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Briar is stretched out on the peak at the center of a slanted roof, a makeshift shelf for building supplies set up next to him. He has obviously just finished modifying the roof, widening the ridgepole of it. Not to make it easier to reach, but to give him a comfortable seat when he does. Briar leans back and rests his elbows on the lip of the chimney, the weather warm enough that no fire is lit below. Running water forms faint background noise, his home located not far from the river.

"Has anyone else noticed how strange the plant life here is?" he asks idly, alternately basking in the sun and enjoying the view. The garden, the sun, and the cloudwatching are all doing him more good than he can say after recent events. Being up on a roof always did seem to help some.

During Briar's first explorations of the city, he made note of both familiar and unfamiliar plants, anything he could find as many of them went dormant for the colder months. "The weather here fluctuates more than the usual climate for a lot of vegetation I've found. I wondered whether they adapted to cope with a wider variety of temperatures and rainfall levels." He pauses, frowning. "But they haven't."

Briar's garden stands out in stark contrast to the neighboring areas to someone who knows what he's looking for. Seeing it from above only makes what he has already observed from ground level even clearer. "My garden is still growing what I planted in it recently, but nearby? That's different. There's plants that weren't there before, plants that wouldn't have survived the colder months here. Decade-old trees that hate cold temperatures are flourishing, and they weren't in the city when we got snow."

He grins now, informing everyone, "Fruit trees that weren't even around to get pollinated are in season. I've transplanted some vegetables that are near the end of their growing cycle but definitely weren't last time I checked them. If anyone wants lemons or oranges, I've found a lot. I've also got--" He reaches into his pocket, retrieving a brown and fuzzy-skinned oblong fruit. Briar peels half of it with a small knife, biting into the juicy green fruit inside. He chews, swallows, and smiles again. "I don't know the name for these, but they're good."

He shrugs a shoulder. "I'm in the northwest district, Wilde, a mile upriver from the tram line to the center of the city." City still seemed a misleading word, given the massive size of the place. "You're welcome to stop by and visit if you'd like some fruit or some company." Briar adds as an afterthought, "Or a sparring partner. I haven't gotten much practice with a staff lately."

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Teleportation. Like what Willow did to Glory, only with apparently less difficulty. "I wonder if teleportation is common among Taxon's prisoners," he muses. "No one at home can use it, but you're not the first I've met here."

Briar laughs at Ashley's stipulation. "I usually go through the house and out the skylight, but there's nothing wrong with climbing. Go ahead." He hasn't done it yet simply because there is no need to. Briar is fairly certain he would be able to make it up the wall with very little trouble. The fact that Ashley is willing to climb the wall has Briar intrigued. She can handle herself well, obviously, but there are a few different skillsets that would lead to that confidence. He wonders what abilities she has in addition to teleportation.

Sheer grit and determination are what make up Ashley Magnus, which she proves by choosing the largest and sturdiest-looking vines to pull herself up with. She's careful not to yank anything off the house or clip the bricks or anything else with her feet as she climbs. Once she's up on the roof, she balances carefully, one foot in front of the other on the edge until she cautiously sits down close by and smiles.

She's had to balance on much worse places than a rooftop like this. The abandoned semi-destroyed building in Old City where some of her informants liked to hang out was one of those worse places. Ashley had learned at a very young age to be the best she could be and not to take undue risks... of course, the risking part she always took and it drove her mother mad.

"I doubt any of the others have the same ability I do," she answered. "It's kind of unique. In a really twisted way."

The plants are sturdy enough to take some abuse, or he would not have considered them safe to climb, for her sake. Still, Ashley takes a remarkable amount of care; Briar notices. He likes her already.

Rooftops have been something of a comfort for Briar for years. He liked high places to start with, and then hours spent on the roof at Discipline with his sisters cemented it into something real and important. He and the girls might be separated, and might be at each other's throats if they weren't, but nothing has ever quite erased the effects of those hours of cloudwatching.

Briar tilts his head in consideration of her words, frowning. "I don't know if I believe in powers being inherently twisted. How they're used is more important." Briar could grow a beautiful garden or rip a person apart with thorns. Tris had grown up thinking she was a monster, and now look at her.

