2019-11-20 - Gantzeh Makhers / Movers and Shakers

When a dated, but well-maintained cherry-red Jeep rolls to a stop in one of the designated parking spaces of Steelhead Service Center, it is a crisp, Autumn evening. The air outside is laced with the unmistakable signs of an inevitably bitter winter, but for a sleepy, eerie town like Gray Harbor, it is perhaps appropriate.

That isn't to say it can't be beautiful, however. Twilight falls over an urban landscape splashed with the colors of the season, fiery foilage adding some much needed texture to the otherwise gray canvas. The moon is visible early on such a clear day, hanging fat and luminous above a distant horizon cluttered with stars - a veritable one-eighty flip from the recent storm-inundated days. The buzz of traffic rises and falls in a steady but somewhat disjointed cacophony past the business that Itzhak Rosencrantz keeps in this side of town, somewhat muted once his visitor walks through the main bay doors, her slender shadow crossing the threshold and brisk bootsteps hitting the walk.

Isabella Reede is not a frequent visitor so she can't help but look out of place in these environs, her dark-haired head peering around and letting her inquisitive green eyes take in the meticulously-arranged space. She's dressed casually, but warmly in deference to the weather; jeans tucked into knee-high boots, a loose, ruffled top and a fitted leather jacket pulled over her shoulders. Her hair is pulled up behind her hair in a careless twist and the moonstone pendant she is never without swings against the front of her shirt, scattering rainbow motes of color whenever it catches light at the right angle. There's a satchel slung diagonally over her body, and she's got a scarf draped loosely around her throat.

"Hello?" she calls out. "Mister Rosencrantz?"

A gorgeous autumn evening, and Itzhak is working on something: a collection of copper pipes and fittings lies on his workbench. Whatever he's making is small, of the size to put on a table or a kitchen counter. Bluegrass fiddle music plays, but for once, he's not playing it. There are speakers set around the garage, mismatched things thrown out by people who didn't know what to do with them and rescued by Itzhak.

He looks up, scowling, or maybe that's how his face just is. Then his expression changes to something...complicated but at least not openly hostile. "Hey. Isabella, right?"

"Hey," she flashes him a smile, however faint and uncertain. There's a glance over her shoulder. "And yeah, Isabella. Itzhak?" She mimics the way Alexander pronounces it. "Is this a bad time? I'm sorry for dropping by unannounced, but I was in the neighborhood and I saw your sign." She nods to it, before taking several steps further towards the taller (he's so tall!) mechanic, her head tilting back once she's in police conversation distance.

"I remembered you said you wanted to talk to me, after the funeral. But if you're in the middle of work, I can head out and set a proper appointment next time." Her hands slide into her pockets at that, and unable to help herself, there's a curious glance at the collection of copper pipes he's fiddling with.

The shop logo, inherited from decades ago when it was new, is a Pacific Northwest-style tribal raven carrying a salmon in its belly. Which might be hard to tell because the poor thing is so scratched up, paint gone from the years of weathering.

Itzhak wipes his hands absently on a rag hanging from the back pocket of his coveralls. "Well, you can see how busy I am," he says dryly, flicking his fingers out to indicate that there's literally nothing going on. Two bays have cars, both under tarps, and the third has a handsome Triumph motorcycle, gleaming and detailed to within an inch of its life. "Yeah, it's Itzhak. Do me a favor and don't call me Mr. Rosencrantz. Just Rosencrantz is fine, no mister." He really is very tall when he stands up from the workbench. "I can hear you. That's why I wanna talk to you. You're like me." He gestures to his temple. "Your Song's like mine."

Your Song's like mine.

Her smile curls upwards, wry and visible when he gestures to the largely empty space, but that fades away in light of the things he tells her. "...is that how you sense other people like you?" Isabella wonders, her interest clear and overt on her sunkissed features. "It's fitting, you're a very talented musician." If those soulful strains of Ave Maria were any indication. "Did you train for a long time?"

Her hands slide further into her pockets. "I can see it, rather than hear it. Your power's very significant, even if the Exorcist hadn't pointed it out during that meeting in the Veil, I've been able to tell." Her expression twists faintly. "I'm sorry that you got dragged into all of that."

