[Drama] Green Acres is the Place to Be...

[Will Stanton]

Right...Right. Can't go back there. Not going back there...

The physical ripples continued, as Will's anxiety started threatening a breakdown of her form.

[Miriam Bell]

Perhaps mentioning Muir hadn't been the brightest idea Miriam ever had.

"You won't. You won't. Just calm down, we'll figure this out. You need... something reliable to fall back on that isn't an hour drive into the boonies."

[Will Stanton]

Maybe...Maybe I just crank up the MGH again. That made things a lot clearer....just a little hit, just to take the edge off..

This was probably a Bad Idea.

[Miriam Bell]

"If it'll help you calm down." Miriam nods. "Just be careful."

[Will Stanton]

Careful is hard to manage, but I'll do my best...

At first, nothing happened. Turning on an internal process doesn't exactly make for thrilling theater.

A cow melting away, on the other hand, is not the sort of thing you see every day. It also wasn't standard Will bouncy-shifty stuff; more like wax slowly dripping to the ground. Will stayed as an unremarkable blob of clay for a good 45 seconds; long enough to be clearly too long without being long enough for the worry to actually lead to action.

Will reformed on her hands and knees in the paddock, staring down at the straw-covered floor and blinking, flexing her fingers as she took some shuddering deep breaths.

[Miriam Bell]

Miriam takes a half-step towards Will when she melts down, only making actual contact when she forms a shoulder to touch.

"Feeling better now?"

[Will Stanton]

Will stared off into space, glassy-eyed, turned her head towards Miriam, and let out a long, plaintive moo.

Then, she laughed a bit, and bent backwards to sit upright.

"Yes, yes, I'm sorry, I couldn't resist...the fog is sort of lifting. Give me a few minutes, Mel, and I'll be good to go..."

[Miriam Bell]

Miriam's chuckle dies in her throat and her stomach twists into a knot.

"That's not funny, Will..."

[Will Stanton]

"Hrm?" Will asked, seemingly legitimately confused.

Miriam's hand sunk into Will's shoulder as she stared off into space for a moment.

"Oh! Oh right. It's you, Miriam," she said. "I'm sorry, I was..."

She trailed off without finishing that sentence.

[Miriam Bell]

"You were what?" she asks and Will can feel Miriam's hand tense up and clench into a half-fist inside her shoulder. "Maybe this was a mistake, something's clearly not right if you're confusing me with-with her."

[Will Stanton]

"I was what? I'm sorry, I'm just..."

Will didn't seem to quite get that Miriam was frustrated, as she slowly looked around the barn, rising to her feet. Rather than staying stuck in Will's shoulder, Miriam's hand ended up sliding down as Will stood up, creating a small trench as the clay moved around it.

"You're right. Something's not right. Or maybe something's exceptionally right and it's wrapped around...or both, simultaneously."

[Miriam Bell]

"None of that makes any sense." she says, forcing herself to relax enough to pull her hand free of the clay.

[Will Stanton]

The hole in Will's back didn't immediately close up as Will started slowly walking around the barn, running her fingers on some of the surfaces, pausing every time she came to a different groove or knot in the wood.

"Everything's so...sharp, now. I'm going a mile a minute and can barely keep up -- just look around."

She bent over slightly, deeply sniffing at one of the wooden gates, closing her eyes. "What kind of umbrella was it?" she asked, seemingly out of nowhere.


In contrast to her...spacy outward front, Will's mental presence was more active than Miriam had ever seen it, flashing and sparking. The polar opposite of the meditative state it had been in when she had found Will here in the barn.

[Miriam Bell]

"Umbrella? What are you on about? Your mind is all over the place."

[Will Stanton]

"You had an umbrella. When you came here. You were holding it in that hand. I could feelsensetouch it when your hand was inside of me. The slight remainders of it on your palm."

Will somehow said three words at the same time there; three similar but subtly different tracks of thought fighting to get out at the same time.

"We're struggling to put this into wordsthoughtsfeelings.

We should stopcontinueanalyze this. We can see why Sam and Tosh were getting concerned; this is frighteningamazing."

[Miriam Bell]

"Uh... this is... I don't know what's happening, but those are... too many things at once in your mind. I get anxious just looking at it."

[Will Stanton]

Will turned around and looked at Miriam, her head lolling to one side.

"We're...not sure, either. This hits different -- on the plane, we were just existingfeelinggrooving, and at Muir, we were angryhurtscared, but now...

There's intent here. We're doing this of our own Will. It was not an accidentmistakeopportunity. And that's...very, very strange. I don't know if we can handlemaintain this for much longer; it's so hard to choose what to focus on."

She took a few hesitant steps forward, though she wobbled some as she did.

