Anna Amarande (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hauntedsavior) wrote2019-01-26 05:49 pm
hauntedsavior) wrote2019-01-26 05:49 pm
Entry tags:
the lotus.
Anna Amarande was sent on a mission into the sixth layer to find an abandoned lab and bring the research inside back to Zee. Here's how that went. cw: slight body horror.
take a breath and let it go, we'll never come back home to the darkness
where light is divided and cast into the song of oblivion, the death of all we love
Yeah, fuckin' sure. Zee went out into Bosuma and he fell between the layers and he got vored by a whale and its skeleton is still out there, and she's gotta go collect some goddamn magic memory smoke from out there. Anna Amarande never could've imagined her life getting this strange, but on some level she's really glad for it. Having an endpoint means that sometimes the means get real weird, and she guesses that if she'd listened to Zee while he was still alive, maybe she wouldn't have kicked off this whole "working for him" thing quite so. Ridiculously.
Besides. Her android feet are crunching against some not-fully-disintegrated leaves in the middle of the forest, and her bloodstained katana hangs light on her back in its makeshift sheath on top of an empty-for-now backpack, and her metal heart isn't beating any harder than usual now that she's not involuntarily high on robot drugs. If she wanted normal, she should've started with herself.
Whatever. She's been out here a few times before and ended up enjoying it, so maybe this won't be so bad. This is where she met Kasen, right? And where she got closer with Clover. She's never really found herself alone out here—and speak of the devil, there's some more footsteps, louder, more prominent than she expected them to be. Glancing to her left, she catches the sight of a... fucked up dog. A really fucked up dog, purple and monstrous and not something that she wants anything to do with. And now that her attention is away from her own thoughts, she finds herself snapping out of her reverie and noticing that Bosuma is much... much less colorful than she remembers it being. Her footfalls are louder, the air is still, the world feels different and she hates it.
It's got her on edge, and she grimaces, with her right hand ready to take her blade off her back and start making eggplant parm of this thing if it decides it wants to play. But it doesn't seem like it's doing much except watching her—is this what Zee meant when he said he could track her? She has to assume. Otherwise it would be coming for her, because she's out here in the wilds alone and nobody knows she's on this mission except Zee, and it would be way easier than Anna ever wants to admit for Vanderweele to just snuff out her light. Take her heart away. Let her die without a drop of blood in her body.
A shudder runs down her spine as a beastly frog joins the party. Unrelated. It almost feels like it's... coming from her sword? That's bullshit, but she believes it. Best to keep walking, keep her eyes open, just try to. Stay on task, just try to do what Zee sent you out here to do. Ignore how the only thing you can hear is two, four, eight, ten, fourteen footfalls, padded and metallic and scaly and following you. Ignore how everything you can see is locking up, freezing like a computer simulation that's actively getting hacked, the color draining and light disappearing and earth moving under your feet and if the sky starts tumbling down a-tumbling down you're fucking out of here.
Just breathe. Breathe like your lungs still matter and press on.
on a path that winds through the wild
to a house of rose and devils' dreams
Too much, Carlisle. Anna finds herself thinking a lot of things, now that she's ended up in a place where the only thing she seems to have is her thoughts. She'd made it through Bosuma enough for her sword to stop complaining at her, and she'd ended up trailed by beasts until seeing the outline of one of those doors that she'd heard everyone losing their minds over. And they'd lunged at her to finally fuck her up, faster than she could draw her sword, but then they just suddenly weren't... there anymore. Or they definitely attacked her? But she can't remember them actually hurting her.
She's still not sure what happened, but she's through the door now and there's nothing but the outline of the forest surrounding her, and she just has to keep moving forward. She's on a mission, and weird mutated animals shoving her through silvery outlines of doors can't hold her back. God, if only she were into power metal. She could come up with a full concept album just from this, and she wasn't even within sight of the lab. It doesn't feel like she's in sight of anything, really. So is it too much or too little? Whatever. Zee knows what he's doing. She just has to trust him.
Looking around as she walks, she can see the only shock of color surrounding her in the footsteps of the path she's been forging for herself—distinct and clear and bright pink among the blackness of the still, silent, life-free forest she's fallen into. This must be another layer of Bosuma, though she couldn't even begin to guess what's in here beyond the soul energy research. Her body turns so she's walking backwards, something she hasn't done in a few years at least, but she's always been pretty good at it and it's helping her figure out just how these footfalls work.
