Scene #8412: Us and This and Everyone and Everything Else

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	"You're not getting spoiled; you went through so, so much. You're not being treated like you're normal, because it's me and I hate you. And you're not going to lose anything, because it's just us and this and nobody and nothing else; and, let's be honest, you've been holding back for a long time, right?" Petra was in, um, high spirits, after Lilian's last visit. She slept comfortably for the first time in a week, for long enough that she couldn't be sure if her calendar tracker for the date was correct anymore. Lilian was gone when she woke up, of course-- she only sleeps for two hours each day, after all, and Petra had crashed for anywhere from half a day to a day and a half. After hobbling over to the shower, Petra hums to herself throughout her daily routine. 'It's all over anyways, right?' There's nothing to do in this room besides think, nothing to think about besides her, no one to observe her and nothing to work towards, no acts to keep up. The ethereal afterlife of being erased from existence to everyone except for the one that actually understood feels almost comforting, in a vague, dreamlike way. A few days later... It's Petra's birthday! Give or take. It bothers her a little bit, that she can't be sure what day it is anymore-- it bothers her a lot, actually, it feels like something important is slipping through her fingers. Petra is still able to sleep, at this point, after days of being alone. Ghosts of intimacy keep her fading company in bed, enough to drift off without panicking from irrational fear. Petra resolves to ask Lilian what day it is next time she's around, then back-calculate which day her birthday was, just so she'd know for certain. She thinks about other topics she'd want to ask her about, to direct their conversations in positive and maybe healthy directions. Cecilia was a name that came up multiple times, and seemed to be a positive aspect of Lilian's family that could lead into more gently working at Lilian's, uh, challenging feelings on the subject. Or maybe she could ask about Night Mist; Lilian always looks happy when talking about it. God, that sword is so cool. It feels a little silly to plot out conversations like that, but Petra's well aware of her limitations in figuring out the right thing to say on the spot. Besides, her thoughts keep coming back to her anyways, so it's a good use of her time. She's got plenty of it. A few days later... It's now been longer between visits than Lilian's ever gone before. The thought passes through Petra's mind: She only visits when she's angry and needs to vent and hurt me, right? What if trying to help her makes her stable enough to never come back? Maybe instead I should-- It's an unwelcome train of thought, but it sticks in Petra's head. She does her best to ignore it. The bed feels cold and empty again, and Petra's sleep is continually interrupted by nightmares. A few days later... What if it's worse? What if it's the other way around? I didn't help her reconcile with her feelings at all, I just poisoned her more because that's all I ever do and she realized that after she left. What if she's disgusted with me now and regrets talking to or being around me, and she's just going to stay away and leave me to rot? Maybe she only believed I meant any of it because of the alcohol, and now she's just-- just ashamed, of treating me with more respect than I deserved. Ahahaha. What if the next fucking speed bump's already arrived? It's past my birthday, it's getting close to a year since I got the Kana and joined the Watch, that's right on the annual schedule. Maybe that's why she's busy. It's not that she's intentionally abandoned me, it's just that I'm not relevant anymore.
