8/7 late night/early morning; video; @girl.albatross

[enchangement]

A new planet.

[ The video is dark, too close, zoomed in on someone's brown eyes. They blink. The image zooms out to a girl with dark brown hair, long, unkempt, and in her face. She's wearing a knit dress over a long-sleeved top, which hides her hands from the camera. Her eyes are both tired but startled and wide. Like she's just seen a ghost in the middle of a nightmare. She's sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor of a cabin. ]

A new puzzle to learn.

[ She taps the lens on the smartphone with a fingertip, three times. Her face has a gentle expression of consideration, tinged with some sadness. ]

It's all going to go terribly before it gets any better, and then go terribly again.

[ The girl starts chewing on her bottom lip and turns her gaze away from the phone, frowning. There are some pointy party hats in fleshy colors on the floor, each one several feet from the others and each one is pointing on a different axis.]

She doesn't think that's very surprising to anyone by now.

The food's gone rotten like the floorboards like the card.

[ She returns her attention to the camera, picks up from her lap and flashes the card at the phone's camera before tossing it to the side. ]

The Albatross Girl has arrived unwhole and hale; her various missing pieces still unaccounted for. Why do the hats sing?

[ She sticks out her tongue; clearly that was an unpleasant experience. ]

Does she have to live alone?

Comments

un: @wei.wuxian

[mannerless]

( in the video appears a man in a black hooded sweatshirt despite the weather, his hair tied high up off his neck as if in some small attempt to counteract the sweatshirt's heat. he appears otherwise unfazed by it, as is his way.

his head tilts just slightly, lips curling at the edges even as his brow knits with puzzlement. )

Singing? Is that what they're doing? ( ...oh, but that's hardly the most important part of the post. wei wuxian clears his throat a little, righting his head, and his expression is incrementally more serious when he says, )

If you tell me about these 'various missing pieces', I can try to account for them. And, ah, surely you don't have to live alone - there are plenty of people here, just pick one that looks friendless and all by their lonesome and tell them you're their new roommate.

[enchangement]

Screaming songs to a tune together. [ Nosewrinkle. It's unpleasant. ] They're a terrible gift.

[ The offer to find missing things is kind, but River isn't sure where either of them would begin. ] They were gone before she got here. The stopgap and controls, putting the stop to fight, flight, and the lack of freezing.

Is it that easy? [ She glances around the cabin. ] She woke up alone.

[mannerless]

( 'they're a terrible gift.' his nose wrinkles in solidarity. ) Downright awful.

( as for the rest... ) We all woke up alone - er, most of us, anyway. That doesn't mean we have to stay alone.

And about your pieces. Do you think you could draw them, if I found you ink and paper?

[enchangement]

Was there also a cake? Hers is ugly, [ she says frankly, because she doesn't know what else to say about it. ] But smells like chocolate.

[ She's uncertain about actually eating it though.

Could she draw her missing pieces? The girl brightens up visibly. ]

Yes! But a doctor would be needed to put them back, if they're here.

[mannerless]

( ah, she seems quite excited about drawing her pieces. he's definitely a bit more confused about the nature of said pieces, what with the 'doctor' comment - are they organs of some sort? how is she functioning without?? fascinating questions, quite honestly. )

Aha - a surgeon is a doctor, right? We have a surgeon! So all we'd need are to find these pieces. I can probably fetch you some paper in the actual morning, ( not this godsforsaken hour, certainly not, ) and we'll go from there, hm?

( oh, but backtracking: )

And! There was a cake, actually - do you want to see it? It's actually quite pretty, hold on - ( he drifts out of the frame a little as he gets up and heads for the kitchen, the backdrop changing behind him... and then the camera's pointing to his own cake, the top right corner of which has been eaten. ) Shame to cut into it, honestly. Perhaps an ugly cake is easier to eat?

( the camera turns back to wei ying now, who... may or may not have stolen a finger of frosting and is now eating that, whoops. )

[enchangement]

A surgeon, [ River confirms with a nod of her head, though her eyes show that she's a little bit afraid of that, ] one who is good and patient but she makes no promises that she can do it beyond setting the ink to paper.

