Something's ... Not Right (Open)

[true_noir]

WHO: Chloe and You!
WHERE: In and around Recolle
WHEN: 4/6-4/12
WHAT: Awkwardness as Chloe notices some things are not right with her body
WARNINGS: Nup

Option 1) It was a Thursday, like any other Thursday since she'd gotten this silly app on her phone. She was trying to keep her life normal and together, and doing a good job of it. In fact, following through with Yu and Naoto's request had helped a little, taking some of the worry away from her life. Having just finished her shift, she was walking back towards the bus station to get a ride home when it happened. There at the cross-walk, maybe she was a bit tired, but she started to cross before it was her light. There was a honk of distress from a car and Chloe acted.

Really, she wasn't in any danger. The driver was over-reacting and swerving successfully to miss her. But, the honk caused an immediate reaction. Her body launched back without her thinking, leaping up and into the air, sommersaulting back and landing lightly on her feet. The motion was far too limber for what she should have been able to do. It wasn't like she was in poor shape, but leaping like that in the air felt beyond her. As she landed, her eyes widened and she took two or three shaky steps back before falling unceremoniously on her butt.

"What... just happened?" she said, looking around in shock.

Option 2) When she wasn't helping out with the play, Chloe had a couple of days off on the weekend. She tried to visit the local gym to get a bit of the stress out. There was a horse set up there for those who wished to practice gymnastics, and she found herself staring at it with a nervous look in her eyes. Biting her lips, she walked over and patted it, reaching up to scratch at the back of her head.

"Should I?" she asked, wondering for a moment before going to put chalk on her hands. There was only one way to find out if the strange itching sensation in her arms and legs was real. She was feeling restless, restless like her body wasn't moving the way that it should, that it needed to move.

Option 3) There was bad news on Friday, news she did not want to hear. It had her in Starbucks, fumbling for a drink of mint tea. She wanted to calm her jangled nerves. There had to be a logical explanation for any of this. She was tempted to ask on the network, but at this point she wasn't even carrying her phone with her. She'd warned her boss that if he needed her to call the land-line, that she was trying to test out what happened if she didn't use the network. She wasn't going to break that promise.

She had to know if this was affected by the app, or if it was simply happening. But, as it stood, she was getting nervous and worried... and the tea was only helping a little.

Wildcard (Anything that you want can be managed. Chloe is off network for this week, helping out at the play and frequenting work. She has just experienced the return of her natural athleticism and agility, along with the realization that her hair color actually changed last month and wasn't dyed while drunk like she thought. It's causing her to start to freak out again. Either way, if your character wants to meet up with her, we can handwave that they left a message on her answering machine at home.)

Comments

[true_noir]

Chloe didn't notice, not at first and not later. She was lost in the moment, listening to him. But, as his memories of the writings of the scriptures became more vague and confused, mixing the Latin with the Greek, she too was losing track. She wasn't hearing Matthew anymore, and it wasn't a man's voice.

She could recall the taste of the evening meal still in her mouth, its simplicity and warmth. She heard a woman's matronly voice near, saying A Thousand years ago, the people saw the shape of the world. The words of hers replaced his and continued for a while before she heard something that shook her out of it.

'The blood of the Soldats will seep throughout the wilderness and flow into the great river.' Chloe's eyes snapped open and she froze there, lips quivering while she looked at the page she'd shown him moments ago. It was no longer empty. In French, there were words adorning it.

"Father... I...," she began, the confusion suddenly evident in her eyes.

[obscultator]

Karl was in the middle of concentrating on keeping a pair of passages straight in his head when she froze, so it took him a moment longer than it might have otherwise to notice. When he did, though, he looked right at her with wide and worried eyes. It didn't occur to him yet to follow her gaze down to the page.

"Miss Bouchard?" he said with obvious concern, any niggling confusions of his own pushed firmly to one side. "Are you alright?"

[true_noir]

She reached down to the page and shakily shifted it towards him. On it, in french, were the lines of what had the feel of a poem or religious verse of some sort.

A sinner, once passed away will never return,
but the sins will never vanish, and the love will never die.

