Tis the City, City of Light (Methos and Crows)
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		<h2 id="linktree">Play-By-Post: Bondage, D/s, S&amp;M =&gt; Bondage: Exotic Solos =&gt; Topic started by: Crows on 07-04-2008, 06:00:48</h2>
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				Title: <strong>Tis the City, City of Light (Methos and Crows)</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Crows</strong> on <strong>07-04-2008, 06:00:48</strong>
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				Alice pulled her green wool coat tighter around herself as she huddled through the New England rainfall and into the Boston Public Library.&nbsp; Her eyes caught on – as they had, crossing the street – the empirical-looking, tidy letters etched into the side of the building.&nbsp; <br><br>“THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE AS THE SAFEGUARD OF ORDER AND LIBERTY”&nbsp; <br><br>Order and liberty.&nbsp; The words sighed through her brain as she settled into a table, underneath a green-shaded reading lamp mounted there on.&nbsp; Her shoulder ached underneath the suddenly-relieved pressure of the strap of her computer bag as she slid it onto the table.&nbsp; Order and liberty.&nbsp; Alice felt a distinct lack of order and liberty, in her own well-regimented life and the world in general.&nbsp; There was nothing... catastrophic happening in the universe at large, but there was this growing sense of unrest that she could read off the faces of strangers.&nbsp; <br><br>People didn't usually concern themselves with people like her – if and when they found out what she was.&nbsp; It was an ignored fact, like some slightly shameful but socially accepted foible that people just turned a blind eye to and didn't speak about.&nbsp; At the same time, they wouldn't help her particular minority with its unique predicaments, either.&nbsp; <br><br>Alice was 'talented'.&nbsp; She had an ability to tap the emergent energies, to perform 'magic'; had a sense of things she couldn't know.&nbsp; It manifested itself differently in all who had 'access', who had 'ability', and was thusly difficult enough to classify that it would probably never come into mainstream understanding.&nbsp; It was an incredible gift, but it did not come without particular dangers.&nbsp; There were things from that other side of existence, the primal world where the energies that people called – if somewhat primitively – magic.&nbsp; Monsters; the more you got involved with a talent, the more likely it was that the things that went bump in the night were no longer your imagination.&nbsp; Nobody liked to talk about it.&nbsp; There were groups set up, loosely, for a variety of purposes – support, protection – but Alice wasn't part of one.&nbsp; It made her feel guilty, like she was sticking her head in the sand, but she was in a graduate writing program at the university and all she wanted was to buckle down and finish her degree, start looking at PhD programs.&nbsp; She tried to ignore it.<br><br><br>But it was getting more difficult.&nbsp; She'd been seeing shadows of them, here and there... things she couldn't explain.&nbsp; Perhaps another person might have written the shadows at the edge of her vision off as the specters of a hyperactive imagination.&nbsp; And, occasionally, they were... but Alice had a sense for when she was encountering something more primal, something from outside the daily world, and one thing that she had learned over the years was that... she was never wrong.&nbsp; <br><br>It wasn't cold in the library, but she was having a hard time warming up.&nbsp; The chill had gotten into her... the rain was hard, this evening.&nbsp; Alice didn't like to carry an umbrella, but this evening she wished she had.&nbsp; Her hair was wet, hanging in clammy waves of liquid black around her shoulders.&nbsp; She pulled out her laptop, powered it up, and stared blankly at the desktop as she rubbed her upper arms, trying to stir circulation.&nbsp; There was homework galore, this weekend, and though she wasn't, her lack of focus made her feel as though she was falling behind.&nbsp; There weren't very many other people in the library this evening, she noticed.&nbsp; The solitude was rather nice; probably the rain, keeping people indoors.&nbsp; Alice felt like she had to get out of her apartment... she worked best away from the distractions of her life.&nbsp; 
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				Title: <strong>Re: Tis the City, City of Light (Methos and Crows)</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Methos</strong> on <strong>08-04-2008, 05:35:49</strong>
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				Dorian adjusted the manner in which his backpack was slung over his shoulder as he made his way down the winding staircase of the library. His light brown hair was slightly mussed up and a yawn escaped his lips as one arm was wrapped around a stack of books on such exciting topics as human anatomy and organ systems. He headed down the stares to a carrel and there he leaned forward and opened one of the books. A pen was produced in hand as he began to jot down some notes, dark brown eyes seeming to concentrate on the diagrams and information found within. He was dressed rather casually blue jeans, a black t-shirt and slightly worn leather jacket of the same colour graced his form. His eyes briefly flickered over to the girl sitting at a table nearby. His dark eyes scrutinized her for a moment as he seemed to try to place her, although he seemed to struggle to do so yet had the distinct feeling she was familiar to him somehow.