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[07:48am] Quaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMXdJqGMq-I
[07:51am] Quaker: The First Invisible Visionary didn’t gasp. She just stopped holding her cup when Cav put the box on the table. It bounces off the floor, chipping.
[07:52am] Crion|: Cav will reach down to pick it up, then put it on the counter.
[07:52am] Crion|: "So it's one of those, then."
[07:52am] Quaker: She looks at it for a long time. “Where did you get this, again?”
[07:53am] Crion|: "Big Bird gave it to me." He grimaces. "Giant spirit creature, chained to the roof of the San Diego court estate in Miramar. Owned by..." He waves a hand. "Sorry. Gangrel. Owned by some monster or another."
[07:53am] Crion|: "I've seen something like it before."
[07:54am] Crion|: "The witch hierophant Jubal gave one to Edgar."
[07:55am] Quaker: She holds the box in her small hands. “He cursed Edgar with it.” Her fingers pause at the latch. “Can I…?”
[07:55am] Crion|: Cav: "If it's safe."
[08:01am] Quaker: “It’s safe, like this.” Leisurely opens the little container and picks up the acorn. In the light of the kitchen, he can say that the acorn itself has a strange color. He’s no botanist, but…it probably shouldn’t be black.
[08:01am] Quaker: She studies it in her palm. “I can’t believe it’s real…”
[08:01am] mattbaby joined the chat room.
[08:02am] Crion|: What color was Edgar's? Does Cav recall?
[08:03am] Quaker: Once Edgar caught it, it looked normal in shades of brown.
[08:04am] Crion|: Hmm.
[08:05am] Quaker: Leisurely swallows and blinks. She looks around the kitchen, almost in surprise. Then, with a trace of guilt in her voice: “I think you and I have been avoiding asking and answering some questions.”
[08:05am] Crion|: Cav: "Maybe so. Is any of that beer I brought over last time still in the fridge?"
[08:06am] mattbaby left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 121 seconds)
[08:07am] Quaker: Leisurely: “Um…I gave it away to a friend. There’s, uh…” Her eyes light up. “Do you like bubble tea? There’s a place just down the street. We could walk there and back.”
[08:08am] Crion|: Who the hell takes Modelo as a gift? He reconsiders that. He'd probably take Modelo as a gift. Out loud: "I've never tried it. Let's go."
[08:13am] Quaker: She grabs a coat from the closet and puts it on before stepping out, locking the front door behind her. “It’s good. The bubbles are like a chewy candy.” They step off down into the evening. The neighborhood is as quiet as ever. Cav can hear the sounds of the waves hitting the jetty and bluffs over the crickets and breeze. Sometimes, depending on their angle, he can see them. Leisurely’s path takes them down past a little park and more houses. From up here, he can see the rest of the city, and then all San Clemente, lit up against the dark sea, curving off to the south.
[08:13am] Quaker: “What did you see in the Chrysalis?”
[08:15am] Crion|: Cav: "A sea of red flowers. Hills, fields of them, stretching in every direction. In the middle, a pavilion. Three tables. Three bodies, covered in sheets."
[08:17am] Crion|: "Wilson Frost was with me. Somehow."
[08:17am] Crion|: "The actual Wilson Frost."
[08:17am] Quaker: Leisurely nods. “What color was the pavilion?”
[08:18am] Crion|: "Take the sheets off, and you've got two of me, and one of my sire. Alicia Holymount. Wilson reacted poorly to her. I'm not sure he saw the same thing I saw, but I didn't pry."
[08:18am] Crion|: He pauses. "White."
[08:20am] Crion|: "They weren't vampire bodies. Kine, but...unalive."
[08:20am] Crion|: "Not quite dead."
[08:22am] Quaker: Leisurely: “What else?”
[08:24am] Crion|: Cav describes one of the Cav bodies standing and menacing the two of them, him and Wilson, and his repeated trial and error efforts to solve the puzzle until feeding the other Cav body his blood.
[08:24am] Crion|: Cav: "The angry Cav, he didn't like that."
[08:26am] Crion|: Cav: "He had a song, or a poem for me, promising some measure of revenge. Then we, ah, climbed out of the Chrysalis into the sky."
[08:26am] Quaker: They arrive at the little cafe. A teenager makes a sweet milk drink for Leisurely. “Get whatever you’d like. I’ll pay for it.”
