Participants:
| Scene Title | It's (Maybe) Not What You Think |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Elliot and Eve share memories of a drug-fueled plummet through time. |
| Date | July 10, 2021 |
"Hmmm."
Eve "sits" cross legged while mid air hovering or that's what it would maybe look like if her full body was in play except it's just a cloud of crimson with Eve's face flickering in and out of material form at the top. The tiny lights that sparkle within her mass looking like stars twinkling in a cloud of space gas. She is practicing.
She's also searching.
The nebula contracts, shrinks then expands as Eve breathes through her exercise. Trying to access that place. Trying to push beyond this plane and into the next. She's been pushing since the first night they arrived in this world, secretly. But on this evening Eve was less careful about picking a spot for her meditations, whether that was by design is anyone's guess but you could never be too sure with this seer.
The sight of her in the middle of a few trees, shining so red is a beautiful one but the nebula flutters in a way to remind that a chaotic woman is at the heart of this cloud.
Elliot has considerable skill in going unnoticed. Years of infiltration work, a general distrust of humanity, and terrible secrets have helped hone his craft over the last decade. Upon seeing the cloud of unpredictability hovering ominously in the night sky, and remembering the last time she was waiting for him in the middle of the woods, he employs all of that skill. Pivoting slowly, he begins to creep away as silently as possible.
Eve notices nothing.
Continuing her efforts, the cloud shudders and shakes. What makes her think this is even possible? Where there's a will there's a way-
"ACHOO!"
As Eve's face appears in full, a fly flies into her open mouth. Immediately she chokes but the fly goes through her throat albeit slower because its energy was being drained. Dramatic Eve scrunches her nose up at the same time that she hacks and the sneeze sends her cloudy body hurtling through the air backwards.
She "slams" into a tree, in actuality her cloud form now devoid of her ghostly pale face disperses around the tree before pulling herself back together.
Right above Elliot's retreating form.
"Oh goddess above, strike me silly! Don't scare me like that Walkie!"
Elliot sighs, backing out of arm’s reach. “Actually, I go by Elliot these days,” he tells her for the third time in the last month. He doesn't add that he recently shot a man in the face after he refused to call him by his other real name.
“Didn't mean to disturb your…” he trails off, gesturing at where she'd been doing her… “Cheshire cat practice. I’ll leave you to it.”
"Ellliii.." Eve squints her eyes as she concentrates, "Ellliiiiiioooooo." Biting her lip she tries once more, "Elliot Walkie Talkie!" the voice sounds far off and underwater but she sounds pleased with herself. "Elliot, for short!" This has been noted in the lexicon of Eve Nicknames. "Oh my…."
Lowering herself to the ground and materializes fully, a long black trenchcoat that's maybe seen better days engulfs her pale body. The ends of the coat kiss scuffed, unlaced black boots that crunch on a twig as she walks in step but an arm's length apart with the man. Eve looks up into the sky, "My pushing myself past my limits in hopes of unlocking the next step of my evolution in order to ensure the survival of everyone I love and the returning of everyone to our home?" The midnight haired woman snickers softly as she runs a pale hand through that mane. She loves the Cheshire Cat.
"What brings you to the silence of the wood?"
Crimson eyes flick over to read the expression on Elliot's face.
Elliot’s eye twitches when Eve gets one last nickname in. He lets it go with another sigh.
He can't fault Eve for trying to push the boundaries of her ability, regardless of the fact that he has no idea of what it is beyond oppressive fog that feels terrible to be exposed to. He's pushing well past his own comfort zone with his ability lately, due to that same end of the world. A year ago he never really thought he might have to do what needs to be done to save everyone from him. He thought lying would be enough.
“Oh, just…” he says, “trying to find a quiet tree to piss on. What the fuck is your ability, if you don't mind me asking? As I recall, you used to paint metaphorical horses and this seems like kind of a radical departure from that.”
"Well that won't be hard these are mostly dead!" She grins as they move together, one hyper vigilant while the other blissfully appearing unaware. Elliot's mastery of lying can match Eve's mastery of pretending to be more aloof then she is.
You can't bullshit a bullshitter and yet these two still try. An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Eve likes to dance (roll) though.
Stretching her arms outwards and upwards, the sigh that accompanies it is one that's contemplative and (maybe) a little sad. "I used to dream and then I would paint the terrors lurking just in front of us. Then it shifted, on its own. The next step, no dreams, no endless loops of getting no REM sleep for weeks on end technically because while I was sleeping I was really awake." Eve is being candid but she is still Eve. "Then I died! That part I think you know. Flung straight out of a speeding car thanks to a woman who clearly couldn't drive while the road was collapsing underneath her!" She's grown to forgive Debbie but still. "Woke up thanks to Adam's blood, no change to my gift!"
Eve considers something and then smiles wide showing teeth, "Then things got interesting, I died again! This time I was exploded after being possessed by the First, Mother & Father. You know all the names." The memory is hazy but what happened after was crystal clear, "I came back to life not as a seer, I couldn't see… my form was destructive as I moved through the world in a much more literal way then any of us could have anticipated and many wouldn't want to experience again." A cackle and Eve rubs her hands together, "I was free from my duty of trying to keep everyone aligned, together. I could do it because I wanted too, for my dear ones. Not because it's all I knew from a young age."
Back to the current ability: "Then I died again! Ha! Exploded! Shot in the head, I wasn't really there if you know what I mean. Ninbanda had me in a chokehold by the brain." Again, "Came back after a little convo between she and I…. and I was something new. A mix of both. A misty cloud sapping energy from real live sources. That can leech a recently deceased corpse, warp it to my form and live to see another day…. or several months!" Jury is still out on that. "But there was a twist even within that twist! I could see again but only after I've died."
A beat, "And that's the short version of it all!"
“Jesus,” Elliot says. “Dying isn't fun, I'd like to not experience it again myself. Seems like you're getting the hang of it, though.”
He leans back against the second-nearest tree as he considers. “Not being sleep-deprived anymore must be nice though,” he adds. “Didn't sleep for a week when we got here. Wasn't my best work.” It also wasn't the only time the minotaur was free enough to cause unspeakable nightmares, but he's glad its attention seems to be occupied right now. Glad, and deeply worried.
“I remember you said that the Entity told you that it was the source of all prophecy,” he says. “Do you still believe that? That everything you see is just a lever it uses to get us to do its bidding? Because that would be deeply suboptimal. Not that I'm a fan of prophecy to begin with.” Never did him any favors. He is curious to learn more about the Entity, even if he'd have to sift through a lot of noise to get any actionable information from Eve.
"I have died almost a dozen times! Each time something new to experience, it's a thrill!"
Hearing of Elliot's own battle with sleep deprivation makes Eve frown and she nods, "There were times that I didn't know what was real or a dream. The lines had blurred so much." Some would say those lines are even more blurry now but Eve would laugh at them. "I like knowing where I'm standing nowadays and I'm happy you can rest a little easier now."