It allows a couple steps out of line, she figures out, but if she starts turning sharply enough then her own tracks disappear, black on black on black. Which means that she can always look back and see if she's going... the way that someone wants her to go. If the pink footprints are this easy to spot, and she glances ahead of her to see just how far back she can track her own path, then it won't be hard to get lost, but it will be even harder to lose anything or anyone that decides to come in here after her.
Probably for the best that she'd kept as quiet about this as possible. Probably for the best that she continues to keep as quiet about this as possible, not that the layer around her seems to be giving her much choice. It's like being inside a recording studio lined floor-to-ceiling with noise-dampening foam; it's so silent, so still here that she can barely focus. Her tinnitus feels deafening. Her body turns around so she can face the forest in front of her again; at least she'll be able to hear anything coming.
follow the pine, pay no attention to the spirits of the night
follow the pine, pay no attention to the ghost that follows
"—One of the WORST lays of my life, I can't believe even drunk me thought it was a good idea."
Rose Geteilt's voice had been following Anna since a fork in the road, and since Anna's footsteps had stayed pink up until the voice started and she definitely stopped looking, she knew she'd been on the right path. (Well, the correct one; the left one.) Which means that this thing that had stolen Rose's voice is the thing that's been following her. Which means it's playing a mind game with her and there's no way in hell she's ever turning around or even acknowledging it's there. No matter what questions it asks her or what it starts talking about.
"She gutted me, y'know? My own sister. I saw my own guts on the ground, pouring out of me like fertilizer. Maybe that's what the flower needed. Maybe that's why I came back. A plant needs nutrition, right? Maybe I'm just the fucking fertilizer."
It's not her, Anna. It can't be her because you didn't tell her you were coming. And if you didn't tell her you were putting yourself into the kind of danger that people write death metal songs about, she sure as hell wouldn't be here talking about everything so casually. She wouldn't be talking about her own deaths so openly and she wouldn't sound so goddamn bright about it, either. No Geteilt has ever known how to have a fucking conversation in their lives. But no Lehmann has either. It's why you two got along so well.
"Have you ever felt it, what it's like to die? I have. Twice, even. I felt my lungs give up on dragging in air, felt my heartbeat give out and stop. It's not bad, honestly. I never thought there'd be peace in giving up, but there is. And now I can't even do that."
She's trying to psych you out, Anna. It. Not she. It's not Rose. But Anna will remember this for later; she'll remember what's being said to her and she'll talk to Rose about it when she gets out. When she's safe. When they're both safe and they can talk about this again. Because as much as she hates to admit it, there is a certain peace in giving up, isn't there? She hasn't had that thought in years, not since before she got the app, not since before A2 started changing her life, but she gets it. She'd always been too cowardly to do anything about it, and right now thank god she never did because everything always changes, things can change in an instant, all it takes is one sudden shake-up to give her everything she could ever have asked for—but she understands. She glances down to the ground as she walks and feels the voice-thief trying to strike up conversation again.
"How've you been? Any new robot parts I should be worrying about? Shit, man, how many organs can you even lose before it doesn't matter anymore?"
This thing must be designed by Vanderweele to fuck with her directly, whatever it is. If this is one of the places he's been hiding, it makes sense that this thing that lies by existence is getting in her head and asking her questions that she's asked herself time and time again. Back before she couldn't drink anymore. Back when she found out she was going to turn into an android and all those questions dominated her mind. But she's past that now, past the point where she needs to spend her time worrying about it. She's a living Ship of Theseus carrying A2 back to shore.
"Killing A2 taught me a lot, honestly. I could do anything if it meant keeping the people I want. I would kill anyone to get what I need."
Crunch. Crunch. Her footsteps aren't making that noise but she's letting her mind trick herself into thinking they are. She doesn't want to think about Rose—or rather, this thing pretending to be Rose remembering what happened to them in that dream. When her soul was getting rebooted. Hard rebooted.
"What about you?"
take me down into the arms of every word i've found
calling out to me amid the strangers, unraveling a tapestry
"You can't get anything if you're not willing to give something up. That's how it always is, doesn't matter if it's this life or a past one. Just to let you know."
