Participants:
| Scene Title | Forward |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | After a run in with a dragon, Eve calls her friends together to share what she's learned. A decision is made. |
| Date | January 1, 2020 |
Cat's Cradle is empty. The apartment where Eve calls home is the only source of light in the place, shining down from the upstairs landing the door to her dwelling left open for her friends to arrive.
You were never…
Eve herself sits on the living room floor, rocking back and forth and shaking her head. "No. No. No no no." There are papers on the floor in front of her. The name of a ship is written on one page in thick charcoal. Her dark hair is a mess, she hasn't combed it in days. Especially not last night. She continues to shake and wrap her arms around herself. Someone has been watering the wide assortment of plants in the apartment, vines hanging out of their pots connected to the ceiling.
Liar.Liar.Liar.
A window lets in a soft breeze that ruffles the ends of her midnight blue, backless dress.
Monica is here. Hungover, but here. She's left her sunglasses on against even what little light there is in Eve's apartment. She has a bottle of water with her, which is helping, but maybe too little too late. "Eve," she says as she crosses into the apartment, "what's up?" When she has a moment to take in the state her friend is in, she amends that.
"What's wrong? Hang on, I'm gonna get you some coffee." She crosses to the kitchen, keeping an eye on Eve through the door as she gets some coffee perking.
When Asi comes to the door after Monica, she looks hardly better than she does. Hungover might not be the right word for it, but she's something. It brings her to be more tacit than usual, letting Monica handle words for the moment. After hanging up her coat, the technopath splinters off in the opposite direction of the kitchen, venturing into the bathroom for only a moment before wandering back to the living room space.
She settles behind Eve, ignoring every instinct that advises her not to. Her electronics will live— they're left in her jacket. Her senses will end up no less frazzled than Eve's apparently are. "Tell her," Asi encourages, taking a handful of tangled ends into her palm and beginning to work the brush she's retrieved through them. She works through the knots in silence after.
“Tell who what?” Comes from under the table in the kitchen as Monica comes in. Crawling out from under the table, hair tousled and makeup smudged, Kimberly looks like she had a rough night. Two empty cans of Fosters beer clatter and roll out from beside her. “Oh god, oh god why am I on the floor?” She whines, squinting at the harsh light of day like someone was intentionally shining the sun directly into her eyes.
“Oh my god, Monica?” Kimberly hisses as she looks up. “Monica, make me coffee.” She adds in a pitiful whine from the floor, slouching down onto her back and just throwing her arms out to the side.
Last to arrive but looking the most put together perhaps, Luther shoulders his way in from the staircase and door. His hands are full of a large brown bag, notably not gripped like the neck of a bottle. It's not drinks at all. No, it's bagels. Wherever he'd managed to scrounge up the New York staple at this time goes uncommented on as he makes his way through and over into the kitchen.
His foot nudges an empty Fosters can out of the way. The bagels are set down on the table. Then, he's reaching down to gently brush at Kimberly's disheveled hair into modicum of control, and to helping her up from the floor. Even if she doesn't want to.
"You can have the one with the sun-dried tomatoes. Vitamin B's going to help." Is he amused? Maybe a little.
Eve grunts and lets Asi brush her hair, the woman's tears fall to the floor. Her body shudders and she looks like she's sweating. "I… I had a visitor." She whispers.
It's always like that for Eve, as soon as she begins a tale….
"The Dragon came to me, last night. It talked with me. It told me…" Her eyes close and she closes her lips, trying not to shake her head and disturb Asi's work. "It told me where Adam is, it told me its plan. It told me…"
She can't hold it in.
Tell the truth. You've been a liar.
LIAR. You were never a seer.
False Witness! She Who Aids The Dragon.
"It told me it made me a seer, gave me the Echoes. Made it so I would help It return to this plane. I'm…"
Go on… you'll feel better.
"A fraud."
Monica gets the coffee started before she comes back out to lean in the kitchen doorway. Her gaze moves to Kimberly, to Asi, taking in how bad off everyone is. Except Luther. Which is strange. She grabs a glass, filling it with water and a straw before she comes to crouch next to the table and holds the glass out toward Kim.
"We're a mess," she comments. And stands again. Her hands move to her hips as Eve starts to explain her night. A finger taps as she considers it for a long moment.
"Well, that's bullshit," she says, simply. "Since when do we believe the unknowable entity haunting our reality? That thing will say whatever it needs to say to get what it wants. And maybe right now it wants you, Eve, to be out of commision worrying about the origin of your power while it runs off and does whatever it needs to do without you poking around. Bad guys lie, Eve. They're cruel. You were never a fraud. You took what you were given and tried to make a difference in the world. That's a lot better than a lot of people."
