"So you do want to talk shop? Okay. I'll need twenty-five minutes or so," Melissa tells her, "And remind me to ask about the lawyer."

There's some background rustling, like a person sorting paper.

"For what it's worth? Half the time I think he's an Alien in the Star-Trek sense more than 'different country of origin'. See you in half an hour?"

  Rosemary grunts an affirmative and powers down the phone without bothering to hang up first. Half an hour. She slips out; Rosales can handle himself.

  Twenty minutes later, dressed down to a drab blouse and modest skirt that should have looked boring, she's waiting in line for an Americano. The barista isn't providing the customers ahead with the most attentive service.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:17, Fri 29 Oct 2021.

Rosemary learns the barista's name is Patrick and his handwriting is terrible, at least to judge by the phone number he writes on her order.

Melissa arrives right as she reads Patrick's digits.

Five seven-five six, chin length black hair, green eyes, and a modest tan. She's got broad shoulders and her features bring to mind a cute housewife, something of a rarity in Vegas where hot is the preferred looked.

"Sorry, took me forever to find parking," a familiar Creole accent tells Rosemary, "Want to grab a table while I wrangle a decent tea?"

  Despite herself, Rosemary softens when Melissa arrives looking so harmless.  She nods and mumbles a greeting, then rises on her toes to have a look around.  Spotting one near the windows, she hesitates a moment before deciding on the seat that lets her face the door.  Once she has herself settled in place to wait, her eyes don't leave the stranger, but it's not quite a mistrustful look.

  "Hi."  The girl raises a hand a few inches from the table in a hesitant wave.  "So I guess, um...  What do you think is going on here, anyway?"

Melissa takes a small sip of her tea as she sits.

"So you want to talk about that side of things? All right," she says with a nod, "I think you've done what you can to avoid it and most of us would go around rather than confront you. Something metaphorically smacked you too hard to be ignored."

She frowns for a moment then shakes her head.

"Which was followed up by one of the more extreme cases being the first to talk with you. So I'm making with the metaphorical ice cream if you want to talk or get things off your chest. Nosy of me but you seemed upset so I had to at least offer."

  Rosemary returns a blank stare and offers a helpless tone.  "I'm sorry.  Maybe I'm being dense today, but it's been a rough twenty-four hours.  As you seem to have guessed somehow.  What do you think is going on?"
This message was last edited by the player at 02:02, Tue 02 Nov 2021.

"Oh," Melissa says in surprise, "You mean big picture, world changing? Or just your life the last few days?"

  The redhead forces her hands to put the coffee cup back down and remain in her lap, but her grip went white-knuckled first. It takes two deep breaths before she can get her brow to unknot.

  "You!" She utterly fails to keep her voice down. "Are a stranger! But you know who I am! You know who I talk to! You stalk me and want me to act like you're helping, while you pry for more information about me! What on earth do you THINK I MEAN?"

"Stalk you? That would be like stalking a tornado. As for knowing you talked to Band he can't keep his mouth shut," Melissa replies and sits straighter, "You had the option of declining. I in fact made it easier for you to decline than accept. Have a pleasant day."

She sipped her tea, scooted the seat back, and walked towards the door.

  "You're actually worse than he was, you arrogant...."  But Rosemary has caught even more attention now, and the room full of stares is too familiar.  She lowers her head to the table and flees the shop not long after.  She never touched her coffee.

  The convent and her housing are both left, but she turns right.  Then left again.  Another left.  Right, then left, then two more rights that might have been lefts; it's hard to keep track.  Some of the turns have a block between, some longer.  She doesn't notice, driven on by every pair of eyes that turns her way and a whole childhood full of shame over Making A Scene.  When she realizes she is lost, she turns down an alley and takes a seat in a dark spot, though it would be just as generous to call that intentional as all the rest.  Ten minutes later, still tightly hugging her knees, Rosemary's breathing begins to slow to a sane pace at last.

Several people stop to look at her in the alley but most go on without a word. She doesn't seem hurt and the area is pretty safe, so they keep their noses out of it. An old man in a blue track suit rests at the entrance of the alley, drinking from a bottle of water. He looks over to Rosemary with a raised eyebrow but seems content to keep his thoughts to himself.

  "Never.  I will never, never, never... never."  With an audience of only herself for that assuredly solemn oath, Rosemary does not go the extra mile and say aloud what she won't.  But her grip tightens enough to compact her into an even tighter ball, and she buries her face between her knees until the peak of the feeling passes.  Eventually, she turns her face skyward until the last of her tears have dried, watching a lone cloud drift by and counting off her breathing.  All the BHTs and ABTs and BSSes over the years taught her a lot of self-soothing techniques, and the mix she pulls out in the moment does eventually clear her head.