Itzhak nods, eyebrows quirking. He rests against the workbench, hiking up one long lean thigh on its surface. "I hear people. Hear things, too. I can hear the border, where it's thin. Sometimes it calls to me, wants me to open it." His voice goes a little drifty, his eyes trailing off Isabella. Then he clears his throat, tinting red. "Anyway. I can hear that you're pretty strong too. Not so strong as me, but to be real honest, nobody is." Itzhak spreads his hands palms-up, like, what can you do? "People keep telling me I got dragged into that mishegoss with Gohl, but literally nobody else coulda done what I did. So it ain't that, not really. Besides, we all gotta live here. If I didn't shove him into my fiddle case, he'd still be fuckin' rampaging around slitting throats. How could I not do it?"

To the question of how long he's trained, he shrugs, suddenly going bashful under Isabella's compliments. "Since I was fourteen. Minus five years I spent in prison. I actually had access to a violin in prison, but let's just say they didn't think I deserved to play it so often."

She remembers feeling that way - these days, there's enough fear in her not to; debilitating enough to lock her limbs and it takes a good dose of prescription medication in her blood for her to take the steps necessary to enter the Veil. There's wistfulness and envy there when she remembers, but this is one that Isabella attempts to push off her face.

His assessment of her potential isn't inaccurate and something flickers in her eyes at that. "I used to be," she tells him quietly, moving so she could turn to face him fully by his bench, though she doesn't lean against it. "When I was much younger. When I still had my twin." She smiles faintly there, and while the envy doesn't abate, there is melancholy there, too, and as she continues watching Itzhak and how he burns like a star - can wield all of it with just a breath - she is reminded of what she has lost.

"But I don't think I'll ever be that way again," she tells him. "So if anything, I'm doubly glad you're around...and that you did it." Darkness creeps over her face. "I heard he put up a fight."

His revelation, this piece of him that speaks to the skill she witnessed has her blinking once. "So over...half your life, maybe? Wow." She laughs, shaking her head once. "I never had the patience for it, music. My brother played the piano beautifully, but when I tried to learn..." She gestures vaguely to the side, pulling her hand off the pocket to do it. "It just didn't stick. Definitely not built for creative endeavors, me, so I can't help but be jealous of those who are."

Itzhak's eyebrows pop up, surprised. "You lost some of it?" Hastily, he adds, "I'm sorry to hear that. About your twin. Did they get lost on the other side?" There's no pity in his question. This is a technical query, and he asks it with great interest. Look, he said he was sorry to hear it, that's the required words! "I lost somethin' too, recently. Not my main thing, not the opening, not the moving. The thing Roen can do. The healing. I couldn't heal, not really, I could mostly just feel stuff, but...it was there, and now it ain't there." Itzhak rolls his shoulders in a shrug. "Nothing's for certain in this world."

Then he lifts a hand as if to run it through his curly black hair. He visibly remembers he's just been working on something, so he drops his hand again and folds his arms. "Gohl put up a fight, yeah. And then he closed all the doors on his way out, the mamzer. I can't reach nearly so far as I could. Feels like being locked in a closet, when I used to be able to just go anywhere I wanted. ...Listen, don't be jealous," he adds with an embarrassed tick of his eyebrows. "Not about music. You're gonna get a doctorate. My sister's a PhD, I know how fuckin' hard it is. I couldn't in a million years. Nothin' to be jealous about, not when you can do all that academic stuff. I didn't even graduate high school, I got a GED."

You lost some of it?

There is open hesitation on Isabella's features, and a twinge of pain that she tries to quell. But she straightens up her shoulders and doubles down on her pride when she sees the spark of interest on his dark eyes. "I did, and he did." But it hangs strangely in the air, indicative that the story she tells him is not complete. Still, what he tells her is puzzling and she can't help but draw her brows down in thought. He can practically hear her mind tumbling over the problem, tumblers and gauges echoing in the Eschereque landscapes of the ruined library inside of her psyche, guarded by her dangerous but half-blind dragon. "Do you mind if we...?" She gestures to the bench, so they can sit and she can still look him in the eye, because he's so tall.

