Lemons

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn wanted to go to bed. She did. She was already exhausted. But she couldn't bring herself to turn the lights off, in case the thing in the shadows came creeping back under her door. She wanted to believe Toussaint. She wanted it to have been nothing. She so desperately wanted it to have been nothing.

She couldn't.

The darkness slinking down the hallway after her as she ran. The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach she'd felt standing in front of the window, knowing she wasn't alone. The strange broadcast over the PA, just before it. Quinn was the first to admit that she had a tendency to overthink and overreact to things. She could name several such incidents off the top of her head, she thought, as she sat perched on the edge of her bed, head still gripped—though more gently, now—between her hands. But...but this wasn't like those. She'd felt the thing looming just beyond her door as the lights wavered. She wasn't imagining this. She knew she wasn't. And so the darkness held a special fear for her that night.

As her mind wandered in an effort to not think about what had happened, she rewound to the expressions on the faces of the people that had stood in her door. The pity from Sybil. Cyril's concern. And, of course, the look on Camille's face. The utter contempt. I ruined it. I always ruin it.

And so the next 'morning' came and went with her still sitting on the bed, trying to distract herself with her phone. When she finally stood to find something to fill her hollow stomach, she could already feel the fatigue knotting weights to her ankles. Resigning herself to a miserable day, she cracked her joints, tossed her clothes off to replace them with a fresh set, then plodded to the door and slapped the button. Maybe she could get something from the vending machines. Despite the gnawing hunger, she simply didn't have it in her to go deal with all the people in the common area right now.

...or Camille.

---

That night, after the mercifully uneventful day, despite the fear that still bubbled inside her, she closed her eye...

...and opened it to the lake. She blinked a few times, taking in the strange atmosphere that permeated it. The gaps, the strange way the waves moved. The ankle-deep water in the boat that she couldn't actually feel. She cocked her head in confusion.

And then she was slammed into by a shadowy figure that, after a moment, resolved it—herself into the ever-comfortable Quinnlash. It was strange. She seemed so...worried. Almost afraid. Quinn felt—and then briefly acted upon—the urge to embrace her before she pulled away. It was...nice.

"We’re still here! You can still dream. You’re okay! It’s okay..."

The boat mended itself then, and the lack of water once more made sense. The reflection of the moon, though it was still haphazard, was now present. The buoy on which Dahlia and Safie clung resolved into a more reasonable shape.

"Fear. Look what it’s done to us. How it hurts us. Our mind. We’re still scared."

Fear.

Quinn hugged herself. Not hard or tight enough to hurt, she didn't dig her fingernails into her arms; but noteworthy still, given how detached negative emotions seemed to be within the dreams. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, and spoke a trio of strangled words:

"What was that?"

Amygdala Circuit

The first thing that told Quinn something was very wrong was the voice.

It was someone—a voice—that she'd never heard before. And certainly a voice she'd never heard, or expected to hear, over the loudspeaker. Decide where the power lies. There is no king in the mirror. What? What on Illun was that supposed to mean? Kings? Mirrors? It sounded a bit like a poem, she thought, but...off. Wrong. Admittedly, her exposure to things like poetry and literature had been very limited, but there was something about it—some deep piece of her—that told her it wasn't supposed to be. Perhaps it was the tremulous quality of the voice, but she felt certain that it was...a message, maybe for her. A quiet message, like it didn't want something to hear.

A scared message.

Only a throne, a crown, and a promise. And with great pains, I will see this done.

More things she didn't understand. Kings, thrones, crowns, mirrors? She frowned. It was supposed to fit together somehow. Puzzle pieces, but they didn't make any sense. She tried to ponder what it could mean.

And then the lights went out.

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please exit the floor.

And Quinn suddenly had the terrible feeling of someone—something—behind her. An instinctual and crushing feeling that she wasn't alone. And whatever was here now was dangerous. Just like the voice, it was...wrong. The darkness stretched out, and it felt somehow like a living thing. Her breaths came short and sharp.

Go.

And all at once, galvanized by the sudden voice, she snapped into motion, and she ran.

She sprinted through the hall, driven onward by that horrible feeling of something. The lights came on as the power began to cycle, and she spared a moment to glance behind her.

It was still dark. And as she ran, the darkness raced after her, suffocating the fitful nascent light. She didn't know what would happen if the darkness caught up with her, but she was in no hurry to find out.

Doors flew past, and she kept her eyes glued to them as best she could. Everything looked the same here! And just as she felt herself flagging, felt the thing in the dark creeping up behind her: Quinnlash Loughvein. She skidded to a stop, nearly passing the door in her desperation, and at her gaze, it opened—thank god, THANK GOD that still worked—revealing the lights still barely working. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. It was RIGHT BEHIND HER she bolted in and slammed the button hard enough to sting her hand. It shuttered closed again, and she raced over to the opposite wall, pressing herself to it as she stared wide-eyed in fear as the thing in the darkness...

