Entry tags:

[OTA] Midas is king and he holds me so tight;

WHO: Karen Page
WHERE: Various
WHEN: 8 January 2018, throughout the day
OPEN TO: All, with 2 locked starters
WARNINGS: Standard blanket warning for Netflix MCU spoilers

In the Forest

OTA - 3 max threads

It was probably only a matter of time, Karen thinks. This morning she woke up to find three big boxes sitting in the middle of her chilly bedroom floor like they'd been dropped off overnight by the FedEx Fairy. She's three days out from her one-month anniversary stuck in this place, and she has officially been anointed by the gods.

As much as her instinct is still to be wary, curiosity takes only a beat to win out. Sitting cross-legged in her absconded "I'm not Daredevil" shirt and chili pepper socks, she pulls each box open and lines the contents neatly beside her on the floor. Shampoo, journals, underwear, earmuffs. When she's done, she can't shake the feeling that this is less divine intervention and more care package.

And weird as that concept may be under the circumstances, she's not looking the gift horse in the mouth.

She feeds the furnace and indulges in a longer shower than normal, then starts the process of organizing her notes in her new journals while her hair dries. Then it's out into the snow, bundled like the true Vermonter she is, pack of supplies on her back as she looks toward the horizon. There's a voice tutting in the back of her head that sounds mostly like Frank, sometimes Matt, and funnily, occasionally like Claire, but she's never really been very good at listening to people who tell her to sit still. Boots crunching with each step, she pushes into the forest's edge.

[Feel free to find her in the forest, on the way there, at the canyon wall, or on her way back.]

Canyon's Edge

for Peggy

Here's the truth: It still freaks Karen out a little bit that Peggy (and others, but mostly Peggy) are from points in time so far-flung from her own. The people who say they're from alternate realities, other planets, that doesn't get her as much — She stood in the aftermath of the alien assault on Manhattan. But the time thing she's still getting her head around.

But in the moment, it's usually an easy enough detail to forget, and Peggy makes it easier by being the sort of woman who, when Karen asks if she'd like to come with her to try and scale the canyon wall, agrees without hesitation. It's possible Peggy is mostly looking out for Karen's well-being— Because yeah, OK, it really isn't smart to go mountain climbing solo — but the fact that Peggy seems interested at all, especially when she's been here so long, is encouraging. In Karen's opinion, it's way too easy to be complacent in this place.

Home Again

for Claire

The stomp of snow-clotted boots on the porch announces Karen's return home that evening before she pushes open the door with a sigh of relief. It's warm inside, which means Claire must have been home long enough to feed the furnace. As Karen unwinds herself from her scarves, she can hear the distant sounds of another person in the house, and she smiles, grateful, almost bursting to tell what she's discovered today.

"You won't believe what happened today," she calls out, shrugging from her coat and then plopping onto the sofa to begin working off her boots. Pulling at a heel, she winces; she had a misstep earlier while climbing, and her wrist is killing her.

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This feels insane, if Karen lets herself actually think about it. She doesn't know why it should when her personal experiences have run the gamut of being held hostage (multiple times), shot at (multiple times) and watching alien spacecraft tear through skyscrapers, and yet there's a tiny, tight ball in the pit of her stomach that she knows will send her running the other way if she lets it spool out. It's all just too fucking bizarre.

But maybe that's the point. Not that she's never been in the middle of anything bizarre, but that she has — That her boyfriend wasn't hiding another woman from her, but rather that he was a blind vigilante, or that she's used the pistol in her handbag for escaping a lunatic bomber but never once needed it for a mugging.

She's done weird, and weird has really never been fun for her. Yet here she is, stepping forward into the dark, nothing in front of her but rough stone walls and the slope of Kira's shoulders.

"If they found it without looking for it, surely we can find it," she says, and then huffs out a scoff. "Except for how that would be logical, and who knows where that applies around here."

"Well, it also said Margaery had a vision of the door that led her out here, so." For all the stock he puts in visions, Kira crumples his bottom lip against the top, turns his hands out, and squeezes his shoulders up to convey not at fucking all.

If it feels less insane on his end, it's because the fountain brought him out the other side. The ball already spooled: there is still nowhere to actually run, in any direction.

