9029/Study Buddies

Study Buddies
Date of Scene:	10 December 2021
Location:	Lydia Dietrich's Apartment
Synopsis:	Lydia and Jon retire to her apartment to do some research on how to bind and exorcise an angel. Slowly a plan forms together, and Jon eventually learns how to ward himself against hedgehogs.
Cast of Characters:	Lydia Dietrich, Jonathan Sims
Tinyplot:	Path of Glory

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Lydia Dietrich has posed:
With the clock ticking Lydia offered to help create a rite that could bind the wayward angel. Even though she wouldn't be able to perform it, there are others who would, and she'd be able to use her knowledge for some benefit. Problem is, she has a lot of books to look through, and, as was said, the clock is ticking.

Which is why she offered to bring Jon along. She knew that he wouldn't turn up the chance to browse some of her eclectic and rare texts that she's accumulated, even if lives /weren't/ on the line. When asked how they would get there, since her apartment is in Brooklyn and she simply offered to fly him over.

The flight is probably like nothing he's ever experienced. Held aloft and gently caressed by millions of motes of black ectoplasm, she carries him across the city on the backs of great black wings. "The city is beautiful at night, when you're this high," she says as they sail across the sky. "I love flying."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon's in a /much/ better mood than normal, even once he gets most of the glitter off through the simple expedient of changing his clothing and taking a shower. Oh, there's still bits of glitter in his hair, but he doesn't seem to mind. Whatever that poof of glitter in his face did for him, it was evidently positive.

    His reaction to flying might be odd--or then again, it might not. He seems rather giddy, more than scared. Thrilled, might be the word. "This /is/ amazing," he says in wonder. "New York is lovely at night. And I finally admitted I /am/ a New Yorker... when I mostly don't live in the city anymore." He chuckles.

    "It occurs to me that I could conjure wings." It's a thoughtful statement. He knows someone who knows how to fly, after all. Someone training to fly.

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia looks down and grins at Jon. "Join the wings club! You'll love it." They sail at a height where the speed that she's going doesn't seem too bad. "Of course, I don't really /need/ the wings to fly," she says. "But the visualization helps. Takes up less of my concentration if I do." She sails in silence for a while, just enjoying the experience. This never gets old.

"Here we are," she says once they reach a more decadent part of Brooklyn. She lands on the roof of an apartment building and leads him through the roof access door and down a couple of flights of stairs and leads him into his apartment.

The apartment is a tasteful affair, cold though. She doesn't keep the heat running because one, she's hardly ever here anymore and two, she just doesn't feel the cold. "Make yourself at home," she says, and turns to the thermostat to turn the heat on.

It's a one bedroom apartment, spacious and clean. Off to one side is the kitchen. It's a good size for one person, and is filled with various kitchen implements that one would find with somebody who actually does her own cooking. It's here that she immediately turns to, flicking on lights as she goes. "Would you like some tea?" she asks. Already knowing the answer she gets the kettle on the stove.

Next to the kitchen is the dining area, which has a simple table big enough to seat four, and four comfortable looking chairs. Across from it is a big sliding glass door that looks out onto the city and has a little balcony.

The living room is more like a library than anything else. Off to one side is a desk, one of those old style roll up affairs. This must be where she does her writing. On all walls are bookshelves, though, stuffed full of books and journals. In these shelves there's a nook created to house a TV, and a very comfortable looking couch sits facing it. A coffee table sits within reach and tucked underneath it is an old trunk.

She wanders in from the kitchen as the water boils and gestures to her library. "Help yourself," she says. "Feel free to read anything here except for what's on this shelf." Her fingers trace across the spines of dozens of journals and a few ancient looking books. "These are personal."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon takes a moment to stride to the sliding glass door and peer outside at the view. "Tea would be lovely, thank you." Rote words, said a thousand times in a dozen variations--tea, coffee, water, soda, alcohol--but that's the grease of polite social interactions, the sort of thing that keeps a vampire human and connects an Englishman to his Egyptian ancestors. There was surely some kind of polite way to offer a guest beer in the Old Kingdom, after all.

