on the basic gist of what the stranger was saying to her. 'Ivory descended,' stuck, being the only thing to hit a target and stay with a firm penetration. The phrase reminded her of the sun, that flaming dot that enslaved humankind to its harmful rays; it blessed them with its heat and continued their existence while at once, working through barriers to exterminate them. A hand rose from its place, limp at her side and swaying even with a gentle current of wind. It wasn't aware it was wrinkling the shirt that was chosen to hide the ink that was permanently caked into the layers of pale dermis. How did she know about the tattoo? The Altaire had never met this person. No one but the artist himself was privy to its existence in person or in passing, yet.

At the moment Pyper would slight the misconstrued string of words with a retort that dismissed the erroneous inference to her secret, blood interrupted and broke down the stability of the other woman. The bud planted then. What was she? Pyper's mind unfurled from its stasis and snagged onto the image of the unknown and read what was in the locked boxes of her mind. The burns climbed up her upper appendages, the heat licked the marrow in her bones. Flakes of skin came off, a more translucent sibling to snow. Pyper knew these sensations, they were a comfort to her; the seedling branched out, thickened itself and adapted.

Charles helped her dispose of a body but the information deterred that from being the same course of action she took in order to rectify this particular situation. She's never killed a vampire before, and the Shadow Realm was still a dark place that everyone knew and spoke of. To a point, and maybe that had been because she might show a morbid interest in a place of monotonous horror. It was a Hell that they could claw their way back from, but it wasn't going to ensure that they themselves would remain what they branded themselves to be. The Realm changed people, it was talked about but only to steer the youngest vampires (most of the time) from obsessing over the mystery. This one, was more immediate and promised more immediate self gratification with it.

People would stare, if they stayed where they were. One girl looking at an unconscious counterpart on the side of the road. They would ask questions, questions she couldn't answer without exposing herself, exposing this one too and everyone else. Phoenix's temper may reach new levels if this happened and Pyper's fixation with pleasing her sire awakened a cloud of clarity, enough to actively utilize common sense. The body had to be moved out of sight, away from other eyes. There wasn't a building that wouldn't have people and the routes that police were given in this area she hadn't imprinted in order to logically surmise the situation to best draw a reasonable solution. The option that spoke to her immediately was the worn grate she just popped out of to explore the surface and air out her clothes of the sewer fungi scent that clung to her.

With a misleading tender touch, both hands clawed around the wrists of the new acquaintance and a series of over compensatory scooted the both of them to the circular metal cover. While the unnamed body was rested at the edge, the edges of her fingers pried the top off, breaking the nails that had been becoming too long. This was a compromise to biting them, which she's since learned was a bad habit from the pointed looks thrown in her direction at stores. Breaking it had become the plan after thorough research had been laid out and run through at the glowing screen of her desktop at home.

She typed:

[ Why do people bite their nails? ]
[ Why do people not like when you bite your nails? ]
[ How do I stop from biting my nails? ]

The internet was open with its information and there were plenty of other people that asked the same questions that she had wanted. It answered these for her so that Phoenix wasn't subjected to her scrutiny of social norms. The internet maintained a relatively peaceful bridge of communication between the sire and her childe. It wasn't until the sewer entrance was secure that she nudged the collection of wispy organic material and frail clothing from her shoulder to position relatively flush with the sewer walls that she relaxed. Should she stay? Pyper would want someone to stay with her. Not for emotional or mental reparations but for an objective explanation. Her location. How to get home again. The shoulder that the body slung over it rolled in its socket. The woman hadn't been heavy but then her joints weren't accustomed to having additional weight bearing down on it.

It's in this time now, that the Telepath sits across from the unconscious and collects mounds of sewer fungi to put into her pockets. Someone - her mind kept saying Kyrian - needed these, had specifically asked for them to be saved. If it wasn't Kyrian, then perhaps someone else would need the deposits of fungal birth.

[Severina]

It was dark when she came to once more, which was a little odd, and Sev knew a thing or two about oddness in general, albeit in a fairly abstract way. Usually it only went dark before she passed out. As curses went, being deathly afraid of blood when you’re a vampire ranks right up there with the worst of them. It did have its advantages when it came with blending in with humanity - who would expect a vampire to faint at the sight of the very thing that sustained them? - but for her, her own personality far outweighed that bonus.

Rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms, she looked about her, blowing hair out of her face rather haphazardly. As far as she could make out with the limited information available to her, she was in the sewers. She had no idea how she had gotten there, but that in itself was hardly unusual. Just knowing roughly where she was in the first place was a step up on most nights. And, on the plus side, it was unlikely that she was going to get caught in the sun down here, as had happened on occasion before.

She sat up with some effort, wincing a little as the bumps and bruises she had picked up when she fainted made their presence known, rather like old friends turning up on your doorstep at godawful o’clock in the morning. For some reason, her wrists were killing her too. She had no idea how that one had happened, though she suspected it had something to do with how she had found herself in the sewer tunnels. Which reminded her. Where had the waifish blonde girl gone?

Sev turned on the spot slowly, still sitting in the tunnel, squinting at the shadows as she rubbed at her sore head. Naturally, her new acquaintance (friend, to her mind) was behind her, leaning against the wall. And… stuffing her pockets with mushrooms. She wasn’t one to judge, though, and simply accepted it, assuming that her companion had a similar arrangement with the fungi to the one she had with zombie ears. They did, after all, make spectacular presents. Everyone was always saying things like ‘lend me a hand’ after all, and ears were better than hands. Hands can’t hear things, and most people have enough hands to begin with.

This was a prime example of Sev Logic.

She stood, finally, a little unsteadily and smoothed out her skirt. She’d seen Zoey do it, and so she figured that it was the thing to do. Turning, she faced her new friend and pointed to herself.

“Sev,” she said with a lopsided grin. She pointed across the tunnel, “You?”