[08:27am] Crion|: To the teen: "I'll have what she's having."
[08:28am] Crion|: Cav could probably buy the place on the spot, but won't raise the issue. Sometimes people like to pay for things.
[08:31am] Quaker: She sits outside at the lone table outside. “Some of that sounds familiar. The red flowers, the white pavilion. Rollie saw the same thing. And he had to place his soul’s blood into his body before his Beast would, as well.”
[08:32am] Crion|: Cav: "His Beast would what?"
[08:37am] Quaker: Leisurely: “The earliest stages of the ritual of the Coil transpose the metaphorical struggle between your conscious and unconscious into a reified psychic space, shaped by the local psychic resonance of the space the ritual occurs in.” She sips her drink. “That’s the part I’ve been able to get the others to accept.”
[08:38am] Crion|: Cav: "Well, that makes sense. If it was actually just 'in my head,' Wilson couldn't have joined me."
[08:39am] Quaker: “The rest is not nearly as…repeatable. Or observable. So to speak of your ‘Beast’ doing anything is pretty speculative. It’s right, though. The Beast, your mind, fights your soul for control of the medium, your body.”
[08:39am] Crion|: He sips his tea. "A real unwelcome passenger."
[08:40am] Crion|: "Mine, perhaps, more than some."
[08:40am] Crion|: Cav sighs. "Or maybe not. Maybe everyone's Beast is this much of a ragelord dick."
[08:40am] Quaker: Leisurely stirs the milk tea.
[08:40am] Quaker: “The mind is not the passenger. Or the intruder.”
[08:41am] Quaker: “We are.”
[08:41am] Crion|: Cav closes his eyes. "That makes a surprising amount of sense."
[08:43am] Quaker: “The ritual is an insurrection against the normal state of your being. Normally your mind and body exist in the same space. You’ve pried them apart, and stolen some control from your own nature.”
[08:44am] Crion|: "Brute-force dualism."
[08:45am] Quaker: She nods. “Imagine the horror of someone wearing a mask, only to realize the mask is trying to become the real face.”
[08:46am] Quaker: “Thus the unfriendliness. I imagine everyone’s mind is different, though.”
[08:46am] Crion|: Cav: "Mask and face, or skin and skull."
[08:47am] Crion|: "My Beast didn't indicate we'd be talking out our differences."
[08:48am] Quaker: “Why should it have? You’re nothing to it. A leftover. A ghost. Something to fade away and be forgotten.”
[08:48am] Quaker: “For spirits of death, a soul is a bad dream you forget when you awaken.”
[08:50am] Crion|: Cav: "Fair. But death is not a destiny that demands my respect."
[08:50am] Crion|: He taps his head. "And I pay rent here too."
[08:51am] Quaker: Leisurely: “You do now.”
[08:52am] Crion|: Cav: "I have another date with the Beast, then, next time I enter Chrysalis."
[08:54am] Quaker: “I’ve felt you grow in yourself. But there’s only so much those kinds of rituals can do. I don’t think that you’ll be entering a Chrysalis like that again. At least, not in the controlled way you’ve been doing.”
[08:55am] Crion|: Cav: "...Unfortunate."
[08:55am] Crion|: "Hard to prepare for something if the rules keep changing."
[08:57am] hrolf joined the chat room.
[09:00am] Quaker: Leisurely shrugs. “The soul is a thing of movement. You cannot realize yourself safely and dispassionately. You have to wander through all the hidden places of the world to reach the unknown depths of yourself. ‘The question and the cry ‘Oh, where?’ melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance ‘I am!’”
[09:01am] Quaker: She puts the little box on the table and picks up the acorn, rolling it between her fingers. “Here is something from one of those hidden places.”
[09:01am] mattbaby joined the chat room.
[09:01am] Crion|: Sounds like college.
[09:04am] Crion|: Cav: "The coloration makes the difference, then?"
[09:06am] Quaker: Leisurely puts it in his hand. “Yeah. It means it hasn’t been spent. Don’t, um, eat it.”
[09:06am] Quaker: “What do you know about the Circle of the Crone?”
[09:07am] Crion|: Cav: "Mostly their legal status, telling me not to learn too much. I've done some reading about Cruac, as well, but I'm not too familiar with the organization itself."
