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We need to talk is the most ominous possible message to receive in the wake of the new arrivals. He'd known it was coming—Panorama's a small place, and even if Sciel and Lune hadn't run into anyone in person, word would have gotten around to them—but he wasn't ready for it to be quite so soon. He's still... adjusting. Sifting through the disgusting mess of feelings this has brought up.

But refusing to meet would be even stranger than having this conversation, so he does his best impression of a normal person and replies Okay. Very casual, very non-incriminating. Then he splashes his face with cold water and stares at himself in the mirror for a good ten seconds before leaving.

Luckily, he hasn't yet made his planned move to the Sanctum's abandoned apartments, so Sciel and Lune are still within walking distance. Given that his moped is still in disrepair, he does just that, taking the long way around so that he has time to plan and ruminate and generally feel anxious.

He runs into Lune at the door, seemingly returning to the motel room at the same time as he's arriving. "Hey," he offers in a way that feels impressively nonchalant, rapping his knuckles on the dingy door.

Nonchalant is the exact opposite of what Lune’s feeling, and she isn’t even trying to pretend.

After some extremely unlikely and unexpected encounters across the city, Lune had cut her errands and responsibilities short for the day, driving back to the Stumble Inn in a rush. We need to talk, indeed.

She doesn’t even look particularly happy about the news— she’s bad at sorting through her emotions, hasn’t managed to rearrange the expression on her face into something coherent. She seems a little frazzled. Happy and relieved, certainly, but mostly… focused, intent.

It’s undeniably good news. But it’s also a new mystery on one side, and the impossibility of it keeps running in circles in her skull.

“Hello,” she says, stiffly. Impatient, she fishes in her bag for the key, and unlocks the door so they don’t have to wait for Sciel to let them in. She sweeps past Verso and into the shared room, practically dragging him in after her by the scruff of his neck.

Maelle, Monoco...Gustave. The last of which would probably still be here, considering she'd brought him to their place to get a change of clothes, were it not for the fact that he'd already left to rejoin Maelle.

Probably for the best, considering: We need to talk. The city's trio of Expeditioners, that is (or, they had been a trio, though she reminds herself again that it's no longer the case). Sciel sends out the call not long after Gustave leaves the Stumble Inn, keeping herself busy in the room she shares with Lune in the meantime.

Fortunately, it isn't terribly long before she hears voices outside, and before she can even get up from the edge of her bed, they're both walking in. Or — Lune hurries in, Verso in tow.

"Hi," she offers, getting to her feet. Her voice is...only a touch distant, her expression more measured than boasting its usual brightness. "...So."

So. Green eyes survey the pair, noting each of their expressions in turn.

"I...ran into some familiar faces today."

Dragged in, Verso loiters by the door, arms crossed over his chest. He watches Sciel hop up from her seat on the bed, fingers tapping restlessly against his elbow. She starts to speak, and he reads into every little microexpression, every slight deviation from her bubbly baseline.

He doesn't say anything, hesitant to open his mouth and somehow entrap himself. Silent, he raises his eyebrows.

“So did I.” Lune shoots a look back at Verso, waiting for a reaction that isn’t coming. Then she stops to lock and chain-lock the door behind them, restless and fidgety; partially for the usual security reasons and so nobody can break in, and maybe a little bit so Verso will be slowed down if he tries to escape this conversation. They’ll sit on him if they have to.

“Gustave, Maelle, Monoco. The latest cosmic storm must have…”

She tapers off. She doesn’t have an explanation for it; there’s no rhyme or reason to how this works, from all that she’s heard. What she can offer up, however, in true implacable Lune fashion:

“I made Gustave recite some shared memories to prove it was him. I couldn’t believe it. But he passed.”

Neither women hide the fact that they're watching Verso for a reaction, and Sciel's frown deepens slightly as it doesn't come. Having nothing to say about a man he'd both never met and, possibly, feels some undeserved discomfort around based on the timing of what had happened at the Cliffs...isn't a surprise. That he doesn't seem remotely pleased about Maelle's appearance, or Monoco's —

Maybe it'd been the blackout, she thinks. Whatever he'd experienced, about which he's been tight-lipped. If he's worried about the youngest of the 33s in particular, with whom he's developed a close rapport, having to go through something like that, separated from the rest of them...

"Neither could I." She'd been shocked to see Gustave, of course, after his murder. The implications that followed...have stuck to her like nettles. Another time. "I didn't even think to make him prove it was him. I just..."

Embraced him, made sure he was okay, took the miracle for what it was.

"Not sure I checked to see what Monoco remembers, but...Maelle's from further along than us. After successfully breaking the barrier." So: slightly ahead, but only just. "She was rattled, but seems okay. Gustave too, though..."

Being brought here from the near-climax of their mission and being brought here from death...are two very different things.