She looks over at Luther, gesturing to Eve as if he might be able to fix this.
Asi's hands are calm but firm, unpausing through the news as she restores order to what little she has power over in this situation. She frowns behind Eve, letting her fingers run through the tangles to work them free as gently as possible before running the brush after to finish them off. "You are not," she inputs before glancing up to Monica's more eloquent expansion on that thought. She nods her approval to that.
"Frauds don't get bagels. Isn't that right, Luther?" Asi quips lightly.
With a tsk, she turns back to a more serious consideration of the matter at hand. Eve was visited by the very thing they'd gone halfway around the world chasing the tail of. "What is its plan?" she wonders. "And what does it hope to gain by telling you where Monroe is?"
“Y’all brought me breakfast, right?” Kimberly murmurs in Luther’s general direction before letting out the loudest, most foul-smelling belch she may have in her entire life. Even Kimberly is repulsed by it, recoiling from Luther and swatting at the air in front of her face. “God damn, what’d I eat last n— ” she winces, memory coming back. “The entire jar of pickled mushrooms.” She says quietly. Then, even quieter, quieter: “Right.”
Luther looks back to his most wild-haired friend with greater concern as soon as she starts in. Keywords catch his attention: Dragon. Adam. Fraud. His gaze swings to Monica, her gesture eliciting an arch of his brows, to Asi when the technopath tries to lighten the gravity of Eve's worries.
"What?" His query comes with the typical tone of the man putting things together on the fly. Oh, she wants support. Fix it, Luther.
First thing's first, thoughu. Sundried tomato bagel and a pocket blade folding knife are pushed into Kimberly's hands. He nudges a small half-sized mason jar of cream cheese across the table. If Luther's grossed out by the belch, he doesn't show it at all. He's also stalling in his answer, but eventually adds to the others' responses with, "So what's its grand scheme-y plan? What's it want with Adam? What does 'it' sound like?"
He hazards further, "…Groucho Marx?"
Maybe he's not helping very much. Luther shakes his head slowly. "Ducky, I don't know much 'bout much, but Monica's right. Before all the shit that went down in New Mexico, you saw things. Things we couldn't have known about. And even now, you're still… seeing. If you weren't a precog, then, you were at least a damn smart cookie and you figured shit out quick. And you tried your damnedest to warn people, to save them. Sometimes from themselves. Good people."
And maybe some bad people, given their current situation. But he doesn't get into that.
"Fuck the labels, Eve. What's your insides telling you now?" He folds back the lips of the bagel bag, pushing it down to open up the paper container for the others to grab what flavors they like.
The outpouring of support from her friends warms the icy chill that had settled over Eve's heart. Maybe they were right…. no they were. Their counsel was always wise, she could always lean on it. "God damn it Kimbo you better had left my big bag of Fritos alone I was gonna make us Fritos Pies!!" Bringing some levity to the situation is not unappreciated by Eve.
On the matter of what Its plans are…
"It wants to- Gutes-asi. Unite. That's what this tangled mess is all about, but I always thought it wanted to unite us to save us from the humans who have always beaten us down. I was dead wrong." Heh, at least she's never been dead-dead. Thank you Resurrection Gods. Eve continues to let her hair be brushed and god does it feel therapeutic and meditative. "It wants to unite the timelines, every single one. Merged into a singular sphere. It wouldn't tell me its legend in full but that thing in Sibyl Black's body whispered of how we were betrayed, long ago. It led to the Shattering. Many different worlds, versions that were diluted from the pure source. This world is not what it originally was… this world is sick. Broken and fractured. It wants to restore the balance, its home."
"It cares for nothing else, every domino it has placed, delicately on the line, for decades… hundreds of years. That is its Ultimate Desire."
Fingertips begin to drum on her knees and that therapeutic motion of being groomed is short lived and Eve leaps to her feet as a spattering of lightning manifests around her neck. "Oopsie," She had gotten away from Asi in time but she uses her forward motion to begin to pace. Talking this out gave her something else to think on.
Think all you want silly Sally, you never really thought for yourself. Do you really think you are now?
Quashing the voice within with a grimace that might register as pain from keeping herself together in corporeal form. "Things with Adam for It, are personal. I don't think It actually views him as a threat. In the legend he makes a deal with a dragon. He's a devil, he obviously must have lied to gain his power. Maybe he didn't pay his price in return. And he's been running from It ever since. Until now, I think It thinks it's giving me a gift and also gets rid of someone that betrayed It."