That was the last thing not-Rose had said to her, whispered over her left shoulder before it slinked away into the woods again with a shadow far larger and more monstrous than Rose ever could have cast. And now Anna's here, at the lab—so it exists, so score one for Zee—and those words are ringing in her head as she looks at the blackened ivy growing over the door to the lab. It's locked. Of course it is. So she has to give something up if she wants to get in here.
How the hell are you gonna get in here, Lehmann. You don't have blood anymore, and that's usually what these things crave. But the thoughts of not-Rose's words bubble to the surface again and she has to wonder... she has to wonder if memories will work. Will she be able to get in if she volunteers to forget something? What's... what can she afford to give up? Will she get it back?
"You'd kill anyone to get what you need?" she asks to nobody, on the off-chance that it can still hear her. She needs to prove to Vanderweele that she's serious. That she's not going to take his bullshit, and that if he thinks he can fuck with her like this—if he thinks he can keep taking people from her, taking time and life and memories from her, that she's not afraid of him. That she'll do whatever it takes to take him down.
"All right." A deep breath. If it's not something she'll get back, she'll just have to do it all again. She'll have to make new memories, and she'll do it right this time. "Love you, Rose."
And she focuses on her best friend's beautiful, flower-adorned face that hasn't smiled in too long, on how she snorts when she laughs, on drunk texting her when both of them should know better, on watching A Christmas Story together at 3AM because that's what their booty call turned into. On sitting at her bedside in a hospital after the thing that took control of her body had its way with her. On taunting her into murder, then saying three small words she'd never had the strength to say sober. On laughing alone in the middle of the night about stupid scene kid jokes that they were sharing again like they'd never stopped. On running into Rose in the pharmacy and stumbling her way through an actual conversation about what color she should dye her brand new white hair.
And on the way her heart jumped that day, ten years ago, when they met in the bar that neither of them should have been in, and the whirlwind of emotions this woman, this gestalt of unknowable misery and unfathomable love, ihr schönste Rosenherz went on to instill in an undeserving, sheltered girl from a life that never appreciated her.
Each and every memory she's formed with and of Rose Geteilt plays through her head like a filmstrip on a too-strong projector, the bulb washing out and burning away each cel as it flickers past.
And the lock pops open.
the whispered incantations that hide the hollow sights
of what we've done while we look the other way
This lab is way bigger than she expected it to be. With the lights on, she's finding all of these... puppets? Wooden dolls, marionettes hanging from strings, and more grotesque versions of them, too. Half-finished, fully completed. She has to assume that this is what Zee was talking about—that they were experimenting on soul energy, and just from her own experience, trying to put it into existing bodies. Trying to merge souls into the soulless to create new life, or... or the same life. To let the soul take over its vessel.
It sends a shiver down her spine, this time much more distinct, to think about it too long. The good news, she guesses, is that their experiments eventually worked. Otherwise she wouldn't be standing here, roaming through a lab and trying to find some way to contain the soul energy that Zee had sent her here for. Come on, 2B, you've g—A2. Anna? Not 2B. Right. She stands there in front of an open book and puts her left hand to her eye to cover her face. You've been out here too long. It's starting to get to you, Lehmann.
She's gathering up as many bottles as she safely can, working through these rooms and trying not to overburden herself; if getting in here was so difficult then she can't imagine what it'll be like on the way out. Or maybe she can—being in here seems to be flooding her with memories, which means her soul is probably resonating like crazy, which makes sense because she's closer to whatever's at the center of the layers than she's ever been before, right? But it feels like... so, so much more than when she remembered No.4 and got everything back at once.
She's remembering with such... unmistakable clarity things that she's almost certain that she wasn't there for. Descending to the surface of Earth in a flight suit, staring down a giant sawblade robot with a blindfolded boy next to her, running around the world picking flowers—the white flowers, she finally has context for the flowers, of course she does they were there the whole time she just needed to remember who she was—her grandmother making a ring of them to wear around her neck for protection, defending it with a set of two giant curved swords when some old man begging for just one flower for his sick daughter barged into her home...
She reaches for the edge of a table and jostles it, but doesn't shatter anything there, fortunately. She's... A2. The lights turn on and everything's a green that feels like a hospital sickroom. She's No.4. IV drips line the walls. She's 2B. What are they feeding? She's Ka—
breathe, now, son of a ghost
awake alone in the devil's dreaming
get up get up get up get up geT UP GET UP GET UP GET UP WHOEVER YOU ARE YOU'RE SUFFOCATING
You need to get out of here. It doesn't matter who you are right now. You need to take the fucking sword off your back, you need to... you need to kill whatever trapped you. You need to escape. Do the only thing you're good at. Do what you were born for. You remember what you were born for, don't you? Here. Have some reminders. Feel the weight of the katana in your hand, this virtuous contract that you forged with Retrospec and tempered with the blood of anyone who tried to take it away from you.