[ Be good. Or patient. With any doctor who isn't her brother, and she knows her brother isn't here.

River turns her camera to her cake - it's a bit sad and very pink. She pokes it with her own finger, tastes the frosting, and makes a disgusted face. ]

Too sweet to be enjoyed, too pink to be regaled.

[mannerless]

( oh gods, another nose-wrinkle at that cake. ) You weren't kidding about the 'ugly'. Have you considered throwing it, at a tree maybe? ( that sounds much more satisfying than actually eating it.

a dismissive little wave of a hand. ) It'll be fine, I'll bring you a piece of mine with the papers and ink. Perhaps the part that says 'things', you seem like a 'things' sort of girl. ( a brief brow-knit and, ) Ah, which reminds me. Does the Albatross Girl have a name she might share?

[enchangement]

[ It's so bad! River hates it. ] It's an atrocity to the sense of sight. Have the trees done anything to deserve it?

She likes things. Things have importance and memory.

River. Tam. [ Another of her own nosewrinkles. ] They gave her brother a gorram normal name; he's Simon but he's not here.

[mannerless]

Well, I don't know what 'gorram' is, but I like 'River' a lot better than 'Simon' anyway.

( he nearly says that his own brother's here so hers might show up too, but he hasn't locked this thread and any mention of jiang cheng is liable to call him thundering in at any hour to say- something, something rude that river doesn't need to deal with.

so instead a pause, at which point his body takes the very rude liberty to yawn (which he covers vaguely with a hand). )

Well, miss River Tam - are you alright to sleep where you are? Because if I'm bringing you such things in the morning, I should probably shut my eyes for a bit before then.

un: @oa

[hierophante]

[Video is a harrowing prospect. It carries too much memory -- flashing lights, shouting reporters -- and endures too long. What lives dies. What is recorded is embalmed, reduplicated, echoed out across space and time. The OA is already many places at once; to glory in that fact is a complicated thing, a contradictory push-pull, a thing of caveats.

Still, it feels important to give in turn. Thus the compromise: if she cannot dictate with absolute certainty where this image goes, she can at least dictate what is seen. An eye, stormy in the half-dark. A cheekbone, the edge of a brow; when she turns her head, an ear, the blonde strands tucked behind it, and past her shoulder, a darkened window with a little rectangle of reflected light: the phone's screen, a device seeing itself.]

I don't know.

[She looks back at the screen, adjusts the angle of the phone; the camera focuses, struggles to account for the changing light.]

I don't know why the hats sing. I don't know the solution, either. Maybe a bad joke.

[The hats? The puzzle? Its solution? Any of them; all of them.]

I do know we don't have to be alone.

[There's a beat; the set of her brow, what of it can be seen, communicates a grim certainty, an old and earnest hurt. Then, softly:]

What makes you think there are pieces missing?

[enchangement]

[ River likes that this person has done the same thing, beginning with an image that is difficult to parse by a camera used to having a few feet between its lens and the subject of the soon to be image. She holds the camera close to her own face in response, eyes and eyebrows and hairline visible but not much else.

It's probably kind of cute. ]

Holding the fate of others in your hand and feeling them less precious than water on a desert becomes a sense of humor that smells worse than what was once...meat? [ A quiet gagging sound and the distinct noise of the door of a fridge sealing itself shut. ]

Good. Alone lets the echoes in, the same sound warped beyond aural recognition. There are new songs here, to her listening mind, but a common thread of this place is bad marches in the refrain.

She knows the pieces are gone because she was there when they took them away.

[hierophante]

It does.

[If a person can misidentify power, they can misidentify anything. Humour too.

That, and the silence is loud -- OA closes her eyes, sighing softly; it's late and she's addled. Finding threads of meaning in River's peculiar mode of speaking feels almost natural, but that's dangerous: her own conclusions bear questioning. Knowing how to respond is harder and perhaps more treacherous still.

