Well. It doesn't last long! Instead, it turns into—
Your student Paula is pleading with you—the expression of anxiety and fear on her face doesn't suit her strong features, for once. You are doing your best to assure her that things will be fine—that even if it is fearsome, the both of you have been preparing for this, and soon, the work will be over. Soon, she'll be able to go forth into the night confidently, no longer something instinctively set apart from people.
She's so much like you, in many ways—someone who has difficulty getting along with peers, but with great ambitions, and someone who has already suffered much—that you're sure she'll be able to do it. You're sure.
It's easy to let time slip by you, meditating in isolation in the darkness of the Wyrm's Nest, the intersection of ley lines. Your spirit is resolute, even at times there are strange sounds and visions—even when you feel things pulling at the core of you, like they intend to tear at your soul, or like you are blurring into nonexistence. You know yourself, and you know you can acknowledge these things and let them pass by, for the full day in the darkness that it requires. You are sure that Paula can, as well.
When you emerge, though, she's unsteady, panicky; she's confused and recoils from you, when you step closer. It was a strange experience; perhaps it shouldn't be surprising. She has always met your expectations, and has always stepped up when she faltered; she may take some time to decompress, but she'll be fine, you're sure. And the two of you have an event to dress for and go to.
At the charity event, you feel so much more at ease among people than you have in years—and you're sure that your research has paid off. The inherent distance, the wariness that people have around you—it's vanished. One step closer to being more human.
Paula, however—you see her from across the room, and she's not good at socializing, but you've been practicing, and... even with your achievement, you see the crowds almost instinctively parting from her, her gaze darting back and forth across the throng, wild-eyed, and—something's gone wrong. She's almost on the verge of frenzy, like this. What happened? It should have been fine—
You have to get her out of here. You murmur some hasty apologies to your conversational partners, and dip across the room, gesturing for her to follow you as you pass her. She doesn't, though—instead, she grabs your collar in a way that almost gets your hackles up, even steadied by the way you've tamed the Beast within you.
"What did you do?" she screams, in a way that makes heads across the room turn—ugly tears running down her face, fangs bared. "What did you do to me? I feel like I'm going mad—you wouldn't let me not—"
And, for the first time in your life, you realize you don't know what to say to her.
But then, as suddenly as you found yourself experiencing that, you're somewhere else—
On the outside, you are the picture of grim calm, as you accompany Iris in leaving no stone unturned as to the fate of her adopted sister Sam, only frowning slightly when she calls that abomination to ask if she's heard anything—
—on the inside you are screaming internally and trying to figure out some way, any way, that you can make this all okay. The problem is that you cannot, because several hours earlier, Max showed you the footage he recorded of Sam's death, and when Iris finds out she is going to lose her entire mind.
He explained their plan very calmly and reasonably and you felt increasingly ill the whole time, never mind that you can't get sick. You thought then, and still keep coming back to now, what Despond said—why are you so sad, when you planned to kill her yourself? You still keep thinking, that… maybe it would have been kinder if you'd done something sooner. You keep thinking that's Iris's sister, disintegrating under the electrical burns. Her body, anyway; they'd used her as a trap for the elder vampire who'd possessed your young protegée who shares a name with you.
"Maybe, ah—maybe we could ask... even if Claudette didn't know—"
"Iris," you say, swallowing thickly. "Iris, I'm sorry."
She's always been quick on the uptake. There's only a brief flicker of confusion before horror dawns on her face. "What—but, you can't mean—"
You bite the inside of your lower lip, try to keep your voice measured. "I only found out afterward. Max told me—just too late."
"You let me just go on, thinking—" There's rage in her voice like you haven't heard in a long time. And never directed at you. "Why?"
What else is there to say but the truth: "...I didn't know how to tell you."
Iris reaches up to the crown of woven white roses on her head, flexing it between her hands—staring down at it with a frown on her face. "You told me they were good. That they were different." A pause. "The last thing I told her was that I was going to protect her."
She makes an uncharacteristically jerky motion, and hurls the crown at your feet, eyes red-rimmed with tears of blood, and with one last betrayed look at you, stalks off into the night.
"Iris—" you start to say, but.
Well. What else is there to say.
