Training Montage, Rogue Edition

It wasn't long before those scattered around them began to cluster at the beginnings of a show. Even those who hadn't been nearby before turned their heads, interested in the twin sounds of music and amused delight.

Those Alemi had spotted before remained in place -- the woman, the man -- were fixed in the same places where they'd first been spotted. Both stared at the sudden appearance of the entertainment. The woman seemed more taken aback than the man, as though the sudden distraction was an unwelcome one.

Ezra watched the Ko dance off, impressed. For all her talents, those skills were certainly something she would never possess, but then again, she'd been blessed differently. Casting her gaze continuously toward the planned performance, as though she were surprised by it much like everyone else around her, she slowly made her way to the back of the crowd. From there, she'd have a better vantage point to see if someone was worth investigating further.

She glanced at Adra's position, giving her two swift nods to the opposite side of the crowd; a suggested movement, rather than commanded direction.

There were a scattered few, who had not yet been coaxed in to join the audience now encircling the Ko, whose elegant movements drew in the eye like dizzyingly hypnotic pattern of an endless spiral. For a moment, Alemi took his place there to observe from a distance, examining the group of spectators as a whole and more carefully studying those left behind. It had not escaped him that the two he had initially noticed were momentarily frozen in their place, but even so, their attention was divided, unable to completely untangle from the web of music and dance that had captivated so many within the vicinity.

The anxious man, once again with his nervous twisting of fingers and darting eyes, had yet to move, but then almost as suddenly as the grig had broken the stillness of the day with the frenetic swell of its see-saw notes, the man's gaze seem to lock on someone in the crowd and his whole demeanor changed.

"Lucy, there you are. I told you not to wander off," he sighed loudly, heading towards a young girl, who was eagerly jumping so that she might catch a better glimpse of the grig over the broad figure of taller folk.

The woman too eventually sought refuge with the rest, once she noticed her dwindling surroundings, fabric swishing over her ankles as she crossed the street. It was a split-second decision that Alemi made to follow her, his trajectory at such an angle that they would intersect. All the while as he walked, Alemi kept his chin inclined in Ko's direction as though he simply could not take his eyes off the performance, entranced, tracking her only from the corner of his vision. In truth, he could feel that tug of the magical weave beckoning him in its direction that it almost came as a surprise when his shoulder clipped the woman's.

But it was just enough to disorient her, her eyes blinking up at him with some confusion, and for an instant, they engaged in their own dance of distraction and graceful maneuvering as he helped right her and murmured an apology for his carelessness. His fingers swept the side of her skirt, just close enough to find her pocket and locate the item, though the edges of metal almost hooked fabric upon his withdraw. It was, in all truth, a rather clumsy retrieval perhaps but in the tumultuous chaos of of song and sea of jostling observers, it was not enough to ensnare her attention. Alemi caught the glint of gold in his peripheral view. No, this was not the desired goal. Just some talisman that he let slip from the hand, falling behind her, the sound of small object hitting the ground lost in the din of the music.

"Did you drop this?" He stooped down quickly to retrieve the pilfered item and stuff it back against her palm. "Again, I'm so sorry for running into you." With that, Alemi wove deeper into the crowd, hoping that the others might have better luck in finding the right target.

Adra caught Ezra's glance with a curt nod. She trailed around the edge of the crowd, keeping an eye out for her friends and maintaining the appearance of watching the show. She'd never seen The Ko move like that, and honestly it wasn't hard to seem like she was entranced. She'd thought herself a reasonably capable dancer, but nothing like this.

She caught a glimpse of Alemi from her perch at the outer edge of the crowd. He bumped into a woman, bent down, and handed something to her. Not the mark, then. Time, Adra knew, would run out faster than any of them expected it to. So she thought back to what she remembered of her Shadow days. Most people would have called her an art thief then, but she preferred to think of it as recovering stolen goods. If she didn't think too much about who might own the wicked key they'd been sent for, she could almost pretend this was the same thing.

