[Ellie James] Ellie was doing her best to tidy up the tiny apartment she shared with Addie. She tried to be a tidy roommate normally, but she was doing a doubly detailed round of the apartment in anticipation of her best friend's arrival. It'd been a while since she'd seen Molly, and - more importantly - this would be the first time Molly had seen Ellie's new crash space since Fort Q had become ground zero. The apartment was tiny, but she didn't want Molly to think she and and Addie were miserable uncomfortable. A little cramped, perhaps, but not uncomfortable.
Finally, she heard an anticipated knock at the door, and hurried over to take a peek through the peep hole. Spotting Molly's face, she unlocked the door and pulled it open to hit Molly with a hug before the woman could even say hi.
[Molly Quincannon] The first reaction is, of course, an "OOMPH!" as she is pounce-hugged. It wanted to be a 'hi', it really did, but the wind got knocked out of her by pounce-hugging. When the hugging eases up a little bit, she says, "Hi. I come bearing culinary experiments. Can I come in?" She is, of course, already peering around Ellie at the postage-stamp-sized flat. "S'nice," she says. "Cosy. You guys are okay for stuff, right?"
[Ellie James] Ellie giggled at the squished expression on Molly's face, and stepped back to gesture grandly at her tiny living space. "Enter, enter. Welcome to my closet." She closed and relocked the door once Molly was inside.
"It's nice enough. And we're okay. Freecycle is awesome. Feel free to sprawl on the futon, it's my bed. Addie sleeps on the sofa. I keep telling her I don't mind her pulling out the sofa bed, but she just sleeps on the sofa anyway." She tried to figure out what Molly had brought with her. "What kind of experiment?"
[Molly Quincannon] What Molly brought with her is a cooler-style picnic bag which, when she opens it, is full of Tupperware containers of various bits and pieces. "Peach cobbler, for the most part. There's honey and whiskey ice cream, which should go into the freezer because I'd like to let go of the redistribution of heat code in my head now, please. I also have peach ice cream and for something that isn't dessert, venison stew with herb dumplings. I got inventive. Anyway, I'm glad you guys are okay for stuff but ... are you guys okay generally? I mean, given the shit that's been going down lately, I thought I ought to check in and see if you were okay as letting you know I'm okay. I mean, no being caught in tornados or rains of fire or anything." (Which are the main things going on in Chicago right now - yes, tornados and rains of fire - and it would be very hard to miss the fact that such things are happening, even if smaller bits go by the wayside.)
[Ellie James] Ellie grinned at the sheer variety of stuff Molly had brought. "Oh... wow. You really have been experimenting..." She scooped up the indicated container of ice cream and toted it to the freezer, tucking it in amongst the freezer dinners, frozen vegetables and ice cubes. She returned and ran her fingers through her messy hair. "Mostly, yeah. I've been keeping my head down, and aside from one bible-toting moron who should've listened the first time we told him to leave, Addie's been keeping hers down too."
She eyed Molly for a moment. "You're sure you're staying out of trouble? For now, at least?"
[Molly Quincannon] Molly grins and sits on the futon as Ellie puts away bits and pieces. "Well, in answer to the experimentation thing, I had dinner over at Israel and Solomon's awhile back. Solomon has a thing for peach cobbler, being a Southern gent, and I wanted to do it justice, so I practiced for nearly a week and had a lot more peaches to use up, so ... peach ice cream. And he apparently likes honey and whiskey, and I found a recipe for the ice cream, and there was that, and I figured you'd all enjoy it."
(For the record, Addie doesn't do freezer dinners; she says they're too expensive for what you get. She is, however, a queen of budget shopping, knows when to raid supermarket for the 'buy it and eat it/freeze it now or it will develop independent life' stuff, and is big on ramen noodles. So at least the freezer's pretty clear of anything but leftovers and meat that had to be frozen lest it pass its expiry date.)
Then the question about staying out of trouble, and she sighs. "Not exactly. Before things started getting insane? Maybe you heard about the Green Mill going up? Nice old jazz club, one of Capone's old hangouts? I was there talking to the guy who warned me about the impending Ground Zero status of Fort Q when the weirdness hit and torched the place. I took a few bruises but I'm good - this was a couple of weeks ago. Still, it's seriously heating up. If I didn't have as much info and at least a glimmer of a solution in sight, I'd be more or less freaking out by now, but as it is, I'm doing okay, not in desperate amounts of trouble, but ... well, I'm going to be looking for it soon enough. With backup, though. If I can get Nathan to promise not to pistol-whip me again." Then she shakes her head. "Just be careful, yeah? This thing ... well, I'll tell you as much as I can, but the first thing you need to know is that it seals us off from our Avatars. No Awakened magic. Though apparently artefacts and Wonders are okay." She shrugs. "Go figure."
[Ellie James] "Wow. That's... a long time to practice, Mol..." Not that she's going to complain about free cobbler and ice cream. Of any variety. Once she's done putting things away and has returned to the not-kitchen part of the apartment, she dropped on the other end of the futon to raise an eyebrow at Molly.
"I should've known better than to ask, huh?" She sighed, worrying about Molly all over again. "I'm good at keeping my head down, Molly..." She paused to think about the revealed fact of being cut off from their Avatars. "I wonder if it would affect Addie...? She's not like us. I mean, she's special, just... different special."
