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. )

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?

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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[keeperofkeys]

River's a very pretty name. [The camera shakes a little as Fran stands, moving to stand outside the cabin]

If you're coming over, I'm in one of the cabins that's closer to the woods. I'll wait out here so you can find me!

[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.]

& action;

[enchangement]

[ River pauses and turns her face as if feeling out a wind that doesn't exist within the confines of the cabin's four walls (or at least, not very strongly, though the place is rickety). She closes her eyes and listens, nodding. She has a sense of what direction to go in, now. Someone with her name on their mind and the name she'd give...Fran...someone waiting to see her.

She can't hold the thread of it for very long, in her head, but River appreciates it nonetheless. ]

That helps, [ she murmurs, and then turns off the video to finish gathering up her few things (boots, a jacket, a pair of dinosaurs she borrowed from Wash and now has to figure out returning).

It doesn't take long for the barefoot girl to make her way to the cabin by the lake, where Fran is waiting. She calls out: ] No extra hands for waving.

& action all the way down;

[keeperofkeys]

[The phone gets tucked into the pocket of her jeans. It's not hard to spot her, barefoot as well, with a lime green shirt that comes down to mid thigh.

When she sees River, she waves enough for the both of them, looking deeply excited to meet her brand new friend and roommate face to face.] Can I help you carry anything?

[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.

[enchangement]

Just a jumble, [ she admits, because she could have arranged the items in her hands better but didn't. She feels a little bad for whomever wakes up in the cabin after her, with that garish pink cake and rotting contents of the kitchen, but she has her jacket and boots and dinosaurs in a haphazard pile in her arms, which, after a moment, she simply extends in Fran's direction. ]

A small piece of a life in motion, pinwheeling through the stars and their conjoined powers.

[keeperofkeys]

You talk a little like the people of Ithersta do. I think it's wonderful. It reminds me of the nice time I had there. Even though I was a tree.

[The jacket is slung over one shoulder, dinosaurs under her arm, and boots held in one hand. That gives her a free arm to half-hug River in greeting.] I'm so glad you're here. It does get a little lonely, in these cabins by yourself. I'm very happy to have a roommate!

[enchangement]

A tree, [ she murmurs into the hug, closing her eyes and swaying in place. Being a tree sounds nice, actually; the number of traumatic things that can happen to a tree seems much more limited than what's happened to her.

Well. There are, on second thoughts, a lot of things that could happen to a tree. Fire. Flood. Infestation. Rot.

She shudders and pulls away from the hug. ]

Hopefully it won't be a disaster in the quiet places.

[keeperofkeys]

Why might it be a disaster? Come in, by the way. Let's get you settled in. [When the hug ends, she takes River by the hand to lead her into the cabin. Mister Midnight comes out of hiding to sniff at River's ankles before rubbing against them in greeting.

Fran sets the boots, jacket, and dinosaurs down on the table and spreads her arms wide, doing a little spin to show off the dining area-slash-living room space.]

This is my home! And now it's yours, too.