If he allows her, she'll take it up. "It's definitely something that can happen. Usually, it heals, but I think it's largely dependent on the stressor. How I lost certain aspects of my abilities was..." She swallows, but she tries, because this is Itzhak Rosencrantz, and he's a friend of Alexander's. "...unusual, and violent, in a way. May I ask what happened and what you were doing when you realized you lost it?"

His sister, too, sparks her visible interest - always, when she gets to know the people behind their names and faces. In a way that is what Archaeology is, the study of how people lived their lives, piecing together the fragments and pieces they've left behind - it influences much of her interactions with others. "Your sister's in which field?" she wonders. "And that's good." She means it. "That you got your GED." There's a more teasing bent to her smile. "Sounds like you're very good with your hands, though. I hear violin playing requires a significant degree of dexterity, plus..." She gestures the vehicles in the bay, all the tools, the need he demonstrates to touch something, even if it's just himself.

"I'm like that, too," she confesses; she's toying with the pendant around her neck, the thing she refused to give up to Gohl. "Mover trait, I think. We always need to touch something, feel something. When I was a kid, my brother would make a game out of putting a blindfold on me and see if I can maneuver around a room without tripping over anything, or knocking over anything. I still have that, at least...the spatial awareness."

Itzhak stares in fascination, like one of his beloved reptiles tracking a wiggly bug. What he hasn't mentioned yet, but which Isabella can probably tell, is he gained something else when he lost his mender ability. He can read, now, sense emotions, feel what someone else feels and inflict his own turbulent emotions on them. Right now, he's sensing Isabella's thoughts, and he's riveted. A mindscape where you're going one way, then your perspective changes and all of a sudden you're going another way. You think you're walking up a mountainside when you realize you're walking down into the ocean.

His own self, Itzhak has a mindscape of fractal constructions, twisting in on themselves in long, elegant spirals, like fern leaves unrolling. There's a sense like the folds of origami, impossible inventions of iterative gears erupting above a tossing oceanic plane of Penrose tiles. Below that infinitely complex surface, weird things swim through the deep of Itzhak's intense emotions.

It takes him a minute to realize Isabella is asking to sit, and he comes back to life from his entranced stillness and waves her towards the little sitting area, made of thrifted armchairs and coffee table and a sideboard with the usual PNW coffee and hot water and tea and related stuff. "Yeah, shit, I got no manners, c'mon." He heads over there himself and flops in an armchair, all legs and elbows. "Naomi's an astronomer," he says, stretching out those long legs to cross them at the booted ankle. "She wanted to do field work and research, and she did for a while, but then she got pregnant and they mommy-tracked her. So she had to go into teaching. Adjunct stuff, you know?" Itzhak shakes his head in disgust. "It oughta be a fuckin' crime, the way adjuncts get treated.

"Uh, so, anyway, I got pulled across when I lost the mending." He gets an odd look on his face, eyes going faraway. "They put me back in prison, told me I was gonna die there. I killed one or two of the screws. Think that's when I lost it."

She can sense it, the way his senses attempts to roll one way through the flowing pathways of her mind, in one way, but out the other and Isabella can't help it. There's a grin, and there's something girlish about it - the burning, incandescent star-core within herself is reflected in her smile. She had always told Alexander that she loved her little tricks the most. "Over half my life, I was bonded with a reader," she tells him as she follows his long, lean form, fascinated by the way he cuts through a space with ease, like a honed blade, with those limbs that seem endless. "Sid was a genius, and for better or worse, he was hungry. For knowledge, about our talents, our gifts, the things that lie on the other side, above all things. He taught me this." She gestures to her head. "Helped me fortify my mental defenses. Even Alexander can't break through, sometimes."

She follows his own, just a peek, the swirl of kaleidoscopic complexity that she could sense twigging her already irrepressible curiosity, rolling lightly over the delicate coiling trellises of him. She takes up a space near him, but not too close, tucking her ankles together and her body turned so she can see him and watch him, forever a creature guided by the whims of her physical senses. "It's a difficult field to break into. Anything, really, involving space and the stars...it's extremely competitive." There's sympathy there. "I hope she's still passionate about it, despite everything. Academia tends to eat people alive like that, no matter how brilliant, without the right support. Is she doing okay?"