"He's at sea and I know the boat he travels on," Eve begins to hold her breath and look around the room. It's easier to not directly address the nature of her being a fraud or not. They had a boat to scheme on.
"Kim, no amount of alcohol can excuse that many pickled mushrooms," Monica says before she grabs a chair and drags it over to perch on while Eve explains what she's found out. It's almost like she thinks it's not safe to be too close to someone who ate that and also drank enough to wake up under a table.
"So we need to stop that, right? That sounds like a bad thing we don't want to happen." Monica remembers the dreams Benji gave them of her home timeline, plus they all got a taste of a few others when the travelers were making their way home. "Our timeline might not be pretty, but at least it's not underwater or whatever. Although… would it get us an intact New York City? Hmm."
But she brushes away that thought and lifts an eyebrow when Eve goes on. "Okay, let's see if we can verify that this boat is real. I dunno, Eve, I'm not totally ready to take this entity's word for truth. If it wanted to get rid of Adam, and it's powerful enough to muck around with the timelines… why hasn't it just smited him yet?"
At the use of the phrase gutes-asi, Asi's hands still in Eve's tangles. After a beat, she sets to working out one last tangle, muttering, "That's a Mazdak saying." The build-up of energy in Eve inspires a mutual release, the technopath leaning back from the frazzling energy and setting the brush aside. For a moment, all she can do is listen with a distance in her eyes while she thinks. Her fingers flex in her lap, remaining sitting.
"Is it really something that should be stopped?" she wonders deadpan in a gesture of playing devil's advocate. "And if it is, if we corner Monroe, I'd argue getting rid of him— not like that's possible— would not be in our interests at all. It…"
She presses her lips together, eyes narrowing. "I'm not sure this playing at secrets gambit of his is going to end well for him. He needs to either accept new allies, even if he forcibly is made to see that light, or we might as well give in to accepting the Dragon's desire for reality." Asi looks over to Monica with a lift of her brows. "Because if Mazdak is an ally of his— an ally who espouses the word of the Dragon … he may not have any actual allies at all."
They were all so blurred together, his various groups. In Tokyo, she'd seen Triad standing next to Praxite standing alongside Mazdak. That whited-out image brings her to frown and look back to Eve.
"For that matter, we are going to need more allies if we're going to do anything effective. The—" Asi has to pause in her count, turning to observe Kimberly and weigh if she's really someone who could be counted on in this. "… The more numbers we have," she says instead. "The better chance our combination of abilities might end up being effective. It's going to take more than the people in this room."
“Hold on a minute,” Kimberly says with a hand at her forehead, eyes shut and lips downturned into a frown. “This is… that Dragon stuff, from the Mountain, right?” She cracks open one eye, slouching over to sit on the floor beside the chair Monica dragged out. Kimberly’s decided that it’s too early to be entirely vertical. “Chess left with Adam, so— sorry— I’m having a hard time following this. If Adam’s on a boat,” she says in a sing-song tone, “wouldn’t Chess be with him?”
Kimberly looks around from friend to friend, hands up in a helpless shrug. “Also, why don’t we just tell Uncle Sam where he is and they can, I don’t know, nuke him or something? Or— wait if Chess is there—” Kimberly furrows her brows and looks down at the floor, fully attempting to puzzle this out. “Okay, clearly I missed a seminar on the end of the whole fucking world. How d’we know what this Dragon thing wants for sure, other than I guess one dead Adam?”
Everything bagel paused halfway up to mouth, Luther goes stock still save for the furrowing of his brow. Eve's dream revelations with the talk of timeline-merging draws a frown out of him. "You're not fucking kidding. Imagine the world it showed us in that dream couple nights ago. The whole world would fall into war. But for what? Revenge? This Entity is the one who's sick. A sick fuck." Despite Kimberly's awful pickled-mushroom-cloud stench of a belch lingering in the air, it's her added remarks about Adam or a possible alter-ego of the man, and the mention of nuclear weapons that has put Luther off the prospect of food. For now.
The bagel in his hand gets squeezed as Luther's fingers curl tighter around it. "I agree with Monica. And I'm all for blowin' a damn boat with Monroe on it out of the water," grumbles the man in contest to Asi's observation. It sounds idle, his threat. It isn't. "Maybe it'll make this crazy Entity leave us alone, finally."
Luther shakes his head. "What we need is to get the whole damn story. Maybe that's playing into someone's hands to do it, but all this skulking around the shadows isn't doing us any favors. And it isn't going to get Chess and Alix and the other girls back." That's been his goal since the start, and that hasn't changed. Luther looks to his friends and allies. "So, let's do that and move forward. Find this boat, find the Grand Asshole Supreme again, and drag him in front of the damn Entity, see if that's what's gonna make things right."
