Prologue F - To Hell and Back (Persephone)

[Janus]

Persephone stared in sheer blank horror as the door appeared.

Doors did not do that. She had been confused and relieved at the hallucinations disappearing but now this door had appeared out of no where and it looked real. As real as anything she had seen.

"Excuse me." She said, clearly nearing panic.

She stepped away and sat back down in the car, her pencil and paper out, drawing the door from memory.

Real doors did not simply appear, it therefore could not be a real door. Yet this John Constantine had caused it to appear with a snap of his fingers, he therefore could not be a real person.

Except her father had achnowledged him and she knew her father was real. So they must be real and she must be hallucinating, seeing something that was not there. But it all looked real!!!

She couldn't see the imperfections, she couldn't see the tell tale signs of hallucination that she had learnt over so many years. She looked up again, searching for the clues, searching for a sign. There was nothing.

She felt the panic welling up inside her again, threatening to overwhelm her. Her entire life had been spent working out what was real, using logic and reason to see past her hallucinations and now it was gone. Her defence against her schizophrenia was gone. Stripped away in a matter of moments.

She would not panic, she must not panic, her father was there, he would take care of her. That was her saving grace, her father would not let any harm come to her, she could trust him. Her senses might be failing her but he would not.

She felt the tears well up in her eyes. One trickled its way slowly down her cheek and she took out a handkerchief, wiping it away.

She reached angrily into her pocket and pulled out her sun glasses putting them on before returning to her drawing.

Real doors did not just appear so it could not be a real door!

===============

Action

Art 7

===============

[Manah]

"Bloody hell, Fisk, how sheltered is that poor girl?" John let out, annoyed as he walked to the car. "Has she never seen any of the actual strange things going on?"

"I had to protect her! How badly do you think it would it freak her out to see those things in addition to everything else she's gone through?" the Kingpin defended himself.

"A lot darn less than finding out all of a sudden after all these years", the occult investigator retorted dryly, before turning his attention back to her. "Look, luv, take it easy."

Persephone couldn't help but pause, suddenly experiencing something else unusual. There was something odd about the way the man had said those three words... they had an instant effect on her. It felt like she couldn't help but calm down, relax, and feel... surprisingly peaceful despite the situation and her sudden rush of emotions and feelings. It felt as though she could still sense how she should be reacting, how fearsome, confusing and nonsensical this should be to her, yet she merely had the information that it should be, and yet felt as calm and serene as one could be, merely observing those emotions as though from afar as opposed to within.

(OOC: You are supernaturally and temporarily calmed, and immune to negative emotions such as fear, distress, sadness, and uneasiness. You still know that such emotions register in your mind, but they no longer affect you for the duration of the spell.)

"Like your dad and I said, I am here to help you. No harm will come to you, and we will be giving you some much needed answers. But you still have to face the music, and we need to tell you some truths your overprotective lovely daddy forgot to tell you, as well-intended as he might be", John said.

[Janus]

Persephone stopped, looked up and then around to John Constantine the same puzzled look on her face she had started with.

"Thank you Mr Constantine. I feel much calmer now."

There was a pause as she put away her pad and pencils and got out of the car, her face a picture of curiosity and focus.

"Of course the problem with that is that I am quite certain that I shouldn't be calm, considering a door has just appeared out of thin air in front of me. Worse still it appears to be a real door."

She seemed almost amused at her own reaction.

"Now as I am reasonably sure that isn't normal behaviour for doors, and I can't see any of the usual tell tale signs that it is just one of my hallucinations, I'm led back to my orriginal reason for being surprised. You appear to be doing the impossible."

She looked at him, studying him. Her eyes taking in every detail.

"Of course you can't be doing something impossible, so either I have completely lost my mind or my definition of impossible is wrong."

She took off her sun glasses and looked him straight in the eyes.

"Should I expect that to be one of the answers you have in mind? I am getting very tired of things being impossible, so I think someone explaining all the impossible things would come as a welcome relief."