The dark haired woman tilts her head at his question and she takes a long pause to stare off into the distance. "I've had oodles of time to consider that, but first." Glowing red eyes take Elliot in, "Names are important," there's a hint of a grin. There's no way she's shaming Elliot for misnaming someone right after she did the same to him and on purpose.
She is.
"She deserves her name, Ninbanda." A pause, "She's also known to fudge the truth, lie to get her way. A master manipulator, she's been pulling the strings of things since before we were even thought of." But as to Elliot's actual question, "No, there was a time I might have believed that but I realize what Ninbanda is now. She's pushed and pulled. Tricked, all to get to a singular goal." Eve expands upon that: "She's given me and other seers some visions, but not all. She's an integral part of all our genetic lineage… the blood that runs under this skin," tapping a vein in her arm. "But she's not the progenitor I believed, still a first but not the first. I don't think that matters ultimately."
Well that's fair. He doesn't want to fight her in the name after only just now getting her to get his at least partially correct, but he's thought about this a lot.
“I think it's dangerous to anthropomorphize non-human intelligence,” Elliot says respectfully. “We're talking about a being capable of surviving outside of spacetime, that has inhabited an unknowable number of human host bodies and seems to be completely amoral. Something that, even if it started out as a human that expressed past its original body, it's now truly alien. So unless it asked you to refer to it with those pronouns and by that name, following your logic, shouldn't we be calling it him and Adam? If it's using his body, it's also likely constrained by his neutral architecture, making it at least partially him. Taking that further and considering what I know about the Conduits, it's possible that it is a composite of all previous hosts, at which point it would be hard to say it's still the original host, Ninbanda.”
“Now, if I met the Entity and it said, ‘my name is Ninbanda and my pronouns are she/her,’ I wouldn't fight it,” he admits. Pronouns are weird. Symbiotic incorporeal entities and composite identities are weirder, but they're familiar territory. “I’d probably just die in that scenario. Or if that's what you were told, I'll… trust you on that. But I still think that if we assume its capacity for reasoning is human, we are at a disadvantage because it likely won't behave in ways that we as humans are going to assume. Its existence is an order of magnitude or two above ours.”
He doesn't seem agitated, like he's inflexible on this point, but he's clearly given it some thought. It isn't disrespect for him, it's clinical, scientific categorization.
"Hold that thought," Eve runs back where they came from and digs around before procuring a small pouch. Jogging back over she lights the joint hidden inside and regards Elliot for a moment. She doesn't seem upset at her observations. If anything she seems intrigued. "She's more human then you think. Less what I was told. More about what I saw.. and what someone else has experienced. I have been following her and studying and piecing together her past for a long, long, while now. I've lost my eyesight, my gift, more of my marbles all in the pursuit of understanding." The weed smoke hangs around her face as she leans against a tree, blowing it up and over her shoulder as to respect Elliot's space even still the stench fills the immediate area.
"When I was a wee thing I went to the roof of my parents, smoked a joint, dozed off and had my very first vision," something that has been nagging at Eve for years now. "A little girl stood before an eclipse, it was an old village. Ancient. The eclipse had just started and her eyes began to burn a hot gold, as if you were staring into the furnace of the very earth we stand on now."
The memory of that flashes before her eyes and she looks as if she's staring off a million miles away, "But that girl had a mother.. a seer whose eyes were as white as mine when I see the Echoes.." Eve blinks, "Due to other visions, stories and the like I believe that child was Ninbanda and that seer her mother. Ninbanda isn't the first Expressive but she was the first Mosaic. And she was worshiped and then punished for that."
Closing her eyes and leaning her head against the tree, squirming inside. "The few conversations we've had were sort of illuminating but the basis of her goals are simple to me now. She's moving from a place of grief, the found family she created was destroyed. She lost her physical body in the process, gained a host of other personalities and lives, this whole…" Eve ways her hands in the air, "Fuckery is about reuniting in a way that's not just-"
"Isn't there an easier way to do all of this?" Eve stops and stares at Elliot, "I don't enjoy people in my head and it often hurts them more then it does me. But if you'd really like to know what I do and you'd really like to discuss this dear Elliot. Then I offer an exchange in your," the seer closes her eyes and puffs on the joint, "Brain Merry Go Round."
Blowing the smoke out of her nostrils she follows with, "A fair and even exchange, secrets." This isn't something Eve suggests lightly, she just knows that otherwise they will be sitting here until next month going over the smallest details. And there just wasn't time for any of that.
“An exchange of what?” Elliot asks, skeptical but honestly interested to get the encounters as she remembers them without having to parse her impenetrable jargon. Memories are imperfect, and perspective matters, but at least he wouldn't have to ask who she's talking about every time she calls somebody ‘Chicken.’ “What would you get in this fair and equal exchange? My cooking skill? American Sign Language?”
"You're such a hoot Wal-Elliot!"
Eve cackles and stands on her tippy toes, swaying in place. "These are things I've kept closely guarded to myself. Are you sure you don't have anything of value like that to offer?"
A fair and equal exchange.
"Also," Eve doesn't want him to sweat too much. "I'm sure you have information you can also share on the people we are working with like Marcus or if I can trust Gates." Sort of an out but…
"But I think one or two things you've hidden will do would do. Let's get vulnerable baby."
Eve was a witch, a imp and she loved making a good deal.
Elliot doesn't need to think about it long to know that there are few people he'd trust with his secrets less than Eve. Not because he doesn't like her, but chaos incarnate and having no respect for rules are a bad combination when you're dealing with extremely intricate founded mnemonic architectures. Chaos has its place, but that certainly isn't behind the curtain of his mind.
“I'm trying to learn more about what's going on in the OEI,” he says, “but I still have very little to go on there. There are worries about agents being compromised, so pushing the wrong buttons will likely lead to Wright's not technically house arrest turning into the actual kind. Gates seems trustworthy, but anyone with his level of expressive ability is beyond my ability to defend myself if it turns out he isn't.”
“I'm not against the idea of sharing through the network to add to my general understanding,” he admits begrudgingly, “but there's a problem already, because to do that, you'd need to be sober first.” His eyes float around the weed smoke cloud that Eve constantly wears like a poncho.
"Well!" Eve takes a last drag and puts the joint out at the bottom of her boot. Blinking and waving the smoke away from her face, crimson mist trails from her hand, "We must pass the time until I'm no longer stoned."
To say that Eve has a lot of energy would be an understatement but when you actually encounter her it's overwhelming, chaotic and for some addicting. There were other sides to the seer though, sides she rarely let others see. What better way to pass the time than to tell stories, and thanks to the weed she's feeling chatty. The dark haired woman leans her head against the tree and stares up into the night sky, hair falling back and clinging to the trunk. All the former lives she led are on her mind, the various versions of herself over the years.
