Sound of Silence, Part 1: Or (Dinary)

What makes you so special, Sine Xandra Cosine?

Cloverdale was like so many small towns. Across worlds, across dimensions, across civilizations carved out by so many different hands in so many different shapes, some archtypes always seemed to follow. One was the tiny world within a world of a town, a little microcosm of a greater artificial ecosystem, where the rest of the world seemed so far away at times and sometimes so unneeded. It was a false assumption, but a rational one. The mortal mind could only process so much, some more than others. Trying to comprehend a world was one thing; a town was safer, easier, more merciful on the senses. Sometimes it went wrong, but going wrong was part of life. Cities went wrong. Empires went wrong. Hell, in more than a few legends Atlantis was swallowed because it had gone deeply, deeply wrong. Being part of a tapestry made a facet of it no less beautiful, no less important than the whole...

Unless something happened. Some things always happened.

Other things...not so much.

Is it because of your unique circumstances? You didn't pick those, earn those. Those were granted by the grace, or perhaps the oversight of existence. Your brain comes from that. Your knowledge comes from those before you who earned it with sweat and blood and tears. Maybe you bore it, maybe you learned to make it work for you, but who hasn't? Widow Maker, Erebus, Antoinette, they all made the best of bad circumstances...hell, your tribulations are nothing compared to Jaxx's. You don't like him for that, do you? Well, that and he promised to shoot you...but it bothers you that someone you find so distasteful for his views and choices has such strength, doesn't it? You know what happened after a week in isolation for you; he endured four billion YEARS. If everyone around you is special, than no one is. Is that why you move around so much? So you'd have an excuse to be a snowflake among the rain drops?

Small towns had their charms. Their downsides. Their secrets. Sometimes they held an unfair view of outsiders; sometimes their views were wholly justified. Sometimes being an outsider was the best thing for a small town, to see what its occupants could not, would not...

If that was the case, then Sine was a failure. She'd come here just to have a break. To rest after two hard weeks of delivering stuff. And perhaps to hide away that while Desdemona considered the loft they shared their home, Sine was not quite so quick to decide it was that...

Your creations? You're a scavenger, a cobbler, a engineer of the reverse, as much as you are a builder and creator. You're like a T-Rex, granted such a fierce bite, yet theorized by some to have mostly fed on other dinosaur's leftovers. You don't really have a lot of things that are YOURS, do you? Is that why the loft bothers you? Filled with DES' paintings, DES' furniture, DES' mess, all things belonging to HER...do you remember Sarah's discomfort at the pool party? How you glossed over that she should be proud of herself, her body all hers, unlike you, with your nano-sculpting and gene-tweaking and who knows what else? Sure, perhaps you like to live life on the run, and use what you have to set the pace...but it all comes back to the same question. What really belongs to YOU, Cosine?

She was sweating. She hated sweating, feeling the liquid run down her face, her back, between her breasts. Or maybe she hated being hypersensitive to it, and hated the fact that being hypersensitive was the only way she was probably going to get out of this alive.

Well, there was another way. She could run. It was what she was best at. Run away from the small town. Run away from the damned thing. Abandon the normal people here to the abnormal, when she was the only other abnormal around.

Maybe she should. By the time she'd started having some idea of what was going on, things had already gone out of control. The houses around her were as quiet as tombs; some had their doors open, others their front windows smashed. Cars were everywhere save where they should have been, on lawns or overturned on the streets instead of parked in driveways. Sine was pretty sure she could see a house in the distance where someone had made a new door with a car. Standing in the middle of the street, one hand clutching Fantomas, the other holding a Godwyn-De'az Pattern bolter gun, Sine felt more like a neanderthal caveman waving a sharp stick and a rock at the dark than any form of confidence. That might have had something to do with the fact that she'd lost her helmet (and all its tracking mechanisms) after someone had unexpectedly brained her with a golf club, but that had been outside her control. What scared her more, deep down, was that whatever a caveman might have been threatening, however outmatched they might have been if it was a bear or a mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger, they still had a chance. Sine had weaponry a thousand generations more advanced, a sword with as many ways to kill as Sine had fingers and toes and a hand-held weapon that could carve through the average tank, and she still felt like she just had sticks and stones. And whatever was out there didn't have bones to break.

You know what belongs to you. Trouble.

You're a troublemaker. A shit-stirrer. You decide to hang around that bar, and look what happens. Hell, let's be fair and forget the Lord and its 'divine providence', hell, we'll even forget the Neverthere and their machinations. What about the nest, the Praetorian beast? That alter that Jaxx killed? What about Jonesy, how you stuck your nose into her new life and recovery to the point where she wanted to fight you to the death? What about Des, bringing all the madness of the bar into her life when you could have just had a one-night stand, and not being as generous in return? Did you bring this here? Did you wake it up? Or maybe you're just drawn to it, destined to find it or bring it along with you. There'll be a new Zoofights soon. New faces and old. What are you going to inflict on them then? After all, if this is the lone thing that belongs to you, evidence certainly states its what you're good at...

"Is any of that relevant?" Sine said, her voice so quiet that anyone would have been hard pressed to hear it. Considering how quiet the town was, that was saying something.

So quiet. Too quiet. Dead quiet.

Connection between main units re-established. Opening communication band.

What makes you so special, Sine? Because whatever it is, you don't have it here. So go do what you always do. Run. There's more than one way to do it, after all.

"Sine? Is that you?"

"Hello darkness, my old friend...
I've come to talk with you again...
Because a vision softly creeping...
Left its seeds while I was sleeping...
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence..."

"...Zephyrus, I need you lock onto..."


Too quiet. Too loud. It heard her.


It was on her.