2023-12-08: ?what if i inscribed that i am that i aM
- Cutscene: ?what if i inscribed that i am that i aM
- Cast: Yuliana Kafim
- Where: Within Goragon - Outside Reality
- Date: During Goragon
- Summary: Yuliana experiences a Possibility where she is the Woman in the Void, cherishing an Elisa who has a connection to the Void, instead. Once she escapes that reality, she reflects on all the Possibilities she's seen -- and rejects them all, because she can't abandon her wife for her own happiness.
Of course, Yuliana sees the people grasping for love. But without the mask Eight granted her -- or, perhaps, the mask she stole from Eight -- she wants nothing to do with them. Deliberately, she turns, and escapes into...
'神'
... and it is so familiar. In this place, there is no direction, no time, no location. But it is MORE familiar -- too familiar -- as natural as the air She's not breathing, in this place.
The Empress After Eternity spreads eleven hands, each with twelve and two fingers, across existence. She peels back layers like the skin of a flayed man, digging deeper, deeper, into the beating heart --
There! Expressed in distance is time, occupying space to represent her need. To-there Elisa is dark, with boundless purple hair and expert balance. But She turns the world on its side, just so, and there she is in a laboratory coat, there she is studying. So clever. What she has seen...
"Y sh'ia: jou-w," the Empress says, Her words twisted and split over aeons in this wyrd place.
Once, She would have said I. Once, she would not have voiced her 's'. Once, Her vowels would not be so confused and jumbled - 'e' would not lengthen to iii-ah. Once, Her lips would have formed the semivowels of 'you' without slipping... just so... to the side.
I SEE YOU.
Once... it was English. It is the closest approximation of the language She recalls, after so long dwelling here, wound about nonexistence like a world-snake. She has heard her woman speaking, carving into the world through the cracks which surround Elisa. She knows that it is this language she speaks -- and not dozens of others. How long has it been, since She walked in physical reality, and spoke those tongues? It is a meaningless question. There is no time, here. There is all time, here.
The Empress reaches up, and curls a finger in to gut the nothing there. She has felt the calling, and She carves, until She glimpses in to Elisa, all surrounded by those objects of Her hatred. With two-dozen eyes She stares, cutting, cutting, cutting through the gaps in reality which her darling woman creates. If not for Elisa's weakening of the Way, She would see nothing of her world.
No... even the finger She sliced from Herself, small enough to slip into physical existence, cannot reach Her. Only through deep meditation and Her darling's influence may She instruct Herself. How frustrating -- when She requires so much instruction. Returning into that place has warped Her!
There -- She sends Herself, in the same moment, because the past is the present and the future is but unspoken past. To bind Herself to time is no easy feat, but this is the planet, this is the century -- close to the decades. A soldier. She has become a soldier, to protect Her darling woman, so occupied with studying her animals. All is well.
In the next moment, She will be with the woman She loves, all-enveloping.
Now, in this moment, always there are problems... but She offers generous advice, now her woman reaches out to her so often. She will be here, soon. She will face goring from the kaiju soon place soon time localised Elisa thirtieth year, but She knows how to prepare her. She knows everything.
How strange that she cries out...
How strange would it be, were this the world we lived in.
Yuliana staggers forward, as she returns to herself, in that myriad of cubes. She puts one hand to the ground -- lowers herself down, sitting there.
"Normality," she echoes, to herself, looking down at her hands. "Betrayal... family... species... mealtime... God. All these... are possible worlds, aren't they? Anything... anything is possible, here. Anything. I could make anything happen."
She is distant, as she reflects on herself. "But if any of these worlds were true... my marriage would change. Elya would be different, then... I'd be different, too. And it took so much for her to be here. It couldn't have been easy... for her to come to this reality." She clasps her hands to her heart, and finds that she is in her pilot's suit again. Her tentacles, all clad in the emerald gloves of her suit, wrap about her legs.
"It hasn't always been... easy," she admits, now she's alone. "Sometimes we've fought... other times, I boiled in my uncertainty or my discontent and said nothing. Well, sometimes I've felt frightened, I suppose... fear is a familiar feeling, to me." She sighs, looking up at that Infinity of cubes, floating along in existence. "But if I took to one of these worlds... She'll always be incomplete, won't She? Even if this reality changed... She's somewhere else. She'd be left behind..."
Yuliana shakes her head, fiercely. "Why would I do that to my wife -- the thing I'm most scared of happening to me?! I don't care how rosy these worlds are, what I could achieve here! I want to go back! I WANT TO GO BACK!" She slams her fist upon the golden ground, and that is the moment she sees a cube all marked with 'love' crumbling into pieces.
She will not join the others, in those final moments. She keeps her own council as she watches the pieces fall.
"It's falling apart... all is well. I need no possibility of love, when I am so beloved in this world and the next."
The Mazin core...
Should she thank that girl, crying out, that she returns to her cockpit? Perhaps. One day. Not today. Today, she is glad to have today.
It might have its flaws, but she'd accept no other.