[Vanessa Novotny] Vanessa Novotny teaches a class on Mondays and Wednesdays. She spends a lot of time on campus before and afterward: the life of a TA is busy, after all, and involves office hours and meeting with her advisor and research for her thesis (which, hopefully, will be done in a few months.) And she's content that she manages it, in between all the trials and tribulations of her Awakened life. She was at Chuck's this morning; unfortunately the incident happened to make her short and clipped with the undergrads. Who are nervous around her for reasons they can't quite explain; she's just intense, to them.
There aren't many places in Chicago, by now, that don't hold some odd association with Ashley's Awakened life. One would expect the Northwestern campus to be one of those, except that she and Emily and Nico happened upon an orgy this summer fueled by Awakened participants, and the less said about that the better. Still, she's been on the green toward the center of campus often enough now that she can walk through it without the association, especially right now when the trees are bare and wreathed in white.
She's headed that way now, having just left the social sciences building, intent on lunch. There are days when she can actually afford to eat out; today might be one of those days, and there's a deli just off campus of which she is rather fond.
It's still early afternoon, barely, and it feels too early for so much to have happened. But seeing this young woman in particular in a brooding mood isn't that unusual a thing. She's wearing a black wool coat, the throat stoppered up by a gray scarf, and no hat or gloves. Falling snow lights in her hair, wind embraces her, runs its fingers through it, tugs at her clothing, makes her part of winter.
At the moment she's looking up at the sky and watching the flakes fall while she walks. Stuck in her head, like usual.
[Nicholas Bell] The life of a TA was indeed busy. Ashley's (or rather, Vanessa's) fellow graduate-degree candidates would easily agree on that count. Not only did they have classes to teach, homework to grade and office hours to keep, but they also had to stay on top of all of their own coursework. It was a daunting task. One might wonder how they manage it, some days. (Indeed, many of them do wonder exactly that.) And Vanessa Novotny was certainly not the only TA to occasionally find her life's stresses spilling over into the classroom. The difference n her case was... she was an Awakened Adept.
Nicholas Bell (or Nick, as Jarod had called him) was not Awake. He had no knowledge or experience with supernatural dangers, or the responsibilities of running a chantry. He could, however, commiserate on the subject of more mundane matters. His own class met on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, but he'd been holding office hours all morning and now his stomach felt like it might be attempting to devour itself. So it was that he happened to be outside of the sociology building at roughly the same time as Ashley. They'd known each other before this, of course - as colleagues and acquaintances, but now they had something in common that they had not had in common before: Jarod. So perhaps Nick felt a little more at ease approaching her out of the blue, or perhaps he'd always been at ease doing this, and only just recently had been given a reason. In either case, he spotted Ashley and jogged over to meet her.
There was a light dusting of snow in his blond hair, and he had on a dark gray wool coat and a black-and-blue striped scarf. The brightness of the snow and the early afternoon light made his pale blue eyes look nearly as striking as Ashley's did. At 5'7", he was a little shorter than average, but still a fair margin taller than the Adept. "Hey Vanessa," he greeted with a friendly smile. "Fucking cold out today, isn't it? I'm glad it snowed, though. Almost makes it worth it."
This was the kind of casual conversation that students made with each other while they happened to be walking in the same direction.
[Vanessa Novotny] Most of Ashley's Awakened compatriots are surprised to find that she keeps Sleeper friends, on the occasion they find out. She's certainly arrogant, guilty of elitism when it comes to Sleepers - they aren't as enlightened, they aren't aware of how the world really is, they're still blind to the world around them. But, in her eyes, it's not really much different than making friends with someone less intelligent than herself. It doesn't bar her from casual friendships, though they will only ever be able to reach a certain point with her as far as investment goes.
Then again, the vast majority of her Awakened colleagues don't ever cross that threshold into being important to her either.
In any case, she's not displeased to see Nick, and when he says her name her eyes wander away from their contemplation of the sky and find his instead. If Ashley finds it a little suspect that Nick would suddenly walk over and speak with her after she saw him with Jarod last week, it doesn't show (which means she probably doesn't find it suspect. Expected, really: now they have something in common.)
"Hi, Nick," she says, letting him settle into step beside her. And then she agrees, "The snow's pretty before it gets torn up." And it's early enough, right now, that there aren't trails snaking through it, crisscrossing, sundering the smooth sheets that lie over the world right now. "Where are you headed?"
[Nicholas Bell] "Lunch. Of... some variety or another. I haven't really decided yet. What about you?" Given the time of day, and the fact that Ashley was heading away from campus rather than holed up in a classroom or library, it seemed a fair bet that she might be after something to eat as well. "If you're getting food, do you mind if I tag along? If you're not busy, that is."