Just a cave, and a rope, and a voice to keep them from going crazy in the claustrophobic tunnel. "The way this place is, we'd be as likely to find a completely different door with some Star Trek bullshit behind it. Not that I wouldn't welcome being beamed anywhere else with oxygen, or a young DeForest Kelley, but just--"

Just wait a second; the moving shapes of light from their entry re-align with his feet, as he feels his way past the narrow entrance and into the first turn. "Take it slow," he says from around the corner. "It's darker around here." Not impossible to see, as his eyes adjust and they clear away from the source of light, but an adjustment. Shapes resolve into walls, layers of blue and black that imply deeper caverns and turns, and a few stalactites dripping overhead. There's a winding ribbon of reflected light, a thin run of water that implies the center of the space.

"I miss DeForest Kelley," Karen allows, her voice softening with nostalgia before Kira speaks again, directing, and she suddenly becomes aware of how utterly dark it is now. Her fingers reach out tentatively, nearly blind in the inky darkness, and light upon the rough face of the cave wall. She can hear the soft pinging of droplets falling, make out the blurry edges of what might be the shape of the cave around them, but it only makes the disorientation worse. She thinks of Matt and closes her eyes, but then nearly stumbles on a stone, catching herself just before she crashes into Kira.

They really should have brought a light.

"I don't suppose you have any idea of how far in this door is," she says, mostly just to hear herself speak, her voice instinctively hushed but still echoing in the space around them.

"Give it a second," he says, feeling the rope tap the back of his leg, lift, tap again. She's closer behind now, and a skitter of stone speaks to the lack of grace. He's deciding: light the candle now while he can almost see what he's doing, or see how long he can navigate by shapes. What we wants is some kind of change on the walls, some sign of this supposed door.

If they'd just said what side it was on, they could go by touch--but he doesn't know what the other side holds, or which is which, and he'd hate to separate.

"Far enough that I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel, but close enough they stumbled onto it without any supplies. They might have just gotten lucky that day." But they're not stumbling; they're here to do this. "I'm going to crouch down, I need you to hold something for me." At the edge of where he can reasonably see, he slings is pack down into his lap and feels around for a few items. "Here," he adds, slowly pushing his journal at her. "I've got a candle, but we're not going to see very far if it's in our faces, we'll use that to direct the light."

He just has to light it with a flint in the dark of a cave, and not lose any of the pieces.

This seems like an idea that will probably end up with Kira's journal accidentally going up in flames, but Karen doesn't have a better idea, and she's desperate enough to see even a little bit around them not to argue.

"Sure," she allows, and takes hold of the journal, flipping it open so she can turn the white pages out once Kira's lit the candle.

"Hand me a page," he says, not loving the odds of hitting a wick with a spark in a drafty cave. Even with inches of paper to work with, it takes a few tries, but he lights the candle with the curling edge, and sits in the glow for several more moments, digging through his bag. "Next time I'll just do this outside."

He hadn't exactly gotten far enough on his first try of this cave, to know how deep it went before losing daylight.

When he's finished--following the clink of glass through his pack to find a jar, letting the candle burn off some wax into the bottom to stick the candle in place--he takes back the journal and folds it around the glass, letting his eyes adjust again as it angles the light out of them. "Alright,"he says, aiming the soft light slowly along the nearest wall, "let's try not to die in a cave."

None of what Kira ultimately did was what Karen had imagined, but they have some light at the end of it, and that's all that matters. The world seems to shrink to within the tiny circle of light, but better that than the yawning darkness.

"You said the others first came in here because one of them had had a vision?" she asks, mostly for something to say, a break in the scrape of their feet and distant drop of water.

Near to a year without electricity, he's learned to improvise--though he appreciates having to hide his light from a sleeping bird instead of armed looters. Pointing the glow out lets it gain some distance, but eventually the glow diffuses and the cavern is defined in shades of grey.

"Margaery," he says, remembering the name from the notes he'd found in Mark's collection. "She'd started having them, along with some nasty headaches."

Tracking along to the right, he aims the light at the bottom edge of the wall, watching where they step. Eventually there's a break in the smooth, pebble-strewn line. "She saw a door," he adds, as he lifts the light to reflect off of wood grain instead of stone. Tracing the edges, he can't see anything more out of the ordinary than a whole ass door in a cave.

