[Plot] Where Everybody Knows Your Name

[Miriam Bell]

Miriam for her part looks horrified. If she'd waited any longer she probably would have talked herself out of it but now she can't look away from what's unfolding, hands balled into fists and fingernails digging into her palm. She'd braced herself for the impact of watching the only person she's close to fade away all over again but it still tightens around her guts like a steel wire. It takes everything in her power to keep that all too familiar anguish from spilling out and crashing through whatever Sam is doing to fix things.

[Narrator]

Miriam's knife is a toxic barb. Stabbing Will, even while they're flesh and blood, is not a fatal wound, but this is weaponized trauma of loss. Of death. And for someone as susceptible as Will to telepathy it's like an inevitable idea taking root. Sam can feel it immediately. A door is thrown wide open to endless darkness, a void so empty and vast it's sheer scale has a gravitational pull. To stare at it is to be drawn towards it and swallowed into it's nothingness. And in it flickers Will's 'light'. A spark of immeasurable depth and ever shifting, changing, moving, serving a purpose, seeking a purpose. And Sam can feel it at the tips of her proverbial fingers. In the beak of the Raven. People vilify the reaper but the cutting loose is already done. Sam - no - the Morrigan is simply here to see to this tether that has lost it's anchor, to guide/devour/soothe/return/obliterate/console this precious thing...

[Samantha McManus]

...no. It's not your time.

You have promises to keep, Will Stanton.

[Narrator]

It's probably easy enough to convince Will and Sam's proverbial hand closes around his flickering light and she holds on, setting herself against a pull she can feel down to her guts. An almost primal surging. And through it she feels the force at the other end, reaching through the empty void from a place beyond. A place that defies scope and for one brief moment she catches a glimpse of everything. The sheer weight of it is too much for her mind to truly wrap itself around. Worlds overlaid on each other over and over and over and between them an intermingled web of endlessly repeating fractals of all kinds of shapes and sizes and all over she can see the tiny pinpricks of light where they make contact with reality. With people. Mostly people. And around those points of contact the fractals churn into eddies of patterns. And often they're the same across worlds, sometimes shifted, sometimes the currents cause dramatic breaks, but their still distinct outcroppings.

Finding her own is simple enough, the fractal tree with ravens perched and in a blink it's Cailleach's anemones on an abyssal vent but still the same.

Miriam's too is close, an impossible building, a seat of power, a place of kings and queens, tyrants or CEOs, aristocrats and priests.

And of course Will's. A tool, a building block, the answer to a request, an actor on a cosmic stage, a chameleon. And almost immediately Sam can tell that something is different. Will's pattern is riddled with sparks and from the right angle she can see how his connection to his spark has wound and entangled itself across realities. A tiny ephemeral strand wound around and through dimensions. She can even see the spot where Panopticon had wrenched open the exact spot Will's trajectory crossed their dimensional manifold to extract it's energy. But all the other intersections are active as well, picking up ideas and concepts and whole personality aspects from... where or what exactly.

For a moment she feels like she's at the edge of grasping an universal truth, some grand understanding of.... the Astral, Dimensions, how this enormous web of energy empowers them with these oh so very specific and abstract things, interprets them or is interpreted. But before it can resolve, the dream can be remembered, she can feel a presence surge up. Her own spark is suddenly grasped by something much larger, something that barely even has a shape anymore, only anger, jealousy and hate that stares at her with such intensity that she's physically thrown back against the wall and held by the sheer force of will of this... thing.

[Will Stanton]

Of course, Sam's own mental 'hand' still has Will's spark firmly grasped in it, glowing and pulsing with it's own power, providing Sam with a connection back to...well, wherever it is she's from, and the something larger isn't. A force of comfort, trust and love -- compared to the force grasping her spark, it's the equivalent of a fart in the wind, but it's not nothing.

[Samantha McManus]

Sam's mind, indeed possibly her soul, squirms as she goes wide-eyed at the thing that pinned her.

"What... what are you?"

[Narrator]

"I am stray, forgotten, abandoned, shed, discarded, rejected, unloved." the presence whispers with a surprisingly gentle voice that coalesces into a woman that towers over Sam. She looks like she could be her sister or cousin. The same piercing green eyes at the very least. She's naked, her modesty only preserved by strategically falling hair that starts as deep red at the roots and gradually lightens to blonde tips that seem to fade into and almost ethereal translucence.

[Samantha McManus]

"...you're who she was afraid of."

[Narrator]

"The little fish is out of it's depths. And so are you."

