I turned over the map for the inside of my mind

[bearshermark]

Who: Elliott (Eleven) and OPEN
What: Elliott doin' a heckin' research
When: Feb 16th-28th
Where: New York Public Library
Rating/Warnings: Low-key anxious teenager


To think only a few weeks ago, he'd lamented the fact that all of his friends were growing up. Getting jobs or else bogged down by responsibility, increasingly short on time to hang out like they used to. And now here he was, holed up in the library every day after school and every weekend, more relieved than anything that he didn't have to explain himself to many of them. Sitting in relative peace with a stack of books to work through while he flipped between tabs of scattered information on his laptop.

It didn't make a great deal of practical sense, but the public space felt safer than attempting to study alone at home. The library had a productive atmosphere, he reasoned: an air of focus in the shuffle of papers and heavy thump of closed books while still maintaining a quiet sense of community.

In such a space, he didn't feel at all remarkable. To everyone there, he was just a perfectly ordinary high school student working on perfectly ordinary schoolwork. Though occasionally, he did quickly change tabs or shift in his seat to discretely obscure more esoteric texts- a guilty habit he had yet to break himself of. No one would care about what he was reading, he knew, yet still the sense of self-consciousness persisted.

And then there were times he zoned out while he read or scrolled down a page, either intensely focused or not at all, and jumped back to reality whenever someone brushed by his seat. Always offering a nervous greeting and silently praying no one decided to sit next to him. His materials were spread about a bit rudely to that effect, scattered to take up more table space than strictly necessary to make sitting elsewhere an easier choice for most.

Unfortunately, it didn't always work.

"Oh, uh, sorry, let me move that.."

Comments

February 16th-ish, early afternoon; a day after their network thread

[traceofeffort]

Despite having been here almost two years, Lisa still marvels at the scale of this library. If she needed to do research at home, the place she went was kinda small. Homey, at least, but there were very clear limits on what you could accomplish without requesting books from faraway places or using the online catalog. It was at least part of the reason for wanting to go somewhere bigger, to be able to learn stuff without having to search halfway across the state. Now, looking around, she's got a certain sense that there's a lot of work ahead of her, but at least she won't have to do it alone.

It doesn't take her terribly long to find Elliott; true to his word, there's his bag. And his laptop. And a pile of books... sheesh, he got started already, huh? Rather than announcing herself right away, Lisa sets her gig bag down on the table just beside his books. When he turns to clear his things, she flashes a gigawatt-smile down at him. "Hey! Elliott, right? Anxious to get started?" There's a messenger bag slung over her shoulder, and she's dressed for the cold, a somewhat heavy jacket over her, heavy denim jeans, and a solid pair of boots; she briefly takes a half-step back to shuck her hat and shake out her hair. But her attention is very clearly on him the whole time.

[bearshermark]

Oh. She was cute.

For some reason, that was unexpected.

Elliott cleared his throat and took a moment to remind his brain that yes, girls were a thing, then focused on her question in a vain effort to block out the traitorous bit of it that wondered if guys were a thing, too.

"Yeah- well I mean, it's been kind of distracting. I have schoolwork too that I'm trying to get done, so. Two stones, one bird thing."

Spot successfully cleared, he sat back down and belatedly realized he'd gotten the expression wrong. He covered his burning face with his hands, words a bit muffled between his fingers.

"Sorry! I'm kind of everywhere right now. It's um, nice to meet you."

[traceofeffort]

She waits patiently for Elliott to pull himself together; clearly he's got something of his own going on, too. If she gets through today without another breakdown like last week, that'd be fantastic! If only she knew what was actually going through his head right now.

Lisa can't really complain about being scattered, so she just relaxes a little bit, setting her messenger bag down on the table too and taking a seat where he'd cleared space for her. "Nice to meet you. And don't worry, okay? We'll get through this. Everything's gonna be fine. We'll make it fine," she adds, a little of her Southern drawl coming out unconsciously as she makes sure she gets her point across. "You wanna focus on your homework first? I can help out, I need to decompress a little anyway. If you want, I mean - you organized the meeting, so it's your show, okay?"

[bearshermark]

Eleven peeled his hands off his face and spared a glance to his textbooks.

"No, that's okay, I can always do that later. Thank you, though."

He shuffled through his things and tapped at his laptop, felt the color in his face fading as he did. "I've been looking up Yggdrasil and reincarnation stuff because of... you know, but is there somewhere else you wanted to start?"

[traceofeffort]

That's... quite a stack, now that she's looking at it in a little more detail. "I don't have a better place to start, no - nothing I saw is going to give me direction. Your stack looks... a little intimidating, but it's as good an idea as any. I'm not sure what we're gonna find, but we won't know until we try."