"Well, this is bonkers."

That's putting it lightly, but then again, 'bonkers' can be used to describe any number of things they encounter on a daily basis anymore. Hell, just being here is bonkers: In front of this door, in this cave, in this canyon.

"Maybe we'll get lucky and it'll actually be Narnia on the other side," Karen says, no mirth to her voice, and steps forward to put a tentative hand on the knob while Kira holds the light. It's cold but otherwise unremarkable, and she goes ahead and turns it.

It's definitely not Narnia on the other side, but at least they've got some more light.

"Jesus," she whispers as she steps through the door, eyes sliding from detail to detail, stepping to the transparent barrier so she can press fingertips against the smooth surface. Glass, or maybe some kind of plastic composite.

Reading about it--even having that creepy drawing hung up on Bodhi's wall--doesn't prepare him for standing on the other side of the glass. It's the absurdity of the door, turned up to eleven. It's like stepping inside of a movie, and he thinks he'd almost rather meet Mr. Tumnus in a snowy clearing.

Goat legs he could almost roll his eyes at. This--he blows a breath through the narrow gap of his teeth and lower lip, then rolls it into a bite.

The fluorescent light washes them out; he closes the book and sets it on the jar, suffocating the candle to save it, and puts his own hand up inches from Karen's. The barrier is solid and cool, their dark silhouettes connected by the rope tied between. Its length isn't quite taut at the door, but it has raised from the ground, cutting the corner about a foot high.

"I keep wanting this to be the world's longest episode of What Would You Do," he says, removing his hand to fish the glasses from his pocket. It's no less unnerving when brought into focus, though a little less alien abduction re-enactment. "Fuck--" he points to the nearest cooler, the vials labeled with letters and spots of color. "Are those initials?"

Karen leans in as much as she's able, canting her head in an effort to get a better line of sight, her upper temple pressed against the glass. "Yes," she confirms, quickly, breathlessly, eyes sweeping from one vial to the next until they at last snag on 'KP.'

"What's your last name?" she asks, hair whipping over her shoulder as she turns to Kira. Before he can even answer, she's got her pack off and is pulling it open, rummaging hastily for the notebook she tucked inside.

"Akiyama," he answers absently, sweeping until he finds KA in an adjacent cooler. There's a section of the label beside the letters, solid black, and he spends a moment looking for a pattern in the colors until he remembers an earlier page of the journal. As Karen digs out her own, Kira kneels to pick up his.

Once he finds the page, he hands it across the short gap. "Check the colors," he advises. While it isn't the first thing he remembers about coming through the fountain, there are a few pairs of black scrubs in his closet.

"Apparently, I disappeared for a few days, came back out of the fountain with no memory of this place." While she holds the list of names and scrubs, he scans the black labels again, to see if it repeats. "And a few others disappeared for longer, but--I don't really see any multiples. Not in the same colors."

"I've never seen this list anywhere, have you?" Karen asks, motioning through the glass with her pencil. Mark's done an excellent job of collecting info under the circumstances, but there might be other places keeping tabs on things she's not been privy to yet. This all may be just as new to Kira as it is Karen, but he said it himself: Some version of him was here before, and that might mean people trust him more.

She settles cross-legged onto the ground in front of the barrier, shifting against the grit as she leans in and begins marking down the initials and corresponding colors one by one, cross-checking them against the page Kira had offered. "I think you have to be right, I think they have to be initials," she says, glancing up. "There are too many coincidences even at a glance for it to be anything else. The real question, though, is what does it mean?"

Does it mean anything, held up against Mark's theories, Nerys' galaxy hopping experience, the fact of a door put in a cave and a section of wall left open? Do the people who snatch them out of time and space really just accidentally leave doors open, and if they don't--

"What's it mean to let us in here?" He asks, question for question. His eyes keep moving, taking in the details while he can. Jude really did a decent job of capturing the space, but charcoal is never going to do justice to the antiseptic colors, the smooth lines. The infuriating separation from an obvious console and a door.

There's a whole village and lake on the other side of the broken wall. What might be deeper into these rocks? Kira's hand rests on the glass and closes into a fist, his bottom lip rolled under his teeth.

