Participants:
| Scene Title | Missed Connections |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Asi doesn't want to be left in the dark again. |
| Date | July 9, 2021 |
Riverside Park
Minneapolis, MN
It's becoming well and good and dark and cold by the time that the scavenge team returns from their goal of scavenging. It's well and good that those who had stayed behind have done things that make life easier on nights like these, such as do things that fend off the discomfort night brings.
By one of the fires, Asi glances up from her position sat on the edge of a tire, arms folded against her knees. There's a flicker of seagreen light in her eyes as she leverages her connectedness to the Network, leaving a small ping of attention for the man at its center. She shares her perspective briefly– of the group of travelers returning with their found goods, framed by the haze of sundown trying to fight its way through the gloomy grey shrouding the skies, and then down to the warmth of the fire in front of her. She focuses on the way her socked toes stick close to it while her heels rest on the toes of her well-worn boots– how they no longer feel like ten small, vibrating icicles attached to the chilled trunk of her feet, but wiggling things full of life and potential.
She can manage well enough in the cold, and she doesn't grouse about it much back home, but it's frustrating it's this cold in the dead middle of summer. Not even the 'Pelago got quite this bad.
Asi glances back to Elliot once more and makes the slightest gesture toward the fire with her head to more explicitly welcome him over. She's just glad she doesn't have to go through the effort of saying anything out loud to do so.
“Your socks are surprisingly comfortable,” Elliot says as he scuffs closer to the fire. The brief share of her senses was enough to highlight the coziness of her feet by the fire. “The seam on the small-toe side of my right sock is driving me crazy right now. Want to trade?” He eyes a large block of granite that once made up the wall of a building, but decides that it would be too cold to sit on.
There aren't any better options though. He accepts the coldness of the stone, pulling his jacket tighter and cinching up his hoodie.
She scoffs her initial reply, following it up with an, "Absolutely not." that she feels no need to further elaborate on. A beat passes before she glances up at him afterward, noting quietly, "But I cannot stress enough that if you want to heat your own feet up, do yourself the favor of not melting your soles."
Another moment passes by with something like ease, and then Asi's eyes are flickering in hue again, her eyes going distant in thought. She rifles through every usage of the Network known to her over the course of those seconds, nonplussed entirely about it. It's almost rote for her; touching each tool in her 'toolkit', as much as the experience she's exposed herself through by linking with Elliot is a thing that belongs to her.
"So," she breaks the lapsed silence while still letting her mind work in the background. She definitely had waited to do this, for some reason. "You stayed, and are still moving forward, even though Richard left."
Elliot's smile fades as he slowly inches his boots toward the fire. Richard did leave, and that doesn't feel great when compared to the fact that Gracie also stayed behind. He doesn't want to believe that telling people the things he's been hiding for a decade makes them leave him behind, but being left behind isn't new to him. When he was Elliot, he was left behind repeatedly; it's hard to move past that.
“This is the job,” he says quietly. “I jumped through a hole in the universe into a stormy sea because doing it gets Wright’s family a space in a shelter of last resort if we fail and the world ends.” He directs Asi toward a short memory.
Ames, curled up inside of a large plastic storage bin, alternates between screaming and laughing uncontrollably as Wright and Marthe lovingly bury her with sweaters.
“Have a soft spot for them,” he says, his tone downplaying the amount he misses them. “Richard leaving is definitely a fucking wrench in the works, though.”
The memory is offered, and without malice, but methodically, once she's finished turning it over, Asi metaphorically pats her hand along the shelf it came from. Was there more? If she stood on her tiptoes, was there more? If she looked from an angle…
Elliot's feelings bleed through to her, though, giving her pause. "Compelling reason to not give up," she admits grudgingly. "Even though you lost your– as far as I can tell– big picture guy."
She thinks to herself that perhaps if her sister had ever had any children, maybe she'd feel the same way about them. Absently, in her reaching for absolutely everything she can within the Network, she realizes the passive doorway that in the past had existed (and been avoided) between her and the other Asi is… gone. It brings her to blink.
