video;
[Cassandra glances over before focusing on her wind up music box, and begins slowly turning the handle. Music starts to play, a tune that may be familiar to people from Earth. She's not doing this to play music for everyone though, so she stops after a handful of seconds, looking thoughtful.]
It's funny. You hate home until you've been gone from it long enough, and then you get homesick and home is all you can think about. No matter how shitty it is, you forget about all of the bad things and only care about the people you left behind.
[The music box is picked up and clinched in her hand.]
Do you think it's possible to get a message back to someone? Has anyone tried communicating outside the ship yet? If things like this - [She drops the music box in her hand on the table she's sitting at.] can come through the Ingress to us, we have to be able to send things back through it.
It's funny. You hate home until you've been gone from it long enough, and then you get homesick and home is all you can think about. No matter how shitty it is, you forget about all of the bad things and only care about the people you left behind.
[The music box is picked up and clinched in her hand.]
Do you think it's possible to get a message back to someone? Has anyone tried communicating outside the ship yet? If things like this - [She drops the music box in her hand on the table she's sitting at.] can come through the Ingress to us, we have to be able to send things back through it.
[voice]
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[She's honest with that, at least. She's not going to fluff out an answer with something that will make it sound better.]
That doesn't stop me from wishing I could let people back home know I'm alive.
[Her voice is soft when she says that, sounding tired and more than a little sad. She's so convinced that she dies, she wants her friends who left her behind to know that she isn't. Even if it isn't a good idea or actually possible.]
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It would help if we could talk to someone who has been home and come back to the Moira -- if that's been known to happen. Sometimes, in these "mass abduction via quantum uncertainty scenarios" [(those air quotes are audible)], time won't pass for you in your original universe.
It's also possible that some of them might turn up here.
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[She presses that point gently, a smile evident in her tone.]
I don't know anything about mass abductions or whether or not time passes, but it's nice to think that my group won't notice I'm gone. It makes it easier to think of it that way, knowing I can go back and be where they left me.
[It's not said with any humor or an intent to be dramatic, but rather as a solid truth. Those are her plans for whenever she gets back home, unless her leg manages to stay the way it is here once she goes back. Though if time doesn't move and she goes right back to the exact point she remembers leaving, she's not sure her leg and the infection can be fixed. That's enough to make her a little more somber and quiet.]
If you could send something back, would you?
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There are people who I'd rather see here than where I saw them last... primarily people I worked with. We never received messages from people who disappeared, but I haven't seen any of those people here, so it may be a matter of physics that's over all of our heads. It may be that they went home to their original universes, or were pulled into another one like this... but if that were the case, would we have noticed they were gone? I've always thought that the most unsettling hypothesis was the one in which they just evaporated.
[He leaves off the fact that he doesn't want to do anything to tip off Van Rijn's people to any of this; he suspects that if he did, the population of the Moira, and of the places it stops, could be in bigger trouble than they realize. Sending something back doesn't seem prudent.]
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It's unsettling to think about in any case, isn't it? Whether or not you'd notice if someone that was a part of your life vanished? It would only be worse if we did know and we fought like hell to get them back, but couldn't get anywhere because we weren't chosen to be pulled away.
[Of course, there was only one or two people back home that she'd fight to get back. She cared for her group, but understood the necessity of going separate ways. It was only Tommy that she'd really fight to the death to get back, because he had fought so hard to keep her alive and take care of her when she was so sick.]
But it's pointless to think about. We were the ones chosen, and now I look like an idiot for actually admitting I'm homesick.
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[By which he means: sometimes he misses the Tranquility Comms Hub, sometimes he misses Darcy and Bail, or his private rooms, or the way the doors would slide open at his approach. This foolish sentimental tic is involuntary, annoying, and occasionally humiliating: how could he possibly miss that place? The intermittent tug at his emotions is receding, but not as quickly as he'd like. Leia and Jane's presence suggests that the two people who have been most in his thoughts could turn up one day, but it also suggests that it may not be the people he knew, just their simulacrums.
He's fairly sure he'd tell Cassandra if she were being an idiot... or maybe they both are, it's hard to say.]
I'd like to think I'd notice something like that, though. Wouldn't you? Or maybe there are infinite parallel universes filled with versions of all of us, in better or worse situations.
[Maybe even one where he got the zombies.]
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[It's almost comforting, thinking that other parallel versions of her live normal, happy lives. One version of her might actually have gotten to graduate high school and go to college. Another is alive until eighty, and has kids and grandkids and someone that loves her. Another might get to make something out of her life and do something important. It's an empowering thought, one that settles her down and gives her a sense of peace.]
Would you tell me if I was being stupid, though? I'd be afraid of getting hit, if I were you.
[A tease, mostly. She doesn't want to sit and think about infinite parallel versions of herself for too long, because then she'll just get mad she drew the short straw and ended up with zombies.]
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[He says it airily, but "yes," more or less. He's learned to make a point of holding his tongue simply because he no longer has the clout to casually offend potential allies and have them remain his allies. Not restraining himself now and then would be bad strategy, but he has no illusions that he's ever likely to become the kindest and gentlest of acquaintances.
His voice develops a faint note of mock-alarm.]
Do you hit hard?
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[She tries not to laugh, but winds up doing so anyway. She's never actually been around him in person, but has a feeling she can hit hard enough to make it hurt. Not that she's out to intentionally hurt him.]