    He turns to look over the books, smiling to himself. "Martin and I repurposed the extra bedroom into a library. He'd say I have far too mank books I'll never read again, but /I/ say his poetry journals were getting a bit out of hand." Fondness threads through his tone. He misses the man, clearly, even after only a night or two apart.

    He lets his instinct guide him, trusting to luck or fate to choose out a book. Maybe it's the glitter still sticking to his hair. He pulls it out and flips it open.

    "...This is fiction. Isn't it?" He holds up the fifth book in a series of supernatural romance. Very /steamy/ supernatural romance, and Jon opened right to one of the steamiest bits. Oops.

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia laughs warmly and nods. "It is. Getting rid of books is.... blasphemy," she says, as she gazes at her collection fondly. "Each book is a story that has touched your heart in one way or another. Stories that have helped shape who you are. Even the bad ones." She snorts, "Sometimes /especially/ the bad ones." She walks along the books, her hand trailing behind her caressing the spines of her books lovingly. "Even the textbooks are stories of sorts. Getting rid of a book is like getting rid of a piece of yourself."

She pauses as she realizes that she's waxing lyrical. "I'm sorry," she says ducking her head apologetically. "I'm really attached to my books." She turns and walks over to where she keeps her ancient texts. Gently she teases out a few books. "This one, this one and..... this one."

She walks over to Jon and starts handing them over. "This is the one that I used to begin my search about the creation of the golem. It's a rabbinic treatise on the nature of creation and the divine spark. Dry stuff but some good bits in there. /This/ is a Kabbalistic retort. More good stuff if you can get past the passive aggressive nature of it, and this one is by Rabbi Ebrahimi. He spent nearly thirty years travelling across Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa collecting the oral histories of Jewish settlements that he could find back in the 16th century. It's fascinating stuff on it's own and is a good read, and I remember a handful of stories in there pertaining to angels. You can take that one home, if you like."

At that point the kettle begins to whistle, so she makes her way back to the kitchen. "What kind of tea do you prefer? I've got some jasmine, oolong, earl grey, and green tea, of course. I've also got a variety of loose leaf blends if you want to take a look."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    "When I was a child I /despised/ re-reading books. I wouldn't even read books by an author I'd already read, a lot of the time." Jon chuckles. "I didn't read 'Castle in the Air' until I was grown, despite Granny Moira having bought it when I was seven." He regards Lydia for a moment. "Books are part of your magic, though, I think. I imagine you giving up a book would be like me giving up a memory. Not likely to happen."

    He takes the books as they're handed over, says, "Earl grey's fine," then adds, "I'm certain Martin would love to read that one. I'm glad to take it home."

    He goes to sit down on the couch, and then begins to read the books. He's sort of skimming the pages, looking for anything that jumps out, aware that his perfect recall will allow him to go back over things he might have missed in more detail later.

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia busies herself with making the tea. She waits for a few moments for the water to cool down enough to make a good tea before pouring the hot water into one of those teapots that has an infuser built in. She scoops a couple tablespoons of loose leaf tea into the infuser then sets it all to steep. She loads the pot, a couple of cups, a sugar dish and a few of those little pods of half & half onto a tray and brings it all to the coffee table.

"Sorry I don't have any fresh cream for the tea," she says. "But I've found that ever since I've been turned any kind of perishables I buy end up, well, perishing." She goes around to the other end of the coffee table and kneels to pull the trunk out from underneath it. There isn't an obvious lock to it. Only a little hole on the front. She reaches out a finger and a tendril of black ectoplasm extends and inserts itself into the hole. After a little bit of concentration there's a *click* and the chest unlocks.

