Welcome to Gaia! ::

For someone who was still confined within the walls of what was best described as a cannibal murder casino, Caroline seemed surprisingly calm. Her tranquil state was arguably already odd within the context, but for those who had spent the last month dealing with her volatile mental state and unpredictable breakdowns over all the many ways that they were trapped, it may have been more strange that she had never seemed this okay.

The gravity of the situation wasn't lost on her, however; she'd sobered up since the students' little game, and had been hard at work to help those who found that the nines were not in their favor, determined to leave none of them behind. As an added benefit, it granted her enough access to the cards that she'd finally finished her deck - thirteen sets of nines for a full set of fifty-two.

Sitting alone in a booth off to the far side of the bar, eyes half-lidded with contentment, she sifted through them with the slow motions of someone moving their hand through water, as her other hand idly idly toyed with her second 'souvenir'. It was hard to tell which she was more pleased with, but there was clearly something uniquely sublime about the particular pair.

Though she made no initial remark about his presence, her posture welcomed it, one deliberate shift removing much of the minimal space left between them. She laughed, light and distracted by all the right things, and assessed her blueprint of lines and strings and one particular number. Being this consciously aware that the nines were so simple and so complicated all at once was a feeling that Caroline could only describe as peculiar; not unnerving, but not entirely pleasant either.

"For you?" She leaned against his side, into the touch of his hand, and dealt a single misplaced card from the deck (King of Hearts, because of course) onto the table in front of him.

"'I'll tell you. But what I tell you depends entirely on what you want to know."

For once, the technically correct answer was one that would have sounded the most evasive - through years of rapidly accruing acquired meaning, it was most accurate to ask what it didn't mean to her. It didn't seem fair to respond in such a way when he'd earned something better, but she couldn't help teasing.

"I've already shown you everything." She wanted to again, or to at least encourage the opportunity for it by reacting more boldly to the movement of his hand, but she was exercising the best of her patience. "I know that you were paying attention."

The sly grin on her lips faded as she placed the stack full of nines next to the single king, carefully aligning them.

"One nine was just a number. Two nines make two points and a line. Three make a pattern." One fingernail gently nudged a single nine off of the deck each time she mentioned the number. "There's comfort in what you know, and what you know you can find. With enough nines, everything makes sense. Everything is all right if you can just find the nine."

"You're very good at it," she added casually, declining to add any specificity to what she meant by that either. Not that it was an especially difficult thing to guess.

The solemnity in her expression as she explained cracked into a small smile when he spoke about patterns. Saying that anyone else truly understood felt to her like too much of a reach sometimes, but some were undeniably capable of holding at least part of it within their grasp.

"A pattern within a pattern. Yes, you see it." Her eyelids fluttered, but she managed to keep them from closing. "And once you see it...well. Then it's hard to stop looking. It's always somewhere. Maddening when you can't find it, but the feeling--the good feeling when you do is beyond what I can describe."

With a tap to one card's corner, she flipped it off of the top of the deck. It landed haphazardly on top of the card beside it.