tampered | Log: Completed

Log: Completed

When; Evening of May 12th
Rating; PG
Characters;

impolitical
Summary&Notes; conversation with

inflore triggers a reaction from Evelynne, who goes out on a quote-unquote "manhunt." informal tagging; mostly dialogue with prose introduction.
Log;

About two weeks of searching the city for one of those convenient neon-green exit signs she had grown accustomed to back home had done no good for Evelynne. For one thing, she still hadn't found an exit. For another, it certainly wasn't doing her any good in looking for--

Well, maybe he wasn't here. In which case, she could probably run a good night of looking before going back to midnight building, eleven minutes in--to a bed she had grown a little bit too comfortable with in the past two weeks. It would be as easy as that. And then it would be back to frustrating hours of wandering the city because lately, that was all she ever did, checking every last door in the vague and useless hope that it would lead her somewhere that wasn't here, wasn't this hellhole of an existence where there were switches to turn off guys and girls and lights and sounds.

If there was anything she could beg for at this point, it was normalcy. Normalcy. But right now, she had more pressing matters on mind.

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A few hours. Any minute now, someone would be ringing in on the cell phone, telling him that it was all some really silly mistake. The worst mistake he had ever witnessed in the entirety of his life, but one that could be rectified.

At least, they had better rectify it. Because a few hours had been enough to witness sights that he knew were impossible: lights flickering off and the sensation of a man speaking from everywhere and right behind at once (a search? for whom?), fountains shooting water into the air and raining down images of a life only a few years short of three decades, people wandering who seemed restlessly content in a circus of a world.

It was bad enough that it had been an elevator mistake, but he held out on the hope that he was still in his right mind, and it was some sick joke. A convoluted, very expensive joke.

A few hours. Still too long for him to stand around waiting. He had immediately checked his belongings (all accounted for), turned on the laptop (wireless? without kinks? this was almost more unreal than this, that, and the other thing), and searched out somewhere to at least sit down and wait for the joke to end.

It wasn't ending. And the café bustled with people, people laughing and dreaming and talking about home, and a slightly sick feeling twisted his mind at the thought that this might not be a joke. He had to admit that it was a far-fetched idea, but one could always hope. And hope he did, even though he looked out at the sun setting while thinking about the fact that a few hours ago, when he had stepped into the square, it had been dawn in New York City.

The first answer had to be easy. Where would he go if he were stuck in a completely different place he had never been to? The businessman would find no NYSE here. The artist would find nothing scenic or moving--unless the absurdity of the place could count.

He. He would...

Not be at a bar. Not be at a club. Not be at the fountain--well, no, he could be at the fountain. But running by Misery Square showed no familiar faces, so the fountain was out, the subway was out, the underground was out, the gardens were out--

He wouldn't be at Café Juliet. He only drank water. That wouldn't make any sense.

But he would be looking for an Internet connection, and in natural Earth standards, it was the cafés and bookstores that had that.

Pulling the jacket back up over her shoulders, Evelynne turned on her heel and ran between the people towards the first place she had tried when she first came to the city.

Occasionally, his mind would turn back to two weeks ago, when he had pushed himself back through the hospital doors and demanded to know what had happened. Anne had called. Anne had said something happened. Anne had sounded worried. And Anne never sounded worried.

Occasionally was probably a little less than the truth. He was leaned back in the chair with his attention directed at the stars.

Where had those come from again?

Home hadn't been home those two weeks. Admittedly, he could handle solitude. He preferred it, mostly. But when a prominent face disappears from life, the adaptation was more difficult than most would actually profess to, and those two weeks of quiet nights had been unnerving.

Why stars made him think of home, he couldn't figure out. After all, back home, there were no stars at night. The city made up for it with streetlights and office buildings still littered with papers and people and fluorescent flickering.

He tore his eyes away from the sky and scanned the crowd again to -

Was that...

The café had--unfortunately--been a hit.

And some things could just get worse around here, apparently.