...didn't follow.

But still, she could feel it. Waiting, hunting, just outside of her door. She knew, sure as anything, that if she opened it, whatever was out there would find her. Her breaths refused to slow. Her whole body shook. As tears began to stream from her eye, she hugged herself tight, digging tense clawed fingers into her biceps. Please, please, please, leave, go away, let it be over—

And then the lights flashed back on, bright enough to hurt her her wide, scared eye. The thing in the shadows was gone. And it was over.

She uncoiled herself bit by bit, and her body, no longer so tense her muscles ached, fell limp from relief. She slid down the window glass, falling to the floor with a thump. She stared at the door still. The fear lingered inside of her; both her own, and another. The instinctual fear of whatever had been out there. The escaping tension and fear bulged in her throat. She clenched her head between her hands like it would fall apart if she didn't hold it in. The tension in her throat grew too great to hold, and wrenched her mouth open.

Quinnlash screamed.

Amygdala Circuit

At some point during their study session, Quinn had excused herself to take the dress off so as not to mess it up or something, hanging it up and reclaiming the ubiquitous t-shirt and sweats. So when the curfew announcement suddenly chimed out—she definitely jerked and made a surprised half-sound, what, it had really been that long already?—she was more than happy to take any excuse to spend as much time with Tillie as she could.

"Uh huh, for sure! I'd love to do this again!"

So, walking over to the door, she slapped the button and waited for Tillie to leave before she hopped out herself and let it close behind her.

They walked back in companionable silence. Every so often one of them would say something and the other would respond in turn, but there was something about the hushed ivory halls that seemed to exert a hush on whoever walked through them. Even Tillie.

So instead of speaking, Quinn mulled over what she'd learned. It was...a lot. The text document was more than a few pages long, and there was a disorganized pile of scribbled-over scratch paper clustered around her bed like a nest. Energy. Singularity energy. Weapon-pulling energy. Modir regeneration. Whatever was going on with Ablaze's eye. It was an interesting way to think about it: her—her...?—just doing to the Modir what Modir had always done to their pilots instead. She wasn't sure whether to be proud, intrigued, or terrified; but she found it...slightly off-putting, all the same.

The walk passed quickly enough, lost in thought as she was. In fact, she nearly missed the lift altogether, pitched backwards, and conked her head on the wall. But with that embarrassment out of the way, she looked up into the glass globe that hung above the polished steel door, similar to the one in front of her room, and as it lit up green, the door dinged open. As Tillie boarded, Quinn waved back with enthusiasm to mirror Tillie's own until it finally slid closed, and the silence asserted itself once more.

Heaving a drawn-out sigh, she began the trek back to her room again.

...Felt a little longer that time.

Amygdala Circuit

"Uhhhh..."

Did she have any more questions to ask? She hadn't even asked much already, but she knew almost nothing about modiology. Her only experience was practical, which was...different. Which was to say, she didn't really know where to start. She wanted to learn more, but she wasn't quite sure where to go from here.

"Maybe..." What did Tillie know the most about? She'd mentioned knowing about 'this side' of modiology, the what and not the why. So asking a why wouldn't be very useful at...

Well, she might ask one more why. Because something that Tillie had mentioned in her first wordvomit, Quinn did understand: that every Modir, Savior or no, was supposed to return to its 'template' state. Except Ablaze. And she'd mentioned that it was a new theory that needed studying. Which meant there were people studying it, right? Even if it was only her.

Quinn pondered how to say it for a moment, then: "You said that there was a new thing to study because of Ablaze. It's the eye thing, right?" She hummed low in her throat, then added a page break to her document before writing a new line: The Eye Thing. That done, she returned her gaze to Tillie, face writ with curiosity and more than a hint of trepidation. "Does anyone know why it isn't regenerating yet?"

Deep inside her, a long, long way down...she felt something stirring.

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn's face cleared up considerably as Tillie backtracked and began to explain things again, and a little more clearly this time. Ex nihilo just meant it came out of nowhere. Wasn't eaten by anything, wasn't summoned out of mini singularities: it just happened. It was an exceptionally strange concept for Quinn to wrap her head around; but then again, most things to do with Modir were a little tricky for her to wrap her head around anyway, that was just how bizarre they were.

And now she had to get in one, of course.

With the newfound clarity of meaning, Quinn made sure to write down everything important that Tillie said, so she could read back over it later. The fact that pieces chopped off of the Modir immediately melted was more than well known to her—she'd been on both ends of Savior-on-Modir combat enough times to know that, at least, if not too much more—but it was still so strange, she didn't get it in the slightest bit.