His faraway look is noted, and her attentive stare harpens. "Alexander told me that August and you were dragged back into something exhausting, but he didn't give me the details. He's an honest man, but he's protective when it comes to his friends' travails. And I've seen August recently, he was looking...tired. He wouldn't tell me either, when I asked." She closes her eyes for a moment, bust when she opens them again, they find his own easily. "You lost the healing aspect, but it sounds like you gained some of the reading aspect. How was it before? You had one or the other, or did you have all three?"

Itzhak slouches in the armchair with more of his spine on the cushion than his narrow butt. Head propped in the V of his thumb and forefinger, the rest of his fingers curled loosely against his unshaven cheek, he listens. One of his steel-toe workboots starts tapping out a beat on the rug. Fidgety guy.

"Uh, yeah, uh." Uncomfortably, Itzhak looks away. "Neither him nor me really wanna talk about it. It was just fucked up. They know exactly which buttons to push to get a meal out of me. Out of any of us. I was..." He hesitates for a long moment, frame tense, then shakes his head. "I had all three kinds of Song, seems like, but now I only got two." Subject change! "Anyway, I wanted to ask ya if you knew how to open doors, cross the border, move stuff. 'Cause I can show ya if you don't."

"It..." Isabella hesitates. "It can heal, sometimes. That's what happened to us, when we were sick over the summer. It messed with our ability to harness the Talent, but once the fever broke, it started stitching itself back together. It looked to me that the effects of things that cross over from there to here are temporary, unless maybe there's a conscious mind behind it, like with Gohl's bones. What I've managed to observe and study anyway, I've fallen into enough messes since I returned home a few months ago to start keying into patterns." She looks over to the entrance of the bay, before she lowers her voice. "It was an experiment. These things on the other side, there's at least a few who are testing us. Or people like us. I think largely to see how our abilities work, or how we use our abilities. I'm not sure yet which one."

Open doors, cross the border and move things? "I..." She pauses. "I used to. I did my best to forget I even had this for over ten years, now that I'm back..." She frowns down at her hands. "My old skills have atrophied considerably in my absence. I know how conceptually, but the control I used to have is gone." After a moment, she looks back up at him and smiles. "You're sweet, to even think about teaching me. If you don't mind instructing a remedial student, I'd happily take you up on it. Has...Easton Marshall, has he contacted you? He wanted to ask you the same. To practice."

Itzhak grunts, his eyes on Isabella. Not on her eyes, though. More around her shoulder, or possibly just over her shoulder at the backrest of the chair. It could look like he's staring at her chest, but his emotions don't show much sign of salacious interest. He's interested all right, he's thinking, but not about Isabella's body. ...Okay, maybe a little he is, in the way a man who likes women will react to a beautiful woman (and Isabella is a stunningly beautiful woman). There's honest appreciation there, but he's tamping it down. She's Alexander's girl.

"Sweet, nothin'," he says, although his mobile mouth curls up at one corner. "This is a street fight and we need you on our side. There ain't so many of us in town who can do what we can do. Easton?" Both eyebrows hike up. "He didn't mention, but I heard it in him too. I'll get a hold of him."

He makes another low wordless thoughtful sound, gaze sliding off Isabella. "Experiments. Yeah that makes a lotta sense. Puttin' us in mazes like rats, studying how we react. That makes way too much sense. I hate it."

"You're the most powerful one that I know personally in what feels like an age," Isabella tells him; it's the objective truth and while the angle of his stare is somewhat off (and that sparks her interest also, but she doesn't ask), her eyes are directly on his face, intent and focused with the diamond-sharp intensity in which she applies to the most fascinating puzzles in her life, putting him, for now, in the center of her universe at the exclusion of all other stimuli. "I don't come across a lot of movers in the wild - before you, it was just Easton. There's Magnolia, too, to a lesser extent, but she doesn't like using. And nor do I want to encourage her. Not really." Her expressive mouth tilts down in the corners. "She has a young daughter, raising her on her own. I'd rather she not make herself a target."