When one settles his mind on believing that someone is dead, one settles his mind on that person being dead. And never being able to see them again save for in musty, old photos and scratchy home videos. Not that he had either of Evelynne, but -

But there she was. There she was, not fifty feet from him. Her hair recklessly blown about her face as if she had been running and her coat slipping off her shoulders, she looked like...a train wreck. An utter train wreck.

And she looked alive. He stood and stared because it was just as much as he could do when she - who had supposedly died, though he had fought to believe otherwise - looked that alive.

This was worse than the blackout. And the fountain. And the stars.

"Ev?"

This topped everything that had happened in this place so far. The colors, the genderbending, the whatever--

This was the one that took the cake. The last straw on the camel's back. The whole enchilada. The--

Two and a half weeks without the one person she'd known longest had really done her in. It was this strange to see him again?

Almost unbelieving, she walked forward, looking the man up and down--business suit, the usual American cut, charcoal, white shirt, black tie? What, had he not looked in the mirror this morning? Was this him?

Laptop. Check. Briefcase. Check. Blonde, check, half a foot taller, check, blue eyes, check--

Without a word, she decked him across the face.

He felt like he should have anticipated at least this, but the blow still took him by surprise.

So she wasn't dead. That was for sure.

Rubbing the side of his face with a grimace, he turned back to look her over. Evelynne. Evelynne Waters. Brunette, angry green eyes, short. So there, he bitterly threw in in his own mind. But he never spoke those kinds of thoughts anyway.

"Well, that was - "

"You bastard!"

"What?!"

In remote imaginary meetings, he had run into Evelynne again, and she had been perfectly intact, no poisoning, no murder, and she had been her sarcastic, grinning self, and she had said to him, "What, you thought a little biology would do me in?"

Apparently not.

Twenty years. Hah. Over his dead body. He'd never figure this one out.

Evelynne threw her hands in the air emphatically, raising her voice, even though she stood not two inches from his face. Yeah, so the other people heard. So what?

"You were supposed to spring me out of here! You weren't supposed to actually come here! God, you're such an idiot!"

"What?!" This jaw. This jaw was going to hurt tomorrow. It was going to be hard to hold a board meeting. It was going to be hard to chew.

And apparently, it was going to be hard to get out of here, judging from Evelynne's reaction.

"I can't believe you CAME here," she went on, ignoring anything he said. "When I said spring me out in that journal entry, I MEANT SPRING ME OUT."

Journal entry. What journal entry was she talking about, exactly? Spring her out? He had thought she was dead (well, no, he hadn't, but then he had, but then he hadn't). What was there to spring her out of?

"What are you talking about?" He paused, and as if it were an afterthought, he added, "And where the heck have you been?"

"Where the hell do you think I've been?!"

"Well, you definitely weren't at the hospital. Where I left you." He took the opportunity to, in a fit of atypical immaturity (or was it just annoyance?), glare at her for the faux paus. The sort of faux paus.

Maybe just an inconvenience that ranked as a worry. That would do.

"Yeah, aren't you the observant one," she spat back, still glowering at the man.

"I spent two weeks looking for you, you know," he retaliated. "Two. Weeks."

(OOC: Picking up in the morning.)

"Oh, isn't that great. And you didn't once think tha--" Evelynne halted mid-sentence and gave him a skeptical, quizzical look. "Two weeks?"

>

"...yeah." Could it have been that hard to understand "two weeks"? Two weeks of running down endless streets and asking every last suit, storeowner, and hobo? Did she not get it? Had being in the place for two weeks completely killed her sense of hearing?

Then again. This was Evelynne.

"Two weeks?" she asked again, still giving him the dubious expression. Two weeks meant a lot of things. Two weeks might have been a little much.

"Yes," he repeated, hoping the word made more sense than "yeah." Two weeks had been a clear slice out of his time. It had been two weeks out of fifty-two in a year, and it had been 336 hours out of 8760. He almost expected her to be grateful before he reminded himself that he hadn't been obligated.

She paused, still doubtful. Sure, she had spent the last two weeks, worrying over whether she was dead, how she was going to get out, what he was doing that entire time. But searching for two weeks?

