taxonomites | [Text] / [Location: a cafe in Speares]

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[Text] / [Location: a cafe in Speares]

Does anyone know if transfer of credits can be accomplished from one person to another, here? So far all I have managed is using them at the stores or with the hatches, and as it happens this 'allowance' they give us isn't really adequate.

Where I was from, I offered my services in a consulting capacity, but if I cannot get payment for such here, then that isn't incredibly practical.

....on a similar note, if anybody wishes their tarot read, it appears I'm doing this for free until I figure out a way to return an investment on the deck I just hatched.

If so, I'm at the version of the Café Procope that they have apparently stolen from Paris and transplanted here. It is in the Speares district. I may be found at one of the upstairs balcony tables.

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"I don't know much about them, truth be told."

Madelyne settles into the chair, trying to make sure she's comfortable before this begins. "I'm open to the experience, whatever it is you would recommend to start with."

Jason nods and settles into his own chair, his spine straight, expression distant and a little dour (which is his usual expression).

"Then we will do a three-card spread. It is the simplest. If, in the future, you would like something more complex, I am happy to oblige." A tiny, cynical smile. "The more so if I have figured out how to charge for it by that point. But no matter."

Jason picks up the deck of cards. They are a simple deck of Rider-Waite cards, brand new from the box; he's been shuffling them while waiting for people to respond, trying to get out the irritating stiffness. A deck takes time to wear in, to feel comfortable. These are still slick and awkward, in his opinion.

"You are what is known as the 'querent'. You come to a reading with a question, preferably; I can do a blind reading if you would prefer, but if you have something weighing on your mind which you would like to consult the cards about, then that is a good beginning point, madam."

Madelyne looks thoughtful for a few moments. Pressing her lips together, she thinks about saying something but holds it behind her teeth. The silence lasts a little longer than it is polite to go without a specific response. "I think I'll hold the questions to myself for this first time. Once I figure out how to pay you, I'll figure out what to ask."

Jason waits the silence out patiently, his hands busy with the cards, continuing to shuffle them on automatic.

He nods slightly to her words. "As suits you, madam."

He shuffled once last time, fingers sure and deft with the cards-- centuries now of practice-- then dealt three from the deck, face down.

In truth, Jason found the tarot rather simplistic and insipid-- if you really wanted a divination, tossing bones was his preferred methodology. Or gutting something and studying the entrails. Something with blood. Something with death. Magic without a strong element of price to it never struck him as being all that committed.

But Gotham's high society didn't generally react too well to suggestions that you slaughter a goat in front of them. Doing tarot readings for the bored wives of millionaires was an easy way to pass the time, to finance more serious endeavours, and it was exactly what most of them wanted-- the suggestion of the occult, in one of its most innocuous and sanitized forms.

Still. Even a deck of cards could be tools for power and revelation, when aimed at a suitable target.

Jason brushed his fingertips lightly over the backs of the cards, setting the rest of the deck down to one side.

"Most commonly the three card spread is used to reveal things about one's past, present, and future," he murmured.

"One card for each, then - past, present and future." Madelyne nods at that, making sense of how this is supposed to work. Or at least how he says it is supposed to work. As much as there is a part of her that doesn't believe in this, she is a clone of a woman who embodied the universal force of life.

So there is only so hard she can throw rocks at anyone's powers, beliefs or history.

"Does the cards being new change how you use them?"

"Yes," Jason answered dryly. "It makes them more difficult to shuffle."

He turned over the first card: the Empress, reversed. Jason arched a brow to himself, absently drumming the fingers of his free hand on the table. One of the major arcana, that was.... interesting.

He turned over the next. The Ace of Swords. Not one of the majors, but still a potent card.

The last seemed almost anti-climatic after the Empress and an Ace. The eight of cups. Etrigan sneered a little in his head at disgust for the reading ending on such a relatively positive and subdued note.

"Hmnnh," Jason grunted, so-very-eloquently. He laced his hands together over the lower half of his face and studied the cards, his pale eyes flicking from one to the next, parsing out a meaning.