  And then she pulls out some rocks, too, and sets them down one to a knee to scowl at them for a while.  Still scowling, she picks them up and peers at the light above through them, turning them to different angles to see the unusual faceting.  "I wonder how many times I could sell you, since you keep coming—"

  But that was wrong, wasn't it?  They don't "keep coming back".  The asshole from Interpol said as much, but he was working as hard as he could to avoid her coming to trust him.  But today...  Rosemary tries, but no explanation comes that isn't less believable than the hints—crumbs!—these new strangers dropped anon.  So then maybe she has her answer: she isn't just one of the Cursed, she always was.  And now it's... progressing?  The word sounds enough like a disease to make her flinch at the thought, and she shoots to her feet to get away from it.  But she can't get away from Them, can she?  That's obvious too.

  Whatever you're supposed to do, I guess you better do it, before they start coming looking to fight...  She holds one of the rubies up and closes an eye to squint through it at the crossing street, jumping a little when she sees the old man again and her awareness catches up to her audience.
This message was last edited by the player at 05:07, Wed 10 Nov 2021.

The old man gives an embarrassed shrug.

"I'll be going, just not a good idea for someone so," she sees him think 'pretty' but swaps it smoothly, "Young to be out of sight and alone."

The ruby lets light through but seems to blur all the details of whatever is beyond it. It sparkles more than the ambient light should permit.

  The scent of hunger makes her nostrils flare again, and the old man's slow retreat is harder to cast as remorse—thereby to explain away her own ambivalence—than the boys' earlier.  Angrily, she shoves the baubles back in her handbag and hurries past her volunteer sentry to the larger street.

  "If I have to fly to the Middle East and sneak into a museum to put you back in a statue like it's Tomb Raider, I'm going to be... put out."  She mutters as she walks and glares steadily at the kerb a few yards ahead.  What starts as a threat shrivels to petulant along the way, and she barely makes it a block before the drive to be Out Of The Situation runs dry.  With one great, beleaguered sigh at the heavens, she closes her eyes and—  That way.  Directly behind her.  It's a good thing she didn't get further than that.  But the one weird new change that maybe, hypothetically, in a perfect world, if it weren't most likely a sign of the End Times, she might not mind has been the Map.

  Mother mercy, how would I explain that? she muses while retracing her steps.  It comes out audibly, next, broken by tense laughter.  "I can't see hills and streets anymore, just terrain and corridors!"  And firing lines, she thinks but keeps her tongue from repeating.  The thought wipes the smile out of her cheeks before it has a chance to really take hold, and her pace quickens.  Besides, she'd left abruptly, and it wouldn't do to be caught stepping out mid-task.
This message was last edited by the player at 03:07, Thu 11 Nov 2021.

The young woman in the alleyway is fascinating, and Dusk stares openly. Graceful, despite what looked like an actual, honest-to-goodness nun's habit that tried to conceal the ease with which she moved. And is that a ruby she's carrying? What the hell is this? The sheer curiosity of it is enough to momentarily drown out that awful hollowed-out feeling.

And so Dusk follows behind her for a ways before the girl turns and they come face to face, the dancer and the novice. Dusk, dark-haired and moving with the kind of effortless ease that dancers dream of, doesn't bother trying to hide the fact that she's watching. She just waves, and somehow that wave of a hand communicates clear as day that she's just saying hello and means no harm, and that her primary emotion at the moment is intrigued.

No normal wave is that smooth and communicative. No normal person moves that effortlessly. Her voice, when she speaks, is almost jarring in its normalcy. "Hi. I'm Dusk." Her smile looks perfectly genuine, and it reaches her eyes, and those eyes look haunted.

  "Hye—aah!"  The novice, who had not been attending to her surroundings quite enough to notice Dusk approaching, nearly collides with her and jumps back with a garbled sound low in her throat.  But she actually catches herself and makes eye contact a split second before shrieking, and the noise doesn't start until her scared eyes become angry ones.  She makes it sound like scolding somehow.  The next deep breath is clearly about to come out louder, but she swallows her tongue and raises one shaky hand to point back whence she emerged.  Her jaw is set tight enough for the muscles to stand out individually, and she chases the voyeur off with an actual snarl before turning back down the alley.

  When she gets twenty, thirty feet down and the sidewalk doesn't feel quite so close at hand, she turns back to Dusk with a sharp wince and all the rest of her tight as a mainspring.  "Listen.  Don't give me your magic... your magical psychic garbage for a second and just listen.  I have been creeped on, toyed with, abducted, condescended to, accused of-of things, by people who refuse to even say what things..."  Her breathing had maybe had a flutter, at first, but the next few are shaky and take long enough for her to get back on topic.  "So if you're not planning to tell me exactly who you are and what you want from me, then get out of my face and, and I don't know, go pick a fight with Mothman somewhere uninhabited so at least there's one less of you."

  There are, of course, tears streaming down her cheeks.
This message was last edited by the player at 04:27, Thu 11 Nov 2021.