Ashley tucks her knees up to her chin and wraps her arms around her legs for a moment. "I guess."

He has a point and she has to admit that, but it doesn't make it any easier for her to accept these abilities, especially not after what she'd done with them, been forced to do. Her expression clouds a little bit as she thinks back to the Sanctuary and the last time she'd seen her mother before she'd gotten here. She can feel the emotions swirling around inside her, but with a deep breath, she forces everything back. Briar doesn't need to see her in a moment of weakness.

Allowing her legs to fall back to rest against the rooftop, she gazes out over everything. "D'you think it could change? How someone uses their abilities..."

Her mind's on the man who's her biological father as well, and for a split second, she allows herself to contemplate the idea that may he's not all bad. But then she shakes herself inwardly and concentrates hard on the person sitting next to her.

Ashley looks a little lost, so Briar doesn't hesitate for a moment in answering her question. "Yes," he says firmly. And because he thinks Tris wouldn't mind, he continues, "Most people don't hire weather mages unless they're looking for battle magic or someone to move weather patterns around without caring who gets hurt. My sister won't do either of those things, though she easily could." It was the reason Tris was by far the least wealthy of the siblings, despite her power.

It had taken her a bit of time to accept the power in the first place, too. "When she was a kid, she didn't have control of her power, and she thought that the magic was something horribly wrong with her. She was more than half convinced she was a monster. Now? She's the most conscientious person I know. She has to be, when a bit of temper on her part could cost people their lives."

He may have said more than he meant to. Being away from the girls among people who don't know them has Briar talking about his sisters a little more freely than he would otherwise. Briar gestures down at his garden, adding, "And I could do things a lot more harmful than that. I have, in fact, but I really don't want to. Everyone has a choice in what to do with their abilities." Briar's seen terrible choices made, but the fact that Ashley worries about her power gives him some confidence she doesn't need to be concerned.

He doesn't mean to pressure Ashley, but Briar feels strongly about power not being inherently wrong or evil. Briar would believe it either way, after what he's seen in other people and felt in his own magic, but his foster sister's childhood is what really drove the point home.

It's not pressure as much as reassurance and Ashley takes the explanation for what it's worth. Her face remains as neutral as she can make it for the moment, her mind turning over everything Briar is saying. It makes sense to her... but somehow she doesn't think the situations are entirely the same and she sighs wearily.

"She sounds strong."

Normally, Ashley's the strong type. Normally, she's all power and energy and confidence. But when it comes to what the Cabal did to her, how she let her mother down and killed so many people... it's hard for her to be comfortable with something that makes her skin crawl. For a moment, she debates leaving the explanation there, not continuing, but she has a feeling he'll be able to read that something's bothering her and press her for an answer anyway.

"What if it's not a power you were born with? What if it's something someone gave you and made you use against the people who meant the most to you?" What if she did some terrible things with it? Did that still mean it was okay, she was okay? Times like this, Ashley desperately wished she could just go to her mother. But that option had been stripped from her. And she wasn't even sure how she would go about asking Helen anyway. How on earth would she ask about powers to her mother, the woman she'd nearly killed with them?

Briar shrugs. "You didn't have a choice then. You do now." He says it as if it's easy, obvious to anyone. He looks Ashley in the eye though, serious and sincere, when he continues, "You're not the one who should be feeling bad about whatever you did. The people who forced that on you are the ones who were misusing their power." He'd like to hear the whole story someday, but Briar knew better than to ask too much from anyone this skittish about her abilities, especially when she barely knew him.

An apologetic smile accompanies Briar's next statement. "I know that's a lot easier for me to say than it'll be for you to believe, but it's true."

And then, because he figures Ashley could use a smile, Briar puts a hand over the wooden temporary shelf that holds what supplies he needed to modify the ridgepole. He lets a tendril of his magic weave through the wood, calling to the green life still dormant in it. A miniature forest sprouts up around and between all the items currently residing there. Briar surveys his handiwork only long enough to see that it's worked before his gaze darts back to Ashley. He tries hard to contain a grin, awaiting her reaction with as serious an expression as he can manage. Something about the eyes probably gives it away, though.