It helped a little to have a demon in your head suggesting various interpretations. Although, of course, it then became its own game of deciding what was useful and what was simply Etrigan being... Etrigan.

"So like any new deck of cards, then. I didn't know how your magic worked."

Madelyne looks at the cards, leaning forward to see them better. For a few moments, she's tempted to reach out and touch the cards but she holds herself back from it.

"Is that truly interesting or are you just saying that to decide what to say next?"

"I do prefer a more worn-in deck of cards, but no, it doesn't particularly impact the... magic, as you put it, any more than it does any craftsman being comfortable with his tools."

He half-smiled at her question, a little quirk of his lips. If this were a reading for one of those bored Gotham socialites, he might indeed just be stalling for time, or effect. But not at the moment.

"I'm... considering. This card, the woman-- she is called the Empress. It's a fairly significant card, and as you see, it is upside down. The ace of swords is also a rather charged card..."

Jason fell silent for a few more seconds, then shrugged and cleared his throat.

"The Empress signifies... many things. Feminine energies, a role sometimes as mother, wife, or both. Love in all its forms, more general than the romantic and sexual love symbolized by the Lovers card, but certainly still encompassing that as well. The Empress is a card of strong emotions-- the ties that bind, protective loyalties and nurturing compassion.

"Except that it is reversed.

"When a card of the tarot is upside down, negative meanings come into play. The Empress reversed, in the position of the past, might signify..."

Jason traced a fingertip over the empress, over the flow of the waterfall and the sheaf of wheat.

"That the role of Empress was entered into under false pretenses, or unhealthily. That the 'happy home' was not such. A loss of personal power, perhaps, the Empress's nature leading her to serve the needs of others without her own being seen to as well. Inevitably, emotions run amok, carrying one away with their intensity to the catastrophic crash of the waterfall's end."

Madelyne looks at the card and then at Jason and then at the card again in silence. One of these days thinking about how her family fell apart, how she later took great pains to tear at it will not feel like being punched in the chest. Scott's forgiveness has gone a long way to helping - a gift she had never expected. Instead of wallowing in the feeling, she is able to push through it and give Jason a small smile.

"I would say that is relatively accurate on a number of levels."

Jason nods fractionally. He would have been surprised if it hadn't been true. The cards, despite his preference for other methods, did not lie.

Jason's hand moved on to the ace. "The Ace of Swords. Aces almost always signify new beginnings. The sword is the suit of air, which is to say, the mind, the ego, one's thoughts, and one's perceptions both of self and of others.

"In the position of the present, the stark clarity of the ace of swords can signify the gaining of clarity, and the possibility for new beginnings now that illusion has been dispelled by the harsh edge of the sword permitting no deceit. Swords is not a comfortable suit, of course; the revelations that it promises are rarely easy or kind.

"In conjunction with the reversed Empress, I would hazard to say that the sword represents the destruction of the prior situation by uncomfortable truth.

"The Ace of Swords can also be a warning. As I said, it represents the chance for a new beginning, but it stands as a stark warning that whatever the errors of the past, one must take care in the future to avoid repeating them. Or one has wasted the freedom that the sword has bought, and wasted also the pain that accompanied that."

Madelyne laughs softly. It is a dry, not quite bitter sound as if she's amused but at the same time frustrated. It sounds like the reading has distinctly hit the mark again. "You're uncanny, Mr Blood. So, tell me what the cards have to say about my future."

A slight incline of his head at the not-quite-compliment Pryor pays him. Jason's fingers move to rest on the edge of the last card, his eyes moving over the the moon, the mountains, the traveler leaning on his staff.

"The eight of cups. Whereas swords are tied to air, the suit of cups is tied to water-- the realm of emotions and the heart rather than thought and perception.

"But you will note the waters are shallow here, compared to the raging waterfall of the Empress. Compared also to earlier cards in the cups suit, although you will have to take my word on that. Also, you see the traveler is moving away from the water: leaving it behind.