Petra Soroka	A few days later.. A month of pills only lasts so long. Typically, for a month. Petra scrubs dried blood off of one of the knives on her shelf, cutting the last few in half to drag them out longer. They run out anyways. A few days later.. The knife has blood on it again. Only one out of the three meals each day is opened, and even when Petra chokes it down, it comes back up again later. The uniformly bland trays pile up in the corner of her room, not even taken the few feet to the waste chute. 'I want you to be as completely fucking miserable as I am until you finally get it; not dead.' 'Don't make me take responsibility for that too.' 'You're safe. You have a reason to live.' It feels more like being guilted than reassured. The guilty parts are actually more compelling, since reassurance demands that Petra has some intrinsic value to the other girl, rather than her death just being a problem, a rules violation. Still, either way, Petra keeps dragging herself through an increasingly erratic semblance of her daily routine. The lights don't really matter anymore. Wake up whenever, sleeping just brings nightmares anyways. Shower when it's dark. Stare at the empty pill bottles. Throw up. Brush her teeth for hours one day, then not at all the next. Grip the knife tightly enough that her arm trembles, and try not to think about how Lilian's clairvoyance might let her discover Petra's body and that might be the only way anyone else ever comes in this cell again and doing that damage to Lilian might be the only reason that anyone ever thinks about her again. Try to reread a novel in a moment of lucidity, and realize that her vision can't focus on text that small anymore, and she can't tell if the red streaming down her arms and dripping off of her fingers and blooming across the pages will still be there if she rubs her eyes. A few days later... Petra has been standing in an ice cold shower for who-knows-how-long when the door finally, finally opens again. It takes her a moment to consciously realize that she has a visitor, but when she does, she immediately shuts off the water and frantically stumbles out of the shower. Petra's voice cracks, hoarse with disuse but still nakedly relieved. "Lilian!" At the last second, she ducks behind the partition to wrap the towel around herself. "Wait, wait, give me a second, I didn't get any warning that you'd be here, I need to get dressed."
Dimokratia	Undrowned by a chorus of voices, two spin about in binary orbit. 'It was more interesting to stalk her through a forest.' 'It always is.' 'They have selected me, of course.' 'Wasn't that the point? Your plan?' 'It was inevitable.' 'You always say that.' 'I always mean it. Sometimes circumstances disagree.' 'It would be easier to eliminate her pattern and replace the whole soul.' 'Ever seeing targets to eliminate. There are elegant ways to correct deviations.' 'I'm mature enough to let something go. Are you?' 'Why would I take one, when I may have two?' Laughter, humming radiant. 'And no, Kratia.' 'You are not that mature either.' ~ Extradition is a funny thing for the incarcerated. It is often only the colors of the flags on the identically brutalist buildings that change, irrelevant to the incarcerated. A brief changing of birdcages before the cover goes over the top and the eroding twilight of the soul in exile resumes. But there is that moment, when the cage door opens. Metal-sounds, metal on stone, weight on stability, clicks from points of contact, thunks from planes of force meeting floor. A weight displacement unlike any of the local guards - at least three. 'Lilian', at the door, stands silently -- for she is not Lilian, and she stops just through the entrance, hands clasped behind her back, posture upright. Sleek-and-detailed in the way of clockwork and well managed cables, unadorned today from amusing dalliances in costumes, Dimo of the Silver leaks a humming heat from the doorway into the cold, damp hole that Petra had been committed to. Her wrapped cladding of carbon black and chrome silver presents a kind of coat-collar about her neck, with a Commonwealth insignia embossed on the right. "Take your time." Murmurs Dimo, buzzing with the gentle amusement of a personal joke. The cold shower of anticipation was only a seasoning, and she didn't have to ruin the surprise before Petra got ready.