Briar isn't precisely using his magic to impress a girl. If that happens, fine. What he really wants, though, is to distract Ashley from guilt and worry without mandating a subject change. He will talk about her powers for as long as she needs to, but Briar thinks Ashley could use something outside herself to focus on as well. He has rather limited resources up here to provide that, so he's improvising.

Ashley meets Briar's gaze for a moment before she turns away to look out over the ground in front of them. He has a point, a small one. There would never be words for how much she hated the Cabal and what they had done to her. She didn't know exactly what they'd done to Henry, but she knew it had been something, as he'd been less inclined to talk about what had happened to him than she was when they met up in the labs. The Cabal was an evil organization and they needed to be stopped. If any of them turned up here, Ashley would guarantee them only as many breaths as it took for her to find them. And then she would end them.

Maybe someday she would tell Briar what had happened. Not today.

He's very kind and smart to come up with a way to distract her. His wish is granted as she smiles at the sight of the sudden sprouts around them. She is impressed in a way. She's seen many things in her life, but never anything quite like this.

"Is that your ability? Making things grow?"

Briar decides to let her think about what he's said for awhile. Her powers are obviously not associated with pleasant memories, so he won't be surprised if it takes her awhile to sort them out.

In the meantime, he's more than willing to switch the focus of their conversation. "Yeah. I can do some nasty things with that if I try, but the best part of my power is getting things to grow." Briar pauses, since that isn't really an accurate description. "Or rather, my power is directly tied to plants. I can access the green life in them and help them along, and I can talk to them if I'm willing to sort through a vastly different view of the world. They sense the green life in me and tend to like me better for it." Plants often leaned toward Briar as he walked by, the way they would over a much longer period of time lean toward the sun. "Forcing growth isn't something I do often, since plants grow stronger if you let them take their time about it."

He grins, adding, "I can make medicines too, but most of that is just knowing the formulas, not putting power into it." Briar avoids the word magic just because Ashley has not used it yet. He'd rather avoid taking the conversation any directions she's not ready for, and he knows a few in the city are skeptics, particularly new arrivals.

It's hard to associate good things with abilities that were controlled by someone else and used to kill people she had worked with for her whole life. She wasn't exactly skeptical of his "magic," either, considering where she cam from. She was just used to the term being applied to abilities that could be explained by science. Magic didn't exist in her world. Powers, abilities, did.

"That's really cool," Ashley murmurs. "Can't say I've ever seen anything that could do that, and believe me, I've seen a lot of things."

If he wants to know what, she might be willing to give him a couple of examples. The distraction is welcome, though, and she'll take it and run with it. Thinking about the Cabal and her last moments of life aren't really what she wants to be doing right now.

Well, if she's going to be interested and maybe forget about the things upsetting her for now, Briar supposes he can go ahead and call his abilities what they are. "I am rather fond of my magic," Briar admits. "Where I come from, there are two types. Ambient mages, like me, work with the power in a specific thing in the natural world. Mine is with plants. Some people's power works through metal or weather or threads or stones."

Ashley is welcome to tell him about some of what she's seen, or to ask questions. For now, he offers her something to eat. "Are you hungry? I don't have too much up here," he says with a grin and a careless shrug, taking a satchel from the makeshift shelf and placing it on the roof between them, "but if you'd like some fruit, you're welcome to it." Briar is nearly always hungry, and he seems to have developed a fondness for that one fruit he can't even put a name to.

Magic, huh? Ashley just gives him a side-ways glance at first, not really sure she believes him or wants to call it that, exactly, but she'll run with the idea that it's a special ability of his. That much she can understand.

"Cool. Definitely don't have that kind of ability where I'm from."

His question makes her smile just a little more, and she can't help glancing at the satchel. "Sure. Fruit's always nice. My mom would be happy to know I'm eating right. One less thing she has to lecture me about."

She was joking for the most part, but she really did miss her mother, especially since she knew this city was the last chance they had to have any sort of life together. Once Ashley went back home, it would be lights out for her. Permanently. She wasn't looking forward to it.

"Thanks."

She reaches in to pull out that one fruit and take a bite of it. "This is pretty good."

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