Poking About(Emma, Open)

The man was dressed in rags, and way too much of them for the cooler temperatures that were ushering in the end of August. Likely a drifter wandering in for a moment of shelter, or in the hopes of being offered some reward for allowing themselves to be shuffled out. A close look would put him at about forty, though with his unkempt appearance and weather worn skin he might as well be sixty. He pages through books, in between scratching his neck and picking at his hair, and occasionally looks through other objects.

He seems lost to their meaning or purpose, however, and his mind barely brings focus to anything for long. The store, however, holds him captive and so he wanders its interior.

The sound of the bell jangling over the door caught her attention, and she padded down from the upper half of the store a moment later. The Dreamspeaker's eyes fell upon the unkempt man, and while an average person's immediate reaction might be to classify him as a bum, she felt a faint niggling of curiosity, knowing full well that those who drifted tended to see and hear the most.

That didn't mean she wasn't going to check to make sure that her books weren't in good order when he left, though. Some things were just practical.

Smiling gently, the shopkeeper approached the man. Nothing about her warm demeanor suggested that she had written him off as impossible to be a customer or inconceivable to be of any use. "Hi," she greeted him. "Can I get you a cup of coffee?" Attentive and familiar with her stock and the layout of her shop, she glanced at the book he held to see what topics were drawing him most.

Astrology, it seemed, had his interest. In fact, everything he had touched involved the sky or stars somehow.

"Oh, I uh...no...today...what is today?" He seems to have difficulty focusing his eyes on her, and looks around the store as he answers her.

His inability to focus on her for any length of time piqued her curiosity. "It's  Monday,  August 19th, 2013,"  she answered calmly, considering all the places a homeless man (or one who appeared to be homeless)  could have seen the date.  Without haste and without letting  him out of the periphery of her vision, she moved to the counter where the cash register was.  As was typical, there were sticks of incense and crystals and bells lying there, ostensibly for decoration.  The Dreamspeaker gently tapped one of the crystal bells and focused on the feeling of the time against her sensitive skin.  She knew the ways that the sound of a bell could echo off the workings of other creatures, and it was this attentiveness that filled her mind for a moment or two. ((Watch  the Weaving.))

"Is something special about today?"  she inquired,  absent moving one of the crystals between them and setting a slightly spicy stick of incense on a carved wooden dish.

He moves casually along the aisle, almost staggering with a sway of someone lost or losing control of themselves. His finger runs along a bookshelf, his eyes cast to the ceiling.

"Oh, there's something special about everyday...I just...well, when things are disappearing so fast it's hard to keep track of what's still here."

The bell rings off of him like a brass bowl. He's alive with power.

Caution. The resonance prickled against her skin, and she slid the smoky crystal closer to her. In spite of her increased wariness, she felt slightly vindicated to have had her hunch pay off. The Dreamspeaker pulled in a deep breath of air. She braced for the smell of a man long unwashed, but beneath it, she was looking for the smell of alcohol or other substances that might have a scent to it. Her ears were attentive to the occurrence of slurring words.

"The stars help you keep track of what's still here?" she inquired, trying to keep conversation going. Blinking a little as she ignored the thrum of power rippling around the stranger, she took a small box of matches out from beneath the counter. Incense in an occult shop was such an obvious thing. "Everybody loses things, it seems," she remarked, lighting the stick of incense. While she waited for it to give off enough smoke to be of use to her, she picked the crystal up and began to polish it gently with a soft cloth. "Nothing's like it used to be, and folk don't pay attention to what's around that it's harder still to notice what goes silent. It's like someone's thrown down a gauntlet for a soul to just keep track of what's his. Missing something in particular?"

The stranger's voice sounds airy and distant, maybe he was high on something? He smells like alcohol days old, but he isn't giving her a drunk vibe.

With careful precision he removes a book from its spot, holding it in front of him and looking it over, as if it were a scientific specimen.


"My place among things, it would seem, and all of the things in my place." A raucous laugh, one threaded with throat trouble...no...chest congestion? It was raspy, and had a wheezing sound.

He drops the book to the floor and continues picking through the store.

"You're sharp, girl...when am I?"

"Girl," she repeated with a soft chuckle. "You're at least ten years too late to be calling me 'girl', that's for certain." The woman glanced at the stick of incense, then leaned down and blew out the little flame so that only smoke crawled upward. She breathed it into her lungs and straightened up, examining the crystal by the gentle overhead lights. It was positioned carefully enough that she could look through the crystal and past the smoke of the incense. Through the refraction and the haze, she looked past the Gauntlet. ((Spirit Sight.))

Well-versed in the sorts of phantasms that tended to frequent her shop, she looked instead for the things that were out of place as she appeared to deep the crystal acceptable before setting it back down on the counter. "I told you the month, the date, the year, the day of the week," she commented, giving weight to the consideration of pressing the panic button under the register. Awakened being she might have been, but that was no substitute for common sense and a good alarm system. "I'm not sure what else I can give you as landmarks in that impossible stream we splash around in that will tell you what you want to know."

In the umbra there is almost nothing following him, there's nothing there that shouldn't be it seems. Then again, it looks like everything is giving him some room.

He shakes his head. "I am not here, and you are not real." He holds a finger out, accusingly.

"Gawk all you like, but a problem like that isn't going to fix itself."

The man staggers to a display of jewelry. He paws at them idly, as if testing their weight, until he selects an item to stare at.

"The world is alight with wonder, and I, well...I'm tossed upon its waves." His hand closes upon the jewelry, and when it opens it is singing with energy.

That's interesting... she thought, looking at the simple pendant he'd imbued with his energy. The absence of spirits following him was something she couldn't quite qualify as favorable or fell. Judging from the faintly rising hair on the back of her neck, she was quietly leaning toward the latter.

"Man, if I'm not real, then I must be a figment of your imagination, and I wish you would've done a better job with me," the Dreamspeaker quipped, looking down at herself critically. She glanced back at him, wariness refusing to let her move too far away from the counter and the panic button.

"You seem to be splashing about quite a bit... getting drops of the world all over other things. How long have you been floating like this?"

The naturally sweet-tempered woman found herself wishing for one of her cabal-mates to be present, but Josiah rarely left the compound, Hannah had her clinic, and Brent was probably working. No matter, she told herself. You can handle this. Just... no sudden movements.

He opens his mouth to answer her, but then his eyes shift to the door. "Oh...there's my ride..." and without fanfare or preamble he wanders out as if he'd never been there.

Except the book on the floor, and the shining moon pendant.

Left rattled by the strange man's departure, she was a little weak-kneed as she made her way around the counter. Thoroughness demanded that she look out the front display window to see if he had, indeed, hopped on a car or a bicycle or a bus or hell, even a dust devil. It wouldn't have surprised her too much.

Exhaling unsteadily, she went to look at the book he had dropped so deliberately and to examine the pendant he'd left his essence on. Perhaps she could identify a resonance from it, if she could get her heart out of her throat.