Petra Soroka	The first sign that something is wrong is the temperature. The wash of warmth, the champagne-bubble synaptic crackle buzzing against her consciousness, is starkly different from the needle prickles of ice cold malice that her expected visitor always carries with her. Petra's hazily distorted mind struggles to latch on to the visitor's voice, and her first words disintegrate into scraps of static before being processed, but that psychic pressure immediately alarms her, the lack of hatred registering as more hostile than Lilian ever did. She warily leans around the corner of the partition to verify what she already knows is true-- her sight is barely more reliable than her hearing, at this point, and the one sense that she trusts was enough to make her certain. The cell is a disaster. A small, comfortably studio apartment style layout, the main area contains just a bed, a bookshelf, and a short coffee table and chairs, surrounded with normal walls and sealed off from the rest of the prison with an airlock set of heavy metal doors. The table and bedframe are bolted in place-- everything else is strewn around. The sheets were pulled off the bed and thrown to the ground in a fit, the chairs are pushed into the far corner as if they were getting in the way of something. Scattered across the floor is an incoherent array of items: the expected meal platters, sealed and unsealed, empty cans, torn up papers, the occasional whole book. Tools of torture. On the table is a heavy metal flashlight, the type that security guards use, surrounded by shards of white and translucent orange plastic, the wooden surface of the table covered in dents and scrapes. And blood, nearly everywhere. Paper towels, crumpled up with splotches of red-brown crust, apathetically withheld from the disposal chute like the food waste. Stains on the bare mattress, dark spots on the floor, on knives that were never cleaned after Lilian's last usage of them and on one that was. There's no splatter. It's not a murder scene. Just drops, here and there, smeared by accidental contact, building up over weeks and never having the presence of mind to clean. Petra herself would fit seamlessly in a horror movie. Only half visible when peeking from behind the bathroom wall, the girl would look like a corpse if not holding herself up by her own strength. Wet hair streams rivulets of water into the white towel wrapped around her torso. Her lips are blue and her skin is pale, owing to the frigid shower, which only makes all of the marks carved into her stand out that much more, purple-red and agonizing. Scabbed burn marks dot down her legs, from an intentionally placed lighter, matched by angry, spiderwebbing patches of seared skin by electric shock. Bruises color and texture the skin even beneath other wounds, and the most prominent, with barely patches of inches left untouched, are jagged lines of split skin, from a sharp knife deftly applied. Down her one visible forearm, the knife marks change, from haphazard to horizontal, irregularly spaced but straight across. Around her neck and down her collarbone, disappearing beneath the towel, are bite marks. Not crushed bruises or hickeys, like human mouths typically do, but cut skin pierced by sharp teeth. Petra's dull glare settles on Dimo, swelling for a moment with automatic anger, before it all drains away into sheet white terror, ducking back behind the wall. What might've been a defiant shout comes out as a shaky, hollow croak. "Wh-what are you doing here? W-why-- where's--" Petra clutches at the top of the towel, shuddering uncontrollably. With a rapid flurry of motion, spurred on by her panicked heartbeat, she tears off the towel and throwns on her soft white blouse and shorts, much higher quality than anything a prisoner should be expected to have.
Petra Soroka	Petra still doesn't step fully out from the bathroom once dressed. She clings to the empty doorframe as if it was a barrier, shielding herself from Dimo. "Dimo. I-I-I didn't think any Paladins would visit. I thought the plan was to just let me rot and disappear." Did Lilian do this? I thought I wasn't arrested by the Paladins, technically. Did she tell Dimo? Did she tell everyone? Is-- is she--? Petra's eyes track over to the knife laying on the bed.
Dimokratia	Before, before everything - or at least, most things borne as scars and marks and purple swellings highlit by cold water - there was a silver falcon in a forest of quiet trees. A small ground animal, scarred and marked as Nature's own, had held fast to an insufficient barrier, placed thin excuses between itself and the predatory, and trembled. In the forest of concrete and authority, through an airlock of disregard, stoops a paragon of clean warmth and metal purity. And her blue optics reflect, with an impassive pan-across, a deliberate place of tortutre. A physical, material, organic place of sensation. A specialization - a complexity of anguish, of torture, of sharing and becoming more sick. A plague ward. A plague cult. A plague empire. Disgusting. Larger than the doorframe, larger than the room's accents, larger than Petra, Dimo stands with the casually perfect poise of someone whose idle stances are still effortlessly balanced. Warmer than the water, drier than the room, cleaner than all the surrounds, the carbon-black and chrome-silver champion takes a step, and then another, into the room. Around the path of her feet, temperature transfer creates little motions of air and dust, smoothing and sterilizing a few inches around even where her steps land. An island of the way things should be, buzzing warm and obvious. Palpable to the tight knot of Petra's forebrain. Just like the cold forest. "Poor, poor girl." Dimo hums, the intensity of her tone carrying around the thin partition like a tantalizing pie-scent to tempt a cartoon character. "You must understand that everything you do, and do not, in the next few moments will be critical for the rest of your life, and for Lilian Rook's." The synthetic paragon informs Petra in an almost singing, certainly humming, beatific tone. "You have not rotted. You did not disappear. And despite the knife, you are not ended." Turning towards the bathroom partition-wall, a length of pseudopodic silver from the small of Dimo's back extends through the air as an extrusion and extension, weightless and flowing until it wraps about the knife on the bed to retrieve it, delicate, and lift it towards the tall woman. A 'bright' smile rests on her carbon-dark lips. "The Commonwealth has issued an extradition for you. The Paladins - through me - will be taking over your custody. If you understand, present yourself."
