[open] ability testing

[shri]

CHARACTERS: Lakshmi Bai & YOU
WHERE: Hyrypia - Anywhere you feel like.
WHEN: DAY :016 - DAY :0
SUMMARY: Lakshmi is testing out her symbiotic abilities on some suspecting/willing test subjects/unknowing ppl. Also, backdated to hell.
WARNINGS/OTHER: Nothingness. Also Lakshmi's extra everything? Didn't talk to her the first time and still want to join in? No problems. Come get some sweet, sweet extra emotions. If there is a particular emotion you would like to have your character go through, please let me know.

I. I NEED NOISE.

Her testing isn't direct on anyone to begin with - simply she wants to try it without comment. To that she takes anyone who said they might wish to be part of it and see it for themselves, measuring it for herself. She cannot be sure with a host exactly, the way they all bleed through each other's bandages. So she instead looks to mix it between them. Not to engage directly with oh, a group of gossiping staff, a set of seconds drinking and talking about the results of the hunting races, whoever seems a good and unknowing target, as she sets herself near to them with a Host to accompany her, she gets to sit next to her.

Knows that what she'll need in particular is a host to limit any conversation she has with another, when she slips to the deep waters of that cool dark nothingness.

( Ready? )

II. I NEED THE CRACK OF A WHIP.

Once she can be sure of it, sure it's weight, it's flex, how it feels in her own skin to take all that is outside of her and push it out - it's then that she finds another host to know the exactness of how it feels. How it flows, of how it might react on those nearest to her. To peel away those bandages and let it drip, drip, drip.

So in the privacy of a tent, she settles herself in a the set of her skirts and the push back of her veil

"You're quite sure you want to... feel this?"

Last chance, jump from the ship, that way she can be sure she is ever a summer fire racing across empty grass fields, consumptive, she never leaves much else behind her but ash. Even animals knew to flee that.

III. I NEED BLOOD IN THE CUT.

After a few tries, she no longer is half so unsure, she turns it out to what it is, a tool. She steps out, she finds oh, groups of Seconds, whispering servants, drunk off duty guards, she fills herself with easy laughter and like a spiked drink, she finds them to give it to them a laughing word to build a picture of herself of someone, removed, perhaps, not inclined to touch, not liking to discuss herself or her group, but well - she is clever, isn't she? Always likely to make others laugh.

Now she knows her timing, though, now she knows to step herself out of any conversation before it wears off, to put herself back to the confines of the tents. It's there she sits, like this - where she so normally fire, now she sits a empty wine dark sea. Cool, removed, it takes and gives nothing back.

To find her then however, she is not idle, she is only a process of movements. A series of calculations that come without merit. Instead: she has taken out her knives. Lays them out by length, a stair case set of longest to shortest. Of their ceremonial blade, hers - Sir Bors, what remained of her husband's shamsher melded together as one - a shorter woman's knife for cutting thread and snapping away unwanted snags.

It's there, she begins to sharpen them. Because they must be sharp, is the only burgeoning thought of soon to be her own emotion again. But for now: it is only that they must be sharp. Tools have only purpose, after all.

Comments

[earthborn]

Shepard nods, sharp, stern. There is a pause, like an in-drawn breath, and Shepard's mind turns towards itself, seeking out some pattern of thought, some unknown electromagnetic mnemonic that might make it easier to--

Like a figure emerging from smoke, the second Shepard appears. It seems unnatural that it should be so easy, so silent, quieter even than the sunrise. The effect is less as if this new Shepard had come into being, than that she'd been there all along, and only just now had the other two in the tent noticed her. That she should be sitting there at all seems perfectly natural, and yet the precise, horrible similarity between the two of them is subtly grotesque.

Every fold of clothing, every hair, every freckle and blemish is identical, in every way. Even her expression is similar, vaguely annoyed, considering as each Shepard sees at a glane her position in the room. Who is the copy? Who is the original?

They both lunge at the same moment. One to grasp the other's arms, seeking to restrain her, and the other glowing a virulent blue-white, seeking to instigate a violent reversal of gravity-- though perhaps not fast enough to prevent Damon from stopping her.

[blooded]

Damon's never seen Shepard's ability at work before, and he watches with a sort of detached interest as the clone just... appears, as if she had been there all along. For just a moment, he considers the two of them, takes in their similarities, the identical blemishes and freckles and hair follicles —

and then the clone lunges, and he blurs in front of her, his hands outstretched, one on the real Shepard's arm to hold her back and one on the clone's shoulder to hold her in place. She's caught, staring at him, face slack and vacant as his pupils dilate, the compulsion taking hold.

"You're not going to fight us. We're gonna have a little experiment, and you are going to be a helpful little lab rat."

I'm not going to fight you, CloneShep intones, and Damon slowly drops his hand from her shoulder. She doesn't move.

[shri]

Before she's even finished coming to terms with it all - the shadows that take form, the form that takes presence in a perfect double of the Commander, the too quick step she had experienced once before - the blade is in her hand. The lion headed pommel of the blade wrapped around by - one, two, three - fingers, hand up behind her back.

Though it goes no further than that. As Damon cools her with words that set something so deeply at ease in herself. Perhaps she should be glad, to see him at work but not at her so she can prepare herself for the things he is capable of.

But for now, it's a pushed back thought. She has a task in front of her, and with it, she doesn't take her eyes off of the perfect replication of Shepard, but her question is turned to Damon. "And this will hold?"

[earthborn]

"You know you might just earn an asskicking yet, Salvatore," Shepard remarks, as she eases back. Half-life, half power, but Shepard wonders if the 'strong will' Liara used to go on about was just the flash of a crush or real enough to mean something.

That's not an experiment for the time and place, however. She gestures wide, as if to say: this one's all yours.

[blooded]

"I did exactly what I said I would, how am I earning an asskicking now?" he asks, but the question is posed absently as Damon stares at CloneShep, watching her carefully. He's used to being shat on even when he does exactly what he's told and no more, so Shepard's offer of an asskicking hardly even fazes him, really, he's more worried about making sure the compulsion sticks.

"It should," he says to Lakshmi eventually, not taking his eyes off of the clone, "But just in case, work fast."

[shri]

She ignores them both, bickering or otherwise, as she steps forward with her hands outstretched and the thought of what she wants to do, in her mind. Latches onto what she feels most - relief that this will all be over soon. A relief that she latches onto, let fill her up from the heart out. Her fingers brushing against the curve of the clone's cheek, warm even through the material of the veils, guiding close between them.

A ripple, the flicker of a flame that gutters in the wind. That casts light over them all, her, as much Damon and the Commander and the clone. But directed at least that the warmth doesn't settle so much as pass over them, but it stays shared between them. Those fingers light and then turn playful as it overcomes her and Lakshmi begins to laugh. Full, rich, breathless, and little by little, the clone does too. At what - perhaps it never really mattered. Her head leans forward as then, slowly, surely, the clone begins to laugh little by little, easy breath by easy breath until there they are, two grown women. Laughing at nothing and everything.