Case File 2017.07.15
After leaving Tijuana, a reasonable amount of travel time was made to end up around Santa Fe just a little before nightfall. Just enough time to locate a proper threshold for Liam to take refuge in from Wanderland's Lost in an old church structure built in 1714 -to- 1717 known as the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi. Locals normally refer to the church as Saint Francis Cathedral, the older church that stood in its place during 1626 had been destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt. Regardless...it remains a sturdy threshold.
Since the others weren't the direct target of The Lost...it would do Rhea, Alex and Delilah best to leave and catch rest for the night. They wouldn't likely be able to catch much sleep with The Lost clawing and howling from outside the cathedral walls seeking to get at Liam. Rhea wasn't keen on the idea of leaving him alone but for a minor compromise the three took up booking at the St. Francis Hotel which was just down the street from the church. At least that way should anything happen, they'd be at best two to three minutes away from Liam.
Alex and Delilah got settled in as Rhea left to go pick up a road map to scan the area for the best routes and ideal pit-stops should they need something with a strong threshold before they could catch up with Gwen and do something to help Liam's current situation. It was after she'd returned from outside at scanning over the map that she ran into Alex that was going to venture out and look for Rhea without his current set of eyes to aid him, Delilah. That didn't make a lot of sense at first...but something was nagging him and he wanted a more one-on-one conversation.
Using the excuse of having Rhea take a look at his hand that was still on the mend, the two sat down to have a bit of a talk. Delilah's work so far on Alex was good...being able to do any level of healing magic was impressive, though there was still a bit more Rhea could to to help. At least a good deal of work was done so she would be able to conserve her energy for unexpected emergencies-- Rhea might be good at her quirky healing, but it still drained a reasonable amount of resources.
Once she'd started to get to work, Alex unloaded with a lot of questions and concerns. Most centering around Liam and the situation he was stuck with as the man's new apprentice. Since the near-death events in Wanderland...Liam had named himself Alex's teacher and removing Rhea from that particular mentor-ship role. Part of her was conflicted...but part of her also felt it would be better for the young man. Rhea didn't have quite the hard edge Alex needed to see to get the message at times when he was stubborn. Though she could see a lot of her stubbornness in his attitude...and she understood that, but it was still frustrating to try and explain-- Alex was the type where he had to 'see it' to 'believe it' and that could be deadly.
Rhea pointed out that no matter what she said, it wasn't going to be good enough for him to just blindly trust Liam. She could confirm based off her own experience that she were more in the position to learn from Liam instead of her vigilante path she went down...she considered Alex lucky. If Alex really wanted answers, he should ask Liam directly-- he'd never lied to Rhea, but she just didn't like a lot of the truth he'd stated. She wasn't certain if much, if anything, said helped Alex in his own thoughts. Maybe at least the young man would give Liam more of a chance than Rhea herself did before getting into trouble that cost lives-- that was one area Alex had in his favor over her. His mistakes hadn't cost the direct loss of life...yet. It didn't take long for Alex to notice that Rhea was holding back a bit to conserve energy even though she didn't outright deny to look at his hand and help mend it...he left her to go rest for the night-- leaving Rhea to her own devices once more.