"What happened to 別の私?" she asks suddenly, not bothering to delineate whether or not it was her or his doppelganger she was referring to.
Picking around the memory reveals mostly empty shelf, with the impression that there is more on either end of the memory. Possibly not much, memories don't usually form a perfect linear narrative. Elliot is an old hand at network use, and what he shares is usually cropped for efficiency.
“She's been gone for a while now,” Elliot says with a fond sadness that's pointless to hide from his voice when the emotion is shared either way. “Assuming you're not talking about my local alternate. Keeping her in the network for three weeks straight was difficult. She's been gone since before we left Manhattan.”
“I'm honestly not sure I'd consider Richard a ‘big picture’ guy at this point,” he says on a wave of frustration and resignation. “Big picture people generally don't abandon their support staff and rush into danger blindly. That's more… hero complex behavior.”
Asi's gaze returns keenly to Elliot when he says she's gone, studying him. Feeling what comes from him with a subtle suspicion. Difficult, he says. None of them have been connected for that long, so maybe, who is she to judge?
"I didn't think hero complexes involved giving up right when things matter most. And that is the impression I got when it was explained to me– that he was staying behind. Walked off." She dislikes talking about it, dissatisfaction edging closer to the ever-present, all-consuming despair and frustration over the impending end of the world and the feeling of inability to do anything about it.
So, she cants her head slightly to toss the subject aside and quickly, returning to the previous topic. "It's the 'Pelago," she corrects him. Immediately, Asi boors next into asking, "What made it difficult? I've left spiders in other systems until they've died, passively receiving information from them. Did it feel more like a muscle was getting tired, or were you experiencing overload from it? Too many external sensations?"
She thinks herself helpful, the topic casual if brusque and perhaps intensely personal. There's no malice behind her asking.
“It's difficult to describe,” Elliot says with a sigh. He leans back, thinking mostly about the conflicting theories on Richard's behavior and letting the annoyance of being told to call a place only half of a word pass by without focusing on it. “The sensation doesn't share and it's not like a physical sensation that I know to compare it to. There's a kind of weight to it, though heaviness would be inaccurate. It gets to be a lot but tiredness isn't right either.”
“I suppose it's like having a lot of active network users,” he says upon reflection. His toes are still cold, so he pushes his boots closer to the fire. “There's a limit to the amount of network traffic I can tolerate at once. Maybe there's a buildup of some kind that needs to be defragged periodically with a time out.” Maybe it's all a lie, too, but it's the one he's been telling for so long that he's betting he could beat a lie detector.
He scratches at the stubble on his jaw which was until recently a short beard. “Were you there when Gracie got into trouble?” he asks. “I've been having a surprising amount of trouble getting straight answers about how it went down.”
The use of computer-related terminology sees Asi almost perk up, cold and the fighting of it temporarily forgotten. This is infinitely more interesting to her than talking about the black cat of the convoy.
"Defrag?" she echoes back. "I'm willing to bet you could develop a way to do it while keeping your connections online. Leverage them, even, to clear out the noise." What was it Elliot had called the term? "By overclocking," she suggests.
It's almost involuntarily, then, that survival instincts push her to check in with her surroundings. She blinks down to Elliot's shoes and warns again, deliberate wisenedness in her tone, "You're going to melt your shoe if you're not careful."
“分かってたのに,” Elliot grumbles like a teenager as he pulls his feet back into the cold. These boots came with him in his shear suit, maybe they're fire resistant but there aren't many shoe stores open at this hour. He fumbles around him for more stone, taking a flat brick of broken marble facade and setting it on the coals. “That's going in the sleeping bag tonight.” He nudges a similar sized rock toward Asi with his foot in case she'd like to do the same.
“It is rare for me to let anybody stay in the network that long,” he tells her. “The level of trust needed to maintain that kind of intimacy for so long is very high. Not a lot of people I'd be willing to get along far enough to experiment with an overclock. If I had to guess, it would also require close contact like overclocking the linking process itself.” He's leaving out the obvious; that Wright isn't following the time restriction.