Her grip loosens; the camera slides downwards, framing her jawline, the shadowed column of her neck.]

It's your choice. The story is yours.

[She swallows, lips parting at the end to release a soft tut.]

I needed to find a new angle on mine. The places where the pieces used to be; I had to find a way to look at them directly before I realised that they'd changed, grown over. That the things that were taken wouldn't fit anymore; that I was... a new whole.

[It's a strange, complicated thing, to accept that one is inexorably changed, to accept that one would make the same mistakes over again, knowing their outcome, to continue the same trajectory. She has. She does. Every time she comes out a little different. Every time she finds another loose thread and pulls herself just a bit closer to freedom.

To ask someone else to do that kind of work, that kind of paring down, would be cruel, and so she isn't. Doesn't.

OA returns to herself, extricates herself from the tangle of language long enough to redirect the camera's gaze back to her eye.]

I just mean... you get to decide what you are. Maybe you already know. Is-- you, is that too close? It can be hard, being stared at head-on. Should I be talking about her?

[The gentle distance of the third person is something OA can give, if it would be a balm.]

[enchangement]

[ The places where the pieces used to be brings to River's mind the image of herself, years younger, happier and open and just wanting to learn before The Academy changed everything, and all her dreams turned to ash.

But she's a survivor. She's survived this long. She can, she will, continue to survive as long as she possibly can. Just because she can't return to the child she was once doesn't mean she can't still be.

River traces the line of OA's throat on the small screen. ]

It's hard to tell stories when the thread is unwinding unraveling as they speak; she can be seen but cannot see herself, to force the language into the first sense of self means...

[ She stops, suddenly, breathing hard. It means things she isn't prepared to deal with, pulling her fractured mind into a semblance of a whole. ]

She's not ready.

[ The seed splitting her apart at the planes continues to exist. ]

She knows what she is sometimes. A girl, broken and torn, but it still smiles like a girl, laughs like a girl, cries like a girl. [ She doesn't know how lucid she'll be long term, without Simon, but that isn't something she can control so it also isn't something she's focused on at the moment. ] Special and different.

[hierophante]

It's okay.

[A reminder, not a platitude.]

It's okay, you don't have to force it.

[OA doesn't even know if it can be forced. Just... invited. Coaxed. Encouraged. One may leave one's door open to it.

She hesitates, turning her head as though to ensure she's alone. All of this, the seeing and not seeing, the possibility of interception, of others listening in -- it makes her skin crawl. She'd lived under those conditions for years, but however accustomed she'd been to the cameras then, distance has forced her to reassess how she feels about it all.

In lieu of her face, a few strands of hair are just visible, and beyond, that windowpane again, the square of light reflected in its glass. A window in a window. Doors in doors. One path is many paths.]

It took me a long time to find the word for it. For the word to find me.

[Soft, like the sharing of a secret, which it is. Like all secrets, it needs time to germinate, and River... River is frazzled, possibly -- probably -- frightened. It's not the hour for metaphysics.]

Right now we're here. Is there anything I could do to help make that easier?

[enchangement]

[ River takes in a series of breaths in short order, in then out again, regulating the one thing she can control since her brain is...the way it is.

Is this person right? Will the word find her? She has no reason to believe that they're wrong, that's for sure, and OA's method of speaking has gone the furthest to make her comfortable so far, though that's probably unintentional on everyone's behalf. ]

Witch, [ she tries out, tasting the shape of the word. ] Psychic. [ She pops the p at the beginning. ] Crazy.

[ They all feel similar. Maybe it's a new, unheard word for her. Maybe someone else needs to say it. ]

Tell her... River frowns and considers, tilting her head like a bird. The ending, the worst, the insurmountable. These are tests. They're always tests, but this is a different planet. [ Her words rush together, jumbling a bit. She's afraid to ask: ] Are we close to the Blue Sun?

[hierophante]

[The words are... well, most of them are familiar. The path is not precisely the same as the one she's wandered, but from where she's standing, some of the landscape looks familiar. There's little enough time to stew, though -- the question bears more consideration.