[09:11am] Quaker: “It’s not really an organization, I suppose. ‘The Circle of the Crone’ is just an umbrella term for about a thousand mostly unlinked tendencies. Cruac is about the only thing they have in common. But then, that’s mostly unlinked, too.” She shrugs. “It’s not like blood magic is the same thing everywhere.”
[09:12am] mattbaby left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 121 seconds)
[09:12am] Quaker: “Every band of worshippers has its own history and context. And its own secrets.”
[09:13am] Quaker: “Do you know what was here before the Court?”
[09:13am] Crion|: Cav: "We had some back in New York. They most stuck to upstate."
[09:14am] Crion|: Cav frowns. "No. Native land, I suppose. I guess they might fall under the Circle's umbrella. Them, and werewolves."
[09:19am] Quaker: “When J. Frederick Owens arrived from San Diego, most of the native tribes had been reduced by genocide and displacement. They still had to fight with what remained. And whatever parts of that structure that had moved into the settler society. But the Southern California Circle had always been divided into two parts: the larger part, the one Owens found, lowlanders who lived on the plains and the low hills and on the coast.”
[09:23am] Quaker: “The first group always saw themselves as new arrivals, though. Something had been in the land far longer than they had. Before humans lived here. They called these things the Old Spirits, and worshipped them. When people came, the Old Spirits left the world of the plains and the low places. They lived in the high places now, hidden places. Places where they could hide from light or people, and live as they always had. From time to time, they took human servants and turned them into spirits, to serve them.”
[09:24am] Crion|: Cav: "What sorta taxonomy are we talking here? Spirit-spirits? Elder vampires with thousands of years of torpor in them? Something else?"
[09:25am] Crion|: He pauses. "Kinda would put paid to the Sanctum's whole Longinus angle."
[09:26am] Quaker: Leisurely: “Well, the Sanctum’s really stupid. Anyway, I’m not sure. It’s pretty hazy. The only things you’ve got to go on when you’re reading about this stuff is the most roundabout material imaginable. Fragments of rumors, legends of legends, you know? I couldn’t tell you whether they’re even true.”
[09:28am] Crion|: Cav: "Everywhere's got their old stories. The Court back east has legends about an elder or two when it was New Amsterdam."
[09:28am] Quaker: “But…it was always clear that for them, the whole ‘spirit-spirits’ and ‘vampires’ distinction wasn’t really there. The whole “Vampire” thing is pretty recent, actually. They certainly didn’t think of themselves as a unique category of undead that stopped at a certain point, with strict rules about Vampirism.”
[09:29am] Quaker: She nods. “Yeah. But I mean pieces of folklore that are 10,000 years old, referring to stories that are even older.”
[09:29am] hrolfy joined the chat room.
[09:30am] Crion|: Cav: "So...how do we approach something like that?"
[09:31am] hrolf left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 121 seconds)
[09:31am] Quaker: Leisurely: “Like…as scholars?”
[09:32am] Crion|: Cav: "To start with."
[09:36am] Quaker: “You have to be willing to work with others. I can’t reach back in time to verify a diary’s authenticity, or translate a dead language with no referents. Or travel into the spirit world to ask questions.” She stops sipping to blow a lodged boba out of her straw. “But I know people who can.”
[09:37am] Quaker: “And you have to be careful.”
[09:37am] Crion|: A small smile. "Of course."
[09:38am] Crion|: That's what they all say about Clinton Cavanaugh: he's so careful!
[09:41am] hrolfy left the chat room. (Connection closed)
[09:42am] Crion|: Cav: "I think we both know a spirit guide, at least."
[09:42am] Crion|: "I could use a bit more help on the academic side."
[09:42am] hrolf joined the chat room.
[09:43am] Quaker: “I think you’re more careful than I am, so…anyway, I mention all of this because all that remains of the Circle in Southern California are the bands that live in proximity to the places where the Old Spirits live. The Pacific Coast Ranges were always regarded as homes for the Old Spirits, so the survivors moved close to them. Some say that they serve them directly. Some say the Old Spirits have embraced them as their own, and turned some of them into spirits. The deeper you get into the mountains, the closer you get. Those are the places where even the People won’t go.”
[09:43am] Quaker: “The black acorn reminded me of a story I heard about the Old Spirits. So I guess some of it must be true.”
[09:43am] Quaker: “Joanie? Yeah, she’s very helpful.”
[09:44am] Crion|: Cav: "What I'm hearing then -- about this blurring of distinctions -- is that the bird I freed is most likely not just a spirit, but also one of these...servant vampires."
