Welcome to Gaia! ::

Cybil smiled suddenly. It wasn't entirely a nice smile. "Well, if we need to know more about the dark things, I know someone we could ask." She'd gleaned this a long time ago, but had held off asking. She just hadn't really wanted to know. But now that she was apparently stuck with Miranda, she might as well find out if she was to be saddled with anyone else. "Did you see anyone else in those visions of yours, by the way?"

She opened the door as she spoke, and the last sentence carried clearly into the room without. Cybil didn't seem to care that that meant that Mark might hear.

After a few minutes, it became clear why.

Mark looked up tentatively from where he lay sprawled on Cybil's bed. Some of the wild, drug-induced fire seemed to have died out of his eyes as he asked, too carefully, "Visions?"

Cybil flashed Miranda another of those wicked little grins and sat down beside Mark, seeming unsurprised when he shrank towards her and away from Miranda's words. "No," he muttered repeatedly, shaking his head. "No, no, no."

"Yes," Cybil replied clearly. Her voice was cool and firm. "I told you, Mark, it isn't the drugs and it isn't you being crazy. It's just how it is. You know I wouldn't have lied to you." When he reached out blindly to her, she took his hand and patted it gently before letting go. For Mark, Cybil could be nurturing - the kid needed her.

She looked at Miranda steadily. "I know you're not real fond of him, Miranda, but the fact remains. He came to me just like you did. He saw you. If we're something, he's one of us."

Mark seemed sober enough now - perhaps his earlier actions had been the last gasp of a high. His eyes were wide and nervous as they moved from Cybil to Miranda, and he'd flinched at every word she'd said until now.

So they had a high-school student, a teenage runaway, and a teenage addict. Not real promising.

((OOC: Off to bed. Goodnight!))

Two pairs of eyes - one blue-grey, one dark - watched Miranda have her mild fit of hysterics patiently. It seemed to be the sort of thing that they were used to. It was Mark, though, who finally spoke, although he looked to Cybil after every sentence. "They're not much more substantial than dust bunnies," he said quietly. "But they're much scarier."

Cybil looked at him, and some kind of understanding seemed to pass between them. Looking back at Miranda, Cybil said softly, "They've been after him for a while, if they're what we're thinking of. Apparently he's a prime candidate."

Mark sat up, and there was a new sense of purpose in his eyes now. "I can't see," he said hesitantly. "I mean, not like you can. I can see things. People. Places. But no events, nothing happening. I don't know why I see them, but I saw Cybil. And I saw you."

The blonde girl, watching him, looked dissatisfied. Cybil was privately of the opinion that there was something more to it. She didn't know what it was, but that ability didn't seem too helpful, considering that Miranda's was similar to it. There had to be something else. But she didn't want to press Mark too hard about it.

Cybil gave Miranda a pointed stare, like she couldn't believe the other girl was being so dense. "I don't do drugs," she replied calmly. "I don't even drink. I sleep a decent amount of hours at night. And thus I am in full possession of my mental faculties. Added to that, I'm - well, according to Mark, anyway..."

Mark interrupted earnestly, seeming rather eager to please now that he was back to his senses. "She's more grounded. I'm kinda flighty - least that's what my mother used to say." He looked a little faraway for a moment, but then resumed what he'd been saying. "She knows her own head, and what should be in it and what shouldn't. I don't."

Rather a sad admission, really, but neither Cybil nor the boy himself seemed to think of it that way. Instead, Mark went straight to the next question. "Mostly it's just been you and Cybil," he admitted, looking a little uneasy - like he thought he'd messed up somehow. "But there've been a few other things. A brown-haired chick. A couple of random things - like old toys and notebooks and shi-- stuff. Really old. I don't know." He shrugged. "I don't see so much sober."

"Now, that doesn't mean they're not after us," Cybil added. "It would be stupid to pretend that we're not in any danger at all. It's just that they're likely to go after Mark first, and..." I'm worried about him. "Well, they're just more likely to." Even if she and the boy both knew what she had been about to say, there was no need to embarrass Mark by saying it for Miranda. The kid wanted to pretend he was tough, well, no skin off hers.