She looks up, grinning. "God forbid I ever lose my powers. I'd never be able to open this up again." She lifts open the lid of the chest and starts pulling out various books and journals, setting them aside until she can get to the ones that she wants. "Here we go. A black tendril wraps around a book and adds it to the pile. "This is a book filled with wards. You want a ward against spying? It's in there. Hedgehogs giving you trouble? Worry no more. Ward your garden and you'll never see them again." She continues to poke around in the chest, "I figure that a binding circle is just the inverse of a ward. Instead of keeping something /out/ you're keeping something /in/."

She pulls out a newer looking leather bound tome. "This is my grimoire." She caresses the soft leather rather sadly. "This is where I keep all the spells that I've worked out." She doesn't add that to the stack. For her eyes only. She pulls out a small journal that's specked with flakes of clay. "If you ever want to build a golem, let me know. I've left detailed instructions here." She sets that aside. "Ah. Here we go. This is Rabbi Tuwim's personal diary." The book she pulls out is old, and she handles it delicately. "He has more complete notes on creating a golem than any other source I've found. It had several key passages that was missing from other manuals I found."

"He also performed an exorcism against a powerful dybbuk," she says as she starts putting away the other books and items of power. "Dybbuks are nasty, nasty things. Unlike demons, dybbuks attach themselves to the soul, like a leech, slowly eating it over time. You can't just /force/ it out like you can a demon, otherwise you'd damage the soul ... or even destroy it. It takes time and energy, persistence and precision to surgically cut the thing out and cast it back to Gehenna, which I guess, is the closest thing to hell that Jews have."

She picks up her books to join Jon at the couch. "It's not much," she says, "but I figure this is a good place to start."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon nods as he flips through the first book. His eyes glow yellow-gold as he does so, even though he doesn't seem aware of the fact. "'The Servants of the Divine are bound by rules that govern their individual natures. To turn against that nature is anathema to them and will result in their own spark being removed.' Hunh. Not... surprising. And... 'if bound by a creature with the Spark there are pathways that can be overridden by the Spark within.'"

    He frowns for a moment, thoughtfully. "I /think/ it's saying that if an angel is bound to a mortal, certain aspects of the mortal's life can overpower the being inhabiting them. Which... implies that the angel would be swayed by whoever summoned it? Their deepest-held beliefs, their love or hate?" He chews on his lip, thoughtfully. Something's begun to bother him, that feeling when the answer's staring him right in the face and he just hasn't turned the puzzle the right way to see it yet.

    He sets the book aside, having flipped through the rest of its pages, and picks up the next. "You think something about exorcising the dybbuk might be useful? The power, the precision...?"

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia curls up on the couch, tucking her feet up underneath her and pulling the Rabbi's diary into her lap. She looks up as Jon reads the first passage, her eyes furrowing in thought. "If the angel is bound to a mortal, then, yes. The exorcism would be a good foundational groundwork to start from. Cleave the angel's Spark from the hosts and *wheet*" she whistles shoving a thumb upwards. "Back to heaven it goes." She pauses. "Or you unleash it upon the world without any fetters. One of the two."

She starts delicately paging through the book, looking for where the good Rabbi describes his exorcism. "We may have to add 'opening a portal to Heaven so we can encourage it to go home' to our ever growing list of things to research. Hm."

Absently a couple of tendrils of ectoplasm snake out to the tea set and pours herself a cup of tea. It's almost as if she isn't aware of what she's doing as she's absorbed into the diary, now. The tendrils adds a small spoonful of sugar and a bit of the creamer and pulls it back into her waiting hands. She doesn't really sip at it. She's just enjoying the warmth it provides and the smell that wafts from it.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon takes a moment to fix his own tea, splash of half and half, a heap of sugar. It's a thing he's done do often he hardly has to think about it. "Ahh, yes," he comments wryly, "the oh-so-simple matter of opening portals to Heaven."

    He pauses, and frowns, considering. "Actually... I wonder if it /would/ be all that difficult, for some of the people we know? We're in the big leagues now--literally. I mean, tonight was..." He shakes his head. "Wonder Woman. And /Batman/. /The/ Batman. Did I ever tell you I used to work at Arkham? Half the people in there are /terrified/ of him."