Idly, she reaches for whatever's on top of the stack, but for a moment her eyes are distant as she thinks about what is going to give her direction. Playing bass in a band, when she could barely play guitar now... what is that supposed to mean, even? What is she going to accomplish? "What are you trying to tell me, Lisa...?" she breathes out softly, apparently not realizing she said it out loud as she stares at the cover of the book she'd grabbed, unseeing.

[bearshermark]

Elliott tipped his head, taking in her blank expression with a jolt.

"H-hey," he said, reaching out for her shoulder, voice increasingly worried. "Are you here? Are you okay? Lisa?"

[traceofeffort]

"Buh?" Inelegant, but as she snaps back to herself she doesn't really think about it. "Oh, sorry, Elliott. I just... at least you know something, y'know? I just keep thinking about what I saw and it just makes me want to play music. Except I can't even do that, because I play the guitar and my vision had me with a bass." Lisa pauses, then grimaces. "A nice-looking bass, for that matter. Just that right kind of shiny to be expensive but not gaudy. So it's kind of got me in a mood, and I was thinking about it again, because if it's supposed to mean something, I'm not very good at talking to myself. Didn't mean to scare you."

Shaking her head, she refocuses, smiling back at him again. "I'll be okay."

[bearshermark]

With little to musical inclination, Elliott fears he doesn't quite know what a bass is, but at least from context, he understands that it's clearly very different from a guitar.

"Okay," he says, not really an expert in okay-ness and deciding to take her word for it. "But, I don't know, if it's believed, they're past selves and different from our current.. incarnations. If not, maybe it means you could be good at two instruments if you wanted to?"

[traceofeffort]

Lisa takes a second to take that in, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. "Okay, I think I get that. Past me isn't necessarily present me, right? We're separate people, just... connected," she says slowly. "And I could be good at two instruments, sure. I could be good at three, or four. But learning bass would take time, and I'd have to buy one. When I'm decent at best on the instrument I do know, I'm not really... sure I wanna pick up another one, just over a vision." Now she frowns, sighing. "Bleh. It's not enough to doubt myself, I guess, I have to doubt another me across space and time too. Good going, Lisa."

With a grumble, she runs a hand through her hair. "I'm being a little bit of a downer here, and I hate it. Sorry again."

[bearshermark]

"You're okay." Elliott leans back into his own space with a smile. "All I know about my past self was that I had a lot of friends. I guess that hasn't changed- like your love to play music hasn't changed. Maybe one day when you pick up the bass, you'll be a natural at it."

That might almost prove something, even.

"I could almost accept it, you know. Reincarnation. No one really knows what happens when we die. But.. that definitely was a different world, and that's the bit I'm stuck on."

He turns back to his laptop. "Yggdrasil is said to connect nine worlds. And our world, called Midgard, is one of them. A multiverse. Isn't that too crazy to be real? How did I get here, if I'm from another world?"

[traceofeffort]

Lisa can't help but smile again listening to Elliott. "You're a good kid, you know that? I dunno if I can be as good at the bass as she was, but I guess it couldn't hurt to try. If I am, I'll make sure you've got tickets to my show at Madison Square Garden." She winks at him as she says it, in a good mood again.

After a second to think on what he'd said, she continues a bit more slowly again. "Well, if there are nine worlds connected by Yggdrasil, maybe they share one afterlife? And you got reincarnated here? A multiverse isn't that crazy in the grand scheme, is it? But then, is this Midgard? Or is this another of the nine?"

[bearshermark]

Kid.

Elliott rubs his face and chin, briefly concerned with whether or not he could pull off a beard.

"Yeah," he says, deciding it isn't important just as quickly. "My- my past friends, I guess, said that.. Yggdrasil's leaves.." He frowns, trying to recall how it went again. "Well, when someone is born, a new bud blooms, and when people die, their leaf falls. A cycle of rebirth, basically."

He clicks a link on the wiki page and scrolls down to the bottom, where very norse-looking names are listed. "..I haven't had time to read up on the other worlds yet, so I'm not sure. But a lot of this is kind of theory anyway, seeing as its all mythological.."

[traceofeffort]

Lisa hums in consideration. "Okay, sure, that makes sense. Although now I kinda wanna know what happens to the leaves. But hey, don't worry too much about it being theory - you're about to become a theologist. Mythology is serious business. Especially if it turns out not to be myth after all."

She leans over his shoulder to peek at the page; there's a lot here, but it's not terribly dense, she supposes? Still not something she'd read for pleasure. "I'm not sure that explains the memory thing, but it's definitely a start."