On the edge of her vision, not quite halfway across the growing crowd, a tall thin man with too many eyes and not enough face was weaseling his way backwards, out of the crush of people. He was moving slowly, carefully, trying not to disturb anyone around him. His head was still but his eyes roved the crowd, scanning for something or someone he seemed increasingly anxious about finding. Adra stood a little on her toes, hoping to meet either Ezra or Alemi's eyes through the crowd.

Instead, the thin man was first to catch Adra's gaze. Two eyes narrowed at the sight of her. Two more, then four, then six, began to move independently, following her gaze to determine her cohort. The eyes that spotted them fixed upon them, one eye per vislae, following their movements. Then his head ducked beneath the crowd, but any who had seen him could still feel his eyes upon them, heavy as a tangible touch. His presence crept closer, moving slick and silent as a serpent.

Overhead, clouds began to gather, threatening rain.

In the thick of observers, where some stood stone-stiff and others jostled and shuffled and shoved, Alemi found himself almost guided through the cluster of people as if by an unseen current.  He didn't immediately notice Adra, though she stood pushed forth from the flat of her feet, neither did he feel that weight of the stranger's narrowing stare, tracking his movements.  Alemi's view was obstructed in a lattice veil of bodies with only glimpses to be caught between all manner of angles cut by the lines of limbs.  It took a moment to find pause enough to orient himself, and when he had, he sought out his companions.

But it was the man he found first, his willowy figure head and shoulders above the rest, his sharply boned face set with the multitude of eyes, all clustered between the original sockets like the compound vision on an insect.  Alemi felt all the force of the man's gaze then, the unease it evoked running through him from the rush through his veins to the sharpening thuds of his heartbeat.  Again, he looked for his friends, only eventually realizing that they were all under the man's unending watch. The first droplet of rain struck his cheek as he remained locked in place, awaiting the slightest clue that any of his friend's might be in danger. His attention flickered from Ezra and Adra at the opposite sides of the crowd, skimmed over Ko as he moved between.

Another squall of bodies held Ezra's interest as the scene evolved around her, without her notice. By the time she'd looked back, the threads of the event were too obvious to miss -- this figure, almost at the center of their lopsided pentacle, picking them out one by one.

Well. One always has to work with what they're given, and Ezra wasn't one to shirk away from a potential opportunity.

As soon as the thought crossed her mind, Ezra started to push her way through the crowd. She made sure to keep looking, though this time she added an intensity behind her actions. A freneticism as though a growing concern was dawning on her and becoming all too real.

She reached the many-eyed man quickly, and waved at him to garner (hopefully) his complete attention.

"Please! Please, can you help? I can't find her anywhere!"

There wasn't time to send a message to the rest of the group, but Ezra hoped that they would be able to understand her intentions regardless. Either she could at least provide enough of a distraction for them to evaluate this new option and assess where he stood in their test, or at least pass over him and get rid of the obstruction he could present.

Adra's blood chilled and her skin felt heavy. She wanted a bath, to wash away the man's gaze. The rain started to fall on her as if it heard her thoughts, and as she searched the crowd for her friends she heard Ezra's voice above the fray. She couldn't see the thin man anymore, but she realized the feeling of his lingering gaze was fading, sliding off her body as his attention moved elsewhere. Fuck. She wished she could read Ezra's thoughts. Without waiting for another signal, Adra slipped away from her position in the crowd.

No one else seemed to have noticed the thin man; while a few people glanced Ezra's direction, most were still entranced by the grig and The Ko. Adra moved along the rear of the crowd, searching for where Alemi might be able to exit the crush of bodies.

The Ko continued his dance, looking over to see Ezra approaching a many-eyed man with a look of desperation. He surmised that the man was observing and probably the changery visit to improve his vision for his job's sake. No way to figure out if this involved legal authority or if he was working with Articulous and Breme to observe and evaluate the group's efforts. Another possibility was to test if we were watching our backs, rather than simply fixated on finding targets. In either case, the Ko had his part to play and had to continue the effort.