She begins to speak on her time with PARIAH, about what it felt like working towards what she felt could lead to the "liberation of the Expressives", if anything it's here where the true Eve lies. A rebel, a freedom fighter, someone who will fight for others and gladly. But there's a tinge of guilt in her usually whimsical tone, there were people who died from some of those explosives she made. Sending a message wasn't bloodless work. It's like she's aged right there in front of Elliot.
The light that usually lives in her eyes has dimmed aside from the unnatural glow due to her ability, her shoulders sag. There have been so many lives lost due to the things she's done. What began as a recounting of history ends up as a tapestry of her sins.
Could you really be a good person if you've taken so much life? Where was the line? Wherever the line was she had crossed it multiple times over and would continue to do so if that meant the people she loved, the world would carry on.
As the time passes and Eve gets less and less stoned, she finds herself wondering what life would be like if she hadn't become a terrorist or if the Flood had never happened. She didn't think there was a world like that really out there, surely though… right?
For his part, Elliot only sneaks off once to find the aforementioned tree. Otherwise, he listens with interest as he builds a better understanding of the unknowable woman. He makes noises here and there to show that he's paying attention, and asks questions where it feels appropriate in order to get a better picture. Her mannerisms are interesting, and he learns them the same way he learns everybody else's, adding them to his understanding of the way people behave.
He fought in the war too, and he's not afraid to talk about the Ferry and the sort of work he did for them in comparison to her own exploits. His time at the institute is too fragmented to honestly recollect and, as what he does remember was terrible, it's not something he will elaborate on. Wolfhound was basically an extension of that work, both way back then and only just recently. He's killed people too, but it doesn't bother him so he doesn't offer it for commiseration.
He's done terrible things, and will definitely do more. He can't absolve her for what she's done, while simultaneously hoping that he might someday be absolved. That hope is important because it keeps the Switchboard locked. Instead of trying to relate to her distress, he just nods solemnly to acknowledge the hard truths.
“There's certainly at least one world where none of us went through any of this bullshit,” he offers, “though who's to say if it's an improvement. Had a vision during the crossing in which I was some corporate asshole with a desk job and expensive booze. No flood, but I wouldn't want to live that life.” He can still remember the taste of the whiskey that the man spilled in his petulance, and the face of Claudius Kellar.
“We all made the choices that led us here,” he gestures around them. “And a path that leads to saving the entire species from annihilation can't be all bad.”
They can relate on the Ferry, saving lives and doing terrible things in the name of saving everyone they can. Eve listens to Elliot's stories and tries not to interrupt too much, stories were the most ancient of currencies. Lived experiences, no matter the perspective, told you what you needed about a person. It's nice to hear a little but she knows there's more. There's always more and on this the pale woman can relate to the man as well. They kept their secrets buried deep.
"Life just isn't the same if it doesn't have the thrills of riding robotic dinos into battle." Eve laments and then considers Elliot's last point before nodding along, she agrees. "As long as they are saved, it's worth it."
Dusting her hands off and getting into a more comfortable position, "I haven't been stoned for about an hour," HA! She just wanted to talk. "Guide me through this and remember, think of something to share. A secret we can keep." Regardless of what Elliot thought Eve kept the secrets that were exchanged in bargains, it would just be up to him to trust her as she is trusting him.
Tilting her head with eyebrows raised, "Unless you've grown nervous."
Elliot considers what secrets Eve would consider to be a fair trade, ruling out anything of actual importance on principle. “I'm still workshopping how to set links with the least chance of discomfort for everyone involved,” he says, “so there are a few things worth touching on first.”
“In order to link you in we have to make contact until the link is in place,” he begins. He is already trying to convince himself that Eve is safe, though, having been exposed to her depression fog just after landing here, he's having some difficulty putting the necessary cognitive dissonance in place. “Breaking contact ends the process, so pulling away ends it for both of us. Easy ripcord if you accidentally share something you don't want me remembering with you. I'll need you to remember something in detail, preferably pleasant or banal, and I'll remember the whole thing with you as I find where your memories go.
“Emotions and sensory stuff also have to happen,” he continues, “but I think we can keep sensory closed for now, it's a whole thing. Emotions can't be shut off, so if anything gets too much, either of us can break the link just by wanting to. Also it can just break on its own, fresh links are kind of fragile, especially if you're new at maintaining one.”
“Any questions?” he asks.
Eve doesn't think much more for fear that she will back away, people anywhere near her brain unnerves her. Instead she lays a pale finger on his hand, "Go on!" Crimson eyes glow with hunger as she grins easily, she's less nervous now. This could even be exciting.
A happy memory?
Her world dissolves and instead she's laying on a couch in a large mechanic shop, a mirror nearby is angled just right to show the reflection of the crumbled ruins of New York City outside and a sign that reads: Mas Mechanics.
Smoking of course but three cats, two dogs and a snake roam around the space. Her leg bobs up and down as she sketches something, joint hanging from her lips. This was her home growing up and her home again post Bomb and post leaving PARIAH (or thrown out depending on who you asked). Candlelight makes shadows on the walls that are covered with what appears to be endless paintings. Canvas after canvas vibrant colors all around. This was her Oracle Room, the very first one.
Her safe space before everything in it was stolen by The Institute.
Stacks of paintings, many of them hung up, some just leaning against the brick walls.
Some of Peter, some of Gilly, some of PARIAH, Sylar (a few of him actually, one depicting him dancing with a dark haired woman who could be Eve).
This was home. This was safe.
“Huh,” Elliot exclaims softly, eyes half lidded in concentration as he feels around the memory for where it connects to the others in her mind. “You really dealt with all the power players, I see.” Talking seems like it's taking a lot of effort.
He feels the emotional content of the memory, putting a pin in that contentment. “Give me another one,” he drawls. “More like that. Strong emotions are helpful, but, again, try to stay on the bright side.”
The memories' eyes leave the sketchbook to stare in Elliot's direction as Eve does in the waking world, or does she? "Oh yes, I've seen most of them at least once. Some can hide, sometimes." But not very many of the power players.
Some of the other paintings depict battles on a bridge between a group of people and a cloud of unwavering darkness, a dark haired woman falling into a sea of icy glass.
An old man's face stares straight ahead from the canvas, covered in withering darkness. Kazimir Volken. A name not uttered but felt nonetheless in Eve.
Before Eve can ruminate too much on the negative that can be found here she twitches her nose and the Oracle Room dissolves into particles that rearrange themselves into a new tableau.
Music plays and Eve can be seen sitting before a grand piano, a spotlight illuminates her skin giving her a ghostly pale complexion a glow that's intensified by her dark eye make up and equally midnight toned dress. On a cocktail table in delicate script the name Orchid Lounge can be seen.
