①
After recuperating from the side effects, the Journalist with the Cowlick Tuft and the Accountant with the Canary Smile were interviewing each other, gathering their bearings before attempting to conduct dialogue with the SeerSighters again. Baring any unforseen events happening to any of them, there should at least be some record of their presence left, giving proof that at one time, they existed.
“The beauty of math is that there are so many different ways to wind up with the same answer. I want to know what their system is. So far, they’ve introduced me to their numbering system. They use a base three system, and use lavender where I’d use a fuchsia instead.”
“Yes, very impressive,” the Journalist replied, doing his utmost best to suppress a yawn.
“I ask that you be patient with me. My experience with SeerSighters like these is severely limited. When the ONEs talk to me, they usually talk in higher maths. Now, I’ve drawn up a little formula here. I’m curious as to what their answer might be.”
{Now is not an opportune time for answers}
“But I’ve seen you solve mathematical problems before. What’s the problem now?”
{Complications}
“I’m beginning to see why the past teams had trouble.”
Indeed, the SeerSighters seemed to be notoriously finicky about just when they would give their foresight. The thing was, math formulas couldn’t be given on a guess. There was only the right answer or the wrong answer, and nothing in between, unless you were dealing with hypotheticals, imaginary numbers and quantum mechanics, but this wasn’t anything as complicated as that. The SeerSighters simply refused to give the answer right away, preferring to give them {When the time is right}.
And no amount of questioning on just when the right time was was forthcoming, no matter how much the Journalist queried.
“Is the light in your eyes or something?”
②
The Girl woke up from the hard floor, wondering where she was before she remembered. The aftereffects from the SeerSighters’ Visage affected her more strongly than expected. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she was dimly aware of movement happening around her, but couldn’t make sense of it. Now that she’d regained her senses, she was annoyed at herself. The others had walked off the effects faster than she had.
She brought her legs together, turning her body around, arcing them until they were upright, and then stumbled. It shouldn’t be this difficult - the flat of your soles were supposed to be parallel to the ground, right? She attempted to stand again, propping herself upwards on her arms, momentarily forgetting how her wrists worked until she was parallel to her legs and stood up, but failed to move the rest of her body as well, and fell over again.
It took numerous attempts involving combinations of splayed legs, arms and feet until she stumbled upon one that worked. It was an unorthodox way of standing, involving using the nearby chairs and tables as a crutch, but she’d managed it! Now, all she had to do was walk.
She decided to stay still a little longer until she was certain which way her knees bent.
Was being in the presence of a ONE enough to disorient you like this? She realized that in addition to regaining her lack of balance, her sight and hearing were affected as well. There were flashes of bright spots that remained fixated in front of her long after the image had faded away. Her ears were ringing an annoying tinnitus tone that wouldn’t go away, a constant humming sound she was unable to shut out droning on and on in a manner that annoyed her to no end...
It took her some time to realize that the noise was dialogue between people and SeerSighters.
③
She didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but her current condition made it difficult to sneak away quietly, and her presence was soon noticed.
“Oh, you’re up! Have you recovered?”
“This? This is nothing! I’ve gone through trials that were worse than this!”
Those were the bravado words she spoke, or at least, tried to. What actually came out was,
“Umfph, dmph uf nffdmph! Uf gnf thrp trls drt vir vrsh dn dsh!” It seemed her method of speech was affected as well. Her diatribe would’ve been more effective if she kept her mouth open.
“It can take some time getting used to. What helps is focusing on something that’s important to you.”
“Uh cnt tmpk uf nythg.”
“Really? Not a thing?”
“Surely there must be something.”
“Uf nffr hd mch ntrst n nythg.” She was finding it difficult to reorient herself back onto familiar territory. In addition to her discombobulated senses, her tongue had no sensation of taste, and she was surprised at how unnatural her teeth felt.
“You didn’t get a chance to introduce yourself earlier. Just out of curiosity, how do you know the Alien Woman?”
“Oh BOY,” the Girl started, regaining her powers of speech, “where do I even begin???”
①
“It all started when I was rescued from being captured in a germ cult, but before that, I was wandering the streets after being released from my jobs, both of them, unable to find proper lodgings in a City where I’d hoped to make my pregnancy less smelly. It’s more fair to say that it all started when I was tricked into thinking that tentacle sex was all it was cracked up to be.”
