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| Scene Title | Gold Dust Woman |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Eve finally goes too far. |
| Date | April 13, 2018 |
In the old days, oracles were kept safe in their temples to the gods and watched over by the priests and priestesses placed there to interpret their visions, ramblings. The time of Pythia, Dodona and a few others. Swords use to sing while blood was spilled in the name of such prophecies then or if you were curious if the man you were meant to marry was worthy. No topic too small but the answers were not always what you wanted to see or hear. Nowadays you had oracles of all sorts of variety and then you had oracles like Eve, new age hippie witchy lady that smoked her drugs and drank her liquor just as much as the old soothsayers but with newer materials. In this moment the oracle in question thinks on if she and Gillian maybe had a real temple in another life. Eve would bet that more often than not people were more upset that they came to see her then if they would have remained ignorant on about certain things.
Still Eve gave answers, to the storekeeper around the corner who wanted to know if he would be able to keep his business, to the woman that just knew that her husband was cheating. Eve didn't use her ability for that one, the evidence spoke for itself but the woman did leave stoned and the oracle felt that was a good thing, she even offered to bake her pot cookies.
Rock on gold dust woman, take your silver spoon
Dig your grave
But today was for answers that Eve herself wanted, needed and while she could induce visions anywhere the space that is her Oracle Room, her temple, fits more than someone’s apartment.
Heartless challenge, pick your path and I'll pray
The room is cloaked in a haze but not too heavy for the two fans in the corner keeping the smoke from stifling her completely. Upstairs business was as usual, people stomping around can be heard. Sassy Bartender yelling at some young punk. “Thank you for helping me Gilly, yank at the veil.”
Wake up in the morning, see your sunrise loves to go down
Lousy lovers pick their prey but they never cry out loud
Cry out
In the days of old, Gillian didn’t mind being around smoke and other such things, but the smoke had been her compromise. If Eve had to use drugs to do what she needed to do, she could only use pot. Nothing else. No blue fairies, nothing stronger. Just a little smoke to get her nerves settled. She even took one toke before sitting down next to her. “I’ll bring you your sketchbook when you’re done, so don’t try to get up.” She doesn’t want her friend to hurt herself more— and the painkillers might have added to the visions, anyway.
Did she make you cry, make you break down
Shatter your illusions of love
An exhale brings more smoke to billow into the room, the joint she holds in a pale hand needs to be ashed but she's swaying in the big armchair she had moved down here pillows, her leg with the cast propped up by a pile of large pillows stacked on top of one another. Now humming to the music, eyes closed. Lips opening and closing as she mouths the words. On the round table in front of her lays a crystal ball, an magic eight ball (which she almost threw out when she received the answer: “You're Fucked” to a particularly sensitive question.) and her sketch pad with charcoal nearby. Props mostly but sometimes she has to focus harder to call these visions forth. The fumes and vapors were her way of recreating how the oracles of old prepared to receive their visions of things not having come to past. Her eyes find Gillian one more time.
Reaching out, Gillian takes the other woman’s hand, allowing a trinkle of energy to begin to flow from her knot of energy into that flickering light of her friend’s. Her’s had always felt like some kind of reflective surface, rather than a pulsing light, like the light bouncing off of a mirror, or cascading off of a flickering river. She had no idea if that meant anything, but she recognized it as different. With how often she’s been around the woman, she thinks she could recognize her unique energy even in a crowd.
Her eyes start to glow faintly in the irises, offsetting her hazel with a hint of violet. That same glow dances down her fingertips, into the hand she holds.
“Show me,” Eve whispers, her dark mane of hair a veil over her heart shaped face. Her hands go to rest on the table in front of her as she calls forth the feeling of the Dragon Samson as her first query to the universe. Eyes flicker and go a milk white as she holds herself steady on the table and takes a breath.
And is it over now do you know how, pick up the pieces and go home
She opens her eyes to that Eternal Forest in her head, smoke fills her view as thunder booms and lightning cracks above her. Squinting through the forest, its leaves dying and being reborn in a constant loop. The whole forest dead one moment and alive the next. Eve looks nervous as she runs through the forest no time for lollygagging when she's looking in on this person.