The hermit also spoke thus.

The blood of the Soldats will seep throughout the wilderness and flow into the great river.

She swallowed and shook her head, perturbed at the impossibility of it all, and of the fact that she had finally just seen this mysterious Altena in her vision. "I just... had a vision, but you should see this."

[obscultator]

He looked intently down at the page as she pushed it to him, then blinked and glanced around the table briefly before his eyes widened and he stared back at the photocopy. Yes, that was the exact same sheet of paper she had showed him minutes before, when it had been a photocopy of a piece of completely blank parchment.

"It... it has text now," he said stupidly. His mind was visibly hung up on the physical impossibility of that for a few seconds before he even tried to parse the words.

Though he had periodically stumbled his way through a few French philosophy journals in college (a lot of the most significant contemporary papers on metaphysics were published in French), he didn't actually know the language especially well. His lips moved subconsciously as he tried to work it out. A sinner... won't return, sins will not... disappear? Love... won't die, a hermit says... the blood of—

His eyes darted back up to hers. "Soldats?"

[true_noir]

She nodded at his attempts and began to recite what was there. There was a deadness to the recitation, like it was more of an incantation. Chloe was still struggling with the vision that she'd had. "A sinner, once passed away will never return,
but the sins will never vanish, and the love will never die." Her voice droned on methodically as she read it, though deep down she was sure she didn't need to read it. "The hermit also spoke thus. The blood of the Soldats will seep throughout the wilderness and flow into the great river."

Snapping out of it. "I think... I remember the story that she was telling me in my vision. It was about this Soldats. They were a group meant to check a great injustice among the people. I am not quite sure what to think of it, though. Some of what she said made sense, and a lot did not."

[obscultator]

Karl stared at her in open fascination. He had been hearing about these "visions" for weeks, but he had never actually... witnessed anybody having one, or the immediate aftermath. There were a flood of questions in his mind that he wanted to ask her, as a curious scholar and as a potential recipient of these phenomena both, about both the experience and the actual content of what she had seen.

But then his eyes softened, and his held breath came out in a quiet sigh. He gently slid his hand towards hers across the table, and instead, in an equally gentle voice, he asked just one.

"Are you alright, Chloe?"

[true_noir]

"I... am ok, yes," she said, nodding a little distantly when she looked down at the page. "The vision wasn't an unpleasant one. It just involved me listening to the story, like it was my mother reading a bedtime story before I went to sleep. She... seemed to think of Altena like I do my mother." It had, in fact, been the exact same emotion involved, which was both reassuring and a little alarming considering that she loved her adopted mother quite a bit.

"The story sounds religious, but in the same way the knights errant might be. It's... I'm really not sure what to make of it, or how to feel about it. Who are these Soldats, and why do I keep remembering them?"

[obscultator]

He nodded. She seemed a bit more settled by now, and he was relieved to hear that the vision itself hadn't been too distressing.

"Yes, it does have the air of some stories associated with old fraternal organizations and military orders, like the Knights Templar or the Freemasons," he said, looking down at the scanned document again. Then, a bit dryly and almost to himself, "... Or the Priory of Sion." He'd had a roommate in minor seminary with some very strong, very loud opinions about The Leonardo Code.

But after a moment he sighed and looked back up into her face. "There's no need for you to feel any particular way at all about it, if you don't want to," he said, in a voice that was gently firm but without reproach. "Whatever you have 'seen' or 'remembered', you yourself are a normal, good-hearted woman who has lived a normal and good life. Never doubt that, Chloe."

[true_noir]

It hadn't, not by any stretch. Just... surreal, and really she was able to deal with that over the alternatives she'd had to deal with in the past. Listening to him, she made a motion with her finger and an 'ahah' sound. "Yes, like the Freemasons. It has that same feel as that, which... I suppose makes sense, and yet it does not. Why would such a thing even be needed? And if it was truly successful, would not the world be a different place?"

She nodded in gratitude to his reassurances, sighing some. "Thank you, Father. It's heartening to hear you say that." In more ways than one. She really didn't expect this sort of talk from her priests.