[Manah]

"Aah, now we're making progress", the blond man said, smiling mysteriously. "You hit the nail on the head, lass. Your definition of 'impossible' is very much incomplete, thanks to yer dear, rather overprotective daddykins", he said with a somewhat mischievous tone, earning him an annoyed glance from Fisk. "Now... if you are willing to put aside the possibility of impossibility, I'd really love if we took this to my home. And this here door leads right to it. I guarantee it is safe, so would you kindly come along? I will explain everything."

[Janus]

Persephone nodded.

Things were possible that she didn't think were possible. It would take her some time to get her head around the concept but it was real, it wasn't crazy, she could cope with it.

She looked to her father for his approval and then stepped though the door, pausing as was her habit in new places to get an idea of the layout and its contents.

Old habits died hard and her eyes took the entire area in, her mind recording and cataloguing every detail for later. A photographic memory was both a gift and a curse but she had learned to use it to combat her mental frailties.

[Manah]

On the other side of the portal awaited a large, luxurious-looking living room in what appeared to be a gothic-styled mansion. Large bookcases lining the walls, ancient-looking chairs, couches and pieces of furniture around, an old-style chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and so on. The floor was entirely carpeted and a black stone fireplace stood in the middle of one of the sides of the room, with a warm fire burning in it.

Moments after Persephone had entered the room, Constantine and her father followed along.

"Welcome to the House of Mystery. Please have a seat... we got quite a bit to talk about", John said, with Fisk doing just that.

[Janus]

Persephone took her time getting to a chair. There was so much to take in after all. Titles on the spines of books, dust on the top of shelves, the way the light caught the edges of chairs. The multitude of colours and shades, the ballet of light and dark, the detail and the grand scheme.

She wandered almost aimlessly for a moment, seemingly drawn to sights and sounds around the room before the silence of the two men waiting for her startled her out of her revery.

She gave an embarised smile and sat down rapidly next to her father.

"I'm sorry. It's... New." She said by way of explanation.

In her world new things were something to be wary of, but with her newly acquired lack of fear, her wariness had turned to facination. She drank in the sights and sounds like parched man takes his first sip of water.

She sat with her hands folded on her lap, an expectant look on her face, her gaze occasionally straying around the room to drink in its wonders.

[Manah]

Constantine smiled.

"You don't need to apologize, lass. If anyone here needs apologizin', it'd be your beloved daddy fer keepin' ya in the dark too much, an' me for bein' about to drag ya into the light", he said, taking a drag of his cigarette. "And yet you have to know, because otherwise it'll only get worse from here. So... how about we start from the beginning?" he said, clasping his hands.

"...Just how normal do you believe the world to be, aside from visions of yours you keep havin'? Lemme guess, magic exists only in fairy tales, humans are at the top of the food chain, we're alone in the universe, and the laws of physics are absolute?"

[Janus]

Persephone looked at her father reaching over to squeeze his hand and then looked back at John, her focus disappearing for a moment into the middle distance.

She was lucid now, more lucid than she had ever been, and lacking its usual target for dissection her mind went to work on what he had said.

Aliens must, by pure dint of probability, exist somewhere. The concept of a food chain was simply based on circumstance. Put a human unarmed on the African plains and the food chain would look a lot different. Physics was simply based on what was currently known. All those things we arguable, so they weren't what he was talking about. That left, magic.

Could he be talking about that? It was the centre point of his statement. Magic changed physics, changed the position of humans on the food chain, changed if we were alone in the universe.


More over there as no other explanation for what he had done. He had without means of chemicals stopped not only her hallucinations, but also stopped her panicking. She could feel the effects even now. Maybe it might be possible with medication, but her father had tried the best doctors in the world. All the medications she had tried had come with side effects, they had taken hours to work at all and months to reach potency. This had happened with no obvious chemical and the effect had been instant, it was miraculous. Then there was the door and the invisible House, could technology explain that? The only technology she knew of that could do something like that was science fiction. Star Trek and holography, and that certainly wouldn't explain her mental state.

