[h1][img]http://i1383.photobucket.com/albums/ah281/Q-C0ntinuum/Namaisare_zpsyt3uqbvr.jpg[/img] Nemaisare[/h1]
[h2]Thea 'Teddy' Palmer - Urban Grinds[/h2]
Deep breath. 

In and...

She wanted to hold that breath forever, because she knew that once she let it out, she was either going to walk in there and change her life forever (yesterday warranted a few dramatics, so sue her), or she'd be turning around and hiding in her room until someone came to find her. Tia'd said the choice was hers. But it was only hers if she made it, and put in the effort. Wasted opportunity if she didn't, but... Was she even making the right choice? Did it matter? The world had gotten that little bit stranger and maybe her life wasn't ever going to be the same anyways. Maybe she was just dreaming. Though she'd never deliberated this long in front of a cafe door in her dreams before. For that matter, she couldn't remember ever actually visiting a cafe while dreaming. It was usually something far weirder, like getting an oldfashioned hand clock installed in her forehead by autonomous robots ruling over human kind. (She was still very certain they'd been trying to help with the chronic human problem of not keeping track of time and no one had thought to remind them that humans couldn't read their own faces.)

If she was going to go through with this, it had to be now. 

Teddy exhaled, grabbed the door and stepped inside. Glancing around, it looked pretty ordinary. Calm, subdued, but friendly. An open atmosphere with far too many empty tables to choose from. The few people already ensconced chatted with each other, mouths moving in a variety of contortions that shifted their expressions. Heated debate at one table, she thought. Animated storytelling at another. Or, whatever that fellow was doing waving his arms about and the two others smiling and nodding as he went. Another quickly filling up with other girls, who were either very good friends with nothing more to say to each other or strangers from the same church group, maybe? They didn't really look like they were there for each other. Anyway, as they all settled into their seats and pulled out their phones. All in all... Pretty ordinary place. Coffee smelled alright. So did the food as she walked past the arguing men. No faces she recognised though. 

Good. Smiling to herself, a little nervously, granted, but pleased that she'd at least arrived before anyone else, she took the chance to get herself settled. She picked a table that gave her a relatively good view of most of the cafe, and when the waitress came by, ordered a spicy vegetarian sandwich because why not live a little, and a milkshake, just in case by spicy they meant really fricken hot. The waitress was very obliging about having the order pointed out to her, had a wonderful smile and nice enthusiasm. Teddy liked that, it might put this place on her list of reccomended places.

The lovely wide windows at the front of the building more than made up for the older lighting they employed. The flickering over her head was lost with the height of the ceiling and the natural light streaming in, so, for all her nerves, she was actually sort of enjoying herself. The atmosphere was nice, anyway. Particularly after the avid debaters left to take their gesticulations somewhere else. And the sandwich, when it arrived, was definitely spicier than she'd been expecting, not bad, it just made her blink a lot and definitely cleared her sinuses. 

So, she almost missed it when the group came in. She had to do a double take, but yes, possibly, probably. A quick check on her phone, and they matched. There was the grey-haired man with the thin mouth who looked stricter than he wanted to be. Probably his glasses and the way he kept his hair trimmed. And the other guy, Daniel? Yes, Daniel. And a lady. That one wasn't in Tia's texts. But she came in with them, and she stayed with them, sat down at the same table as them, and her mouth never seemed to stop moving. Well, it didn't really change anything in her plans. Just that it felt a little safer to be going up to three strangers when one was a lady. Were they meetings someone else? Or was the talkative woman the one they'd come here for? She hadn't asked Tia about that. Probably should have.

It left her not knowing how much time she had left to dither. She still had to work up the courage to say hi. She could still back out, she didn't have tp do this, but, no, no buts. She didn't have to. She was going to though. She would, and to prove it, Teddy texted Tia.

-Found them. Deleting stuff now.-

There, now she couldn't turn back, or Tia would have to ask why and she'd have to come up with a valid excuse. Then, following her plan, she deleted the whole bunch of messages they'd sent back and forth since the hacker had interrupted her discussion about hummingbirds. Then she deleted Tia from her contacts. If there was any chance that they'd look through her phone, she didn't want any evidence of the other side on it, since Tia had made it pretty clear they weren't on friendly terms, these two groups of people that could do weird things. (Freaks was a little easier to think, but she didn't want to number herself a freak so she figured they wouldn't like her thoughts going that way either) 

She'd just have to hope Tia could find her again, because she'd have no way of starting the conversation herself. Especially not if that chip Tia had given her didn't work. Teddy made sure it was still in her pocket before she took another bite of her sandwich, tearing up as she chewed through a jalapeno pepper and trying not to be too obvious about either her discomfort or her staring at the trio. it was an effort to turn her head though, to look somewhere else, act casual, pretend she was interested in some other conversation. Even though she was almost certain the woman had just said something about powers. 

She'd been paying particular attention after that bout of handwaving. She wasn't sure what else she'd said, but she looked a little confused. Maybe she was the person they were here to see. It would have been far more useful if she could have seen the men's faces, she realised, but it wasn't as though she could predicted where they'd sit. Well, maybe there was someone out there who might have managed that, given as she'd just met a woman who could read texts with her eyes closed. Frowning at that thought, and thinking that Tia probably would have warned her if one of them could read minds or that sort of thing, she worked on finishing her sandwich while they ordered, guessing that she had a bit of time. 

She was just taking a soothing sip, or well, making a forceful extraction attempt, of her milkshake when her staring was noticed. The lady was looking around, letting the others order in peace, presumably, and their eyes met. Blue, she thought. The woman had blue eyes. Or light eyes anyway, they might have been grey, and she held herself still, dropping the straw so she could smile at the other woman while wondering if she'd been caught out or if this was just one of those awkward accidents. Whatever the case, she wanted to make a good first impression, but it seemed it was only an accident as the other swung her gaze away and threw herself right back into conversation. 

Okay, almost, she'd held her ground at least, right? She could do this. She'd told Tia she was doing this. She needed to do this. Taking a breath, Teddy put her milkshake down and was just starting to consider her approach as she pushed herself up, when the woman started getting excited over her phone. Alright, not yet. Hopefully they wouldn't rush out the door. She settled back and took another bite of her sandwich, considering her options. Maybe if she said she thought they'd been talking about something she'd been thinking about lately. Because of weird things happening. Was that too much? What if they were just talking about some X-Man movie, or something? Wait and see. She pulled out her phone to try and look distracted, but held it so that she could still see them by looking through it. 

She only hoped she wasn't being obvious.