Modir, she decided, were weird.

But then, out of nowhere, "Maybe the Modir are secretly just big, nasty cans of soup!"

Quinn couldn't help it any more than she could help breathing: at the sudden joke, she burst out laughing. She wouldn't have found it funny in most situations; but here, now, filled with stress in a foreign country isolated from everybody—ALMOST everybody—she knew and loved? It was about the funniest thing she'd ever heard, and the release of tension could practically be HEARD independently in that frayed Quinnlash laugh. Her body, already leaning, went almost limp, and she just about flopped into Tillie as she laughed harder at the stupid joke than she had any right, and for longer.

When it had finally passed, she peeled herself off Tillie and sat up again, still choking back giggles. “Sorry, sorry!"

At length, it passed completely, and she exhaled a long breath. "It's just...been a long couple days, you know?”

Amygdala Circuit

As Tillie's explanation went on and on, Quinn found that she began to understand it less and less. She'd learned a little bit of science from mom back in Hovvi; so she knew more than she perhaps otherwise might've, and understood most of what Tillie had said prior. The drawbridge thing, the two different sides of modiology, all of that. But that only lasted up to her tangent about how modium melted. She blinked a few times as she tried to follow it, looking for context clues.

And she did find some, enough to understand what was being said in the loosest way. But, at the same time, there were some things she simply didn't get. Perhaps she knew at least some of the words in isolation, they sounded a little bit familiar. But being strung together so fast was a lot to take, and one phrase in particular stumped her entirely.

What she was saying was interesting, honest. The two different kinds of modiology, the why escaping Tillie, and of course the bright and cheery assertion that Quinn was an expert in modiology too, because she was a pilot. Modiology, she decided, was kind of cool.

But still, she didn't understand, and it was bothering her more than she'd like to admit.

So, hungry for warmth and comfort as she always seemed to be, she leaned a little heavier into Tillie's shoulder and the smile dimmed as she plucked anxiously at her dress. "I'm, um, I'm sorry. But...what does ex nihilo mean?" She swallowed hard, trying to beat past the embarrassed lump in her throat. After she invited Tillie to her room to talk about modiology with her, there was something a little humiliating about not getting it. "In fact, could you...explain that whole melting thing again? It sounded cool, but...I didn't really understand the words..."

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn winced ever so slightly. Okay. That tack didn't work. Bringing it up as a hypothetical was clearly a non-starter. So the only way she would get an answer is if she revealed the secret, which she was LOATH to do. But at the same time, she was so curious...but it was such a betrayal of trust...and it had taken Roaki so long to trust her at all to begin with. She closed her eye for a moment, trying to imagine the look on Roaki's face when she found out Quinn had told someone, and the thought made her cringe. Okay. Got it. No.

So instead, she frowned slightly and looked up at the ceiling. "Are you sure? I could've sworn I heard Besca mention a pilot who couldn't phase at all once." Technically true, but evasive enough for plausible deniability.

But that's as far as she went on that, because her brain had glommed onto something else Tillie had said: that phasing was a physical trait that Modir had, but somehow couldn't use, and it needed a human to get it running.

She wondered if Dammerung could phase.

It wasn't human, that was certain. But it was more human than any other Modir thus far, right? It was the only one who had EVER spoken, and it spoke with his voice and used his weapon so there was clearly something of him left inside. Right?

She wanted so desperately to ask Tillie. But the whole incident was classified. If she let it slip—even just to Tillie—then Besca would be furious, she knew. And there were few things in the world that she wanted less than for Besca to be mad at her. "So when I phase and I hear little voices deep down, those are the voices of the circuit talking to me, right?" She jotted a few lines out on the nature of phasing next to her poorly-sketched brain: drawbridge goes down fast and lets in traffic. A moment passed before she spoke again: "why does modium melt?"

Then, oddly enough, she smiled.

She could practically feel Quinnlash smiling inside of her too. Spending time with someone she liked was just what she needed after the past day or two she'd had. Warm and fuzzy inside, she let her eye close for a moment before reopening it and falling to the side, leaning up against Tillie's shoulder.

This was nice.

Amygdala Circuit

As Quinn leaned in closer to Tillie so she could get a better look at the diagram, there was an almost haunting feeling to looking at the illustration, at the innocuous little object that was the cockpit here. It seemed so...little. So insignificant. Just a blot of ink on a sheet of paper. I sit there, she thought, almost disbelieving. That's where I sit when I connect. Despite the gray matter surrounding her in the cockpit, it was sometimes all too easy to forget that she was inside of, and connecting to, a Modir's brain. Sitting back up, she tapped out on the laptop: I'm a brain drawbridge.