Petra Soroka	"You must understand that everything you do, and do not, the next few moments will be critical for the rest of your life, and for Lilian Rook's." Petra's blood runs cold. Pupils constrict, breath catches in her throat, heartbeat pounding through tense muscles ignites new pain in every wound. She takes an unsteady step back, further into the bathroom away from Dimo, dizzy from tilting her face up enough to look at Dimo. 'Extradition'? What the fuck is-- 'Taking over custody'. Petra breaks her gaze from Dimo, scanning the wreckage of her room, chest rising and falling in wheezing hyperventilation. They're-- the Paladins are taking me? From here? I-I-I-I was right, I was right, Lilian needs to prevent herself from talking to me. She probably felt-- felt guilty, and told-- who oversees the Paladins? Do they have something like MPs? Is it just-- well, no, she shouldn't be in trouble for-- actually, that's it, I'm being taken as a trade, so that she doesn't get in trouble. "I-I-I, I don't see w-why Li-- why Rook would be involved in-- why her, specifically, of everyone that-- that arrested me." Petra defaults into a tight-lipped, shivery neutral, choking out a response. If Lilian isn't in trouble, then Petra won't give anything away. She only would've told them what was necessary to keep herself safe, to deflect as much as she could onto Petra rather than herself. That's how it is. Thrive and feel guilty, or die. 'At least it's just me, right? No one else saw, no one else will hear, and really, it's not like there's much to apologize for.' Petra wraps her arms around herself, then flinches at the contact against her skin. Her arms stick to her shirt when she pulls them away, and the white becomes patterned with faint stripes of red. She has to-- she has to hide this, she can't let people look at her like this. Letting people see means that it becomes real for both her and Lilian, and-- oh god, the bite marks. "You don't-- you don't need to bring Rook into this. I've had enough of her." Was this really the best way for you, Lilian? "C-can I grab a sheet, first? To cover up? Before anything-- before whatever shit you have to do?"
Dimokratia	Examining the knife, bloody, dusted minutely with flecks of a compound - medicine. The blood - everywhere, blood - told a chemical story as surely as it painted a picture of tortured physical misery. Dispassionately, black-wrapped-silver fingers lift the blade, maneuver it gently about with the soft clicks of metal on dirty metal. There are no defacing click-crunch-scrapes of pressure and evidentiary decreasement -- things like oily fingerprints were a laughable flaw for Dimo to have. Petra shakes, trembles, and hyperventilates - so familiar, little ground animal - while the champion of the Silver adjusts in slow paces about the room, inspecting small details with a detached curiousity. The barrier of clammy air in the bathroom, long over-saturated with water, steams, forms a shroud. Ineffective, in truth, but still. Brow raised, questioning, a soft emission of tone-dropping hum as Dimo's mood dips off a cliff and bounces back to a lower standing level. Bassy, like a fusion engine that a pilot sits atop of, the paragon uses her explaining voice. "If I must be so painstakingly clear," The sophont woman begins, expression tilting down to stare 'through' the wall at Petra. "then I will claim all of your illusions first, Petra." "Rook is involved in this festering,disease-ridden mess because she is the one who signed the orders." It's not important which ones. "I need to bring the ones responsible for the state of the results forward to speak for her results. And the results. . ." Are not presentable to the society, to the public, to the populace. To the regular people, the chilling and crushing gaze and weight of Everyone and Everything. "Are not up to Paladins standards. You are not repaired. You are not presentable. You