snowblindrpg | [network] @Enoch; A day late (Morning/Night 83) [open][death talk?]

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[network] @Enoch; A day late (Morning/Night 83) [open][death talk?]

Morning 83:

[It isn't like the first time. He doesn't panic and fall out of the drawer. In fact, there's a nice warmth in his chest, so comfortable he doesn't even try to move, and before he realizes he can't, he's distracted by a memory that flickers to mind, unbidden. It's one he hasn't needed to remember in centuries, and yet here it is as if it had happened the other day. The swan with a purple tint to its feathers only his eyes could see - Gabriel - climbing into his lap after a nightmare, her gentle voice seeming as if it should comfort him, and yet her words...her words only drive the knife deeper, tell him his pain is inevitable, but she'll comfort him until he adjusts to it.

She had really tried, of course, she couldn't have known that humans won't just accept suffering so easily, angels do not lose their loved ones or their homes or...anything.

She'd thought she was helping, really, she just couldn't understand...

...understand what? And for that matter, what was this attempt to help he'd just thought about? It certainly sounds like Gabriel, at least...but there is something missing here, he had it only a moment ago! He can't even recall the vague scene. It's frustrating, but nowhere near as upsetting as if he'd lost a memory closer to his heart.

...He hadn't thought of her in a while. He picks up the tablet once he's gathered all his things and pads his way out of the morgue, still puzzling over the new gap in his memory. Of course, all it took was once glance at the tablet's screen to learn what his death had taken from him: he could no longer read.

The network's very first glimpse of him after his death is, in spite of having just gotten out of his body bag, tired. He's been handed so much to process at once he's not sure what to think or feel. So he speaks as he walks through the chapel, stained glass windows behind him dark from the storm outside.]

I hope you're enjoying your laugh, Lady Administrator. Taking a scribe's literacy is certainly ironic, if nothing else.

[He seats himself on a pew, tablet in his lap, and it isn't long before his head lolls back to give the camera a perfectly useless view of the underside of his jaw.]

I suppose I owe her some thanks, though, for that feeling of warmth in my chest. It was quite comforting. The strangest thing happened, however...for some reason, I thought of Gabriel as it happened. Something that happened a long time ago. I can't remember anything else about it, as if it's taken the vaguest scrap of detail back with it into the past too far to recall.

[He finally looks back down at the tablet again for a moment, before picking it up and taking it with him. The view shakes slightly as he approaches the door to the chapel; the numbness of distraction is wearing off, and he's notably cautious, slower, around the door and windows.]

He's gone then? Are they all gone, or did I...give mine what he needed? Oh-

[He raises his tablet to focus on his face like a normal person again.]

Clayton - did he say anything?

B: Night 83, just before lockdown

[The panic Enoch feels comes purely from him. The weather hasn't cleared up and he knows he can't stay here. If he tries he'll be forced out, but there's no moving in this storm and he knows it. He's surprised it isn't much colder than it is, honestly, but he doesn't have the luxury - as far as he's concerned - of thinking much on the temperature anymore. He's huddled himself in the farthest room from the door without chancing the morgue, the backdrop behind him a dark corner.]

I'm...I'm still here. In the temple- the church. I can't leave but it's going to force me to and I-...

[He cuts himself off abruptly, looking down into the camera with hopeful suspicion.]

Wait a moment. It never asked me to leave in the first place...

C: Night 83, around midnight

[The camera pans over the morgue drawers. There is nothing out of the ordinary. Enoch's breathing rate behind the camera is slightly elevated; he's nervous, but not panicked. Nervous enough to keep up a monologue to nobody in particular.]

So far, nothing has happened. It's as if this is a perfectly ordinary building. ...By this town's standards, that is. ...Ah, I should have taken the bag with me. It could have been useful. [Another restless pause.] ...I certainly hope I don't die here again. As if the first time wasn't foolish enough.

...Wait, what's this? One moment.

[When he returns, he's in the chapel again, curled up on a pew. Seems he's decided on using it as a bed.]

I found something. Please check the public data on your tablets and tell me what it says; when I asked Helel - my tablet assistant - to read it for me, he seemed to...fixate on the phrase "emergency teams non-responsive". Is that truly all it is, or is there something wrong?

[He is referring, of course, to this text file.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[So Shiro goes ahead and opens the file to read, and is in fact reading it out loud to Enoch. Kind of.]

Well this is weird, it just says 'emergency teams non-responsive' over and over again. Then it switches to 'adjust parameters' a few times, followed by one 'cancel contact emergency teams'. Huh. I guess whatever they were doing, something went wrong.

Then there's 'attempting resuscitation' a bunch of times, and-

[He stops suddenly, when he reaches Enoch's name. He's more concerned with the numbers after his name honestly.]

Edited 2016-02-03 12:16 (UTC)

[How odd. Enoch tilts his head at the text he should be relearning by sheer repetition. He should know what each block of new, repeated symbols means but it's just not happening, not even after Shiro's told him what they are.

Unsettling, really. Though not as much as the abrupt stop. What has he found that's so disturbing?]

What is it?

[Kesara does not know that Enoch died - which is perhaps for the best, but she can certainly notice him being out of sorts. Again. She peers at the tablet, concerned.]

Are you all right, Mr. Enoch? What's the Admin gone and done to you?

[Taken away his literacy? She hopes that she is misunderstanding. To be literate and lose it seems like an endlessly worse fate than simply being illiterate to begin with.]