A fact not lost on Asi. She wrinkles her nose in amusement when Elliot issues his retort, amusement flaring underneath her skin more than in her expression, though the scrunch of her face eases when he notes about the rocks. Interest is definitely piqued, and she toes the very cold rock toward the very warm fire with absent thought. Old school, but potentially very useful. Maybe she should keep an eye out for others they could haul with them as heating stones, especially as they pushed farther north.
Once she has her toes curled out toward the flame again, she lets out a thoughtful hum. "You have a failover site you could use during maintenance like that, though. Through Wright. Right? She's the other permanent 'server' in this equation, after all. Couldn't she take on the majority of the mental load while you run メンテ1?" The supposition leads her to want to verify, and seagreen flickers unnaturally in her eyes as she looks back to Elliot again – at once seeking verification from him and within him at the same time. She reaches for his knowledge of the Network, what she would consider inherently to be something important to have among the Index, and yet…
There's a sizeable spot missing on the proverbial bookshelf where that knowledge otherwise might lay for her perusal. Still, she stands by her hypothesis, eyes fixed on Elliot with curiosity.
"それに興味あるん2," she offers up without needing to think twice about it. "Figuring that out. We'd need– what–" Asi glances aside for a brief moment before her gaze returns. "You, me, her; then another to facilitate the overclock while Wright holds down the fort?"
"If trust," she recognizes abruptly as if struck by it, sitting up and back from where she'd unconsciously begun to hunker down into a lean against her knees. "Weren't an issue." Rather than suspicion, there's just the hollow of disappointment, an expectation that the inside of this outline won't be filled in after all.
“I've been giving that serious thought,” Elliot says, leaving trust alone for the moment. “The thing about indexing skill in network use is that you already need to at least be trained in how to recognize a direction toward a memory and how to pull it across.” He looks down to the side, finding scattered and shattered wooden furniture from a nearby seating area. So that's where the chairs went. He throws a couple pieces on the fire.
“So as far as beginner's guides go,” he elaborates, “there's not much more that would go in the book. There's also the burden of maintaining the skill stream on top of the effort of whatever else you're trying to do with the network. Obviously that can be overclocked, but it's about twice as hard to lift the burden for the other users as it is for the users to do it themselves.”
He feels introspective for a moment, eyes unfocused as he gathers up an assortment of memories. He pulls Asi’s attention to them in soft flickers of intent. Her familiarity with the network is more than enough to trace them to their sources: moments across the years of his life. Fragments of ideas and emotions and sentences without context. It feels familiar, like pulling his skill in English for the odd turn of phrase. It's an entire language made of memories, each pinned in place with a word.
“District,” he says, lancing her attention toward one of them. “It's not that I don't trust you,” Elliot says. Wright smirks as she gives the tetherball a real haymaker.
“Circulation,” he adds, with another automatic pull toward something from this new supply. This one comes from Asi’s link to Wright; the Index is spread through both of their minds. “Trust like that takes time,” Marthe tells Elliot across the island in the kitchen of the townhouse. Wright bounces their daughter on her knee from the floor. “Seems like you like her, though.”
“Rhetoric?” he asks, and the meaning of the memory changes from a statement to a question. “I think it's worth a shot,” Elliot says, cleaning the last of the blood off of his knife and sheathing it. “Could start tonight.”
In her eyes, Asi's ability faintly flickers in and out of visibility. Everything about networked activities feels so much like it should be like her ability is active, and it's been so long since anything of substance has been done with it, she almost overreacts to that possibility. This mental bridging isn't the same, of course, but they keep using so many of the same words, same concepts.
The veritable playground opened to her with these new database keys Elliot grants her access to within the Index sees her brows slowly raise, the hair on the back of her neck wanting to rise, but the chill doesn't quite let it. Under the layers of clothing she bears, goosebumps come to life on her arms. She looks off at the memories, line of sight darting hither and thither until it's eventually back to Elliot again, gears turning visibly in her expression.
The keywords, she notes, are careful. Distinct. Not things that could be thrown just into everyday conversation without some detours. Seagreen floats through her gaze as her eyelids flutter, reaching for the tools she's been shown in the past to better resonate in the present. They'd done this before– when speaking in front of Spades– but it was different, then.