are not warm. The disease remains - the disease in you turns others. And you are here in this filthy" The words rumble at the trench of the wave that Dimo's voice carries, emotional in the way of a engine fed low quality fuel, a complex protest. "festering hole of society. I have been sent as is right to correct it. To correct you." It is then that Petra learns about a fun ability of the champion of the Silver, as the warmed-metal hand of Dimo reaches smoothly through the room partition wall, and yanks Petra. Held through the wall by the nape of her neck, she is yanked through to a particular sensation: the wall parting like wet sand around her, a ring of too-close contact that almost feels like mingling with the bits of solidness that fits like a tight glove as she's pulled through. Held, ungently, in one hand, Dimo looks down at the tortured girl in her grasp and makes no effort at a human emotion or a facial approximation. Blue optics glassily reflect Petra's state back at her in cold colors. "The world has not had enough of you, Petra. You will be seen again. By many. The Paladins will process you, and no sheet will help you there. You will live, and no partition will allow you to hide behind it. By your own hand your choices have been limited, and now, as the one given custody of you by the Commonwealth, I will take the easier of two things from you:" "Your compliance. Or your obedience."
Petra Soroka	"Stop it. Stop l-looking. Please." Each hard, disapproving glance that Dimo passes over the cell snaps a fragment Petra's superpositioned nonexistence back into cold, unambiguous reality. Pain becomes pointless, conversations sound hollow in memory, and dreams and promises evaporate into nothing like alcohol. One hundred percent real. The way it always was. Pretending otherwise was a fucking joke. Petra feels sick, the world spinning around her. Dimo's words are smothering; heat and pressure choking ash and demanding that it become diamond. Petra shrieks when Dimo's hand reaches for her, and sick and battered and exhausted as she is, she's pulled along like a doll. Like a fucking prop. In response to Dimo's inhuman stare, Petra's weak, writhing resistance is sickeningly human, in all the sloppy, helpless ways. She twists and pounds her fists on Dimo's arm, wordlessly shrieking between overexerted, raspy breaths. "No! No!! Don't touch me! Stop!" Bile stings at the back of her throat, mixing with the taste of blood in her mouth. "I don't need to be presentable! I-I-I don't, fucking--" "The disease remains - the disease in you turns others." Ah. That's why. She infected Lilian, so she needs to be purged. Lilian had to have requested this. Otherwise they'd just want me dead. She-- her rules wouldn't let her, so she did this. She sent Dimo, to, to, to-- "The world has not had enough of you, Petra. You will be seen again. By many." If Petra really was one of those special children from space, if she was strong enough to assert her will over reality, if she could make anyone fucking listen to what her ideal shape would be-- then in that moment, after hearing those words, her heart would be choked to a halt by psychic desire. It almost feels like it happens. Inarticulate pressure crushes her chest, gagging her into silence, ribs bowing and creaking with the impact of the sentencing. Her heart flutters unconsciously, automatically, against the muscular tension, beating over and over and over into the future without missing a single moment, without giving her a single break. A wish as sick as that would never be granted. Only a sick girl could wish for it in the first place. Petra stiffens up, every muscle clenched and quivering. Her voice only comes out as a whisper. "N-no. No. Just kill me. Fucking-- cut the disease out, don't try to cure it-- her. I won't be presented in front of a fucking audience like this. Put me down, you sick freak. I-I'm not. I won't do it."
