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| Scene Title | In The Beginning… |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Cardinal fills Rebecca in on everything she's missed so far, which is pretty much everything. |
| Date | June 12, 2010 |
The Residence of Elisabeth Harrison
It's the evening after Rebecca met for the first time, her new cohorts. The revelation of what might have occurred the day before yesterday was speculated on and seemed to be the best plausible explanation. Still, the image of her execution haunts her. Even in her dreams. The scene replays again and again. She cannot seem to get away from it.
Today, she's spent the day crunching numbers, scouring web sites and reading 'visions'. Some just seem downright scary, but she counts them none the less. Everyone is starting to come out of the woodwork to tell their story. Their future, so they seem to think. She flips to another screen where she has a city map up and is plotting the location of each dream, if given. She finally leans back in her chair and rubs her temples, letting out a large sigh. Too much time staring at a computer screen on too little sleep.
"You look like you've got a headache." Cardinal's hand appears over her shoulder with a subway sandwich still wrapped in cellophane, rustling it temptingly, "Dinner? You need to take a break. It'll be easier to do that once Apila's set up that crawler… thing for me, and we start getting all those stories filtered through to our computers."
Rebecca glances up at Cardinal as he comes by to rescue her from the insanity of unfilter forum posts on the Internet. It's not hard to imagine some of the things she's read. She gratefully accepts the meal and closes the lid of her laptop that she's hooked up to Liz' network. "Well, I wanted to get a head start on it anyway, but really, it's hard to tell what to count and what not to count, so I'm just counting anything. Everything."
She takes a bite or two of her sandwich, and washes it down with some tea she's made for herself before she glances up at Cardinal. "All this.." She rather waves around the sandwich and the tea as if that would explain 'this'. "How long has this been going on? How did we get here? What is it that I haven't been told yet?"
Cardinal's head jerks in the direction of the couch, and he steps along over to toss his own sandwich onto the table before sprawling onto the cushions, stretching his legs out and toeing off the boots one at a time. "The answer's going to take awhile," he admits, his tone dry, "Take a load off from reading and I'll try to catch you up. Keep in mind, I'm gonna be telling you some unbelievable shit."
Bringing her sandwich and tea with her, Rebecca joins Cardinal on the couch and turns her full attention to him. In her time, she's seen a few things, but she's fairly certain that what she's about to hear will be unlike anything she's ever heard before.
"I'll give you the cliff's notes," Cardinal explains before leaning forward to start unwrapping his sandwich, "Obviously, there were Evolved around before the bomb… the secret, at least here in the states, was kept by a group called the 'Company'. Ostensibly they were protecting us from keeping people from finding out and hunting us, in practice there was a lot of shady shit with secret prisons and some fucked up experiments going on, including some viruses that nearly killed everyone in the world at least once. Messed up shit. Obviously, the Bomb changed everything."
"They're still around - they've got some deals with the government I think, they pretend to be Homeland Security a lot. I have some people in the organization that'll give me information now and then. I think they're on the way out as an organization, though," he muses, pausing to take a few bites of his sandwich, leaning back, "Then there was a group called the Vanguard - terrorists, mostly, they worked for this sonuvabitch named Kazimir, and their own idea was that they wanted to kill most of humanity so they could take over. I don't think that's the story their rank and file were told, they were supposedly anti-evo or something, but that was Kazimir's real plan. They got stopped, Kazimir's dead. The last important 'bad guy' group you need to know about is the newest, the Commonwealth Institute. Science gone bad. I told you about them last night."
Cardinal kicks his feet up on the table, and he leans back, "So, major events. All those rumors about Moab Penitentiary? True. It was a huge secret prison for Evos. Phoenix - you know about them - went and blew the fuck out of the place in this big temporal explosion, something to do with a time controller. At the same time, a guy named Edward Ray came back in time with some friends. You'll hear a lot about him, since we work off his theories."