He looked up at the sky, realizing that the fascination of his weave-enhanced dance probably couldn't overcome the annoyance of rain. He could weave Weather from Wind and... He felt the limitations of his threads. The Woods had an absence of Light, so he couldn't shift the weather to sunny. He might be able to accelerate it with Growth. Maybe by weaving with Nature, he could get a weave "generic" enough to simply reset the weather to cloudy.

He looked back to Ezra and the many-eyed man, breaking up his gaze with some twirls to avoid staring. Whatever happened there would probably determine his best course of action. A sudden downpour would make for a good distraction if she needed one. If she handled the situation, he could instead try to delay the rain.

Rain fell in fat droplets. It splashed onto the cobbles below them and collected in deep puddles between missing paving stones. It soaked their garments and made them heavy, weighing down pockets and hems.

One of the being's eyes moved to Ezra, regarding her with a piercing stare. The others remained on each of her counterparts, save one. The Ko's distraction proved fruitful in that the vislae before them did not seem to recognize The Ko as one of those he should have been observing. He let the song and dance go unattended while he tracked the movements of each of his pursuers.

"What," he hissed at Ezra, "are you looking for?"

Water splattered across her vision, and Ezra felt a thrill of fear electrify her form. The worry she’d been attempting to feign just a moment before became much more real, but she channeled it into her performance.

"My daughter," she said loudly; perhaps trying to overcome the inclement weather, but truly trying to subversively convey her plan to those who needed to know. "She ran off when the performance started. I thought – could you help? I don’t have … your abilities."

Ezra swallowed, letting the fright permeating her form fill every word and gesture to make it as convincing as possible. Regardless of whether she was appealing to the wrong sentiment or not, her main hope lay on the idea that her comrades weren’t too far away.

The strain in Ezra's voice would have been alarming if Alemi had been further away, if the span of distance between them had been enough to allow the drum of rainfall and the sway of music to completely drown out her words. But the handful of phrases Alemi could make out had been enough to sketch out the context of Ezra's intentions, and he kept his stride at an idling pace, one that wove him through the crowd in a manner that mimicked thoughtless meandering. Like Ko's, Ezra's act was a diversion, but this time with the intended audience of just one.

With the push of those surrounding him, Alemi let himself be steered so that his approach toward the man would come behind. Perhaps it would be enough to escape the stranger's seeking gaze, though he could still see one eye just on the periphery of that sharp, upper cheekbone. Yet, for the time, Ezra's performance held him, and he never turned his face away from hers. Alemi was close, then closer. Four feet away chiseled down to three. Each step pushed Ezra further into dangerous territory, but he had to trust her and hope he didn't fall short of hers. Since the man's appearance, tension clung to Alemi, like the chill wetness of rainfall, seeping down to settle deep against bone. But the clock was ticking and the crowd might start to dissipate if they thought the bad weather would linger.

Alemi slipped one hand forward, sliding between the frames of two bystanders, bringing the edges of fingertips just close enough to brush the man's back as one of the people standing between them moved so that he might mask it as their mistake. It was a long shot. An old trick his mother had once taught him, to open himself up to what was around him, to glimpse a bit of the world through different eyes. He had no control over what this grasp at understanding would tell him. But if he could manage some fragment of information that might give them a better sense of the situation, it would be worth it.

The knowledge unfurled in his thoughts, like the sweep of black ink bleeding into paper from pen tip as it sketched out the fluid strokes of cursive letters, and Alemi knew without a doubt that there were three wicked keys on this man.

Adra watched Alemi weaving through the crowd, closer and closer toward the many-eyed man. She cut into the edges of the crowd, making her way toward Alemi and hoping to provide him some cover to escape. Her vision slid out of focus, no longer looking at the space around her but the Space around her, the Time through which they all moved. Surely there was a way ... ? Adra weighed whether any advantage gained from a weave now would simply draw too much attention to Alemi and the others, and it didn't seem worth it. Not now.

The atmosphere around the man felt heavier, slicker, like rain mixed with oil. Adra drew as close as she dared, opening a small path in the crowd she planned to close behind Alemi.

