ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2007
- Posts
- 16,135
Chloe
Chloe rubbed her eyes as she slumped against the wall. She needed Visine like a man in the desert needed a cool drink. Her eyes were very red... she had been crying, and she'd hardly slept, and to top all that off she'd been staring fairly non-stop at a computer screen since she'd arrived.
She was already at school.
She had already been in the office of The Torch.
(Her skirt was black today, and so were her boots. Her shirt was pale pink, and it matched the fake flower she'd perched into her hair.)
Earl hadn't been there to greet her, but she'd called SMC and they said they fully expected to let him out later that day.
Fortunately for her, Mr. Gladstone had been within earshot of her knocking on the door and had let her in just as easily.
And thus she had sat, and done much of the research that she'd been too insane to do the night before.
She had sat on her bed with tears rolling down her face, and she had hugged her little old Tawky Tawny so tightly she had worried that his head would pop off. (She had worried her own head would pop off.)
There had been roller coasters made of her neural pathways and whatever small genius had been ascribed to her had been waylaid temporarily by the screaming riders of those coasters.
Because she'd always known there was Something Going On in Smallville. She'd known in the core of her gut in the heart of her brain, she'd known that there was secret hugeness happening right under her nose.
But this was big. This was so very very big.
She hadn't been able to handle it, not all at once.
Rose. Professor Smith.
Principal Jamison. Kyle Matthews.
Poor Earl! And poor Darla!
Poor Michael, too. But then, he had probably been suffering some kind of electrolyte imbalance and he'd got sent home already.
It was all so very very insane. Like some sort of bedroom farce where everyone's in everyone's business and whose bed have your boots been under and all these disparate fishtailing storylines dovetail together in the end...
...except unlike in a bedroom farce, no-one was actually Getting Any. (That Chloe knew of.)
Chloe had eventually drifted off to sleep, the glow-in-the-dark constellations on her ceiling a soothing green presence above her.
She'd dreamed that the sky was falling. All over again. And that she couldn't pull her eyes away. She'd wanted to see... she'd wanted to see Everything. She'd wanted to Understand.
And when she'd woken, her mind had been steadied overnight.
Having gained ingress to the school, she'd sat down at her computers and she'd hammered away. She'd paged through The World of Weird and through what she'd had of Professor Willowbrook's notes.
She'd retrieved a book on Kawatche folklore from the school library to refresh her memory, and she'd remembered to send that fax to Professor "Smith's" office. (As much as school had been a train wreck yesterday, some teachers' memories were long about attendance, and she wanted to make sure neither she nor Bruce nor Rose nor Pete nor even Kyle got in trouble when they shouldn't have to.)
And then she'd sat back down, coffee and power bar in hand, and once more burrowed into The Internet.
She'd Googled.
Lazarus Pits were a thing of legend. Myths, spattered across the world, found at the intersections of ley-lines. Stories had it that these festering cesspools promised immortality for the strongest-willed of men, for those who used them whose minds were less than ironclad would utterly lose those minds.
Ra's al Ghul was himself a matter of legend. His name had been whispered during The Fall of Rome. Revolutions in Russia and mainland China and across Europe... his name was there. Apparently the mythic figure dabbled in a little bit of eco-terrorism on the side, but ever and always was his name associated with the deaths of kingdoms.
And then there was his League of Shadows.
The long arm of Ra's al Ghul's law, The League was, according to conspiracy mill websites, the force by which Ra's exacted his judgment on kingdoms that had lived, in his opinion, much too long.
There were uncountable numbers of secret societies in the world. The Skull and Bones Club. The Masons, and their Illuminati. La Cosa Nostra, in its way.
The Hellfire Club.
The Order of Ancient Mysteries. The Order of Saint Dumas.
The Brotherhood of The Cruciform Sword.
The Alliance of Twelve, and The Magnific Order of Rambaldi.
The Invisible College. The Watchers' Council.
The Remnant.
But few were as steeped in dread as was The League of Shadows.
But that's pretty much all there was online about The League. That it was dreadful, and that under Ra's al Ghul's command it claimed responsibility for overturning civilisations like a gardener would turn soil: so that new things can grow.
If there was more to find on this, Chloe would have to look much longer and much harder to find it.
There was, however, a link further down one of the pages. A link buried in blurry photographs of supposed League of Shadows memoranda. A long thin symbol, a vertical line with a circle at the centre, and a lopsided arrowhead around the top end.
Chloe's brow furrowed, and she grabbed the journal, and paged through this hurriedly...
She found the symbol. "Crusade." Just like Var-Sen had pointed out to her yesterday.
The symbol itself, through some miracle of HTML or what-have-you, was the link, like an "Easter Egg" on a DVD. She clicked this link...
...and she found a whole new conspiracy mill site, dedicated to...
...dedicated to a search for the so-called...
"The Elements of Power."
There were pages and pages of articles, most of them encoded. Some were written backwards in Latin and this broke Chloe's brain a little. (She bookmarked the site so that she could come back to it later.)
