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[hider=How Avant-Garde]Max spent the time before his performance rudely focused on his phone. He made sure to stay behind the vampires, lest Eris see it and give him shit for being inattentive. Quite frankly, he didn't care about Pale Girl's shrill little noises or Whoever-The-Fuck's poor attempt at pyromancy. Besides, this was technically related to his performance. A picture of the piece he was going to replicate was open on the screen - some pretentious tree-looking thing carved from sculpted bronze that Eris assured him was so obscure that no one would notice if he messed up, yet famous enough that none would dare question what it was, lest they look like some kind of uncultured artistic rube. Of course, Max was supposed to do it in silver rather than bronze, in deferrence to the great House Sinnenodel. What a load of crap.

Max dragged a stool over and dropped the briefcase he'd brought on the floor beside it. The case unlatched itself as Max circled his makeshift podium, and various lengths of metal floated upward on their own accord to spiral around themselves in a stylized likeness of a tree trunk. Max left a few more pieces levitating in the air as he paused in thought with his back turned to the audience, as though he was deliberating on his next move. In reality, his focus was on snaking tendrils of his magic into everyone's electronics and, after a short delay, made everyone's phone start vibrating in unison regardless of whether it was turned on or not.

[color=8585AD]"No, no, it's fine. Go on and answer it, I'll wait,"[/color] He chimed while the 'branches' began assembling themselves before him, sparing only a glance backward to see if he managed to get a hint of embarrassment from anyone in attendance. When the construct was complete, he turned and bowed to the audience wth an elaborate flourish timed in tune with foil 'leaves' unfurling from the tree. The statue quickly broke apart as Max walked away, as though the tree were rotting in a time-lapse. He kicked the briefcase under the stool to catch the falling pieces, guiding them only minimally with his magic.[/hider]

Max took up a spot beside the gathered mages out of necessity only. He didn't see the appeal of all being together, but if Lilie wanted to pretend they were all friends and not in varying degrees of political cold war against each other, he wasn't going to contradict her. If he left to go sit alone, some jackass would surely walk over and start pestering him, and he certainly wasn't going to go hang out with the [i]vampires[/i]. At least, not yet. He'd have time for games later in the night once conversation started winding down and everyone else's guard had relaxed a tad. Besides, Eris had told him to shut up and watch, far be it from him to disobey.

Madison or whatever her name was had already started getting eager to meet everyone, which meant he was probably seconds away from the usual introductory questions people ask when they first meet someone. The Revel just kept getting worse and worse - first he gets roped into a shitty murder case, and now some dead kid's replacement gets to bother him.

[color=8585AD]"I'm Max,"[/color] He responded coolly, not eager to engage beyond that. Hopefully she'd gloss over him and find one of the other ones more interesting. Women who couldn't tell the difference between someone playing hard to get and him actually wanting nothing to do with them were annoying, doubly so now that his association to Eris made him a catch or something.

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