[09:45am] Crion|: Cav: "Would clear up a lot of things about why the San Diego Court had it chained to the roof."
[09:45am] Quaker: Leisurely: “Maybe. If it was carrying a black acorn, it must be familiar with where it came from.”
[09:45am] Quaker: “And where it came from, that’s where the servant vampires are supposed to live.”
[09:46am] Crion|: Cav: "Would be nice to have an ally up there. Since I've already got an enemy in Jubal."
[09:46am] Quaker: She finishes her boba and hucks it into a trash can. “I’ll show you where I heard about the acorns.”
[09:47am] Crion|: Cav stands, following suit. Good, if a bit sweet. "Tonight?"
[09:47am] Quaker: “Yeah. It’s just a book, back at the house.” As they walk back: “I always got the sense that Jubal was…isolated, down here. Like he was operating on his own.”
[09:48am] Crion|: Cav: "That would line up with how bad his social skills are."
[09:49am] Quaker: “Well, the whole cycle of raid and counter-raid is an Invictus invention. I can’t imagine the Old Spirits have any real interest in playing cops and robbers with the new lowlanders.”
[09:50am] Quaker: “Maybe I’m projecting. It just seems like when you hear about ancient god-spirits, you hope that they’d be more interesting than we are.”
[09:51am] Crion|: Cav: "Age leads to calcification. At least that's how I've always heard it. I wouldn't get your hopes up."
[09:51am] Crion|: "If they've bucked that stricture, though...who knows?"
[09:52am] Quaker: They walk in silence for a while. Then: “You remember that illness Rollie had? The visions?”
[09:52am] Crion|: Cav: "Malkavia."
[09:53am] Quaker: “Yeah.”
[09:54am] Quaker: “‘Malkavia’ is one name for it. Maybe a distinct version. But I’m sure that something related came out of the Coast Ranges at some point. Like a hint of the Old Spirits’ existence.”
[09:55am] Crion|: Cav: "Guess that explains some things about how accurate his visions were about Jubal. And all that nonsense."
[09:58am] Quaker: Leisurely walks for a while. “If you’re looking for academic help…I used to work for an old human sorceror who used the name Phocas. He could peer back into the past, and show me the meaning of words I couldn’t understand. He was unconcerned with the intrigues of the Court.”
[09:59am] Quaker: “You should find someone like that. I wouldn’t trust many of our kind with secrets like this. They…”
[09:59am] Quaker: She smiles. “Well. They haven’t seen their own Beast in the pavilion, have they?”
[10:00am] Crion|: Cav shakes his head. "I'm sure they see other things."
[10:00am] Crion|: Cav: "But few of them are probably wearing their own face."
[10:01am] Quaker: “And you’re always welcome to my archives, from now on. I still have my pass to the Huntington Library, too. You can have it.”
[10:01am] Crion|: He's already put the name "Phocas" into his notepad app.
[10:01am] Quaker: “And you know how to ask Joanie for a favor.”
[10:01am] Crion|: Cav arches an eyebrow. "The Huntington Library?"
[10:01am] mattbaby joined the chat room.
[10:04am] Quaker: “Some magnate founded it as a private collection, a long time ago. The Prince bought it from the family years and years ago, and expanded it greatly. There’s a special section for occult scholars of our kind. The Wilderness Committee publishes its research and findings there, as well. Plus the botanical gardens are very nice.”
[10:05am] Crion|: Cav: "Huh. I'll have to check it out."
[10:06am] Crion|: "As for the acorn...any ideas what to do with it? How to store it safely?"
[10:06am] mattbaby left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 121 seconds)
[10:07am] Quaker: She unlocks the front door. “I’m not sure. I can’t see spirit magic, so I can’t really tell if it’s building towards something dangerous. I’d ask a specialist. But keep it somewhere secure, for now. Probably best not to keep it close. Back here.” She leads him back past the living room.
[10:08am] Crion|: He follows.
[10:09am] Quaker: In the back room, there are several huge bookshelves and more filing cabinets. Leisurely opens a closet door, revealing a row of safes. She nicks her thumb with a fang, and squeezes a drop of blood onto the face of one. It swings open.
[10:10am] Crion|: Cav: "Nifty."
[10:11am] Quaker: Inside are several cardboard boxes. She selects one labeled “MYTH - ANIMAL PRODUCT” and tugs it out of the stack, putting it at their feet.