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[It's always better not to get hit. But his moment of levity falls away, and he lets out a little huff of a thoughtful sigh before he continues.]
What would you want to send back if you could? Just a message...? A gift?
[He wonders what exactly he would send to Watari, apart from a message to make preparations for both of them to go into hiding immediately upon his return. And even that is based on a hunch, and having several years to mull over the situation at his leisure.]
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[She's not sure she could handle sending 10k a gift, but a message for him to get and then pass on to the others sounds nice. Entirely idealistic, but nice.]
I was sick, before I came here. They had left me behind, and I just want to let them know that everything's okay.
[Of course, it might be selfish letting them know she's alive at all, if they left her behind to die and expect she did. It would only fuck with them to hear from her, and realizing that has her sounding ashamed.]
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Is there some way in which that might be a bad thing?
[It makes him wonder: if there were no risk of tracking, would he want to send a message to Darcy or Bail to let them know that he was somewhere else? Would he have wanted to receive such a message from someone like Nathan Petrelli? Would there be any point... would it have unintended consequences for the recipients? Hope, or just bitterness that they'd been left there? Maybe they'd believe it was a trick; more than one party had seemed to be out to trick them.]
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They may not be expecting to hear from me. If they do, it would be like a ghost contacting them.
[It would do more harm than good, potentially. She's glad she was able to come to that point on her own, though, and relatively quickly. It saves her time wishing that she could get word back to them, because it's an unrealistic goal anyway. ]
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Would that necessarily be negative in and of itself? You might be a ghost they'd want to hear from.
On the other hand, they might envy your change in situation.
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[She thinks of 10k in a place like this, and knows he wouldn't do well. Murphy would enjoy the hell out of it, and so would Addy and Mac. Doc probably wouldn't care one way or another, and Warren...
Well, she's a hard one to get a read on. All in all, she thinks that she's the one best suited out of all of them to be here. So maybe it was luck or good fortune that has her here instead of dead and gone back home.]
The thing is, a ghost doesn't have the right to pop back up in the lives of the people they left behind. They've got to move on, and maybe being here is my moving on. I just had to talk it out to realize it.
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[That might have been a little tactless, but it's also supporting her resolution.]
I was responsible for a small team, in my last situation. Mostly people with technical capabilities: we worked on the network. In the absence of information, they might assume that something terrible has happened to me, when that really isn't the case... but that's assuming they're aware I'm gone at all.
And to be honest, we'd gotten used to people disappearing.
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[She says it to be reassuring, not to make him feel like the people he worked with wouldn't notice.]
The people I work with here better notice if I go missing.
[She isn't really sure it's likely, since she's been told there's a couple of other people she might want to meet who have the same job, but hasn't actually met them yet.]
It's not like any of us have anywhere to disappear to. We've already vanished from home, do you think the Ingress could pull us back in and send us somewhere else?
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[And it's better if the people he left behind do move on without him... but he has a strong impression that anyone who was in the corridors in the month before he was pulled through the Ingress went through something similar to his own ordeal, which may mean that a few of them are irreparably stressed, which may impact their chances of long-term survival. Even here, it's taken him weeks to gain back the weight and most of his strength, which he could barely afford to lose to begin with.
It's the mark of a shift in him, he knows, that he still wonders and cares.]
I think it's extremely likely that the Ingress isn't the only object in any universe that can do the things it does, and it may not have any bearing on what happens to us once we're here. Do we have any evidence that it's more than a gate that attracts things from various universes? If not, it isn't as if we've been glued to this one.
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[She switches her end of thing from a voice response to match his, over to video, so she can show him the smirk that's on her face.]
I think we're getting in way too deep about this. Wherever we came from, wherever we might end up, we're here right now.
[She doesn't want to seem like she's making fun of him, but her head is swimming from all of the thinking about what the Ingress can possibly do, and the various places they can end up. It makes her feel even smaller than she ever has before, and she doesn't like feeling that insignificant.]
[switching to private until further notice]
[He heaves a deep sigh, then switches to a private setting for the rest of the conversation.]
When I was pulled onto the other ship, I spent months refusing to get involved in anything, thinking I could go home at any time. Their problems weren't my problems, and so on.
It was a mistake. Well, it wasn't a mistake not to want to get killed there: that's just common sense. But I was involved whether or not I wanted to be.
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That's what I thought, when I first showed up here. My experience with other people hasn't been all that great the past few years, and I thought it would be the same here. But it's not, and I'm getting involved with people here. I'm getting healthy here.
[Being able to eat three meals a day and sleep in a real bed can do that for someone. She gives out a sigh and drops her head, looking resigned.]
I should be angrier about being here.
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[His tone suggests that he agrees with her.]
It isn't as if the choice of being stranded on some planet without any hope of going home is much of a choice. They have us over a barrel. But it's still better than some of the alternatives, and some of the places people are coming from.
It's impossible to live with this many people, day in and day out, and remain totally separate and uninvolved. I'm not sure it's even desirable.
[That may be a confession or a truism: he's not sure.]
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[As nice as it is to talk over a network, it's so public and not personal. She's gotten so used to only communicating face to face back home, that she prefers it.]
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It wasn't, but I'm not opposed to it.
How do you feel about coffee? I'd be surprised if it had been common anymore, when you were home.
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