And to his credit, Nick seemed like the kind of guy who'd take a polite refusal in stride, if she happened to give him one. Ashley had seen enough of him to know that he was a pretty sociable person who seemed to keep a wide variety of friends. People liked him. His students like him quite a bit - though there were rumors that last year he'd completely blown up at one for saying something racist in his classroom (right about this time of year, actually.)
"How's your thesis going?"
[Vanessa Novotny] She's been better liked by her professors than her students. It isn't that her students dislike her - actually, there's a handful who like her quite a bit - but she's hard on them, and she's blunt, and there have been one or two unhappy occasions when she's directed rather cutting comments toward students she didn't think were trying hard enough. Then again, with her size and appearance, one might imagine she sometimes has to work a little hard to be taken seriously, or is at least used to the idea that she will have to work hard to be taken seriously (even when that effort isn't needed.)
The ones who have spoken to her on a more personal basis, during office hours and the like, find her more accommodating. But no: she does not have a social reputation the way Nick does.
"I don't mind," she says. And then he asks about her thesis, and a rueful smile tilts her eyebrows and a corner of her mouth while she rolls her eyes off to the side. "It's going. My research is done, but the writing bit is going kind of slow. I've had a lot going on the past year and I've had to take a lot of care making the argument, because believe it or not conflict theory isn't exactly popular." She knows what most people think of it; outside academia most people find it bleak.
"How's yours?"
[Nicholas Bell] Bleak, perhaps. But acknowledgment of the darker aspects of society and human nature is a vital and necessary step to building a better world. As a student of social inequality, Nick was more than a little familiar with the many variations of conflict theory. He dealt with them in his own thesis, though with the intention of proving the necessity for a less capitalist and more economically socialist form of government. He actually taught a bit of it in his class, as well - primarily to use things like the Matthew Effect to illustrate how difficult it was for traditionally oppressed peoples to change their place in society.
He was, however, familiar with the fact that he and Ashley didn't always take the same positions on these things, though he didn't know her well enough to feel like he had a grasp on the breadth of her personal politics. He chuckled a little when she mentioned dryly that conflict theory wasn't popular. When she asked him about his own thesis, he shrugged. "Oh, you know. I give myself excuses about needing to help my students and then it just gets put off another day. Jarod totally got me a meeting with Richard Durbin though. I guess somebody somewhere owed him some kind of favor. To be honest, I was a little afraid to ask." There was a wry smirk, there. "I suppose I should just be happy and not look a gift horse in the mouth. That's generally the best way to go, with him."
[Vanessa Novotny] Ashley might have rolled her eyes when he said that he gives himself excuses about needing to help his students - except that it's not too much different from what she does, these days. She's not a person who believes in altruism or in helping people because it's the Right Thing To Do or in self-sacrifice, but given her behavior with the chantry's magi sometimes, a person could be fooled.
"Richard Durbin, really?" Ashley asks, with a sidelong glance toward Nick. She's nowhere near that well connected; of course, if she wanted to, she could easily bend minds in order to advance her career, in order to get where she needs to go with her academics. She never has.
"He seems to be well connected," she concedes after a moment, because she doesn't know much about his Sleeper life. But, well. Given her position in mage society, it isn't hard for her to imagine Jarod has done similar things elsewhere (and Ashley is certain that has at least something to do with why he decided to help her.) She looks sidelong at the young man after a moment. "I was kind of surprised that you guys know each other, but I guess I shouldn't be."
[Nicholas Bell] "Well, you know... it's not Barack Obama, but it's a start." Nick grinned, his tone playful. "And yes... he does seem to be rather resourceful. When I first met him I had the impression that he didn't care much about politics, but he plays a lot of things close to chest, you know?"
Of course, Nick wasn't really sure how well Ashley knew Jarod, so this might very well be news to her, but it seemed a fair bet that she would have at least guessed that he wasn't the world's most open and revealing person, as evidenced by the fact that she'd just chided herself for being surprised at an aspect of his life previously unknown. Nick likewise seemed to find it amusing that she was surprised, and he glanced at her with a meaningful look, as if to say ...seriously?
"He does freelance work for my Dad's publishing company. That's how I met him. Though given his taste in grad students, it was probably inevitable in any case."
The wind was cold as it struck the pair of them, ruffling through Nick's hair and chilling his ears. Cold enough that he fished into his pocket for a knit hat that he'd been carrying and pulled it over his head.
"How did you two meet? He totally evaded me last time when I asked him."
[Vanessa Novotny] "I do know," Ashley says. And in truth many of the magi she knows play things close to their chests: she's closer to Kage than plenty of people are to their siblings and she still doesn't know the reason behind her split with Temple and Virtue. Ashley herself isn't what could be termed open (though she has plenty of people successfully fooled [she's learned to misdirect, not hide.]) It's not a world that often rewards people who are too revealing about their inner selves, this world where such things determine how their magic works, how reality bends, this world of politics and hidden enemies.
