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Late evening on Temple's main campus, and lots of people are out doing people things. Study groups for Summer school are sprawled across the grass on the main quad; a pair of girls make out leaned against a wall, a man walks his dog. Everything is like, super normal. Right now, anyway.
A face not usually seen sits people watching in the quad. An older student with shoulder-length dark hair pulled back into a low ponytail, wearing a white buttonup shirt and gray slacks. The look on their face is thoughtful, but tired, signs of stress in the tension of their muscles. A small stack of library books sits next to them on the bench.
Exhaustion frays the corners of their perception: are they really so tired that rainbows shimmer at the corners of their perception? When did they last sleep properly?
When they're looking at the ground for a moment, a pair of sneakers appears in front of them. They don't walk into frame, they are simply there a moment after they are not there. Worn out Chuck Taylors, white, scribbled on with marker. (pink and blue stripes, left shoe, yellow, grey, black, right shoe)
Not just shoes, but the feet in them, slouchy socks, skinny jeans with torn-out knees. A slow puff of vapor curls over and around the student after the hiss and pop of a vape.
the girls are watching them now
and everyone knows
(knows what?)
and everyone knows
Anthony, as they call themselves now, and have since birth, stares at the shoes through the shimmery haze. After so long isolated in their room, everything outside seems hyper-real. And those shoes...they induce instant envy, and an out loud "Oh wow". Before they even look up, they're taken by covetousness, by the pink and blue popping against the white, by the sheer color itself but also whoever wears them so easily, whoever gets to be so interesting.
They blink at the curling vapor, nose twitching at the familiar scent of sweetened herbal mist. Their eyes finally track up the legs to see who it actually is.
"Hey kid," offers the -- girl's? -- voice lazily. The figure props a hand on their slender hip; sleek dark hair falls around a perfectly-made-up face. A face too familiar, and yet not familiar at all. Eyes wide and dark, the corner of their mouth curled up. They flip the vape in their hand lazily. "Strawberry or blueberry?"
Out of the corners of Anthony's eyes, he catches the profile of another figure moving.
does the girl have a twin
that was a man, that dog was with a man, why is the man a girl now
Her smile shimmers, and yet there's something accusatory about it. Something rises in the back of Anthony's mind, a crawling sensation up the back of their spine, into the lizard brain:
everyone knows, everyone knows, you liar, you liar
"Strawberry or blueberry?" the feminine figure asks, as a pair of her dopplegangers run past, laughing.
Anthony stares, and confusion gives way to surreal awe. The figure in front of ...him, and everyone else... It's overwhelming for a moment. But they can't look away. They can't break gaze with the immaculate figure in front of them, the wavy hair swept dramatically to one side and buzzed short on the other in feisty asymmetry. The sleek little vape in their manicured fingers. "Blueberry," they hear themselves say, as they rise to their feet, holding their hand out. "It's always blueberry. You know that."
They blink, as if not understanding what they're even saying. They don't know this person, of course. They have no idea what's going on. They're clearly having a stroke, or some sort of nervous breakdown, and...
Liar, hisses the back of their mind again. They know who they're looking at. They know what's happening. They just don't know how they know.
"I mean, you could have chosen the red fruit," that soft voice lilts back at Anthony. "But that would have been a little too on the nose, don't you think?" The figure sticks its tongue out at him, and laughs out loud, a bright thing like prismatic light scattered across the walls through broken glass.
laughing at him, at him, at him, don't be a fool, it's always him, can't change a thing
liar, liar
sinner
The sleek-and-perfect reaches out the hand with the vape in it, and a booming laugh comes from the far end of the bench. Starched up and pressed, red power tie and jacket, pocket square matching, sleek moustache. Like looking at Anthony's father distilled into their nightmares of themself as an adult. That laughter rises. "Whatever you pick, they're both fruits."
