has_a_horn: (considering | frown)
[personal profile] has_a_horn
It's been nearly a week since the TARDIS' abrupt departure, and Gabriel is having some trouble adjusting to the change. Johnny has helped immensely, but grief still weighs on him in a way that he can't quantify. Johnny isn't in the building now, gone for some reason or another he doesn't remember, and Scout is sleeping in on his bed.

Gabriel is sitting at the kitchen table and staring across the room at the Kandinsky print hanging on the wall. He lets his eyes unfocus. As he watches, the colors bleed into each other making the abstract shapes lose cohesion. He's thinking about what's behind the painting. After Lucifer had first arrived, he'd set up an angel banishing sigil in case Johnny were ever in the room without him there for protection. It's still there behind the print, drawn in his own blood.

He's been thinking about the sigil a lot in the past week. If it were his own universe, activating it would send any angel including himself back to heaven. Here, he's not sure of the effects. Would it send him back home, or crashing into the Rift? Or would it do something else entirely, something that he's not prepared for? What if it could give him a way into the rift- a way to follow the TARDIS back to wherever she is?

He takes a deep breath, knowing that he needs to try. And now, with Johnny gone, is the perfect time. The problem is that if something goes wrong or if it goes right enough that he slips through the rift, he doesn't want to leave Lucifer behind to hurt his friends.

He stands and walks to the door to wipe the sigil from the door, then drops down to remove the sigil from the front of the building. When he returns to the apartment, he shuts the door to the bedroom quietly, then walks to pour himself a drink from the bar. The painting and the sigil underneath it wait on the wall behind him while he calls Lucifer to come.
lottawork: (concentrate)
[personal profile] lottawork
He is tired, but this is not atypical for him.

He has a headache. This is also not atypical for him.

Rush walks the dog and he thinks of physics and he thinks of electromagnetism and he thinks of the Rift and he does not think of Asadi or of her arm or of the Devil.

He thinks of the Rift. The Rift.

He is aware he has been avoiding Central Park since that unfortunate encounter, and whether this personal decision was made unconsciously or subconsciously or semi-consciously, he does not care to examine. He prefers anonymous streets. He does. He's fairly certain he should institute this as a policy of his, fair fucking soon.

He'd been fucking brilliant, hadn't he, with his brazen confrontation of Satan and his handling of the problem and Rush tightens his grip on the leash and he is walking slightly faster but his breathing is steady and his headache lingers but he often has a headache and he has established that this is a perfectly natural state of events for him.

He is getting distracted.

He turns his mind back to centralized issue.

The Rift. Or the Devil, possibly.

One of the two. Possibly both.

He looks at the dog as it pants at him, flanks heaving, and stops. He kneels in front of it, scratching it behind its ears absently.

Its panting lapses into a low growl, muscles taut beneath his hand, and Rush sighs. The merits of dog ownership are becoming increasingly clear to him, most prominently in the fact that he will never get a fucking moment's peace when said dog is apparently acutely aware of sensing extraplanar beings.

Rising to his feet in a smooth, controlled shifting of weight, Rush wearily turns to face it.
lottawork: (absolutely not)
[personal profile] lottawork
The dog is in no way growing on him.

It has proved to be admittedly unobjectionable in its patient, unhurried treatment of its surroundings, largely content to dominate sections of Rush's floor with a leisurely sprawl. He may have been presumptuous to assume his work may progress unimpeded as of the moderately alarming moment where, upon his denotation of a particularly relevant equation scrawled in the lower corner of one wall, the dog evidently thought it prudent to rest its head in his lap with little warning aside from the preceding whisper of its paws over hardwood and a low, contented huff from its nose.

The action has subsequently left Rush with an incomplete understanding as to how one would (a) rise without disrupting the ostensibly sleeping creature cradling its head in his lap, (b) purport to care very little for the animal's well-being despite his inexplicable inability to simply stand and dislodge the thing and be done with it, (c) in any way continue to maintain his reputation as a cold-hearted bastard.

Unhelpfully, this entire subsidiary of events has very likely fucked that sequential agenda truly, wholly, devotedly, and completely.

He is not, he thinks vehemently in the general direction of the continuously absent and probably totally indifferent Colonel Young, a completely cold-hearted bastard. This, if nothing else, would prove as much.

"Off," he commands the dog, raising a hand to point in a direction away from himself.

The dog yawns at him, perhaps pointedly. Rush glares at it.

"Off," he repeats.

The dog's eyes droop closed in drowsy recumbence. Rush's hand drops as he regards the recusant animal with disgust.

"You are insufferable," he informs the creature, who continues to doze on, in his lap of all places, utterly indifferent.