Sciel mentions Gustave, and Verso feels such a horrible pang of guilt that he butts in— "I met up with Maelle already. And Monoco."

And Gustave, too, but he just can't bring himself to say that. Not yet. Maybe not ever? Maybe he can just ignore this problem until it goes away. That's certainly Plan A at the moment.

Sometimes, she wants so badly to shake him by the shoulders.

(This is to say nothing of the fact that Lune is often stoic as well, tamping all her emotions down and hiding how she truly feels; so similar to him, for such different reasons.)

But this time, Lune cuts an even sharper look at the man: “Aren’t you glad about Monoco? He’s your best friend, isn’t he?”

"I am glad," he shoots back, because Lune really has a way of needling at him. And he is—sort of. He's spent many a night here wondering if he'd ever see Monoco again. Or Maelle. Or Esquie, or Alicia, or—

"It's just... unexpected."

Sciel glances from one to the other — Verso, Lune, back again. The feeling in the room is like a low fog, not unlike some of the moods that had fallen around the camp once or twice along the expedition so far.

"It's complicated," she submits, eternally smoothing ruffled feathers. "It is. I'm glad to see them, it...honestly makes me feel a bit better than when I thought we might have left them to deal with things themelves. "But..."

But. This isn't exactly the paradise they'd initially hoped, and she can't blame anyone among them for not being excited to see their friends without a healthy dose of doubt attached.

Not to mention — again — the implications of Gustave coming back.

"We should run the list by each of them." Here she looks to Lune, indicating without specifying the account they'd come up with close their arrival of where any discrepancies lay in their respective memories. "Yeah? See if anything interesting comes of it."

Trust Sciel to know exactly how to start smoothing over the tension in the room after the other two start picking away at each other like they always do.

“That’s a good idea,” Lune agrees. “We’ll do it with all of them. Verso, naturally you’ll have more shared memories of Monoco to compare against. I already told Gustave I wanted to run some more detailed timelines past him. After he’s had some time to settle in, and when it’s not quite so—”

So immediate, so fresh, so visceral. He was still covered in blood when she first saw him at the scrapyard. She tapers off, the sentence trailing; it’s not often that Lune completely loses track of what she was saying, but this time she pivots.

“Have either of you heard from other fluxdrifts that they’d recognised dead people here, or that they came here when they themselves believed they were dead? I didn’t even know that was possible.”

And it’s genuinely fucking with her. Rather than keep pacing a groove into the shabby motel carpet, she forces herself to sit down on the edge of her bed, hands pressed against her knees, back straight.

Edited 2026-04-07 23:08 (UTC)

Back to Gustave again. And so quickly, too. He feels a quiet but ugly chord of resentment, and uncharitably thinks that now that Gustave is here, he's immediately all they can talk about. It's unfair, and he knows it's unfair; instantly, he feels guilty for even having the thought, taking it to the back of his mind and stuffing it as far down as he possibly can.

"I've heard of that, yeah," he offers. "But I wasn't sure if it was real or not."

The lie counter dings. He'd had no reason to doubt Livio. He just hadn't wanted to bring it up.

Sciel watches Lune, abuzz with restless energy, force herself into a sit. She, meanwhile, remains on her feet, arms crossed as she takes in the question, and Verso's answer in return —

"Actually...yeah. I have, too." The heat comes off Verso, perhaps, as she realizes he isn't the only one who'd run into someone who fit the bill and not shared with the group. She casts an apologetic look from one to the other, shifting her weight as the memory returns. "...Sort of, anyway."

The conversation inspires a deeper frown as it returns to her, troubling as it'd been then. Troubling, still, as it is now.

"Man called Sylus, who I've run into a few times. He — " She pauses, again fixing Verso with a look. "...Maybe...is a bit like you. He asked if it ever occurred to me whether I'd died before coming here, since he'd been shot in the heart beforehand, but that it 'usually isn't a problem' for him."

But: waking up in this place rather than his own world had evidently inspired some questions. His doubts had crept to her, back then, though she'd managed to shake them...and, evidently, let the whole occurrence slip from her mind as a consequence.

"I was wondering, though... Maybe it isn't that anyone actually died. Maybe whatever happens to bring us here took Gustave just before."

Between receiving a fatal wound and actually succumbing. Managing to patch him up (a miraculous feat all its own) before he'd well and truly...gone.

“That was one of my thoughts as well. We…” Deep breath. Lune typically never shies away from the blunt, brutal, awful truth, and so she forces herself to push past it and not start now.

“We saw Gustave’s corpse, so it doesn’t technically make sense in our experience. But if Sciel never experienced us vanishing from a gestral beach, and if Maelle came to us after the Barrier, then the timelines are already slightly out of joint. So if this world claims people right before death, and heals them with their more advanced medical technology…? It could be possible.”