But one was in French and she could handle French.
There was another blurry photograph. Of a grave in France, in a venerable church in Paris. The girl had been burned as a witch, but she had been buried in a church, and that struck Chloe as a rather strange dichotomy. Unlike Saint Joan, this witch was still a witch in the eyes of history, and she hadn't been canonised.
And yet there she was, buried on Holy Ground. Like the priests and nuns were keeping an eye on her, even after death.
(The date and locale of her death had not been insignificant, either: the very early seventeenth century A.D., near Castelnau-de-Montmiral in France.)
Chloe pursed her lips at this, and she looked again at the blurry picture.
There was another of Var-Sen's Kryptonian symbols here. Actually? Snuck in there? She could find a handful of them.
The symbol for "Transference." The symbol for "Resurrection." And... and the symbol for "Air."
Hurriedly, Chloe printed this page. With a red Sharpie marker, she encircled the symbols, and, in particular, she drew arrows to the symbol for "Air."
With a rush of skirts and a cadence of boots (clud-swish) she had gotten herself back to the library and sent out another fax to Professor Smith.
Of the picture of the witch-girl who in death wore symbols from beyond the stars.
As Chloe had left the library, she had noticed something else hidden in the jigsaw puzzle of images on the original printout... right at the very bottom, in the corner, yet another installment in a veritable cornucopia of hidden meanings.
Cyrillic? ...Russian? ...as it might have looked before Peter the Great had mandated Westernised forms in the eighteenth century.
Chloe's eye twitched as she walked, and she stared at the image.
She was. This was a little out of her league. This was...
...her whole face scrunched up.
It was Russian, and it read: 'I have looked deeper.'
Had those been her last words? Why in goodness' name had they been in Russian? If they hadn't been her last words, why would they put something so enigmatic on her grave?
...and it was then, walking back to The Torch, there in the early hour just before classes began, that she leaned against the wall in the school and lamented her lack of Visine.
Shortly thereafter, she trudged back into the offices, and once again berated herself for leaving the door unlocked.
And sitting there, regal, as if awaiting a peasant who had sought audience, or as if he were Ahasuerus awaiting Esther, was Kyle Matthews.
Chloe arched her eyebrows, and she blinked rapidly, and she wished desperately for more coffee.
"Kyle?" she wondered. "Is everything okay? Is there something I can do for you?
"If you're coming out to me as the secret identity of Deep Throat, I promise you?" she remarked, wryly: "They already found him."
Chloe rubbed her eyes as she slumped against the wall. She needed Visine like a man in the desert needed a cool drink. Her eyes were very red... she had been crying, and she'd hardly slept, and to top all that off she'd been staring fairly non-stop at a computer screen since she'd arrived.
She was already at school.
She had already been in the office of The Torch.
(Her skirt was black today, and so were her boots. Her shirt was pale pink, and it matched the fake flower she'd perched into her hair.)
Earl hadn't been there to greet her, but she'd called SMC and they said they fully expected to let him out later that day.
Fortunately for her, Mr. Gladstone had been within earshot of her knocking on the door and had let her in just as easily.
And thus she had sat, and done much of the research that she'd been too insane to do the night before.
She had sat on her bed with tears rolling down her face, and she had hugged her little old Tawky Tawny so tightly she had worried that his head would pop off. (She had worried her own head would pop off.)
There had been roller coasters made of her neural pathways and whatever small genius had been ascribed to her had been waylaid temporarily by the screaming riders of those coasters.
Because she'd always known there was Something Going On in Smallville. She'd known in the core of her gut in the heart of her brain, she'd known that there was secret hugeness happening right under her nose.
But this was big. This was so very very big.
She hadn't been able to handle it, not all at once.
Rose. Professor Smith.
Principal Jamison. Kyle Matthews.
Poor Earl! And poor Darla!
Poor Michael, too. But then, he had probably been suffering some kind of electrolyte imbalance and he'd got sent home already.
It was all so very very insane. Like some sort of bedroom farce where everyone's in everyone's business and whose bed have your boots been under and all these disparate fishtailing storylines dovetail together in the end...
...except unlike in a bedroom farce, no-one was actually Getting Any. (That Chloe knew of.)
Chloe had eventually drifted off to sleep, the glow-in-the-dark constellations on her ceiling a soothing green presence above her.
She'd dreamed that the sky was falling. All over again. And that she couldn't pull her eyes away. She'd wanted to see... she'd wanted to see Everything. She'd wanted to Understand.
And when she'd woken, her mind had been steadied overnight.
Having gained ingress to the school, she'd sat down at her computers and she'd hammered away. She'd paged through The World of Weird and through what she'd had of Professor Willowbrook's notes.
She'd retrieved a book on Kawatche folklore from the school library to refresh her memory, and she'd remembered to send that fax to Professor "Smith's" office. (As much as school had been a train wreck yesterday, some teachers' memories were long about attendance, and she wanted to make sure neither she nor Bruce nor Rose nor Pete nor even Kyle got in trouble when they shouldn't have to.)
