notyourutopian | Open Action in the morning, the audio later in the day.

[Action]

It was an hour or so after sunrise when Eleanor arrived at the battle dome, arriving early enough that she was able to get the room she liked, a bit out of the way from through traffic. She had been working on her combat program for months, but a few weeks ago she had finally finished it. When she turned it on, the air shimmered and shifted until a large room formed, tinted red with the glow of emergency lights. There were large windows in several walls, and beyond them sat the hard, dark blue of the deep ocean.

Persephone prison. She had tried other places, but it came back to this. Her mother's stronghold, the last place she had been in Rapture before she had found herself in Luceti. She knew some of the details were wrong, but she had tried to get them as close as possible, with the various tunnels heading into other sections of the prison, the various small water leaks that were collecting on the floor faster than the aging pump system could keep up.

She set her bag down by the door, then fished from it the right glove of her diving suit, with the long, unpleasant syringe spear attached to it. She had opted not to wear the whole suit, dressed in a black ankle length skirt with slits up the side and a white blouse...honestly, she hadn't put the suit on in weeks and weeks. But the spear was the weapon she was most familiar with. And the one she would be using once she was finally sent back here.

She pressed several buttons on the control panel and then made her way out to the center of the room, her boots sloshing in the ankel deep water. At first, nothing happened, the only sound that of the water draining into the room, and Eleanor's soft breathing as she waited. This was all randomized, and she could feel the tension building inside her.

Suddenly there was a shout of gibberish from above, and she twisted around to see a man in a bloody rabbit mask standing on the upper walkway, his clothing torn and tattered. He was brandishing a baseball bat above his head and his beady eyes were whirling behind his mask. A splicer.

As if drawn by his insane shouting, more of them appeared from the surrounding hallways. A woman in a fox mask, her dress in tattered, shaking a tommygun. A man in an almost pristine suit juggling fire. And more behind them.

Round one, Eleanor thought, bracing herself as the group charged towards her.

Eleanor had never been trained to fight. What she knew, she had learned by watching her Father and the splicers battling it out in Rapture. So there was nothing elegant about it, no beautiful martial arts motions or carefully planned moves. Just a kind of brutal, heartless efficiency. The man with the bat jumped down towards her, and Eleanor caught him with her telekinesis and swung him around, ignoring his screams as she slammed him into a pillar with a wet, thick cracking sound. The woman with the gun stopped a few feet away, lifting her barrel and opening fire, but Eleanor was gone, leaving a swirl energy as she teleported behind her opponent.

She plunged the syringe into the woman's back, lifting her off the ground and dragging her along, crying and groaning, just in time to use her as a living shield against a pair of fireballs thrown by the third man. The woman's cries turned to screams, and Eleanor shook her off the syringe, tossing her aside like a rag doll before she charged the third man.

This fight took longer, he could teleport akin to the way she could, but eventually he stopped in the wrong spot and she caught him up with her power, driving him down under the water until he stopped moving.

More came, armed with their makeshift weapons, and she moved through them like a tiny reaper, leaving a stream of smoking, bleeding, dying bodies in her wake. The last man fell to a fireball that jumped from Eleanor's fingers and caught him in the chest, and he went up like a candle before collapsing face down on the floor.

And then, silence again. "Three minute pause," the program declared, and Eleanor let herself slump to the floor to catch her breath.

[Audio - evening]

[Eleanor doesn't address the journals often, really. She talks to other people, but usually isn't so social as to invite the attention herself. But something has been bothering her for a while, she eventually she flips the book open, careful not to turn the video on.]

Do you all ever wonder how they know the things they do, here? [She starts talking after a moment, deciding not to bother with the pleasantries.] I mean, how do they know what the right thing to inflict on us is? The things we want, or the things that bother us so deeply...they always seem to know.

When we were in that strange university, my mother called me. She was part of the illusion, but it was her. Her voice, her tone, her...personality. But she has never been here. Or at Christmas, people received things they wanted...sometimes things they didn't even know they wanted!

It just...I don't know. Do you think they can just read everything we're thinking?

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[Eleanor blinks at that question. Well, she hadn't been expecting that.]

Uhm. [How to explain.] ...Sort of?

