• Ϯѻɼϯʉɼɛɗ • →ʂlคvɛ ɼp← f u l l

[iiGypsy_Jazz]

Poke  

[SilentShadowDreamer]

Curiosity pressed his hands onto her shoulders, awkwardly standing there as though he wasn't quite sure what to do with a sobbing young girl. No surprise there--he probably didn't.

"Passion," he said once it sounded like she had begun to cry herself out, "we'll go together and find him again." His voice had changed a little; it sounded colder. Determined. "We'll make him see reason if it takes all three of those damn days. If the master said what you say he did, and I have no reason to doubt you, then that's what he wants." With a slow shake of his head, he added, "I should have known the master would find something. He loves him, you know. He thinks we don't see it but we do. Well, I mean, Reticence doesn't. But we do."

He let go of one of her shoulders and turned away, keeping his other hand on her arm to steady her. "Let's go."

 

[iiGypsy_Jazz]

Passion held her breath, watching him as the rest of the tears slid down her cheeks. With her lip jutted out she couldn't have looked more like a puppy if she tried. She nodded slowly, but looked tp the ground.

She didn't think they could convince him. Not with the way things had been going. For as excitable as she was, she was very very close to being broken.

She chewed her bottom lip, and let Curiosity lead her, but her feet dragged now. The exhaustion of her hysterics, no doubt.

She din't know how long she had been at this strange and slightly awful place, but she never imagined that she would have felt so close to these complete strangers. Maybe it was a bad thing...caring this much. This is what she debated in hard silence during their walk.  

[iiGypsy_Jazz]

((Do you think we'd be able to fit in any tests on her? I'm starting to get less fond of the hysterics I created in her personality. lol))  

[SilentShadowDreamer]

Curiosity gave her a smile. It had a hard, pained edge to it, but it was still not unkind. He was by nature a gentle boy. "Come on. We'll go find Naïveté first--he listens best to her. Who knows why. But anyway, we ought to be able to talk him into it if we can--"

He paused abruptly, his head tilting as though listening. By this point, Passion ought to know what that meant. "Oh. Well, we might have to put that off a bit. The master is looking for you. Come on, then."

Sliding a friendly arm around her shoulders, he walked along with her. "Maybe he wants to add something to what he told you before."

Once he'd walked her to the door, he gave her a pat on the shoulder. "Just say my name when you get out. I'll come fetch you, and we'll track Reticence down, the three of us. Then we'll talk some sense into him. Don't worry too much."

He left her there in front of the door, which stood heavy and intimidating in front of her. It wasn't the room that Marc had called her into earlier. Just from the door, it looked colder. Bigger.

And dangerous.  

[iiGypsy_Jazz]

Passion stood blinking at the door infront of her for a good few seconds, before tentatively giving it a knock.

Had she been inside this room before? She didn't think so. It felt different to her...detached somehow from the other rooms. She was confused and her cheeks were still tear stained when she opened the door a crack, "Master?"
She didn't know that she liked calling him that, but it was all she really had to go by.

"You wished to see me?" Her eyes danced around the room, taking it all in at once. She suspected the worst, but then she had somewhat been looking forward to the worst. Was that odd? It must be odd.  

[SilentShadowDreamer]

Marcelius gestured absently for her to come in as the door swung open. He didn't seem at all surprised to see her there, which would make sense under the circumstances.

Once she entered the room, he directed her into a tall, thin tube similar to the washing-tube she'd discovered in her earlier ramblings--could it really only have been a few cycles ago?--all without saying a word. Only once she had entered it did he begin to speak.

"This may cause some minor emotional distress," he said, entering something into the command console on his desk. "Do not be alarmed, and do your best to keep your mind clear."

He paused for a moment, and then added, "This is not a test, at least not at the moment, but it is experience for what you will end up doing upon my return." (He devoutly hoped she would be doing no such thing, if he had played his cards right.) "It is merely a neurological examination of sorts, simply to set your baseline. Now. There will be a flash of light. Please keep your eyes directed ahead and do not attempt to look at it."

As he spoke, flashes of light would appear at the corners of her eyes--one red, the other blue. This would continue throughout the test.  