"彼岸花," Asi murmurs quietly but clearly, petals of a spider lily opening in her mind as she encodes the memory called to mind. Asi's eyes move from the Tokyo skyline to Kaito himself as he approaches her around the side of his desk in his vast office, saying, "«I need you to understand, before I tell you this, the level of trust I'm extending you. This… is a grave matter, and I ask that you exercise discretion. To keep it secret is up to you, but I do ask that you exercise… discretion.»
Her eyes lose their glow, then, calling on something more automatic. "Rhetoric," she repeats with quiet confidence, pinging the appropriate Indexed memory for it as the trigger is spoken.
"Capricorn," follows, to make sure she's absolutely clear, reaching across the border into Wright's memories for this one. Wright bobbles a cool can of soda in her right hand, then a slightly warmer one in her left before closing the lid on the cooler. “Agreed,” she says, handing the colder one to Elliot.
"It's not the user manual I'm worried about," Asi clarifies, even if she still finds it odd. The hand which had been holding the colder can in the memory instinctively flexing to try and shed even hints of potential further cold. "It's writing the debugging one. Figuring out how to…" She trails off without meaning to, and uncomfortable with something suddenly, she reaches for her second pair of socks and begins the process of pulling them over the warmed first layer.
"It's selfish," Asi acknowledges hastily, dismissively, eyes down on her boots as she fixatedly reties the laces.
Elliot smiles as Asi adapts to using the network just as fast as the other version of her did. He concentrates on what it feels like to index the new memory as she offers it, then shares the memory of the sensation with her.
He has an easy suspicion of what she considers to be selfish. His friend Asi had a similar hole where her ability used to be. One had an ability without infrastructure, another infrastructure without ability. He could share memories of conversations about it as a way to connect, but he knows this Asi well enough by now to leave it alone despite his lack of understanding why she feels the way she does.
The thing that sits like a lead weight at the center of his understanding of this woman is that he already has her. He doesn't need to develop her at all, he just needs to let her take what she thinks she wants. But he doesn't want to become a new person again, not with her. He really likes the Asi back home and still doesn't want to become a new person with her.
Ability equals neither desire nor need; it's possible she's Relevant, but he has no reason to think she's Foundational. There were potentially as many as five other abilities involved in building the Palace, but if there were he can't remember them or the people they came from. No matter what, he will have to let her go once they approach the point of no return.
“You want to feel connected again,” Elliot guesses, then sends a delicate flurry of traffic, pulling her attention here and there along the network just enough to know it's being done but with no meaningful destination. “I can understand that. I don't know what I'd do without this, honestly.”
Asi's brow twitches in a tell that there's something he's said she doesn't quite agree with, as she tries to bite back that urge to correct him, like she had about the Pelago. Her mouth is dry, though, and she knows he'll know the difference in her emotions between then and now. The heaviness behind it. She finishes pulling the laces taut on one foot and sits there longer than is needed.
"«That's not quite it.»" she murmurs in Japanese, and reluctantly lifts her head, looking his direction if not quite at him. "«It's just…»" The words fail to come. And they fail to come. And then…
"«One day, some day very soon, you're going to be gone.»" Her eyes dart up to him for only a moment, and then they're back toward the fire. Her hands press together, fingers splayed, ball of her palms grinding against each other. "«And last time, there was just… wondering. Never knowing, once the Travelers left port. This time, I want to…»"
She looks ashamed, feels something not quite like it. Whatever it is, it's something she wants to throw into the fire like the scrap wood they've found. "«I want to know it made a difference. I want to know it mattered. That all this is really going to…»" Suddenly, she bares her teeth as though the admission physically pains her, but no, it's only mentally. It's only embarrassment.
"I told you it was selfish," she says as though the words themselves are stained. "It's why the debugging manual matters. How long to still see– across the void."
Her eyes go down again, and she fastidiously begins to pull on her other boot. He wasn't wrong, either. She wants to feel connected again, for as long as she might be able. "Do you want to practice it?" Asi asks almost dismissively.