"This does not suggest an abandoning of emotions, but it does suggest that their turbulence has waned, that the querent is no longer in danger of being swept away from the current. The eight of pentacles is a card of growth, maturity, of reaching new phases in life. The moon symbolizes both the cyclic nature of such changes, and guidance for the traveler to continue his-- or her-- path by.

"The traveler is walking towards the mountains, which signifies further adversity; but this is a journey consciously undertaken, with awareness and acceptance of the risks of the road. The traveler is armed-- the staff signifies authority. Sometimes over the exterior world, but in the context of this reading I would say a mastery of self, or steps towards such."

Madelyne leans back in her chair and looks toward Jason. There is a brief temptation to look inside of his head. For a moment, she wants to know what he's done and how he's done it and there is a even briefer flicker of a darker desire to rip it out of his head. The Goblyn Queen will ever be a part of her, the touch of demons lingers in memories that this body did not participate in.

Explaining her life is challenging.

"Thank you. Is there a service I may offer you in return? I fear most of them are not nearly so ... interesting."

"I don't know. What services can you offer?" Jason asks baldly, picking up the rest of the deck and beginning to shuffle once more. He leaves the three drawn cards out, in case she wishes to look at them more closely or ask questions.

"But you needn't feel obligated to pay me. As the pushers say... the first one's free."

"Do you have anything heavy you need lifted? Perhaps anyone's mind you need read? I could .... clean your house?"

Madelyne shrugs a little, obviously reaching for some sort of something that she can do in this situation.

Jason arches a brow at the second 'service' listed, lips curling in a cynical smile.

"That second is quite an offer. Am I to assume you would be doing this without the permission or knowledge of the target? Because that is a dangerous offer, if so."

"Not without a hell of a reason. It is dangerous, not to mention extremely rude, to go poking about other people's minds." Most people don't present much danger to her but there have been and certainly can be again exceptions to that rule.

"Then-- since I would hope that my performing a tarot reading for you doesn't qualify as 'a hell of a reason' -- you were offering to read the mind only of a willing, complicit subject?" Jason asked, the thin smile still playing on his face.

"I was mostly offering up skills I have instead of actually offering to read someone's mind. There are a lot of other reasons to delve into someone's mind, so it isn't just eavesdropping." Madelyne's eyes have narrowed just a bit at the tone of conversation.

"Ahh, I see. Forgive me, then, it did sound like an offer as phrased. We'll consider it pleasantly retracted then, shall we?"

Jason lifted his coffee for a sip.

"At the moment I need nothing moved, and my house is clean. As I said, you are not obligated to pay me-- but if you insist, you could always owe me a favor."

This was said with an entirely straight face. Somewhere, Etrigan was laughing.

"It potentially is, if there is a reason for it." Madelyne shakes her head, "You'll forgive me if I"m not comfortable owing people I don't really know undefined favors. That tends to go poorly."

Jason shrugged and let it go. He felt no need to belabor the point beyond what had been said already. He stirred his coffee with one hand.

"Prudent of you," he said to the words of not wanting to owe favors. "Especially when you are dealing with magicians. We are a terrible breed to owe favors to.

"Freely done this time though. You owe me neither a favor nor any other payment."

"There are a lot of people I don't feel comfortable owing open ended favors. Magic has little to do with it." Madelyne gives him a small smile at that before nodding.

"Thank you."

Jason only shrugged. In the world in which he operated, the difference between owing a favor to a magician and owing a favor to someone else was that it wasn't merely a figure of speech or courtesy, in magic. Blood debts and life debts were powerful things, but even something as simple as saying one owed a favor could grant power of a tangible sort.

He did not feel the need to clarify any of this.

"You're quite welcome. Did you have any questions about the reading?"

"Not this one, though maybe if there are more in the future."

She leans back in the chair and looks at him thoughtfully, "Are you used to being whisked away to other dimensions?"

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