Get up. You need to move. You need to cut everything here. You know what neurons look like, don't you? Here. Feel the spines coming from your skin, feel the soul of the beast that merged with you when you came in here. Feel how easy it is for you to move now. Good. You're not drowning anymore. You're in control. You've got this. You've always had this. Keep running. Careful not to touch any of the other souls. You're already a mess—look at you; you don't even have a name anymore, do you? But go. Run, while your lungs still matter. Press on.
Nothing can hold you back now. This is what you're here for. There goes another neuron, and there goes another one of your memories. Draining you the longer you're in here. Air isn't the only thing you need to be able to breathe. Careful. Don't lose everything you are. You remember who you are, don't you? Here. You're the oncoming storm. You want to be pointed in a direction so someone else can pull the trigger. You are the light when all hope is gone. Keep going. Keep going, girl. You can do this. Only a few more to cut now.
Only one more until you're free. Only one more until this thing is done. Ignore the new memories, ignore the flood of thoughts that aren't yours, focus on your own voice. You're the only one you can trust. You've always been the only one you can trust. Nobody else is here but you. Nobody has ever been here for you but you. No friends, no loved ones—things like you, they don't have family and they don't fall in love. Pay attention to your own voice. It's the only thing you've ever had. You remember what you sound like, don't you?
Here.
if all our holy eyes can see is all that we believe
let the memories ignite
The woman, the 27-year-old half-robot woman with white hair and a metal heart, emerges again in the lab screaming in pain. She has enough sense to look around, to see the remains of the... giant brain creature? That she'd been. Sucked into. Captured by. She remembers fighting for her life inside there, attacking nerves and neurons, dodging free-floating souls—and she immediately tries to open her eyes and get her senses back together so she can see how many she was able to save for Zee. Zee! For Zee, holy shit. She. She remembers him. Her body feels like it's ready to overheat but she's coming back to reality. A smile crosses her lips.
But it's short-lived. The projector starts up again, the one she doesn't remember starting, and it's flickering past all of those memories again but running faster and faster. Here, a flash of being asked to protect—it's gone. Another flash of firing off bullets at a floating man, and it's gone, too. Her eyes try to close as she grips the table again, but only her right eye gets there, and there's a searing pain behind her left eye as it feels like it will burst from her skull at any second. The scenes are getting harder and harder to discern, the projector spinning so hard it's going to explode, the left reel shaking and cracking and coming apart under its own force, and images, images of the blindfolded android, of the fully-sighted one with her sword buried in so many stomachs, of the one with an eyepatch talking about how exciting Earth is, of the boy shouting at her with sword drawn, of the girl in the burned-out trailer with the wreath of glowing white flowers, images blurring together and their speed only increasing and the reel getting hotter and hotter and it just.
It's gone. The left reel. The projector stops, and Anna's vision goes half-dark, and she falls to her knees. Her left hand comes up and touches her face and there's—don't think about it. Don't think about it, Anna. Don't do it.
She gathers up everything she can, the bottles of soul energy, the... the microchip? There's a. She's not questioning it. She's not questioning why an enormous brain had a microchip inside it because she can't walk and she can only see out of half her face and she just needs to get. Out. She needs to leave. And it's hard to remember the way out of the lab; all of it seems different now. But she has... she has the soul energy. She has the microchip. She's crawling through the lab and returning to the woods, the woods where—
Where someone tried to tempt her. Someone tried to trick her into turning around. Her eyes (no) look up at the colorless sky in vain, trying to find her way out of here, trying to claw her way back to Bosuma instead of this layer. This... this place that she's just. It's. Fake. Haha, right? It has to be. Nothing here has been the way it was supposed to be so far. It's fake. Once she gets back into Bosuma, into the regular world, she'll be... fine. She'll be fine.
