Zero Divide - Episode #1 - "Looking Glass"

[Vanifae]

The Estate

10:20 AM, Date is Unknown

It is late morning now, the sky is clear with minimal cloud cover. The air is crisp and clean, and there is a peaceful air about the Estate. It is an old Victorian style home, with dozens of rooms. There are three floors to the building, the bedrooms are on the second and third floors, and the first floor has a large kitchen, dining hall, and large den/common room. Two dogs walk the halls, both pets of Vanessa, Krishna and Arjuna; both powerfully built mastiffs.

Vanessa is sitting in the second floor study reading a book, the Bhagavad-Gita; she reclines in a chair a glass of tea sitting on a table. There is a large garage attached to the main structure, various vehicles of unknown makes and models populate the interior in varying states of repair. Several faded posters in French, depicting stylistic artwork dot the interior of the garage.

A pool and pool house are in the back of the building, and garden to its right with bountiful flowers and fresh food ready to be picked. The high walls are made of stone that surround and make up the perimeter of the Estate. Each individual has their own room, a large bed, closet, and wide window all to themselves.

Dee stands near the pool looking out over the still waters, a knife in hand as she slices up an apple to eat.

Feel free to describe where you are and what you are doing.

 

[Shayuri]

The woman who has named herself, sarcastically at first, 'Facade,' wakes up late...at ten in the morning. She's a night owl, she's found. Stays up late, gets up late. Has she always been?

She showers. It's a habit. Habits are about all she has left. Standing under the stream of hot water, she makes choices about her body. How big around should her waist be? Chest? Hips? What shade skin? Hair? Eyes? Male? Female?

She's found she prefers female greatly. Hopefully that's because that's what she is. Otherwise...well, what difference did it make?

After the shower she brushes her hair slowly while staring at her face in the mirror. It's not HER face, strictly speaking. She made it up. Making up faces wasn't easy, but she seemed pretty good at it. Oh, at first there'd been some weird cheekbones, jutting chins, unibrows...but with a little practice...she could whip up anything from a nondescript middle age matron to a stunning supermodel. Or imitate faces. Or entire bodies.

Right now Facade sported a rather cute, if mousy, face with long straight brown hair, a spatter of freckles, and wide blue eyes that looked like they needed spectacles. She called it 'the Librarian.' The Librarian's body was slim and petite...a little tall for her proportions, but not overly so. Small hands, small feet, small bust... In the 'wild' she'd wear dresses with long skirts, and lace on the hems and around the wrists. She'd attend church religiously, but not because she was religious...rather because that's what was expected of her.

Staring at her, Facade wondered again if she might BE the Librarian. How else could she know so much about her? She could hear the voice, knew the turns of phrase...the little likes and dislikes. And yet none of it was really a MEMORY. It was all instinctive somehow. Like knowing how to drive.

Not for the first time, Facade reflected unhappily on her situation as she got dressed. The others lacked memory too, but at least they knew their -faces-. The problem with having amnesia and having the power to change your appearance was that...you had no idea which appearance was your "real" one. Maybe that's why she was so restless here. Maybe that's why she kept having niggling thoughts about seeing out, going out...just to see, even for a moment. To chase her past, wherever it had fled.

One thing was certain...it wasn't waiting here in the Estate. At least, nowhere she was allowed to go.

Finally Facade was ready, and about a half an hour after waking up, she headed out of her room and down the stairs to see if there was any breakfast still floating around in the kitchen or dining room.

 

[Velmont]

Ian was in teh garage. He had been working on a car that was out of function. He always wondered how things could come so easily to him when it was time to repair that car, but it worked. The motor was working again, but teh elctrical system had still some difficulty. He was sitting on the passenger seat, trying to make the right speaker work.

One thing that make him happy to work on that car, it is the feeling on his hands of the metal, plastic and rubber. After the first day he remember, he had always been wearing gloves. He remember that first day when he was presented to all teh inhabitant of this Estate. He had shooked hand with most of them, and everytime, he had felt the same feeling he had felt when he had awoke: confusion, anxiety, fear... everyone here had lost there memory. He was not the exception, but strangely, each time Ian touch someone, he sees and feels a moment of great emotion that person had lived.

In Vanessa's estate, where no one remember anything form outside the walls, very few moments of emotion have been lived, and no one remember what happen before they came here. So the most emotive moment everyone has lived is the moment they woke up and found they had no memory. Ian has lived his own moment, and didn't liked to lived the one of the others. So he is wearing leather gloves almost all the time.

As he was lost in his thoughts, the song The Unforgiven of Metallica starts to fill teh car. the speaker worked. One down, three to go. thought Ian. He stared a moment at the poster. It was written Tournée du Chat Noir de Rudolphe Salis. The black cat on it was interesting, but he was wondering what was that show. After a moment, he open the door and stop the CD that was playing. He put back his gloves and start to put back his tools in the case before going to eat something. He start to be hungry.

