Participants:
| Scene Title | The Horse is a Metaphor |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | It's about a meme. |
| Date | December 31, 2019 |
The stench of death clings to the air with a cloying quality. Flies buzz loudly and both Eve Mas and Odessa Price are suffocating under a tremendous weight pressing down atop them. Their bodies ache with deep, vivid and lancing pain. They can both taste blood, sweat, bile. But they cannot see anything, it is dark all around them and—
Odessa feels a clammy hand.
They are buried under a mound of bodies. Rotting, maggot riddled, swelteringly hot bodies dropping fluids down deep into the charnel mound they must be pressed within. It's almost impossible to breathe, and what breaths can be taken result in gagging and retching.
This is how they both die, it seems. Confused, pinned, heaped within a stack of the dead, covered in maggots.
There's a gasp as the oracle tries to take a breath but that just ends in her vomiting all over the place. Her eyes are wide as she tries to orient herself but is failing too. There are just too many bodies, “Des! Des!” They’ve entered the unknown. Eve has no idea what the fuck is going on but she wiggles as she coughs and heaves pushing through the hot bodies.
She spits out maggots and bile her light gray eyes going wild. She doesn't know where she is but she tries to steady herself. Breathes.. or tries too, she's seen crazier things on her own for sure but the sensation of not being able to breathe is almost too much for her. She shoves forward though. Clawing through the bodies and muck.
She has learned one thing in all her time in dreams and minds. You must go forward.
Once, Des read an article about climbers trapped in avalanches, and how they would be buried in the snow and unable to tell which end was up. She had serious doubts that a person wouldn’t be able to tell which way gravity was pulling them.
She no longer doubts.
Des would be screaming if she could get enough air in her lungs to produce sound. Instead, she chokes on bile. Not all of it is her own. Maggots crawl from rotted flesh and onto her own. Between that and the feeling of suffocation, panic settles in and has her scrabbling in the direction she’s currently facing. Desperately attempting to claw her way out from among the dead.
She can hear Eve call to her, but can’t tell from where.
Eve is nearly unconscious by the time she hauls herself up out of the stack of bodies, finding glimpses of daylight between gaps in mangled and dismembered human remains. The heat is suffocating, thick, and humid. Blood is thick and has a gelatin quality when she touches it, her bare hand presses into a pile of meat that was once a person’s stomach and entrails. She sinks wrist deep into the mess, and doesn't even realize she's screaming incoherently by the time she gets to the surface.
Of a field.
Littered with corpses in equally swollen piles. The bodies cross a long and rambling hill leading down into a forested valley. The bodies are riddled with arrows, and a man on horseback rides past in the full oyoroi armor of a samurai, face concealed by a scowling fanged mask. Blood covers his armor, and from his back a standard is flown on a field of red cloth. A black S-shaped symbol Eve and Odessa have seen time and again
The horseman turns, riding toward Eve’s screaming form even as Odessa presses her face up, streaked with blood and filth, in time to see the samurai’s approach. As he rides ahead, his gallop picks up speed and he reaches up to his back, withdrawing the sword from its scabbard — Hiro Nakamura’s sword — and rides precariously close to the heap of bodies.
Odessa watches as the rider careens past Eve’s flailing form and swings the sword down in a clean arc. Her head separates from her body and rolls down the pile, cutting off her scream in a gurgling report of blood from the stump where her head once was. Her flailing body falls to the side, still partway pinned into the heap.
The rider begins to turn, coming around for another pass.
Adam Monroe.
Odessa reaches up to the top of the pile, pulling herself out, gasping for air. Her eyes are wide as she watches Eve’s severed head roll. She looks at the samurai - she knows his symbol. “Yamete!” she screams. “Yamete kudasai! Watashi wa Kensei no tomodachi desu!” Oh, God. “Adam!”
The temporal manipulator throws herself down, tumbling over the hill of bodies and to the ground, crawling over the field as low to the ground as she can. “Please, please, please.” She feels for the threads of time around her. If she can stop him and prove she’s like him—
She hazards a glance behind her and her hand finds something warm ahead. Looking back, she sees her palm has laid across Eve’s cheek. “Fu—”
Odessa can feel the threads of time around herself, but they feel covered in soap, and whenever she tries to reach for them they slip through her fingers. Her head feels foggy, weighted by something clouding her judgment.
The rider comes to a slowly galloping stop at Odessa’s scream, ending up mere feet from her. He angles his sword down, point first, and Odessa can see the bright blue eyes above the mouth-guard. She can see her own reflection in the edge of the blade. “Hizamazuku.” He demands of her, making it abundantly clear that he understood her.