“We've only been connected a handful of hours at this point,” Elliot says, not dwelling long on having guessed wrong because her emotions tell him that he was right to some extent. “And we'll probably need another local co-host to make the attempt either way. With the physical touch restriction of overclocking my ability to set new links, Wright probably won't be able to give us a boost on this one.” When they had added Silas to the network to break their code, everybody had to be in contact with both Elliot and Silas to speed up the process.
Something grim which has been simmering in the background comes to the front. “«We also don't have a way back,»” he admits, “«so you're probably stuck with me either way.»” He nudges his heatsink rock to even out the warmth.
Asi's cold fingers lose track of her laces as she freezes, looking up to Elliot with suckerpunched shock. "What?" escapes her so unexpectedly it almost doesn't carry the fog of breath with it.
“This was sold to all of us as a one-way trip,” Elliot admits. “We don't have the combination of abilities we need to smash our way through the old-fashioned way so, unless we come up with a totally different method of crossing, we're stuck here.”
“I was lied to,” he adds, “by the guy running the show. He said he had information for me, but the only person I even remotely trust in the operation says that was never true. Not that I wouldn't have done it anyway, considering the stakes. But, yeah.”
“Know any good retirement destinations?” he asks with a laugh that's more sad than amused.
Asi shifts her feet one and then the other to point herself directly at Elliot better, fixing him with a bewildered expression. "ならば、何のために…" She trails off long enough to shake her head, but doesn't leave him hanging long. "«Then what's even the point? Why are we going to Alaska? I thought there was something that was supposed to save the world, there. Your world. If you can't even get back…»"
Her voice has raised slightly. Her heart is pounding. She keeps her language contained, at least, rather that saying something most anyone nearby could acutely pick up on.
“We're here for information,” he explains quietly, “and we have a device for transmitting it. Assuming it works, I don't know that it's actually been tested. I suppose, worst case scenario, I can read all of the code to Wright line by line.” He's feeling the emotions that form around Asi’s hammering heart, trying not to get wrapped up in them. Continuing to be okay with never going home takes constant effort. He really would like to see Merlyn and Rue again, even if the latter understandably hates him for getting married.
“I mean we're crafty,” he admits, “and resourceful, but the totality of our current options for crossing back over is ‘wing it once we're there.’”
Why does Asi even care, she asks herself silently as she stares off, trying to thread calm back into her being and get her bouncing heel to still again. She drops the deliberate touch to the Network, closes herself off as much as possible. Withdraws, or tries to, as she feels the feedback between herself and Elliot beginning to static. Her head shakes suddenly, and she looks down at the cool, the cold, the dark at her feet. "Sorry, Wright," she mutters, sure that the emotional noise must be bleeding.
"Okay," she says to herself as she tries to call herself back to center. "okay." It even halfway seems to be working. After several breaths, a void opens up into herself, leaving nothing but the marinating of the news, all the negative emotions falling down to be processed later. There's just an echo of what was as she pulls herself calm.
With somewhat clearer eyes, she looks back to Elliot again, looking at him directly. "That sucks," she states bluntly. Hands on her knees, she begins to lean back, righting herself from where she'd been tensing up. Asi blinks slowly. "I've been mad… all this time," she acknowledges something that might be obvious. "Thinking you people were going to show up, take what you needed, and go back to your better world."
"I hate you a lot less, if you're stuck here with us," she proffers, for whatever that's worth. A mirthless breath of a chuckle escapes her, a bit of the stunnedness from before creeping back in with that.
Elliot notices that Asi has some of the same emotional coping mechanisms that he does, for better or worse. He chuckles a bit more freely when she does. “Good to know there was a reason behind all the wrath you broadcast through the network,” he says. “I've just been assuming that it was because of all of my egregious social blunders.”
He'd occasionally felt curious, but never pressed for explanations for the way she felt. Now it's just some relief and companionable affection.
Asi winces visibly, more self-aware than she was before. "Ah," leaves her more like a sound of pain than one of realization. "悪い3."