The seer looks younger here, maybe by a decade. Her body rocks back and forth as her fingers dance along the skeleton toned keys, her voice a rasp and that siren's call tells of a love betrayed and lost. Of a woman shaken to her core and left staring high into the moon's light.
From the back, in a booth all to herself an older woman sips a cocktail quietly but watches Eve intensely.
"Mama Petrelli always kept an eye on me. I didn't realize she has been doing it since I was a child." Eve doesn't know how to feel about that still but she knows this place offered her peace and solace. Amongst the chaos that was freedom fighter life, it also paid her bills.
“Never met the matriarch of mayhem myself,” Elliot says through a haze as he continues to pinpoint the little bits of light throughout Eve’s mind. He's holding several threads at once as he ties little things in place. He taps on the back of her hand to feel her registering the sensation. He listens to the sound of the wind through her ears. “Probably for the best, I hear she isn't great Company. Having someone looking out for you…as a kid sounds good though.”
“Didn't know you could play piano,” he changes tracks. “Can you sing something real quick?” It's hard to tell if he's anywhere near her sense of smell, the odor of weed is powerful from his perspective, but she may be desensitized to it at the moment.
"She was cool, selfish, a mean mama and a strict mentor but she did save me a few times," Eve says lightly and when Elliot begins to share her sensations she almost pauses but then snickers, this felt almost akin to taking shrooms. "We're colliding." Heh.
Leaning into the absurdity of it all causes Eve to feel more relaxed and her back straightens as she gets more comfortable. "Well yes dear, that was my dream. I was to tour and bare my heart on the stage."
With that he feels the seer tip her head back and open her mouth, the song she sings is an original or hers so Elliot would not know it but still it is a dark journey. There isn't much light in her music. After a thirty or so seconds of vocalizing she stops and looks at Elliot. "Do you play?"
“I do not,” Elliot admits as he rounds up Eve’s memory of the song, the way it feels and sounds to sing it, the emotions tied to the performance and its meaning.
He pins everything in place, and the sensation of a closed door appears in Eve's mind even as she feels his attention slipping away from her memories and sensations. He keeps everything locked down for now, the only thing trickling across the network from him to her is a feeling of apprehension as he remains ready to pull the plug and break the link if there are any unforeseen ability interactions. She is able to disintegrate after all, warww he has no idea what will happen to the link what w was ggs we warewW a diffuse mind.
“So that sense you just got,” he explains as he withdraws his hand, “I've found it helpful to think of it like a door on one wall of a room in your mind.” This isn't always helpful, as newcomers taking it too literally has complicated things in the past.
“Right now the door is closed,” he continues, “but my emotions may slip through the keyhole. Can't shut off that facet of the link, but I can shut down memory and sensory sharing, as I have now. Only I can open or close the door in your room, but either of us can leave the room and cause the link to collapse. All it takes is wanting it to happen, neither of us can maintain a link without the other being okay with it. A lot of trust required here.” He gives just enough of a pause to emphasize the importance of the last statement, but a current of professional seriousness accompanies it through the emotional link.
“How are we doing so far?” he checks.
"What if I stuck gum into this keyhole?"
Eve is leaning over and trying to peer at this door or keyhole while also clutching a side of her head, surely complicating the matter.
All jokes aside the woman takes in all he says and nods along, following, giving attention: "Marvelous, what a unique experience! It must be hard to not lose your sense of self in this." Something Eve is very familiar with. The loss of one's self.
She is ready to begin, the feeling shoots through the link. This maelstrom of chaos itching for a new experience, that hunger that seems ever present at the back of her mind tugs at the edges of her mind.
Catching herself Eve tilts her head, noticing Elliot like she's noticing herself. Her vision blurs and she grins, "One of two but one of one." She's fine.
“Not really,” Elliot assures her. “Since thought can't be shared, there's no risk of messing with somebody else's agency. Shared emotions can pull you into somebody else's rabbit hole, which can be annoying but mindfulness training helps. You could be irritated for no reason and then learn it's because someone else is and you're just not differentiating. The longer you stay linked, the easier it becomes to tell which direction an emotion is coming from.” His own authentication l apprehensiveness feels like it's slowly trickling away, though a feeling of vigilance remains. If anything, he feels confused by her last comment, but also resigned to not being able to understand anything she says.
“Okay,” he says, and the feeling of the closed door becomes the feeling of an open one. “I'm directing your attention to a cluster of memories. Pull here and you'll know how to cook fancy food.” There's a sensation that something in her room is more interesting than the other things, and that she could almost reach out and grab it with a thought. “As soon as you stop focusing on pulling it to you, you'll lose access.”
The grin the woman wears is indescribable but she nods nonetheless. There is something in her room but it's something Eve wanted to lead with in the first place. "I'll show you the first time I saw her."
The space shifts and turns, dissolves and then the two are in a different place, a different time. Eve tilts her head at the scene before her, a much younger Eve getting stoned on the roof of her home.
Words echo out of a boombox sitting at a young woman’s black booted feet. A simple cotton dress of a blue color sits on her body. A thick coat sitting over her shoulders as she sits with her back to the wall leading to the doorway downstairs. Teen Eve isn't bothered by the cold though. She rather likes it. She's bobbing her head to the sound of Lauryn’s voice mouthing the words. Her raven black curls short and loose, she had just taken a pair of scissors to her hair much to her mother’s dismay.
In one hand an almost finished doobie is smoking. “I heard he sang… a good song…” she sings softly as she crushes the doobie into the snow watching as it sizzles and goes out. Smoke trailing up to her pale heart shaped face.
Light gray eyes matching her father's flutter as she lays head back and closes them a moment later. Maybe just a nap, she can help her father in a bit… it's not like their going anywhere…
The sky is clear, cloudless and dim, a twilight or dusk that can't be determined. The horizon is cast a brilliant shade of pink and purple, and more stars than Eve has ever seen in her life shine overhead.
But it isn't dawn, or dusk, or any twilight hour she's ever experienced. The sun hangs like a dead stone overhead, jet black and ringed with brilliant gold in a fiery eclipse. Around the sun shift curtains of light more beautiful than the stars, shimmering and ephemeral waves of green that fade to blue, like the hem of a goddess' dress extending down from the firmament.
A child stands atop a grassy hill below the sun, no more than two years old and as naked as the day they were born, cast in a shroud of innocence in ways only children can be. The child raises a tanned arm over their head, fingers splayed, and the wind changes to swirl their dark hair about. They stare up into the eclipse, tears streaming down their cheeks.
Then, a golden light rises around the child's body like a cloud of luminescent gold filaments cast into the air. The child's skin sheds warm light, and their irises glow with brilliant gold, as though they were mirroring the eclipse.
Lips parted, the child smiles.
The sun explodes with light, coruscating bands of energy the color of fire wash across the darkness of the sky, turn to seething waves of blue and green, and the heavens are set ablaze.