[At least this time it's the disorientation of grasping at a new memory gap on top of everything else and not...that whole mess with the monster.]

Well, I've no proof it's her doing. But it is deliberate, this...removal of a trait, or it wouldn't be so specific every time, and I can think of nobody else with such control over us.

[He sighs, sounding as if he could just flop over and fall asleep right there, just after waking up.]

I wonder if she's trying to dissuade us from death in her own way. If only she realized we don't choose it so lightly... I wonder if she's human at all.

[Says the man who would risk his own life in a heartbeat for a human soul. Already dead.]

[The question of the admin's humanity is not one Kesara has thought about; what else could the admin be? But the way he speaks worries her. She knows something is very wrong and she knows that she is not grasping what. She tries more directly to reach at what she does understand, what she hopes that she understands wrong.]

If she made it so that you can't read and write now - it isn't so bad, with those tablets. They read and write for you and they're more reliable than any secretary. It's only the messages that people write on the walls that are the trouble. And maybe your, your personal assistant would read those also if you asked him?

[Would this help? She does not know, she only feels obliged to try.]

That's worth an attempt... I've found Helel invaluable in learning how these tablets work.

[He looks off to the side, spying a slip of paper on the pew beside him, and he points the camera at it. It's a biblical excerpt: "For God so loved the world he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life."]

Helel, what does this scrap of paper say?

["Please restate the question," says the deep masculine voice he's given his assistant in the neutral tone of one who doesn't have an assigned personality. It doesn't seem to know what he's asking. If they can read what's on the camera, his can't right now.]

...I suppose he can't. The cameras aren't entirely like our eyes, I've found.

Oh, is that the name you've given it? Mine is named Alexander. Helel is a Biblical name, isn't it? Is yours a Jew?

[She has yet to quite decide whether the personal assistants are people or machines, and thinks that this question might help clarify. Machines don't have religion, she doesn't suppose.

It might also give Enoch something to think about beyond his current distress.]

But, in that case - well, you can always take a photo and ask someone on the network to read for you. I - I've done that.

A what? [There is a problem in answering that. First, being in it, he only knows what the Bible is because Dio told him. Second, he is several generations before Judah, so Judaism does not technically exist yet for him, either.]

Ah...he's somewhat named after a very good friend of mine. It's not his name, exactly, but it's another way to say it.

[The second part does stand out - he's noticed that most people seem to be perfectly literate here, which would be unusual at home. Someone who can't read, or at least is still learning, still doesn't strike him as out of place, but it's certainly not consistent with the other "residents" of Norfinbury so far. Combined with the lack of knowledge of the tablet, he has to wonder if she's from closer to his own time...]

[No comment on her small confession. Kesara waits - there is a considerable pause as she waits, almost holding her breath. But he says nothing. Perhaps he's misunderstood. She doesn't know whether to clarify. If he cannot read or write either, now, then he cannot say anything, surely.

Maybe he is also embarrassed. The thought hits her with physical force.]

A Jew is a person who has another religion - it's difficult to explain if you don't know - [It seems very unimportant in comparison. She swallows a little and moves past it.] It's harder when you have to ask people for help with written things, but it isn't so bad once you learn a few tricks. I have a lot of tricks I could teach you, for memory and for, for ways to ask without - asking.

That's very generous of you, but these losses are always temporary - I'm not the first, though I certainly still hold hope of being the last...

[Not that this wish is ever being granted, mind.]

Helel, please make this conversation private. ["Conversation locked", comes the answer from his tablet. Her hesitation and the fact that she's apparently been resorting to these "tricks" for so long tell him this is sensitive in some way. Rather than ask directly, she finds ways around it.]

Would you like me to teach you, when I've regained my own literacy? We've certainly the time here.

What - you'll get it back? [It is an outright cry of dismay. Kesara's face is shocked, hurt. She would never have told him if she knew. It feels like a betrayal, from him, from her own feelings, from the world.

She could cry. Instead her face twists into an angry mask, fighting for a neutral expression and failing. She bites the inside of her lower lip and tries to imagine it isn't visible. Her voice is cold, half-mumbling evasion.]

You can't teach me. I can't learn. Not English. You can't teach me Chinese, can you?

[...More sensitive than he imagined. He understands this feeling of betrayal: she thought she'd found an ally, after all.]

Not English, but this other language? What makes Chinese different?

[If he saw it, he'd know it, he'd seen it in scattered places after Babel, but not very often. The people who wound up speaking and writing it unanimously had left family further east than he ever traveled to come to the fabled tower.]

[For a long moment of frozen silence, looking on with a fierce glare, Kesara wonders if she should tell him. What's the point? For him this is like a bad dream. And he's a man, and a sahib, and all the sadness she felt for him is a wasted agony.

She wants recompense. If he could teach her, she decides, she might consider it fair bargain.]

English is phonetic, [she explains, dry, sullen.] Chinese is idiomatic. That means the characters don't make the sounds, they make the, the meaning. I don't know why it's different for me. But the characters, they're complicated, like little pictures - it's like they're heavier. When I look at them they stay still.

[Enoch nods - he's heard of this phenomenon from time to time; he's too old and well-traveled to have never heard of it. He has no name for it, but he knows of it.]

I will try, when I can make sense of any written language at all again. Mine is phonetic, too, but it does not use the same symbols as English.

[A heavy pause. It wasn't through any action of his own, but he's hurt this child. He has to offer more.]

...I won't tell anyone, if it eases your mind.

C: video, @frfujimoto

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