But then, as suddenly as you found yourself experiencing that in the first person, you're somewhere else—
Mysterious! But after that brief moment, it turns into—
Your student Paula is pleading with you—the expression of anxiety and fear on her face doesn't suit her strong features, for once. You are doing your best to assure her that things will be fine—that even if it is fearsome, the both of you have been preparing for this, and soon, the work will be over. Soon, she'll be able to go forth into the night confidently, no longer something instinctively set apart from people.
She's so much like you, in many ways—someone who has difficulty getting along with peers, but with great ambitions, and someone who has already suffered much—that you're sure she'll be able to do it. You're sure.
It's easy to let time slip by you, meditating in isolation in the darkness of the Wyrm's Nest, the intersection of ley lines. Your spirit is resolute, even at times there are strange sounds and visions—even when you feel things pulling at the core of you, like they intend to tear at your soul, or like you are blurring into nonexistence. You know yourself, and you know you can acknowledge these things and let them pass by, for the full day in the darkness that it requires. You are sure that Paula can, as well.
When you emerge, though, she's unsteady, panicky; she's confused and recoils from you, when you step closer. It was a strange experience; perhaps it shouldn't be surprising. She has always met your expectations, and has always stepped up when she faltered; she may take some time to decompress, but she'll be fine, you're sure. And the two of you have an event to dress for and go to.
At the charity event, you feel so much more at ease among people than you have in years—and you're sure that your research has paid off. The inherent distance, the wariness that people have around you—it's vanished. One step closer to being more human.
Paula, however—you see her from across the room, and she's not good at socializing, but you've been practicing, and... even with your achievement, you see the crowds almost instinctively parting from her, her gaze darting back and forth across the throng, wild-eyed, and—something's gone wrong. She's almost on the verge of frenzy, like this. What happened? It should have been fine—
You have to get her out of here. You murmur some hasty apologies to your conversational partners, and dip across the room, gesturing for her to follow you as you pass her. She doesn't, though—instead, she grabs your collar in a way that almost gets your hackles up, even steadied by the way you've tamed the Beast within you.
"What did you do?" she screams, in a way that makes heads across the room turn—ugly tears running down her face, fangs bared. "What did you do to me? I feel like I'm going mad—you wouldn't let me not—"
And, for the first time in your life, you realize you don't know what to say to her.
But then, as suddenly as you found yourself experiencing that, you're somewhere else—
Think of it like a very brief loading screen. Because after that, it becomes this—
Strictly speaking, you have no reason to believe this woman, Claudette—or the thing that looks like a woman that bears that name—but after what you saw of Despond and young Sam and their strange powers, and the things Simon told you about his experiences, and what he suspected…
…no. You believe her, that she and her organization of even darker monsters conspired to destroy the world’s communication networks on the eve of the reveal of vampires to the world. You believe her, too, that they’d destroyed countless civilizations in the past to keep knowledge of the supernatural from humans, in fear that they might be revealed and destroyed, unable to keep puppetting the world from the shadows.
The rot of this world goes even deeper than you thought. And—not that you could have known, but the consequences for mortals of this, when you had been pushing for the drop of the Masquerade for their benefit—
You remember the fire in the sky, the ruined buildings—the way everything had gone uncannily silent in the world before the screaming started. The great skyscrapers of Los Angeles falling, the skyline crumbling as you made your way across the city hoping against hope that anyone you knew would be safe—and even then, the way people had suffered and died from the loss of infrastructure in the days to come. Those who had starved or been at the mercy of the elements.
It is not your fault. But you had your own hand in the chain of events leading to this; you, who thought knowledge would straightforwardly benefit humans. And this woman, this woman in front of you—orchestrated it all, and you can do nothing to her as you are. That this kind of evil could be allowed to thrive from the shadows—this kind of callousness…
You don’t know what to do.
But then, as suddenly as you found yourself experiencing that in the first person, you're somewhere else—
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
SIGN IN HERE
But only for a moment.
Re: SIGN IN HERE
Re: SIGN IN HERE
Re: SIGN IN HERE
[How thrown is she supposed to be about this? Alisaie is reserving judgement until further data becomes available.]
Re: SIGN IN HERE
Re: SIGN IN HERE
Re: SIGN IN HERE
Re: SIGN IN HERE
But for Serenity, this darkness is terrifying. ]
Re: SIGN IN HERE