Rabbit was getting worried. It had been hours since he put out the call, and no-one had answered. Although Traces perceived time strangely – as you would expect for these ethereal, metaphysical beings – they were still, begrudgingly for Rabbit, subjected to it. He worried the location he had chosen for the meeting was too obscure, a worry that masked a deeper concern about potential, more nefarious, matters at play. He took a moment to take in the interplay of shadows and contours that gave the alley he had chosen its broody character, and let himself truly feel the reality he was in.

He had chosen a dark alley somewhere in a large metropolis, early 21st century. The relentless hustle and bustle of industrial human activity felt like a fitting soundtrack to his uneasy mind. Rabbit noticed the subtle fingerprints of light in this reality, watching the waves of photons emitted from the street lights reflecting through the many textured surfaces of the alley. The plastic of the trash bags, the clay of the exposed brick, the metal of the dumpster, the synthetic paint of the urban art sprayed on the wall, and the water of the puddles. He fixed his attention on the last one, and finding nothing better to do while waiting, took a moment to notice the details of his appearance reflected back at him.

To the mortal observer, he would have appeared to be a man roughly 42 years old, experienced, competent, and perhaps, somewhat weary. He looked into his own deep, green, kind eyes, the kind you feel can see through deception and reservation. He scratched his few-day-old, yet neatly kept, beard, fixed the part on his luscious, but thinning brown hair, and adjusted the shoulders on his favorite brown leather jacket. He chose to conceal himself from mortals at this time, to avoid any unwanted attention, knowing that other Traces would still be able to sense him. He focused his mind, and amplified his aura -- the same hue as his eyes – and saw it dimly harmonize with the ambient light from his surroundings. He was aligning himself, you see, with the reality he was in. He thought perhaps if he could resonate more strongly, at once with the place he was in, the magnitude of the distress in his call, and his overall self, maybe the signal could reach the others.

He paced in and out of the alley, exercising his patience. For all his virtues, patience had always eluded him, the dread of passive inaction too powerful for him to totally surrender to. In his time as a Trace, ascended 12 mortal years ago as measured by his original life, Rabbit had lived 216 lives, and carried the distilled learnings and growth that you would expect from any entity raised to the peaks, and buried in the troughs, said number of times. Death was not something he frequently dreaded; other fears were more haunting, most pressingly the one then driven into the epicenter of his psyche. He looked within, and queried the time.