She comes to the river that stands still like glass and falls to her knees quickly. Grateful for the full use of her legs in her mind’s eye. There's no hesitation before she's throwing her head down into the river as the world beneath the surface explodes around her and she opens her eyes to see…
Rock on ancient queen
Follow those who pale
In your shadow
Rain pelts down on a battlefield strewn with corpses. Pops of gunfire echo in the air around Eve, accompanied by bursts of light: muzzle flashes searing white-gold in the dark. The sporadic glow illuminates the bodies half-sunken into the mud, most of them dressed in uniforms sewn from a fabric as dark and as red as the blood emptying from their various entry wounds. Not for the first time — and probably not for the last — she's standing in the midst of a massacre.
Rulers make bad lovers
You better put your kingdom up for sale
Up for sale
Tattered war flags flutter in the wind that blows across the field. Others untethered from their poles are caught by the gale and are siphoned into the blackness of space as, overhead, a yawning black vortex seems to call her name. A nearby burst of gunfire allows her to glimpse the symbol of the nearest flag, its broken pole embedded in the sopping earth mere feet away. It depicts a crimson bird with a proud crest and wings spread wide across black background, similar in tone and style to the uniforms worn by the dead.
Well did she make you cry
Make you break down
Shatter your illusions of love
If she didn't know better, she'd say it was a cardinal.
And is it over now, do you know how
Pick up the pieces and go home.
She steers her attention across the other side of the field to where the last of the soldiers in red wage the final minutes of their bloody war with the enemy's forces. Bearing down on them are four riders on horseback at the head of a calvary thousands strong. As she blinks the rain from her eyes, there's another dazzling explosion of light and sound, too bright, too loud to belong to any gun. It comes from above, somewhere in the churning clouds— or the vortex, which has begun to raise the dead from their muddy graves.
Well did she make you cry
Thunder. Lighting.
Make you break down
Bodies with limbs akimbo, as if suspended in water, float into the sky, drawn toward the vortex as the riders charge across the field in slow motion. She can see every speck of dirt kicked up by their horses' hooves, the strings of saliva trailing from lips peeled back around frightening sets of flat yellow teeth. There is terror in the animals' eyes.
Shatter your illusions of love
As for the riders' eyes, they divulge nothing and are covered by the helmets they wear, each with horrible orange eyes that burn from within: FRONTLINE, but of a type the world has never seen, with the rest of the armor to match. The lead rider, astride atop an ashen white horse, carries their own flag hoisted high. Another abrupt sliver of lighting reveals a black wolf and raven entwined on a gray background.
And now tell me
Is it over now, do you know how
Pickup the pieces and go home
Between Eve and the enemy flickers a small silhouette. Narrow shoulders lead into a torso so fragile it looks like it might be made of glass. A child no older than five or six stares down the advancing horsemen, her white dress and fiery orange hair whipping about in the gathering storm like the torn war flags guttering all around them. Eve can't tell if it's tears or rainwater gleaming on her stark, pale face, but her mouth opens into a soundless scream—
Go home
Screams.
Go home
Inhuman, shrieking cries in the dark. Scrabbling claws and glowing points of red light in the suffocatingly cold and damp darkness. Eve is drowning, sinking below the surface of murky water with bubbles escaping from her mouth and nose. The water is ice cold, and long-decayed corpses float by with pulpy flesh and threadbare garments.
Pale
Flitting between the floating bodies, dark shapes swim and churn. Their glowing eyes pierce the darkness, teeth and claws rending Eve's flesh from her bones. She screams, bubbles escaping her mouth and water infiltrating her lungs. Every bit of meat is stripped from her agonized skeleton as she is drawn into the lightless abyss, swallowed whole physically and metaphorically, becoming one with the sea of the dead, and the dark tunnels that are their tombs.
