Scene #9369:

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	Theoretically, they could have done this in the Shrine of Adversity. In some senses, it might have been better-- more space to test the results, all the fiddly options with pain, enemies, and lack thereof, and everything else the Shrine offers. There's only one reason that Petra brings Audrey into the dungeons below the castle on Hydrochoeria instead: privacy. The 'underground' hallways gradually heat up as they go into the lower layer of the castle, where the forges and kitchens are active practically around the clock. Below what used to be servant quarters and is now the workplace of Petra's army of ratbots, the temperature drops rapidly, leeching away into the stone and metal walls that are close to the stratospheric air rushing by the island. At the very base of the castle, dingy cobblestone stairs lead to a wide arched chamber surrounded by barred cells, lit not by torches, but by a combination of the forgelight filtering down from above, and rows of florescent lights Petra installed. There's some ominous machinery, most notably a rack, but it's all pushed to the side and looks unused. In its place, Petra sets down the chair she had been carrying above her head like an RPG character this entire time. She puts a hand on her hip and looks back at Audrey, a tiny bit trepidatious. "Anyways, like, I don't really know what's gonna happen. I've never done this before, and besides, like, the fucking around I've done myself, my power's totally undocumented. But I'm sure it'll be fine."
Audrey Basque	Audrey is still having a good day. You can't take this away from her when she's managed progress on something that had been plaguing her like a weird mental block for years, thanks to White. It's slow progress, but it's progress, and it brings to her mind Lilian's recent statement of the school being a nice foundation to build on, but that she's picked up more from here than there. Since she had to come over directly after class, she's still wearing her school uniform; but it's practical, anyway, because if they're going to be messing around with weird powers, she wants to be wearing something that's lined with her fancy celestial threads, just in case. It is loose, though, the blazer open as a sort of declaration that it's friday and now she's taking it easy. She's such a delinquent. It's only her third or fourth visit into the castle's underground, weirdly enough; it's not somewhere she's needed to come often, outside the tour and once or twice when they were stretching the island some. The unused machinery isn't something she'd noticed before, so idly, as they pass it, she asks: "What's all that stuff anyway? It's collecting dust down here." When they reach the area Petra decides is good enough to put her chair down at, Audrey nods, beaming confidently. "Academically I need to warn you everything you just said is extremely exciting. A weird undocumented power you don't experiment with much? If only it were celestial in nature, I might walk out of here with several papers' worth of materials." Eyeing the chair, she asks: "What's it for anyway? Should I be getting one out too? I think I might have a folding chair on me somewhere..."
Petra Soroka	"Oh, that's torture stuff," Petra says offhandedly, waving a hand at the menacing pile of spiky metal and wood. "I've never used it but I thought a castle dungeon would be weird without it. One of those cells has an iron maiden in it, even though those weren't, like, real. I've hung out in it; it's not so bad." Maybe another time Petra would've made a joke or threat about using it on Audrey instead, but not right now. Petra is oddly intense and fidgety-nervous at the prospect of experimenting with her power on Audrey, halfway like she's worried about something going wrong, and halfway as if it was comparable to Audrey demanding that she strip down. She squints at Audrey, rubbing at her nose because of the dust. "Academically exciting, huh? Well, I-- I guess it is. I mean, it's not like I have any of the, tech and machinery and psychic sensors to measure anything. I don't know if any of this will be academically useful at all. Just, uh, personally." "What's it for anyway?" Petra blinks, confused, and then pats the chair. "... For you to sit on? What else would it be for?"
Audrey Basque	"Oh." Torture implements for the dungeon. Yeah that makes sense. She's not sure why she didn't think about that. "... why, though?" she asks of Petra spending time inside a chamber of spikes and needles. "That just sounds awful. But like, not even possibly-productive awful, just regular awful?" Seeing Petra so fidgety is a bit odd, but Audrey decides not to press it, instead responding with: "I'm getting to see something not a lot, possibly no one else, has gotten to see before. Of course it's academically exciting. Sadly, not my field at all, but "scientific curiosity" is a universal must to study anything at all, I think." Maybe it's just that she's excited to spend time with Petra, full stop. As for the chair... "Oh. Right, sure." Audrey sits, following instructions, tilting her head up and back to look at Petra curiously. "What about you? You're just going to keep standing the whole time? Wouldn't it be easier to focus if you were sitting too?"