There's a hole in the sky, and she just needs to get to it. She just needs to get through it and she'll be back home. Right? This doesn't seem fake. It can't be fake. She can't be trapped here. She just has to get through the hole (why can't she tell how far away it is anymore?) and—
And she lands back in the real world, face down with a bloodied katana on her back and a backpack full of glass vials and enough padding to keep them all safe. And now that color is back in her life, now that she's not trapped between the layers, she can bring all of this back to Zee. And. And he'll get her fixed up. He'll make everything right.
She'll be fine.
where light is divided and cast into the song of oblivion, the death of all we love
Yeah, fuckin' sure. Zee went out into Bosuma and he fell between the layers and he got vored by a whale and its skeleton is still out there, and she's gotta go collect some goddamn magic memory smoke from out there. Anna Amarande never could've imagined her life getting this strange, but on some level she's really glad for it. Having an endpoint means that sometimes the means get real weird, and she guesses that if she'd listened to Zee while he was still alive, maybe she wouldn't have kicked off this whole "working for him" thing quite so. Ridiculously.
Besides. Her android feet are crunching against some not-fully-disintegrated leaves in the middle of the forest, and her bloodstained katana hangs light on her back in its makeshift sheath on top of an empty-for-now backpack, and her metal heart isn't beating any harder than usual now that she's not involuntarily high on robot drugs. If she wanted normal, she should've started with herself.
Whatever. She's been out here a few times before and ended up enjoying it, so maybe this won't be so bad. This is where she met Kasen, right? And where she got closer with Clover. She's never really found herself alone out here—and speak of the devil, there's some more footsteps, louder, more prominent than she expected them to be. Glancing to her left, she catches the sight of a... fucked up dog. A really fucked up dog, purple and monstrous and not something that she wants anything to do with. And now that her attention is away from her own thoughts, she finds herself snapping out of her reverie and noticing that Bosuma is much... much less colorful than she remembers it being. Her footfalls are louder, the air is still, the world feels different and she hates it.
It's got her on edge, and she grimaces, with her right hand ready to take her blade off her back and start making eggplant parm of this thing if it decides it wants to play. But it doesn't seem like it's doing much except watching her—is this what Zee meant when he said he could track her? She has to assume. Otherwise it would be coming for her, because she's out here in the wilds alone and nobody knows she's on this mission except Zee, and it would be way easier than Anna ever wants to admit for Vanderweele to just snuff out her light. Take her heart away. Let her die without a drop of blood in her body.
A shudder runs down her spine as a beastly frog joins the party. Unrelated. It almost feels like it's... coming from her sword? That's bullshit, but she believes it. Best to keep walking, keep her eyes open, just try to. Stay on task, just try to do what Zee sent you out here to do. Ignore how the only thing you can hear is two, four, eight, ten, fourteen footfalls, padded and metallic and scaly and following you. Ignore how everything you can see is locking up, freezing like a computer simulation that's actively getting hacked, the color draining and light disappearing and earth moving under your feet and if the sky starts tumbling down a-tumbling down you're fucking out of here.
Just breathe. Breathe like your lungs still matter and press on.
to a house of rose and devils' dreams
Too much, Carlisle. Anna finds herself thinking a lot of things, now that she's ended up in a place where the only thing she seems to have is her thoughts. She'd made it through Bosuma enough for her sword to stop complaining at her, and she'd ended up trailed by beasts until seeing the outline of one of those doors that she'd heard everyone losing their minds over. And they'd lunged at her to finally fuck her up, faster than she could draw her sword, but then they just suddenly weren't... there anymore. Or they definitely attacked her? But she can't remember them actually hurting her.
She's still not sure what happened, but she's through the door now and there's nothing but the outline of the forest surrounding her, and she just has to keep moving forward. She's on a mission, and weird mutated animals shoving her through silvery outlines of doors can't hold her back. God, if only she were into power metal. She could come up with a full concept album just from this, and she wasn't even within sight of the lab. It doesn't feel like she's in sight of anything, really. So is it too much or too little? Whatever. Zee knows what he's doing. She just has to trust him.
Looking around as she walks, she can see the only shock of color surrounding her in the footsteps of the path she's been forging for herself—distinct and clear and bright pink among the blackness of the still, silent, life-free forest she's fallen into. This must be another layer of Bosuma, though she couldn't even begin to guess what's in here beyond the soul energy research. Her body turns so she's walking backwards, something she hasn't done in a few years at least, but she's always been pretty good at it and it's helping her figure out just how these footfalls work.