[iiGypsy_Jazz]

For fear of whatever it was going wrong, Passion kept her mouth shut. She tried in the mightiest of fashions to keep her eyes forward but keeping her mind clear was another thing altogether.

She simply could not. What was he doing? Was this going to hurt? What if it went wrong? What was there to go wrong? Where was Reticence? Could they change his mind?

Her thoughts simply could not be contained, they bloomed in every which way.

She only had a few more moments, and that was what she decided to repeat to herself, in her head.  

[SilentShadowDreamer]

That was when the images started.

Pictures of her family before they'd given her up, of the orphanage, of every face she recognized and some she might not. They would flicker in and out of her view, speaking fragments of her memories.

Then places. Caverns. Forests. The orphanage again. The black stone and frail bushes of the courtyard where she had been with Curiosity and Naïveté. The house itself. Everything flashed by in a whirl of colour, barely giving anyone watching enough time to focus.

All the time, the lights kept flashing, and the tube around Passion got darker.  

[iiGypsy_Jazz]

Claustrophobia set in and Passion felt like she was caving in on herself. Each picture cast forth such different emotion that her mind was having trouble keeping up. Anger crashed with grace and fear.
Was she supposed to be standing still? She couldn't remember, but she was pulling her hair again, now. Much harder than she had in the past. Any tighter and the handfuls would be pulled free. The ache in her core pushed tears from the corner of her eyes, just ever so slightly. "Stopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstop..." She was muttering under her breath.

Anger.
Fear
Happiness
Fear
Contentment
Anger
Gracefulness
Anger
Happiness
FEAR
ANGER
FEAR
HAPPINESS
GRIEF
ANGER

She felt light headed. Was she getting enough air? She tried to focus on her breath, and ended up closing her eyes. In and out. They were just pictures. This was stupid. Just a stupid experiment. He couldn't MAKE her look. She squeezed her eyes shut. How had he gotten those images? Things only she knew...some things she didn't even know, herself....  

[iiGypsy_Jazz]

bump  

[SilentShadowDreamer]

Marcelius didn't make any move to stop her from yanking at her hair, though he made a note to himself that he would have to do something about that if...if. If she was still here on his return.

Her emotional cycle was moving faster and more erratically than he had expected, or indeed than would be normal in a girl of her age. (She wasn't the first and might not be the last.) The readings of the machine played out in front of him on the desk. There were faults. Of course there were. He'd overpaid for her, so of course there would be faults.

Gratifyingly, they would be easily controlled for with a bit of work. Not that it would be his concern for very long, he hoped, but if she failed him, at least there was that.

Inside the tube, images began to flash brighter. Now they were different, images of things Passion had never seen but might have, losses she hadn't sustained but could have. Friends. Family. Naïveté and Curiosity and Reticence. They died or turned away or simply disappeared before her eyes over and over...and over.

Naïveté swayed and fell under the feeding birds. Curiosity stumbled back into the room with one of the Keshval's short blades buried in his back. Reticence was led away from the house in the chains of the slave-market and placed in the hands of another Keshval, who stood waiting.

It was on that image that the machine beeped a final time and lightened, all the pictures fading away as the blue and red lights stopped flashing. The door to the tube slid open, revealing Marc still working in the console. "You may step out," he said absently.  

[iiGypsy_Jazz]

Passion cradled her head. This wasn't what she had been expecting. It wasn't what she was expecting at all.She didn't understand what she was feeling.

Tears swam down her cheeks by the time the images of her comrades showed up on the screen, "No."

Hard resolve, "NO."

The last image, "NO!" She shook her head back and forth. "Nononononononono you're wrong. You're wrong, you're wrong! Why are you doing this!?"
When she was done thrashing around she held a small lock of her own hair-detached in her fist, and when the tube opened she dropped it to the floor in a dazed kind of state.

She looked at him with a sharpness in her eyes that had not been there before. There were times when it seemed like she had the inability to be mean or menacing, and most of the time she came off as a silly girl. This was not one of those times.

"You will reap what you sew, I hope you know that. Every action brings a repercussion." Her voice was a low growl. Something he never would have heard from her before.  

[iiGypsy_Jazz]

bumppppppppp