"Not that anything we imagine is a concrete answer, but--they've got our blood. People lose abilities when they arrive that show up in villagers with no powers at all. Specific groups get sick, people come back over and over, different memories every time. Look at those--" He points at the next cooler, scientific names set below blood and seeds. He recognizes a few species well enough to guess the point, and his fingers tighten against his palm as it clearly riles him. There's only one answer he can latch onto, in the moment, and it isn't one anyone likely wants.

"It's fake, or. It's manufactured. Including us."

Pressing her lips into a line, Karen slides a look back to the samples in question, a shadow pushing in at the edge of her thoughts at the implications of what Kira's saying.

"Do you mean that..." she begins, but it's reflexive more than needing an answer — They both know what he means. "Clones," she says aloud instead. The word should sound ridiculous, should feel flimsy and easily-dismissable, but it doesn't. It's stolid. It sits there like a third person in the room.

This isn't the first time the notion has occurred to Karen at all, although it had taken Mark's notes to suggest it. Even then, even from such a supposedly great scientific mind, it had seemed to be scribbled down more out of thoroughness than because it was any great theory. It was part of a list of possibilities, and never further expanded on. She hadn't even thought about it again until just now.

But it fits. And Karen really doesn't know if she'd capable of processing something like that in any way that's helpful.

"Fuck," she whispers, and then flips the page in her notebook, beginning to jot down everything she can think of that points that way, beginning with Kira's list.

At least a clone is something solid, something biological. Kira draws the mental line from simulation to assets and has to step back from the glass. Reach up for his glasses, pull them just far enough from his face to blur the bright lights and smooth lines.

The heel of his hand is damp; he slides the glasses back on and looks at the faint fog around a smeared hand print. Condensation, the room within warmer than the space without, but lined with coolers. It's the little things, pricking holes in every theory, making him doubt even the simplest, most straightforward answer. How do you simulate this; why do you simulate this?

Because it makes more sense than the sun refusing to set, or the direction of a river reversing at a whim. "What's easier," he reasons aloud, trying to let the realization sink in. "Hand-picking people out of infinite realities, from different times, or having a backlog of shitheads to grow in tubes? Dump them in a fountain when you're done, hook them up to the fucking Matrix. Do whatever you want, grow three of them just in case."

It's not exactly a pep talk.

Karen doesn't want to say it, thankfully doesn't feel like she needs to say it, although it's hanging there between them: This is not the first version of Kira to be here. She hadn't know the old one so she can't speak to any differences, subtle or otherwise, anything that might give away which is the original or which is the first, if that's even a thing.

If they are in the Matrix, though, which seems scarily plausible the longer she's here, it makes as much sense that the same Kira would just be... well, rebooted. Waste not, want not. She can't decide if that's comforting.

Sighing, she scrubs a hand over her face and then just sits for a long moment, her gaze shifting idly from the control panel in the room back to the cooler.

"I can't believe I'm saying this, because— You know what I do for a living," she finally says, and lifts a knowing look to Kira. "But if people haven't come to this conclusion on their own yet, and I'm kind of thinking most of them haven't, then we don't need to be the ones telling them. Not yet." People like Mark who wouldn't be completely freaked out by the mere concept, sure. But the average person who is just trying to survive day-to-day? Having half the village emotionally comatose would probably not be helpful.

The job she did, or the job she remembers, but hasn't ever performed--none of it any more helpful to say than spreading this around the village. Kira curls his fingers into the end of his sleeve, feeling the almost suede texture of the parka. If it was already a simulation, it was never real anyway--all the easier to fake if it was only ever a memory in the first place.

"I mean, if it occurs to them, they might feel faked-out by the presentation. If it's all part of the Matrix anyway, it's here to freak us out."

Which doesn't make it feel any less true. Maybe it's just a way to gauge reactions: if the village freaks out, come up with a more placating story later. If it doesn't--up the ante? He's no closer to understanding the motive behind all of this than his last incarnation was, even with those old notes to go by. "But there's nothing we can do about it, either way, so. Agreed, sit on the existential horror until we go insane, I guess." The near petulance of his tone is offset by true frustration, his fingers digging hard into his palm, through the fabric of his sleeve.

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[OTA] Midas is king and he holds me so tight;

In the Forest

Canyon's Edge

Home Again

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