"Didn't even go to work or anything?" she suggested, even more expectant of a "no." Work had always been a true test of how his priorities were lined up, and while she did have to say that she might possibly have been acting overly skept--

Well. Better to know.

"Yes," he re-asserted before pausing. "Wait. No. No, I didn't."

After a long moment of staring him down (from half a foot below his height), Evelynne finally bit down on her lower lip and--

Punched him again.

[[Second comment coming.]]

"It took you that damn long to find me?!" she demanded. She might have been able to overlook two weeks if he had actually gone and done his usual corporate-giant business work. She might have been able to overlook two weeks if he had gone and fell in a ditch for half of that and been unable to do anything.

But two weeks of just searching, and he had taken this long?

Before tomorrow morning, there would be, no doubt about it, very large bruises on his face. The question now was whether that should be his main concern or not.

"How did you expect me to know you were in this place? This is like...like some sort of circus freak show! You can't possibly have expected me to know this place even existed, Evelynne!" he argued. Hopefully, she'd understand that much at least.

"Yeah. Good job. You who have all the resources in the world can't even find a city like this! Like it isn't advertised or something!" she shouted. She caught herself before she went on though and took a deep breath, as if it would help her calm down.

"Okay. Well. It doesn't matter. You're here."

"I am. But what here is, you haven't said, and I haven't found out." After a moment of waiting, he gave her an inquiring look and added, "Well?"

"That...s'probably going to take a lot more explanation," she replied hesitantly, forgetting her frustration for a moment. "It's kind of like hell, and it's kind of not, and it's sort of." Shaking her head, Evelynne threaded her fingers through her hair, trying to figure out what exactly the place could be called. "If anything, it's near impossible to get out, and--"

"Okay," she said, interrupting her own train of thought, "we need to have a long chat on the ins and outs of this place. Pack all your junk up, and we'll...go somewhere."

He sighed, seating himself again. If Evelynne was being serious about this, it either meant she had lost her mind after the whole fiasco two and a half weeks ago, or the place was cursed. "Alright. It's probably better I hear it from you anyway," he reasoned, mostly for his own sake.

Shutting the laptop on the café table and sliding it back into the briefcase, he asked tentatively, "You've...been doing okay though?" He clicked the briefacse closed as he looked up at her again.

It was difficult enough to have to deal with some place that seemed like a bad hallucination, but for a moment, he remembered again that he hadn't seen her in two weeks, thinking her missing or dead. Of everything else, this was going to be the hardest to digest.

"As...okay as possible?" she answered hesitantly. A long silence lingered after the words, and she sighed again. "Look. Like I said. We'll talk about all that. It's...complicated."

"Alright," he consented with the barest of shrugs. Hooking his jacket over his shoulder with the collar gripped in his hand, he nodded and stood. "We'll talk."

"Yeah. We'll uh. Yeah." Evelynne rubbed the back of her neck almost nervously, trying to imagine why it would be awkward to talk to him at all--the last twenty years had been easy enough, hadn't it? Was it the "death" thing? The two weeks? Was it just an awkward situation?

"Hey, uh."

"Hm?" Evelynne's uneasiness seemed to barely affect him, and he almost suspected that he might have been taking everything a little too well for her to be able to process it, though he felt more uncomfortable than usual for a new environment. It could also just have been that - well, who knew?

She gave another nervous nod, definitely unsure of why anything had to be so anxiety-inducing about the meeting. Hopefully, she told herself--hopefully, there wouldn't have to be anything like re-adjusting. It wasn't as if two weeks could change that much, right?

"Thanks for uh--thanks for trying, Amadeus."

A little taken aback, Amadeus gave only a curt nod. It didn't make any sense for Evelynne to be thanking him, much less with such hesitance.

"You didn't think I'd just wait at home and do nothing about it, did you?" he asked, almost as a joke. But he made no indication of smiling or laughing or brushing the matter off, instead shaking his head in mock disbelief that he tried to convinced himself was fake. "It's...of course, Ev."

This was going to be difficult.

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Log: Completed

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