[10:12am] Quaker: She opens it up, sorting through several plastic bags. Cav can see pelts, vials of fluids, and some preserved limbs and digits.
[10:12am] Crion|: Jesus.
[10:13am] Crion|: She's quite a collector.
[10:13am] Quaker: Leisurely holds up a…book? It’s kind of like a book. The sheets are made out of a kind of browned, leathery substance, written on in a white script. The binding is a thick, black cord of some sort. It was clearly fashioned by hand. She lets him hold it.
[10:14am] Crion|: Cav takes it in both hands.
[10:18am] banana|split is now known as banana.
[10:18am] Quaker: “Deerskin, written with a chalk mixture. Don’t get it wet. It’s about eleven hundred years old, written in a Chumash ancestor language, mixed in with some earlier Ute elements. It’s a storybook, essentially. For children.” If Cav opens it, he’ll see simple illustrations of people and landscapes.
[10:19am] Crion|: Ah. Excellent burn, Leisurely Foster.
[10:19am] Crion|: He's very careful with it.
[10:22am] Quaker: She turns the pages to almost the end of the book. “The story of the sisters and their brother who hid from the Sky People.”
[10:23am] Quaker: “Wait, hold on…” She rummages through the box. “I have a translation somewhere…here.” She hands him a piece of paper that translates the text blocks and annotates the illustrations.
[10:24am] Quaker: The story reads:
[10:25am] Quaker: This is how the youngest of the Old Spirits fled from the Sky People, who wanted to take them up into the space above even the clouds, where nothing lives.
[10:28am] Quaker: In the time of dreaming, when people still lived only on the shores of an endless ocean and the spirits of all things lived in the world, the Old Spirits were still in the mountains and the hidden places.
[10:30am] Quaker: The people who lived on the shores of the endless ocean told themselves to respect the Old Spirits, and never went into their lands, for anyone who went into those places would be forced out, and the Old Spirits would be angry at the people who tried to act like spirits. But some people still said that if you were in danger, the Old Spirits would have mercy on those who sought their help.
[10:30am] Quaker: The people remembered not to go into the places of the Old Spirits, and were happy with this promise that only some remembered.
[10:31am] Quaker: One day, the sky began to get darker and darker, even when the sun was supposed to be at the top of heaven.
[10:32am] Quaker: People began to get angrier and angrier. With themselves, with their families, and with each other. The people would hurt and even kill each other, and everyone knew it was because the sky was getting darker.
[10:33am] Crion|: Kinda rough for a kid's book.
[10:34am] Quaker: There were two sisters and a brother among the people, who were afraid. They said that the sky was going to take everyone back up into the clouds. Some of the people were afraid with them.
[10:35am] Quaker: One day, spirits came down from the sky. They looked like people, sometimes. They had golden eyes. The people who lived by the endless shore called them the Sky People.
[10:38am] Quaker: The Sky People said, come with us. We live in the place beyond even the clouds. In that place, there is no such thing as spirits or people, because everyone is the same thing. Lots of people went with the Sky People.
[10:38am] Quaker: The two sisters and their brother said they shouldn’t go with the Sky People. They left with all the people who believed them, and looked for the Old Spirits.
[10:39am] Crion|: Guess only these kids knew how horror movies work.
[10:40am] Quaker: They walked for a long time, longer than anyone remembers. When they reached the lands of the Old Spirits, the Sky People revealed themselves and tried to block the way.
[10:40am] Quaker: The two sisters and the brothers called out to the Old Spirits, save us. The Sky People told them, all the people by the shore are gone. We have taken them. The two sistes and the brothers and their followers cried out for anyone.
[10:42am] Quaker: The Old Spirits appeared and said to the sisters and brother, we will have mercy on you. But there are too many people. We cannot live with all of you while you are people. But we will save you from the Sky People.
[10:43am] Quaker: The Old Spirits drove the Sky People away from that place. They turned most of the people that had followed the sisters and brother into trees and animals.
[10:43am] Crion|: Harsh.
[10:43am] Quaker: The Old Spirits turned the sisters and their brother into Old Spirits, too, so they could look after their people.
[10:45am] Quaker: Now the sisters and brother live in the hidden place with the Old Spirits, tending the trees and animals. Now people say that they live in a place where they can see the old sky, before it turned dark, and the old moon before it disappeared. People say that the light of the old moon is like the sun to all the people who were turned into spirits.