<br><br>Dorian’s talents had manifested themselves in an odd fashion. As a medical student he’d assisted in treating patients while he learned. Occasionally his cures worked a little bit too well at first, unusual recovery times, the alleviation of entirely unrelated maladies – until what several of his friends had dubbed ‘the E.T. incident’ where his hand had glowed a reddish hue and upon touching the patient he’d sealed cuts, removed bruising, and corrected soft tissue and spinal injury resulting from a car accident. That had been a source of torment for Dorian for it made him ‘special’. His teachers wanted to study him like some sort of guinea pig, while religious people had approached him telling him he must be some sort of saint – others had suggested he was some sort of demon. Rather conflicted opinions, worse still once he’d done that once it seemed to be expected that on demand he could recreate the power, while in truth it tended to be rather touch and go.<br><br>No one really seemed to understand that it wasn’t a thing he knew how to control so much as it just was. It manifested itself sometimes when he wanted it, sometimes he had nothing. Nor did it seem that healing people was the only thing he could do, for he’d found himself levitating several feet off the floor inadvertently at one point.&nbsp; Few seemed to take him seriously when he claimed to have been chased around campus by some sort of troll – well actually the only people who had believed him had been those who saw him fleeing a towering green monster, well and those who had dropped some acid seemed to readily believe him as well for what it happened to be worth.<br><br>For the moment he seemed content to study until he head a rather loud crash, and a shattering of glass – thereafter the eight foot tall and rather burly form of a loin clothed troll seemed to have leap through the window of the Boston Public Library. Its green form looming as its pockmarked and wart infested face gazed out at the various students and patrons about it – thereafter it began to move in the direction of both Alice and Dorian. As that lumbering brute approached Dorian’s mouth opened as he stated “Oh SHIT NOT AGAIN.”<br><br>He scrambled backwards as he outstretched his hand and muttered “Oh come on I got to have something better than this E.T. thing and floating. Come on Abracabra kick his ass!” He stated as though attempted to convince whatever this strange power he possessed was to cut him some slack. “Okay..maybe both hands?” He stretched his hands out and muttered “okay how about..HAADDDOOUUKKEEENN”. Nothing appeared to happen to his evident disappointment until a moment later a blazing blue ball of flames seemed to erupt from his hands to fly towards the troll to the remark of “Holy shit…that worked?”<br>
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			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Tis the City, City of Light (Methos and Crows)</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Crows</strong> on <strong>09-04-2008, 06:17:20</strong>
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				Alice felt a prickling at the base of her spine at the same time that she heard the quiet shuffle of someone else entering the library.&nbsp; It came in two waves; a not-unpleasant wave of shallow goosebumps that distracted her from the concentration she didn't have a very good grip on anyway, and then a second, more adrenaline-laden pulse that made her sick to her stomach.&nbsp; Her eyes shot up instantly to find Dorian's unfamiliar face.&nbsp; Her eyes, like her hair, were dark and set a stark contrast among the paleness of her other features.&nbsp; The young woman's brow furrowed slightly; this boy was not the source of that other sensation, the dread that clawed suddenly at her throat...<br><br>All too abruptly, the reason for that adrenaline presented itself.&nbsp; The troll-creature burst through the window, it's fetid, primordial reek assaulting her senses.&nbsp; She lept from her chair, diving toward Dorian and narrowly avoiding being singed by his fireball.&nbsp; THAT was something she hadn't seen before, and only served to set the fear that had risen in her pulsing all the faster.&nbsp; Distantly, somewhere, her mind was thankful that there wasn't anyone else in this workroom, but she knew there were people right outside.&nbsp; It was the only thing that kept her from shrieking at the top of her lungs.&nbsp; Though she knew, painfully so, how all-too-real that monster was for her - and presumably for him - most of the world's citizens had as little concept of the primal creatures as they did of the primal 'magic' that certain people could dip into.&nbsp; Alice, for her part, wanted to avoid beingn sent to the loony bin for paranoid delusions.&nbsp; <br><br>After she dove and rolled to avoid the fire, she was just recovering her balancce when the fireball would have impacted the monter.&nbsp; Looking up from beneath the arm she'd raised to shield her face, Alice could only hold her breath and hope that it at least disabled the beast, sent it back to where it had come from, if not killed it.&nbsp; She wasn't sure what she'd do if that wasn't the case.<br>
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				Title: <strong>Re: Tis the City, City of Light (Methos and Crows)</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Methos</strong> on <strong>11-04-2008, 01:56:06</strong>