It allows a couple steps out of line, she figures out, but if she starts turning sharply enough then her own tracks disappear, black on black on black. Which means that she can always look back and see if she's going... the way that someone wants her to go. If the pink footprints are this easy to spot, and she glances ahead of her to see just how far back she can track her own path, then it won't be hard to get lost, but it will be even harder to lose anything or anyone that decides to come in here after her.
Probably for the best that she'd kept as quiet about this as possible. Probably for the best that she continues to keep as quiet about this as possible, not that the layer around her seems to be giving her much choice. It's like being inside a recording studio lined floor-to-ceiling with noise-dampening foam; it's so silent, so still here that she can barely focus. Her tinnitus feels deafening. Her body turns around so she can face the forest in front of her again; at least she'll be able to hear anything coming.
follow the pine, pay no attention to the ghost that follows
"—One of the WORST lays of my life, I can't believe even drunk me thought it was a good idea."
Rose Geteilt's voice had been following Anna since a fork in the road, and since Anna's footsteps had stayed pink up until the voice started and she definitely stopped looking, she knew she'd been on the right path. (Well, the correct one; the left one.) Which means that this thing that had stolen Rose's voice is the thing that's been following her. Which means it's playing a mind game with her and there's no way in hell she's ever turning around or even acknowledging it's there. No matter what questions it asks her or what it starts talking about.
"She gutted me, y'know? My own sister. I saw my own guts on the ground, pouring out of me like fertilizer. Maybe that's what the flower needed. Maybe that's why I came back. A plant needs nutrition, right? Maybe I'm just the fucking fertilizer."
It's not her, Anna. It can't be her because you didn't tell her you were coming. And if you didn't tell her you were putting yourself into the kind of danger that people write death metal songs about, she sure as hell wouldn't be here talking about everything so casually. She wouldn't be talking about her own deaths so openly and she wouldn't sound so goddamn bright about it, either. No Geteilt has ever known how to have a fucking conversation in their lives. But no Lehmann has either. It's why you two got along so well.
"Have you ever felt it, what it's like to die? I have. Twice, even. I felt my lungs give up on dragging in air, felt my heartbeat give out and stop. It's not bad, honestly. I never thought there'd be peace in giving up, but there is. And now I can't even do that."
She's trying to psych you out, Anna. It. Not she. It's not Rose. But Anna will remember this for later; she'll remember what's being said to her and she'll talk to Rose about it when she gets out. When she's safe. When they're both safe and they can talk about this again. Because as much as she hates to admit it, there is a certain peace in giving up, isn't there? She hasn't had that thought in years, not since before she got the app, not since before A2 started changing her life, but she gets it. She'd always been too cowardly to do anything about it, and right now thank god she never did because everything always changes, things can change in an instant, all it takes is one sudden shake-up to give her everything she could ever have asked for—but she understands. She glances down to the ground as she walks and feels the voice-thief trying to strike up conversation again.
"How've you been? Any new robot parts I should be worrying about? Shit, man, how many organs can you even lose before it doesn't matter anymore?"
This thing must be designed by Vanderweele to fuck with her directly, whatever it is. If this is one of the places he's been hiding, it makes sense that this thing that lies by existence is getting in her head and asking her questions that she's asked herself time and time again. Back before she couldn't drink anymore. Back when she found out she was going to turn into an android and all those questions dominated her mind. But she's past that now, past the point where she needs to spend her time worrying about it. She's a living Ship of Theseus carrying A2 back to shore.
"Killing A2 taught me a lot, honestly. I could do anything if it meant keeping the people I want. I would kill anyone to get what I need."
Crunch. Crunch. Her footsteps aren't making that noise but she's letting her mind trick herself into thinking they are. She doesn't want to think about Rose—or rather, this thing pretending to be Rose remembering what happened to them in that dream. When her soul was getting rebooted. Hard rebooted.
"What about you?"
calling out to me amid the strangers, unraveling a tapestry
"You can't get anything if you're not willing to give something up. That's how it always is, doesn't matter if it's this life or a past one. Just to let you know."
That was the last thing not-Rose had said to her, whispered over her left shoulder before it slinked away into the woods again with a shadow far larger and more monstrous than Rose ever could have cast. And now Anna's here, at the lab—so it exists, so score one for Zee—and those words are ringing in her head as she looks at the blackened ivy growing over the door to the lab. It's locked. Of course it is. So she has to give something up if she wants to get in here.