[bearshermark]

"I wanted to be an environmental scientist," he complains, half-hearted. "But I guess this is my life for now."

Elliott angles the laptop toward her a bit more. "I'd guess the memory thing has more to do with reincarnation and past lives, but it weird that we're dealing with both at once. But if it really is all real, I wonder why it's not happening to everyone."

He frowns, thinking about it for a second. "Maybe.. I don't know. Nah. There's no way billions of other people could be just on their first life or something like that."

[traceofeffort]

Lisa laughs weakly. "Hey, Yggdrasil is a tree, right? That's totally related to the environment... kinda."

She focuses again after a second, now that she can see without stretching so much. "Maybe you have to be special to get the memories back. Or maybe it's something to do with the tree itself - maybe you have to be on a particular branch or something. Hey, maybe it is the fallen leaves - what if someone were saving them, or... yeah, no, this is all just conjecture," she admits after another second, sighing again. "There are too many variables and not enough information. It might all be worth noting for later, but we can't make a solid assumption right now."

Suiting actions to words, Lisa pulls out a notebook - a perhaps surprisingly plain spiral notebook - and a gel pen and starts to scribe their ideas from the last few minutes, humming softly as she goes. After a moment, she speaks again. "Oh, maybe that goes back to what the Bureau's hiding from us. Maybe there's a lot of people that suddenly got added into the cycle without having been in it before? And only the people that were in it before have memories? Or..." She trails off, grimacing. "Or maybe we're the new people." Still, she writes it down.

[bearshermark]

Elliott blinks, then smiles a bit. Notes are a good idea. God, it really is like a school project. She rambles on a lot to follow closely, but he gets the gist: there's a lot of possibilities.

"You think the Bureau's hiding stuff from us?"

[traceofeffort]

Yeah, rambling is a thing Lisa does, apparently not entirely without thinking about it. Once she's got it all down, she sets her pen down and turns back to Elliott. "I'm almost certain," she says, with a somber tone. "They know a little too much, react a little too quickly, are a little too... Not surprised, I guess. I don't like being in the dark." Lisa frowns, worry crossing her face. "Hey, this might sound weird, but... be careful, all right? I said we'd make things okay, but I'm not gonna take any chances with stuff that isn't under my control."

[bearshermark]

Elliott takes in her worried expression and finds himself nodding.

"It's just that I don't know what to be careful about. I mean, I'm not-" he glances around a bit. "Not telling anyone I'm- well, I might tell my mom but.. other than that, is there anything you think I should be watching out for?"

[traceofeffort]

Lisa's eyes close and her head tilts in consideration. "That may not have come out right... I more meant, just keep an eye out for weird stuff," she clarifies. "It's up to you who you want to tell, and it's not like we're gonna get snatched off the street or something... probably. But I don't know who's watching out for us. I don't know that anyone's watching out for us, other than ourselves."

She shivers, despite the heat in the library being turned up plenty high, and to distract herself she turns a bit more stern. "So don't let anything happen! I won't be happy if I hear about you getting into trouble. Well, that kind of trouble," Lisa adds quickly. "Feel free to get into whatever other trouble you like." She winks at him, trying to take some of the unhappy implications out of her continued worried rambling.

[bearshermark]

It works, just on the side of insinuous enough to set off the bloom of color in Elliott's face he's always hard-pressed to control.

'Don't get into trouble' seems to be a recurring theme, lately. It occurs to him that there's a lot of trouble he could have been getting into while his mom was away in her business trip, but simply hasn't thought to.

He clears his throat and fidgets at his laptop keys, attempting to refocus.

"I won't," he assures. "I'm not- I mean, other than environmental activism rallies, I don't want to cause problems for anyone."

[traceofeffort]

Lisa sees that and just barely suppresses a giggle, a hand over her mouth to make sure; she should probably apologize for that, but hey, it changed the subject, which was the goal, right?

"I have a feeling those don't cause as much trouble as you want me to think they do," she says after a minute, grinning. "But thanks, that's honestly reassuring. I think you're probably less likely to find trouble than me anyway." She glances meaningfully at her gig bag, before shaking her head. "And sorry, I'm probably being a little too hard on you. I'm just worried, you know? This is... kinda weird."

[bearshermark]

"It's okay," he says, managing a quick smile. "I appreciate it, really. This really is weird, and I don't really know what's going on, but I want to help if I can."

[traceofeffort]

"Me too," Lisa replies with a sigh. "I wanna figure this out, understand what's going on. Maybe understand the girl I'm seeing, too, but let's start a little smaller, yeah?" She focuses on the notebook in front of her for a long moment. "And let's try to figure yours out along the way. I really do want to help, I just get a little distracted sometimes."