Dimokratia	To the requests to stop looking- To the shrieks and pounds of fists- To the squirming, human writhing- To the clammy, oily skin that dries warm at her touch- To the wish to die- The answer that Dimo of the Silver, summarily, to the whole of the above, the struggle, the diseased thing known as Petra: "No." Dimo's hand contracts, seizing around Petra's throat. Contact with the champion's palm is intense, closer-still than human touch is. The warm silver spanning the inside of her palm has a cilial flow of connection more like a liquid than a solid, only meeting at certain points. At the neck vertebrae, the connection tingles and pinches and pricks, little hairs able to stand into the surface eerily. Her whole body could torque around that connection and it is tighter than skin against muscle and bone. The way she carries on is sweet, agreeable. "And, yes. The disease in you wails and screams and knows its time is near, and lies to you that you will die as well. But you won't. Not your beautiful soul, little warrior. And to the disease, I must be 'sick'. And to the illness that paralyzes your heart in the presence of warmth and love, I must be a 'freak'." Dimo laughs, lifting the stiffened girl, still by the neck, like a doll to be appraised, dangling and help-less. Cool blue optics to quivering eyes, Dimo's dark lips lift anew in a smirk. "There's the obedience, hidden beneath your diseased tongue's flailing. Cut it out. I will. I'll peel it from you gently, my darling lost little soul." The paralysis, the stopping-up, is far more agreeable than the wrenching, for in a suddenly intimate embrace Dimo brings in her other arm around the hanging form of Petra, pulling and pressing to drop a tender kiss on Petra's lips. Warm carbon-black presses in a perfect approximation of 'human' connection to clammy blue. Like a familiar lover, a rumble and exhalation escapes dryingly across the wings of Petra's cheeks, as Dimo finds this truly amusing. "What sort of freak would prefer taking, hmm? What sort, indeed." The feeling of contact spreads from the back of Petra's neck, crawling across skin, snug and definite, warm in the way of the Silver, dispelling the clamminess of water and the ill, shivering-tremble of sensitivity-lit nerves. 'Complying', as 'obedience' has been found, Dimo drops Petra the three feet to the floor from her outstretched hand, letting her react to her south-crawling and enclosing collar of silver. "The diseased you will die, wounded, of her illness. This place will be erased, little warrior, and then you may return to society. Warm. Whole. Complete, and complex. This is my mercy, blessed little one. Do not try to fight it." "It may become rather painful if you do. Stay strong, for the illness is leaving you."
Petra Soroka	It doesn't count, when it's not Lilian's hand around her neck. Petra falls to the floor and crumples, her legs rendered unusable and agonized for a moment on contact. Wheezing and still dazedly off-balance, Petra scrambles backwards on all fours, hitting her head against the mattress frame in the same way as before. But it's different, now. It's already happened. There's no talking, or convincing, or connecting of hearts, there's no comfort in the absence of autonomy; only inevitable strength and her inability to resist the choices it makes for her. Petra's hands shake as she slowly brings her trembling hands up to the silver collar around her throat, then screams until her voice rasps away into hoarse nothingness, trying to pull it off. It's no use. Beneath the skin, quicksilver sheathes replace myelin along axons, dripping, branching fractals spreading across dendrites, darting across the synaptic gap, propagating within and without her entire body over agonizing minutes. Petra's own aura, a familiar feeling for Dimo, thrums at full intensity, frantically dousing the sun's warmth with the hot, sticky mess of human blood, twisting under Dimo's surface like a neuropathic itch in flesh that the Silver's champion doesn't possess. Even as tendrils of warm, inviting silver crawl up her spine and across her scalp, Petra rejects being a part of Dimo's collective, a black, dead pixel buzzing in her peripheral senses. The rest takes. Fighting it is natural, a prey animal instinct when Petra's mind clings to remaining as meat. She doubles over coughing from the damage to her throat, each painful retch coming out more and more peacefully as her torn, inflamed esophagus is smoothed into pristine metal. The pain and indescribable