Rush sighs.
peacefulexplorer: (Ascended | Sad | ultimately helpless)
[personal profile] peacefulexplorer
Existence without form or breath or shape is disorienting, the spread of atoms over a plane he doesn't recognize, with the repeated dissolutions and reshapings of an indistinct self. At one point there was pain, and the unspooling of himself into light and purpose, and for a long while there is only amorphous drifting. He hits barriers, dissonant and frequent, where once he should have crossed from one plane to another, one reality to the next, in an effortless slide of energy across the universal boundaries. It is difficult to define emotional state outside of the human context - he only knows that he is not human - but it is a state of affairs that generates confused distress.

Temporal sequencing becomes a problem.

Awareness, too, is difficult to achieve. Gradually he is able to pull together the various components that comprise himself and reshape them into something capable of perception, but doing so strikes him with a revelation disconsolate, and that is that there are no Others here - no Ancients, nothing, simply an empty plane of shifting light and bottomless dark. And he is alone.

He knows he did this, and it was for a reason. But he finds he cannot remember anything, not immediately, and when the memories trickle back with his concentrated effort they are unfiltered and unstructured and unordered until finally he can impose the alien concept of linear time upon the thing, and fully interpret what he is in comparison to what he was.

Daniel Jackson.

The name is the linchpin that generates the outward ripples, spreading from that singular point of origin. It triggers the flood of remembrance, the 'gate, Manhattan, the locked-away knowledge that was once sealed in his head but now coalesces seamlessly into the whole of him now. He cannot delineate his form by shape or size or mass, not any longer, but now he remembers, he remembers what it is he can do and how it is he can do it.

He starts small because he must, drifting as a pair of hydrogen atoms while he glimpses the city on a reduced scale. Then he builds to it, the recollection of his shape. Spectrally manifesting was never truly allowed before, but if there are no Others then he is not bound by their laws. He assembles a body that resembles the one that was human and familiar, and projects it. It takes two tries to succeed, three to sustain it for longer than a meaningless collection of seconds, and no matter what he tries he cannot force his shape to manifest with glasses. Apparently his inner self, or however he chooses to define it, does not need them.

He loses track of how many attempts he makes before he can maintain his form visibly for any significant length of time. But finally, in a ragged burst of energy, the bewildered shape of Daniel Jackson reappears in Manhattan, and there he stays.

[ooc: Daniel Ascended back during the Rift Shitfit of September 4th, and he's only just figured out how to Do Things in his new state of being. Right now he's completely intangible and frequently phasing in and out of visible existence. I've added to his handy-dandy reference post as to what he can and can't do in this state. He can also show up LITERALLY ANYWHERE so if you want in on Ascended funtimes just pick a date and a location, or Daniel can pick one, or whatever.]
etherthief: (sassmaster | flirt machine)
[personal profile] etherthief
[this is moderately NSFW, and gonna stay that way for the first few tags, but nothin too graphic]

Iman knew pretty much the moment she saw Greta in her party dress that she was going to be getting someone into her apartment tonight, preferably someone as different from Greta as possible, and Gabriel is about as perfect an option as such a someone could get. Lucky her, running into him, punching him in the face, and still managing to get his number after that. Lucky her having to deal with Rush's whole shitshow almost right after that. It's been a real day. She feels like she owes Greta more of an apology than what she gave, even though Greta seemed to have enjoyed herself as well as one could. But now's not the time for Greta thoughts. Now is the time for liberating Gabe from his shirt.

He's sitting on her bed, where she more or less deposited him, and she's straddling his hips as she works her way down shirt buttons with casual efficiency, occasionally glancing at him and smirking. He's very fun and very pretty and seems predisposed to take nothing seriously. Exactly what she needed.

"That was a pretty neat trick you pulled earlier," she says, "when you healed my hand." She slides his shirt down from his shoulders. "Got me wondering what else can you do."

'Magic', he'd said. She knows by now not to rule that out as an explanation, but it sure hadn't seemed like a full one. She's not interested in specifics now, though. She makes that abundantly clear by leaning in close and kissing him with deep enthusiasm, one hand curing into his hair, the other moving slowly down his chest.
has_a_horn: (banana entrance)
[personal profile] has_a_horn
It's become abundantly clear that Gabriel needs to have a talk with his brother. He's not convinced that it's going to be a particularly productive talk, but at least he can try to set down some ground rules now that they're sharing the city. Most of all, he needs Lucifer to stop terrorizing his friends. He's not looking forward to this, and he feels nervous about asking anything of Lucifer. THe last time he tried didn't exactly go super smoothly. He has a feeling that this is going to be more of a high-pressure negotiation than a brotherly conversation.