Petra Soroka	"... why, though?" Petra stares back at Audrey as if she's the one being strange. "... Haven't you ever thought about it? Like, you know, just what it's like? I thought about it all the time, so I figured I might as well do it since I had the chance. Duh." "... And, I, uh... figured it'd be better if I had the Beauty of Ash out. So I don't need a chair." Petra fiddles with the compact mirror hanging off of the cord around her neck, and she looks around the chamber as if she wasn't already sure it was large enough to fit the mech. "Even if I sit on the floor, I'm not going to be uncomfortable once I, like, start doing it." Once Audrey is sat down, Petra unfolds the mirror and presses her thumb into it, and when a crack splits down the middle of the reflective pane, it unfolds into unfolding pieces, spilling out like glittering ice, turning the forgelight to fluid along the infinitely faceted surface of billions of broken shards. It wraps around Petra, clicking together like jigsaw pieces to form the Beauty of Ash on all fours, though the chamber is just barely large enough for it to stand up on two. It leans down into its forelegs to stretch like a cat, shivering with a click-click of rearranging glass finding the most comfortable place to settle, and the breathless, vertigo-inducing aura that's too faint for anyone who isn't repeatedly familiar to notice tangibly washes off of it in proximity. As a dog circles its bed, the mech paces around Audrey a handful of times, and while sitting, she can watch the way its legs support its entire body weight on the singular, razor sharp tip at the end of each. Even along the rough cobblestone, there isn't a single unbalanced tremor in its movement, and it uncannily avoids placing its feet in any of the cracks or grooves that would make it slip up. After a few rotations, it finally settles down, curled in a wolflike crescent with Audrey at the center. Glass shatters and tinkles out of its back, and Petra slides to the ground. She sits down on the folded arms of the mech, right by Audrey's knees and beside the massive head of the Beauty of Ash. She takes a slow breath, closing her eyes. She'd said before that there was a mental and emotional component to using her powers, but in this environment, the boundary between 'using' and 'not using' her psionics is hazy and unclear. Really, she's always using them, and it's just that when the wish is undirected, it's smothered in the sublayer of reality, and 'intention' is just the knife that pierces a gap through the tapestry. When her intention doesn't need to be as immediate and precise, the wish bleeds through like beading ink, growing in indistinct gut sensation. For Audrey, it's a blend of intuitive dread and expected exhilaration, like a rollercoaster creeping up a hill or a razor being lowered to skin, a fundamental wrongness in the human state and the world around her that can only reach a breaking point soon. "... Alright. Okay. I've got balance, I think. Could you use a little bit of your magic?"
Audrey Basque	"The only torture device I've ever thought about intentionally leaping into is you," Audrey smiles, playfully, as she then adds: "So I suppose I don't get to talk about intrusive thoughts. Well, I'm glad it was... "not that bad"? I think I'll pass on verifying that wisdom." Petra acting on her intrusive thoughts doesn't surprise her, but she certainly can't say she's ever felt like finding out what being in a torture device feels like. The Beauty of Ash deploys, a process Audrey always finds a bit fascinating to watch. It's beautiful, and moves so fluidly; it paces, settles down and almost wraps around Audrey, in a way that feels... safe? If it weren't for that odd feeling being near it provokes, that slight simultaneous thrill and terror of standing on a cliff's edge and realizing how high of a drop it is. But, really... That's just how Petra makes her feel, often. The feeling grows, and Audrey adjusts her seating a bit to be straight and steady, as if it were going to help. "Alright," she nods, not needing to feel out the area at all. There's magic in the air, here; there's a night sky she made, under constellations she's already memorized, focused by and through her tower like it's a lens. She knows where the boundaries are, where the ley lines flow. It's not perfect-- it couldn't be, it's her first-- but it's noticeable. Her blazer is just a second layer of comfort on top. She calmly stretches the room, just a few feet in every direction but the way they came in from. Enough for Petra to lock onto, without either destabilizing her or making an unnecessarily huge room she'll need to fix after. "Is this enough?"