[Molly Quincannon] That gets pondering. "Well ... I suppose if she hasn't got an Avatar to be cut off from ... maybe it wouldn't. Though seriously, I don't think either of you would really want to find that out the hard way. Basically what we've got here is ... you heard about the Avatar Storm of '99, right? Basically cut us off from a lot of Umbral hot-spots, where most of the old Masters were? Well, apparently the survivors of the Storm pitched out Sendings across the Gauntlet, through the Storm ... messages to loved ones, attempts to let us know they survived, that kind of thing. Problem is that these Sendings started ... changing. Becoming self-aware, and generally a bit nuts; theory goes that they got that way - and that powerful - because ... well, a lot of people got ripped apart - body, mind, soul, Avatar, everything - by that Storm, and there are basically shards of pure Avatar kicking around in there. So these Sendings get bits of Avatar chunks embedded in them every time they cross, and they start picking up ... personality. This one's been around a long time, got locked up in a box by Hermetics for five years before some moron decided to poke it with a stick, and now it's back, it's out and it's messing with people. The young and the desperate, mostly. And the problems are getting bigger. Someone's apparently going to Awaken out of this - really Awaken, not just ... get a bunch of power thrown at them in some Monkey's Paw-style nightmare the way it has been the last few times. And they're going to Awaken into Quiet. That's the person I have to find; and I have to do it before they Awaken. I'm not sure I can stop it from happening, but maybe if the Quiet's caught early ... we won't have a Marauder on top of everything else to deal with. So that's my mission. Whee."
Then she grins and says, "Don't worry. I'll have backup. I'll be fine."
[Ellie James] Ellie shook her head. "I'm not dumb enough to go rushing into something that could cut me off from my Avatar without back up. Not that I'm saying you are..." She trailed off as Molly explained a lot more of the Storm than she'd really known. She winced at the idea of some pour soul being Awakened into Quiet, and chewed on her lip. "I suppose you can't find the idiot who poked it with a stick and make him or her help?" She paused. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
[Molly Quincannon] "I don't think I'd trust the idiot who poked it with a stick, and besides, he's in New Jersey," is the response. "But we've got a Euthie Master who calls me dolly and sends me Corvid-o-grams and incidentally gave me the heads-up to get me out of Fort Q before the Mirrorshades hit the place, so I'm really not worried. As to what you can do to help ... well, apparently we need to find a few items, not that I know what those are yet, but when we do? I think at this stage you're going to be as much help as anyone else - the one good thing about the Avatar cut-off problem is that it levels the playing field so certain Adept-level magi aren't going to fare any better than the rest of us. So I'll let you know as soon as I figure out what we need to look for; your contact might be very helpful. It might be worth keeping your ear to the ground, actually," she adds, musing. "There are going to be cults springing out of this, and while I've got my sources and there's bound to be an online presence with any cult activity on this, there's going to be a lot more murmuring on the street than anything else at first. You might be well-placed to get wind of it first. Keep your ears open at school, and when you're hanging with your street-smart friends. If you get any wind of any cult thing starting, let me know, okay?"
[Ellie James] "Oh, well, that's punishment enough all on it's own, I suppose." She twined her hair around her fingers as she listened to Molly, frowning a little. "The equal footing would be a little better if the other thing was cut off too." She smiled a little at the promise that she ought to be able to help. "I'll do what I can. And yeah, news of some cult or another would travel pretty damned fast on the street."
[Molly Quincannon] After a snort of laughter about the New Jersey thing, Molly leaves it at, "Thanks. And try to be careful, okay? This stuff is getting deadlier by the day. And pass the word along to your friend -- and, on the subject. I have to ask, and please keep in mind that there is no offense intended by this question. Is ... your friend and housemate ... some kind of ascetic? A monk of some cloistered order? Because ... well. There's a very small cheap TV-DVD player combo. Five DVDs, two with library stickers. Six books that I know aren't yours, four with library stickers. And ... that's it beyond furniture." (Addie takes her guitar with her everywhere; it's her prized possession and she worries about break-ins.) "I mean, I'm all for basics, but there's not even a computer, beyond your laptop. I mean ... do you guys need or want anything? Games console, DVD burns, something? I worry you're gonna die of boredom! Which is easier on the soul than worrying about you dying of doom, I guess, but still!"
[Ellie James] "I... realize that. I'm trying not to draw any attention to myself beyond doing good in my classes. And that's a different sort of attention, I hope."
She smiled a little, and shook her head. "Nah. Addie takes her guitar with her everywhere. Aside from that... she tries not to collect too much stuff. She's worried about... mistakes. I'm not scared of her, but sometimes in her nightmares things smoke a little. " She shrugged, with a small smile. "Honestly, unless and until we find a bigger place, there's not too much worry about stuff. She works and plays her guitar, I have my laptop and I go to school, we chat randomly... And... I think she's a little worried about things, but you don't need to worry about them right now. Not as long as I keep my head down."
[Molly Quincannon] That gets a wrinkle of her nose and a sigh. "Yeah, but even a ... well, look. I'm going to poke your TV-DVD combo thing until it plays all manner of media files and then I'm going to burn you a few things. The actual discs don't take up much room and they're easily replaced and then you can both have some entertainment now and then. It sounds very quiet to me, and everyone needs a good solid laugh. Besides, you haven't watched the last few episodes of Being Human and that's just not right."
It's a fairly good evening, after that - there's tweaking and prodding and Molly produces various discs of entertainment media and heats up the stew she brought and it's a nice enough evening until Molly has to go 'make quantum squeaky with her markers or something, but you look after yourself and your fire-sprite of a friend, okay?'. And there are hugs and leftovers to share and all manner of good things.
...Probably not such a good thing for Ellie when she wakes up the next morning and finds that Addie never came home from work, but ... well, that's another story.
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