His promise to reach out to Easton has her relaxing faintly, warmth blanketing her features. "Maybe the three of us can get together," she suggests. "Make a session out of it. I'd...like to observe you also, while you teach, if you don't mind? If there's anything the last few months have taught me, it's the fact that I don't know whether any of us knows as much as we should. Easton is...he's practiced, but a lot of it is unconscious. He didn't know he could find things deliberately until I told him he could, for instance." Her jaw sets, something determined and defiant playing along the line of it. "We're getting along into the darker months. Summer was bad enough, and with everything else happening, I think it's going to become even more dangerous by the time Winter settles in." She shifts, serious eyes roving over his sharper features. "I heard that several Doors were opened on the other side lately, but I don't know who or what were freed. You've got the best range I know, and if you felt the Doors closing when Gohl left, maybe you can feel them when they open up unexpectedly, also, so I was also wondering...if you feel anything like that heading our way, could you let us know?"

At his thoughtful sound, and when he looks away, she tilts her head and attempts an encouraging smile. "Street fight, right?" she says, her bravado surging forward. "Just gotta find the right brass knuckles."

Itzhak , unavoidably, starts turning red across his cheekbones and the high, crooked bridge of that huge nose. Isabella is looking at him like a puzzle she'd love to solve. "I didn't do it on purpose," he murmurs, "bein' so strong. It just happened. Like bein' tall. Just happened." He snorts, as she uses the term 'using'. "Alexander calls it that too. 'Using', like it's coke or speed. Guess that fits with the way he sees it, that we shouldn't do too much of it or it's bad for us. I dunno as I agree. I think God didn't give us the Song so we could ignore it and never sing it, yannow? Or why did He give us the Song at all? It's a mitzvah to use our bodies and minds to our full potential. The Song don't fall out of bounds with that, I'm pretty fuckin' certain."

He looks back at her. His eyes are a grayish hazel with strong striations of green and brown, clear and sharp. "Sure you can watch me. Observe, whatever. Gonna be important for us to all know as much as we can, right?And...yeah, of course. I hear any doors open, I'll send up a flare."

"I was never really clear whether it was genetic," Isabella confesses. "Members of my family have always had this, but it might also be that everyone has it, and it just takes the right equation by way of life experiences to develop it, and shape its potency and strength. I..." And there's a smile. "I don't know much about you, just that Alexander thinks you have a beautiful mind and that he values your friendship, but there were hints...bits and pieces he's told me, that suggests that you probably didn't have it easy. Like him. I think maybe that's part of it...what you've endured, so far."

She falls silent, listening quietly to his opinion. "I've been wondering lately whether there isn't a balance we can't achieve, there. To use just enough to keep us sharp, without needlessly dropping disaster on our heads. But we can't determine that either, without practice or testing. Otherwise, we're just guessing and after what happened to Gohl..." It's not cutting it anymore.

They're like semi-precious stones, his eyes, and there's an appreciative smile playing on her lips, forever drawn to color and life. "Thanks, Itzhak. For this, I appreciate it, and for even thinking about reaching out and..." There's a glance down at her fingers, and she laughs, somewhat breathless. "I'm a prideful idiot, most days. I didn't even think about asking, the way Easton was thinking." Looking up again, she leaning forward to squint at him playfully, her smile broadens into a grin. "It's adorable, the way you blush. I can see why you're so popular, wherever you go."

"I got no idea if the Song is genetic, but ain't everything genetic these days? Maybe people like us, we're like pro athletes or something. Everybody has what we have, we just have more of it. I dunno, that kind of thing's gotta be up to you and Alexander and people smart about it." His attention is on her again, focused and lasery. "Look, we all got our problems and stupid shit. I thought I'd ask ya because I don't know you at all. Figured I could at least get a feel for your Song."

Then Isabella compliments Itzhak on his blushing and he laughs, embarrassed. "Oh jeez no, now you did it." He goes as red as a damn tomato. "Ugh, stupid capillaries!" He scrubs at his cheek as if that will somehow turn the blush off. "I can count the times someone's called me popular on one finger. Believe it or not, not everybody wants to hang around an ex-con with an attitude problem."