But Eve is dead.
And someone else is coming. Down the hill from the direction Takezo Kensei came from is a dark-haired woman in a carnation red and bright vermillion kimono, too distant to identify. Except that her irises glow with the fiery intensity of molten steel. As she approaches, Kensei looks over to her and canters his horse back a step from Odessa.
“Nīru matawa watashi wa anata o koroshimasu.u!” Kensei shouts this time, thrusting the sword forward at Odessa.
“H- Hai.” Odessa pulls her trembling hand away from Eve’s lifeless face, a look of apology as she does so, even though there’s nothing to be done for the seeress. Slowly, she pushes up to her knees facing the samurai. “Onegaishimasu, Kensei-sama.” She plants her hands down on the grass in front of her and bends forward to a low bow.
She’s shaking all over, trying to keep the tears from coming. Trying to keep from vomiting. Covered in blood and other darker fluids from the corpses, she may never feel clean again. The smell is overwhelming.
This was a mistake in every possible way.
Kensei swings a leg off of his horse and drops down onto the ground with a clap of armor. He approaches Odessa with his sword held point down toward her, each step cautious and purposeful. Kensei circles Odessa like a wild animal, coming to stand behind her as he watches the figure in red descend the hill down toward where Eve’s body lay not far from Odessa, her mouth still agape in a look of shock and horror. Kensei exhales a sharp breath, gripping his katana tightly with both hands, standing over her with the edge of his sword against the back of her neck. Odessa can see the sandaled feet of that woman approaching, arms folded within the wide sleeves of her kimono, eyes burning.
“Kanojo wa watashitachi no hitori desu ka?” Kensei asks of the approaching woman, who casts her baleful stare down at the blonde without recognition or clarity. But it is also without fear that she reaches out to place her palm on Odessa’s head just above where Kensei’s blade kisses the back of her neck. It is a strangle gentle sensation, that touch of her warm hand at the crown of Odessa’s head.
“Kamigami,” is the woman’s response in a youthful voice. “Dochira mo.” There is an electric tingle burning beneath Odessa’s skin, something fiery like an infection. The woman sucks in a sharp breath through her teeth and rolls her head from side to side with her eyes closed. “Kanojo wa watashitachi no yōdesu,” is said in one exhale, and then “Kanojo wa watashi no monodesu,” said on the breath in. Odessa’s vision swims, her eyes burning with a bright gold light. “Karera wa betsu no toki karadesu,” she says with a faint smile, “Watashi no tamashī no ichibu wa kanojo no naka ni arimasu.” As she speaks a telekinetic rumble hums through the ground as bodies are lifted into the air, floating as though they had no weight, casting shadows down around Odessa.
The woman turns, hand outstretched, and Eve’s headless corpse floats through the air toward her, now that it has been freed from gravity. With a wave of one hand she moves Eve’s body and severed head closer to one another in the air. The woman snaps her fingers and both body and head become nothing more than a seething red energy crackling with crimson lightning. The clouds intermingle, and then with a wave of her hands resolidify into Eve’s whole body which floats beside Odessa. “Kako o kaeru,” the gold-eyed woman says as she reaches one hand toward Odessa, and Odessa complies to the demand. Her eyes seethe green and a hellish like green energy surrounded by a haze of yellow light roils down her outstretched arm toward Eve, then begins weaving through her body. Odessa whines, screams, and then bursts in a flash of light, sending Eve sprawling back onto the ground on hands and heels. She breathes in a deep, rasping breath and stares wide-eyed at the two figures.
“Karera wa koko kara kite inai,” the woman with glowing golden eyes states confidently. “Watashi wa karera no tame ni okurimashita.” Raising her hand again, to call forth a curtain of auroral energy from the sky, bathing the battlefield in shades of shimmering blue and green. “Watashi wa karera o ie ni okurimasu.” Auroral light shines around the gold-eyed woman’s body in blur of colors bending light at its edges like a prism and extending out in scintillating rings from her hand.
The light erupts out of the woman’s hand in a roaring cone line the afterburner of a jet engine. As it washes over Eve and Odessa is floods them with both agonizing pain and blinding light, accompanied by the sensations of weightlessness and falling alternating back and forth.