"Maybe… we have no way to know if the Merger would allow us to remember these past events… what kind of world It even lived in. Were cities real?" Eve scratches her head but she nods along, following blindly with its commands seems dumb. At least without assessing the whole situation.
"Oh my dear, Kazimir was thought to be unbreakable. The government was a tyrant that would never relent their heels, Arthur Petrelli with enough power to appear as a god. All fell. Do not ever tell me an evil cannot be taken out. Immortals, bah. We all have our weaknesses. Moni has a sword arm to behead, Hot Hands to burn the stump and the rest of the body." Eve snaps at Asi and sighs afterwards because as Luther delivers his mind on the matter she shakes her head.
"It's for revenge, It may not be totally in the right but if we were in the same position. Cut off from our world, our loved ones? Everything changed. Doomed to live long, where would we be standing?" Eve shrugs her shoulders, "The fact remains, we are in our own position where we have to keep our way of life ticking, tick tick tock. Adam is just a footnote for It. The true aim is to have Its home, to return all of this," waving her finger in the air, "To what it once was. New for us, familiar for It." Eve rubs her temple and lightly knocks her head against a nearby wall. At least it wasn't one of her episodes where she rammed her face into any surface available. "Adam poses a threat to every single non evolved person we've come to know and love. Family. He has failed at this at least two times. I'm not willing to wager the fate of the world on that, are any of you?" She takes the time to look at all of them in turn with piercing crimson eyes.
"Bhan Bhan- Siobhan," Eve says the name but isn't sure any of the people in the room would know her. "She was Ferry, like me. Had a ship back then, The Clipper, still does apparently. That's the ship we track," Looking at Asi before she turns and faces them all with hands on her hips. "We don't have the full story, only the fragments and I'm not sure there's enough time to dissect the pennies with the wealth of memories on it. If we aren't going to kill him, even though we could," Stare at Asi, "Then we'll need a way to subdue him, hold him. I visited his memories through dreams once, really messed up place I'll tell ya. But the scientists that worked on his body, they said his body works fast. Chemicals or things of the physical won't do."
Luther earns a hard look from Eve, "So we'll need to lean on something that's a wizard in the mental."
“Am I the only one that’s having a hard time following what’s comin’ out of Eve’s mouth?” Kimberly asks with one hand at the side of her head and a single eye squinted shut. She looks over to Monica for support, but notices that she’s stepped a few paces away and has a cell phone tucked to her ear. Kimberly glances back at Luther and Eve, but when she turns back to ask Monica who is calling, all Monica does is raise one finger in a one minute gesture and excuse herself from the bar promptly, in search of a better signal.
Kimberly exhales a sharp breath and crosses her arms over her chest, looking to Luther, then to Asi, and finally back to Eve. “Let me be the one t’ask the stupid question here. Why ain’t we taking this to the government? ‘Cause I don’t think that was in whatever it was Eve just said there.”
"Don't disrespect Ducky's process," Luther chides lightly of Kimberly's query, thought without much actual correction meant in the tone. The man leans back against the wall, bagel still unbitten and waved about as he notes, "Because if they were going to have done something about all this, you'd think they'd have done it by now? They might already be working on it from a different angle. And honestly, we don't know who the hell Monroe or anybody else has planted there, who we could trust. Pretty sure Secretary Lazarro's up to his smokey ass in things he's got to parse, too. Who knows how many others saw that… vision."
He's reluctant to call it a mere dream, but refuses to call it a portent. "Besides," he continues, "Eve's got this under control." That's not sarcasm. But it is pressure on Eve, as he looks to the ex-seer in support. "We went through the war together, came out the other side of it. Sure as this is going to be another mission… we will see it through."
Luther casts a glance to Monica's back, then Asi, and then back to Kimberly. A faint wry twist of a mouth corner is accompanied by the pop of the bagel into his mouth. "We'll move forward," he muffledly responds, nodding at Eve.
Got this under control, Eve doesn't laugh at the notion but she does look Kimberley squarely in the eye. "Because the government does not believe until it is too late. Bureaucracy is not my forte my dear and the world cannot wait for the men who run this country to step up to the plate." She does smile though in this moment and hums aloud.
"Who has more a vested interest then us? For some it's for family, for some it's for love, for all of us it's for our world. Our future." The former seer wrings her hands and looks to everyone in the room before nodding at Luther.
"I don't claim to know every tiny morsel of it all, its much to diluted to get a read bead but I will say, yes. Yes my friends. We will will move forward."