"So…" A pause, and Richard sums up, "…the president's father, Arthur Petrelli, showed up on the scene with a big 'take over the world' plan himself, controlling a company called Pinehearst. He was a psychotic bastard, so I fucking killed him, and Phoenix leveled the building." He scratches at his chin, "They seem to do that a lot. Anyway. Moving on… Vanguard left a present for us all. Nuclear bomb in Antarctica, would've pretty much flooded the world after it melted the ice cap. The government hired a bunch of us to find it, we went all over the world hunting old Vanguard factions, finally got down there, stopped it."
He falls silent for a moment, saying quietly, "…wasn't easy."
The logical side of Rebecca finds quite a bit of this rather believable, though there are a few things that do surprise her, but she listens to every word that Cardinal says, ingesting it into her brain, which is already so full of so many things. She's well aware that for every story there are different sides, but if she's going to put her life on the line with this group of individuals, she's going to have to take them at face value. Take them at their word.
There are portions of the dialogue that she has heard about, from her time in the NYPD, there are things that don't quite mesh with what she's known, or believed to have known. All in all, it's when he finally stops to take a breath that she speaks, "Sounds like you've all been very busy." She smiles at him and takes another bite of her sandwich, and after swallowing. "How does all that bring us around to what we've had happen in the last week?"
"There's… obviously a lot more to it, ask now or later if you want the details," Cardinal admits, silent a moment as he takes a bite of his sandwich, chewing and swallowing, eyes closed, "The storm was caused by the Institute… there's these twin girls, they can absorb abilities. They were separated, and one of them freaked out and started causing the snow until her sister was 'returned to her'. I guess they managed to solve that, I wasn't involved. This blackout…" He frowns, looking over, "I'm not sure. Exactly."
"I guess that's why we're here now, right?" Now that she's had time to finish off her sandwich, for which she's entirely grateful, and washes it all down with the last of her tea. "There was one aspect of this alliance that I was invited to that I was a bit hesitant about."
She leans back, looking far better than when he first came into the room. "I really am all brains and no brawn. I took a basic self defense course with the NYPD, I barely passed the marksman course on at the range. I spent time in rehab after a battle with Refrain, and was asked to resign my position. I guess what I'm saying is that if this is as bad as we are thinking it is, I want to be prepared. I want to have real skills to defend myself or anyone else if necessary."
She chews her lips for a moment. "I need someone to help me. I want to learn to shoot and to fight. I've only just met you, but I've a feeling that if there's someone who can steer me in the right direction, it'd be you."
"I think I can definately point you in the right direction there," Cardinal replies, flashing over a grin, "We were doing firearms drills at the library for awhile - as far as guns are concerned, talk to Liz. She can take you down to the legal range, or another one, and show you how it's done. She'll drill you until you got it, trust me."
A pause, "Unarmed— I'm passable, but I'm no expert. I think I know just the person to teach you, though."
"If these visions are supposed to be the future, then I may not be around long. But whatever I can do to prolong that, I'll do." She returns his grin with a smile and a look of relief washes over her. "Thanks. I'll take whatever help I can get."
She stands, taking her trash and dropping it in the wastebasket before checking on her laptop. "If your friend is going to monitor the net for vision related traffic, then I think I should focus on other things."
She types a few keys into the laptop and turns to look at him. "Maybe I should start visiting the scenes of the worst incidents from Thursday. See if perhaps a look back can give us a chance to change our future." Rebecca lifts her hand and covers her mouth as she yawns. "Sorry. Maybe there's something to see looking back."
"The future those connected to doesn't exist anymore," Richard points out, even as he points at her literally, "The very fact that so many people had those visions means that the timeline's swerving like a fish on a line right now - but I doubt anything will happen as we saw it." He sounds— determined, more than convincing.
As much as Rebecca would love to agree with that assessment, there's something illogical in thinking that you'd see a future that didn't exist. But then again, there's still that part of her that can consider the possibility that if you change one thing, you change the future.
There's a tiny part of her that she might call the 'dreamer' who wonders about the role fate plays into all of this. Everything is unknown right now, despite what she's seen, and as Cardinal puts all his faith into hope, she can only offer, "I hope you're right. I really do."