The Ko looked up as the rain came down hard on its own initiative and the audience began expressing their disapproval. He saw Adra getting closer to the action, and figured she could probably use a distraction, herself. He looked to the crowd, "Here's a little experiment: an anti-rain dance!" He began an improvised dance, mentally reversing some traditional step orders, bringing out war fan, making cutting motions as he twirled. The motion of his casual clothes betrayed the fact that he wasn't actually rewinding time, but that was a detail for the observant to catch. He proceeded with his untested weave: Weather and Nature to reset the rain to merely cloudy. Experimentation was always risky, but improvisation was the key strength of Weaving.

He hoped he had at least drawn a few of the mystery man's many eyes in his direction with the announcement. Keeping the crowd around meant he had more to work with, along with plausible deniability for himself. He waited for the weather to change with both curiosity and dread.

The many-eyed man was not so easily distracted. They were given a reprieve in the form of the shifting crowd, who began to scatter as the rain continued to beat down. They raised umbrellas, ran beneath the awnings of storefronts, dipped into shops and coffeehouses for a moments' reprieve. A scattered few summoned flying thoughtforms or conjured floating stones to protect themselves from the elements. However they chose to do it, they sought refuge from the wind and wet, and left the motley crew more exposed than before.

Annoyed -- though by what precisely, none of them could tell -- the being turned its attention largely to Ezra. "Your spawn is likely hiding," he said. "I'm told they're wont to do that. Ask your friends. You have enough of them here, I think." His eyes darted, landing on Adra. By some miracle no eyes alighted upon Alemi, who was now perhaps too close to be detected.

Adra fought the rising bile in her throat as the full force of the man's gaze hit her for the first time. Somehow she kept her stomach right side in, willing herself not to look at Alemi. Instead, she dragged her eyes away from the man to Ezra. "Ezra, I'm sorry, I've looked everywhere. I can't find her," Adra said, forcing all her discomfort into her voice. He couldn't possibly be buying this, but she was willing to take the knocks if it meant Alemi could find his mark and get out.

Adra's voice struck Ezra with true surprise; her heart was already sinking into the pit of her stomach at the many-eyed man's comment on her "friends." She let her shock appear on her face as she glanced at Adra, the motion allowing her to ignore Alemi's presence just behind the man, visible in her peripheral. As much as she wanted to get away from this man, and despite how much it seemed like they were failing at their sole task, she knew it was still too early to duck out.

"You didn't see a little girl? Short, black hair?" Ezra hoped her attempt to feign details was instead coming off as someone pulled between too many emotions at once, their mind unable to gather the scattered marbles of their thoughts. Her words sputtered out at the man, either uncaring of his disinterest and growing annoyance, or in spite of. "She's wearing a green dress, if that helps!"

The rain continued to soak her form, weighing her body down as much as her waning emotions clouded her thoughts.

Their cover was too quickly dispersing, even as the spill of rain began to ease from the thick grey of clouds lingering overhead at Ko's magical coaxing.  It was as if the initial strike of cool water on exposed skin had swept away the enchantment of the grig's music and Ko's fervent dance, broke the connection made and dulled the allure of siren song.  If they weren't careful, they would soon find themselves alone and all too obvious.  Nevertheless Alemi knew he couldn't leave yet when their task remained unfinished.  But exactly how to complete it was unclear.  The scrap of information he had managed to glean was far too little to go on. There was nothing to indicate where any key was being kept, and of equal importance, whether it would be the right key if he managed to find one.
Those sparse passing seconds that Alemi took to consider the next move felt like an eternity.  He only vaguely heard Adra's voice join Ezra's as he studied the sleek lines of the towering man a few feet in front of him. The tailored fit of clothes stretching down along an unnaturally long form were not the sort that lent themselves well to concealment, trouser pockets lying too flat to be anything but bare, but there was something in the way the cloth fell along the waistline that struck Alemi as uncharacteristic.  That could be something.  Alemi drew from within himself a spell that he hoped would add further clarity.  It escaped him in the murmur of lips, seeking, searching, sketching out  the invisible and the obscured. 