Nick mentions his father's publishing company and Ashley looks over at him then once more. "He told me he works as a translator," she says, "but I wasn't sure what sort of translating that entailed." So: publishing company, which she finds interesting.
Ashley doesn't have a hat, but she doesn't seem too bothered by the wind. Or, at least, she's too stubborn to act as though the wind bothers her. At Nick's question her eyes flick back toward him again, and there's a pause that drags out just a little too long. "It was a random run-in," she says, which is true. "We sort of have an interest in esoterics in common, and we started talking. That's really it."
She's not a good liar. She's not even very good at evading. It's why, even though she has some Sleeper friends, she doesn't have very many, and why she doesn't get to know any of them very well.
[Nicholas Bell] She didn't answer him right away, and when she did, her words were as vague as possible. The kind of thing someone would say when they didn't really want to answer the question. Nick eyed Ashley for a moment, and he seemed to know that she was giving him the run-around, but ultimately he decided not to pry any further - at least in any direction that might press Ashley to have to lie. He wasn't unintuitive, this man. One might imagine that it would take a very intuitive person to be able to get close to someone like Jarod. (Though precisely how close the two men actually were... was ambiguous.)
"Wait, let me guess... he played it all attentive and active-listener, and revealed just enough about himself to make him seem interesting, then he turned on the charm and was all 'let's get some tea' or something and somehow you ended up in bed together."
Nick had no way of knowing that Jarod was only the second man that Ashley had slept with, or that she might not be comfortable talking about her sex life openly with a casual acquaintance. This was just friendly conversation, for him. Part of getting over his intense attachment to Jarod had involved coming to terms with the fact that the wealthy model-slash-entrepreneur was never going to be sexually monogamous to anyone. They all got little pieces of him, the people he slept with. Nick liked to believe that perhaps those pieces were all a little different - that each of them got to know and spend time with their own version of him. He liked to hope that his version of Jarod was still just his, and no one else's.
Perhaps that was naive. Perhaps it actually wasn't far off from the truth.
In any case, he seemed to be attempting to bond with Ashley over this shared experience, and to joke about it a little. Someone like Emily might have been offended by the personal nature of it. It remained to be seen whether Ashley would prove as protective of her private life.
[Vanessa Novotny] Her sex life is not a topic that comes up very often, period, when she's speaking with other people. Others tend not to ask Ashley questions, and they tend not to prod too deeply into matters of a personal nature: her personality generally steers them clear of it. They assume that she won't be willing to talk, or to divulge anything, and they assume that she doesn't want to.
Oddly, the people it's come up with, when it has, have been Sleepers. Perhaps it's because her personality must, to some extent, necessarily be muted around them. She can't resort to being Ashley McGowen bani Hermes bani Tytalus, Adept of the Ars Mentis, among a few thousand or so of the most powerful Willworkers left in the world. She gets to be Vanessa Novotny: shy, brusque graduate student, broken prodigy.
Nick gets a smirk, wry and only just touched with something a little pensive. "Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how it went," she says. "I don't really do that, usually, but I don't feel too bad about it. I get the impression that kind of thing happens a lot."
[Nicholas Bell] "With him?" Nick laughed. "Oh God, don't ask."
He seemed a bit pleased that his guess had been accurate, though. Perhaps he liked to think that he knew Jarod fairly well. Better than most, though if their conversation the night of his birthday was any indication, he still had a long way to go. Hell, he'd gotten as far as he had primarily through sheer, stubborn persistence.
"I don't either, to be honest. Well, I mean... I have. But not like with him."
He might have said more, but Ashley wasn't familiar enough yet for intimate details, and much of it was still raw enough to hurt a little when he spoke of it honestly. He didn't know that Ashley and Emily knew each other (that, like Jarod, they were all Awake, where he was not.) If he had, he might have been tempted to ask after her - to try and get some perspective on a situation that he'd tried valiantly to stay out of but nonetheless couldn't help but feel invested in. Instead, he told Ashley a story about a time when Jarod had let him tag along to a photo shoot in Tokyo (one might wonder at the kind of lifestyle where buying someone a ticket to Japan was considered letting them tag along) and how completely dazzled and out of his element he'd felt.
And at some point they'd arrive at the deli, and get something to eat. And perhaps the conversation would eventually ease away from Jarod once more and back to the more mundane and pressing matters of finals and schoolwork. Either way, they'd eventually have to part ways when they returned to campus, but chances are that they might repeat the outing at some point in the near future, because Nick seemed to have decided that Ashley (Vanessa) wasn't really such bad company to keep.
