IC Contact: Recollé

[notyourutopian]

Eleanor Lamb

Hello you've reached Eleanor Lamb's voicemail. I'd explain what's next but I can't imagine you don't know what to do at the beep.

VOICE | TEXT | VIDEO | ACTION

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[notyourutopian]

What happened?

[true_noir]

Another vision. I was visiting with a friend when the power went out, and it came to me. A tea party under the moonlight with two very tense girls. The cloak again. One of them pulled a gun on me, though I wasn't afraid the whole time.

What was most disturbing, Eleanor, wasn't what I saw or what happened, it was what I knew. I remember knowing things that someone shouldn't know, being sure of them, and proven right. I knew the gun was a Walther, but if you set three guns down in front of me, I could never tell them apart before yesterday. A gun is a gun, but I know what a Walther looks like now.

[notyourutopian]

That sounds like me and building that machine.
Albeit a lot scarier...

Could you tell three guns apart now, or just the Walther?

[true_noir]

No, not quite so much. I remember what their two guns look like, intimately. It's like part of knowing them was knowing their gun, and they always used the same one. The other girl preferred a Beretta. I remember that, but I couldn't tell you more.

It's like remembering that I knew a thing, but having no context to fit it in. Names keep cropping up, the same ones. Like watching some other woman's life, who looks exactly like me. Some days, I'm terrified, some days fascinated.

[notyourutopian]

Hm.
It's like we only receive a snippet of what we should know, if we were really seeing something.

Have you ever heard the name Grace Holloway?

[true_noir]

I have not. I take it that this is name from your visions, much as Altena was one from my own? I will look into this name, if you like, to see if I can find anything.

[notyourutopian]

Yes.

But it's...

I remember her name. Calling her...Aunt Gracie. I think I was...living with her.

I mean, that's ridiculous. I don't have an Aunt Grace, and I've never lived with anyone but my parents.

I have a dog named Grace...

[true_noir]

It is extremely strange, yes. The tone that I used for Altena in mine was almost as if I were staying with her as well, but that is not my mother's name, and she adopted me far too young to know my birth parents.

It is almost like looking through a lens at someone else's life, wearing your face, is it not?

[notyourutopian]

That's actually a really good way to put it.
A really miserably weird way.
But good.

[true_noir]

The only possible thing it feels like is what I have been told a past life experience is like. The problem is that it feels 'modern,' or recent. The technology, the world, they are all from the era we live in. So, it isn't really like that.

Hence the 'watching someone else's life.

[She almost made a Neutrino Leap reference, but decided against it. Nobody should ever admit to having watched that old show.]

[notyourutopian]

I don't believe in that stuff either way.

I don't know.

I don't care if these memories feel real. They can't be.

[true_noir]

Nor do I, really, but I have seen a few psychic specials when bored. Though, I should hope you are the one that is right. That somehow someone is feeding us these thoughts and they are not real.

It would be better, I think.

[notyourutopian]

What's the alternative, really?
Hundreds of people living strange double lives they've forgotten about?

That wouldn't even make a good low-budget sci-fi movie.

[true_noir]

There is no clear alternative. That much is relatively certain. Any possibility that I think we could find would not really suit the situation right. There is always a hole somehow.

But I apologize. We just seem to end up walking in circles with me too often, do we not?

[notyourutopian]

I wish I could make sense of any of it.

I just hate it when I don't understand something.
Even if it's something ridiculous.

I feel stupid if I can't puzzle it out.

[There was a reason Eleanor started taking things apart when she was three, basically. And it never went away.

[true_noir]

You aren't stupid. We haven't been given enough to learn what is going on right in front of us. Without enough pieces for the puzzle, we can't hope to put it all together.

Get ready for when more of the pieces are there.

[notyourutopian]

I suppose.
I can't say I can convince myself of that.
I'm usually rather good at puzzles.

But you're probably right.

[true_noir]

Yes, though even a master cannot finish a thing if they do not have all the pieces. Still, I can understand how the frustration settles in the mind and won't go away.

[notyourutopian]

You think we'll ever have all the pieces?

[true_noir]

I think we will have to have enough eventually to at least know what the picture is supposed to be. Too much keeps dropping into our laps. We cannot hope but to eventually learn something of value.

[notyourutopian]

Yeah but none of it is connected to anything else.
What I remember is utterly different from what you remember.
Or what Yukiko remembers.
It's like...

We're all seeing snapshots of different movies and trying to make a plot out of it.

[true_noir]

This is true, but whether the stories fit, if we can get the Retrospec angle to make more sense with collected information, we can get the blanks we really need filled in, at least those we need as a group. The individual stories may be their own problems.

[notyourutopian]

Maybe.
I have to believe these...visions...are related somehow though.

They can't just be sticking things in our heads for no reason.

[true_noir]

It might not be something obvious, like each of us sees pieces of the same story. There may be something else that they're all tied to, even if I'll be honest and say I don't quite know what that could be just yet. Still, we might not be looking at this the right way yet.

[notyourutopian]

If we all have different pieces of different stories...
I don't even know what that would mean.

Maybe it'll start making sense eventually.