    He takes a sip of his tea and then starts paging through the next book. Tales of angels as messengers, tales of angels as warriors. Nothing about binding or exorcising, not yet.

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia sits upright, "I know, /right/? I didn't sense him in the room /at all/. No heartbeat, no breathing, somehow melded into the shadows /which I can see into/. Only when he was there for a while was I able to catch his scent, but that's only because I was looking for it. He smelled like /Gotham/." She shakes her head in wonder. "Batman has to be a metahuman of some kind."

"And Wonder Woman," she breathes, rolling her eyes up. "My /god/ she's beautiful. Don't tell Mystique that I still have a crush on her." She inhales wistfully. "She smells so /good/," she says softly, more to herself than to Jon.

She shakes her head to clear her thoughts and turns back to the diary. Silence settles upon the pair as they study the tomes, only punctuated by the turning of the page, or the sip of some tea.

"Hm," Lydia says, breaking the silence. "Rabbi Tuwim goes off on a tangent here and starts ruminating on the nature of Creation." She flips back and forth between two pages as she collects her thoughts. "He speculates that angels are God's journeymen, creating and repairing the nature of the universe. Carpenters from Heaven constantly putting up scaffolding to support the universe against the wear and tear of entropy. Sometimes they even take up the sword to actively /fight/ against entropy's agents." She looks up at this point, "Like demons and dybbuks and such." Nose back in the book she reads, "He says, 'If Heaven is the Realm of God, and All Matter comes from him, then the opposite power, that of the Anti-Matter Universe, must be that whichi He protects His children from succumbing to."

"Note how he says, 'the Anti-Matter Universe,'" she says looking up again. "He's not talking about Hell or Gehenna or anything like that. He's talking about the primordial nothingness that God's creations sprung from."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon... blinks up from the book he's paging through, the third one. "Anti-Matter Universe...?" He frowns thoughtfully. "So not a place of suffering, eternal or otherwise... not a place one goes to be punished for or atone for sins. Something sent there is just... gone. Broken back into constituent parts."

    Lydia can hear his heart beating. Beat. Beat. Beat.

    "Oh," he says softly. "That's... why the Archivist fights angels. I can channel that power. That's where the Eater of Hearts sends the things I judge."

    He draws in a slow breath. Lets it out. That's... a lot to consider, right there. Then he smiles. "Well. At least we know /that/ can hurt an angel, right?" But his heart's thudding fast, now. Nerves? Fear?

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia blinks rapidly as Jon reveals something of his powers. "You can do /what/?" Right now her mind is racing with possibilities. She starts rapidly flipping through the diary while tendrils picks up the books of wards and brings it to her. She finds the pages she's looking for and sets the book down and starts rapidly flipping through the book of wards.

"If you can channel that energy into the right circle," she says, frantically trying to find something specific. "You /should/ be able to trap the angel within it. Aha!" she shouts, pointing triumphantly to a page. "What's the inverse of keeping entropy /out/?"

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon's been staring at the page for about three minutes without really realizing what he's looking at. Then he blinks, and sits up, and holds out the book.

    "One of the tales Rabbi Ebrahimi gathered speaks of an angel allying itself with a nation against their enemy. The people it was helping tried to bind it, but the binding failed--they didn't have enough energy to power the circle--and it turned on them, turned the nation into a ruin and all but erased it from history. It looks like he got curious and went looking for the circle that could be used to bind an angel."

    Jon taps the page of the book. "This, here. This is it. Does it look right to you?" He doesn't know anything about this; he's looking at Lydia expectantly. She's the expert here.

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
"Magus Otto Bohm was a bit off his rocker," Lydia explains. "He figured that if he warded off entropy, nothing in his house would ever degrade or get worn out, /including/ his body so he could live forever." She chuckles and shakes her head. "Well it /worked/, but not as he planned it. He found a really backhanded way to put himself and everything within the ward in stasis."

