DELETED SCENES FROM 15 STRANGERS ROUND 6

[incendiarize]

[Arthur has been known to swim in the pool on occasion. Or just let himself float. It's a good way to lose himself and stop worrying so much, and it's a good way to work off a post-vision funk. So, yeah, he's headed there now.

Maybe someone else is too?]

Comments

[backuphero]

[Of course Arthur of all people would be able to just let that roll off his back. Jonathan nods, and finds his way to the bench closest to the locker he'd chosen, and sits down.]

I, uh. I figured. You've got a good range of motion, and they don't look like new scars.

[He feels very young, somehow. Also very stupid, but that's not exactly a new feeling in this town of gray boxes.]

[incendiarize]

Yeah, they're like... Ten years old, by now? I kinda forget they're there, most of the time.

[It rarely comes up since he's in the habit of keeping covered. Everyone at the Library knows, and it's not like he's stripped in front of Ricky or Rosa, and Rune's about as chatty as Link so he didn't comment....]

You want the long version or the short?

[backuphero]

Whichever version's least uncomfortable is fine. But... ten years? Jesus, you were a child....

[Well, on the bright side, he isn't falling into time with the ticking when he talks now. And thoughts of Hiyori have been thoroughly flung out the metaphorical window.

Now he just wants to punch probably an entire army square in the teeth. There are some weapons that shouldn't be used.]

[incendiarize]

Eh, they're not that different, but the long version's all tied up in some bad stuff happening back in Etria.... Back in my world just saying Gotham would be enough.

Gotham was a mining town at the foot of Yggdrasil. It got totally levelled overnight in an unprecedented disaster and if you believe the rumors no plants grow for miles around the ruins and there's a big pit where Yggdrasil used to be that's still burning. There's only two known survivors, me and Simon.

[He's casual about the telling, it really doesn't bother him. It was a long time ago.]

[backuphero]

So it's not just Earth that's got places where all you need to say is the name and people just know, huh... still, that's....

[It's hard to focus. It's hard to understand why Arthur's so casual about this, or even how he is... it's been years, sure, Jonathan can wrap his mind around that, but this doesn't seem like the kind of thing that time should help with.

Then again, he's never known that kind of loss. Maybe it is! He doesn't know.]

I'm sorry. Know you've probably heard that a lot, but... that's a hell of a lot to go through.

[incendiarize]

....Uh. I'm from Earth.

[Hooboy. This is about to get really heavy, isn't it?]

When I mentioned Gotham, back in the Mansion, Eric, uh, Eric Lecarde, not the Eric here now, immediately asked if I was from, uhhh.... Yew Nork City? And I don't know for sure, I don't think anyone knows that. But I do know my world used to have a huge city, bigger than anything, called Tokyo.

[He kind of waves off the apology. He has heard it a lot, and it's a nice sentiment, he guesses, but as ever he focuses on the present and near future.]

[backuphero]

That... that sounds like Tokyo as Nagisa knows it, yeah. A city so big there's no horizon without buildings even out in the suburbs.

["Eric Lecarde, not the Eric here now" - God that hurts. It doesn't have any reason to; after all, the last time Jonathan saw the man he was alive and well, safe in Texas.

Part of him does wish a better adult were here, though. The thought of New York City leveled like Hiroshima is horrifying to where he wishes he couldn't picture it so clearly. Ruins, and a fire that never stops burning where there was once something named after the Vikings' world tree... ]

I - okay, before we get way too far afield, yeah, Gotham's a name for New York City, which is... it's... Paris is wrecked, so it's pretty much the city where people go to be artists or actors, or writers, things like that. That's an old name for it, but I guess he'd be the type to know....

[incendiarize]

Yeah. We only explored a tiny piece of Tokyo's ruins, but there were...there must have been no end to it, way back when. An ocean of, of I don't even know what, I have no clue what it was made of.

[He wonders if this "New York City" was anything like Tokyo. he can picture the city's beautiful remains so clearly.]

Artists, actors, and writers... I kind of hope the town name's a coincidence. The Library'd probably love to find those ruins.

[backuphero]

Who knows? If the world's changed so much that Tokyo's a sea of ruins... well, hell, maybe they'd be lucky enough to find the Met's still there underneath everything.

[A pause, just a beat, really.]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I mean. They've got a beautiful collection of weapons and armor... I've only been a couple of times, I'm from the central-south part of the country. "Austin" and "Dallas" don't sound familiar, do they?

[He can't not wonder.]

[incendiarize]

[He shakes his head.]

Nah, I don't know those names. Ricky probably would, she's from the Old World. And Raquna might know something, her kingdom supposedly goes back that far, but it's not like the whole world a been explored. They could still be out there, maybe even thriving. Just, you know, without contact with the rest of the world yet.

[backuphero]

[Jonathan shakes his own head, slowly, and then sighs.]

When I think about time on that kind of scale it just gives me a headache. I know humans are really good at surviving - hell, you're living proof - but the thought that we could go on so long that all the cities I know are either ruins or lost somehow just... it's a lot to take in.

[He smiles, then.]

Pretty egotistical, I know. Anyway, uh, I know the pool's not goin' anywhere, but right now I think jumping in would do me a world of good.

[incendiarize]

It's not like it was some slow process. Your cities probably would've survived indefinitely, without any kind of event horizon.

[He stretches, though. This was much more intense than when it came up with Eric Lecarde, that's for sure.]

Yeah, a swim sounds great.