"It's poetic, in a way, how you describe it. I never thought to call it that way, and I don't think I ever would have until I heard it from you," Isabella confesses. Song. If nothing else, it reflects much of how he views it, the importance he places on it - this wholehearted acceptance that it is part of him. Something beautiful and meant to be experienced, instead of viewing it like a curse. "Mine's broken," she says, finally, after a brief pause. "I don't know if it'll ever heal, and be how it was. Whatever chance I had to reach the levels you have is gone, I think, and I've been too..." Afraid, but her pride reacts viscerally against the word, it stubbornly clings to the back of her throat and refuses to come out, not in front of a man who can probably shake this entire room apart, and toss her out by her clothes with a single thought. "...reluctant to explore what I can still do. But Alexander's right about that being dangerous, too. I know he is. I was just being ridiculous and stubborn about it for months. There's no sense fighting with one arm tied behind your back." After a pause, she laughs. "Unless you're very good at it, I suppose and I've seen you go rounds with Joey Kelly so you probably know something about that, also." She makes an exaggerated bow towards him. "So I submit myself to your very capable hands."

Her expression warms visibly as he laughs, and she lifts slender shoulders in a shrug. "Just telling you what I heard," she says, with a flash of that quick grin, cutting through the dim lighting of his garage like a beacon. "Everyone I've talked to who knows you seems to have a tremendously high opinion of you. But at the same time, everyone else I know seems to be drawn to difficult, complicated people. I'm one of those, definitely, so you've been warned." She winks at him teasingly at that.

"Shit is dangerous. It's smart to be, uh," Itzhak veers off from saying 'afraid', "yannow. Careful. I ain't smart, never have been, I wanna put the pedal to the metal and see where she bottoms out. But, look, that's no reason not to work out what you can still do. I'm serious. We need people like us who know how to be tough, know how to open doors, and know how to move stuff. Far as I can tell, we're the rarest kind. Bex Carr, Alexander, Isolde, de Santos, de la Vega, Hya Addington, just to name a few! All readers. As for openers, there's you, there's me, Easton, Roen can do some of it, I can't think of anybody else. Ain't met Magnolia, don't think, but I'm gonna have to get a hold of her."

He's no longer slouching, having shifted his weight forward to talk urgently to Isabella. Those big, calloused, tattooed hands flash out and dip along with the cadence of his words. Apparently this weirdo mechanic-slash-violinist who shines like a lighthouse is invested as hell.

Isabella neatly derails him, then! Itzhak laughs a single 'hah!' and claps one hand over his eyes. "Oy vey izt mir! Well I can't argue with that. I'm the most difficult asshole I know. ...No, I take that back, de la Vega is." There's a glint of mischief in his agate-hazel eyes when he resurfaces. "Had to come all the way to the West Coast to find a guy who's worse than me."

Offering her a hand, he tells her, "We're gonna get this shit on lockdown."

"Sometimes that's smart too, though," Isabella points out. "My father was a navy man and he oftens quotes a famous tactician who said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, so once things fall apart as it inevitably does, we need bodies who recognize the necessity to spring a trap to know where the danger is coming from." There's a quiet moment where her fingers toy with the gleaming moonstone around her neck. "Vyv Vydal's a mover, also," she tells him. "And advanced, from what I remember the Exorcist saying in that meeting. He was the one who carried the bones of Gohl back to this side when Miss Carr and Vivian found them, and I know for a fact that neither are like us, so by process of elimination based on what we know we can do..." She gestures vaguely to the side; it's how her mind operates, quick to absorb information and discard other possibilities in favor of what could possibly be the right conclusion.

His gesticulations, energized and brimming with that restless, artistic spirit, softens and warms her expression considerably. His investment is apparent and it's difficult not to feel the exhilaration of it - the call to battle, passion, in general. And the work, the things she can discover, even if she has to rely on others to execute these discoveries.

There's a hint of surprise, though, when he mentions a familiar name. "Javier?" Ruiz's first name rolls off easily from her tongue, familiarity and subtle traces of affection - and worry - there. "You know him, too?" Well, it's a small town and he is a captain in the GHPD. Her astonishment draws a laugh from her, shaking her head. "Well, I like Javier very much. He went out of his way to look after me after my mother died, so don't let the caustic, calcified shell fool you. Though that stands to reason that you." And she points at him playfully. "Could be a giant marshmallow on the inside, also. But don't worry, I won't tell anyone." She winks at him then.

She reaches out to take his hand, squeezing his fingers securely. Determination stitches over her face.

"We will," she says, firmly. "I'll keep you posted and vice versa."