She continued rambling, bouncing from event to event, not bothering to remain coherent, all her pent-up repressed memories of her time in the City of Lies pouring out, with no regard to whether they made narrative sense or not.
“...and then my bag got stolen. No wait, that happened later.”
The Journalist looked on in amusement. Let the Accountant have a taste of what it was like interviewing second-rate individuals espousing over their dubious contributions to their lives for a change.
“How’s it going?”
“Very confusingly. She goes in spurts and stops, going back to explain something she overlooked.”
“Maybe visual aids would help? Here, this box of tissues is the Germ Cult, this balloon is me...”
{Would this be sufficient?}
The SeerSighter assisted by showing imaged dramatizations of the events she experienced.
“Even better!” she responded, snapping the pictures up, utterly oblivious to the sudden invasion of her privacy. “It’s a little mixed-up in parts, but they’ve got most of it in order. I can go into the intricacies in better detail!”
“That was amazing. How did you that?”, the Journalist turned towards the SeerSighter who ignored the pointed questions. “Could you go into further detail of extracting memories into physical form?” he continued running off, chasing the SeerSighter flitting away in search of more interesting answers.
“His loss,” she shrugged. “It all started when I was celebrating my 16th birthday the only way I knew how...”
“You don’t have to recall your life story if you don’t want to,” the Accountant politely replied, hoping to get out of this purgatory and back into more interesting math.
“No, it’s no big deal. You’re the first person who’s even bothered to ask how I’m doing. Everybody knows what their purpose in life is, and I’m still waiting for mine. All I’ve been doing is serving drinks at work. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I can’t really contribute anything. If I’d known... SHE was here, I wouldn’t have come in the first place. I thought it sounded like a cushy job.”
“The Alien Woman isn’t so bad once you get to know her.”
“That’s pretty much my job description at this point. I’m not complaining, but I’d like something a little more mentally challenging. I’m so bored. Everybody knows what their purpose in life is, and I’m still waiting for mine. I mean, it’s not even fair. I’ve been unfairly expunged from the rest of the team and then integrated after being tricked by a Weird Scientist putting on a very convincing disguise in seeing BugBoy.”
②
The Alien Woman and Silver-Haired Reporter continued watching the monitor, doing their utmost best to wrest meaning from the meaningless scribbles on the screen. After long scenes of intense concentration, the Alien Woman made an observation.
“I think that squiggle appearing at both ends of the screen is supposed to be the same human. Or their representation of how they see humans.”
The Silver-Haired Reporter looked at the image again. If seen from a cross-section, it certainly could be half of a nervous system. He looked back through his personal assembled blinder, hastily crafted using various parts found lying around the room, sliding the shielding panel towards the center. Certain sections of the screen were blocked to allow for easier viewing. Only the barest fraction of the display could be comprehended. Seeing the whole image all at once was too much to take in. He looked from one side of the puzzle, then back, with no success at getting any closer to their way of thinking.
“Okay, so given what we already know, how does that change things?”
“The reason we’re having so much trouble is because we’re going into it blindly, without getting any sense of their cultural representation it implies. Take us for example. We have hundreds of references to old stories, filtered throughout the ages that have become so commonplace we’ve forgotten how original they were in the first place.”
{It’s designed for a younger set}
The Silver-Haired Reporter resignedly looked away in disgrace. “I have been defeated by a children’s show.”
③
At this, the Alien Woman’s head snapped to attention to what was just said. She stared intensely in the direction of the speaker, who remained unaware of her interest.
The Silver-Haired Reporter continued brainstorming.
“As best as I can tell, there are about 60 reoccurring characters, each with differing relationships with each other that changes over time. I’ve grouped the most frequent appearing ones together. I still haven’t figured out what the purple/orange/black one does. If it were up to me, I’d take a random SeerSighter and go back in time. Any SeerSighter who’d express reluctance at being touched would be the one to investigate, since their foresight wouldn’t extend far enough to going back to the past. But it takes tremendous energy to build up enough to go back a few minutes. Damn, going low-tech is an exercise in frustration.”
It took him some time to realize the Alien Woman wasn’t looking at him. He wasn’t accustomed to being ignored.
“Did you notice something?”
“Shh,” she whispered, holding up a finger, her attention focused on the moving figure before her. She kept looking off into the distance, and had to be snapped at to get focussed on track again. She looked at the Reporter without actually looking at him, then abruptly walked off without explanation, leaving him to watch the SeerSighter’s baffling show all on his lonesome.
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