What is Broken, Can Be Reforged (TicTac & Kay)

[TicTacGuy123]

"Everyone wants to be special. Everyone. That's why we watch movies that are about superheroes, or movies about the world's most skilled agent, or the most talented singers. That's why we idolize those that can perform better than we can: athletes, musicians, comedians. The sad reality is that a vast majority of people never get that opportunity to make their name known, and even when the few that manage to get that chance see it, they fail.

I refuse to let this slip by. My name will be household, and I'll die before I give up. Log 22, Shaw. End."

The young man set his small recorder down on the desk before him, popping the cassette out and grabbing for a marker. He brushed a few papers about, a couple of empty coffee cups tumbling down onto the floor. He marked it and then pulled out the drawer to his right, slotting it into the twenty-second slot. The drawer was closed and locked, and his head fell into his hands.

He slowly dragged his hands down until his eyes were peering through his fingers, a tired and almost desperate look in his eyes. His hair was disheveled and the light scruff that framed his jaw was ungroomed. His gaze was locked on what he had been focused on for quite some time now. Her.

Beyond his desk and in the center of the small observation room he had set up was a large metal table, on which rested the body of a woman. A white sheet covered a majority of her body, save for her head, neck, and feet. He had labeled her Project Lazarus, and he was determined to return her from the land of the dead. He discovered her body in astonishingly good condition, wearing clothing that was clearly from well before his time. The young scientist was eager to make a name for himself and had spent the past several weeks trying to reboot her vitals.

"Why won't you just wake up...?" he muttered, a hint of frustration in his voice. He suddenly snapped, shoving the clutter of his desk to the floor, papers and cups scattering. "WHY?!"

 

[KayLove]

During the ice age the human race had formed awareness as well as knowledge on how to survive. They ventured to wherever showed the most prospect, learning with every generation. Their skills growing against the trials that mounted before them. Predators, weather, rations, relations. It all amounted into one large experience in which the human mind was capable of interpreting and surviving throughout even the worst that was thrown at them.

Their primal society thrived.

Father!" The young girl smiled as the hunting party returned. Elk and bore upon their backs, waiting to be skinned. Every part of the animal used to spread as thinly as possible for the close nit couple of families that had formed a small tribe.

They all looked similar. Dark hair, tanned skin from days in the sun reflecting upon the snow, brown eyes.... Well. Most had brown eyes. She was different, she had always been different.

Her broad shouldered father greeted the young blue eyed girl happily picking her up and dropping the large bag that was also filled with rabbit and supplies. He asked her about the gathering, how the planting of the newfound seeds were going. Farming. It was new to their people but they had learned from a wondering man that had traded with them seeds for shelter. They were learning, evolving, slowly but surely.

Her life now was all a memory for her. Replayed in her ever active mind. Readings would show her mind was in an active state of rem sleep, but unaware of the passage of time within her own prison where she passed like a caged animal.

"No!" She slammed her fist down upon the stone, "I refuse to sit and do nothing! My father would have never allowed us to stay here if he thought there was nothing here for us any longer." Even as she mentioned him years after pain still laced her voice, "Far too many moons have passed since the last heat." She stood, fur clothing rustling in the cold winds that tore through the night and and snuck through the tents flap as she left.

The rare form of radiation had kept her body whole, unharmed by the passage of time, untouched but enhanced. She had been shorter, her hair had been darker at the ends, her skin now lighter from the lack of exposure to the sun, her bodily functions performed perfectly.

She tried not to relive her death, if she could call it that. Tried to force her mind to think of something else. But this time it forced itself upon her senses.

Her tribe had been right... She shouldn't have gone. All she did was get herself lost in the terrain that had changed so much during the months of snow and ice. She didn't know how far she traveled. She didn't care she'd rather die trying than die like a frightened child

Everything was cold. So cold.

Her heart beat spiked.

The stable snow she had thought she was walking on gave a soul cracking splinter.

Her fingertips moved, scraping against the metal table.

She froze in her place, taking a cautionary step back, but it only caused more damage to the shelf of ice she was on. Above her the spirit lights were beginning. Their radiant green and pink colors shimmered against the starlit sky, illuminating her deadly path as it began to break apart below her.

The monitors picked up her irregular breathing, her dark brows furrowing.

One chance. That's all she had. She looked behind her, unwilling to move her footing, the adrenaline building in her body as her muscles tensed and she gave a silent prayer to anything that might be listening.

She bolted the way she came, but the sheer amount the ice had already cracked... She could feel the ground disappearing below her. Felt the way the sides of the jagged ice ripped through her gloves as she tried to grab at the ledges. And finally the severing pain as something unexpected happened just as she was falling. The lights flared above her and through the ices opening going directly through her body. It pierced every atom of her being.

It was the most painful experience of her life.

Her back arched, like it had so many years ago, and she opened her mouth in a silent scream, her hands sparking with unknown powers, the same shade of green of the lights. The ancient woman was waking... To a world she could have never imagined.

 

[TicTacGuy123]

The once eager scientist had slumped onto his desk, his eyes closed and forehead squarely pressed against the wood. He had given everything for this project: left his old position, left his family, ignored the outside world and all of her responsibilities. His life was in ruins now, and he had nothing to share for it. Attempting to bring a woman back from the dead and failing, that was his legacy. His old friends and coworkers were going to be interviewed when the story of a crazed pseudoscientist that spent weeks studying a preserved corpse broke. They were going to tell everyone that he was acting strange and they knew something was wrong. They would talk about how much they wanted to help him. His former wife would tell everyone she left because she knew he was insane.

Would it be better to just...end it?

The monitor that was keeping track of her heart rate rang out, a single peak destroying the flat line that had been tracked for weeks. It snapped him from his thoughts, bringing his head up and off the table. Bloodshot eyes stared at the screen across the room, struggling to focus. Am I really going crazy?

Then he saw it. The ever-so-slight movement of her fingers, the twitch. There was no way this was in his imagination. He threw the chair back, the wheels carrying it to the wall where it bounced off with a hard thud. He dropped to his knees by the desk where a large collection of files lay, frantically shifting them around, desperate to find the ones that were most vital. "What could have triggered this...?" he wondered out loud, the papers flying left and right. "Why is she wak- aha!"

Clutching a paper littered with diagrams of her anatomy, he approached the table. The cloth covering her body raised and arched as she did, and he stopped roughly a foot short of the table. Her silent scream was a piercing sight, and he almost didn't see the arcing energy coming from her hands. His monitors began to fritz, their screens popping one by one, causing the man to stumble back to his desk. The look on his face was one of terror, the kind when a young boy first realizes that he is mortal after breaking his arm in ways most could never imagine. But deep in that expression was another emotion.

Joy.

 

[KayLove]

Auroras world turned white after centuries of black. It was... terrifying? Exciting? Painful? She would never know how describe the moment that she awoke, it would haunt her for as long as she lived. It was like every atom of her being was being sparked back to life after an endless hibernation. Instead of moving at a sluggish almost dead pace her cells were trying to rapidly come back to life in an excruciatingly painful shock of energy coming from outside influences.

Her body fell back onto the metal table and for several moments she didn’t move. Didn’t even breath. The only indicator of her life was the sputtering monitors and the green sparks that had been at her fingertips seemed to travel up her veins. Slowly, sluggishly, but soon they reached her temples and her eyes opened wide.

Everything was a faint shade of green before it faded to pink and then nothing but bright lights aimed down at her.

Aurora heard the world around her, nothing to suggest a threat, so she began to sit up. Catching movement out of the corner of her eye she tensed and instincts took over, her knees came under her and she tried to kneel upon the metal surface trying to getting her footing under herself but failing to do so, and slipping off the table dragging the sheet with her as she fell onto the cold ground. Devices crashed and the beeping began to get faster as her breathing began to become rapid.

Cold, she was still so cold. Her body began to shiver as she tried to move herself away from whatever hellish place she had gotten herself into. Hands upon her ears and knees pulled up against her bare chest, the fragments of her clothing simply discintigrating as she moved, the sheet falling into a white pool around her.

 

[TicTacGuy123]

Bradley Shaw had seen it. He had seen it with his own eyes. The Revival, he would call it. A woman who was very much dead before him was now very much alive, or at least moving. All the signs were there, and the monitors were picking up her vitals. The green sparking that was traveling through her body was troubling, and something he would be looking into. It didn't match anything that he had expected or charted, and he shuffled through the papers in his hands multiple times to confirm it. The only plausible explanation was the low-level radiation of an unknown source that he had managed to pick up, but even then...

His thought train was derailed by her commotion onto the floor, and he quickly ran about the desk to the drawer that held his tape logs. Fetching a new one, he crammed it into the recorder after a couple fumbles, walking slowly towards the woman cowering on the floor. "Log 23, Shaw. I don't know what caused it but she just...woke up. I wasn't prepared for this, and while I'm not entirely sure how to safely proceed, I'm going to make an effort to calm her before shock causes her to relapse somehow."