As Odessa and Eve fall through this light, they feel disassembled and yet at the same time whole and at peace with their situation. Glimpses and echoes of their own voices reverberate through their minds, things both said and unsaid, moments of internal monologue made verbal. It is as if they are falling through curtains of light made from their choices of both action and inaction, a world of possibilities both infinite and—
The Oracle Room
Cat’s Cradle
Phoenix Heights
December 31st
11:22 pm
What’s Left of 2019
The concrete floor is cold on Eve’s face. A broken wine glass lays in pieces beside her, accompanied by a stain of red wine on the floor. Riotous noise fills the air from beyond the Oracle room, there was a New Year’s Eve party going on at Cat’s Cradle. Eve’s heart is still racing from whatever just happened. One minute she was heading into the Oracle Room to get a refill on her weed stash and the next the world turned upside down.
From the floor Eve can see a shadow cast across the nearby wall of someone standing in the room. As she cranes her neck to look up to whoever is standing over her, there is a familiar ghost staring back down at her. A dark silhouette with burning gold irises. But as her eyes adjust to the light she sees more familiarity in that face.
Eve had been ready to trip on acid as well as weed but somehow, she thinks as her eyes flutter open, yelping with fright from the dream and she feels around to get her bearings she must have taken a tab earlier and just been hit by it. But wait, no that's not it, makes no sense! She doesn't even feel high! Not that kind of high! "Did Poppy give me molly water? What a horrible memory to dream about. No bueno. Bad vibes, docking her pay," The question is asked in an all too serious tone. A pale hand landing on the girl's barefoot who stands above her, Eve was barefoot as well. The red stain of the wine she also spilled on her dress didn't show that much since she was in black.
"Watch yer feet! There's glass- jumping blue fava beans!!" Eve shrieks and tries to scramble backward away from the "child." Her body glows with the blood red light. The one who had given her the gift was here, in the flesh.
Okay she must be high.
"Mother and Father, what, how- well she's pretty powerful," the last bit she muses to herself with a slight flick of her gaze to the entrance/exit but that stabbing fear sensation slowly begins to fall into the other feelings she holds for this being. A bit of gratitude for her life, a healthy respect(?) for her power and above all else curiosity.
Her foot felt real…
This is obviously a dream! You know the ones! Face first in the River!
That's not the gift anymore nitwit!
Pinch yourself, the true test!
"Ow!" Okay she's awake. Eve touches the spot on her hand she just pinched, looks to Sibyl's foot. Squints at them, squats (she was already on the ground so she's crouching at the figure's eye level now) before slowly looking up into burning gold irises that have haunted her. "Well," Lighting coils down her arm and around her wrist. "I'm Eve welcome to my home, it's mess- ah don't look at that!" Leaping to her feet in order to attempt at blocking a painting of a woman in a red kimono with eyes of burning gold. Yaeko, from the memory she was just in. "Did you come to ring in the new… year? Must get old for you… heh?" Inside, Eve's mind races. Don't freak. Don't freak.
She takes it it's a good sign she's not dead right this second but Eve can't help but look on in fright at the being in front of her. "Got your present in the mail ha ha," Wiggling her fingers that fizzle and crackle with energy. The music above alongside with the people's stomping makes the ceiling shake but Eve barely notices as she tries to make light on the whole switching of her abilities.
Light on the fact that a god is standing in front of her.
The girl's eyes lower to the broken glass on the floor, then back up to Eve. She narrows her eyes, not in frustration but rather scrutiny, as if trying to make heads or tails of anything Eve is saying. She carefully steps forward through the glass, risen up on her toes and navigating around the broken wine glass. Once she's tread that difficult terrain, the girl turns those burning gold eyes down at Eve again and comes to crouch beside her.
The slouchy sweater the girl wears is much too large for her, making her torso look wide and the way her black leggings slim her down makes her look like she has but two matchsticks for legs. Threading an errant lock of hair behind one ear, she looks around the Oracle Room and then back to Eve. “You survived,” she says with some surprise in her voice. “Eve, what do you want?” Her brows pinch together, lips downturned into a frown.
"My momma taught me how to survive!" Eve says this rather proudly, chest slightly puffed out. "Have you died before? It's the third for me." The memory is nagging at her, she doesn't remember some of it right. The cloud… her body. The pale woman looks down at her hands before looking back over to the girl crouched beside her. "Were you trying to kill me then?"
The girl that was once Sibyl tilts her head to the side, eyes narrowed again as if trying to find meaning in the noises Eve makes with her mouth. “Don't be silly,” she says as though Eve were talking about the sky being purple and it raining candy.
This feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity, Eve’s wanted nothing more than this moment since the very first vision that put her on the Dragon's scent. "I didn't mean to find you, me or my cousin. It was an accident. Honest." Or it was an accident on Eve's part, the first time she experienced It anyway. It's Eve's turn to frown and looks off to the wall in front of them on the other side of the Oracle Room.
That much has the girl smiling and shaking her head. “There are no accidents, Eve. You were lost. Stranded in a place without places, in the darkness. In the nothing. So I gave you a push, and sent you to where you'd always been.” She wrinkles her nose. “Eve, your friend was just like her mother. No strings. The circle, unbroken.” She smiles, gold eyes burning relentless and bright.
"I want to know why, why you're doing this, I want to know you." It's as honest as Eve's ever been, "We feel connected. Ever since…" Confusion laces through and she closes her eyes. "There were four. Four of you. Enslaved? Why would the King do such a thing?" In this moment Eve's demeanor is more childlike, full of wonder. Questions. The danger she's in doesn't quite escape her but, her guard is slowly lowered.
She's still not on fire so that's a good thing. "Will you…" Eve fidgets with her hands in her lap before looking back at Sibyl. "Tell me a story?"
“None of that matters,” the Entity says, slowly rising up from her crouch. “We’re connected because I made it so. Ever since I saw you that day you fell through time. I knew you were a part of the circle. You were a thread, to sew closed the old wound.” Smoothing her hands down her sweater to straighten it, then girl looks past Eve and takes on a distant stare.
“Eve,” the Entity says in a hushed breath, “you were never a seer.” Those gold eyes level back down to her. “Everything about you I made. Reached out across the infinite nothing and plucked your thread like a string on a violin. I have been every vision in your head,” she says with an open-mouthed smile, reaching over to touch a fingertip to Eve’s forehead. “Across your selves, like writing on thin paper so you can see the impressions on others. You've always been my herald, shouting my instructions, doing what needs to be done to get me to the moment your visions ended.”
The Entity lowers her hand. “No more visions,” she says with a crinkle of her brows and a wrinkle of her nose, “no need. I'm here now, and everything is going to be alright.” She takes a step back, looking down at the floor, eyes distant again. “Is that the story you wanted?”
"Your story matters to me it's-" But she can't interrupt the person speaking to her because as The Entity continues… It's as if Eve hears the pillars of support around her life slowly exploding, debris flying wildly about. She's absolutely still, face staring forward. Blinking when she's touched on the forehead.
You were never a seer…
You were never… a seer…
She did this, she made us crazy! Made you crazy!
I'm not so hungry anymore.
Her finger feels real.
You were never a seer.
A pale shaky hand goes to lift the lid of a box made of dark wood on the table, she pulls a flashy gold lighter and a pristine rolled blunt. No joints right now. She needs the real good stuff. Eve lights it and puffs away, staring off into the distance as the smoke collects around her fingertips. The laugh starts low, slow and hiccupy. It extends until the midnight haired woman throws her head back and shrieks with eyes wide bulging from their sockets, "I hope making me crazy was worth it!" She's unsure how to feel. Her stomach is falling beneath the floor they sit on though, mind reeling. She sways and closes her eyes before nodding.
She did this to me.
I fell through the Hole though.
The visions were good while they lasted huh!!
SHH! She's having a moment of self reflection!
"Quiet." Eve whispers feverishly to herself and scratches the back of her head. "I like all stories," Directed towards the Entity. Even the ones that hurt. Several things that the Entity says go over Eve's head in this moment and probably won't be thought on until later. Old Wound. "Your herald. You're here now." She repeats softly, gaze half lidded and distant as well. Lightning crackles from her wrists, striking the floor from her emotional state. Was there any control in her life? Or was she moved from place to place, adventure to adventure purposefully?
Did she have a purpose now?
She had begun the process of moving forward from her visions and this story was the final nail in that coffin, bowing her head as she takes another pull. Eve offers the blunt without a thought, "What will you do? To.. make it all alright?" She whispers, the smoke billowing from her parted lips. Imitating a dragon.
“The world is sick,” is the Entity’s answer. “I intend to heal it.” It's strange, standing here and listening to her — if it weren't for the gold eyes Eve would swear this was Sibyl. Her manner of speech, her posture, even her style of clothes all seem distinctly like the girl she bit in a fancy bathroom at a gala once.
Eve admittedly has made hasty some life choices at times.