violatory horror churns her stomach, and she throws up onto the floor, bile mixed with blood and beads of hydrophobic mercury, dancing and splitting like cells under a microscope. The rest takes. Saltwater tears dry up and spill out of faintly glowing, infinitely intricate glass eyes as rivulets of silver. A million sources of pain, illness and hunger and exhaustion and even the filtered out pain of pressing feet into the ground, all fade; rushing blood in her ears stills along with her heartbeat, replaced with a steady reactor hum, without any relief in the stillness. Filling her torso and down the length of her limbs, from the soft blonde wire of her hair to the permanently, flawlessly glossy alloy of her nails, all of it takes. Her skin should be newly reborn, immaculate. She should be purged of disease entirely, and finally presentable. But when Petra puts a shuddering hand to her mouth, flinching away at the unnatural sensation of contact, glittering metallic tears already smeared across her cheeks, it is obviously, disgustingly not. Wounds that were previously upraised skin still mar her body, imprinted on the otherwise untarnished surface, twisted and irregular. Beneath each slit in her wrist is shimmering silver, matched by the scabbed blisters of burn marks, and all the knife wounds and nail marks that were meant to be purified. The bites remain all over her neck, passing under and above the silver collar, marked with human blood-red rather than silver. 'Even Dimo was patient with you, wasn't she? Even if she can be awkward.' Petra's voice is still hoarse, grating on the ears. "I...--" She cuts off, the sensation of speaking without breath unbearably alien. She presses a hand to her mouth, flinching at the hard clicking of metal against metal, wheezing through her fingers. "What the fuck? What the fuck?! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK! What's wrong with you?! I-- I-- I--" Panicked anger burns away almost immediately, faced with the woman who'd already proven unshakable to it. Petra's voice dies out, and after a brief pause, she bursts into wailing tears.
Dimokratia	There is a connection that Dimo expects to finally attain, the release, the tremoring, trembling pop of the last bit of pus from the wound. To squeeze the vessel and force the ill filling from the good whole. To know, to see the goodness remain after the chunks were forced free, jettisoned as useles, to push out every bit of the mess and every kind of sickness. Squeeze. Press. Find the weak point, release the barriers, and let the flow equalize with divine rightness. An embrace of becoming, a welcoming kiss, and then the last pain Petra-of-the-Illness would ever experience. Truly, it 'should' have been a transcendent experience of divine fire igniting within her. The champion of the Silver knew exactly the experience from both ends, giver and receiver. And-- --like a black spot, a dead pixel and blind pimple both, a circuit that would not complete for no reason, painfully and impossbly resistant, the sickness does not leave the vessel smashes against the obliterating pinch -- Dimo stands there, impassively, but Petra understands that she 'took a step back', emotionally stunned. The champion of the silver watches the writing of filth being purged and the marks remaining with a detached and glassy dispassion, as within she fights a spiritual war, rattled and searching behind and about her, summoning the knowledge of ancient humming tones that no longer have voices, to commune in frequency variance without formal words. Distress, and a query sent up like a flare. Had Dimo integrated a shard of the old threats? As the sick synaptic core of Petra rests like a pool of dirty blood on pure hydrophobic mercury and clean synthetic perfection, an inversion of her heaving chest and retching evacuation's spill, and is marked with all-too-meatlike, all-too-human wounds. Then a real horror dawns, within her synaptic buzz and without, painted on dark lips and cold blue optics. A furrow of metal brows and platinum white filiments accents the slow, paced recoil as - now that she had taken Petra fully and completely in her grasp - she realizes the girl still isn't presentable. Moving - not and never falling - to a knee, Dimo attempts to reach out towards Petra's shoulders, hands soothing, sisterly-familiar and warm even without contact. "You... You are still wounded-- " and crying! Dimo, still exploring new territory, tries to calm down her first... ...reluctant convert.