Mark blinked at Miranda's enthusiasm, and his response was slow in coming - and decidedly tentative. "Um, well, it was all yellowy on the edges, like an old book. The cover...I think it was like, leather or something, and it was crumbling a bit. Maybe it was rotting. You know." He shrugged, his descriptive powers failing him as his fingers shook a little bit. "Old."

Cybil noticed the beginnings of the boy's trembling, and stiffened a bit. Mark had told her he was trying to ease off the drugs, but his body was now telling her otherwise. How much time had he spent high since the last time he'd left her, if he couldn't even go, what, twenty minutes without beginning to feel withdrawal?

And if she and Miranda needed him, she was going to have to do more than start to try to talk him gently into easing off a bit. She was going to have to make him stop entirely. Fast, and ruthlessly.

Maybe she could recruit Miranda for that.

Drawing her mind to other things, she frowned. "Why, Miranda? What do you think an old book matters for?" Distracted by her worries about Mark, she wasn't connecting the dots as quickly, but then they fell into place. "Ohhh. You think it might be hers?"

Cybil watched Miranda thinking, and took the time to consider this herself. "So maybe we even do have a handy walkthrough guide," she mused. "Who knew?" She was joking, but at the same time, she wondered if maybe...if just maybe it was possible that...

No. It wasn't. They were screwed, end of story, sorry Optimism, no room for you here.

She nodded slowly to Miranda's next words, looking lost in thought. "Maybe he sees things still so that he can get all the details. Nothing gets lost in translation. I don't know."

Cyb still had doubts about the extent of Mark's abilities. She still thought there was more he could do. But if there was, he clearly didn't know it, or else he'd have said something by now.

Mark flinched away from Miranda's sudden peppering of questions. "I don't know," he stammered. "I don't know. It's...Leaves," he remembered abruptly. "There's some kind of gold leaf design on the cover. It's flaking off. It's old, it's covered in dust or something, I guess. It's dark, like there's no light on it. There's no room, no desk. I don't know. It smells musty when I see it, like no one's breathed around it for a long time, I don't know. Like an alley all full of old boxes. I don't..." He trailed off, shrugged helplessly.

"Don't know, yeah, we got that," said Cybil tartly. She turned her gaze to Miranda. "So what, now we go on a notebook treasure hunt? Do you know how many hundreds - no, thousands of notebooks like that there must be? My grandmother had one, for crying out loud. This isn't even a needle in a haystack. This is like...like looking for the back of an earring in an entire field of hay! It could be anywhere!"

Mark started, stiffened, and pulled back from Miranda, wrapping his arms around himself and shaking his head. "Please don't," he whispered. "Please don't fight. They like it."

Cybil, her ice-cold retort on the tip of her tongue, looked at Mark instead, startled. After a second, compassion took the fore of her gaze and, ignoring Miranda, she brushed a hand over the boy's dark hair. "It's okay," she assured him. "We're not going to fight."

She looked coolly at Miranda. "I'm going to point out to Miranda that sending us on wild goose chases is no more help than sitting here doing nothing, and very sensibly add that it would probably be better to try to find out more about Abigail and who she was and if she had any descendants and thus where her things might have gotten to - in other words, research - before trying to chase after this magical notebook, and calmly mention that this is what I was about to say before she blew up at me, but we aren't going to fight."

She was baiting the other girl and knew it, but she was ticked as well, and ready for an argument. On the other hand, she didn't want to upset Mark. For a moment, she seemed unsure.

Then she let it go. It was hard, because at the moment she really wanted an argument, but she knew the boy was right. The dark things, whatever they were, would probably like nothing better than to see this fragile alliance rip itself to pieces before they even had to lift a...tentacle? Appendage? Tendril? What exactly did amorphous blobs of shadow (or whatever they supposedly were; she was basing her thoughts off Mark's descriptions) have instead of fingers?

She picked up her notebook. "And I want to test you, Mark. I don't think you know yet, everything you can do. Call me crazy. It's just a feeling. But I think there's more to you than I know yet."