Scene #8436: An Oasis In Gold From An Emptiness Of Silver

Owner	Pose
Dimokratia	Again, the realm of endless silver, with sky of the waking real through glass and the distance of periphery, an expanse unpopulated in every direction. But this time, something on the horizon. Something like color, shapes like foliage. Giving-wet mercury turns to something comfortingly-to-Petra's-feet if she travels to it - if she runs from it, it comes all the same. A stiffer, firmer foundation, a layer of fine powder-dirt over durable ground given only the vaguest impression of texture. It is the color that is tell-tale, warm gold and dusty tan - heated and awake in a strange and exhiliarting way. At an oasis, where the dusty tan dips into a decline, and a small lake of gold sits among the dirty dune hills, shimmering in light that seems entirely sourced from a single feature upon an arched piece of metal that fully approximates a pool chair - without actually having any of the banding. Instead, all frame, Dimo drapes herself languidly over the bars, stretched luxuriously bare and unwrapped from her trails and claddings and armor, smooth and flowing and contoured. From her spinal base falls two lace trail limbs of chromed silver, warmed in the center like veins of hot metal branching along the frills and consistent down the center-line. She waits with meditative purpose, the golden oasis filled with the welcoming hum of song, like lakeside worship.
Petra Soroka	Night after night of an empty silver plain and unceasing consciousness has Petra perking up at the blur on the normally vacant horizon. At first, she walks, then practically runs, towards it, multicolored ichor spattered behind her to make a trail that traces back to her arbitrary starting point in the sea of silver. Once it becomes clear that it isn't §her§ pillar again, that something else had established a presence in her mind, that the semisolid ground is becoming firm rather than §tarnished, Petra comes to a dead stop from her sprint, inertia throwing red and pearl droplets in front of her. It feels wrong, instantly. Petra's first instinct is to reach for the gunblade in her jacket pocket, but the jacket never follows her into the dreamscape, leaving her with just the soft, muted prison clothes that Lilian had brought her. Her second instinct, slower but getting more automatic by the day, is to reach for the Silver, but despite the all-encompassing presence of morphic metal around and within her, none of it responds. The third option, then. Petra backpedals a few steps, then turns and bolts. It's not for a few seconds until she realizes that the trail she'd left behind her was gone, swallowed back up by the metal, and that moment of stalling is enough for her to completely lose her sense of direction. Petra considers staying in place for the rest of the night, or trying to feel out how to escape from the mental desert, as her options for avoiding the source of her building dread slowly disappear. It doesn't really matter though. She goes to it, or it comes to her. Petra ends up at the edge of the hill overlooking the oasis regardless. "Get the fuck out of my head! What's your fucking problem!" It's not a very sisterly greeting.
Dimokratia	A spatter of red, a paint fling of white. A distance-losing path-obliterating turn away from inevitability. Resistance to reticence. Reticence to rallying. 'Get the fuck out of my head!' Dimo, languid yet clearly braced and hung and not draped and so loose as to droop, extends out on her suggestion of a chair, and reaches for the pool of gold besides her to run a finger through the liquid, which laps and spills and drifts trails of liquid-warm chrome along the little spaces of the digits of her fingers. Glittering-rich drops pool in the crevasse of her palm. "Hello, lost sister." Dimo returns, patient. It's easy, since despite her protestations, Petra is once more before the champion of the Silver. "I would say that you are my problem, to be poor here, but I have taken a kind of responsibility for you, so I would see you grow." She answers like an older sibling trying to Be Real To A Kid Sister, adding the humming beatitudes of a singing warm reactor. "Has your freedom not been enriching to you? This place is still so empty you have no place to run away to."
Petra Soroka	"I'd better be your problem! I'll be your fucking biggest problem until you fix what you did to me, you monster!" Even though she's shouting and her fists are clenched in anger, Petra stomps down the hill towards Dimo, rather than turning to run again. "Piece of shit. Don't talk to me like that." Petra stops by the side of the golden oasis, not stepping into or around it, to keep some distance between herself and Dimo. Still as raw and ragged as the day she got them, chrome-filled wounds cover every visible section of skin below her chin, shirt sticking to her torso and bleeding through. A note of heavier anger-- rather than petulance-- enters her voice, subvocal hum scraping and grinding like unoiled gears. "You had nothing to do with me getting my fucking freedom! You're the reason everything sucks so much now! Why Lilian is so hurt! I would've been free anyways, but you-- you fucking-- you said she sent you! I should kill you for that!"