Petra Soroka	The moment Audrey reaches out to interface with the world beyond herself and Petra, it feels wrong in a way that's hard to define. It's like smearing clay into colors you can't unmix, wiping away the confabulation of a piece of art being a sign-and-symbol of anything besides dyed mud squeezed into one shape of infinite; it's the sensation of raw and painful fingernails bitten down to the quick, scraping against wood and stone and feeling every flaw penetrate your stomach as illness and revulsion. When she calls upon the magic that's meant to repeat patterns in extended space, so well-practiced that she doesn't consciously think about it, she finds that it's not there. Or rather, she feels face-blind, stumbling, capable of summoning every piece of the image in her mind separately but unable to cohere them into a whole. The stones floor, the iron bars, the lights and the metal they're attached to and the piles of wood shoved in the corner, fail to fit together as objects with a collective definition, and in absence of the physical schema that inscribes meaning into the world, it's as if she's drawing every line one by one without being able to see any of the others. Petra doesn't seem to notice at all when the boundaries of the room become Escherian. She slowly opens her eyes and tilts her face up at Audrey, flushing just a little bit. Within the cold unreality of the dungeon around them, another feeling builds up inside Audrey. A warm glow, a spotlight for a performance well done, the greedy gaze of adoring eyes rest on her, tracing and radiating presence, but unlike the times where Petra's used her power on Audrey before, she doesn't push it all the way into the catharsis of completion. Petra shuffles closer on her knees, and Audrey's warming stablization of self reflects off of her and magnifies like off of tin foil, dragging the impression of her 'soul' into their gravitational midpoint. Petra, slightly bleary-eyed, puts her hands on top of Audrey's. "Mhm, I think that's, um, enough. So I guess... what do I do... it's hard to figure out, um, how to 'experiment' with this. I guess, first, let me try...." Petra laces her fingers into Audrey's, and lifts up her hands. When she channels Audrey's magic, it's not a 'copy', scanned and made into cold mimicry in print-- instead it's like she's puppeting the interaction with the medium through Audrey without moving her physically, stepping inside her skin and wearing her knowledge and practice as an intimate suit. The gentle raising and lowering of gravity that she causes within the chamber feels like a dance, of a single person in lockstep with their own ghost or guardian angel, and like obsessive, quivering voyeurism that sees through Audrey as if she was transparent. Petra's cheeks are gradually becoming pinker. "Sorry. This is weird."
Audrey Basque	Maybe it was for the best that she be sitting down after all. This is the first time that Audrey has ever been subjected to the external world feeling not just wrong, but like it's incompatible with her magic. There's a difference, a huge one, between her novice attempts at it, as a child, still unable to fully experience and understand what she was trying to do, and her fully trained, gifted young adult self suddenly finding that it isn't working, that it feels wrong, and sick, and anathema to herself. Like having to assemble each star before you can draw a star map, and being unable to look at the work you've already done before. If she weren't expecting to feel strange, she might panic; instead she's merely confused, uncomfortable, out of place, like a hack who managed to trick everyone into thinking she was good at this. Until warmth, at least; until the spotlight and the gazes, and Petra scooting closer, reassuringly. She remembers that feeling, too. Their hands touch, and then lock, for Petra to perform her magic; literally, as it turns out. Audrey stays silent, maybe a shade pinker too, but absorbed just a tad by the event, and so not flustered, so much as aware of it. She feels gravity flow up and down, as if it were Petra that had practiced the gestures her whole life, the precision of changing decimal points in an equation that could kill you and everyone nearby if you let the intrusive thoughts win and went just a bit too far in either direction. With a smile, and the radiance of a performance well done kept as a precious treasure, Audrey shakes her head at Petra's comment. "It's alright. Do you need me to do anything? To think about anything? Walk me through how it feels. What you're trying to do. For me, it felt... really wrong, at first. Like... the world wasn't real anymore. You can't manipulate space if space doesn't exist. An emptiness and a sickness like nothing in this room belongs here, or even together as a whole. Imagine... trying to move a wall you've built. But you can only see one brick at a time, and not where the wall begins, or ends. But now..." She tries to think of the right words to use, and only manages: "Don't let go." She doesn't even notice, how badly warped the room is; how stretching the walls away turned into nonsensical ups and downs in the confusion of every operation being separate.