A voice, as if calling from deep inside a cave echoes in Eve's mind.
"Gutes-asi"
Eve doesn't speak Sumerian. But she knows the phrase regardless.
"Unite."
The vision stops and Eve stares ahead at the child. "Well maybe not the actual first time. The real first time we crossed paths was a hoot!"
The sight was beautiful and her head tilts back to marvel at the multitude of stars overhead, "Most of the echoes are marinated in metaphor but sometimes.. sometimes I see a finely tuned clear point." Eve's eyes track over to the child being imbued with ungodly power and she raises an eyebrow. "I don't think she ever really had a chance against her fate." Head snapping towards Elliot, "Remember the word friend. Gutes-asi equals unite. It's important." Tapping her nose with a wink. Elliot can feel a deep respect when she stares at the child known as Ninbanda.
And a healthy dose of fear mixed with an seemingly infinite bout of curiosity.
"Once more yes?"
The sky is clear, cloudless and dim, a twilight or dusk that can't be determined. The horizon is cast a brilliant shade of pink and purple, and more stars than seem possible shine overhead like a carpet of diamonds strewn across a colorful tapestry.
But it isn't dawn, or dusk, or any twilight hour she's ever experienced. The sun hangs like a dead stone overhead, jet black and ringed with brilliant gold in a fiery eclipse. Around the sun shift curtains of light more beautiful than the stars, shimmering and ephemeral waves of green that fade to blue, like the hem of a goddess' dress extending down from the firmament.
A child stands atop a grassy hill below the sun, no more than two years old and as naked as the day they were born, cast in a shroud of innocence in ways only children can be. The child raises a tanned arm over their head, fingers splayed, and the wind changes to swirl their dark hair about. They stare up into the eclipse, tears streaming down their cheeks.
Then, a golden light rises around the child's body like a cloud of luminescent gold filaments cast into the air. The child's skin sheds warm light, and their irises glow with brilliant gold, as though they were mirroring the eclipse.
Lips parted, the child smiles.
The sun explodes with light, coruscating bands of energy the color of fire wash across the darkness of the sky, turn to seething waves of blue and green, and the heavens are set ablaze.
A voice, as if calling from deep inside a cave, echoes in the child’s mind.
"Gutes-asi"
A single, simple word: unite.
“Ninbanda!”
The child turns toward the shout, gold eyes burning bright as they turn to face a woman dressed in turquoise and gold, crimson and lavender. The child’s mother calls out their name again, “Ninbanda!” Beckoning them back toward the small mud-brick house with its clay tiled roof.
A child’s innocent laughter spills into the air, and they turn to run toward their mother, who looks up at the eclipse with tension in her brows.
And the blind eyes of a seer.
The seer tilts her head to the side, brows furrowed, and begins humming something to herself.
Her lips part, forming words she hears but does not understand.
“Singing my life… with his words.”
"Ninbanda."
The seer's attention is all on the other oracle though, "Me and Mama Seer, connected in this moment. Overlapped and overlayed."
At this rate it has to have dawned on Elliot that they are viewing a past event and Eve was a viewer of the future.
There’s a sense of wonder that makes its way across the link from Elliot to Eve as she feels his eyes over the shoulder of her memories. A hundred billion people have lived and died since this event occurred. It’s a sense of wonder that is slowly, almost cautiously, supplanted by a pervasive dread. He’s read enough OEI briefs, talked to Richard and Chel enough, to recognize the event. “Holy fuck,” he whispers.
He remembers it back to her, drawing her attention to the aurora spiraling down from the eclipse. “This is the presentation of an interdimensional tear,” he says quietly. “That child isn’t manifesting an expressive ability, they’re…” Being infested with an alien parasite from the Aquifer or a similar kind of space? He can’t exactly say that out loud without a lot of explaining he has no inclination to do.
He draws her attention to the way the gold light surges up from the child only to settle on them like a mantle. “It would be hard to convince me at this point that the child, Ninbanda, is the source of the Entity,” he tries again. “Expression could have allowed it, but that looks like they were just possessed by an external, pre-existing force like a Conduit host would be. Potentially something that spilled from a perpendicular space or from outside of spacetime. The nothing between the strings, what have you.”
If he’s correct, it’s what he’s feared since Eve fogged up into the forest and told them about the existence of the Entity over a year ago. That the Entity is just like Zero; never human to begin with.
"…you attribute this to actual Gods and not the evolution of our species which is being witnessed today, right now in our own world."
The disappointment reeks from Eve's mind but she smiles gently nonetheless, tilting her head in a sign of confusion. Whatever these terms Elliot is using, Eve does not know them.
After a moment of considering Elliot through a veiled gaze she shrugs her shoulder and nods again, "Would you share with me a time you felt the most safe?"
“I don't believe in gods,” Elliot says, mildly annoyed at the disparity between Eve’s emotions and her response. “Despite an unprecedented amount of power, it's still measurable and not magic. I'm just open to the possibility of consciousness evolving from things other than complex structures of biological matter.”
“We already know it can survive for centuries in the non-space between the strings,” he continues. “I think it's more likely that it can survive in that state because it's its natural state, not because it's just a dislocated human consciousness from a particularly powerful expressive individual. It'd take a really well crafted mindscape like the Graveyard of the conduits to keep a dislocated human consciousness alive in a non-space environment. Even trapped dreamers will start to lose control and fade away if their mindscape isn't founded, which is difficult to do.” Difficult even with all of the Relevant abilities. Gavriila was in bad shape by the time Wright Neverending Storied her, her dreamscape disintegrating around all of them.
“That's…” he waves the topic to the side. “Theoretical, I realize. It'd be nice if… aliens aren't something we have to worry about.”
He remembers that he was asked a question. He's remembered this whole time, actually, but doesn't like where his mind is going for a response. He doesn't avoid giving a response, which surprises him because it's also honest. “As for a memory, I haven't really been lucky enough to live a life where I could feel the most safe,” he admits. “I've been in a not-insignificant amount of one kind of danger or another since my very earliest memories.”
"Magic, gods, the astral plane. All stories made up to explain us. There is no magic, you are correct. There is energy and that which our species harnesses uniquely compared to the beings that are strictly human, hm?"
Pausing a moment and closing her eyes to find a good way to put this for the man next to her, "For your theory to not be squeaky that would mean young Nathalie's lived experience would be wrong and I'm not sure I'm willing to fall into that camp just yet, Elliot." That's to say, "There is more to share and then we can come to our conclusions, hm?"
The older woman does not want to seem like she's belittling his thoughts on this matter. "There is a reason Ninbanda feels alien."
For now back to sharing:
"And that is an unfortunate thing to have your life be." Not safe, Eve's sympathy for the man radiates off of her. "Then show what comes close if you will. Hugging someone close. A memory. Think. This is an exchange. This is how I learn if I can truly trust your mind, this is how we build trust. I will proceed with the next memory after you have shared." Eve doesn't remind rudely, she's pretty calm, slowly rocking side to side. Entering a rhythm that has her calmed but curious. She needs to be in this state to continue divulging all of this information she's kept mostly to herself outside of a select few.