Dimokratia	Approached, Dimo sits up, cants forward, and plants one arched metal foot on the harder ground by the oasis. She doesn't rise, spread across the minimalist frame of bars, and lifts her hands to gesticulate with a slow performative pantomime. "You have done such things to yourself and speak to me? Please, sister, consider:" Dimo asks, hands open and held out - inviting, as her tone turns to entreating. "I had quite a few things to do with you retaining it, despite the maneuverings you called to defeat Lilian for you. A tidy trick, but ultimately misguided." Dark lips underlit with a hue of gold from the warm oasis besides, Dimo's face adjusts into a wide-spread smile, though it never reaches her cold blue optics. "I came to a bloody charnel-house, of ritual biologcal harm, and knew immediately the whole unit had to be purged or Chevalier Rook would face reprisal. You, specifically, were to be handed over to the Paladins to face their judgement. And then, by my intervention, you were not only to be cured of your multiple physical ailments - but also cleansed of the wounds that you suffered. Reborn, with a clean chance!" She's not just convinced, in her effervescent warmth of synaptic preaching - she is trying to be convincing, truly believing her words and placing special emphasis on care tones. "Were you given something flawed? Now, consider what you've done with it!" A gesture finally leaves her performace to wave at the mercury-bleeding wounds. "You could be anything, but you remain performatively wounded. Can you kill me? Will me dead? And why did you let any of these things happen to you, accept the many before - is it convenient to hate me, because I have taken away your convenient excuses for why you are less?" "The Silver has made you more. When I am dead, what do you think happens? Consider it. Give it time."
Petra Soroka	"A tidy trick, but ultimately misguided." Petra flinches, seething, hating the phrasing of 'defeat Lilian for you'. Instead of addressing it, or the outstretched hand, she keeps hers clenched at her side, pounding a fist ineffectually against her leg as she spits back. "'Misguided' because you lied to me! You and everyone else. It's always fucking Lilian's fault, I should always blame her, it's just fucking normal to hate her! I can't fucking stand it!" Petra's barely even responding to Dimo at this point, she's just shouting for the sake of shouting, at someone she has every reason to be angry at. Petra stalks closer, warm synaptic crackle matched by hot, messy neuropathic itch-- whatever it was that dropped her defenses around Exigent Serenity is absent now. She grabs the frame of the chair with one hand, careful not to lean too close to Dimo. "You came into my cell. You decided what was best, all yourself, and lied to me about it. You stole my fucking body!" Metal screams and snaps when Petra's grip tightens. "And you think you did me a favor?! That was mine! My choice!" "You pervert. You freak. Creep. Monster. If you'd thought to stop and ask for one fucking second, you'd know that my body just does that. And you know what? I'm fucking glad, that it bothers you so much, that it's not perfect for you. Because it's mine, not yours." Petra is dimly aware of Nephra's presence, through the frosted glass ceiling, twisting a metal rod out of Dimo's chair to grip like a pipe. "When I kill you, what happens is that I add another tally mark to my list of murdered Chevaliers and then move on with fixing what you did to me."
Dimokratia	The smile upon carbon-dark lips turns down, pouting. "Why would I lie? And you are so quick to blame me for so much." The pout deepens, sympathetic. Her voice drops down deeper, bouncing down the staircase of emotions. "Lilian made the choice to place you in that disgusting room, in that disgusting hole. She took responsibility for you, and your physical and mental state deteriorated further. So if I am not to blame Lilian, then I will blame you." The metal champion's pout flattens, but her tone remains low. "I blame you, Petra, for being so selfishly diseased. Consider yourself - listen yourself, listen really. What part is hurt?" A grip to the metal that Dimo racks herself on is only invitation. Dimo reaches forward to touch and hold and gently embrace, moving draw Petra into her lap just as Petra moves to grab up a pipe twisted from the frame. It gives easily, forms exactly as she'd like it, breaks just so. "Yes. I did you a favor. You are so petulant, so bitterly crying that I did not enable your nonsense as you scream at the others for that sin. Scream at me for doing well by you, wounded warrior!" -pervert, freak, creep, monster- Even if Petra escapes Dimo's hands, the warm wrap of her trails coils synthetically serpentine, just so Petra has to spend a little quality time with her 'big sister' of synthetic perfection. Skin contact is crackling, sparking, synapse crackle-itching. "Let it enter your world with these well-considered words, then, poor lost little sister:" Breathy without breath, a hanging hum of syrup on the sine wave. Chin lightly bowed, Dimo's real hands brush up Petra's neck and collar, she is happy to reveal the warm truth. "All the indulgence, all the giving, all the patience paid to your choice has endangered many souls. You chose, and chose, and chose so much that the problem must be that you are choosing. And now? Yes, it is yours. Your body. You instinctively take ownership of what you begged and pleaded for." "To you, disease-leaving-my-beautiful-sister, I say: I am the freak." She makes it sound fierce and wonderful, emphasized, proud. "I am the pervert of your brokenness. You cannot kill me - I live in you now. The colony of the possible in your impossibly negative world."