Petra Soroka	"Do you need me to do anything?" "Mh-mm." Petra shakes her head no, and tightens her fingers between Audrey's. Every point of contact between their skin prickles like pins and needles, and Petra consciously inches closer into it, kneeling between Audrey's legs. A drawn-out, spacey silence later, Petra reconsiders her answer. "Um... actually... stories? Like, memories? Could you tell me about... things you learned and the way you felt when learning them, and... that sort of thing. Thoughts or impulses you had about it that stuck inside you." Audrey can feel Petra direct her magic to probe at the outskirts of the room at her prompting, but though her eyebrows quirk a little in discomfort, she doesn't feel as ill or unnerved as Audrey about it. In fact, the sole area where Petra's utilization of Audrey's magic is more skilled than her own rather than less is when coasting over the senseless clumsy repetitions of extended space that Audrey created. With some of Audrey's casting motions, she delicately reconstructs the smudged paredolia of reality, imperfectly but recognizable. The suggestion of intent, the heat-color of the buzzing overlap between them, is that of picking up unloved toys and arranging them properly on the shelf; obligatory, unable to part with them out of nostalgia, but resenting that feeling for existing without cause. "It's okay," she says without elaborating. The longer they stay in this state, the less outwardsly expressive Petra gets, but inversely Audrey feels more and more easily able to understand her. She can't precisely read Petra's mind, but with the rest of the world feeling so alien and incomprehensible in comparison, Petra occupies every inch of her perception and mental processing. It feels like if someone else started speaking English to her, it would feel like a fundamentally different language, stripped of every uniquely-Petra inflection and diction that makes it 'language' to Audrey. The reassurance that Petra simply communicates feels like it's more honest than observable reality.
Audrey Basque	Audrey watches, amidst the wave of feelings, as Petra starts reconstructing the room. She's hadn't noticed; and if she were going to make a note of it, doesn't, because that feeling of existing without cause... is a little bit too heavy, for a moment far too long. Isn't that what Petra is trying to save her from becoming? A broken toy on a shelf that exists without purpose, tainted by humanity's complacency and society's soul-grinding influence? Is that how Petra sees her? Is Petra like the dollmaker trying to breathe new life into an old toy? She hms? as Petra asks for stories. "Stories..." Audrey doesn't have to think long about this one. There's clear examples in her mind, because her Tradition is a fundamentally visual one, and every first time she learned to do something new with it was an eye opener in one way or another; seeing a broader, different world... but compared to anyone else, her view is still minuscule, bound to the meaninglessness of the Hidden Continent. "I was eight when father first deemed me skilled enough to try manipulating space, rather than practice the theory. Young, for something like that. He took me out with him, on the night of the winter solstice, to the border between the Otherside and Earth, where the boundaries of reality are at both their weakest and strongest. It was the first time I "left" the Hidden Continent. The air was thinner, it was cold, the sky changed colors between steps, and the stars were..." She squeezes Petra's hand, losing herself in the memory a bit. "Different. I felt lost, and terrified, and I kept asking him if we could go back, but he pulled me by the wrist until he found a spot he was happy with. We spent... four, five hours there, and nothing I tried worked. I was hungry, freezing, sad, and... scared. But he said we weren't leaving until I succeeded." Audrey shuffles, instinctively a bit closer to Petra in the way she's sitting. "There was a moment, I remember it so clearly, when I stopped crying and looked at the sky, and it felt like the stars had stopped moving. I could... feel their trajectories, see the constellation lines between them, imagine the beams of light coming from them, hitting here and there everywhere around me like shafts of celestial energy. It looked so pretty. I knew where to stand, I knew which rays of light had instructions and which ones were noise. I could see the exact line on the ground, in the air, between Earth and the Otherside. And I moved it. A fraction of a fraction of an inch, but I moved that." She smiles wide. "Father was happy. And... angry. No... resentful? I didn't understand why. We went back home, and he became a lot more demanding onward. He never said I did well. Just that if I didn't try harder, I was wasting what I was born with. But I'll never forget how the universe looked to me that night." She angles her head down, to look at Petra. It's okay, washing over every detail of her life that moments ago weren't and could never be okay.