Elliot considers pointing out that he never actually agreed to share anything with Eve when this situation began, though he knows she's contrary enough to immediately withhold further valuable operational intelligence. Sighing, he decides it's safe enough to use an indexed memory for this purpose.
“Cottage,” he says, and Eve has an immediate sense of where a memory lies, ready to be pulled toward her.
The floor is colder than the room, back against the wall by the door to the garden. Heat emanates fitfully from the fireplace, but steadily from the contact with Wright’s arm where she sits beside him. There are cardboard pizza boxes on the island in the kitchen, he's exhausted both from eating them and the strain of moving in. Marthe is in the sparsely furnished living room, cradling the literal infant Ames, who is no longer literally an infant but is still a tiny baby. He doesn't feel safe because he never can, but he does feel content. Marthe smiles at both of them as Wright lets her head fall against his with a happy sigh. He feels her love for her family radiate from her.
Elliot feels wistful as he remembers; that contentedness was doomed. There were a couple of good years left before it all went to shit in a single moment of terrifying extacy, but those memories are now equally laden with regret from the emotional imprints of remembering after the fact. Those he keeps to himself.
“Satisfactory?” he asks.
Leaning back to sniff the air as the memory is pulled and envelopes her senses. "What a unique bond, a unique love." Eve smiles as she gazes on the family just moved in. "You have a cornerstone." Everyone did.
That isn’t Elliot’s Cornerstone, but that’s neither here nor there.
Nodding her head gentle as her tone, "Thank you Elliot for sharing." If this was a surface memory she wouldn't be able to tell it and sharing of anything is a move in the right direction for exchanges.
Deals.
"I am going to show you the actual first time Ninbanda and myself crossed paths. How and when it happened can make the story a bit confusing. But it is important in establishing… more of the nature of what we are dealing with." For some but Elliot has proven smart. "The details are jarring, please steel yourself."
The first thing Eve smells is death, the stench pulls her attention to her left and the memory of that fated encounter doesn't so much as gently pull her but yanks.
"I was hanging with my cousin, Odessa Price. She and I, connected to this from ancient times. Maybe not because of our bloodlines, maybe just a happenstance." There is a extra bit of context she adds, "We did drugs. Refrain to be exact." Knowing how that might sound to most people, "By the end of this memory you will see that we didn't make this up in our heads."
Elliot feels a burning in his pocket, in the pill case, in a tiny glass vial full of Refrain.
Otsu, Japan
1671
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.
"We were so confused. Silly Mas girls playing with cosmic energies, of course this was just a vision in my mind. They all feel as real as walking in the waking world." Eve's voice floats across this chaotic scene of gore and destruction.
The memory is as grotesque as promised, and Eve can feel Elliot's revulsion in the remembering. Can perhaps feel the revulsion coming at her from two directions at once.
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.
"What a doozy, my head went flying!" Eve cackles and shakes her thankfully attached head somewhere. "O could pull the strings of time, possibly even go places. She could go, I could see. Add some Refrain… I was no longer just a future viewing wacko and she was no longer just stopping the strings. A fusion."
Considering the effects of Refrain on Odessa and Eve, and the fact that it was instrumental in the “success” of Project Zero, Elliot can’t imagine ever feeling truly comfortable using the stuff. It’s always been an In case of emergency break glass option, but it looks even less enticing now.
Time skips just a smidge, like a VHS tape fast forwarded:
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.
“Tatsu no mae ni hizamazuku!” 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 he"Looks like we've got a good one today. I'll make this as quick as I can." With very practiced movements, Odessa slides the IV needle into the skin at the crook of Adam Monroe's arm and waits for the blood to fill into the flexible tube. They have several bags to fill today.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.
“Kanjoro wa watashitachi no hitoridesu ka?” Kensei asks of the approaching woman, who casts her baleful stare doJust like every other day.touch of her warm hand at the crown of Odessa’s head.
“Kamisama,” 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 womanAdam winces, but otherwise doesn't complain. He's used to it by now, she imagines. And it isn't as though any complaint is going to get him unstrapped from his seat. "Well, at least you're better at it than some of the others." His accent is crisp, so very cultured to Odessa's ears.odies 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 froWith her head tilted down and her blonde hair veiling her face, she smiles, just enjoying the sound of his voice for a moment. Her expression is passive again by the time she lifts her head. "We're going to be here a while." Sometimes he's left alone to donate and only checked in on when they need to change out the bag. Odessa never leaves him alone. Not unless she's called away. "Tell me a story, Adam."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. But the overlay of images and sounds and experiences makes it hard to focus. The drugs, the Refrain.
“Karera wa koko kara kite inai,” the woman with glowing golden eyes states confidently. “Karera wa motonimodoru hitsuyo ga arimasu.”determined. The horizon is cast a brilliant shade of pink and purple, and more stars than Eve has ever seen in her life shine overhead.##blur of colors bending light at its edges like a prism and extending out in scintillating rings from her hand.
But it isn't dawn, or dusk, or any twilight hour she's ever experienced. The sun hangs like a dead stone overhead, jet black and ringed with brilliant gold in a fiery eclipse. Around the sun shift curtains of light more beautiful than the stars, shimmering and ephemeral waves of green that fade to blue, like the hem of a goddess' dress extending down from the firmament.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 andA child stands atop a grassy hill below the sun, no more than two years old and as naked as the day they were born, cast in a shroud of innocence in ways only children can be. The child raises a tanned arm over their head, fingers splayed, and the wind changes to swirl their dark hair about. They stare up into the eclipse, tears streaming down their cheeks.careening through the air, arms windmilling and screams involuntarily escaping their mouths.
Odessa is the first to hit the groThen, a golden light rises around the child's body like a cloud of luminescent gold filaments cast into the air. The child's skin sheds warm light, and their irises glow with brilliant gold, as though they were mirroring the eclipse.blinding pain and confusion, when Eve strikes beside her, a muffled yelp escaping her as she lands, covered in dried blood and filth, standing out against the snow.
Lips parted, the child smiles.wind is blinding and the cold sucks breath out of both women. Snow whips across the desolate landscape, partially covering the remains of a nearby building buried deep in the snow. Pieces of concrete jut up around it. A sign, buried partway in the snow, is barely legible.
Odessa can see the letters, but it's nearly impossible tThe sun explodes with light, coruscating bands of energy the color of fire wash across the darkness of the sky, turn to seething waves of blue and green, and the heavens are set ablaze.blinks again, Eve rolls onto her side in her peripheral vision, alive.
The sign, itsA voice, as if calling from deep inside a cave echoes in Eve's and Odessa’s mind.