He sends Lucifer a phone, then texts to him, then a few hours later wanders into Wilmot's for the meeting.

He walks in about ten til seven. The farthest corner booth will hopefully be private enough for the type of things they'll be chatting about. He slides in there, orders some top shelf whiskey (two glasses) and waits.
wentdowntogeorgia: (Before long in the heart of the Beast)
[personal profile] wentdowntogeorgia
When Lucifer appears in Iman's flat with a burst of heavy wing beats, it is dark inside; all the lights are out and it is silent, or as silent as it can be in New York City. Considering that it's literally four in the morning, this isn't exactly a surprise, but Lucifer doesn't care much about sleep schedules or socially acceptable visiting hours.

What is important is the fact that Lucifer has an update for Iman on the Rift, particularly about the Rift's responses to external stimuli, and he had told her that he would inform her of anything relevant that he discovered. Lucifer is many things, most of them not good, but he is a being of his word-- he delivers on his promises. He just doesn't always deliver on them when it's convenient.

Lucifer makes his way through Iman's apartment, fairly familiar with the layout from his previous visits, and enters her bedroom. She is asleep, a fact that he was aware of when he arrived, and is somewhere fairly deep into her REM cycle. It wouldn't have been difficult for him to have entered her dreams and spoken to her there, but he has had quite enough of dreams after all the times the Rift has sent him unwillingly into them.

He wants to speak with her in the waking world, so the course of action is simple-- he will wait until she awakens.

Satan stands at Iman's bedside, looking down at her; she is disarrayed in slumber, all splayed limbs and frightful hair. It is messy and undignified and very human, made all the more so by the fact that, sometimes, she snores. The snore, Lucifer decides after a short while of this, is one of the most obnoxious noises in the human vocal range, and that's fairly noteworthy considering his previous exposure to Dean Winchester-level obnoxiousness.
peacefulexplorer: (Thoughtful | Bite Lip | Interest)
[personal profile] peacefulexplorer
It's not that he doesn't like the building. He likes it, he does, he really does. It's just that Daniel can't work out a feasible way to pay for any of it until he can find a decent job, and he's not sure how far archaeology is going to take him here in terms of employment. And, well, he'd prefer to stay out of the museums. For his own reasons.

Somewhat ruefully, he digs out a pen and his rather crumpled list of potential new apartment buildings and runs a neat line through the building he's, unfortunately, about to leave due to pricing being somewhat out of his range. Somewhat a lot out of his range. He doesn't really have a whole lot of range. Daniel gnaws on his pen as he descends the stairs at a thoughtful, leisurely pace, in no hurry to get back to the Rebel apartments. He could potentially stay at Seth's if the Rebels have him forcibly removed, but that's no permanent solution. It all ties into one great loop of broken economy, where he needs to get a job before he can make any plans to officially move out, but in order to facilitate moving out he'll have to have a destination in mind, and in order to make that work he will need, as it so happens, a job. Preferably soon. He thinks he's done an admirable job of adjusting to being spatially and temporally relocated to Manhattan; it's all those little details that are proving to be the most troublesome to navigate.

He gets to the ground floor before he has to fumble for his phone again. He's getting better at grasping the city layout, but Daniel mostly has Lucy and Google Maps to thank for that. Unfortunately, the reception here isn't looking too great. He frowns and gives his phone an experimental shake, as if that will do anything at all, but the little connectivity symbol remains willfully absent.

Daniel pockets the phone with a frustrated grunt. Great. Fantastic.

etherthief: (i'm doING THINGS)
[personal profile] etherthief
Iman's fingers have been itching for proper equipment ever since she visited the labs at ROMAC. That was beautiful. It was unreal. It was like looking into the face of God. And it's at her fingertips. All she has to do is register with the creepy, unscrupulous, corrupt corporate organization, manipulate her way into the role of a lab technician, and start conducting her own experiments. Without being found out. Sure, she could alter records up to a point, but she's not stupid enough to think they won't be checking for that kind of thing. What with everyone having weirdo rift powers and whatnot.

She makes herself her third cup of coffee in as many hours and looks at her worktable without satisfaction. Since she got here she's done a lot of going out, sleeping around, and aimless tinkering. She's had moments of productivity, sure - staking out the Rift entrance, spying and gathering information. But it's not enough. She has to start building up what she had back home. Back to square one. Fuuuuck.

Just thinking about it makes her want to make the coffee Irish. She resists. Not until the sun's starting to drop, at least.

Right, well, Rome isn't gonna build itself. She approaches the table, sets her mug down, and resumes the daylong practice of staring blankly at the legal pad in front of her, pen in hand. She's been writing up old proofs from memory to get herself in the mood. She's not sure it's working.