[10:46am] Crion|: Cav: "Lot going on here."
[10:46am] Crion|: Cav: "If I didn't know about all our nonsense, I'd think the Sky People were colonists -- but they can't be. What's the date on this?"
[10:46am] Quaker: People say that if you ever come across an oak tree with black acorns growing in moonlight, you should leave it alone, because it’s one of the people who were turned into trees, and only the two sisters and the brother are allowed to take their seeds.
[10:47am] Crion|: Oh, whoops. Not done.
[10:49am] Quaker: Leisurely: “I think that’s it. Uh…that storybook was made around 900 A.D. The myth is older though. It cross-references to some earlier folklore that places those specific myths to about 400 B.C.”
[10:51am] Crion|: Cav: "Sky People don't sound like us. Or, really, any kind of creature I'm familiar with, unless they're wizards of some monstrous sort."
[10:54am] Quaker: Leisurely: “There’s some similarities with supernatural creatures who abduct humans and take them into strange places, keeping them there. But I’m not sure it’s any of those.”
[10:56am] Crion|: Cav: "The fairies, right? The Fae. Them working in groups would be a bit strange...unless it's just one of them that appears as a group..."
[10:57am] Quaker: She puts the book in a protective wrap and hands it back to him. “Yes. But they’re not…spirits. They never talk about people and spirits being one. And I can’t really find much mention of Fae elsewhere in the folklore around this area.”
[10:58am] Crion|: Cav takes the book from her. "True. Well, thank you, Leisurely."
[10:58am] Crion|: "I've now got some leads."
[10:59am] Quaker: She hugs him. “Don’t talk about this stuff with people you don’t trust.”
[10:59am] Crion|: He'll hug back, very briefly, with one arm. "So it's just you and Wilson, then."
[11:00am] Crion|: Not many friends left, these nights. Not many friends stayed friends.
[11:00am] Quaker: “I thought you went to San Diego with two people.”
[11:00am] Crion|: He grimaces. "Baron Anaheim is connected to Murray."
[11:00am] Crion|: "I like KJ."
[11:00am] Crion|: "I'm not just not wholly sure I trust her, yet."
[11:01am] Quaker: “Oh.”
[11:01am] Quaker: She pauses. “You said…you said Wilson was with you, in the Chrysalis?”
[11:01am] Crion|: Cav: "He was."
[11:01am] mattbaby joined the chat room.
[11:02am] Quaker: “Was he…aware? Of himself, and the place?”
[11:02am] Crion|: Cav: "He seemed to be. He recalled it afterwards."
[11:03am] Quaker: Leisurely: “That’s not…” She frowns. “Cav, you *are* Gangrel, right?”
[11:04am] Crion|: Cav: "Shephard bloodline, but yes, Gangrel."
[11:04am] Quaker: Leisurely: “Hm. Then that rules out the only explanation I could give you.”
[11:05am] Crion|: Cav: "Which would that be?"
[11:06am] mattbaby left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 121 seconds)
[11:11am] Quaker: Leisurely: “When you enter a Chrysalis like that, you’re essentially casting a wide net over a certain space and drawing in any soul that aligns with a certain psychic resonance. Each soul has its own resonance, like your D.N.A. You can establish a sympathy with someone else through special practices or behavior, but to align it so finely that you enter into a Chrysalis with them is practically impossible. The only case I’ve ever heard of involved a pair of Ordo members who were blood siblings, coming from the same sire. Their resonances were nearly identical because of the common background. But…I mean, you can’t match resonances like that with someone you’re not related to, nevermind not even sharing the same clan background.”
[11:12am] Quaker: Leisurely: “It must be an environmental factor that’s been overlooked.”
[11:12am] Crion|: Cav: "That's not reassuring, considering the environment."
[11:14am] Quaker: Leisurely: “I’m not sure what it means. I could run some experiments, though. It might be…um, actually, nevermind. Probably not a great idea to go back to the Ordo right now.”
[11:14am] Quaker: “Anyway. Good luck with your research.”
[11:14am] Crion|: He wonders what that means, about the Ordo, but doesn't press.
[11:15am] Crion|: "Thank you," Cav says, and then his goodbyes, and then he's driving back up to Laguna, the picture-book next to him on the seat.
[11:15am] Crion|: Questions, questions, questions in his head.