Never Enough Time

[Kage] [Nightmares?]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Kage] There is enough cloudcover in Chicago that the moon, just beginning to sliver out've darkness, just beginning to wake [a creak (a crack)], is a hint of tarnished silver, of hazy lantern yellow, limning one of the clouds overhead, trickling through the smoke-condensed knot of cloud-fists.

There is an art supply store, where they sell gold-leaf and silver-leaf, an art supply store in the same little strip-mall as an old and dying gem lapidary, another store that's the equivalent of a Natural Wonders, a high-endish 99 cent store, and Kage went to all of these places for tools [of the trade. You know the trade. The trade that trades on things. The trade that is no trade at all. The trade that's all wanting and will and essentially mutable. The trade that people with nothing in common at all will perform utterly differently], and a small plastic yellow plastic bag joins a heavier and also thinner plastic bag of white on the passenger seat of Kage's big black truck.

There is an art supply store where they sell gold-leaf and silver-leaf, and it has closed, and see, there is a woman with red red hair by a black black truck just outside of it. The air is thick with rain; soupy, difficult to breathe - it wants to smoulder. Kage wants to smoke, but has been resisting, and distracted by resisting, the urge all day long. The shopping mall is desolate, or waxing toward desolation, much like the moon is waxing toward brightness (although desolation: must it be bright?).

This is a dilapidated part of the city, a part of the city shading toward dilapidation. Kage slams the passenger door shut, and circles around to the driver's side of her truck. Looks like it's going to rain. The rain probably won't bring moon's light all the way down to earth (honey and milk might sustain us), but it'd be nice if it did.

[Harvest Home] The moon is waxing, growing brighter, fuller-faced, thicker, opened eyes: she is Awakening; but this section of the city is fading. It is growing darker, growing dim, turning towards forgotten and over-run. The air is thick with rain, but doesn't hold the promise of breaking. The signs here are weathered, worn and peeling, shattered plastic over neon tubes, flicker-flack-flit lights that will not hold steady. Scuttle-trash hurries across the ground, spurned on by the wind, trapped close to the bodies of buildings, moving along until they either find a place on which to catch or gather enough momentum to break free.

A few overhead lights are still on in the art store, one over the section where they stock gold-leaf and silver-leaf. This one is on. Sickly, pale, wan, there's a greenish cast to the light it casts in the middle of the night. The others are warmer, almost orange-white, dreaming-colored, gentling hue. The shelves cast long and foreboding shadows across the floor.

The front door is locked. It rattles on its hinges if she shakes it to test. Bows in and out a little, but not enough to give.

This side of the parking lot is empty beyond her big demon-black, black-as-night, black-as-sin, blacker-than-coffee-black truck. The moon is wreathed in clouds tonight, the winds are slow and low but constant. Leaves rattle on nearby trees, shake together like marionette bones, clatter like voices, rough-hushed whispers.

It looks like it's going to rain, but it won't. Not until later in the evening. Not until the moon is just past overhead. Not until the winds have died down, held still for a moment, waited, waited, waited...

Then, it'll pour. Rain cats and dogs. Split the sky with light and thunder. Purple-white and claps of god-hands. Deafening. By then Kage will have probably given in to that cigarette; by then she will likely be home.

[Kage] This isn't the kind of place a slender, bones-strong but essentially breakable, smallish woman should stray on her own. A dark parking lot, may as well be a dark paring lot; a lot wot pares and whittles at humanity's lambs 'til they're not so swelling a herd any longer. There's no reason to trust that the shadows don't half-conceal some danger. There's absolutely no reason to trust that the shadows aren't dangerous, in and of themselves. Nails could've been dropped, and razorblades, broken glass, everything's just so broken, so close to breaking. Kage isn't thinking about that. Kage is not unaware of safety concerns, of common sense, in a place like this; Kage is also fearless, unafraid, too bold, and magic. That counts for something, for not straying towards too afraid.

As it happens, Kage did rattle the door in its frame, and slouch past the door to the window, proper, to get a good look inside, at the angled shadows, the lights, winking off, left on, before she went fishing for her keychain and her truckkey, before she compassed her truck and climbed into the driver's side door, turned the key in the ignition, and

woke some music back to life. The woman's expression, alone, is as inscrutable and expressive, as it ever is when she is in company. After all, she's almost always in company. Look, see? Kage is thinking about something she doesn't like thinking about, something more than cigarettes, something less, and the set of her chin is particularly imperious, even stubborn, and her jaw is slightly crooked, her wide mouth tugged into something that approaches a smile, but isn't even near. It's just a thoughtful bit of calligraphy, of body language.