"I can use this as a basis to keep entropy /in/ once you channel energy into it. It won't hold the angel, though but..." she trails off as Jon speaks and shows her the page. She studies the circle described in it and furrows her brows. "I can see why they thought it would work. But the kind of power they needed to keep it contained would have been astronomical. It would be like..... surrounding the positive end of a magnet entirely with other positive ends of magnets to hold it in place. Sure you can do it, but it's always under threat of tearing itself apart. Which it evidently did."

A tendril of ectoplasm snakes over to her writing desk and folds it open, pulling out a pen and a spare notebook. "But!" she declares as she starts scribbling away, "If you use the negative end of the magnet, that positive end will just snap right to it. The negative end being the entropy of the void, in this case." She starts sketching out a diagram. "You'd need two circles to accomplish this," she says excitedly. "One to hold the angel, powered by entropy, and the other to keep the entropy from escaping to... feed it back on itself. Create a kind of current."

She starts to rub her temples. "Oh boy. Remember when I was talking about my magic and how a lot of it was just math?" She looks up. "Looks like I'm about to have a crash course in Chaos Theory."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon cranes his neck to peer at the diagram. "I've never been very good at this precise type of magic," he admits. "I /understand/ it, the... math and the geometry, but I've always felt like I'm missing something. The /soul/ of it all, you know." He frowns, then mutters, "Doesn't help that the man who taught me most of it probably doesn't /have/ a bloody soul." It's a thing said more out of bitterness than any real belief that Elias Bouchard doesn't have a soul, though.

    He sits back and picks up his tea. "Music, now... music has precision and math, but also harmony and depth and feeling. I understand /music/. This... I /try/ to figure out what a circle's for, what it can do, and it... mmm, I don't know." He frowns, shakes his head. Takes a long drink of his tea.

    "But... that gets me to thinking. Will what you're doing," he gestures to her sketching, "work with /my/ particular way of accessing this... Anti-Matter Universe? I call on Ammit, the Eater of Hearts, to devour the one I've judged. Would she let me pour energy into a Kabbalistic circle?" He frowns thoughtfully.

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia looks thoughtful for a moment, tapping her pen on her chin. "I don't know," she says slowly. "Can you judge an Angel? I would think that would depend on her. What we're working on... what we're creating is kind of antithetical to the Kabbalah. I can teach you how to power up a regular Kabbalistic circle. It's not that hard. We can rearrange the furniture and I can draw out a simple harmless ward, and you can practice on that. The principle would be the same," she muses, "just the type of energy you'd be channeling would be different."

She looks down at her initial scribblings. "I've got to warn you, though. This binding that we're doing, once you start it we're going to be on a timer before the entropy ends up eating itself and everything within the circle leaving nothing but void." She looks back up and says seriously, "I'm not talking about something like the emptiness of space. It'd be empty of /that/ too. If it gets to that point and the circle breaks... either creation will rush in to fill the void, or the void will start eating everything."

"Ugh," she groans rubbing her face as she thinks about the amount of work that's ahead of her. "Do you think Z will be able to work on the exorcism if I give her the book? I don't know if I'm going to be able to do both. I can stay up during the day, but it's not like pulling an all nighter. If I shut myself up in the center of the Asteroid and get enough blood I should be able to do it but I don't know how useful I'd be when it comes time to finally confront it."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    "That's part of why I exist, Lydia," Jon says in a solemn tone. "To judge angels. I'd be glad of the practice, though."

    He sighs. "So... /potentially/... this goes wrong, and we... end the world? Is that what you're saying?" He smirks. "No pressure, right?"

    He gestures with the heart not holding the tea cup. "Let's give the book to Zed. Between her and John, they should be able to work out the exorcism--/that/ is John's specialty. You and I focus on the binding circle."