[Well, he just went with the first thing that came to mind. As is usually the case with Sokka, let's be fair.]

Sort of? That's... descriptive.

Ah...I received my father's audio-diary collection. It's a mixed blessing.

Audio-diary... kinda like the entries of our journal things, I guess?

[Somehow, inadvertently, Sokka finds out he didn't change the topic nearly as much as he had thought he had.]

Somewhat. Except that these are other people speaking, not father. He found them as he was traveling through Rapture. Hang on.

[Eleanor is gone for two or three minutes, and when she comes back there is a harsh click of a machine being turned on, and then a woman's voice can be heard. She turns the recording off after the word 'fired'.]

I have no idea who she is, for instance. I guess one of the maintenance supervisors from before things got bad. There are over a hundred of them.

Huh. [That's certainly an interesting gift.] I guess it must make up some rudimentary history of your underwater city then? I mean, I guess that's kinda neat if you're into that sort of thing.

[It should be noted that Sokka's voice belies the fact that he is not particularly interested in history unless it somehow proves useful to him.]

Though truth be told, if a worker in your city was getting dripped upon, I think he should worry more about getting watered than fired.

In...a sense. There aren't enough of them to really understand the city without context. [A pause.] Some of them are even mine. When I was a child.

[She actually laughs softly.]

You'd be surprised how many leaks there were in Rapture. There were pumps hidden everywhere to deal with them.

Some of them were yours? That's... kind of a weird gift idea. "Here, have your own voice recording." Though I suppose it could bring back memories possibly?

Though I don't know how anyone could be comfortable with all that many leaks at the bottom of the ocean. I would be on the first submarine back to the surface, no questions asked.

They're...from when I was younger, mostly. Father found them. It's..it's very strange to them now.

Leaving Rapture was hardly as easy as just getting on a submarine. Once you had been invited in, getting out was...hard.

Sounds a lot like Ba Sing Se and how the Dai Li controlled what everyone in the town knew about the outside world. Can't say I was fond of that city; no wonder you weren't super fond of it there.

[Oh hey look just how they had subtly gotten back to talking about Rapture.]

Sorry, I didn't mean to get back to talking about your past. It was... an accident?

Well. We were allowed news of the outside world, as long as it was...bad news. Ryan wanted everyone to love being in Rapture.

[Eleanor had been too young to really know what that meant.]

It's fine. This...always seems to happen.

[Even if it was an accident that they were talking about it due to the Christmas present, Sokka did always have a curious knack for digging deeper into people's lives, even sometimes when he didn't exactly mean to.]

Hey, you didn't want to talk about it, so I'll stop trying to probe into your life.

[At least for now...... but yet, his natural curiosity gets the better of him.]

Okay, just one last question and that's all. Ryan was the big guy in charge, I take it?

Yes. Well. Until he was killed, then mother took over.

[She sighs.]

Tell me about your life.

[Hey, Sokka can't help it if she volunteers more information than he technically asked for. But Sokka has started to begin to form a very VERY rough idea of what her childhood was like, though certainly he doesn't know it by half.

[But he can talk about his life. Sort of.]

Okay, sure. My life. All about it.

[He pauses for a moment.]

Er, what sort of things do you want to know?

I have no idea. [Eleanor doesn't really do small talk well.] Just...talk.

[That's not helping very much, Eleanor, but Sokka figures he can talk about things. And... he'll even do one better and do some quid pro quo for her and talk about some of his hard situations.]

Well, I guess the last two years have been some of the best years I've ever had, ever since the war ended. I lost my mom when I was still pretty young, and I don't really remember her face any more... or her voice. And my first girlfriend had to give her life away to become the Moon after the Fire Nation killed the Moon Spirit.

[Wait a second...]

...She turned into the moon? [That's rough, buddy.]

[It seemed like everyone asked that question.]

Yeah, illogical as that sounds, the moon apparently is made of spirits or something. I mean, instead of being so big rock in the sky, it's a spirit. Don't ask me how it works. But yeah, Admiral Zhao killed some spirit koi fish, and the Moon disappeared. And then Yue transferred her life or something into the fish, and the Moon reappeared.

Weird, huh?

Open Action in the morning, the audio later in the day.

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