On that note, actually...

"And some people are drawbridges that are wider than others, like me and Dahlia?" she asked, taking out a sheet of paper and trying—with minimal success—to replicate the diagram, "and that's why we phase faster. Is that right?"

It was as she was finishing her rough sketch and labeling the cockpit with 'Drawbridge' that she made a sound of muffled realization: But Roaki doesn't phase even though she can still close the circuit. So...? Curiosity piqued, she tried to work her way around it so she wouldn't need to say straight out that Roaki couldn't phase. It wasn't her place to reveal. "I remember hearing that some people can't phase at all, though, I think? What kind of drawbridge are they?"

Arknights: 5S

The vouivre took a long, LONG breath as the pent-up aggression in her bled off like steam from a pressure cooker. She closed her eyes, rubbing her temples in a vain effort to soothe the headache she knew was coming. Yes, thoughts indeed.

Aoife, the Taran, very much did not like Victorians. They had slaughtered her family, burned her home, and unleashed the distinctly inhumane originium dirty bombs of the County Hillock incident. She honestly wasn't sure how many she'd cared about that had been killed by Victorians, and while she obviously wasn't going to get violent, there was a part of her that was absolutely delighted to see this conceited, condescending Cautus cool his feet in a Sargonian cell for a while.

Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how you looked at it—while Aoife the Taran wanted to see Warren Irving humiliated, the Rhodes Island Operator Ash Girl couldn't just sink into cathartic spite. Especially not with Polka there; she didn't want the musician to think of her as a brash or angry person.

And so, a moment that felt slightly too long to be comfortable passed before she spoke again.

"As little as I would trust Victoria with an ancient superweapon," a shudder ran up and down her spine, "I trust Leithanien and Columbia working together with it even less. Especially," she grew quiet again, and her voice more sober, "because if it's in service to activating a weapon, I doubt kidnapping would be the worst thing to happen to Nur."

She gave a sharp nod: "I think he might be our best bet."

Amygdala Circuit

For the past ten or fifteen minutes, Quinn had alternated sitting on her hands and pacing back and forth across the room at various intervals. She wasn't quite sure why Tillie coming to her room made her as nervous as it did; it wasn't even her real room anyway, right? And yet somehow she found her stomach boiling inside her, and every silent minute that went by made it roil harder and faster. But at the same time, it wasn't a bad nervousness, not really. Quinn wasn't too terribly used to the feeling of 'anticipation.' A pilot's lot was by nature unfriendly, after all, and her decidedly atypical childhood only compounded that. But it was the only word Quinn could think of to describe how she was feeling.

Clothed again in her new dress—who could blame her for wanting to show off to Tillie?—she rechecked for the umpteenth time everything she'd gathered from the workstation that the Casobani had gifted her: pens and notebooks, reams of extra paper both blanked and lined, and of course the laptop computer, which lay plugged in on the new low dresser that now served as a nightstand. After the childhood she'd had, with no contact with anything outside her one small room, she was nothing if not a skilled typist. She'd tried to look up some stuff about modiology on her own so she could impress Tillie when she got here, but she didn't make sense of most of it and so she gave that up before long (not to mention she ran across a few papers with the names Locke and Sansean Loughvein emblazoned on the front, and frankly didn't want to deal with it on her own). Satisfied again for the moment, she sat back down, watching the stars swirling out of her window.

And then jumped a foot in the air with an EEP! as the silence was shattered by a loud and elaborate pattern of knocks, and her heart jumped into her throat.

"C—coming!"

She whacked the button and the door slid open, revealing Tillie, holding an intimidating-looking stack of books. Mouth suddenly dry, she let Tillie in and winced at the sound of that many books being plopped down. Those must be heavy.

"So! Uhm! Don’t be intimidated by all the material." Quinn's lip quirked into a little half-grin. "I didn’t know what you might be interested in so I just brought a bunch of different stuff. Actually, where did you want to start? You don’t have to know anything specific, but if you have any vague ideas of what you might like to know, it’ll help me sorta, uhm! Steer, y’know?"

Quinn opened her mouth to reply, how does my Savior work? But before any sound came out, Tillie finally seemed to notice what Quinn was wearing, and the half-grin turned into a full bright smile as she gave a gentle twirl. "Isn't it? It just seemed like everyone on the Ange dresses so nice all the time, I wanted to fit in." She paused a moment before adding, "...And I never get to wear anything like this!"

Another moment to bask in the glow of Tillie calling her pretty before she gave her head a little shake and focused back in again, sitting down on her bed and opening up her laptop before turning to ask her first question: "Can you tell me how Ablaze works? How did they turn it from a Modir to a Savior?"