the long-awaited...

[veronicaed]

She watched with distracted disinterest as the doctor's coat slipped out of view through the doorway, the door closing behind him with a gentle click. Her fingers rested, as always, on the uneven and scaly surface of her right arm, and her gaze dropped to the ground.

It had been a surprise for Manuela when she'd opened her eyes one day - it might have been night or morning, she wasn't sure - and found herself staring down the walls of the USA's most secretive holding facility again. Now that she looked back on it, maybe it hadn't been surprising enough, all things considered. After all, she couldn't pinpoint the last thing that happened in Nautilus, or the first thing that had had happened here in America. At some point, everything became fuzzy, blending together, and eventually, she'd realized that she wasn't where she thought she was any longer. It was like slowly falling to sleep - the world slipping away, shedding its skin to become something familiar but altogether different.

Or maybe it was that she'd finally woken up.

There was no proof that Nautilus had ever really existed, after all. She clearly remembered her arm being deformed and hideous, her fingers glued together with waxy flesh and chitinous plates until they weren't anything she recognized - but none of that was the case here. It was as it had been the day she'd first seen it - discolored, ill-textured flesh, nothing more. She'd looked on in wonderment as she was able to flex all five digits. There was no bird of paradise in the corner of her room, no odd cat-shaped robot waiting at the foot of her bed for her to wake up. The only sign that anything at all had changed was her missing bracer - the one she'd given to Rion. But when she asked about it, the doctors said that she'd only ever had the one.

Manuela had spent a long time wondering about it. It had been more than a year that she'd spent in that place. She'd laughed and bled and lived there - and for a girl infected with the deadliest strain of the most horrible virus on the planet, that was really something. But in the span of her few months here, it had grown more and more fantastic, more bizarre, more impossible. She'd catch herself trying to Bend things. And after some time, it had seemed like foolishness. The doctors monitoring her condition had said she'd passed out for some time on the helicopter; that she was probably suffering from some serious trauma, and some strange dreams certainly weren't out of the condition, and T-Veronica was almost entirely a mystery to them so who knew what side effects it might be having? But she was healthy, they said. That was good. And she'd stay that way as long as she was here.

She never asked how long that was going to be.

She found herself writing it all down. The things she remembered from the city, that is, because it seemed like it was slipping away into fantasy every moment. They allowed her to do that - so she did; she wrote in her small, girlish handwriting about Vincent's voice and his little house in the North, and the smile on V's mask and the car that blasted opera music, and Rion's grumpy look and the dry feeling of his hands. Sometimes she wrote about her father, and sometimes about those days in the jungle with the snakes and flies, but more than anything, she wrote about Nautilus, closing her eyes and frowning and trying to remember. Like she was doing now, locked up in a special little room in a country far from home.

Because she still believed that it was real. Nautilus was - is - home.

Comments

IT'S GOOD, BRAH

[delmetor]

The fact that Rion didn't know anything about government probably wouldn't have made Manuela feel any better, would it? He was acting all on impulses now, what felt right and what controlled him. It didn't take long before that illusion began to wane, and he began to realize once more that he had no idea what in the hell he was doing.

"Then we're just going to have to make one, right? I'll take us back to wherever I came in."

As if that was supposed to inspire much confidence for poor Manuela. Rion really didn't know. He was trying to follow his memory to wherever it was that he came in from, and maybe find some kind of loophole there somewhere.

Of course, that didn't make much sense, but in hindsight, this whole scenario was pretty much as nonsensical as one could get. He could Bend reality into a thing that was beyond sense, and it still wouldn't make any difference.

SEVERAL YEARS LATER

[veronicaed]

At least he's picking up on the haste. This situation is still so unbelievable; maybe her fear of the security wasn't entirely negativity, but partially due to her trying to rationalize things somehow. But the hand around hers is definitely real, and she can't help but want to believe in his words, even if that cockiness of his is definitely going to be getting them in trouble soon. There's an odd balance being struck between the feeling that she's doing something terribly wrong and the feeling that this is just what she's been waiting for all along.

"... I hope you're right."

As they exit from the hallway Manuela's room is located in into the general wing of - wherever she was these days, there are certainly plenty of doors to choose from. Most of them look like they'll branch off into more hallways and holding cells, but there's an elevator towards the end, and no one in the corridor. Nervous, she gestures towards it with her bandaged arm.

"There -- we are in the basement level. I know that. We must have to go up..."

Her gaze misses the security camera in the corner of the room, undoubtedly observing this activity.