Petra Soroka	"I was doing better!" Petra matches Dimo's sophisticated pout with gritted teeth and angry shouting, the perfect image of a younger, immature sister throwing a tantrum. It's practically a nonsequiter, for her to describe the dull, hunched state leaking blood that Dimo found her in as 'better' than anything. "It would've been fine! Blame yourself, for butting in on something you didn't understand and fucking it all up! You and the Paladins!" She pauses, internally distracted just as Dimo is reaching for her, then absently mutters, "Well, blame me for ending up there in the first place, obviously, but that's none of your business at all. That's between me and Lilian." Petra reacts to Dimo's touch as if struck, of course, as with all women. She shrieks and swings the broken silver pipe-- jagged even though it could've broken smooth-- down as a barrier between herself and Dimo's placating hands. She intinctively flinches and tries to stumble back and distance herself, but her waist is held tight by Dimo's silver trail, and she can only writhe in response. "No! No! Get away from me! This is in my head!" Petra's protests pitch into rough and desperate alarm when Dimo touches the silver collar around her neck, flailing her weapon ineffectually. "I'll endanger however many souls I want! I'm going to endanger the fuck out of yours when I get the chance! You fucking fr--" Petra's face twitches in disgust. Dimo can't reclaim that word, that's hers to use. "I-- I know how to get you out. I know how to fix myself, I can, and I will. I'm going to get your disgusting colony out of me, and then I'm going to keep going, and ruin everything you've built, and then kill you. Freak. This is my 'impossibly negative' world." Petra wraps her hands around Dimo's tendril, squeezing with the reactor shriek building high enough to feel the vibrations through her hands. As Dimo's limb slowly crumples in her grip, the lacy metal around Petra's waist starts to sag and distort, softening as if melted. Lacy silver threads droop and disintegrate into mercury droplets, identical to the uncontrolled Silver blood leaking out of Petra, and the psychic subdermal itch that Petra emanates intensifying to nearly unbearable levels, overriding the warm hum of the Silver where her hands tighten.
Dimokratia	There is a persistent, resilient gentleness to Dimo's touch - a craft to the way she holds, a precision to the span of her hands even when they spread across shattered metal pipe, borne off from Petra's body - warded off. The open-handed style of the champion speaks in a language that Petra understands in physical senses, a poetry and layer-thick exchange of tactile information. The trail about her waist speaks stronger, held and struggling while Dimo speaks hotly. "You became better as a warrior. Your prowess at violence improved, your spear sharpened, your resolve and reasons to push over the hill and defy chance were given another layer." 'This is in my head!' "And so is your place for me, lost sister, berserk warrior." Amused, as she coils up Petra in a wrapping-consuming embrace, and touches a warm extension to the base of Petra's neck as she once laid a hand there, but now she is both a hunter and a sister, and strokes-- Nothing. Chrome-silver pseudopoda filled with sunny warmth, something that would have been a seamless and shared experience like slipping on the warm jacket of a close family member and knowing where the jacket had been. Instead-- The trail that Petra grabs up and forces to fizz and bubble and evaporate to bits and nothing and a smear of dripping 'blood'. The wounds that follow Petra even into her mind - her idealized shape to the self. Through this, Dimo's bright blue optics first widen in mild surprise, and then calm to that same gentle patience. The surroundings have changed, influenced or echoing Dimo even deeper as her contact is rejected and aerosolized into the mindscape. Distance shifts, deepens, the field of view and perspective widens, and dunes don't fall into a pit, but tumble, suddenly fertile, rollingly alive. Overhead, flickering and alternating, every-other-frame, is Nephra, and a storm of information that buzzes with a white noise distortion as crackling synapse meets the fizz of unempathy. Dimo steps back, as Petra asserts, and behind her as the great rise of the champion moves away is an immensity of breathtakingly vast crystal, a pylon in the middle-distance set with a strangely organically-shaped trunking, rising to the head of a massive blue-white crystal tree. Interwoven in the immensity of that tree is silver metal, the same silver, lifted like water in a see-though cross section of plantlife, visibly motile. All around the crystal tree is landscape in the colors of simulacrum, from blades of grass that are too-green , vaned in crystal and bladed in emerald soft-plastic sheen, to steel-thorned roses of clockwork-deployed petals, constuctions free-standing in the cybernature to mysterious purpose with dish and dial and antenna probe, and rivers that pour colored chrome like oil paint into tributaries of mixed-paint chromatics.