Dusk blinks slowly. "Um. I'm Dusk. Dusk Neva? That's my name. What I want from you was mostly just, I dunno, a casual greeting. I'm sorry you've been through what was clearly a pretty rough day or few, but I assure you I don't have a fuckin' clue what you're on about. I just saw you and thought, you know, that looks like someone worth saying hi to." She shrugs, the gesture still flowing more perfectly than it had any right to, but not carrying any particularly complex emotive message this time. "I don't really know, like, what you're dealing with, but it's nothing to do with me. I don't even know who you are."

  The redhead's clear readiness for confrontation takes a few seconds to soften enough for Dusk's words to make it all the way through.  It does happen, though; who can stay angry with The Dancer when she would reconcile?  Not Rosemary.  The girl has been too angry for too much of the day already to cling to it now; the furor has already gone rancid in her mouth.  She sighs, the picture of dejection, and so much strength drains out of her with it, she could be a balloon deflating.

  "I'm... sorry.  Sorry.  There have been three already.  They just keep finding me.  And they know who I am, and they've been looking for me, and they act like I'm supposed to know them, and, and, and I don't even know what's going on with me!"  Whatever is going on, it has her almost out of breath and staring through the wall of the building across from her.  It does not have her out of position, though vanishingly few people might notice.  Despite flailing and stomping around, despite now looking prepared to fall over and not catch herself, the girl hasn't once shifted her weight in a way that leaves her unsteady or would compromise her guard, if indeed she needed to raise it.  She looks up at Dusk again, expression pleading, tears unabated.

  "I'm not crazy.  I'm not!  I don't want to be special!"
This message was last edited by the player at 04:01, Fri 12 Nov 2021.

"Well," Dusk says slowly, "I don't know that I can help with that, but I can listen if you want. Have you eaten lately? Hydrated?" Dusk knows from too much experience that it's easy to forget things like that under stress. She also knows that it tends to have an effect, her own present condition notwithstanding.

She looks around, and then says, "There's a cafe not too far, over that way. Not one of the tourist places. How about I get you some food, something to drink? No strings attached, promise." The word has a weight attached, a presence.

  Rosemary remains still for a time, watching Dusk as though waiting for her to drop the charade, but at the same time clearly wanting to trust. The nod is faint enough she might just have been adjusting her footing, but she turns her attention in the direction Dusk indicates. "New too, huh? Hmph. Well, at least you're not trying to drag me into some secret club, or throw money in my face when—  Oh! The website! Damn i—Er, well..."

  She shrugs and pulls herself together with some effort. But even once that appears done, she remains still, very content to be there in the shadows of a path little-taken. "Okay. Dusk it is. I won't ask. I suppose Patience isn't any more..."   A very queer look crosses the girl's features and settles in place there. "No. That's already... Falling apart. I guess it's going to be Rosemary again soon. That's the rumor. Coffee?"
This message was last edited by the player at 00:53, Sat 13 Nov 2021.

"Coffee works!" Dusk is once again almost dancing on the way out and to the cafe. But this is a low, swift dance, the kind that is hard to tell apart from the steps of a martial artist.

Inside, she proves to take her coffee with both cream and sugar. "Nobody's found me so far. Probably will after today."

  Rosemary follows in no small amount of confusion, considerably muted in the aftermath of her flight and breakdown. She doesn't even fluster at the free coffee, just shrugs, fakes a smile, and takes a seat.

  "Heh. Yeah, the last one, she said I was like a tornado or something, so whatever that means, you're probably not. What happened today?" Rosemary proves to take her sugar in little piles in her saucer, where she can doodle with a stir-straw in it. She scratches out a little sunburst with eight points, then frowns and blows it away.

"I made a deal that might make waves." Dusk smiles a little as though at some private joke. "Nothing, like, Faustian, just it involved a lot of money and might make headlines or something. I don't really know. I'm kind of still feeling my way forward." She notices the drawing, but doesn't say anything. Her foot taps against the floor, keeping a beat - no, a heartbeat, the characteristic thump-thump-pause is clear. She stirs her coffee with tightly controlled motions, the spoon not even clicking against the cup, before setting the spoon down and taking a drink.

  "Well, you seem to be having a good time with it. I–I am guessing right, r—" Rosemary huffs impatiently from her nose, setting the foam on her coffee swirling. She cradles the mug in both hands as though trying to warm them up, but hasn't taken a sip.

"What... was it like for you? What is it like? I don't understand how anyone can be comfortable with all the... everything." Earnest and curious at first, her thoughts take a turn that leaves her unable to meet the other woman's eyes. She colors, a bit. "It's like... I fought all this time to be good, to do right, to be a better person than, than those nightmares were about. But I'm... losing..."

Dusk pauses before answering, this time. "I try not to think about the dreams," she says finally. "It helps that I don't sleep much now. But they're there and I don't know how to feel about them..." She shrugs, loose and expansive. "I guess that it's a matter of what standard you hold yourself to. Me, I kinda learned that the standards I grew up with were...not great. So I left that behind before I even knew about this stuff." The Dancer smiles a little, and that heartbeat rhythm slows, calms. "I guess all you can do is the best you can."