When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains however improbable, must be the answer.

But if he were just going to magic her hallucinations away they would not be having this conversation. He would have visited her home and that would have been that.

He needed to teach her something. Perhaps magic had limitations. Did he need to teach her to cure herself, or was there more to it?

"So, you are going to teach me magic?" She asked sounding slightly incredulous. "OK, how does it work?"

[Manah]

"That's an interesting train of thought ya got going on there, but no, not quite what I meant", he said with a hint of amusement and interest, not unlike a teacher who knew quite well how unlikely his students could answer a given question, but who'd asked it anyway. He leaned in slightly forward, his piercing gaze locked on hers.

"See, I was not telling you four possibilities for you to pick the only wrong one amongst. Truth is... none of them were correct", he said, waving his hands aside in a gesture reminiscent of someone opening curtains. "Magic is real. Humankind does have predators. We are not alone in the universe. And the Laws of Physics... they're more like guidelines. The natural world tries its best to follow them, but sometimes it fails... and not everything is natural."

"For most people, none of that matters", Fisk grunted, visibly annoyed by Constantine's explanation, even though it didn't seem like he was going to argue against it.

"She's not most people", the blond man retorted, smoking for a moment, before continuing. "...The world out there has begun noticing some things that were once believed to be impossible. Superhumans. Technology bordering on what was once believed to be impossible. Strange, unexplainable phenomena. A superhero calling himself Superman has been seen flying at supersonic speeds without the assistance of any visible equipment, and performing feats of strength your average elephant can only dream of. Here in New York have been sightings of a guy in blue and red tights who can use some sort of webbing, stick on walls and crazy agility, calling himself Spider-Man. There's word on the street of a serial killer with various superhuman abilities", he enumerated.

"The world is not nearly as normal as you've come to believe. And neither are you, but not because I'm going to teach you magic. Because... you are the Archive", he said, pausing... apparently for dramatic effect.

"What is 'the Archive', you ask?" he said, nodding. "...A living, breathing repository of knowledge and power. It is the reason behind your troubles, the key to get rid of them, the origin of your own set of unusual abilities... and the path you're going to have to walk from now on, I'm afraid."

[Janus]

She frowned, processing what she had been told.

"So, not schizophrenia." She said, considering. "And there have been others, before me."

Any role that came with a title implied a succession, and John's manner implied that the role came with difficulties.

Suppressed knowledge could certainly provoke schizophrenia like episodes, where knowledge came bursting through to the surface and the conscious mind just tried to make sense of it by putting it into the visual cortex.

Suppressed memories were one of the many things the doctors had tested her for. Of course they hadn't found any, but did that mean they had been looking in the wrong place?

"You should probably keep going. I don't think I have this knowledge you are talking about yet."

She shrugged and and looked at him, expectantly.

[Manah]

"Oh no, very much schizophrenia. As opposed to being the problem, it was simply a symptom", John said, shaking his head gravely. "The human mind was never meant to hold such a connection to the universe, and your brain working overtime - and in overdrive - has encountered some issues. It can be overcome, however. Especially once we help you through accessing your true nature", the blond man explained.

"I can trigger your... awakening, so to speak. But it won't be pleasant. I promise things will be a lot clearer afterwards, though, if that's any comfort. Are you ready to get your, well, mind blown, pretty literally?" he asked, taking a puff out of his cigarette.

[Janus]

"If waiting would help you'd probably have suggested it." Persephone said with a shrug.

She ducked her head under the strap of her satchel and handed the bag to her father.

Then with nothing breakable on her person she nodded.

"And if it's unpleasant I'd like to get it over with."

Unpleasant didn't scare her so much as it annoyed her. Her mind showed her more unpleasantness in an average week than most people would experience in a lifetime.

The psychiatrists had had no way to make it better so she had learned coping strategies. Her art was one, her analysis another, but the third and most important one was acceptance.