Anthony takes the offered vape and lifts it to their mouth to take a drag in front of God and everybody, as the saying goes, not seeming to mind they're out on the quad. A very unusual gesture. The laughing breaks through the reverie of sharing with this lovely new person. Anthony is as they've always been, soft, meek, agreeable. Pleasant. Gentle.
The look that slides into their eyes as they see the jeering man on the bench is anything but these. Their shoulders tense up, and their mouth curls into something between amusement and revulsion. They're not entirely sure who or what the man is, but they know what he's saying. They know the symbols. They lock eyes with him, refusing to shy away, fixing a confrontational gaze. "Is he talking to us?" An icy tone.
The thing about Awakenings is that they shine like beacons to the Awakened -- for good and for ill. If Leta can feel the adrenaline rush of what the grown-ass Mastigos knows is an Awakening in progress, then so can Seers and Banishers and and and and --
It doesn't so much hit her Peripheral Mage Sight as sing on it, as light it up, as provide the sort of light she can follow like Laura following Shadow across the US in American Gods.
There's just this kid, sitting on a bench, talking to themself. Buttoned-up boychik-looking figure with their hair pulled back into a low ponytail. Looking around and talking to themself, which -- if it hasn't drawn attention -- will soon. Making gestures with an empty hand like they're taking something from someone.
"Hunh?" The femme asks Anthony, wrinkling up their forehead. "Who?" Her head cocks to the side, and she takes back the vape, starting to wander away and then turning back. "It's just us, baby!"
And the man in the suit just laughs, and laughs, and laughs. "You heard me. Who do you think you're kidding?"
It's a good thing Leta's sober for this. Y'know, because otherwise that wave that her peripheral sight might've just seemed like another in a chorus of hallucinations. The twiggy Mastigos is currently dressed in her work clothes - a black coat with gold trim, a pencil skirt, and a sleeveless, floral print button-up. She ducks off out of sight, and hikes her skirt just high enough to procure the iron rod strapped to her thigh in a leather holster and works a spell into being that will fortify her mind.
She smooths out her skirt, and steps around the corner with her eyes fully open. Tripsitter Leta: Activate.
Something in Anthony's head says to stay with what's nice. To believe the self that says it's just them, to shut out doubt and fears. But there's more in their soul than just fantasies of identity and expression. They have their sins, like everyone. And while true Pride is still elusive to them, there's plenty of Wrath. So it's at this moment that they stride across the quad and start yelling at what, to everyone else present, looks like an empty bench.
"I think I was just minding my own business until some smug fuck with an ugly moustache started jeering at me for some reason. Why the fuck do you even care? Is this what you do with your time, just stand around judging people? With no skin in the game yourself?" It starts out at normal volume, but ramps up quickly. Fists curl into balls at Anthony's side. "You think I don't know what YOU are?"
The sleek figure with its undercut sort of looks off to one side, confusedly, as if the conversation they'd just been having was interrupted by the person they were talking to starting to act crazy. They awkwardly take a puff of their vape -- all illusion, of course, and none of this visible to Leta -- and turn to start walking away a little bit.
Two things happen at once for the grown Mastigos: when Anthony starts to ramp up in volume, there's a crackling along the edge of her already-overloaded Peripheral Mage Sight, and then a Goetia pops into being in Twilight behind the bench.
know who you are, know who you are
sinner echoes in Anthony's head
The Thing behind the bench is a tall, dark smear of ink. Featureless and vaguely humanoid. It slowly weaves from side to side just behind Anthony.
Halfway across the quad, the woman in her early twenties pushes her mass of curls back from her face as she shoves her headphones back from her ears. Her backpack weighs her down, but she changes direction, starting to angle over toward the yelling student.
The man rises from the bench, straightens his jacket, and takes a step closer to Anthony. Looming. "No skin in the game?" His laugh cuts as sharply as a blade. "As if you've got enough of a game going on for anyone to have skin in. Look at you. Pretender."