Petra Soroka	As Audrey goes through her recollection, Petra's eyes stay leveled on hers, chin tilted up where she's kneeling in front of Audrey's lap. She's concentrating on steadily increasing the psychic torque of her power on Audrey, tweaking pressure to push it past the typical breaking point, with gradually building tinnitus ringing through both of their ears. Psychic barbs sink painlessly into the essence of Audrey's being, twisting to catch and pull, dragging her apart and inside-out to bare emotional sinew and nerves to the air and Petra's observation. "That stuck in your mind because it scared you, huh?" Petra practically breathes out, stare flickering back and forth between Audrey's eyes. "And you want to pretend it doesn't anymore, when he looks at you like that. Like you're above it, and now you're just vindictively proud of your skill, but it's not true." "I wonder what it says about you that your foundational memory is something like that." Petra strokes her thumbs across the back of Audrey's hands, and the skin she traces prickles and burns after she moves her thumb away. The intensity of the sensation of Petra's power has ramped up and up without Audrey paying attention to it, starting to feel like a bad high with a torrent of intimate feelings that drowns out her executive function while directionless panic wells up behind it. The warm spotlight of Petra's attention is scaldingly hot, not painful but dizzyingly overwhelming and vertigo-inducing like Audrey's being tossed around in a storm. The yawning chasm of nothingness that defines the rest of the world has its heart inside Petra, and no matter how much light she magnifies and siphons out of Audrey, she can still devour more endlessly. Adoration, obsession, the sheltering cupped hands of Petra's presence and the Beauty of Ash curled around them at rest; Petra keeps digging deeper and deeper, hitting bone, hitting brain, scraping clean the ventricles of her heart and absorbing every scrap of 'Audrey' that comes with it. "I like the stars," she says, and Audrey knows it's a massive understatement. Petra lifts her head up to stare unflinchingly at Audrey's face. "They're beautiful. But every time you look at them, you think about here. It's such a waste to have magic like this when you only ever think about other people when using it." "Imagine that memory without your dad. Can't you? If he was just gone, or dead, imagine how 'clean' that memory would be. Or maybe, you wouldn't have been anything special at all, if you weren't pushed by him, but that doesn't mean anything now."
Audrey Basque	"That stuck in your mind because it scared you, huh?" It's hard to deny Petra like this, or to make excuses. When everything else is out of focus, and she's right there, holding her hand, speaking truth, the idea of making excuses seems so silly as to be refuted and discarded the moment it enters her brain, and so she nods. "Because it scared me. A bit because it was the first time I really managed to look at the sky as a complex but fundamentally understandable system that I could intuitively feel, rather than relying on books and tools exclusively. But... mostly because I was scared. That I wasn't good enough. That I was going to let him down. That I was "wasting" my talent." Petra pulls her thumb away, and just that, and Audrey is able to notice how awful that feels. The panic makes her try to grab onto Petra's hands harder, keep her from pulling away, secure herself to reality, to her self, like Petra's the only thing real she can hold onto in the storm. For all intents and purposes, she is, and that's terrifying. "The stars are beautiful, yeah. They're the way the universe speaks to us. But... you're right. It's been a long time since I've been able to look at them like I did that night. Now I see... purposes, goals. Respect I want, strength I need. I don't see them as just a beautiful sky. They're a reminder of what I'm good at, and need to be good at, or..." She can't finish the thought, so overtaken as she is with the vertigo, the immediate discomfort if Petra pulls away even a quarter of an inch. Even just a finger. Audrey's vice grip on her hands tightens, as much as Petra will let her at least. "No, you're right. I'm here, now, so it doesn't matter what could have been or not been instead. It'd be nice if I didn't have to ever see his jealous glare again," she vocalizes, darkly; it's not necessarily that she means dead, like Petra says-- but at least, no longer giving her that look. Whatever that may mean. Because neither her father or her family matter right now, and the single thing that's real is telling her to be honest. Is there still enough Audrey left for Petra to keep eating whole? She trembles a bit, even the contact of her hands not entirely enough to ward away the unease that's accumulating as she's stripped away layer by layer.