    A pause. A beat. "Harmony. Consonant harmony." He gets up and starts flipping through one of the books. "Here, this says... angels can be in two places at once, if pressed. If we had two different groups of people binding the angels in two different places with the same circle... might that..." He rubs at his face. "Consonant harmony. Tones balancing each other, I'm thinking." He puts his hands apart. "Two different circles, two different energy flows, /different/ but /similar/. In harmony, balancing each other, letting us draw the energies out longer, maybe? Give us more time to find the way to exorcise this thing?"

    He swallows. "Because... I can think of someone else I know who can /probably/ channel the same energy I can. If she'll be willing."

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia furrows her brows, trying to follow what it is that Jon is going on about. "You're suggesting that we split the angel in two, bind it in two different places using two different, but similar circles at the same time?" She sounds doubtful, "How would you get the angel to split in the first place? Which spot would you go to to perform the exorcism?"

"You have to understand that what you're putting into it /isn't/ energy," she says. "It's the opposite of that. It's... anti-energy. It's what you get when all the energy is /gone/. In musical terms it isn't a rest. It's the silence you get when the music is over."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon shakes his head. "No, it's... I mean, it is, but it's... it's still /something/ that I'm channeling." How can he possibly explain? The feeling is strange and bizarre and he does /not/ like it, even though the Archivist does. "Something comes out and through me. It's... /negative/, like... a negative number!" He snaps his fingers and turns to look at Lydia.

    "Negative numbers. You multiply a negative by a negative and the signs cancel out. That's what I mean. Balance the two circles against each other, make the system bigger, give us more time before the negative energy tries to return to its source."

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
"Hunh," Lydia says, thinking this through. She chews on a blood red lip as she mulls through the possibilities. "I see what you're saying," she says. "You get the two energies spinning in opposite directions, but that'd only work if they occupied the exact same space, which is physically impossible."

Then a thought occurs to her. "If you get the angel to split, it'll be one being occupying two spaces at the same time. It'll effectively bring the two bindings together using /it/ as a channel to warp the two circles on top of each other."

She runs a hand through her hair and blows a breath through pursed lips, puffing out her cheeks. "Boy, when that thing gets turned on, reality is going to get /really weird/ in the area. Like, if you get too close to the circle it'll be a crap shoot as to which location you walk out of. This'll also solve how to do the exorcism. Get close enough and you'll exist in both places, too."

"The timing on this is going to have to be perfect, though. There's going to be /very little/ wiggle room."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon nods. "Yes, yes, that's exactly what I meant. The notes harmonize." He beams at Lydia, a bright smile. "Like two voices coming from different places and creating a whole in the ear."

    A pause. "...Look, it made sense to /me/." Clearly his magic doesn't work /quite/ the same way as most people's.

    He frowns, then. "We'll have to be certain we have a way to communicate. Easy enough." Earbuds, he's thinking. For one thing, he and Phoebe both have communicators linked to each other. Surely others might be willing to wear earbuds. "Two people to channel energy, at least two for the binding circles, and enough people to keep the angel busy while we're binding it. I'm thinking five per team. I'll have to work on this. That's fine. Alright, so... you need time to work out the circle. How long? Can you be done by tomorrow or do you need an extra day?"

    Jon hesitates, then says, "I figure we set Pezzini out as bait tomorrow, let it take her, have one team track it down and the other force it to split and chase it... probably to the Laughing Magician. Easiest area in Hell's Kitchen to control."

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
"Oof," Lydia says, looking at all her books. "I don't think I'll get it done by tomorrow. This will be the most complex thing I've ever worked on, and I damn near created life." She stands up and starts to pace. "This is going to require a lot of math that I know nothing about, not to mention making a fourth dimensional binding circle. I pray to God I get this right because if I don't... best case scenario we tear an angel to pieces. Worst case..." she shudders.

She stops pacing and sighs. "Okay. I've got my homework cut out for me. Help me move the furniture and I'll get you up to speed on how to power up a circle. By the time we're done you'll never have a problem with hedgehogs again."