Gutes-asi
Odessa’s breath is stolen as she reads the sign.
"That woman… that was Yaeko! She's… an ancient love. She's a mother of many." Eve is silent after that, thinking of Chess and her sisters. "We ended up in Alaska. I'll finish that in a moment."
Her teeth chatter because she feels the cold that day they did. "This next bit I've come to believe was just a vision." Otherwise the ending makes no sense.
Elliot sincerely wishes he knew Japanese at the moment. It seems a bit late to try to convince Asi to loan it to him. “She went by Joy when Wright met her,” he says solemnly. Is there another wall in Eve’s room? Another door? There is if she thinks about it, closed tight at the moment. “I’ll share some of that when you’re done, it’s topical.”
"Joy… the daughter who wouldn't die, she of many names and many daughters. In so many ways, The Spark for the Immortal's heart." Eve is a romantic at heart, their story seemed to tragic.
The door appears behind Elliot and Eve glides past him to twist the knob, "I have a big question for you as my next. Prepare yourself."
The door is yanked open and snow billows into their faces. "Ahhh Alaska!"
Ruins of the Moab Federal Penitentiary
Mount Natazhat, Alaska
March 13, 2018
At first it was darkness coupled with utter silence. Eve felt nothing, it was quick her last memory of Adam’s sword coming right towards her face.
When she snaps back to reality she is disoriented and can't really follow what’s happening but she sees them, those two figures. Adam and..? She hears that feminine tone. Before she can utter a word she is lifted and then falling through light feeling as if she was coming undone, the effect is jarring. And then she hears it, Gutes-asi. That word.. it causes her to fly back to that first dream. That one with the sky full of stars like none she had ever seen. She can't process it fully, it doesn't make sense. How..?
slam
Her vision spinning as she is on hands and knees in the snow. Hissing from the unnatural feeling coursing through her body. Resurrected again. Covered in filth, shakily trying to stand the blistering cold making her wince. They are not dressed for this. “U-Unite.” the seeress says through her teeth as she looks over her body. A second time she's been killed and brought back to life, it's not that fun being a zombie twic because you have to go through dying. Her body gives a violent shudder as she takes in the sign with wide eyes.
Moab.
Light gray eyes widen in surprise and she crawls forward to run a hand over the surface of the sign and she looks back over her shoulder at Odessa. “D-Des. DDess.” Eve inches forward to grab the other woman's arm and tries to drag her forward. “G-go in.” The seer moves forward trying to drag Odessa with her. She hadn't been here on that day in 2011, she was halfway across the country. But this place.. held so many stories. So much history.
Somehow, Des understands that Eve is translating for her a word she cannot possibly know the meaning of.
Unite.
"Freezing bits," The seer's brow furrows and she frowns, images play in front of them but they are jumbled. Hazy, murmured voices ring out. "Shared visions, nothing of consequence." Or something Eve didn't want to dive into herself at the moment giving how jarring the experience had been.
A single, soft beep sends Eve’s eyes open. Lights are a blur and shadows deeper. Her entire body aches, muscles tense and back stiff. Her throat is dry, a breathing tube taped under her nose and an IV in her arm, heart rate monitor on one finger. As she jolts to move, Eve discovers she is held down to the bed she woke on by padded restraints. As her eyes adjust to the light, she does not recognize the concrete-walled room she is held in.
But she isn't alone.
In a bed just ten feet away in the concrete-walled hospital room, Desdemona Desjardins lays sound asleep in an identical bed with a breathing tube taped at her nose and an IV in one arm. It's only now that Eve notices something about the other woman, the silvery streaks of gray in her hair at her temples and a few telltale creases of she at her mouth and nose that weren't there earlier. She looks, unevenly, older.
Fifteen feet away at the far end of the windowless room there is a blue-painted metal door with peeling splotches of rust around its edges.
The absence of cold is what Eve notices at first. She's no longer freezing to death and that's taken as, “Where's the hot coco?” She whispers softly to herself. There should always be hot coco after you survive a blizzard.
This reminds Eve of a few things.
Notably, her time in a asylum back in ‘06. Strapped to her bed, force fed her meds and food. She thought she would never get out of that place and for a moment the oracle believes she never did. That the last few years have all been a dream. She bucks in her bed with a soft cry and look of horror, “Ow ow ow,” She whispers over and over as she tries to look around her.
For all the things Eve has seen and encountered in her mind. Being trapped back in that ward is something that terrifies her more than anything.
The restraints are noted with raised eyebrows and she blinks before shaking her head. “This is a dream, this is a dream. This is a dream.” what did Gilly always say? ‘Take deep breaths and concentrate on home.’ So Eve does this, she concentrates on home. Thinking of her best friend, of Chicken, Red.. Lady Zeus.. she just wants to be with them. Eyes screwed up in concentration but she feels nothing. There's a sniff as she realizes there's no waking from this.
Her right leg jerks uncontrollably as the nerves take over and the wild animal that Eve is feels caged. Desdemona gets a wide eyed stare. “Oh dear.. Des.. Des..” she tries to peek down at the door with peeling blue paint. Blue. “You can't be turning into a granny on me Dorothy. I need your help.” They need each other it would seem.
“Dorothy! You've gone gray! Your face is creasing!” said in a hushed whisper that echoes off the walls. Eve tries to pull against her restraints, yanking hard on them, trying to wiggle out of them. She bares her teeth as she tries to pull herself off the bed. “Dorothy,” there's a rattle from Eve’s frantic movements,
“DOROTHY!”
Odessa does not rouse. But at Eve’s shout, there's a heavy latching sound at the door, followed by the emergence of a tall and thin man into the room. Dark hair is swept into a neat coif, and he has a soft and gentle expression that belies regret. He wears neither a uniform nor doctor’s scrubs, just a wrinkled button-down shirt and an old pair of khakis.
“Ssh,” he raises a finger to his lips at Eve. “Please. Uh, she's really not well and needs her rest.” Whoever the stranger is, he doesn't move from the door. “You’re safe,” he explains with a more pleading tone of voice. “My name’s Bruce. Bruce Maddox, and… I have no idea who you are or, uh, if you’re dangerous.”
"Brucie Boy!" Eve claps her hands and cackles into her hands, "What a guy- oh!" Eve turns her head and tilts it sideways, peering at Elliot at an odd angle. "What happened to you in the Institute?" She doesn't say that's the question but the way her gaze stays on him can only convey she's either going to fart or that this is the question she hinted at.
"Very murky surrounding that, traumatic place." There's a wariness in Eve's tone and it echoes from her mind, what was terrible that they kept him locked up? "Science fairies playing as if they're the gods, never works out for anyone." There's sympathy there, whatever happened to him she's sorry for him without knowing.
"Then we can move on to Erica Krabid!"