Bradley took a hesitant step towards the woman on the floor, making his movements slowly and deliberately. "Please. Calm" he said in a gentle tone, putting an open hand out in front of him. "Safe?" Each step echoed in the hollow room, the usual silence now consumed by the wild beeping of the monitors, her sporadic breathing, and his own voice. "My name is Bradley Shaw. I'm here to help." He put the recorder back up to his mouth, referring to it rather than the frightened woman. "I find it hard to believe that she understands modern English, given that the carbon dating of many materials on her body are older than anything dated to the current century."

He knelt down to the cold floor, slowly grabbing and pulling the sheet that had fallen on the floor from around her. He carefully draped it around her shoulders, doing his best to cover her nudity. Being unprepared for her awakening, he didn't have the clothing he had purchased for her on hand, and he didn't feel comfortable risking her being alone while he went to collect it. "Bradley Shaw" he repeated, gesturing broadly to himself. "Name?" He held the recorder out towards her. "Name?" he insisted, desperate for evidence that she was, in fact, living and breathing in front of him.

 

[KayLove]

Everything was so loud, she could barely hear herself think, the unfamiliar noises ringing in her ears. All of her senses seemed to be on over drive. Everything was so bright even as she tried to look around her, the white lights hurting her light blue eyes, and the ground she sat upon was so hard as if solid stone.

The familiar sound of human footsteps cut through all the noise and her head snapped up, and looked at the figure approaching, she only saw the outline of his body as he came closer. And then he began to speak... but what she did not know. She recognized the patterns in which he used, the inflections and even that she knew he wasn’t actually talking to her but to something else completely. But about was completely lost upon her.

Even though the bright lights hurt her dilated eyes she forced herself to watch as he moved closer, unable to back up any further, the beeping noises only getting faster. In truth she was frightened out of her mind, this wasn’t home, this was nothing that she remembered and the instinctual need of flight to fight was starting to kick in and she could no longer flee... but there was one thing that seemed to be edging upon her thoughts.... Curiosity. Ever so slowly, timid to come out of hiding.

He was speaking to her now...

Calm. Safe?

Two words she didn’t know but she guessed, he was trying to sooth her like a frightened animal. Her brows furrowed as he got closer and she was able to see the features on his face, tired, like he hadn’t slepted in days. He began to talk to himself again and she didn’t care, simply wanted to listen to him speak.

Her mind was ultimately advanced, the radiation had advanced her far beyond the state that she had been, her brain functioning at a higher level now than in what she would call her ‘former life’ or even any of todays humans. So her brain was like a sponge, as soon as he started speaking she had already memorized each word and was trying to decipher what they meant even though she did not know she was doing it consciously or had any reference to what it all ways in the first place. Her learning began.

Roura tried to move her shoulder as she watched it placed over her, not truly wanting the suspiciously snow colored material to touch her in fear it might be just that, as cold as snow. But she was pleasantly surprised when the light material rested upon her shoulders and knees, reaching out to feel it between her fingertips.

Bradley Shaw.... Name?.... Name?

There were those words again. She watched I’m closely, his body, the way his hands pointed to himself and back at her. The strange black rock aiming towards her. She tentatively looked from it, to the male, and back to it as if to say what am I supposed to do with that?

But she gave him what she thought that he wanted, clearing her dry throat, “Name?” She mimicked what he had just done, gesturing to himself, “Aurora.” Her voice had become foreign to her own ears.

“Bradley... S-Shaw...” she said simply stating it because she now knew what it meant, but as she sat there she wasn’t getting any warmer, her body heat still weak as she had been in ice for the past thousand or so years. She looked down at herself now and noted she pieces of what used to be her clothing around her, in pieces, she didn’t care about Shaw seeing her body, she was more concerned with taking off ever piece of equipment that was attached to her so that she could move and get somewhere warmer.

She started by taking off the heart monitors on her chest, hissing at the adhesive coming off, the ones upon her temples next, various machines now simply flatlining. An I.V. That was attracted to her arm had luckily not been torn from her vein, but she yelped in pain as she attempted to take it out.

Angrily looking at him, “What is this?! Get it off of me!” In her own language which was a form of many of the earliest languages simply muddled all together seeing as her and her people spread across the countries taking pieces and portions of their language with them to develop into their own. Although she didn’t know if she trusted the male enough to let him get it off of her, it was a true conundrum. She wanted it off but she didn’t know how badly she needed it off.