[Samantha McManus]

"I wasn't trying to go this deep. I just needed to see."

[Narrator]

There are no words in response, only a feeling of something trying to reach inside of her and the sensation of utter rejection that creeps over every muscle fiber, every nerve and through the marrow of her bones and then it's gone. There's the slightest tinge of disappointment that lingers for a moment and then she comes crashing back down to the real world, still clutching Will's light as much as she's clutching Will who has toppled against her as the two of them slump against the wall.

[Miriam Bell]

Judging by the horrified look still on Miriam's face the whole thing must have taken less than a second.

[Samantha McManus]

For a moment, all Sam does is shiver and clutch at Will, her eyes staring into the middle distance.

Then, as she starts to recover she tries to put Will's light back in him, though her mental 'hand' is certainly shaking.

[Will Stanton]

It took a moment for anything to happen -- a long, lingering moment that was just long enough to make everyone wonder if something had gone wrong...


...And then Will took a shuddering breath, the wound on her neck closing up as the light re-entered her eyes.

"Our Lady..." she muttered, as she rebooted; the room around them stopping it's decay.

[Samantha McManus]

"...if you want to be told you were right, Miriam, you were right," she says, still shaking.

[Miriam Bell]

"I'll rub it in later, if you don't mind." she says, mostly just sounding relieved.

[Will Stanton]

"Are...are you alright?" Will asked.

It wasn't immediately clear which one she was asking.

[Samantha McManus]

"You went too deep, Will. You were actually dying. I had to chase after your light."

[Will Stanton]

"...we don't..." she said, furrowing her brow.

"We're sorry. We didn't mean to frighten you."

[Samantha McManus]

"You didn't scare me so much as what I found out there."

[Will Stanton]

"It's OK. You're safe here, with Miriam and us," Will said, reaching up to stroke Sam's hair some.

Do you want to talk about it?"

[Miriam Bell]

"Really, trying to follow someone's death lead to a scary place?" Miriam snarks in a blatant coping mechanism of her own. "Sorry. Just... sorry." she adds as she tries to calm herself.

[Samantha McManus]

"Aye well... this was me. Or it was me, once."

[Will Stanton]

"Like, you you, or you like Callileach is 'you'?" Will asked.


Behind Miriam, one of the warped armchairs creaked as it slipped forward, shuddering a little bit.

[Samantha McManus]

"It was one of us. It doesn't have a body anymore. It tried to wear me as a jaunty skinsuit."

[Will Stanton]

It took Will a second to respond, as if she had to process this for a moment; like she had to come to the conclusion that this was a Bad Thing.

"Did you get out safely? Or are you still in danger?

Because, you know, to get to you, whatever she is will have to get through us. And Tereza and Viv."

[Samantha McManus]

"I'm alright. I think I pushed her out. I'm not sure how, it was like a reflex. Then she sent me crashing back down into the physical world."

[Miriam Bell]

"Did you at least see something that'll help us with Will?"

[Samantha McManus]

"Maybe? Will's light is... a little different."

"I mean everybody's is different, but it's not just that his is a different flavor."

"Most people are like a lamp. You can shade it to control how much light comes out."

"Will is... more like a string of Christmas lights."

[Miriam Bell]

"Hence all the little lights trying to make themselves heard?"

[Samantha McManus]

"Aye, and while Cailleach might have the same light as me, each light on the string is a Will I think, in different worlds."

[Will Stanton]

"Like, we're all connected, somehow?" Will asked, furrowing her brow even more. "More so than you and Callileach, or Miriam and Melpomene?"

[Miriam Bell]

"Unlike you, we were never hurled across dimensions by a black hole."

[Samantha McManus]

"And you've left... a trail, I guess."

[Will Stanton]

"That....strangely makes a lot of sense. To us.

We mean, it raises many further questions, but...no, that checks out. We're...inundated with ourselves. We always suspected we were full of ourself, but this is ridiculous."

[Samantha McManus]

"I think when you figured out how to make MGH, it allowed more of every Will through."

[Will Stanton]

"If that's true, that implies that we always had the ability to do this; we just...didn't. Or couldn't.

That sort of jives with Legion. We guess that when he started struggling, he was...coerced, by Faultline, into working for and with her. Convinced that was the only way that he could stay sane, maybe."

[Samantha McManus]

"Or he loved her."

[Will Stanton]

Will nodded at that. "Talk about an abusive relationship, but maybe you're right. Feelings are...difficult. And there, but for the grace of God, go we."

[Samantha McManus]

"You... tend to be willing to do a lot for acceptance."