God Is Gonna Cut You Down, Johnny Cash. The great, the late: He whose voice rasps good, when turned up to drown out darkness and autumn-coming and scuttering trash pieces and other things. The radio. Hello, radio. Her headlights come on: a flood of warmth for the sidewalk and the lot before her.

[Harvest Home] IT is the night before, and Kage is out gathering, out collecting, preparing to make tools, to make ready her tools, to make herself a ready tool : preparing for battle. Elsewhere in this broad-and-varied city, others do the same. A Singer-girl hand writes a letter, a just in case, a litany of things unsaid. They all prepare, in their own ways, draw down the last-night into their bones, where they can keep it safe.

Kage flicks the truck to life, and it sings out in the late, great voice. It is rough in all the right places, rasping and timeless. The radio. Hello, radio. Hello, Kage. Hello, Kage's big black truck. Hello, Him.

But this is the way of things: on a dark and soon-to-be stormy night, in a waning parking lot, in the belly of her big black beast, Kage is preparing to prepare. The radio crackles. It makes that scrolling sound, like a song parted, midway, almost like a zipper; it flickers, then goes on steady like it had before. When the next song comes on, it is God is Gonna Cut You Down. It's a good song for drowning out the waiting on rain, the waiting on doomsday.

In the light of her head beams, a plastic carrier bag floats past. It's blown by the wind, but slowly enough that she can see the undulation of its pale-thin skin as the air inside it changes, shifts, re-pressurizes, pushes. It takes seconds to pass from one edge of the headlight-flood to the other. Like a bird struggling to keep pace against the wind and ever so slowly losing ground.

But it doesn't struggle. And it doesn't yield like it ought to.

[Kage] [Doo-de-doo.]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 8, 9, 9, 9 (Success x 4 at target 6)

[Harvest Home] There is a storm coming but the air around Kage is unseasonably cool. It is chill; bone-deep, not teeth-chattering. Reach through your skin and skim a nail down your femur. Chills. Spine-shudder. Eerie. Nails on a chalkboard. Slow like suffocating, slow like stifling, slow. Slow. The air around her is heavy-thick and slow, cloying. Clinging. Like breathing thin-water; like a sleep-draught; slow.

[Kage] Kage pauses. Pausing is different from freeze. It lacks rigidity, it lacks overt tension; it doesn't touch on fear, or panic. Merely caution, or memory; merely consultation, or thoughtfulness. Pause, not freeze, not stop, not stay; just pause. Kage pauses. Her fingers on the radio dial. The music turned up so loud, there's a whine beneath the simple melody, the simple clapping, drumming, the underscore, like a pulse, like a pressure. Kage pauses when she becomes Aware of a pressure system moving in that is unnatural, something that cuts through her flesh and etches itself on her bones [like a word in Enochian, something inhuman and pure], something that sets the hairs on her arm standing to attention, the nape of her neck cold, a trickle.

Something that feels like that, before this day, and maybe it isn't connected at all. Then again; perhaps it is connected. Perhaps it's easily avoidable. Kage is Aware, but no more knowledgable. She takes her hand from the radio, and rests it on her bag, wherein another Orphan's gun is residing. The truck is idling in park, murmuring to itself, behind the clap, clapping of song, and Kage hums, underneath the music, hums, and focuses, and calls forth another sort've sight.

She's watching the plastic bag, and she's noticing how wrong it is: how it moves like silk underwater, not like a plastic bag, buffeted by a wind. Kage takes her hand out of her bag, and puts the truck into reverse instead, and has it fall back.

[We're going for Prime Sight/Watch the Weaving/WTF is going on rote, thank you. -1 practiced. -1 focus. -1 taking time.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 8, 8, 9 (Success x 3 at target 3)

[Harvest Home] This is wrong, but it does not feel corrupted. She does not sense, or see, or feel any touch of the Labyrinthine foe here. This slowness, this chill, this footsteps-on-her-grave shudder is not oily, not sooted, not twisted and gnarled. It is a relief, perhaps, to be only dealing with the oddity of the city and not the war brewing between cabals, the skirmish that has drawn them all in.

Like silk underwater, like loosed fabric in a slow breeze, like an exhalation (tired and weary [end of a long journey]) -- there is a seep of energy around the bag, in the sweep of Kage's headlights, in the pool of light that will slowly grow smaller as the truck shambles backwards in reverse.

The puddle is not contained to the sweep of her headlights, though. It has swept under the art-store and reached out into the asphalt of the parking lot. Tacky, like un-dried paint. Like tar-paper. Like a fly-trap. The things that move into it eddy slowly as they progress along their path. Overhead, the clouds move by on a normal trajectory; they seem to be time-lapse, sharp-quick by comparison.

There is no clear source, no Will pushing this forward. No adversary to know and name and conquer.

In the car, the music begins to slow. Johnny's voice distends, lowers, falls into a basso profundo with remarkable stamina. The bottom of the bass notes become something unheard, but just felt.

[Kage] This is something she's noticed since her Seeking, since she and He came to their new accord. It's easy, very, very easy to summon an Effect and hold it. Not always. But sometimes, like now -- it's hardly an effort at all, to make herself slantwise, wise and open-eyed. The Orphan doesn't experience Otherness (the sight of) only as radiance, pooling, spreading; a glimmer-gleam, gossamer-strong, invisible for a moment [in shadow] and then sharp and bright. Nope. Her roots show. The Orphan experiences it as a sensual thing: not just sight, but also sound; a hum, a song, the song, the underlying, discordant, no-longer-coherent thing.

You'd think it would be difficult to continue to act as a normal person, when Looking like this. But it isn't. These are just senses. This is just another way to experience the world. This is just natural. This is summoned, conjured, but what she's Seeing and Hearing isn't, and Johnny Cash begins to goooooooooooooo teeeeeeeeeellllllll thaaaaaaaat loooooooooonnnnnngue and Kage presses on the gas, jerking the truck back and veering out've the seepage, before it swallows the truck her liiiiiiiiiiiiaaaarrrrrr. Gooooooooo teeeeeellllllllll.

Then lower.

"What the..."

[Harvest Home] Kage backs the truck up, veers out of the seep, and for a moment it seems to be helping. The song speeds up, back to the familiar cadence, and the truck tires grab against the ground more surely.

Oh, well, that's a problem, see.

She'd been backing up, veering out, and all of that was like moving through molasses, through deep mud, through cold slurry. It was slowed, but then she found the edge of the puddle and the wheels grabbed and the veering was a bit more literal as she snapped into normal motion, as the rear wheels grabbed first and yanked her out.

It was like running along and hitting an unexpected path of moving-walkway. It pitches the leading edge (rear bumper) of the truck downward. Rocks the cab like bucking horse. Squeal of rubber on pavement. It's enough to make her hold fast the steering wheel, wonder at the precipitous nature of that veering (so carefully planned, no doubt). It gets the heart racing, just a little. Then she's free, and saying What the... and the seep is creeping up on her again.

Spreading outward.

The lights are off in the art store now. The in-dash radio's lights flicker, the sound crackles.

[Kage] [Dex! Do I fumble, or am I like, yup, I know where this shit is? ...just for Jess's edification in descriptiness.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 5, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Kage] Jesus. Her heart slams into her throat when the truck (no, baby, you don't want to do that, oh sweetheart, oh lover, oh baby) lurches like that and jolts and is suddenly, dangerously free, and white-knuckled, Kage pushes the truck (c'mon, c'moooon, don't, don't) back unto what little bit of lot is still free of seep. Behind her, the street. Empty, mostly, and behind her, more seep, time-slippage, whatever the Hell it is, and to the side as well, creeping, flowing, falling.

Kage puts the truck into park. The radio stays on, fizzing, spitting at her when the edge comes too close. A warning sign. And Kage reaches into one of the bags she's just bought, and her hand knows just where to find the silver chalk, and just how to open the package, peel plastic away from cardboard (hastily, let's be honest). Then she begins to, very carefully, sketch out lines on her dashboard. When she isn't drawing, she's watching the seepage, watching it eddy about the truck, suck it in, so it's very possible her lines aren't as straight as they might be. She knows she doesn't have the right knack, quite, to lock It out of her car,

and she thinks it's, mostly, coming from the art supply store, where there might be some poor sap (like, say, Kage) stuck in it,

and she knows she doesn't have time for this.

[Another rote. Entropy, this time, and Corr, using resonance-yness (Prime?) to pinpoint the, uh, epicenter of spill. Is it in fact the art supply store? What's the pattern to this crap? -1 practiced. -1 taking, badum, time. -1 foci.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 9, 10 (Success x 1 at target 3)

[Harvest Home] Kage is smart, like that. Using the radio as a warning. Giving herself the ability to do two things at once. There's a creativity to that, a brilliance. Sharp on her feet, quick with her thoughts, yes; nimble star-thing you are, Brightness.

She doesn't have the tools to lock it out, keep it away, push it back, but she can do what she's attempting, to find where it all begins, to trace the flow of it, the pattern of the seep, all the way back to the place from which it emanates.

Which is, indeed, that art store. Behind the locked door, under the flickering lights, in the aisle where the silver-leaf and gold-leaf stay. There's a ripple there, an upwelling, where the slowness seeps out of it. Like it is a thing. Like Slow were a flow, a column of pressure, like groundwater, like air through a tunnel, like magma, like tar. A thing pressed up out of the earth, squeezed between plates, squeezed like a tooth-paste tube all pinched in the middle. It blurbles and bubbles and oozes, the slowness. Tacky like tar, thick and syrupy, and then it spreads out in slow moving ripples, squishes under the door, drags out, draws out, thins in places and begins to cool further.

It's like sugar, like amber, when it cools it traps things in. Keeps them coldly. Keeps them still. There's a roach trapped in an eddy that hardened just beside the art-store door. She can feel it with this rote because it is dying. It's becoming dust again. Just dust. A mote trapped in the slow-time-slick.

[Kage] Ah, yes. Kage is smart and Kage is clever, clever Kage is, and also smart. Smart enough not to play with fire. Smart enough to go running when she thinks that there's no chance of surviving, principles intact. Smart enough to pretend like she knows what to do with a bunch of dead bodies on a front lawn of the perfect American house. Smart enough to be sought out for advice, and to give it, unasked, without causing offense ( - and that's not easy).

Kage is also smart enough to take a moment to send a text out. She knows only a couple of Time mages still in the city, and they're the ones she hits up. Time spill, slow. Trapped, plz advise. WTF. And maybe another, out to those who she -- relatively -- trusts, something simple, a message like, Difficulty, if not at X by Y pls be alarmed just not yet. And maybe that one, she waits before pressing, waits until the seepage has started taking her truck again, and maybe it gets lost in Time anyway, reaches else-people only when it's too, too late, many hours from now [whenever now is].

Kage brushes her hand across the dashboard, and undoes the arcane symbols [personal symbols, sigils]. Instead, she draws a door.

[Harvest Home] Those text messages go out, go out through the time-slow digital realm, begin to fray away from the usual patterns of send/receive, syn/ack, handshakes, packet-routing, all the usual ways that data flow. This comes in too slowly.

Somewhere a server gets a Syn.
Sends an Ack.
Sends a Syn.
Waits.
Waits.
Waits.
No acknolwedgment, closing connection.

The text message stop there, halted by a security safe-guard. The little bits of data the message carried are lost in transmission.

In a few hours, maybe, the same server receives an un-prompted Ack.
Error handling ignores it.

Where Kage is, the radio flickers again. And it is the same song. The same Johnny Cash rasp-song. The same slide-slip lowering of his voice, the bleeding out of the bass into tactile realms rather than auditory, and the crackle. Kage draws a door.

On the windscreen of the truck, fat rain drops begin to fall. They creep downward. She can see the leading edge of them, rounded as it is, connect with the glass. She can see them flatten, like little doughy pancakes, and then shatter-break. The wet spreads out, ripples, undulates, then succumbs to gravity and starts to slide down.

One here.

...

..

.

Another there.

[Kage] [Corr 3: Make a Door, Go Anywhere. Like the epicenter of spillage. Base Diff: 7. -1 taaaaking time, ahaha, so hilarious. -1 foci. +WP. No botching Corr effects, yo. Extending as necessary. What, 2 suxx needed?]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 2, 6 (Success x 1 at target 5) [WP]

[Kage] [Ah-hem.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 8, 9 (Success x 3 at target 6) [WP]

[Kage] Kage draws a door. And Kage draws hinges, and shrugs her bag, with her (some unstable Orphan's) gun, with some tools of her trade. And Kage presses her hand, palm down, a kiss for you, my fine black truck, a caress for your troubles, fingers splayed, against the center of it, and then Kage pushes. And when she pushes, she also pushes herself.

There is rain on the windshields, stroking down the glass, slow, slow, and Kage is glad that she understands the rain is moving slow, slow-ly, because perhaps she won't understand when she's in the midst of it. Or, worse: what if she still does, but that doesn't hurry anything up? What if the dying thing, the Entropy-caught thing, ashing away, knows it's dying in real-time? That's an unbearable thought.

The door opens at the center of the slippage; the door is just a symbol, and after a few moments of concentration, there is no red-haired woman in the black truck. Just the keys, dangling, and the rain, and for those who are very sensitive, a feeling of ardency, a burning that drains away.

[Kage] ooc: make that, 'with some tools of her trade, over her shoulder.' Ha.

[Harvest Home] It is a good thing that Kage thinks to switch off the ignition when her palm-pressed kiss good bye fades into something a little more forceful, until the big black truck is left with the memory of ardency, of amorousness, and even that is burning away too quickly to hold it through the dark, slow night.

The door at the epicenter opens into the aisle of art things that are both silver and gold, lustrous, that are gleaming in their packaging under the ailing green light. And it flickers, flickers, flickers, spits when she steps through, steps into the cold --

-- and it's a real cold here, bites into her ankles, chomps right on down on the wee little piggy-toes. It's cold and her feet are heavy when she lifts them. But the gold-leaf is 25% off (overstock sale!) and there's some neat upholstery buttons here, out of place, mis-shelved by someone earlier in the day.

There's a crack in the floor, in the middle of the aisle, where the cold seep is worst. And too her prime-sight it is the upwelling. A torn thing. A thing that must either run its course or be pulling back together somehow.

And the worst of it is that here, in the heart of it, in the eye of the storm, things seem to move normally. There's enough of a breeze to flutter the leaves and petals of the silk flowers at the end of the room. They do not slow-motion arc and drift like lazing. They move as she'd expected them. In real-time.

[Kage] Kage blinks. And when she blinks, maybe an hour goes by, or two. Kage blinks, and her eyelashes kiss her cheekbones, cast a shadow which is not demure, not even nearly, for all the line of her collar is, for all the set of her shoulders, so poised, so carelessly neat. Doesn't feel like hours, just feels like a blink. Kage frowns, too, and sinks down to the ground, crouching beside the crack which is more than just a crack in the tile. She touches the edge of it with her fingers, and considers the problem. It's a problem she can't affect, and though she searches herself for revelation, for sudden understanding, ah! Yes, this is how I affect this, there is no epiphany, and energy continues to leak out of the crack.

"Hello?" she calls out, just in case, while considering the problem, touching her fingers to her pulse, her hand against the crook of her neck and shoulder, canted to the side just so, pensive. "Hello - is anybody else in here?"

Because she doesn't have enough control over fate and fortune to spin the spell out unto its end, so that it's all dissipated, so that it's all withered-off into naught. That won't work. Because she can't touch Time at all; she can only be touched by it in the normal way. Because she can't even seal up matter, make it meld, erase flaws with a touch (soon [there was an Epiphany, there]). Means, well: she should maybe just try and leave the same way she came in; call in some cavalry, and let them deal with it. Except, except: this is the night before a battle; why have more than one person waste their resources untying a knot?

So, frowning, Kage stands up again (and it doesn't feel like it takes all night), then sets off to find the aisle with clay, or glue. Whichever comes first.

[Harvest Home] Hello? she calls, but there is no reply. The shop has been closed for hours. The shop has been closed all night. Outside, the rain is falling so hard that Kage cannot make her truck out across the parking lot. It sheets down like streaks of white-grey. She does not see the flicker of lightning or hear the clap of god-hand thunder.

There is clay, modeling clay and clay for throwing and some strange clay that when it's fired turns to silver. There is glue -- hobby glue, fabric glue, glue with glitter in it, hot glue for glue guns, less hot glue for child-safe glue guns, gluing things I broke back together glue, and gluing things so that they may never part again glue, super glue, krazy glue, model plane glue, rubber cement, Elmer's glue, paste. Oh, and glue sticks.

By the time she studies them all, the word Glue will no longer quite make sense. It will be a collection of letters, and the e will seem utterly unnecessary.