For a moment, she says nothing more, but then she admits, "If you're stuck here, if the Pelago isn't to your liking, there's places warmer. When we went on the trip where we found that lockbox last year, Japan's weather was still normal. Hawaii was still a tropic. Can't recommend the Panama/Colombia area, personally. There were machine sharks in the water hunting boats - can't imagine what might be on land still out there." She idles for a moment, and mumbles, "There were pirates near Haiti - a rather large oil spill still spoiling the water in the Gulf, to hear it told…"
"But if you don't mind the weather, Anchor might not be a terrible place to stay for a while," she supposes. "If you're looking for something smaller, Goodnews settlement farther west on the coast of Alaska was also a pleasant find." A beat, before she frowns. "… Chicago wasn't terrible, either, even if it gave me a bad feeling. Similar to Delphi." She wonders about that. "Gotten too used to the sea, maybe." Being able to escape on a whim, the rock of the waves beside.
“Guy running New Chicago is a gangster back home,” Elliot says. “He's been cleaning up his image, but he's the guy you go to if you have less than legal pursuits these days. He works out of Staten Island in the Safe Zone. So overall I think you got the vibes right. Does seem like a place I could settle into, all things considered. I'm handy. Could be running the place in no time.” He feels amused with himself and unserious in a sad way. He'd be separated from Wright until they died.
The inverse, of course, is that if it's possible to make the crossing the old fashioned way—no shear suits needed—Asi could cross with them. He doesn't mention it, because it would be cruel to suggest something he can't possibly guarantee. “Never been to Hawaii,” he admits. “Suppose I could use a destination vacation.”
As much as she can, Asi tries to shed the immediate rejection of a mention to anything that isn't here. Tries to immediately pull her coat in around the feeling that crawls up her at the mention of a Safe Zone, a term she barely remembers from Silas' adventures. She shakes her head to herself as she sloughs it all off. It's just a conversation, Asi. It's not that his world is more important than yours.
"They were very kind to us out there," she says of Hawaii. "Insular, at first, but welcomed us after we told them who we were. Somehow, when we said we were only passing through, establishing trade, they opened their doors a little wider, it felt like." Asi even chuckles at that memory, glad to touch its warmth for a moment. "Of all the places, there was the hardest to move on from. We ended up staying there for… about a month?" Her eyes narrow. "Spent Christmas there, and it was a hell of a lot warmer than it is here in the dead of summer." Her breath tumbles from her visibly after that.
"Lots of stories exchanged…" she murmurs as the space around the fire dances with visions of places past. For some reason, she's compelled to point one out in particular, drawing the prolonged moment into a single coded word: "希望."
She swings her arms back around in front, one hand hooking around the other wrist as she captures tented knees between her forearms. "I'm probably a few minutes early," Asi concedes. "But happy birthday."
The moon and the stars, the balmy sea breeze and the sands, still warm from the clear tropical day; it's a perfect moment. Then Asi settles down beside him, and proves that even perfect moments can get better. Happy birthday sees him give her a bit of a side-eye, but even that's tinged with amusement. "You know," Silas says after a moment. "I kinda hated my birthday for a long time," he says, in what is most definitely an understatement. "A few years ago, I never would've imagined I'd end up havin' one like this."
"But you know… this really is one. A happy birthday, I mean," he says, taking the bottle and studying it. He chuckles. "Guess we finally ended up goin' somewhere warm after all."
The quirk of her head to one side, accompanied by the raise of her brows and a thin smile just between them indicates Asi's amused agreement. So they did end up going somewhere warm. "Let's hope it's a sign," she says. "Warmer weather, happier birthdays… the world might spit in our faces for daring, but hey, we can hope anyway."
She finds herself startled suddenly as the white-coated cat that's made this whole trip along with them chooses that particular moment to find a seat in her difficult-to-access lap, startling her and causing her to break the hold around her shins. Blinking, she lets out a surprised scoff and knows not what else to do but allow the invasion of space, allowing the cat to lie down against her. "«I don't know what you think you're doing»," Asi whispers to it in her native tongue. "«I'm not fishing, and we're not friends.»"
