# Erin Examined

published: 2020-08-22

"And I'm telling you, Doctor, she's so passive. She didn't fight me at all. What kind of a person doesn't freak out after passing through the metaclysma? Or upon finding out there's been a whole different world under her this whole time?"

"Did you alert Horace before you fished her out?"

"I... no. I didn't. I mean, it's not like she's a Lorinthia or anything. She's not dead. Just... dead inside."

"So you mean to tell me that you just let in a potential sympathizer without any kind of questioning at all?"

"Which one is it, Grandpa? Do we interrogate them while they might be bleeding out inside, or do we bring them straight to you?"

A slap echoes through the halls. The door opens. A man getting up there in years but not yet geriatric shuffles in, followed closely by the girl from earlier, now with an angry red mark on one of her cheeks. A gray coat flows from the man's shoulders, almost sweeping the floor. Its buttoned pockets are bulging with what could be tools.

A doctor?

"I thought I told you to lay down," she mumbles.

"Your bed's not very comfortable," I respond.

My eyes follow the doctor man as he kneels at my bedside, fiddling with the corner of the blanket. He unbuttons one of his pockets and retrieves a thick black cord, which he attaches to some port hidden in the blanket's fabric. The other end goes into... a phone?

They still have phones here?

No, it's too big to be a phone. A... what was it called? A surface? A slate? A-

A tablet. That's what it was.

"Are you listening?" The girl is toe-to-toe with the foot of my bed. The doctor squints at something on the tablet's screen. "I said-"

The doctor's eyes suddenly widen. He sends a sharp glare to the girl. "How long did you leave her in the metaclysma?"

She shrugs. "I don't know. We fished her out as soon as we saw her. So... a few minutes?"

He turns back to me. "How in Velouria's name are you still alive?" He violently taps something on his tablet. "Your breathing is intermittent. Your blood flow is nil. All of your internal organs are missing. By all accounts, you should be a lifeless husk. And yet, you sit before me." He holds up two fingers and moves them back and forth, around in a circle, a zig-zag. "Your visual cortex seems intact. Say something."

"Um... something?"

He grabs a fistful of his silvery hair, exasperated, and lets it go just as violently. The strands frizz out as he looks back at his tablet. "Tell me how. Tell me how you are still alive."

I draw my legs into my arms. "Tell me where I am first."

"You're in Abyss. An apt name, no?"

The girl rolls her eyes behind him, where he can't see.

"That doesn't tell me much."

"I will tell you more once you answer my question."

"I..."

How much should I tell him? I barely know him. He could be with the Lorinthia. Cetra never told me how they look nowadays, or how to recognize one...

And yet... They know I'm not one. And they don't seem too kind to "sympathizers". Maybe they don't like them?

"Do you not remember?"

"Are you a Lorinthia?"

He scoffs. "A Lorinthia? In Abyss? They'd never get through the metaclysma. They'd disintegrate to bits and scraps the moment they touched the border."

"So you don't like them?"

"Personally? I find them fascinating. Professionally? I hope to never see one. Obviously you aren't one. So, then, what are you?"

"I'm a... human, I think." I glance behind me, just in case. "I don't seem to be an angel. And I don't think I've ever had god powers."

"There are more in the heavens than just gods and angels. How can a human survive without organs?"

Adamant, I see.

"I... I don't know." His brow starts to furrow. "Mistress Velouria did something to me a long time ago. Something about preservation so I'd live forever."

"Can you feel any obvious changes since you passed through the metaclysma?"

"Not... not that I know of."

He relaxes. He does not need to know the gory details of what happened that day. I almost think he can tell I am hiding something back, but what he does have must be satisfactory, for he stands back up and disconnects the tablet and cord.

"Selmina. Please take our guest straight to Horace."

"B-but-" She swallows her stammer. "Straight to him?"

"If Velouria is sending us people, I think he needs to know."

"I wasn't sent," I add. "I came here myself."

Confusion comes over his face. "But why?"

"I'm looking for my daughter."

"Well... Horace should still see you. Someone... touched by Velouria should be on his radar anyway." He nods to Selmina. "Away with you."

Selmina sighs. I slip off the bed, leaving the blanket behind, and follow her out the door, through the hallways, back to the elevator.

"This might take a while." Selmina slides down to the cage floor, stretches her arms, yawns. "Of course, it's never long enough for a proper nap..."

"Do you... nap often?"

"Well, it's not like there's much else to do here. There can only be so many people on guard duty at a time. And the aqua farm doesn't like to be crowded. And it's not like we have to go scavenging like the people above Abyss..." She opens one eye, focuses on me. "I almost feel bad for you surface people. Spending all your time just surviving. Is it hard?"

"I wouldn't know. I've only been on the surface-" is that what it's called?- "for a day."

"Huh."

Selmina shrugs and closes her eye again. And we continue descending, further, further, further...

