Emancipated and Quite Capable

Jack normally could suss out the romantic potential of any given encounter within the first five minutes, so he had no reason except distraction to be so surprised when he realized that this -- this coffee-with-a-classmate thing he and Alistair had been doing for the last few weeks -- was, at least in Alistair's head, a date.

If he'd known the expression, he would have said his gaydar needed a tune-up. Really, he should have worked it out back when Alistair was just glancing at him from across the lecture hall in a way that suggested he knew more than he was saying, but he'd been deep in a bout of post-Bristol paranoia at the time: He'd thought it was about time travel or vampires, not anything as mundane as lust.

Well. As long as Alistair was being slow and shy and waiting for Jack to make a move, Jack had no particular need to press on the point, and wouldn't (at least, not with a visit to Emma on the horizon).

Which made for a double surprise when he reached into Alistair's bookbag to retrieve a pen and spotted an old, vaguely familiar text. "You have Gray's Compendium of Spellcraft," he noted. "Holding it for a friend?"

Alistair looked like he'd been caught with something far more illicit than a spellbook. "No. Actually it's just ... something I should have mentioned."

Jack waited patiently through the pause.

"There's a strain of sorcery in my family," Alistair explained, in the end. "I want to go into magical investigations after university, so I take night classes on the witchcraft side of things. Our school tolerates it, barely." He ran a sheepish hand through his hair. "I should have told you, but -- some people go all funny about anything supernatural. Wasn't sure where you stood."

Well. This coffee-date-thing had just gotten even more interesting. After a bit more chat -- during which Jack established very well that he was not the type to go all funny about something as minor as a bit of magic -- Jack was almost sorry he had to take his leave.

He had a portal to catch.

[OOC: NFB, NFI. Just setting up a magic user in Jack's world for future plot.]

Well, Carl was more or less settled by now. He'd found a roommate and a club to go to, and Sebastien had quietly made sure no one asked too many questions there weren't good answers for. So Jack had to be satisfied that entire mess was more or less taken care of, or as much as it would be.

But besides doing some legwork for Sebastien in finding a place for Carl, he'd disappeared into his own life. He sent flowers to Emma for the holiday, but had made no special effort to call or visit or deal with anything related to Fandom otherwise. Every so often, he just needed a break from all of it.

Besides, there was a boy in one of his history lectures who kept giving him the oddest looks. Almost as if he knew something and was working up the courage to mention it -- but he couldn't, so clearly Jack's paranoia was getting to him.

Said paranoia counted as yet another reason he needed some time off from Fandom.

If the time off was about to come to an end this morning, as he divided his attention between a research paper and a fairly excellent breakfast, he was blissfully unaware of it.

[OOC: NFB. Open for phone calls/texts/random visits.]

Enough word had handwavily filtered back from Fandom that Jack was dimly aware everything had worked out once again. He still wanted the whole story, but for the moment he'd settle for knowing everything was all right.

Besides, he'd been a tiny bit distracted with matters on the homefront. He hadn't been around long enough to do any organizing, but it was always a good time to watch, listen, and figure out who people were and what they wanted.

He hadn't precisely forgotten that today was his nineteenth birthday. But he'd never made much of a fuss over them, save the one in Fandom that marked his passage into adulthood. When the man you lived with was in his second millenium, the details of anything in the human lifespan seemed a bit silly.

He made himself some tea and a sandwich and settled in to work on a final paper.

[OOC: Open for calls, texts, surprise guests, etc.]

Emma's portal was letting her out just a few blocks from the hotel she'd chosen, so it was easiest for Jack to just meet her in the bar there. He ordered a cognac, not really sipping much at all as he waited.

When Emma had informed him she was staying in a hotel and not with him, he'd been a bit hurt but too grateful she was coming at all to argue. Now, two long weeks later, he was happy he could be here where Sebastien wasn't. He needed rest and normalcy (or as much normalcy as one got with a psychic, anyhow) and that was outweighing his usual fierce desire for his vampire.

He felt more than a bit guilty about leaving the group in Bristol so abruptly; he'd have to make sure to call to check in. Still, there was something to be said for recovering almost alone.

[OOC: NFB. For Emma and for SP -- though I'm not averse to other phone calls.]

Jack had stayed at the library late after hsi first day of classes. He wasn't studying -- it was all material he'd covered at the age of 12. He was, however, trying to ingratiate himself with his fellow students. They were such an interesting group, and Jack asked so many interesting questions about their lives that no one noticed he hardy talked about his own.

Home at last, he found a note from Sebastien indicating he'd be out working, then cooked himself a light dinner. Then he went up to his room and took out his phone. There were a few people back in Fandom he needed to check in with.

He dialed.

[OOC: If you want him to have called you, he did!]

Jack had been fretting since he talked to Karla yesterday. He would have grabbed a portal to Fandom and damned the expense, but Sebastien needed his help interviewing some witnesses, and that unhappy task lasted so late into the night that, reluctantly, Jack decided sleep was essential before he could talk sense even to someone recovering from a concussion.

And then he had to wait until it was a reasonable hour to call Fandom. Sometimes he thought time zones existed purely to spite him. It was early -- but not impossibly so -- when he gave in to his impulse and dialed Emma's number.

[OOC: For Emma, but open if anybody else wants a Jack!]

It was considerate of Portalocity to put the main port to and from London in a dimly lit alcove of a crowded underground station; no one was looking at anyone else, and, even if they were, there'd probably been stranger things to remark upon that morning than two (to all appearances) young men stepping out of a glowing blue doorway to nowhere. Certainly Jack was not going to break his stride to remark on how unusual it was.

He did, though, pause when they were out of the station. "Guidebook first, I think," he ventured. "Seeing as it's been some time since I was here."

[OOC: For Mitchell, unless someone else is in London today.]