Sorrynotsorry, Verso, that she keeps circling back to the same subject of Gustave. But it’s less the man himself, and more that it feels like sinking her teeth into a brand-new conundrum, a quirk of their universe that she hadn’t been prepared for at all, and now can’t let go. Like a splinter stuck in her skin, and she can’t stop picking away at it.

At least Monoco and Maelle are less complicated, as far as she knows: the easier relief of having their teammates here with them again, the last members of the Expedition reunited.

If there's any subject he wants to talk about less than Gustave, it's Gustave's death. He keeps his expression very carefully neutral, even as Lune says 'Gustave's corpse' like that, but on the inside, every sentence makes him feel more and more ill. He wipes a sweaty palm on his trousers as he listens, gaze on the floor.

It could be possible, she says, and all he has to do is keep his mouth shut. But the shame is overwhelming, and he just can't—

"There was no coming back from that," gushes out like fresh blood. "It must have been instant. By the time I got there, he— there's nothing I could have done."

Oops.

"Anyone could have done."

It's the time element that makes it so...enticing. Like the lure of an angler fish swaying in the darkness. Yes: Gustave had died. The three of them — and Maelle, too, it seems — had lived on past his death.

But. Whoever, or whatever, draws them into this world...clearly has an incredible power. Whether it's on purpose or merely the random nature of the universe, it's taken people from different points in their shared experience. Gustave had died, but also: Gustave is here, alive. So...either it's as they're wondering now, and he hadn't technically died in his experience of things, or...he'd well and truly been resurrected.

Her heart thunders in her throat. She's thinking of Gustave, but not only of Gustave, and the idea, the possibility, is bearing down on her like a train. And so Sciel, ever-perceptive, doesn't notice Verso's slightly-off bearing, or the possibly strange and defensive way he phrases the certainty in which Gustave could not have survived.

"Maybe it's very precise, then, when they're taken. Done in less than an instant." She looks into middle distance, head going increasingly fuzzy. "We don't know enough about their technology here, or the force that draws us in, to say anything for certain."

Yet.

“Exactly. Or… if the timelines vary slightly,” to Verso’s point, “then it wouldn’t necessarily have been instant: that wound in a different world might have been survivable. A few centimeters or a few seconds here or there, making all the difference.” Her fingers curl and dig into the knees of her trousers, contemplating, before she mutters, “I think I need to talk to the Lyceum Institute, and find out what they know about dead fluxdrifts and what their prevailing theories are. Perhaps the storm-chasers…”

Verso’s pushing back and Sciel looks distracted, but Lune’s still fixated on it like a hunting-hound. Technically, how it happens doesn’t make any real difference to their day-to-day, and they could just shrug their shoulders and leave it at that— but not understanding is maddening when it has so many implications.

She trails off again, however, this time because there’s simply too many questions and not enough answers.

To practicalities, then. Things they can solve:

“Lodgings-wise. We’ll shelter them until we, and they, can sort out a more permanent solution. Yes?”

Edited 2026-04-08 01:10 (UTC)

Unfortunately for Lune, it seems her companions are only half-listening. She begins talking about the Lyceum Institute, but Verso's mind is running on a completely different track. All right, he can make this work. No one suspects a thing. He just has to act like everything is normal for—

The rest of their lives. That's fine. He's been violently suppressing his emotions for decades already; what's another few?

But another anxiety springs up right after, his line of thinking not so different from Sciel's in the end. If Gustave can come back to life here, then that means other people could, too. People that Verso has wronged. His throat tightens, and he catches only the tail end of Lune's words: yes?

She sounds expectant, so despite the fact that he isn't certain what he's agreeing to, he shrugs and says, "Yeah. Sure." It's only after he responds that his mind catches up with what she's said, and he adds, "I already brought Maelle to my place, actually."

She still hears Lune even through the noise within, pushing herself a little through it to look up at her roommate, to at least catch snippets of the plan. Of course Lune's already got a plan, and for that she's forever grateful, particularly when she's feeling a bit like her leg's caught in an emotional bear trap.

"Sounds good." Someone else had mentioned the Institute lately. Jasnah? Sciel makes a mental note to ask, when next she inevitably runs into the other woman in an unplanned crossing of paths, whether or not she's come across any such thing in her own research to that point. For now —

"I had Gustave here earlier," she admits, with another apologetic look in Lune's direction for the unplanned guest, though she assumes the circumstances will excuse her. She'd brought him back to continue their conversation, to let him borrow a change of clothes (such as it was: she could only offer one of the oversized shirts she'd been using to sleep in). "I think he did catch up with Maelle after he left, though. Happy for any of them to stay here..."

Obviously. They'd all shared a camp, what's hers (and Lune's) is theirs, as far as she's concerned.

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