Elliot remembers when he was someone who met Bruce Maddox, in a way. A memory of a memory, in bad condition. He remembers without sharing it for Eve to view, he wouldn’t do that to her.
Yancy is exhausted, sweating, straining to keep everybody in the room in their fitful, angry confusion at his suddenly not being in the room with them. He sidesteps a doctor, clawing at the needle in his hand, the cuffs around his wrists. They shout, blaming each other for losing him, all while he stands inches away, the knowledge of him bending against their minds and falling away. A man he’s never seen before enters, annoyed, Everything that has kept Yancy safe suddenly stops working, stops bending, stops falling away, and they have him again.
“Lots of unspeakable shit I don’t remember,” Elliot answers honestly. “I know I got caught mid-infiltration for the Ferrymen, that I was subjected to some truly heinous crimes against humanity stuff, and that I escaped. I can’t share any of those memories across the network, if that’s what you were hoping for. They all had to go into quarantine because sharing them is like giving somebody a trauma blunderbuss to the open mouth.” All safe as can be in the BLACK BLACK BLACK. “It’s not just unpleasant to remember, it’s all fractured, compounded, damaged. Multiple simultaneous emotional and physical perspectives of nightmarish events, made worse by previous attempts to try to remember it.”
“I can tell you I was pushed into a secret department that wasn’t on the map,” he grants her, “that I was the first person to survive the experiment they were running, and that all following survivors of the experiment died in the Ark detonation or in the chokepoint.” Strong emotion tries to worm its way through the network from him to her, but he keeps the worst of it in check. She can tell that thinking about it is supremely painful to him, and a lot of it feels to Eve like grieving loved ones taken with violence.
There are moments of wallowing and self pity and there are moments in recognizing your hand in someone else's suffering, even if it wasn't exactly her hand she can only imagine one scenario: "I'm very sorry for what you had to endure Elliot." Eve knows what it was to feel totally out of control of your life and to the degree that Elliot must have experienced has a frown sitting on the woman's face.
“Appreciated,” Elliot says honestly, and she can feel that it is.
"The other me and her friends failed at holding Richard Cardinal accountable and everyone suffered because of it in that world and ours. Even if he meant to save people in the end." Eve thinks about even now with how the two fight and bicker how she wouldn't try and kill (permanently) her Richard. Maybe the Other Eve suffered the same thing, maybe it was too hard to do what was necessary before it was too late. The seer would never know and there was a large part of gratitude that resonates within her at that thought.
She didn't want to know.
The rest of Eve's journey is recapped in bits and pieces. Nothing wild of note, Eve had to use the bathroom in front of Krabid. It was all very embarrassing. "She's very condescending." The pale woman says matter of factly.
The end of it is Eve and Odessa waking up in the Oracle Room back in the Safe Zone. Except they were completely covered in gore and dirt.
"So you see," Turning her head to look at Elliot, "This all, strangely happened. Actually, in the flesh. Mostly in the flesh." A sheepish shrug. "I have shown you something that I've never done. Unfiltered access to the truth through my eyes." The gravity of this act from Eve is not something she wants to be misunderstood.
"Do you remember when you first manifested? I can remember mine like it was yesterday. Just a babe getting lost in the echoes of the future."
Elliot feels a kind of detached revulsion about Kravid, and that trickles through the network. That isn't the woman who according to Pete Varlane oversaw Project 0, but she sure looks like her.
Another thing Pete told him was that Refrain was integral to the project. If there's a possibility that Odessa's ability was the cause of an actual time travel nightmare tour, he's glad he never invited Destiny into the network. Manifesting directly in front of the enemy and being immediately beheaded is not high on his bucket list.
“I appreciate the trust,” Elliot says simply, and no feeling of flippancy comes through the emotion link. He understands what it means to her because he feels what she's feeling.
“I really don't remember manifesting,” he answers the question after some thought. “It happened during all of the double secret mad science torture. I went into the Ark thinking I wasn't Expressive.” He hadn't manifested at all, he actually still isn't Expressive, but it's close enough to what she's getting at and he doesn't trust anyone with the truth anymore. People who find out either leave or get broken by the truth.
"I see…" Tilting her head before leaning forward to stare into Elliot's eyes. Eve's mind is a chaotic place and were it not for the walls that he was able to build they would both be consumed by it. The constant thread they share between them now has been mostly wrapped in Eve's chaotic and sometimes brutal nature but something happens, like a switch goes off.
A sense of calm rings through the connection and Eve visibly seems to relax in a way she hadn't before. "What a murky birth," her voice even changes in a way, no playfulness, no deceit. "I am sorry again. To be taken is one thing, to be changed without your permission is on another level. You are right to be guarded." Whenever he is being so.
Sighing before leaning back she pats Elliot's arm as she retreats. "I… have been to hell and back over Ninbanda and what she's doing to our world. All the worlds."
"I think I have a fix. Just need more time with the noodle." There is always an Eveism, always. "There will be a moment in time that I am going to need you to trust me. All of you."
The connection is severed.
Eve blinks in the real world again and smiles across at Elliot, "You will know when. Thanks for the," finding the right words, "Session." This version of Eve is a strange one to see, it's rare but it's there. Tangible and real. Whatever has flipped Eve's mood has placed her in the most peaceful mindset she's had in a while. However fleeting this may be. "I've got to.. take care of something while I'm," again searching for the right words. "In my zone."
Elliot, in an odd state of equilibrium with Eve, manages not to flinch when he's touched without preamble. They've built something like trust over the course of this encounter, as one-way as the mirror in the 0bservation Room. It doesn't extend so far as to encompass a blank check like I'll need you to trust me and you'll know when coming from somebody as unpredictable as Eve. Delightedly, she breaks their link immediately after saying it, so she feels none of the worried incredulity that he easily keeps from showing on his face.
“Thanks for the memories,” he says in trade for her thanks, both sounding and being sincere.
Most of the memories that she shared are already located throughout the living room in the House in Tulsa. The couch, the throw pillows, the afghan, the coffee table and television and two remote controls. Thinking from the doorway to the kitchen, he knows that this is still not enough to go on, but he knows significantly more now than he did when the sun was up.
“I'll give it all a good ponder.”
"Oh you will."
Winking as she treks away barefoot, scoping her bag up as she goes. A light hum resonates from the pale ghost as she disappears into the trees. The haunting but peaceful melody echoing after her for some time.
It's not until later when the dusk filled sky has returned that Eve sits under it, watching as the sun begins to rise. Half cloud and half corporeal form. Her face flickers in and out of focus, arms waving in the air slowly. "Hmmm."
Her pale face snaps into focus, crimson smoke hanging around her like a chaotic halo. "Another one set." With a sly smile she stares down at a piece of paper with various names written down. Circled and lines leading to a large word underlined eight times in the center of the page.
Save the-
Water has smudged the last word written there.
Save The Worlds
There wasn't much time.
Eve had work to do.