Well. She can make lists, at least. She's good at that.

Rift Has:
1) known center
2) known radius
3) complex internal physics making it a one-way street
4) motivations???? maybe?
5) fuuuuuck


She drops the pen in frustration and presses a hand to her forehead.

"Cool," she mutters as she takes a generous sip of coffee. "This is going well."
wentdowntogeorgia: (Something wicked this way comes)
[personal profile] wentdowntogeorgia
Lucifer supposes that it's about time that he drops in to speak with the only other fallen angel in the city.

He isn't particularly difficult to find, nor is the place where he rests his head at night-- sleep? Really, Crowley?-- and the Devil is pleased to note that the apartment has not fallen victim to the rash of warding sigils that have cropped up around the city. A wise move on Crowley's part, because Lucifer would not have at all been pleased if he had had to find a way to remove the ward or track the demon down.

Instead, he pops right in to the demon's empty apartment to wait for his return. It's adequate, as far as human dwellings go; small, perhaps, though they all seem small to him, and appropriately furnished for human habitation. He understands the purpose of all the furnishings and possessions, that there are certain necessary functions that must be satisfied and particular objects to meet these mortal demands, but the specifics are not something he bothers to familiarize himself with.

He pokes around a little anyway, out of idle curiosity.

By the time Crowley returns, however, he is sitting in a lordly sprawl on the couch and the temperature in the apartment has plummeted a good twenty or so degrees. Centigrade.
etherthief: (playing with fire)
[personal profile] etherthief
Iman practically drags her new friend to the East Village, wandering with intense focus until she finally comes across the bar Jodie had recommended to her, which looks just like it sounds, a proper English pub. It's been ages since she went to an English pub. She's looking forward to it. A little hysterically, actually. No wait. Scratch that. She does not get hysterical. She's a scientist.

"Here we are!" she says brightly, drawing Daniel in. Oh wow would you get a load of this place. The lady behind the bar is in costume. Adorable.

"Wow you can kinda tell it's for people from an alternate universe, can't you?" She snorts and takes stock of the people, looking for someone to talk to, or someone whose brain she (they) can pick. It's pretty early for anyone to be drinking, so there's not too many people there, except one guy who is drunk, slumped over the bar. Looking exactly like she feels, or rather how she wants to feel in an hour's time.

"That one," she says decisively, not bothering to check if Daniel's with her on the idea of approaching a drunk stranger and asking him questions about their mutual cosmic misfortune. He's probably not. She doesn't actually care.

She goes straight to the bar, assuming Daniel will follow, sits herself on the stool next to the guy, and nods to the tender. "I'll have what he's having."


[[ooc: Daniel's just gonna be here for the initial thread, but Iman will be here all day! Say hi if you wanna.]]
wentdowntogeorgia: (Disobedience is man's original virtue)
[personal profile] wentdowntogeorgia
Lucifer falls.

This is old news for everyone involved. He fell from Grace, he fell from Heaven, and after the so long awaited confrontation in Stull Cemetery, he and his once-beloved brother and the promise of violence, he fell back into the Cage in the body of Sam Winchester.

Now, when he falls, he feels a shift around him like the universe cracking open at the seams; there is the smell of ozone and a lightning-snap that’s louder than even Sam’s fearful internal monologue, louder than the terror that pounds his frantic mortal heart at the sight of Perdition yawning wide beneath him. He is yanked sideways, sudden lateral movement that would be dizzying if he had a center of balance to upset, a rip-tide pulling him in and down and through the rabbit-hole, shadow-thin and darkling deep.

The body that is supposed to be his—that has had his name written over and across and around every fiber of its being since its conception—is suddenly far away, and he is wrapped in the old, familiar skin of a vessel he’d left dying in Detroit, flesh given freely rather than claimed by divine right. And then he is a streak in the sky that hits water and sinks like a stone.

Under the water, cold and getting colder from the seed crystal that is his freezing Grace in its mortal house, he can feel the vast emptiness where Heaven should be above him and isn’t; the universe is silent and it is deafening, a tinnitus ring where there should be angels’ voices. Lucifer grabs two fistfuls of space-time and pulls, moving himself from under the water to standing in the shallows at the bank, and behind him the lake’s surface is already frozen over thick like it’s the dead of winter. The water around his feet is sluggish and barely liquid, filmed over top with a thin frozen layer that breaks and flows around his ankles.

Someone approaches him with a towel, and there is no Hell below him and above him only sky, and he makes no reply; he banishes the water from his clothes with a thought before he puts his fist right through the man’s chest.

[[ooc: So this is going to be the hottest of messes; see mod comment for post instructions and fun stuff like that.]]

[[TW: gore, major character death.]]

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