And then she'd sat back down, coffee and power bar in hand, and once more burrowed into The Internet.
She'd Googled.
Lazarus Pits were a thing of legend. Myths, spattered across the world, found at the intersections of ley-lines. Stories had it that these festering cesspools promised immortality for the strongest-willed of men, for those who used them whose minds were less than ironclad would utterly lose those minds.
Ra's al Ghul was himself a matter of legend. His name had been whispered during The Fall of Rome. Revolutions in Russia and mainland China and across Europe... his name was there. Apparently the mythic figure dabbled in a little bit of eco-terrorism on the side, but ever and always was his name associated with the deaths of kingdoms.
And then there was his League of Shadows.
The long arm of Ra's al Ghul's law, The League was, according to conspiracy mill websites, the force by which Ra's exacted his judgment on kingdoms that had lived, in his opinion, much too long.
There were uncountable numbers of secret societies in the world. The Skull and Bones Club. The Masons, and their Illuminati. La Cosa Nostra, in its way.
The Hellfire Club.
The Order of Ancient Mysteries. The Order of Saint Dumas.
The Brotherhood of The Cruciform Sword.
The Alliance of Twelve, and The Magnific Order of Rambaldi.
The Invisible College. The Watchers' Council.
The Remnant.
But few were as steeped in dread as was The League of Shadows.
But that's pretty much all there was online about The League. That it was dreadful, and that under Ra's al Ghul's command it claimed responsibility for overturning civilisations like a gardener would turn soil: so that new things can grow.
If there was more to find on this, Chloe would have to look much longer and much harder to find it.
There was, however, a link further down one of the pages. A link buried in blurry photographs of supposed League of Shadows memoranda. A long thin symbol, a vertical line with a circle at the centre, and a lopsided arrowhead around the top end.
Chloe's brow furrowed, and she grabbed the journal, and paged through this hurriedly...
She found the symbol. "Crusade." Just like Var-Sen had pointed out to her yesterday.
The symbol itself, through some miracle of HTML or what-have-you, was the link, like an "Easter Egg" on a DVD. She clicked this link...
...and she found a whole new conspiracy mill site, dedicated to...
...dedicated to a search for the so-called...
"The Elements of Power."
There were pages and pages of articles, most of them encoded. Some were written backwards in Latin and this broke Chloe's brain a little. (She bookmarked the site so that she could come back to it later.)
But one was in French and she could handle French.
There was another blurry photograph. Of a grave in France, in a venerable church in Paris. The girl had been burned as a witch, but she had been buried in a church, and that struck Chloe as a rather strange dichotomy. Unlike Saint Joan, this witch was still a witch in the eyes of history, and she hadn't been canonised.
And yet there she was, buried on Holy Ground. Like the priests and nuns were keeping an eye on her, even after death.
(The date and locale of her death had not been insignificant, either: the very early seventeenth century A.D., near Castelnau-de-Montmiral in France.)
Chloe pursed her lips at this, and she looked again at the blurry picture.
There was another of Var-Sen's Kryptonian symbols here. Actually? Snuck in there? She could find a handful of them.
The symbol for "Transference." The symbol for "Resurrection." And... and the symbol for "Air."
Hurriedly, Chloe printed this page. With a red Sharpie marker, she encircled the symbols, and, in particular, she drew arrows to the symbol for "Air."
With a rush of skirts and a cadence of boots (clud-swish) she had gotten herself back to the library and sent out another fax to Professor Smith.
Of the picture of the witch-girl who in death wore symbols from beyond the stars.
As Chloe had left the library, she had noticed something else hidden in the jigsaw puzzle of images on the original printout... right at the very bottom, in the corner, yet another installment in a veritable cornucopia of hidden meanings.
Cyrillic? ...Russian? ...as it might have looked before Peter the Great had mandated Westernised forms in the eighteenth century.
Chloe's eye twitched as she walked, and she stared at the image.
She was. This was a little out of her league. This was...
...her whole face scrunched up.
It was Russian, and it read: 'I have looked deeper.'
Had those been her last words? Why in goodness' name had they been in Russian? If they hadn't been her last words, why would they put something so enigmatic on her grave?
...and it was then, walking back to The Torch, there in the early hour just before classes began, that she leaned against the wall in the school and lamented her lack of Visine.
Shortly thereafter, she trudged back into the offices, and once again berated herself for leaving the door unlocked.
And sitting there, regal, as if awaiting a peasant who had sought audience, or as if he were Ahasuerus awaiting Esther, was Kyle Matthews.
Chloe arched her eyebrows, and she blinked rapidly, and she wished desperately for more coffee.
"Kyle?" she wondered. "Is everything okay? Is there something I can do for you?
"If you're coming out to me as the secret identity of Deep Throat, I promise you?" she remarked, wryly: "They already found him."
Last edited:
