[Thread] All that you reason

[mind_hunger]

Characters: Sylar (OU), OPEN
Where: The plaza
When: Late evening
Summary: Quite unexpectedly, Sylar finds himself in a new and entirely foreign place. The logical next step? Find out what's going on.
Warnings: None, currently.

Comments

[mind_hunger]

There was no trace of surprise in either Sylar's stance or expression as the other man appeared, apparently, from out of nowhere, and no hint as to whether this absence was genuine, or simply the result of practice at masking his emotions from outside observers. His eyebrows drew up, showing faint bemusement at the comment, though his gaze went a shade colder. "Excuse me?" he replied, quiet voice as mild as the other man's was scathing.

The hands already clenched in his coat pockets pulled just a little tighter, the knuckles of the right scraping lightly over the unfamiliar weight of the device nestled there.

[mind_hunger]

"Maybe your expectations aren't the important ones," Sylar replied. There was just the faintest hint of amusement audible in his voice, as though the other man had stumbled into some private joke. It did not match the slow coil of aggravation that was his honest response. He picked over the situation in his thoughts, settling upon a likely test, considering the circumstances he'd left not long previous. The stranger's barbs struck a little too close to home for it to be otherwise.

[phonespsych]

Neka was bored. She hadn't wanted to go back to her apartment since the cuffs came off. Not with the risk of Saya being around. She idly wondered if it was possible to get her MP3 player charged somehow and get a new set of headphones. She was really starting to miss her music.

She paused in her wanderings when she noticed someone standing close to the fountain. She didn't recognize him, but then again, she didn't recognize many people in this place. She was still fairly new.

[mind_hunger]

It didn't take Sylar long to notice the girl. His gaze settled on her, and there was a few seconds' pause, as though he was deliberating approaching her. It was long enough to file away a myriad of little details, something done reflexively. He smiled, just a little, as though uncertain. It was a harmless expression, ever so slightly sheepish, the sort one might see on a tourist who had wandered astray in search of something.

"Excuse me, miss," he began, taking a few strides forward. Enough to cut the distance down to something politely conversational, but not quite enough to encroach on her personal space. "Could you tell me where I am? I seem to have gotten..." He trailed off, looking around the plaza as though inspecting it for the first time and deciding that, no, it really wasn't at all familiar. "...Lost."

[phonespsych]

She scratched the back of her head for a moment, thinking about what to say. She didn't know what exactly to say, after all, he wasn't really lost. He just wasn't in his home world anymore. It sounded crazy, but then again, it was the truth.

"You're not exactly lost." She said, motioning to the sky. "See those things? Those are the Keepers, the ones who brought us all here. We're supposed to fight a war for them." She said with a sigh.

[mind_hunger]

He looked up, studying the indicated being intently. It wasn't the demeanor of someone only now noticing, but rather of someone re-evaluating something he'd already seen given new context. "Keepers," he repeated, quiet and a little thoughtful. "What are they?"

He returned his gaze to her, and this time, not all of the intensity had bled away. He was studying, evaluating, and while there was no sign of hostility, it wasn't necessarily the most comfortable sort of scrutiny to be under. "A war?" he asked further, as though only just processing that detail. "Against whom?"

[feline_nonsense]

Oh? What was this?

Cat blinked and padded a few steps closer, peering over the edge of the roof at the figure simply standing around looking around him like a lost little mouse.

It had been a while since he had left Wonderland and gone wandering in the Outside. Cat knew about mice.

But that wasn't quite right either. Cat frowned, flicking an ear, eyes narrowing contemplatively. Whomever, whatever this figure was, he was not a mouse. Cat was not a dog, but his nose could work just as well when he pulled all the scattered bits of his mind to it, and what he smelled was familiar also, one that he had not had to leave Wonderland to discover.

Cat smelled danger.

But Cats will be cats, and Cat was curious. Slipping out of existence, he crossed the expanse and reappeared, a little way away from the stranger. After all, Alice was dangerous too. And Alice was a friend. "It doesn't really matter which way you go," he commented, flicking an ear in place of the tail that had gone mysteriously missing.

[mind_hunger]

Sylar was not expecting to find a cat, of all possible creatures, when he turned to face the voice addressing him. Or something, at least, that was remarkably visually similar to a cat. It was not that he had an aversion to felines, precisely. It was just that, in his experience, they did not typically talk.

Had he not still been uncertain if these surroundings were genuine rather than a remarkably convincing illusion, he might have begun to have the slightest bit of uncertainty regarding his own sanity. Not a great deal, and not for long (wouldn't he know, after all, if he himself was broken?), but some.

Because talking cats could really be considered a bad sign.

His brow furrowed in puzzlement, eyes narrowing as he studied the strange entity, as though trying to mentally reduce it to component parts, to the point where it would make some sort of sense. Would work.

"Doesn't it?" The question was almost, though not quite, absent.

[feline_nonsense]

What was this? Cat blinked and pulled his mind away from the thoughts of his tail. It would come back, it couldn't have wandered far, after all. His eyes focused again on the not-mouse-man, grin growing wider. "Not at all," he agreed, fur flickering a myriad of colors before settling back down to a dusty gray, "Here, there, everywhere, it all leads to nothing. Nothing at all."

It was like a riddle, but wasn't. Not really. Cat had been to the borders, looked at the line but didn't touch it, didn't cross it. He knew what death smelled like.

And he had found the one who'd tried to cross over, found the bits and pieces left of him that no one really knew, no one really cared to help pick up and put back together again.

Cat had looked at that man's head, prodded at his mind, but he was gone, gone, gone. Nothingness indeed. Down the rabbit hole into a kind of Wonderland into which even Cat didn't want to venture.

[mind_hunger]

Sylar closed his eyes, counting several heartbeats as he tried to center himself somewhere in the discordant whirl that surrounded him. "It has to lead to somewhere," he replied. His voice was a little hoarse, strung with just the hints of frustration that went deeper than simply that of someone who has looked up of a sudden to find himself utterly lost.

It was telling, if only a little, that he paused before continuing. "The walls. No one's been over them?" He'd noted them, of course, impossible to miss easily even in the gloom of dusk. Though he was not quite willing to admit it even to himself, they unsettled him a little.

One cage traded for another. There was irony in that, if one cared to look.

[ned_piemaker]

Did it reflect badly on him, the Piemaker wondered, that he gravitated towards individuals in this compound who looked, on the outside, like normal humans? Did it make him a coward, ducking out of the way any time he saw a creature or robot or who knew what coming along?

Ned had been returning to the fountain at least once every day since he had arrived. He lingered over the place where he had been brought into this other world, with the hope that it might provide a passage out.

Imagine the Piemaker's surprise when he saw another man lingering by the fountain, looking almost as lost as he still felt. He appeared more normal than anyone Ned had seen here so far, as a matter of fact. Ned wondered if he might be from his own world. It was this expectation of a shared background that drove him to approach the man, hands tucked into his pockets.

"This might be a really strange question, but, uh, are you possibly ... from the same world as me?"

[mind_hunger]

"The same world as you?" The faint shift of inflection on the near-repetition made Sylar sound slightly puzzled, a tonal version of 'I don't quite follow'. Even if he did accept the apparent transdimensional nature of the area, something difficult to achieve without a great deal of deliberation, that question wasn't a simple one to answer.

He studied the other man, looking for markers of the familiar outside of the baseline sense of normalcy. He looked, certainly, like someone who would not stand out terribly in the cities with which Sylar was familiar, which was certainly not something that could be said of a number of the people he'd glimpsed even in the short time he'd been observing.

Whether or not that meant anything was not something of which he could be certain, and he grimaced faintly, as though at the beginning signs of a headache's onset. It wasn't that far off. "I don't know."

[ned_piemaker]

Ned chewed his upper lip for a moment, trying to come up with some concrete example from his own world that could not exist in any other. How could he know what the other worlds were like? What if one existed that exactly mirrored his own, except it had another Ned, a Ned who couldn't dispatch death and life with the touch of a finger, who had never inadvertently killed his mother, who had grown up with both his parents in Coeur d'Coeurs, who...

Sighing deeply and shaking away the whimsical thought, the Piemaker said, "Sorry. Nevermind. I just- I suppose there really is no way to tell, is there? I want to just say I'm from the world where everything's normal, but-" Ned grimaced in embarrassment. "I'm Ned."

[mind_hunger]

That was the pertinent question, wasn't it? There had to be some way, Sylar was certain. After all, there were particular points in the progression of events that served as turning points on a grand scale, steering the world in one direction or another. This was fact, or near enough; they were accessible to those with precognitive abilities, if not always perfectly translatable. Comparison of these points might lead to some breakthrough