 

[Shalimar]

The blue haired teen named haven looked like a little cherub as he slept, his right arm and leg hanging out mournfully over the side of his bed. the sheet was tangled up about his waist yet still managing to reveal a long line of naked thigh. With his eyes shut and his mouth in a peaceful smile he didn't have the almost omnipresent mischevious expression he wore when he was awake.

Haven had found that he couldn't help himself, he always had to be flirting, always had to be easing tensions with a joke or by striking a ridiculous pose, or with an outrageous comment that couldn't help but bring laughter. Every one was so serious all the time, but that wasn' for him, what good could it do? Regardless of who they were before they were all in the same boat now and they might as well enjoy it, and really, what could possibly be better than sex? He couldn't remember anything, but he was dead sure that sex was the most fun a person could possibly have.

*Crash* Haven had rolled off the bed, and grinning laughed at himself as he rose, sliding on a robe so he coul take a shower. Left to his own devices he thought he might have just gone naked even with the house this full, but he had been told not to. It wasn't sexual, it was just being comfortable in his own skin, and if anyone was that, it was definitely the guy with hair matching the cookie monster.

After a quick shower, taking no more than five minutes using the toilet and brushing his teeth included, Haven was back in his room throwing on a pair of jeans. Once he had his jeans on he headed downstairs for breakfast, rubbing at his bare tummy, his pleasantly hairless and six-packed tummy.

"Morning sexy, want to check my library card?" he flirted with Facade good naturedly, aware of what she called this form. It didn't particularly bother him that Facade could actually be a guy. Smiling at the mousey looking woman, he picks up an apple and bites into it.

 

[Hammerhead]

After a quick shower in the morning, the young man walked a perimeter of the Estate, breaking into a quick run whenever his legs became restless. He kept his right hand trailing along the wall as he walked, occasionally glancing upwards at the high walls that kept him in and others out. He didn't remember much of anything, except that his name was Michael, or something like it.

His daily ritual ended at the back of the manor house, where he caught sight of Dee, one of the others like him. Someone with no memory, no past, and only the barest scraps of an identity. While the young woman looked out over the pool, Michael conjured a duplicate of himself with a slight effort of will. Although only composed of ethereal shadowstuff, the duplicate was indistinguishable from the real him, perfectly replicating his athletic build, unruly blond hair, and roguish face marred slightly by a nose that had been broken once or twice.

While his duplicate ambled towards a nearby apple tree to pluck a fruit for breakfast, Michael sidled behind Dee, then spoke his first words of the morning. "Good idea," he comments, nodding towards the knife in her hand. His duplicate, upon finding a fruit ripe for eating, tosses it towards Michael, which he catches handily. "You never know when the apples might try and fight back. Good morning, by the way," he adds with an easy and practiced smile.

 

[James Heard]

The Night Before

He woke up again in a cold sweat, and darted his hand out to the nightstand to gulp greedily at the tepid water next to him. The dreams, always the dreams... Every night was a disaster waiting to happen, the monsters of his unknown past lurking in the corners of his mind waiting to prey upon him.

What was worse, he wasn't sure if he was the monster his dreams were warning him about or if the monster was out there waiting. Fickle things, were dreams.

Sitting up, he ran his fingers through his hair and stared across the bedroom at the mirror in the pale moonlight streaming through the window. Was his hairline always this high or was it receding? This place was maddening, the staff friendly but less than helpful. He couldn't remember his own name, for crying out loud.

Other issues were less distracting on an emotional level, but only because of the dark shadow of lack of information cast over him because of the amnesia. Whatever else he didn't know, he was fairly certain that loss of memory wasn't normally accompanied by... spontaneous knickknacks. Sheets of paper, countless combs and cutlery, a hammer and a glass figurine - objects of his ordinary dissatisfaction fell from his fingertips sometimes, dream-like victims of his frustration.

The other day he sat for four hours tapping out stacks of pennies, just to see if there were some cosmic piggy bank he were robbing that would eventually run out. He couldn't. Nor could he summon a driver's license or a high school yearbook, a picture of his mother, the address of his first girlfriend, his dog, or a pony.

Not that the pony wasn't interesting, made out of who knows what and starring at him with a fixed baleful eye that any wax museum curator would jealously curse over. And once done, to smoke, to the ether, to elsewhere, where? He stared at the empty glass and watched it vanish into nothingness and then twist from that nothingness whole again and full of water.

He sipped the chilled water. "Drink Me," he thought. Reflecting on the rabbit hole, he put the glass down and rolled over to try to sleep.

Walking through the Looking Glass

He stared at himself in the mirror, willing memories to come to surface in what had become his morning ritual. He checked his teeth, the rings under his eyes, his profile, all to see if today was the day when something new would happen that would reveal the slimmest clue to his former life. God, he'd cut off an arm for the recklessness to have gotten a tattoo when he was younger, or perhaps to have robbed a bank.

Then there'd be somewhere to start, someone looking for him. Instead, there was only this: He looked over the spare room with its polite wallpaper and lace throw tossed over the recliner in the corner. He frowned at the white sheets stained with sweat rumpled across the bed before frowning deeper as he simply...thought at them and they vanished before another push and they returned, heavily starched or something like it, crisp and laid out like a geometric design tight across the bed.