Shadow
She falls out of that depth, downward from a lake in the sky. Through dark clouds, raindrops falling from the surface of the water, steam and mist and clouds returning flesh to rendered bones. There is a great bird circling her in the sky, its black feathers rattling like razor-sharp sheets of metal. The bird swoops in, its mighty wingspan as wide as a car, snatching Eve in its talons and carrying her over rugged, snow-capped mountains.
Of a woman
There are fires burning there, but the bird does not stop at the snowy peaks. Instead it moves beyond them, presses through the scouring wall of a sandstorm, to where a massive skull of scrap metal presses up out of the ground like a colossal corpse lost to time. The mechanical skull works its jaws open and closed, and from the desert sands an immense mechanical hand rises up, sand falling from between its many joints. Red light burns within lenses in its empty eye sockets, and it lets out a mechanized horn-blast howl that shakes Eve to her core.
Black widow
A blast of light lances out from the mechanical skull's mouth, punching through the bird's chest. It releases Eve, and the great steel bird soars downward, plummeting toward the ground as the seer is in freefall. Lightning leaps from the ground, up toward the sky like hairs on an arm standing up. A bolt strikes her, and she explodes.
Pale
Every part of Eve is fractured, broken, and spread out like pieces of a shattered plate on a tile floor. Screams echo in one ear, while gunfire pops in another, but there is also a mechanical grinding sound to be heard, the sobbing wails of an old friend's mournful crying, the lapping noise of ocean waves, terrified screaming, panicked breathing, and then a voice.
Shadow {You can see me.}
Eve feels a hand around her throat, and in the blinding infinite field of white something squeezes. Two gold rings form, brighter than the brightest light she has ever seen.
Of a dragon {If you look hard enough.}
She feels something in her mind, in her skin, in her cells burning from the inside out. It tears her mind from her, pulls her apart like so much taffy and hastily throws her back together. Between the glowing rings, a black symbol is cast like an infinite shadow.
♊
The symbol grows to encompass everything, and soon Eve is sitting up in a choking fit of coughing and agony. She is covered with dust and laying in the burning ruins of an unfamiliar city. Smoke rises up high into the sky and long banners with the symbol of Takezo Kensei hang from lap posts, tattered and frayed at the end. Bodies are piled up all around her, most of them have been desiccated and reduced to dusty bones and ashes within their clothes.
Dust woman
Adam stands, clear as day, atop a pile of the bodies in a sleek black suit. He holds the Kensei sword in one hand, back to Eve.
Pale
"This world wasn't mean for them," Adam explains in a low, rasping tone of voice. Blood drips from the blade of his sword, reflecting firelight in it. "It wasn't meant for human kind." As he slowly turns, he begins to descend that mountain of corpses, blood traced across his brow in the same symbol on the banners. His irises glow with a fiery orange light, like two rings of hot steel.
Shadow
"It was made for our kind." Adam states flatly, pointing the sword at Eve.
Of a woman
"The Resurrection is upon us."
Black widow
Eve lets out a blood-curdling scream as her hands reflexively claw at the sides of her face, fingernails digging into flesh hard enough to leave shallow cuts along her cheeks. The sound is a horrifying and strangled one, accompanied by the twitching spasms of her body and the ability she has taxed and overtaxed time and again since the war began.
Pale
Eve Mas has never put this much into herself, never dreamt this hard so frequently, never gone this long without sleep before. As the radio plays, she feels her mind being torn asunder when the threads that held it together finally snap under the immense pressure she’s been putting herself under these last few years.
Shadow
The Refrain trip, all the sleepless nights, all the forced visions. Putting Gillian’s power into her mind was the final straw, the breaking point where her ability was pushed to limits the Institute was afraid to take her to, and now she’s seen too much for her mind to handle.
She's a dragon
The dream has ended, Eve is awake, but her eyes refuse to uncloud. She lays back on the floor of the Cat’s Cradle, arms and legs spasming, white froth building at the corners of her mouth as her neck tenses and she seizes.
Gold dust woman
Every ability has its limits.
Woman, woman
Eve Mas just found hers.