Petra Soroka	Among the flood of revolting alien sensation, Petra's empathic connection to Dimo goes unnoticed. That's almost normal, after all, and the physical differences are more pressing. But from Dimo's end, being tethered to Petra is continuous psychosomatic agitation, drawing disproportionate attention like that single dead pixel out of thousands, tied with an undercurrent of fleshy itch that swells when she focuses on it. Like splinters embedded in skin softer than either of them have, the sensation prickles and irritates, washing across her in ripples whenever she moves. Utopia has tried to bring Petra into its fold before. The disease lingers; glass shards cut and bleed; shrapnel buries itself in your heart. Crumpled on the ground and bawling, Petra wildly swings her arm out to shield herself from Dimo's touch. Uncontrolled strength brings the motion not to knocking the hand away, but following through, crashing into the bedframe and shattering wood. Dimo had blessed her as a warrior of the Silver, and in her divine certainty, equalized the power dynamic between the pair. Petra surges to her feet, electroplated tear tracks streaking down her cheeks. There's no grace in her movements; the bed cracks where she places her hands to shove herself up, she teeters on her feet after overshooting, her gesticulations are frenzied, uneven. She glares at Dimo, reactor whirring into a whine, and takes a shuddering step forwards. "Get the fuck out. Get out. Get away from me!" Her shout is articulated with a wild arm motion, roughly shoving Dimo away. It's sickening, to feel the frictionless glide of internal mechanisms, awareness of the micro-motions of intricate machinery in place of muscles, exerting a fraction of their strength with a nauseatingly relieving feeling like stretching. It's worth bearing, to get this fucking monster out. Petra trembles violently, wrapping her arms around herself, as the reactor whine builds to a shriek, crackling like feedback as if overheating. Scales of metal, chipped off of her skin, peel away from her body by unseen force, razor thin and razor sharp and floating in a cloud around her. "...I hate you. I hate you so much. I hate what you did to me, I hate your fucking condescending preaching, and I fucking hate, that Lilian, was tricked into letting this happen!" Millions of tiny silver blades, more than Petra's entire body volume, twinkle like stars before haphazardly launching in, approximately, Dimo's direction. The table is sliced into kindling, the floor and walls are marked with hundreds of tiny scars, and Petra herself dives to grab the knife. She holds it towards Dimo, arms shaking with quicksilver mess leaking out of them, gesturing with the tiny, human thing rather than the Silver weaponry now at her disposal.
Dimokratia	There were legends about this, dangerous stories. Sine waves stories bore cautionary frequencies. The ones that desired, took, and betrayed. The Lost, the Traitorous, the Fallen. Before their Mother, before their god had come to purge fear and doubt from brilliant, beautiful process. A star at the center of a vast system, wrapped in want-warmed metal and passion-fired carbon. Absolute, and poured from vessel to vessel in a divine remaking that diminished nothing, and granted much. That one could exist after their Mother was unthinkable, yet it was true. Silver turned against Silver, and with all the grace that Petra did not use, did not bear, Dimo moves. But even she spends a moment, just a first, flat-footed and surprised when her 'gift' turns on her. Flensed by the microflechettes, it is that she is not actually a flesh-and-blood person herself that she doesn't take a lethal shotgunning of suborned metal right into her torso. Satisfyingly, even unaimed, the flailing pushes her off, and the blast steps her fully back, off her knee, to stand at the outside of a harshly-enforced circle. The room of sugar-glass things and cardboard-hard materials, things that she was now firmly, wholly, utterly beyond turn to flinders under the pure feelings of her expressed stress. Petra inherited Silver drips from her arms, falls to the ground, and rejoins her by meeting her feet. It simply is more 'her', though without a connection to the collective around the brightest star, the patterns for utopia are not summonable to mind. Her processing power, her soul, hangs in a lonely void. It, like the laughably useless knife in her hands, sharply points outward towards Dimo of the Silver. Backstepping a second time, towards the sealed airlock, Dimo stops. "I... will believe in the warmth in you, newborn sister." She offers, in a quiet-hum prayer. "I can see past this pain. I have." She adds, and backsteps again -- through the airlock's span, phasing through the wall with a melting-sand ripple through the solid material -- disappearing as the sealed door swallows the contours of her pale metal face and contoured panel lines. In place of a heartbeat, there is a pulse of irregular warmth from a star her eyes tells her is beautiful, and her skin tells her is warm upon her, and her ears hear the wave of sound from the Mother-star as a lullaby. She can move towards it whenever she wishes, and become more. She just isn't moving towards it right now, not at all.