“But it doesn't matter, none of this really matters.” The Entity continues, threading a defiant lock of hair behind one ear. “Except for some things.” Her brows rise. “I can tell you where to find Adam Monroe. Would you like that, Eve?”
"It's probably been sick for as long as you've been alive, even before?" She dares to wonder and Eve pulls more from that blunt, brow furrowed in thought. "You're the most upset with him," More than the world itself it seems. Tilting her head to the side, tapping the side of her temple. "You offer what I already have Mother and Father. He's west, with my family. Why send me when you have… all you do."
A hand curls around her knee and she grips it, the confusion and shock wearing off from the things revelations just witnessed. "I have seen for you. I have served you. I don't seem to have failed you once." Whether she knew it or not, "I would like your name, Mother and Father. I would like to know where your home was, what it was like." The former see-not seer is persistent. Their connection explained but there was more. There was always more.
"Do you love us? …or do you want to control us?"
There's an unspoken question beneath that, Eve almost never drinks a full cup of Kool-Aid. Not at once. Crimson eyes lift to meet those gold ones.
The Entity tilts her head to the side, regarding Eve the way a pet owner might a chatty cat howling at their ankles. “No, Eve. You're mistaken.” That expression fades.
“Adam is not where you think he is,” the Entity says without emoting, “and I don't care about any of you.” Now her brows raise. “I just want the world back to the way it was. The way it should be before we were all betrayed.”
The Entity takes a step forward and closes the distance to Eve, reaching down to cup a hand on Eve’s cheek. “Call me whatever you will,” she adds in a whisper, “I have had too many names.”
"You must have a name you've liked better than the rest." She whispers back and closes her eyes. Being this near god, "Kam said you were terrible. The most terrible thing."
“People fear what they can't understand,” is all the Entity has to say about that, even as she moves that hand at Eve’s cheek to curl fingers beneath her chin. “And no. Names are unimportant.”
Eve doesn't shiver or shy away from the touch. Instead blood red eyes pop open, she looks deeply into The Entity's eyes. "You stole my eyesight, you hurt me more than once." Eve will not, has not forgotten that. "I will bite, where is the Immortal?"
“Oh Eve,” is the gentle response, “I stole nothing from you. If you jump off a building, would you not expect your legs to break?” Her nose wrinkles brows creasing. But then, she lowers her hand from Eve’s cheek and takes a step away from her. “Adam is east, hiding. Like he always does.”
Eve grins then, too widely. It's eerie, they mirror each other at times. "Betrayed. All of us. Something was taken?" Placing her hand over the Dragon's. Revenge. On more than just Adam. This Eve relates with, "What did he do to you?"
The pale woman places her free hand on her middle, the pain in her belly that shoots through the rest of her body. She was ready for a fight when they met, this was not that at all. "He thinks you'll end the world. I think you end it together."
The Entity has been silent for a long while, staring down at the floor. She looks back up to Eve, still wordless. “Adam betrayed me,” is her simple and succinct answer, “and he betrayed the world.” Her gold eyes sweep down to the floor again. “Adam couldn't end the world even if he wanted to. He's a child who thinks he is smarter than an adult.”
The Entity extends a hand toward Eve and she can feel a pressure build behind her eyes, see images flash before her, knowledge blossom in her mind that wasn't there before. A submarine, a travel Route through the Atlantic, a ship that travels above the submarine route captained by a French woman. Her name blooms in Eve’s mind, Siobhan Delaflote. Joy is there — Yaeko — Adam. “You can find it with that information. You can destroy it. Adam. Forever.”
The Entity lowers her hand. Her fiery eyes uplift to Eve. “But, you're right on one thing. I will end this world. This world and every world like it. You know why, Eve. You've always known.”
A single phrase reverberates in her mind.
Gutes-asi
Suddenly
“Happy new year!”
Voices roar in conjunction with one-another. Eve can hear them thrumming through the walls of the Cats Cradle from outside the Oracle Room. She's a bit stiff, slouched you against a wall sitting on a pile of throw pillows and tangled blankets with a mostly empty wine glass in one hand and an unlit joint hanging from her bottom lip.
Her head throbs, a hangover before hangovers. But then it all comes flooding back to her, what she'd just seen, and reflexively Eve bolts upright expecting to see the Entity standing in the corner of the room. In her haste she trips, stumbling over the tangle of blankets and falls down onto the floor, her wine glass shattering beside her.
Staring at the broken shards of glass, Eve’s chest tightens into a knot.
The horse was a metaphor.
And she was never a seer.