How the hell are you gonna get in here, Lehmann. You don't have blood anymore, and that's usually what these things crave. But the thoughts of not-Rose's words bubble to the surface again and she has to wonder... she has to wonder if memories will work. Will she be able to get in if she volunteers to forget something? What's... what can she afford to give up? Will she get it back?
"You'd kill anyone to get what you need?" she asks to nobody, on the off-chance that it can still hear her. She needs to prove to Vanderweele that she's serious. That she's not going to take his bullshit, and that if he thinks he can fuck with her like this—if he thinks he can keep taking people from her, taking time and life and memories from her, that she's not afraid of him. That she'll do whatever it takes to take him down.
"All right." A deep breath. If it's not something she'll get back, she'll just have to do it all again. She'll have to make new memories, and she'll do it right this time. "Love you, Rose."
And she focuses on her best friend's beautiful, flower-adorned face that hasn't smiled in too long, on how she snorts when she laughs, on drunk texting her when both of them should know better, on watching A Christmas Story together at 3AM because that's what their booty call turned into. On sitting at her bedside in a hospital after the thing that took control of her body had its way with her. On taunting her into murder, then saying three small words she'd never had the strength to say sober. On laughing alone in the middle of the night about stupid scene kid jokes that they were sharing again like they'd never stopped. On running into Rose in the pharmacy and stumbling her way through an actual conversation about what color she should dye her brand new white hair.
And on the way her heart jumped that day, ten years ago, when they met in the bar that neither of them should have been in, and the whirlwind of emotions this woman, this gestalt of unknowable misery and unfathomable love, ihr schönste Rosenherz went on to instill in an undeserving, sheltered girl from a life that never appreciated her.
Each and every memory she's formed with and of Rose Geteilt plays through her head like a filmstrip on a too-strong projector, the bulb washing out and burning away each cel as it flickers past.
And the lock pops open.
of what we've done while we look the other way
This lab is way bigger than she expected it to be. With the lights on, she's finding all of these... puppets? Wooden dolls, marionettes hanging from strings, and more grotesque versions of them, too. Half-finished, fully completed. She has to assume that this is what Zee was talking about—that they were experimenting on soul energy, and just from her own experience, trying to put it into existing bodies. Trying to merge souls into the soulless to create new life, or... or the same life. To let the soul take over its vessel.
It sends a shiver down her spine, this time much more distinct, to think about it too long. The good news, she guesses, is that their experiments eventually worked. Otherwise she wouldn't be standing here, roaming through a lab and trying to find some way to contain the soul energy that Zee had sent her here for. Come on, 2B, you've g—A2. Anna? Not 2B. Right. She stands there in front of an open book and puts her left hand to her eye to cover her face. You've been out here too long. It's starting to get to you, Lehmann.
She's gathering up as many bottles as she safely can, working through these rooms and trying not to overburden herself; if getting in here was so difficult then she can't imagine what it'll be like on the way out. Or maybe she can—being in here seems to be flooding her with memories, which means her soul is probably resonating like crazy, which makes sense because she's closer to whatever's at the center of the layers than she's ever been before, right? But it feels like... so, so much more than when she remembered No.4 and got everything back at once.
She's remembering with such... unmistakable clarity things that she's almost certain that she wasn't there for. Descending to the surface of Earth in a flight suit, staring down a giant sawblade robot with a blindfolded boy next to her, running around the world picking flowers—the white flowers, she finally has context for the flowers, of course she does they were there the whole time she just needed to remember who she was—her grandmother making a ring of them to wear around her neck for protection, defending it with a set of two giant curved swords when some old man begging for just one flower for his sick daughter barged into her home...
She reaches for the edge of a table and jostles it, but doesn't shatter anything there, fortunately. She's... A2. The lights turn on and everything's a green that feels like a hospital sickroom. She's No.4. IV drips line the walls. She's 2B. What are they feeding? She's Ka—
awake alone in the devil's dreaming
get up get up get up get up geT UP GET UP GET UP GET UP WHOEVER YOU ARE YOU'RE SUFFOCATING
You need to get out of here. It doesn't matter who you are right now. You need to take the fucking sword off your back, you need to... you need to kill whatever trapped you. You need to escape. Do the only thing you're good at. Do what you were born for. You remember what you were born for, don't you? Here. Have some reminders. Feel the weight of the katana in your hand, this virtuous contract that you forged with Retrospec and tempered with the blood of anyone who tried to take it away from you.