Blue sun? There comes a rustling of clothing as OA shifts in her seat, drawing one knee up to her chest. Metaphor, literal, or somewhere in between?]

Mm, I don't-- I don't know what that is. I don't think so.

[The rest is... always tests is resonant, different planet less so, but it still plucks sufficiently many chords of familiarity that they don't set her as wildly off-kilter. After all, she's travelled too.]

I think...

[Another rustle; the frame shifts -- an eye, a pensive brow.]

Maybe this doesn't mean anything to you, but as far as I know, we're on Earth.

[A beat, then a gentle offering:]

Person?

[Maybe start there. Maybe no more or less than that. Each one a universe, each one precious.]

[enchangement]

Earth that was, [ she whispers, suddenly afraid, suddenly in awe. River's eyes go wide. How is such a thing possible? Traveling through time and space, reversed and reserved for storytelling in her experience, until now.

She wonders what Simon would think, to wake up here. She hopes he won't and simultaneously misses him greatly.

River hums in consideration. ]

The Blue Sun shines at the Core. Thousands of Earths, reformatted and retrofit for planetary use as a new Gaia. The origin becomes myth, and it's all forgotten again in a new expansion of the mortal horizon. No aliens were harmed in the making of this story.

[ But there are Reavers. She shudders. ]

An alignment of stars; a wormhole or a hole in reality different than that? How does she get here and now?

video; un @fran.bow.dagenhart

[keeperofkeys]

It's wonderful to see another girl my age here! Or you look around my age, anyway. [Fran smiles and waves hello. Somewhere in the background, a cat meows.] Oh, Mister Midnight says hello, too!

My name is Fran. Did you just get here? I love the way you talk. Like very pretty riddles.

Do you not want to live alone? We could be roommates, if you'd like! If you like cats, of course, since Mister Midnight would be there, too.

[enchangement]

[ River waves, a slow spreading of her fingers and then the articulation of every joint, extended, down, extended, up again. ]

She woke up here, in the now, of less than an hour ago.

Never had a cat. [ Her parents weren't ones for pets. The Academy wouldn't have allowed it anyway. But she's standing, now, and gathering her few things up in her arms, holding the phone and scattering the video to the beams of the cabin's ceiling. ] Do you sing to him?

[keeperofkeys]

You know, I never thought to sing to him. But I suppose I very well could! Mostly I talk to him. We have the most wonderful conversations.

Oh -- [Fran looks closer at the camera, as though she might see where her new friend has gone.] You've disappeared. Is everything all right?

[enchangement]

The longer she's alone the worse it'll become. Need more than the eight or twenty senses to gather the proper information.

[ But still. Her new friend? Is worried that something has happened, so. She sets the phone down on the floor, next to her bare feet, bending forward until her hair touches her toes and obscures the camera before she transitions into a handstand. ]

Still here. What does he say?

[keeperofkeys]

Are you coming over? How wonderful! There are plenty of bedrooms for you to take! Mister Midnight and I share one, so there are four left, if I've counted right.

[She tilts her head a little, to try and look at the upside down girl a little better.]

We tell each other stories. He's none too pleased about being here. He'd much rather be at home, and so would I. But as long as we're here, we agreed we ought to make friends.

[enchangement]

The offer was extended, she won't turn back now.

[ It's empty here, smells rotten, and feels weird. She'd rather feel weird with someone else in her line of sight than not. She's already crazy, she doesn't need any help going further in that direction. ]

A friend. [ She says it almost wistfully. ] A return to education and testing and a return to social niceties. She'll do better than best at being a good one.

[keeperofkeys]

How exciting! I promise not to give you any tests, but I bet there's loads we can learn from each other. There's always something wonderful to learn from new friends.

Does she have a name? I don't think you've said.

[enchangement]

[ A new friend who won't give her tests. Well. River is certain that tests will happen whether they like it or not, this all seems like a big experiment. ]

River.

That's her name.