"Miriam. You're Miriam, not Melopmene. You're blackcurrant; she's ash. That means we're here, not therethenhim. But, we're not here at the same time?"


Will bit her lower lip, furrowing her brow as she tried to concentrate.

"Home. We need...home. There's too much...stuff here. No focus. We could spend all dayyear here examining everything. Something's wrongright, and we don't have it under control."

[Miriam Bell]

"We? There? What? You're here, in a freaking barn, with me. How can you be somewhere else?"

[Will Stanton]

"Memories. What happened once can happen again; is happening; will be happening. We can close our eyes and bring them back if we concentrate hard enough. Remembering the feelingsformssensationsusefulness.

Melpomene is in there, causing us pain. You are here. You are the same, but different. We will focus on you and your fingerprint, and stay in the moment."

Finishing her unsteady walk, she grabbed Miriam by the hand, running her fingers over the lines in Miriam's palm.

"We....I am losing focus quickly, Miriam. Overstimulated. Like in the plane. We...I need peacequietsafety. The buoy on the ocean. We can't stay on task when there are so many tasks to be done...we're only one man..." she said, trying her damndest to keep everything together.

[Miriam Bell]

"I don't... I don't know what to do. I can barely make sense of your thoughts right now, I wouldn't even know where to start. Maybe I could try segmenting off some of those memories from the here and now? But I'm worried they'd get lost entirely..." she says, clutching Will's hand even if she doesn't quite get how that helps.

[Will Stanton]

"We need...

It hit harder this time, and we don't know whyhowwhat. We came here for quiet and simplicity. We need quiet. We need simple. We need friends.

Take us home. The MGH will pass through our systembodyself shortly. We hope.

Make the busy stop, and take us home."

[Miriam Bell]

'You have one friend right here, even if it's a crummy one. I... hang on, maybe..."

She grabs Will's other hand with hers and closes her eyes. Quiet. Simple. Friends. She tries to focus her mind on what Will is saying, past what she's saying and on the thoughts and ideas behind it. A serene surface, water or ice? Or something more abstract. Free of motion, endless, an expanse of silence so complete it's almost unsettling. But she's there, Will and their roiling thoughts are there and they step onto the utter stillness with the softest of touches that sends a single ripple out on the otherwise perfect surface.

"I can try to pull this into the real world but I'm scare of what it might do..." her thoughts reach Will's though they're faint and fragile, like the stillness all around them is reaching even their thoughts

[Will Stanton]

The sky in Miriam's created silence space turned black, stars dotting it, as Will cast her own mind to her own endless expanse of nothingness. The vast emptiness of space; the space Will had drifted through for untold ages, half-there, half-not, floating in and out of consciousness as the cosmos formed and swirled around him. The vast nothingness where Will had spent 100% of her life to any degree of rounding precision.

Don't pull it out, then. Pour it into us. Into me. Fill us with nothingness, and take us home

[Miriam Bell]

Miriam looks up at the stars and their dizzying display above them and then they're reflections in the flat expanse and for a moment there are two Miriam's balancing on each other's tip-toes. Then she jabs her foot down and the perfectly still plane shatters into a million pieces around them, tinkling around them like the stars, a chaos of perfect little still fragments, each catching Will from a different angle as they begin flowing into them.

[Narrator]

Will's eyes, both in the mental scape and in the real world, widened, her pupils dilating as the vast will of the cosmos flowed into her. A slight gasp escaped her lips, and then she was silent -- both physically and mentally, Miriam's sense of her fading, fading, fading until it was just a quiet hum of background noise; one she'd have to concentrate on to pick up at all.


Out in the real world, Will slowly dissolved, sliding through Miriam's fingers as she slowly pooled on the floor. She wasn't quite a liquid -- more of a malshaped, silvery puck of gel, lying on the floor -- dark and shiny, with twinkles like starlight shining, despite the dullness of the barn atmosphere.

Looking down into it, Miriam could see...well, it wasn't her reflection, per se, but it was Will's face, looking back up at her with the same expression of worry she had on. And, for that matter, the same hairstyle and makeup job, if perhaps not quite as pale as the vampire normally would be.

[Miriam Bell]

"Are you... okay? Please tell me you're okay." she says, kneeling down just enough to pick up the strange disc of Will and cradling it in her hands.

[Narrator]

The disk wasn't solid or rigid, so it drooped a bit as she scooped it up, and it oozed a little over her hands -- it was staying contiguous, so there was no risk of, like, dripping Will across the barn, but it wasn't the easiest thing to carry around.

There was no response from the disk; Will's face just mimicking her own concerned expression as she peered into it. The faint flicker of mental presence still existed, so presumably, she wasn't dead or anything -- which is generally a plus. She must have just been in a deep, dreamless sleep.