Get up. You need to move. You need to cut everything here. You know what neurons look like, don't you? Here. Feel the spines coming from your skin, feel the soul of the beast that merged with you when you came in here. Feel how easy it is for you to move now. Good. You're not drowning anymore. You're in control. You've got this. You've always had this. Keep running. Careful not to touch any of the other souls. You're already a mess—look at you; you don't even have a name anymore, do you? But go. Run, while your lungs still matter. Press on.
Nothing can hold you back now. This is what you're here for. There goes another neuron, and there goes another one of your memories. Draining you the longer you're in here. Air isn't the only thing you need to be able to breathe. Careful. Don't lose everything you are. You remember who you are, don't you? Here. You're the oncoming storm. You want to be pointed in a direction so someone else can pull the trigger. You are the light when all hope is gone. Keep going. Keep going, girl. You can do this. Only a few more to cut now.
Only one more until you're free. Only one more until this thing is done. Ignore the new memories, ignore the flood of thoughts that aren't yours, focus on your own voice. You're the only one you can trust. You've always been the only one you can trust. Nobody else is here but you. Nobody has ever been here for you but you. No friends, no loved ones—things like you, they don't have family and they don't fall in love. Pay attention to your own voice. It's the only thing you've ever had. You remember what you sound like, don't you?
Here.
let the memories ignite
The woman, the 27-year-old half-robot woman with white hair and a metal heart, emerges again in the lab screaming in pain. She has enough sense to look around, to see the remains of the... giant brain creature? That she'd been. Sucked into. Captured by. She remembers fighting for her life inside there, attacking nerves and neurons, dodging free-floating souls—and she immediately tries to open her eyes and get her senses back together so she can see how many she was able to save for Zee. Zee! For Zee, holy shit. She. She remembers him. Her body feels like it's ready to overheat but she's coming back to reality. A smile crosses her lips.
But it's short-lived. The projector starts up again, the one she doesn't remember starting, and it's flickering past all of those memories again but running faster and faster. Here, a flash of being asked to protect—it's gone. Another flash of firing off bullets at a floating man, and it's gone, too. Her eyes try to close as she grips the table again, but only her right eye gets there, and there's a searing pain behind her left eye as it feels like it will burst from her skull at any second. The scenes are getting harder and harder to discern, the projector spinning so hard it's going to explode, the left reel shaking and cracking and coming apart under its own force, and images, images of the blindfolded android, of the fully-sighted one with her sword buried in so many stomachs, of the one with an eyepatch talking about how exciting Earth is, of the boy shouting at her with sword drawn, of the girl in the burned-out trailer with the wreath of glowing white flowers, images blurring together and their speed only increasing and the reel getting hotter and hotter and it just.
It's gone. The left reel. The projector stops, and Anna's vision goes half-dark, and she falls to her knees. Her left hand comes up and touches her face and there's—don't think about it. Don't think about it, Anna. Don't do it.
She gathers up everything she can, the bottles of soul energy, the... the microchip? There's a. She's not questioning it. She's not questioning why an enormous brain had a microchip inside it because she can't walk and she can only see out of half her face and she just needs to get. Out. She needs to leave. And it's hard to remember the way out of the lab; all of it seems different now. But she has... she has the soul energy. She has the microchip. She's crawling through the lab and returning to the woods, the woods where—
Where someone tried to tempt her. Someone tried to trick her into turning around. Her eyes (no) look up at the colorless sky in vain, trying to find her way out of here, trying to claw her way back to Bosuma instead of this layer. This... this place that she's just. It's. Fake. Haha, right? It has to be. Nothing here has been the way it was supposed to be so far. It's fake. Once she gets back into Bosuma, into the regular world, she'll be... fine. She'll be fine.
There's a hole in the sky, and she just needs to get to it. She just needs to get through it and she'll be back home. Right? This doesn't seem fake. It can't be fake. She can't be trapped here. She just has to get through the hole (why can't she tell how far away it is anymore?) and—
And she lands back in the real world, face down with a bloodied katana on her back and a backpack full of glass vials and enough padding to keep them all safe. And now that color is back in her life, now that she's not trapped between the layers, she can bring all of this back to Zee. And. And he'll get her fixed up. He'll make everything right.
She'll be fine.