Alemi could see now that there was indeed nothing in those pockets, yet it was shocking how many keys could be hidden beneath the stranger's suit jacket, keys of all types, spanning the full rainbow in complexity of design.  There were six that hung toward the very edge of the back of the jacket, and at least one of them seemed to have all the intricacies of a wicked key.  It would need to be cut free, and Alemi hurried to retrieve a utility knife as unobtrusively as possible.  The last thing any of them needed was to be accused of trying to do violence.  With the small blade tucked against his palm, he followed the rhythm of the shifting crowd to get as close as he could from behind, cautiously lifting up the back flap of the man's jacket.  In the same fluid motion, the knife sliced free the first row of dangling keys that came into view, their shapes still only visible in the sparse lines drawn out from magic, and only taking solid form again as they fell into Alemi's awaiting grasp.

It was only as he withdrew his hand that he felt a sudden sharp sting on the side of it, only as the clothing slipped quietly back in place that he saw from the corner of his eyes what looked like the string, which had once held the keys in place, writhing, straining outward as if they sought to find their missing possessions,  Ignoring the flash of pain, he waited for the next shove of the restless audience to push him further away again, clutching six keys tightly in his fingers and hoping that soon they'd all be able to make their escape. 

The Ko breathed a sigh of relief as the rain began to ease up, but it was plain to see his dance wasn't working anymore. He walked towards some of the nearby awning to dry off, give himself time to think, and avoid too readily associating himself with the rapidly growing scene. His grig companion joined him. Hopefully, he would be written off as a street performer the group took advantage of, should the worst happen. He could probably hide in plain sight, but the rest wouldn't have it so easy.

The grig, no longer engaged in its concert, now found itself bored. And this, of course, simply would not do. It spied an inattentive vislae a few paces behind Alemi, and there it directed its bounding steps. The crowd cried out as it leapt over, around, and through them. For a moment it seemed it might bowl Alemi himself over. But it avoided him, intentionally or otherwise, and made for the young vislae now scampering away from Alemi and his cohort.

"No!" the young man shouted. He ran into a nearby alleyway, his voice echoing off the paving stones and brick, fading beneath his own footfalls and the ceaseless hopping of the grig. "No I just got rid of you lot! My house will be ruined! No more!"

The many-eyed man turned to watch the commotion, all eyes on what he assumed was yet another diversion, an attempt to part him from his belongings. He did not notice Alemi, now furtively slipping back into the crowd. But he felt himself lighter, and, blaming the grig and the vislae it followed, he moved toward the alleyway. His cruel gaze followed with him; all save two eyes, which cut back, affixing on Adra and Ezra.

The weight of that gaze lingered even after he had gone into the alleyway, after his footsteps had receded altogether and his presence was otherwise well and truly gone.

Like the rain that had cooled the earlier warmth of the day and painted the streets in darker shades with its wet, the eerie nature of those many eyes had somehow altered things, and even in their absence, did not let those who had once been the victims of their pinpoint focus shake so easily free from it. Alemi was still quite tangled in its hold. During all that time - upon the sudden launch of the grig shooting passed him, as the young man had departed in dismayed pursuit, when the thin man himself wheeled around with seeking gaze - Alemi had felt as though his breath had stuck in his throat, wary that the barest sound, even the quiet, rhythmic draw of air, might attract unwanted attention.

Yet, now he found himself shuffling alongside half a dozen others who idled down the street, feigning interest in a window display with his hands buried deep into the depth of his own jacket pockets. With a moment to pause and organize his thoughts, he clocked his companions, and then with a quick, sharp motion, as if to toss the fall of bangs out of his face, he inclined his chin sharply in the direction of the building a few doors down. Whether he'd succeeded or not, they needed somewhere to regroup. To check if he'd even snagged the right object, or make use of their remaining time to concoct a new plan. He could only hope they'd caught the cue.