halcyon_houses

Who: Ayolinda and [open]
Where: House Aquatic common area
When: mid-afternoon
What: It's been a while since I made an open thread and found myself unable to bring Ayolinda out into the bright, blue yonder. Or whatever.

A girl could only keep to herself for so long. Or rather, she underestimated the shipping time for her personal effects would take. More realistically, her aunt was taking her sweet time to actually ship them out. This left Ayolinda with only what she could have possibly taken with her to begin at Halcyon: her clothes and her most treasured 'entertainment' media. Her laptop provided hours of laptop, but high level WoW raiding had gotten boring just weeks after the last expansion. Everything also took so long to download without her own personal bandwith connection.

She was wise to the tricks of high-speed companies and would demand full service at all times. Ayolinda monitored her bandwith rate and enforced it strictly. Unfortunately, at a school, this wasn't possible. Lately she'd spent a lot of time systematically fighting for a new highest score in minesweeper while waiting for things to finish downloading in her empty room.

Sometime between her trips to and from the cafeteria she'd noticed the common room was almost always empty. The gleam of a gaming system caught her eye. Was that a force grip Nyko Xbox wireless controller? It appeared to be so. She was intrigued. She looked once to either side --tastefully applied navy illusion powder in a cat-eye shape with eyebrow accenting a must for public consumption-- and stepped inside one expensive black patent flat after the other.

In moments she had the respectively large television live and had cleared a Halo 2 map. She was sitting on the coffee table --easier to stay upright-- and chewed on her gum whenever she rememberd it was there. Her black patent envelope clutch rested against her foot. The shouts of defeated alien troops wafted out of the stereo speakers. It was heaven to her ears.

Damn, ambushed. "Fuck." She muttered, leaning a little as she focused. She was going to sully her portuguese tag if she couldn't clear the third map flawlessly.

Who: Ezra
Where: Apartamento dele
When: Afternoon to early evening
What: It's that time again

It started with the sweating, then the restless nights. Ezra had his palms pressed against his aching eyes as he paced restlessly. Sharp turns. Three steps, turn. Three steps, turn. The room was in complete dissarray. If asked he couldn't say where Kenzie was. For the moment, he was trapped in his own world. His body and mind taking a toll to weather the raw lines of their shared universe. Reality was like an onion. Or a tree. Or a shape that is not solid or round, but layered and intertwined. Very frequently the layers between worlds grew weaker, or so Ezra believed, and this is what brought him to these states. Like most things in the universe, it happened with some regularity.

This had been coming for a while. For hours he'd feverishly rearranged the room as he grappled with how he came to own the shirt he was wearing. Ezra didn't know if this was his third or fifth or first time at Halcyon. Was he in the future? Was he in the past? Time was so relative when he'd looked so timeless for so long. His awareness encompassed his current face, the mirror was no help, it ate at his brain, sending him sweating as he placed chairs on their backs and stacked books underneath them. He'd nearly stepped with his woolen socks into a bucket of water inexplicably by the window. His shoes were somewhere, sitting toe to toe.

Ezra couldn't look at what he'd made. He knew what was coming. This was his training. To not give into dread. To not give into fear. To continue to fight the silent battle and steel himself against the fate to which he'd been conceived. Still, they came. His eyes tightly shut, waves of soft sky blue and violet infused light drifted across his left and right eyes as if a rock had been dropped into the water on either side just below his vision. They met where one's visions cross and were diluted. Slowly, however, the waves grew more and more distinct, until they were lines. He was frozen, hardly breathing, standing rigidly straight in the middle of the room. Like before you know you're going to vomit frozen.

Then the lines stopped coming from out of his sight and drew from the middle. Stretched out the middle and they were circles. Circles in circles in circles in circles. Ezra wouldn't know he was on the floor rather than standing up. Things like gravity and consciousness had little meaning to him now until either his mind or his body grew too weak to support this sort of intra-universal travel. His irises spun madly and often out of tune with one another. Ezra had left the building.

Who: Rafe and Davia
Where: beginning in the kitchen at Terrene
When: evening

Rafe had gotten back to Halcyon at dusk, and he'd done the usual things that anyone did after returning from a trip. Unpacking close to two weeks' worth of dirty laundry, a few clean pieces of clothing, MP3 player, phone, magazines bought at the airport, and other odds and ends. It wasn't that he truly wanted to be neat and tidy and get everything put away immediately, but it was a distraction he could employ to try not to dwell on the fact that the break was over.

His confession to his family about what he was now and what had happened to him had gone reasonably well, all things considered. They hadn't wanted to believe him, of course, but the actual presence of fangs in his mouth wasn't something that could be easily put aside. He'd tried to soothe their worries by filling them in on where he was living now, and what he was doing. By the time he'd left, it was okay, he thought, though he was exhausted.

It was a good thing that he'd saved his visit with Tay for the latter half of break. They'd had a wonderful time, and he'd simply refused to think about the fact that at the end of the week, he'd be leaving, and she'd be in Los Angeles still. She'd visit. He'd visit. Everything would be all right. He'd been able to appease himself with those platitudes until he'd had to leave her. Then, it wasn't so easy.

But here he was, back at school, and everything was the same... except for the fact that Taylor wasn't here.

Once Rafe got his room situated, he went to take a shower and wash off the aura of travel that clung to him. After he'd dressed in shorts and a tank top, he headed downstairs to the kitchen. Blood bags were still one of the banes of his existence, but they were necessary. It was rather like settling for an apple when one really wanted chocolate, but he'd deal. He'd been dealing with it up until now, hadn't he? And apples were really better for you, anyway.