She sat back in the chair, took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax, silently told the butterflies that were suddenly lurching around in her stomach to sit down and shut up and then spoke.

"I'm ready. Well, as ready as I can be. Which probably isn't very."

[Manah]

The occult investigator simply nodded as she pointed out how waiting would be technically irrelevant, and how eager she was to be done with the unpleasant part. He seemed to agree wholeheartedly, although her father seemed somewhat nervous.

"Just... do whatever you can to make this easier", Fisk demanded.

"Gee, thanks. Hadn't thought of that", John retorted somewhat dryly, shrugging as he reached for the girl's forehead with the palm of his hand. "...Think happy thoughts, rainbows and sunshine", he said, likely sarcastically, before everything around Persephone went ridiculously loud, and blindingly bright for a moment, her senses overloaded by everything and nothing, at once, for just a moment. It wasn't necessarily painful, but it was thoroughly dizzying and overpowering, unlike anything she had ever imagined even in her wildest dreams, nightmares, or hallucinations. And then, just as brutally as it had begun, it all stopped.

She opened her eyes - having not even noticed when she had closed them and how she had been clutching hard onto the fabric of her seat with her hands as she underwent this intense experience - and she immediately felt the differences. The changes, both within, and without her.

She knew the Archive. She was the Archive. She didn't have a full grasp on all that this implied, no, far from it. In fact, while she had gained so unbelievably much from this mere instant of enlightenment, she only realized the extent of everything else she could access with time and effort, the real potential of what she had become. She was no longer a simple mortal, but she was far from what she could potentially become in time.

And then she snapped back to reality, her consciousness returning - mostly - to her usual self... except with incredible new abilities and an immeasurable potential, just waiting for her to learn to access it. She also noticed that John's spell from earlier was not affecting her anymore... because she now understood things she had never dared to imagine before*.Her father and John were both patiently waiting for her attention to get back to them, and when the latter noticed it seemed to be the case, he smiled.

"Quite the trip, heh, lass?"

---

OOC: *or rather she knows she would easily understand it if she used one of her new powers, the list of which I will send your way right away.

Please note the ANs of your powers are quire low. There are two reasons for this: one, your very high intelligence makes up for this a bit and they all come with Int.bonus. Two, the scope of those powers are all very versatile and potent, so they cost a lot even at low levels. As you have seen, I explain this via the whole 'immeasurable potential but limited grasp of it yet' deal.

...Also, you took 10 stun damage to your energy from the whole experience. XD

[Janus]

Persephone blinked, once, twice and then stared off into the middle distance.

There was no way to accurately describe the sensation of awakening to her power. No words for the knowledge that was now a part of her, that had always been a part of her, even without her knowing it.

She could feel 'everything' at the edge of her consciousness, the sum of all knowledge just beyond her reach. It was annoying in a way she had not expected infinity to be. Like a word just on the tip of her tongue, but multiplied by existence.

She scowled and focused on something else. She was immortal now and that, barring misfortune was going to mean she would have to put up with this sensation for a very long time. The universe evidently had a sense of humor, and she couldn't help but feel that she was now the butt of this particular joke.

She could apparently also be anything, or come to think of it, anyone. She looked around and decided against disappearing. It might be considered rude and she was just getting used to being omniscient so disagreements would give her a headache.

"Ita, nunc quid accidit?" She said to John, then her face clouded over in a frown. The words sounded odd.

(*OOC trans from Latin: "So, what happens now?")

"Izvinite. Zvuchit nepravil'no"

(Russian: "Sorry. That doesn't sound right.")

"Hindi rin iyon"

(Filipino: Nor does that.")

"Oh mërzitem!"

(Albanian: "Oh bother!")

"Geen... Née... Mahi... Na..."

(Afrikans, Dutch, Marathi, Welsh: "No... No... No... No...")

"Ooh that was closer. Oh I've got it! I'm sorry, there's a bit of a jumble in here."

She stopped and took a deep breath before continuing.

"So, what happens now?"