Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:jacksonville_journal [2026/02/18 17:24] – [The Talks] Bryan Stephens
+++ game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:jacksonville_journal [2026/04/16 15:02] (current) – [05 Understandings] Bryan Stephens
@@ Line 3544: / Line 3544: @@
 They don’t park close. Never park close.
+{{:game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:bell_with_ball.png?400 |}}
 Sam eases the truck down the street with the headlights off for the last stretch, letting porch lights and moon glow do the work. They pull into a dark pocket between two houses, half screened by a stand of live oaks, Spanish moss hanging like wet thread. Somewhere nearby, an AC unit kicks on with a low mechanical sigh, and the whole block smells like hot mulch.
@@ Line 3570: / Line 3572: @@
 //“I can.”// Weilin pulls a device out of her brown leather satchel. It’s a short brass cylinder, about the length of her palm, with a knurled grip and a thin collar of etched calibration marks that look half like engineering tick marks and half like a tiny prayer wheel. Copper filigree wraps the body in clean spirals, interrupted by little insets of dark ceramic and a single sliver of glass that holds a faint internal glow...not bright, not theatrical, just the soft indication of something awake.
+{{ :game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:04c_01_weilin_picking_lock.png?400|}}
 The Etherite mage crouches, sets the cylinder against the keyway, and gives the collar a slow quarter-turn. The device doesn’t whine or chirp...it answers with a faint, polite vibration, like a watch ticking under skin. For a second the metal seems to listen. You can almost imagine it mapping tolerances...pin heights, tension, wear...reading the lock the way a diagnostic probe reads a circuit. The internal core spins in tiny increments, not forcing anything, coaxing it...pressure, release, pressure, release...until the lock gives a soft, satisfied click and the bolt slides back as if it had decided compliance was the simplest version of reality.
@@ Line 3598: / Line 3603: @@
 Jessie drops to Sam’s side, hands already moving. He pulls out a small tin and flicks it open with his thumb, revealing a tablet the color of dried honey. //“Good thing I made these to dissolve on the tongue.”// He slides it into Sam’s mouth, presses lightly under Sam’s jaw, and the Life magick follows...quiet, surgical, a push against the body’s failing rhythm.
+{{:game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:04c_05_unconcious_lock.png?400 |}}
 //“Time to wake up now.”//
@@ Line 3740: / Line 3747: @@
 When she finishes, she double-seals everything, wipes her gloves with an alcohol pad, and pulls them off inside-out. She tucks the samples deep into her bag like contraband,
+{{:game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:jessie_out_back.png?400 |}}
 While Bell works, Sam and Josh do what they have to do to make sure nobody else comes looking in the right direction. They keep it broad, keep it plausible...an accident, a tragedy, nothing worth a deeper dig. Josh moves through the house with that EMT-and-soldier efficiency, eyes scanning for anything that would scream murder or intrusion instead of misfortune. He nudges a tipped canister where it could have fallen on its own, cracks a line here, shifts a tool there, building a story with small, believable imperfections. Sam follows behind him like the second hand of a clock, watching angles, listening for neighborhood noise, thinking three steps ahead about what the fire marshal will say, what the insurance report will look like, what a bored cop might fixate on if the narrative isn’t simple enough.
@@ Line 3780: / Line 3789: @@
 And they still don’t know what is going on.
+===== 05 Understandings =====
+|Game Date|02/08/26|
+|Campaign Dates|6/22 - 7/11|
+==== Back to the Mundane ====
+The drive back is mostly silent until Jessie jerks awake. His speech is still unsteady, and he sways a little as he talks.
+//"Dude! I know how to get your wood!"// he says to Sam. //"It’s easy! Weilin looks for lightning strikes in the swamp. Natural lightning is //your// kind of Forces, right? Then,"// he gestures toward the others, //"Bell and Josh do their thing. They find the right trees for you to look at. You go chop them down! Boom! Thunder staves!"//
+Bell wears half a grin and cannot help herself. //"And what, exactly, will be your part in all this?"//
+Jessie grins back as he slumps into Weilin. //"I have parachuting lessons I’ll be going to."// With that, the exhausted mage is asleep again.
+Back at Moon and Wave, Ray and Mae are already waiting for them at the employee drop-off. Mae takes one look at Jessie and moves in without panic, calm and efficient in the way only someone who knows him well can be. Ray steps in under one shoulder while Weilin quietly explains that Jessie is not drunk, only reeling... too much contact with a dying mind, too much strain, too fast. Mae nods once, accepting the explanation without needing more, and tells Bell that Ray already has the details of //"Breakfast All Day, Baby!"// in hand. Bell can come in late. Nobody argues.
+Weilin leads them upstairs and toward Jessie’s rooms, directing them not to the polished front of the suite but inward, toward the more private heart of it... the bedroom that opens into the sanctum space that is more truly his than any hotel office ever is. Ray gets Jessie to the bed with practiced care. Mae kneels beside him long enough to brush damp hair back from his forehead and make sure his breathing settles into something easy. Then she glances at the others and gives them the look that means the situation is handled. Ray heads back downstairs to keep morning from becoming anyone else’s problem. Mae stays. Weilin lingers only a moment longer before withdrawing. Jessie is safe, and that is enough for now.
+=== Bell ===
+{{ :game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:characters:bell_ets_tacobell.png?200|}}
+Bell leaves Jessie safely in the hands of his oldest friends and heads home, with a brief stop at Taco Bell. For once, Dad is not up waiting for her. Maggie Hollis is off today, and she and her husband are both sound asleep after a day together. Bell eats alone in the kitchen, thinking over the last few days.
+A lot has happened to her.
+At the start of this month, her parents are pushing her to get a job... any job. A second interview for a server position at a beach bar somehow turns into //this//. A whole new life. A secret life. It is, as her mother would say, awesome in the biblical sense.
+Awe-inspiring. Amazing. Terrifying. Unreal.
+Suddenly she is chasing zombies and demons and spending her time with three men who, despite all being under thirty, somehow act more like her father than most of the boys she knows. Even Weilin, who is not much older, feels composed in a way Bell still does not.
+//Time to grow up, Bell.//
+She snorts Pepsi up her nose trying not to laugh. She has mastery over Time, and now it is time to grow up. Mom would appreciate the joke if Bell could ever explain it to her. Jessie certainly would.
+//I am in the Cult of Ecstasy. Can’t exactly tell Mom and Dad that.//
+With that thought, Bell heads to bed. Tomorrow is not as big as today. It is only Monday. Only breakfast all day. Only another impossible life.
+=== Josh and Sam ===
+{{:game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:characters:sam_and_josh_talk.png?300 |}}
+Sam takes Josh to Rally Point and decides to crash there rather than make another hour-long drive home. Both former military men are asleep in moments.
+In the morning, Sam wakes to the smell of coffee, toast, and bacon. Josh is already moving around the kitchen like he has been awake for hours.
+//"What do you think?"// Sam asks, grabbing a cup and a bite without even sitting down.
+//"This no-man’s-land seems to have a lot going on,"// Josh says. //"Jessie is used to peace in his little domain. That’s over. Feels like Alecto ripped the cover off things. Or maybe Bell’s Awakening did. Maybe both."// He drinks his Red Bull while the coffee sits untouched in front of him. The coffee is for Sam. //"You and I got ordered here. The brass hats know something is going on, and we are in the dark as usual."//
+//"Feels like we never left the service. Just answering to different people."// Sam pauses, then adds, //"Less accountable people."//
+Both men chuckle at that.
+They talk a little longer, and the conversation turns to the others. Jessie, they agree, is the center of gravity whether he intends to be or not... all charm, instinct, and force of will, a man used to shaping a room and now learning that some rooms push back. Sam thinks Jessie is bolder than is healthy, but he respects that he keeps moving toward the danger instead of away from it. Josh is less romantic about him. He sees a gifted man who has been operating on home turf and now needs to adjust to a field where the threats are real, mobile, and patient. Still, neither of them doubts Jessie will adapt. Men like that always do.
+Bell and Weilin strike them both as opposites that somehow fit the same machine. Bell is young, quick, sharp, and still becoming herself in real time, but she has guts and far better instincts than she knows. Weilin is the most composed of the lot on the surface... brilliant, exacting, and always thinking three steps farther out than anyone else. Sam trusts her mind. Josh trusts her discipline. As for Sam and Josh themselves, neither bothers to say much. They both know the type of role they fill. When things get strange, they are the men who plant their feet and help the others survive it.
+Breakfast done, Sam heads home to change and get ready for work, giving himself time to think. Jessie has a good suggestion about how to find powerful wood. At least the lightning records. Hell, Sam has used that kind of tracking himself for fires. He settles on a plan. This week, on his day off, he will head into the woods and use strike records to find the right trees. That should help him identify the best wood for staves. After that, he can turn back to the rest of the repairs on the house.
+//"And I’ve got to whip up some field potions,"// he says as he pulls into the driveway and feels the node in the back like a living thing at the edge of awareness. //"And maybe have the crew over for a cookout. No reason for Jessie to always be the host."//
+Josh heads out after Sam and makes his way to work for another 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. shift. The service has settled on his team. Although he is new, experience has made him the natural lead. His partners are already getting ready when he arrives.
+//"Well, well,"// says Raj, //"you usually beat us here. Slowing down in your old age?"//
+//"If you want to run laps with me until one of us drops, you just let me know. Winner buys beer for the other for the next year."//
+Raj raises both hands in surrender. //"I’ll pass on that, boss."//
+Marsha just shakes her head, though she is grinning despite herself.
+As Josh slides into the passenger seat, he thinks again about the crew.
+{{ :game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:npcs:joshs_team.png?400|}}
+Marsha Kincaid is young, blonde, blue-eyed, and carries the clean, practical look of someone already dressing for the job she means to master. There is intelligence in the way she listens and earnestness in the way she approaches every call. Fully trained but still new to life as a certified EMT, she carries that early-career mixture of competence and edge... confident in what she knows, careful in what she does not, and quietly determined not to be the weak link on the truck. Patients tend to trust her quickly. Josh understands why.
+He remembers being that earnest once. It feels like another life.
+Venkatesh //"Raj"// Narayanan looks every bit the son of Indian immigrants, with dark features and an easygoing presence, but his neutral Florida accent catches people off guard every time. Raised in Melbourne, he has the laid-back rhythm of someone who grew up around heat, flat roads, and no reason to hurry unless the radio says otherwise. Raj’s whole energy is relaxed and sunworn. Stress does not seem to stick to him. That steadiness does as much for the mood in the ambulance as anything said over the headset.
+The day is uneventful as EMT days go, which means it is just a Monday for them while it is the worst day of someone else’s life. A tourist with sunstroke. A teenage girl with an asthma attack. A father of two with a possible heart attack. Everyone makes it. Josh sees no hard face in the mirror. Overall, a good day.
+=== Weilin ===
+Weilin is still awake after getting Jessie to bed, ruminating on the past week. Calculating might be the better word. Formulae sit open on her screens. Models. Notes. Questions. How does it all fit together?
+She misses the chiming from her tablet until Lucky-Chan finally speaks.
+//"Xīn gān, I might remind you that, bright as you are, you actually have to work on school once in a while."//
+//Xīn gān//... dear heart. Her grandfather’s term for her. Lucky-Chan uses it when he wants her attention and knows exactly how to get it.
+Weilin groans. School. It seems so unimportant now. Since her Awakening in March, the ordinary world keeps feeling more and more like cardboard scenery. She is in real danger of falling behind, and only her extraordinary intelligence has allowed her to keep pace at all. Well... that, and a far more profound understanding of the universe than her classmates could possibly imagine.
+//"I suppose I need to spend some time on my project."//
+//"Yes. There are thirty-seven emails from your teammates asking for your input on the capacitor structure. Mateo notes there is no way he or Ananya can make this work. You also have five emails from Dr. van Rensburg."//
+//"Can’t you just answer them?"// Weilin says, rubbing at her face.
+Lucky-Chan somehow manages to look offended despite being an animated projection. //"No. First, I know nothing about how energy works as you understand it. I chase it, play with it, and eat it. Second, you do not want me telling your advisor what I think of him. And third, I am not your digital agent. I am your companion."// He shifts into a regal, frankly snobbish pose. //"You are fortunate that I even mention your emails."//
+Weilin tries not to laugh. //"Fine. Bed now. Emails and work in the morning."//
+By six that evening, she has spent the whole day buried in the project with the same relentless focus she usually reserves for far stranger problems. What begins as reluctant email triage turns into a full day of hard, brilliant work... annotated schematics across multiple screens, simulation runs cycling, capacitor geometries revised and discarded and rebuilt. Mateo and Ananya receive more than a few quick answers. They get a flood of sharp insight, elegant corrections, and entirely new possibilities that pull the project back into motion. By late afternoon, Weilin is deep in the problem, hair half-tamed, coffee gone cold, working at that impossible edge where ordinary doctoral research almost looks like sorcery... except this time the miracle stays, barely, within the rules of the mundane world.
+=== Jessie ===
+{{:game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:jessie_meditates.png?300 |}}
+Jessie sleeps late. Mae is already gone to work by the time he fully wakes. The sleep helps, but the jumble in his mind remains.
+//Meditation.//
+The thought comes easily. Jessie meditates every morning. This time it is longer.
+He sits on the balcony in the already rising heat, sunlight pouring over him. Sweating feels appropriate somehow, a fitting way to sort out one’s mind from death... a death he pushes a man into. At first it is normal. Normal centering. Normal connection. But today that is only the starting point. Today he sorts through the last thoughts of Taylor.
+He eases toward the memory of him... not the broken body, but the living pattern Jessie touches at the end. Fragments come first.
+Green. Every kind of green. Sunlight turning into life. Soil under fingernails. Half-dead plants coaxed back on windowsills and porches. The quiet comfort of growing things because people are rarely kind enough. Taylor is lonely for a long time. Not dramatically. Just persistently. The kind of loneliness that becomes climate.
+Then high school. Drugs. Drift. A boy already half outside the circle finding a chemical shortcut to belonging. Somewhere in all of that, his powers begin to stir. Small things at first. Intuition. Influence. Plants responding to him. No teacher. No guidance. No one to tell him what he is becoming.
+Then Tamera.
+That lands in Jessie’s mind with cold certainty. Taylor finds the drug through her. It gives him power, but it also opens him. Jessie feels that truth as clearly as a hand around his wrist. This is not just intoxication. Not just enhancement. The drug makes Taylor porous. Something vegetal finds its way in through the high... some kind of plant network, vast and patient, feeding while it gives him power in return.
+Jessie’s breathing deepens.
+He sees it more clearly now. Taylor is still learning. Still raw. He finds the shortcut before he finds discipline. The drug boosts his magick, and the one-shot devices make him feel strong, capable, chosen. But the intrusions worsen. It becomes harder and harder for him to stay fully himself. The more he feeds the drug, the more the thing behind it feeds on him. It grows in his mind. It turns hunger, anger, and loneliness into roots. He is not innocent. He is not harmless. But he is being twisted.
+Taylor is not the root. He is growth pushed in the wrong direction. Used. Fed. Encouraged to bloom into something monstrous by people standing safely behind it.
+Jessie opens his eyes and stares out at the water.
+//"Tamera."//
+The name settles into place. The face he could not quite make out in the darkness on the golf course is clear in Taylor’s memory now. Recognition.
+//"I know her."//
+A party. His parents. Her parents. Two tag-along twenty-year-olds from well-off families, bored and orbiting the same world. She is friendly enough. Selling drugs now?
+Jessie stays there another moment, sweat beading and then rolling down his back. Then he rises. Before stepping inside, he speaks once to the dead man, quiet enough that only the sea might hear it.
+//"You should have had someone sooner."//
+==== Monday Meetings ====
+{{ :game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:places:beachbacon.png?250|}}
+Everyone gathers in Jessie’s suite after six to discuss what they know.
+Bell’s //Breakfast All Day, Baby!// was a success. Built on the simple promise that nobody on vacation should have to miss the best meal of the day just because the clock said otherwise, it landed exactly the way Jessie hoped. Breakfast ran from open to close with a playful, indulgent menu... omelets, waffles, French toast, breakfast sliders, shrimp and grits, and sweet specials that shifted through the day. Calloway’s Castaways joined in fully with its own breakfast features while still keeping the regular menu available, giving the whole thing a looser beach-bar energy alongside the hotel’s more polished brunch feel.
+The signature item was Beach Bacon... thick-cut bacon glazed in rotating styles like candied, maple-bourbon, and spicy chili, served in baskets and as add-ons to almost everything. Kids got pancake stacks, waffle bars, and breakfast taco kits. Adults started the day with mimosas and Bloody Marys, then eased into richer and more creative breakfast cocktails as the hours rolled on. It was exactly the sort of thing Jessie wanted... taking a simple idea and turning it into an experience that gave families, couples, and day-drinkers permission to relax, indulge, and happily ignore what time breakfast was supposed to end.
+Sam and Josh have ordinary workdays and are more than happy to find leftover Beach Bacon waiting for them As Jessie explains what he discovers in Taylor’s mind, the cabal is struck by how fully Jessie seems back in form. Gone is the shakiness, the drift, the sense of psychic recoil from the night before. This is the man they have all grown used to in just three weeks... confident, focused, and entirely in command.
+//"S, I think we need to learn more about Tamera and Soma. I don’t think she recognized me any more than I recognized her out on the golf course, so I plan to reach out and try to set up dinner. Something about mutual possibilities between Moon and Wave and Soma. I’ll make contact in the morning. But we do this after the Fourth next weekend. I’ve got too much happening here, especially with the holiday falling on a Friday. I imagine Tamera is in the same boat."//
+//"If you’re doing that,"// Bell says, //"I want an open line to the conversation on Weilin’s phone app all dinner. And I want us nearby in case something goes sideways."//
+Jessie sees the others nodding. In the past, he might have been content to let Ray linger in the vicinity, but this feels like a different kind of risk.
+//"Yeah,"// he says. //"Good ideas. Maybe we get a couple of normal weeks first."//
+//"Someday we have to look into that box more,"// Sam says, eyes bright in a way that makes clear he means sooner rather than later.
+//"Yeah, but let’s tackle the immediate stuff first,"// Josh replies.
+==== Weekly Activity ====
+=== Staves and Potions ===
+{{:game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:characters:potion_making.png?250 |}}
+Over the next week and a half, Sam follows through on Jessie’s suggestion. On his day off, he heads out with strike maps, ranger instincts, and a sense for the land that turns data into something more intuitive once his boots are in the mud. Finding the trees is not quick work. Some have split too badly when the lightning hit. Some are half-rotted or wrong in the grain. But a few stand out the moment he puts a hand to them -  trees that took the strike and held, changed by it without being ruined. He marks them, studies them, and starts cutting the right lengths with the quiet satisfaction of a man collecting the bones of future tools.
+The work leaves him sweaty, scratched up, and happier than he expected. It feels grounded in a way the last few weeks often do not. This is not zombies, psychic backlash, or weird boxes from the sea. This is wood, weather, judgment, and labor. By the end of it, Sam has a small but promising haul stacked and curing, each piece carrying the memory of storm in its grain. Driving home with the truck bed loaded, he finds himself thinking less about danger and more about making... staves, potions, repairs, a cookout, maybe even a little bit of stability for people who seem to need it as much as he does.
+Sam puts his hours to work with the same patient steadiness he brings to everything else. Some of that time goes into the staves. He does not rush them. He studies the wood grain, shaves it down by degrees, tests the weight in his hands, then works again until each piece begins to feel less like cut timber and more like something willing to carry purpose. The labor is physical, grounding...knife, rasp, sandpaper, the slow turn of wood under his palms. By the end of a long session, the floor around him is dusted with curls and fine powder, and the staff in his hands has begun to take on a clean, deliberate shape, sturdy without being crude. It is craft as meditation, each pass a way of quieting his thoughts while giving them somewhere useful to go.
+The rest of his attention turns toward smaller works with just as much care. Sam brews practical potions in careful batches, using herbs, resins, and mineral tinctures measured with a ranger’s field sense and a Verbena’s respect for living things. Nothing about it feels theatrical. It is workmanlike, almost understated, until the scent of crushed leaves, alcohol, and something sharper begins to fill the room. When each mixture is ready, he pours it into sturdy metal flasks instead of glass...durable, portable, meant to survive hard use and bad conditions. He lines them up once they are sealed, labeled in his own efficient way, each one another quiet preparation for whatever comes next. Between the shaping of the staves and the filling of the flasks, his days take on a rhythm of readiness...the kind built not on anxiety, but on the deep belief that skill, patience, and preparation are their own form of protection.
+=== Science! ===
+{{ :game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:characters:weilin_at_study.png?250|}}
+Over the next two weeks, Weilin finds a rhythm that almost feels sustainable... at least by her standards. Most mornings and afternoons at Rally Point are given over to her doctorate work, the mundane project on hybrid energy storage pulling real attention now that she has finally re-engaged. She works through capacitor structure models, battery buffering behavior, thermal stability, and material tradeoffs with a level of concentration that makes her teammates briefly wonder whether she has split into three people. Mateo and Ananya get drafts, corrections, design notes, and the occasional devastatingly concise comment that solves a problem they have been circling for days. Even Dr. van Rensburg’s emails become less of an irritation and more of a tolerable tax on progress. She does not love the work, not compared to what she has seen behind the world, but she does take a certain stern satisfaction in making the mundane behave.
+The rest of her time at Rally Point belongs to the real work. When the academic models are stable and sent off, she turns to her own notes, her devices, her sketches of ruptures and harmonics and impossible geometries. Surrounded by salvaged equipment, whiteboards, cables, and half-finished prototypes, she pushes deeper into the relationship between stored energy and patterned reality. Not just how to contain charge, but how structure itself might invite, resist, redirect, or disguise power. Some nights that means building. Some nights it means staring at equations until they stop being mathematics and start feeling like a language reality is using to hint back.
+As the days pass, something in her begins to feel slightly unmoored... not unstable, exactly, but stretched thin between understanding and revelation. She catches herself seeing the same shape in different places: in the branching paths of capacitor arrays, in the fracture-lines of cracked concrete, in the way extension cords cross the Rally Point floor, in the wake patterns of rainwater running off the loading dock. Circles are a fraction too wide. Angles feel suggestive. Numbers repeat with a quiet insistence that makes her pause. More than once she wakes with the certainty that she has solved something enormous in a dream, only to find her notebook filled with symbols, arrows, and phrases that almost make sense. Almost.
+There are flashes, too. Brief moments when her thoughts seem to leap ahead of themselves. While adjusting a test rig, she suddenly knows exactly which component will fail before it does. While rereading an old note from Dr. Ziv, she feels for half a second as though she is reading not one text but several versions of it layered atop each other, each written by a different future. Once, while Lucky-Chan idles on a nearby screen making soft digital noises of disapproval at her sleep schedule, she looks up at a field diagram on the wall and feels a sharp internal jolt... not pain, but recognition. As if she is very close to remembering something she has not yet learned.
+She does not talk much about those moments. She records them instead. Time. State of mind. What she is touching. What she is thinking. What the air smells like. Whether Lucky-Chan reacts. The scientist in her catalogs. The mage in her watches. Both understand that something is building.
+By the end of the two weeks, Weilin makes real progress in both worlds. Her doctoral project advances enough to satisfy her team and quiet her advisor for the moment, with a clearer path forward on the capacitor architecture and a renewed reputation for impossible usefulness. At the same time, her private research sharpens. Her notes grow denser, her theories bolder, and her instincts increasingly difficult to dismiss as mere intuition. She stands on the edge of something... tired, brilliant, and inwardly electric... with the distinct feeling that the world has begun leaning back toward her, preparing to answer.
+==== Dinner and a Club ====
+{{:game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:npcs:jessie_and_tamera_at_dinner.png?300 |}}
+It takes two weeks for Jessie to meet with Tamera, the Monday after the holiday. She responds to his outreach with clear enthusiasm. They meet at the Club at Sawgrass, of which Jack Calloway - and indeed Julian Calloway - are both members.
+Dinner is pleasant. The two of them trade old Jacksonville stories and bond easily over what it is like growing up in the shadow of successful parents. Jessie talks about his good fortune in acquiring Moon and Wave. Tamera talks about the satisfaction she takes in running Soma over roughly the same span of years. It is strange, really, that they never knew each other better. But then, they only ever crossed paths in passing. Tamera went to private school. They lived, and live, in overlapping but not identical circles.
+The odd thing is that Tamera seems entirely on the level. She appears to have no memory at all of being on the golf course at the //"boring charity gala Mom made me attend."// Jessie, with all of his practiced ability to read people, is stunned. He saw her there. Taylor saw her there. Quietly, carefully, Jessie risks a touch of her mind. If she is Awakened, the moment could become awkward very quickly.
+She is not.
+And yet she also showed no sleeper resistance from the magick performed by Taylor and Sam. Magick she does not even remember.
+She has been altered. Mentally. Jessie can see the shaping in her thoughts. This is done to her.
+Another pawn. Another victim.
+Jessie stays calm even as anger flashes hot in his chest. Time to end the evening.
+//"Let’s put work on something more formal,"// he says, glancing at his phone. //"Would Tuesday next week work?"//
+They set a time and head out. Jessie briefs the team on what he sees.
+//"I want to visit Soma this Friday night.”// A genuine smile, //”Weilin... do you want to go on a date with me?"//
+Bell does her homework. Soma is housed in an old Gothic church, and it has been a reasonably successful nightclub for a little over three years under Tamera’s management. Sam and Bell accompany Jessie and Weilin, while Josh elects to stay parked nearby as backup.
+There is a line to get in, but Jessie takes Weilin by the hand and walks straight to the front. The bouncer squares up in that automatic way men do when someone tries to skip procedure.
+//"Line starts back there, man."//
+Jessie smiles, easy and expensive. //"Tell Tamera Jessie Calloway is here. Old friend. I’d rather not make a scene in front of your customers."//
+The bouncer hesitates. Weilin says nothing, but her posture and expression give the impression that waiting in line is something that happens to other people. The guard looks them over again, decides the risk of being wrong is worse than the risk of asking, and steps inside to get someone.
+A few minutes later, Tamera appears at the door. Her smile is immediate, but Jessie catches the fraction of surprise behind it. Too quick for a normal person to notice. Not quick enough for him.
+//"Jessie,"// she says, laughing lightly. //"You really do not do anything halfway, do you?"//
+//"You know me. I was nearby, thought I’d stop in, show Weilin the place."//
+Tamera looks to Weilin, then back to Jessie. The warmth is there, but so is calculation now. //"Of course. Let them in."//
+Jessie smiles back, charming as ever, but something cold settles into place beneath that ease. She is surprised to see them. More than surprised. Worried, maybe. Not enough to refuse them, though. Strangeness. Again.
+Bell and Sam have to wait another forty minutes to get inside.
+Inside, the club is immediately striking. The old church bones are still there... vaulted ceilings, dark timber arches, long vertical lines drawing the eye upward, stone and carved wood still framing the space... but everything sacred in the old sense has been repurposed into appetite, motion, and spectacle. Lights move in layered color across old masonry. The former nave is now a dance floor packed shoulder to shoulder with bodies in summer clubwear. Sound rolls through the room in waves, bass reverberating through stone that was once built for choirs. The bar glows where an altar might once have stood, and the side aisles are now broken into lounge spaces, private seating, and shadowed pockets where people lean close to talk.
+Nothing about the place is goth despite the architecture. It is not black lipstick and funeral lace. It is a normal nightclub wearing the shell of a church... bright drinks, pressed shirts, short dresses, too much perfume, too much confidence, people looking for sex, status, distraction, or oblivion in proportions that shift by the minute. And to all four of the cabal, one thing becomes obvious almost immediately... drugs are being sold openly enough that anyone with trained eyes can see the pattern. Hands meet hands too quickly. Tiny exchanges vanish into palms, pockets, bras, waistbands. Weilin checks through her lenses and confirms it. No magick in the product at all. Just ordinary illegal commerce... Ecstasy, pressed meth pills, cocaine. Mundane poison in a profaned temple.
+{{ :game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:characters:jessie_and_weilin_dancing.png?300|}}
+They spread out naturally once they are inside, then circle back together on the dance floor. Jessie and Bell are naturals in the club environment. Bell has youth, instinct, and a willingness to let the rhythm take her. Jessie, of course, knows exactly how to inhabit a room like this... loose, smiling, sensual without trying too hard, always just aware enough of who is watching him. Sam is not a man with much clubbing in his history. His drinking has mostly happened in bars where military professionals go to get properly drunk and keep their stories close. But movement comes naturally to him anyway. There is something old and bodily in the way he dances... less performance than instinct, more animal than stylish. Before long, people are giving him space just to watch.
+Weilin takes longer. Free dancing does not come naturally to her, and for the first few songs a trained eye can see that she is running a routine in her head, matching steps and timing like a problem to be solved. But she is nimble, graceful, and quick to adapt. Jessie helps without making it obvious, drawing her into his rhythm rather than forcing her to imitate it. Over time, the movement loosens. Meanwhile Jessie drinks, accepts offered substances, and plays the part of a man gradually riding the edge of intoxication... but his body burns through it, and the inebriation remains an act so polished only his cabal would know the difference.
+After a time, Jessie asks to meet with Tamera. This time she refuses to come.
+//"Bell, time for you to do your thing,"// Jessie says, and his voice is sober now.
+Bell nods and produces a stylish crystal. After a moment she says, //"She is in the warehouse. We have to go through the kitchen to get there,”// which comes with a vaguely concerned look.
+{{:game_systems:world_of_darkness:mage:jacksonville:bell_with_ball.png?200 |}}
+Jessie grins and leads them toward the back. When challenged, the Calloway charm is in full effect. The kitchen staff, busy and overheated, buy his story about old friends and private business, and the four of them make their way into the warehouse.
+Josh leaves his car and starts his casual walk towards the back of Soma. Just in case.
+Tamera is coordinating shipments when Jessie approaches. He gives a brief prayer of thanks for Mae and then lets a slight sway enter his walk.
+//"Jessie! What are you doing back here?"//
+//"I need to talk to you. In private."//
+She directs the workers to keep moving, then steps aside with him.
+//"There are people selling drugs here, Tamera. Did you know that?"//
+Tamera sighs and studies Jessie like a woman taking the measure of a man who has just stepped into deeper water than he knows... or so she thinks.
+//"You know how it is, Jessie. You allow some of that, or they make trouble. I look the other way. I’m not the one doing it, and if somebody gets busted, that’s on them."//
+It makes sense. It is realistic. Quite convincing.
+It is also a lie.
+//"If you’re in trouble, Tamera..."// Jessie begins, but she cuts him off.
+//"Look, Jessie, I am very busy, and you need to go."//
+//"Sure."// Jessie turns as if to leave, then swivels back enough to catch her eyes.
+Contact.
+She is a distributor for outside sources, and she is fully willing. Her mental aura is still altered. Still asleep. Still a victim. Less innocent than before.
+Jessie acts every bit the man riding the wave of intoxication as he leads the others out. To anyone watching, Tamera included, he is in the curl... not too gone, not too sober, just where the night still feels perfect.
+Once they are back at the Moon and Wave, and Jessie has updated them cabal, he makes a proposal.
+//"I’m going to send her a letter. Have Ray use one of his contacts to get it into her personal mailbox. Say we can’t work together right now and that if she is in any trouble, I’ll help. Hard to intercept a hand-delivered letter. Beyond that, I want to see what Lucky-Chan turns up on our friend down south. We need to know a lot more before we paint a target on ourselves."//
+It is Friday night, and Jessie knows his absence from the Dolphin is being noticed, especially by regulars... Ashley most of all.
+//"It’s late, but I need to make an appearance at the Dolphin. They notice when I’m not there on weekends, and this is another Friday night."//
+The meeting breaks, and each member of the cabal heads back to their own place in the pattern. Peace for tonight.

Seenar.com

User Tools

Site Tools

Differences

Page Tools