To Anthony, both Leta and the approaching woman appear as -- something similar to the idealized figure who's turned away from them -- somewhere on the sliding scale between Idealized Self and Internalized Horror. Leta's sliders pushed more toward Idealized, the approaching woman's appearance something like a Nightmare Of Not Passing. Scraggly facial hair, features too blocky.
There's a little grumble from Leta as she activates her Sight. The Mastigrownup blends in pretty well here, shockingly. As it turns out, when you look like a hot English professor that's just stepped out for a smoke after grading terrible dissertations, it's pretty easy to fade into the background on a college campus. She peers at what seems to be the pieces of an Awakening, vigilant in the event that something shady starts to go down.(edited)
Anthony doesn't recoil from the looming figure, but his words cut deep. Their eyes widen. "I'm just trying to make things easier," they murmur. "To..." The excuses falter. Their attention falls on the dysmorphic vision approaching them. The unshaved face, the inevitable worry lines, the hairy legs. "Is that what I'm afraid of?" In their half-lucid state, they face the fear, and glance back curiously at the moustached man. "You're right," they admit. "I'm sitting on the fence because it's easier. Fuck." A hand smears over their face in confusion, in disorientation. They falter, and their righteousness is suddenly blunted by a wave of Shame. Their gaze passes over to Leta, staring sort of through them, beholding another mirrored eidolon of themselves. "I'm making myself fit into place in this shitty world where only the wicked are happy."
And all of this seems pretty normal to Leta, of course: just a baby talking to various internal versions of themself, like a baby does. The smeary figure directly behind Anthony -- and thus out of their range of vision? -- that doesn't quite fit, though.
To put it mildly.
But then the thing just sort of starts to wander off by itself. This is very normal and of course one should always let unsupervised Goetic horrors meander around Philadelphia. It'll be fine, right? Just let that leave, and stay with the kid?
When Anthony stops yelling, the girl approaching slows her roll, watching the figure on the bench talking to themself, and casts an uncertain glance around. Leta did a pretty good job of hiding herself, though, so she takes a couple steps closer.
Anthony's perspective becomes -- suddenly -- a little like the scene in Being John Malkovich when John Malkovich goes through the door and everyone is suddenly John Malkovich in a chaotic party: as soon as they say that, it's like the universe unfolds and refolds, twisting in on itself impossibly. Every blade of grass and mote of dust floating in the air laughs with their face, and over and over, the world whispers: sinner.
Everything and nothing is possible. A single fixed point exists, just beyond Anthony's reach: a blank space in the shape of sanity, a hole in the world in the shape of a handprint.
Of course, that Goetia wandering off into Philadelphia is probably bad, but it's also probably not the worst thing wandering Philly's streets right now. So. Fuck it.
Anthelion slips those tinted tea-shades onto her face, stepping forth from her fly-on-the-wall hiding place, and moving to intercept the approaching student with a smile. Now she looks like a proper trip sitter, and the lie she'll probably be telling in about twenty seconds will make perfect sense.(edited)
They see it. The world turns inwards, and everyone laughs, they laugh. Their eyes turn on the one out of place, the ones not laughing, the scraggly figure of doubt and self-pity. The one coming to try and talk them down to politeness and modesty and obedience. Their eyes lock, and as they're held back from reaching them, the person named Anthony at birth answers the fallen world's last attempt to make them stay:
"No."
They turn towards the hole in the world and reach towards it, past everything. Past the air and the space itself, past gravity and matter and the Lie. Their fingers fit into the grooves of the handprint perfectly. It was meant for him, for her, for them. For Tanya, finally ready to see it. They don't care who sees as they stretch out their arm to not merely touch the Truth beyond distance, but to curl their fingers right into it, grab hold, and pull.
And that is the moment, for those tending the Tree in the Arboretum, when a flower bursts into bloom on the ineffable Tree, and the flower becomes fruit.
It's old hat for a Guardian trip-sitter to ward off the interests of a human who's being nosy where she shouldn't, which leaves Leta with one (1) baby Mastigos to look after.
This will surely be fine.
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