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				Dorian had been observing the pale, dark haired young woman near to him before the troll had appeared. He too had somehow seemed to feel her presence. He’d looked at her and tried to place her even though recognition had seemed to elude him. However, his attention to her had been replaced by the panic that ensued as the monster came crashing through the window. Although to others it would appear that the window shattered inexplicably. He did see Alice leaping towards him and away from the troll he said “What..you see it too?” He sounded genuinely surprised that any one else could see it at all. <br><br>He seemed to look at the girl a moment as he reached down to where she had struck the ground beside him. “Come on we’ve got to get out of here..I have a bad feeling that if I stop one of them more might show up.” The fireball had indeed flow across the room and struck something, as there was a horrid stretch of burnt flesh that ensued and a scream of pain, both of which seemed to settle firmly into full fledged reality as others about the library took note of them. For a moment he looked over at the flaming form of the troll that seemed to have been brought to its knees as fire raged along its form burning incessantly and he remarked “Awesome.” He briefly looked towards Alice and confessed “I’ve never done that before.” <br><br>He remarked “I’m not sure it’s entirely dead, and I don’t want to stick around to find out. I rather think we should get out of here.” He tugged on her arm as he said “Come on, even if I leave they’ll see you here.” He grinned slightly as he noted “That looked like a troll and I don’t want to know what else can show up.” He started heading towards the backdoor of the library as he sought to make his way out of the building as he muttered “Keeping moving for a while seems to lose these things, but they seem to be drawn to actually using magic and to magic users as well.”<br>
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			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Tis the City, City of Light (Methos and Crows)</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Crows</strong> on <strong>13-04-2008, 03:36:05</strong>
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				Alice locked eyes with Dorian, her own gaze one of mingled fear and intensity.&nbsp; She was about to speak when the stench of burning troll flesh momentarily overtook her senses.&nbsp; She raised a hand to her nose, while Dorian was reaching for her other arm.&nbsp; Hauling herself up and slinging her back against her shoulder and took his hand.&nbsp; <br><br>“Yes, I can see it.&nbsp; You really don't know what you're doing, do you?”&nbsp; Alice hissed, breathless, looking around before Dorian pulled her off.&nbsp; She re-routed him once to avoid some inquisitive parties who were going up to the empty room to investigate the noise.&nbsp; “Yes, I know what it was... they're, they're primals...”&nbsp; She gasped as they left the building.&nbsp; Now, Alice took control, pulling Dorian down the street at a breakneck pace.&nbsp; “I've... I've seen them before but never up that close.&nbsp; Had it been following you?”&nbsp; She stopped when they were a block or so from the library, just a pause to search his face for familiarity, or anything she could place.&nbsp; “And you've never done that before?”&nbsp; Her... abilities manifested differently than his, nothing so violent, but also Alice guessed she had a better idea of control than her newfound friend.&nbsp; <br><br>“Stop, listen...”&nbsp; She said before he could answer, flashing a hand out to grip his shoulder.&nbsp; The city was quiet, comparatively... there was a buzz that Alice was listening for, a tingling when things were 'up', she called it.&nbsp; She didn't know if this boy could hear it, her heart was still pounding hard enough in her ears that she hadn't sorted out what was going on yet.&nbsp; But there was nothing; it sounded mundane, it sounded like Boston.&nbsp; “I... I think we're safe...”
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			<dt class="postheader">
				Title: <strong>Re: Tis the City, City of Light (Methos and Crows)</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Methos</strong> on <strong>12-05-2008, 08:25:54</strong>
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				Dorian offered her a rather reproachful look as he noted “Well, I do know some of what I’m doing – I won’t say I entirely understand. It seems to work better when I really feel it needs to work.” He nodded to her “Yea..primals that makes sense to call them that. I was calling them ‘those ugly bastards’ but primals works.” He paused and shook his head “No it wasn’t following me, I had one following me before but this one just seemed to show up out of no where.” He grinned to her as he noted “That um no..I mean it would be a lot easier to deal with the..primals if I could do that all the time. It was just something from a video game and a webcomic…I really wasn’t expecting it to work. But man that’s way cooler than what I’ve done all the other times.”<br><br>He’d ran with her for about a block, and when she requested that he listen he looked at her oddly. “What am I supposed to be listening for?” However, he seemed to tilt his head slightly as though to strain his ears to seek to hear something in particular. He didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary and soon said as much. “I don’t hear anything unusual.” He peered at her for a moment as she declared them safe “You get that just from listening to the street?”<br><br>He gazed at her for a moment as he noted “You look kind of familiar, I’m Dorian.” He introduced himself and extended his hand towards her. “I’m guessing you have some..talents of your own since you know about these things.” He smiled sheepishly as he noted “I’ve never been able to do anything like that before, really it was usually the opposite I made people heal as opposed to blowing up monsters.”<br><br>
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