kore_logs | What if this is all a dream?

Who: Fortescue, and you. (Open!)
When: Day 195
Where: The cafeteria.
What: Things feel weird to Fortescue, and that means the old paranoia's coming right back. This means breaking out the booze. Predictably.
Warnings: Some small mentions of torture. Will update if there's anything else.

She can't put her finger on it, but something is odd.

Jazz is slightly more irritable than usual, the black cat refusing to ride on her shoulders at all. At night, she thinks she hears whispers. Voices. Things in the dark. Things that speak when they think that she can't hear. She would toss that up to the Center being weird, as an ambiance, except she remembers her training manual on Seid magic. Dream walking and manipulating — what to do if someone is holding you against your will to get information from you, but disguising it with a dream. Less powerful casters always slip up and lessen their magic when you sleep, deep in your hallucination. Cracks appear, things spill through from where you really are.

Things like the casters' voices. Fortescue had just talked herself out of such paranoia, and now it's returned full-force. What if she never left that dank room in the jungle? What if those thugs are still draining the life out of her, and this is just some vibrant high before her mind is severed from her? What if the people here are just projections from a caster, trying to get information out of her about the war? About Imperium?

As usual when such thoughts go through her mind, Bethmora Fortescue goes for the alcohol. She makes her way to the cafeteria and kitchen in what she imagines is the late morning, after crawling out of bed with slightly shaky hands. Not bothering to change out of the black cocktail dress that she's been using as sleepwear — the Center was nice enough to furnish her with a change of clothes, a few weeks back. Maybe the Center likes her. She'd liked it much better than home... back before she'd had these thoughts. Perhaps she's still in her world after all.

She pours herself a hefty drink from one of the bottles of amber liquid she finds, whiskey from a brand she doesn't recognize, and sits down at a table to observe the room with cautious eyes. If the casters are making a habit of slipping up, she wants to see it in action.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A friend of mine found one, and then apparently one of our angels discovered another. Both of those incidents were quite some time ago. [Fortescue doesn't even bat an eye at the word 'angels' anymore. If it's confusing, they'll cross that bridge when they come to it.] I suppose that this place must not like us going outside.

( ... it's okay, Fort. Someone else will bat at angels for you. Maybe a little later. It couldn't be literal, could it? )

What does keep us in? To make everything change. ( Because doors couldn't be occasional things, but then those dogs had just appeared )

Near as we can tell, it's a machine.

[She smiles a little. It does look different to everyone who sees it. She sees one of the consoles that was attached to the Angel Gate back home.]

The scientists who used to be here were studying it. Now, I think it's safe to say that it's running the asylum.

A machine is running this place? Changing what we see, what happens?

( She bought it so far as running the electricity, maybe some systems - oxygen filtration, lighting, heating. But bringing them and other things in? There had to be people )

[Fortescue nods, having a sip of her drink.]

Yes. Us arriving used to be a side effect of them studying the machine. Or maybe it kept bringing us here and they couldn't stop it. Either way, it's responsible. From what I remember, we got that much from a scientist's confession.

[Which had sounded an awful lot like torture, way back when, but Fortescue hadn't been in a position to judge what had been done. Not with her record. Though she's fairly proud that she's never directly tortured anyone for information. It's not very reliable, anyway.]

Then where did they go?

( If they had been studying it they knew something, and they'd been around before. They'd said as much then, but now they were gone, and there didn't seem to be many people in the facility. What made the machine pick who it did, if it did? )

That's the big question.

[She glances at the rest of the empty cafeteria, imagining the place packed with people in white coats and severe expressions. Or maybe jokes had been passed around at lunch time, results discussed over mediocre food.]

We haven't the foggiest. They all seem to be gone, and so are their notes.

As if they never existed.

( But they had, people had met them. Or was that all part of it - a belief that there were other people here, either something from the machine or the real source. Loki had been able to manipulate much, and the power of the Tesseract had been able to alter thought - control. What really was this? )

Can you be sure they did?

[Fortescue considers how best to word her confirmation that they had existed. It's the kind of thing most people frown on, and it does... cast a none-too-flattering light on some of the people snatched here.]

When we were in the town, before, some managed to detain a scientist and... get some information out of him. That was before I arrived here.

[Information taken in a bodily way, from what she'd heard.]

What if this is all a dream?

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