Alas, the cat cares not. It even begins purring after finding itself cosy against her, her arm shifting to better support it with a half-hearted scowl.
"I'd love to believe there will be more like these," she murmurs abruptly. "Birthdays. Days. Not here, but just… generally."
"Better," Asi clarifies and lifts her eyes to the sea, taking in a deep breath only to sigh out. After all, it was a tall order.
Silas keeps his silence as Asi speaks, smiling faintly; his grin broadens a bit with delight as the cat joins them. "Well," he says at last. "I'm gonna try to keep at it. Having more, I mean. More and better. And if the world spits in our faces…"
He trails off for a moment, looking out at the sea… then he chuckles, glancing back to Asi. "Won't be the first time."
"But if nothing else… we've started something. Here, and at the Gardens. Maybe… maybe it's something that'll make things better."
This was her hope, hard-fought with dirt and blood under its nails. This was the world she fought for, to excavate out of all the ruin they were surrounded by.
"ま、いいか," she supposes, trying to brush it off. Anyway.
Elliot looks distant, nodding as he remembers what she's pinned to the Index. He feels that hope and uncertainty, it reverberates back to her. “That does seem nice,” he says. As good a place to die as any. “And I did learn how to swim before deploying; might as well live somewhere I can use that skill.”
He gives the rock another nudge at the fire. “Are we sure it's actually summer?” he asks, jamming his hands deeper into his pockets. “I'm trying not to imagine how brutal actual winter would be up here. I'd say people should have moved south by now, but I'm from Massachusetts and I could say the same thing about my own ancestors.”
Asi only snorts, only an echo of how humorous she finds that to be flowing from her. It's overpowered by her deep, deep agreement. "Other places aren't so bad. Northern North America, though– the Stormfront was created by weather controllers so powerful they changed the jet stream. Pulled Arctic air further South, made it colder. Accidentally created the storm that never ends."
Her nose wrinkles as she looks up to Elliot, expressing joylessly, "This feels worse, though. This year in particular. Delphi I would have expected to be warmer." After a beat, she glances back behind her into the dark, a small frown given in contemplation to the convoy and to the gathering of tents before she looks back to her rock. "With this new technology, I think I'll risk being stepped on in my sleep tonight." As in, risk sleeping on Frizzel's floor.
Elliot wonders if the magnetosphere here is in similarly bad condition to the one back home, and if it could affect the weather here. He doesn't have a way to research it without explaining the whole idea to themselves through type, and doesn't want to bring Asi’s mood further down by speculating aloud.
“One thing I should mention,” he notes while testing the heat of the stone, “is that in the past we've experienced dreams together across the network.” It's never come up before because he hasn't let anybody stay linked for more than twelve hours at a time this whole trip.
“It's rare,” he says, “but not out of the realm of possibility. This can include nightmares, which aren't fun for anyone. We have an Index tag for that situation, which sometimes helps pull us into lucidity in those occasions. Coda.” The memory streamed reveals a much younger Elliot and Wright standing in a war-torn library, writing poetry. The memory is remembered in composite, from both perspectives simultaneously.
“I figured I should tell you that before you agree to go to sleep while linked.”
Asi blinks once, then looks back to Elliot as she's in the process of rolling her rock toward herself, away from the fire. She pauses, then reluctantly allows, "Maybe we hold the link starting tomorrow, then. I'm driving again tomorrow, and exhausted after today– can't afford to be caught in someone else's nightmare." Or cause someone else to be caught in her own, should she have one. They happened, after all.
"But tomorrow," she repeats, this time with more confidence.
Elliot reaches for his own stone, but decides he'll let it go a bit longer. “Tomorrow works too,” he says.
“Downturn,” he adds. “Stay warm,” Wright says, watching from her new home as Elliot throws another log in the bedroom fireplace.
She feels him chuckle as he closes the glass door. “If I run out of firewood I'll just chop down the oak out back.” He throws back the covers on his bed.
Asi smiles despite herself, and turns away to hide it, hefted, hot rock rolling on the palm of her gloves carefully before she shoves it into her pocket.