It feels like a century has passed by the time the cage slams into the ground. The actual ground, for I look outside the metal lattice and see not open air but dirt. Black dirt, barely illuminated by whatever light spilling out from the hallway can make it past the elevator, but I can see the rough clumpy surface all the same.

Selmina does not move as the attendant at the bottom opens the elevator cage door. I lightly poke her with the bottom of my foot. Her breath falters, startled, but she remains deep in the throes of sleep.

"You are here to see Horace, yes?" the attendant calls out to me in an accent I can't place.

I nod my head.

"Right ahead. The door at the very end."

I thank him and start walking.

The lights get progressively brighter the farther I walk. One door, two door, three doors. All have a piece of tape on them with a name I don't recognize. All of them are locked- or, at least the first few are, because I stop checking after the fourth or fifth.

And what would I do anyway if one opened? Walk inside and explore?

A long time ago, long before I ever knew of Mistress Velouria's existence, I was at the house of one of my grandparents. A TV covered the entire expanse of one wall. Usually the screen would be blaring football or Christmas tunes, since it felt like the only time I ever got to see that side of the family was during a holiday, and there was never any reason to think the adults would ever give me a place to sit beside them on the already crowded couch.

But every once in a great while, we would go over for no reason at all. There were no cousins to play with, and since no kids lived there anymore, there were no toys to play with either. Father would take away all of our electronics and expect us to somehow manage to entertain ourselves anyway. Rarely did it work.

One day, however, Father's sister came over. She had a video game with her, a multiplayer one. I asked if I could play- and she accepted, but threw a controller at me without another word. Everything was foreign to me. None of the faces were those my sheltered upbringing had allowed me to know. And she laughed at me after every match, after every time I bitterly failed. And I begged her to explain the game to me, and she refused every time.

And just like that hazy night biting back frustrated tears, I am in a foreign land, with foreign rules and foreign customs that I do not understand, that nobody has explained to me. But no tears are coming, or even on the horizon. I just press forward. One foot after another. The only thing I know for certain will work in this land.

Eventually, the doors flanking me on both sides come to a stop. The hallway ends. There just stands one set of double doors, wooden and imposing.

I knock.

The doors creak as they lurch open towards me. I jump out of the way before they can flatten me against the wall. The sound of what could be ancient hinges creaking open echoes through the hall- but the hinges don't look old, or even worn-out. They gleam golden, flawless, a miniature mirror staring back at me.

If this place were made out of plastic bricks, I would say that they had just taken the door off of a house and attached the rest of the structure to the end of this branch at the hole they'd made. For I peer past the doors, and it just looks like a standard living room from any old house of my time. A couch, a few armchairs, a coffee table. A cheap painting hanging tastefully on the wall. I take a step forward, and the carpet rustles underneath my socks.

The air smells like oranges.

"Enter," a deep voice booms from what I assume is the kitchen.

So I enter. I step gingerly across the carpet, as if I were home, that home from so long ago, ordered by parents not to step on any carpet with dirt-encrusted shoes.

There is one lone figure in the attached dining room. A towering figure, head just a foot under the ceiling. Draped around him are layers upon layers of thin flowing fabric, weaved together to make some kind of slick armor, greens and blues fading into each other like a rose grown in dyed water. A masculine flower, for the mountains and valleys of his muscles show through even the thick layer of armor. It covers even his neck, obscuring the lower half of his face, the upper half topped by a mountain of jet-black hair.

His eyes are softly glowing beacons, a sea of blue in a darkened face.

I wish I could see the rest of his face. What does he feel, staring down at me? Confusion, why someone so obviously weak as me is standing in the middle of his abode? Disgust, that I had the audacity to show up uninvited and then dare to be in the same space as him? Anger, that I interrupted whatever he was doing?

"Dr. Ophiel informed me you were coming. You have interrupted nothing."

His voice is almost flat, emotionless, like what a general would use with a simple soldier. A pawn.

He could crush me in an instant.

"I mean you no harm, so long as you mean Abyss none."

I force myself to keep eye contact. It almost feels like a distant me is balling her fists as I say, "Can you read my mind?"

"Only that which you choreograph so easily."

"So you know why I am here."

"That I cannot tell. Enlighten me."

"I... I'm searching for my daughter. She went missing sometime within the past month. I don't know exactly when. All I know is that she's probably here-"

"Give me her physical description."

I...

I don't know what Dimitri looks like. Is she tall like her father? Blonde like her mother, like I was at the time? Button or flat nose?

Does she have wings?

Do Nephilim have wings? Are they strong enough to fly?

Is she at least healthy?

I don't know.

"I don't know," I admit. "I know she's about eighteen. That's it."

Horace lets out a long sigh. The sound is less like human lungs and more like a pipe releasing pressure. "Time means nothing here. People are old one day and young the next as they please. I can't do anything if I don't know what to look for."

"Then please pardon me." I manage half a bow. "I need to leave. I need to keep searching-"

"Halt. There is no leaving Abyss."

"No... leaving?"

"Not for you." He steps forward. "I cannot allow a potential Millennium Girl out of my sight."

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander