orderfromchaos | 1. Video, public

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[Dillon arrives precisely at noon sharp, January 1st, bargetime, because....of course he does. He doesn't notice this. The tranquilizers are gone from his system, but he's still trussed up in his full transport rig, immobile, masked, muffled, field of vision restricted by blinders. It's a little more involved than fiberglass cuffs, but it still only takes him a few minutes to wriggle just the right way, and piece by piece, his restraints fall away.

When he flicks the communicator on, he makes an incongruous picture: a young man with effortlessly, immaculately neat hair, wearing a distinctive and equally pristine prison orange jumpsuit. The glimpses of the room behind him lend themselves to a very prosaic early nineties teen, suburban and homey, and from one hand he dangles a particularly distinctive mask, with added eyes-forward style horse blinders.]

Hey, does anybody want a souped up Hannibal Lecter mask? I managed to get it off without breaking it, and it seems like the kind of thing that might come in handy sometimes around here.

...oh, and I'm Dillon. Hi.

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[Well that's. He looks away after the first moment, because the things he's seeing feel too raw, too private. Her father. Sort of. Damn. He shakes his head ruefully.]

I have no idea what day it is at home, either.

[He's been underground for a long time.]

Happy holidays, then?

Edited 2014-01-02 16:10 (UTC)

Happy holidays.

[Her eyes bore into him even as he looks away. She knows what he must have seen. He should look away - and so should she, but she doesn't seem to feel the need anymore.]

[Finally she lets the mask fall to her lap, dead and broken.]

It's January first here. Although I don't really know why. I'd think time wouldn't mean as much not on a planet, but it's that or go crazy, maybe. [Crazier.]

Do you need a tour or anything? I got two my first day. That's when I found this place. People like giving tours so they don't have to ask a lot of personal questions.

[He lets out a rough bark of laughter when she tells him the date - not bitter, exactly, but not happy, either. Closer to resigned. Of course it's January first. Of course it is.]

Sorry.

A tour would be nice. It's been a while since I got to stretch my legs.

[Sincerely. And it's been just as long since he had company that wasn't military or dying profilers.]

It's okay. [She's laughed about weirder things, she considers, standing up and brushing off the front of her pants. The mask she tucks under her arm, then extends her hand to help him up.]

Do you mind if we stop by my cabin? I don't want him to see me walking around with this. He'd think it means more than it does.

[He waves her hand away - amiable, casual, a no thanks I'm fine sort of dismissal - and pushes himself up, sticks his hands in his pockets. It looks like the motion of someone who just happens to be reflexively and subconsciously self-contained, self-sufficient; there's no bluntness of deliberately avoiding touch, no squirming or recoil. It's not as crucial as it used to be, but he's had time to fold the aversion into his natural patterns, and it's still not a bad idea.]

I don't mind at all.

[It's easy not to question this (yet; she'll examine his every word and gesture later, when there's time). She just makes her way out of the chapel, easily assuming the role of - what Chris said: high school chicks. Bitch. Fake polite. She thrusts it all forward, though, directing it towards anyone who gets in their way. It's not that she feels the need to protect Dillon, exactly. She just has all of this power in the mask in her hands, and it has to get out somehow.]

[She's good - excellent - at mean.]

[Taking the stairs two at a time, assuming he's following, she pushes her door open with her elbow and scans her cabin quickly. Nothing fancy: a teenage girl's room in muted autumnal colors, sparsely decorated but otherwise not unusual. She leans the mask up against the back of her desk for now, then turns with her hands on her hips.]

Do you want the worst first or the best?

[He thinks, a little incongruously, of Lourdes. He hopes she finds something that makes her feel as happy as Abigail is now. He knows that - unlike the mask - it's not something he can give her. He does keep up, two steps behind. He's basking, a little. He figures he's allowed.]

Worst, definitely.

[No hesitation, and no trepidation either. It's very nearly chipper. This just seems, to him, the preferable natural order of things.]

Zero, then.

[She pulls the door shut behind her and heads down to the lower levels, talking all the way.]

It's the worst on a normal day. When something weirder isn't happening. I can't show you all the theoretical weirdnesses, but - you know. At least there weren't blinders when I was in there.

You'll have to let us in.

[He considers telling her about the shock chair. He doesn't.]

It wasn't all bad. But I've got things I need to fix, and I can't do that from in there. So.

[He pulls a poker chip out of his pocket, taps it on the door to open.]

[The poker chip is an interesting choice. She wonders what it means - thinks of Ben's Go piece and curls her lip in a small smile.]

Me too. And I can't do that from in here.

[She leads the way in, her eyes tracking from the wall opposite to the cell she stayed in. It wasn't a time of anything like hardship, at least in terms of the necessities of life. Afterlife. Whatever. It had just been . . . strange. Confusing.]

This is it. The cells, um, turn off your powers. If you have any. Which most people do.

[The breath rushes out of him, soft but distinct, like he's grappling with something. Not fear. Not fear at all.]

Right.

[His fingertips trail along a row of bars. Longing, maybe, or envy. It's not in his face, but he isn't really hiding it, either. But the impromptu reverie is interrupted.]

...is she dead? She isn't quite. That's.

[This is not squeamishness. This is the focused wariness of a sailor catching sight of a distant stormcloud.]

Edited 2014-01-03 06:20 (UTC)

[Her eyes narrow on the back of his neck, the tension of his shoulders, snapping to violent and sudden attention, gaze as sharp as her tongue.]

Dillon.

Do we need to go?

[There probably isn't any we; it's probably presumptuous to assume that he'd listen to her even if she thought he was in danger. She doesn't care. She's pretty damn sure they need to go.]

[Fragments of the strange, ephemeral meeting he's been flippantly calling the job interview are coming back more crisply. No powers inside the cells at all, including through the bars. She won't start twitching and gasping - except that she could, whatever she is already - she won't turn hale and warm just because he came too close. Even if he weren't reined in, he couldn't affect her, couldn't fix her even if he wanted to.

The contrary side of him pushes, suddenly, against the inscrutable, impregnable boundaries. Inside, nothing. Outside the cells, there's a deep, subsonic thrum of energy. Abigail is, fleetingly, bolstered, stabilized, energized; rejuvenated. Every human being is dying from the moment they are born - earlier - but for this moment, she is not.

He stops pushing, lets the admiral take the pressure of holding back what he can't once again. This is, he reflects, the opposite of what he's supposed to be doing.]

...yes, I think we'd better.

[After one last look at the woman in the cell, the not-quite-corpse that reads wrong to him on so many levels, he turns neatly on his heel and walks out. He holds the door for her, jaw gritted slightly. He should not have exposed her to that.]

[Something jolts her to the core, momentary and effervescent, and is gone. Dumbly, she looks at her hands, then up at Dillon, and follows him with a businesslike bustle that is at utter odds with the flurry of confused information her body is sending her.]

You should probably tell me what just happened, [she says with quiet insistence, and in the same breath:] Do you like lifting weights or skating better? I'm trying to get my order right here.

[He waits until the door clicks shut behind them, the bows his head, humble, penitent.]

...I'm sorry. That was...me. I suspend entropy. Randomness becomes patterned, rivers flow uphill, death becomes life. People...well. You felt it.

[Just as quiet, almost as solemn.]

I used to love rollerblading. Save skating for the end.

[She judges this for a moment and finds it, in the end, fascinating enough that she'll forgive him.]

It's fine. But I've never heard of anyone who could do that before. [A shy, curious smile later and it's forgotten; she leads the way to the gym, which she more or less dismisses with a wave of her hand before heading up to the deck.]

This isn't a very straightforward route for a tour. But I think I like it better this way. You'll have to ask the Admiral for your own skates if you have weird-sized feet. Let us into the CES first, though?

[A half shrug, faintly sheepish.]

I hadn't either, until it started happening around me.

Sure thing. You want to go in first? I'll probably get desert.

Desert. [This is not a question, just a bemused repetition accompanied by a wrinkle of her nose; she pushes the door open once he's opened it, onto a long road heading up to a big old house. There's a sign in front of it with writing on, though they're too far away to read it from here.]

[Abigail's brow furrows, but she heads up the road anyway. They don't have to go all the way, she reasons.]

This is the CES, then. Sometimes it pulls random places, sometimes it pulls places that are familiar. The best thing about it is it's got the most space of anywhere on this ship. I think it's probably a reason people don't kill each other any more than they already do. Less cabin fever.

[He walks at her side, taking it in. It feels strange to him - there's internal logic to it, there's a pattern, somewhere in between the ratios of nature and the clear blueprints of intention, of artifice. Programming with randomness. And on either side, metaphorically, temporally, the constant blank wall of the barge itself. It's a little like a puppet show, he thinks, and that frame suddenly makes it much easier to process, less uncanny and surreal. Paper cutouts swinging on strings and hinges, following gravity and physics as naturally as anything else. A show of a road, build by a sketch artist, not a construction crew.

If you give caged chickens one big television screen of a few chickens in an open field, they peck each other and themselves less. He doesn't consider any of this a bad thing.]

You're probably right.

Interesting that it's restricted, when you put it that way. I guess it wouldn't be prison, otherwise.

[If everyone had as much space as they wanted.]

I wouldn't know. I've never been in any other kind of prison. But I understand most prisons with inmates of this caliber don't have even simulated fields to frolic in.

[Might as well get the inevitable over with.] I used to live up there. [She points to the house.] But it was easy to escape from, and they had gardens.

Mine wasn't really normal either. I guess regular ones have a yard, at least.

[They gave him movies, in the vault. It looked like a hotel room, except for the lack of windows. He was a national security asset, after all.

He doesn't learn anything in particular about her, looking at the house. She wasn't really here. It's a pastiche, not part of the pattern. But - used to live. They had. She doesn't think of it as home, either. Not really.]

We can just go on, if you want.

[She looks at it for a long moment. One day, she should confront this place for what it was: the mock-up of imprisonment that made her feel free when she escaped from it, rather than a lab rat running from one cage into a slightly larger one. Someday, she'll do it.]

[Not today.]

[She nods.]

Let's . . . just go on.

[He nods, motions for her to lead on.]

You can ask me things, if you want.

[Maybe she doesn't. But it seems...the least part of fair, to offer.]

[Maybe personal questions would be too easy, she thinks as she takes the lead. She's tempted to ask them anyway; maybe she will later. But for now:]

Are you happy to be here? Really happy, not just serving-a-greater-purpose happy.

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