Dimokratia	And it goes on, and on, and on like this, the world at the base of the crystal tree, as overhead the outside flickers between what Petra remains certain is her outside, and then the lost signal from what is outside Dimo. What is within her, though, what is abutting the mindscape, Petra knows: It is homeland. And atop the crystal tree, past the branches she cannot see, for her sight is stopped by the fizzy cieling, is a source of tremendous light that basks down, yet does not saturate the landscape. Instead, every surface and thing drinks in the glow of the Sun. Only she is not shone upon - and she should be. Her lifeline, simply, is that objectively speaking, she's still exactly where she is. And the vast world that Dimo carries with her and wafts with the data-scent of hangs like an aura, an image, impressed upon the dreamscape. "But you'll keep the benefits, won't you? The ones you begged and screamed for. Will you kill me first, and then give yourself back whole, long, achingly awful tenths of a second of reaction time? Or will you kill me after you hobble yourself? Will you demand your next merciful benefactor to grant you all the gifts I had but make them... wet? You may be wet," She makes it sound so granting, and then sweetly adds: "Little sister." Not held, and free to run, but run into a terrain of Dimo's influence, the Champion of the Silver spreads wide her arms as she steps backwards one step, then another, giving Petra plenty of space but only three choices: approach, away, or stay. "Run towards me, Petra. I will accept you warmly, and your whole family will finally greet you. The family you deserve, and have since your re-ignition."
Petra Soroka	Dimo's insistence on staying calm and treating Petra gently is about the worst thing she could do. Worst for whom, though, isn't entirely clear. Petra's glare narrows at Dimo's widened eyes-- after getting over her own moment of surprise-- and she opens her mouth to continue clawing at the exposed weak point, lips half-curled in a snarl. When it passes, and Dimo recovers to that same empathetic placidity, Petra chokes on her words, practically flinching. Why isn't she getting mad? I'm ruining it for her. She tried to hurt me and control me and she can't, and I'm going to hurt her back for trying. She should hate me, or be afraid, or at least disappointed, so what the fuck is this? Acting like a fucking therapist, or an actual older sist-- Completely unbidden, underneath the roiling tide of anger and defiance, Petra feels a small stab of guilt when Dimo backs away. The landscape shifts, beautiful and complex, the vista of the dreamscape breathtaking except for the uneven circle of dull silver that surrounds Petra, as if her quicksilver leakage is pooling around her feet. She doesn't move her stare from Dimo, even as jittering motions in the concentric patterns of her eyes betray what involuntary saccades would before. Wandering eyes would mean interest, and Petra is very pointedly ignoring everything but Dimo. "What's your problem? What's even your fucking angle here? Do you think that showing me your colorful plastic toy world will make me not want to be a fucking human being anymore? That I'll think 'oh, wow, so pretty' and be your--" Petra stumbles over her words, aborting whatever she was in the middle of saying. "--and stop wanting to kill you? I didn't ask for any of this. I don't want any of this." Petra hasn't moved, forwards or backwards, ever since Dimo withdrew. Her posture is elastic-tense, fists clenched and shoulders drawn defensively, fractionally inwards, glare framed perfectly by soft wire-hair that always lays right where she would want it to. For moments, the only sound or motion out of her is the tinny plinks of mercury droplets joining the wavering puddle at her feet, and the grating reactor whine like gritted teeth, frozen in place like a skittish animal. Then-- "...Little sister." A jolt of electricity-- metaphorical, emotional, displaced from the suffused energy throughout her body-- runs down Petra's spine, the snap of a rubber band without the release of tension. The way her shoulders twitch and her gaze twists away from Dimo to the ground is visibly unwholesome, coinciding with a torrent of unvoiced exhaustion and yearning. Obviously not, though. Belonging is always synonomous with ego death, for Petra, and in this case it's nauseatingly literal, physically antithetical to her entire body, and no momentary hairline crack in her frosted glass walls will change that. It should be the easiest thing in the world to spit on Dimo's insane, selfish invitation and run. Or she could at least shout some resolute rejection, rather than just mutely shaking her head. The edges of the vibrant horizon disintegrate as static eats away at Dimo's vision of her world, flattening it back into an empty silver plain. Slowly at first, then collapsing inwards, everything is wiped away with that same maddening itching sensation, leaving Petra alone in her blank enclosure, before that fades too. Petra gradually returns to consciousness, not having moved forwards or backwards at all.