Somewhere in the parking lot, her truck's engine has gone cold. The keys have stopped swaying. The radio is still. The bed is filled with a layer of water, and the rain keeps coming down. Did Kage know that you cannot park overnight in this lot? No? Well the towing man knew, and he's waiting out the fifteen more minutes before he can hook up the big black beast and take it (slowly, so slowly) away.

[Kage] The lights are out. Aren't they? The lights are out, except for a couple, warm-honey, here and there, the kind of lights people just leave on, as if an employee forgot to switch off the final switch. The lights are out, and the shop is dim, and silent as shops are: a place, hushed, where people shouldn't be walking. Kage, however, walks; and she has to worry about security, doesn't she? Has to worry about cameras; art shops are usually shop-worn, old, not places for state-of-the-art, but still:

Before she finds the glue aisle, she finds an aisle of pens, and she grabs a dark blue one: blue -- the colour of loyalty; of fidelity; of cool things, and slumbering things. She looks toward the corners, looks for that telltale blinking red light, and then she grabs some super glue, some crazy glue, and hey, why not, some gorilla glue. It's just a symbol; it's not what's actually going to, if this scotch-tape idea works, hold the split closed. That'll be energy, pure and simple, diminishing as time goes by, and hopefully time'll go by and erode before time'll --

The point is this. Kage finds the glue aisle, and makes her choice, and then she returns to the crack, sits crosslegged. She starts to color the crack in with the pen. And as she does, she starts to cover it up.

[Base Diff 6. -1 taking time. -1 foci. Extend as necessary. -1 quint now, alas.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 6, 8, 9 (Success x 4 at target 4) [WP]

[Kage] [Extend-y.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 4, 4

[Kage]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Harvest Home] Kage colors in the crack. She colors it in and defines it sharply and begins to pull the space back together, to suture it, to seal it. If it is plastered over through her Will, perhaps that will give the rend time to mend, to heal, to stop spewing out slow-time like a sludge-spill. To stop the puddle from deepening.

It's cold, on the floor, beside this opening. It is cold and it bites not just into her toes now but drags its nail-tips down the knuckle bones in her hands. It's the kind of eerie cold that could snatch away her digits, dissect them down, carve runes into her finger bones and cast lots with them. It's Eerie. Uncomfortable. But she has enough Will to stay focused, to keep on track.

Outside, the towing man hitches the big black truck up to his bigger truck of blue and white. It pitches the cab at odd angles as two wheels raise off the ground. The yellow bag and the white bag on her seat shift. The smaller slides to the floor, gets caught under the seat. The water in the bed runs (ambles) for the tailgate, drips out in slow oozes. Her keys sway lazily.

The blue and white and black trucks leave, lights all a slow-flash. It takes time. It takes less time than mending the crack in the art-store.

[Kage] After the blue, after the bright, loyal vibrance, after the sea's shadow colour is full, is shadowed, and her second sight shows her too the way this overlays into otherness, the way the seam is being pressed together, re-shielded, re-sown, Kage uncaps the glue, and brushes it over the crack, fixative, be Fixed, stay, just there, just there. Like that.

A lock of hair escapes constraint, and brushes against her cheek instead. A lovely thing, and flushed; her hair. Blushing all the way to its roots with amory, with blood-gore dreaming, with heat-warm visions, right?

Fifteen minutes, maybe. Half an hour, tops. That's all. Maaaybe fortyfive minutes. Maybe.

[Harvest Home] Fifteen, thirty, forty-five tops...

... perhaps for Kage. Perhaps in Kage seconds and Kage minutes she could measure it thus. But Kage was nearest the seep, deepest in the slow time puddle, cuddled up close to the rift. And when it heals over again? The parking lot has filled, has emptied all over again again. The art store is still closed, but it is closed on Tuesdays, always; this is why she had come knocking on Monday, no doubt. It is still locked from the inside. There has been rain and it has come down hard, hard enough to knock some leaves from trees, to rip a banner half off the building across the way.

And it has dried over in the heat of the day.

There, above the horizon, undamped by any fist-like clouds, the sickle moon sails. She rises, like a gondola, a Cheshire Cat smile. And there is no hint of rain to come, and no hint of building storms. The night is clear.

And the parking lot empty. From here she cannot see the big black truck. From her she can see the space where she left it, keys in the ignition, not even idling. Dormant. Still.

[Kage] [Dox-y dox?]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 5, 5, 5, 6, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Kage] [Soak-y soak?]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 5, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)