There were stranger things than a house full of amnesiacs in this place, and deeper mysteries than magic sheets.

He shook his fist impatiently until the razor appeared and scraped the dark black stubble from his face. A name. Everybody had a name, right?

In A Pool of Tears

Reluctantly, he made his way out of his room to join the others. Their hosts, or gaolers, depending on how you looked at things, were already up. Even the dogs had names, he acknowledged with a nod as he passed the door where Vanessa sat reading. Maybe I should pick some pithy descriptor like the others? He looked at his empty hand, closed it, and opened it to reveal the delicate silver fork before shaking his head and closing it once more to make it vanish.

Nope, The Human Fork sounds ridiculous.

He continued down the stairs and toward the kitchen, pausing to nod noncommittally at the new face there while digging for food in the icebox.

"Do I know you?" he asked, before segueing into "Scratch that, do you know me?" he said hopefully.

He reached across the table to shake her hand, wincing when another fork appeared and fell to the table with a clatter. That's it. I'm going to be the fork guy. The #$%ing fork guy.

#$%.

"I don't even know what day it is."

 

[Vanifae]

Haven, Façade, & Fork Guy

The kitchen is large with a central island for the stove and suitable cutting and preparation area. Pots and pans hang from the ceiling, and it smells clean, almost antiseptic in here. Plates sit on the island with eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, and fruit.

There is an open cereal box that reads Omega Fruity Flakes, with a silly parrot eating the “delicious sugary fruitastic flakes”. Arjuna gnaws on a bone in the corner of the kitchen, upon seeing both individuals enter she saunters over haunting their steps and basically making sure that the two notice her.

Michael

“Good morning,” Dee replies, “if the apple did fight back it would make this dull life a little more interesting. I wonder sometimes how long we have been here… and why we are here, I mean I don’t even remember coming here. Maybe we should try and contact our families, if we even have families? But surely one of us has to have someone that is looking for us.”

She eats a slice, “It just bothers me. What bothers me more are these powers… abilities I guess we have. Maybe that is why we can’t remember anything, maybe something happened to us, and now we are freaks?”

Ian

The radio/CD deck in the vehicle turns off, the old vehicle is dusty on the inside. But the tools are clean and immaculate, and although cobwebs cover the vehicles the work benches and tool boxes are clean and in good order.

As he starts to pack his things up, he hears static from the radio; he was sure it was off.

… “Oh my god… are you getting this… we shouldn’t be here. We… don’t touch… so beautiful…” the static continues for a moment then the radio goes dead. But the voice, it was his own voice.

 

[Shalimar]

Haven patted the giant dog around her shoulders and neck before ruffling the fur on her head. "Well hello miss, were you getting a bit jealous of the attention I was giving Miss F?" he asks, kneeling beside the dog and giving her her due attention.

Rising to his feet again, the good natured flirt digs into one of the plates on the island, eating hungrily but not touching the sausage. He wasn't sure why he wasn't until a bite later he confirmed that he did not in fact like sausage, at all.

Once his plate was safely in the dishwasher the teen, or early twenty-something, reached for a bowl for cereal. There was something about the cereal, something he couldn't place. He shrugged, it would come in time or it wouln't, no need to stress over cereal.

 

[Velmont]

Ian stared a moment at the car. He was standing next to the work benches. He was trying to understand what he has just heard. He felt his stomach was asking for food. He awoke early this morning and he hadn't eaten anything. But it wasn't enough to give him hallucination.

He open the toolbox and grab his electronic kit. He sit back into the car and look at the radio. It still seems off. He grabs a screwdriver and start to remove the radio from it sockt, but keep it in connection with teh only speaker that work.

Once removed, he try to find out how it had could work for a moment, and where did the feed was coming from. The radio? Why his voic would be transmit on some radio wave? The CD? The CD that was in was the Black Album. He has listen to it so many times, he had only ten CD in his collection, so he had quickly listen to them all. The Tape? Was there only a single tape in this estate? He wanted to find if it was a glitch of the radio, or one of his memory.

Craft (Electronic) +3, Knowledge (Technology) +4

 

[Shayuri]

Facade gives Haven a stern look and actually reaches up to push her glasses back...only to realize she isn't wearing any. The persona of the Librarian dissipates in the ensuing dissonance, and she shakes her head with a sigh and pours herself some cereal.

"Good morning," she says to the shirtless boy.

When they're joined by the 'guy who makes things,' whom Facade has already mentally labeled "junkyard,' she nods at him wearily.

"Yes, we know each other. I'm just trying on a new face today. And no, neither of us remember anything besides here."

The last word is laced with unintended, but heartfelt, venom as some of her pent up frustration vents. She sits down hard in her chair and starts eating with short, petulant movements of hand and spoon...then pauses as her eyes rove over the cereal box.

Why did that word tickle? Facade puts her spoon down and picks up the cereal box to hold it closer...as if filling her field of vision with the word would somehow make its secrets easier to plumb.