#anyway this is my oc aeris gainsborough do not steal

[nautilusopus]

The Number I

Chapter 3: And Now For Something Completely Different

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER I NEED TO GET OUT OF THE WAY FIRST: Crisis Core is still 100% non-canon. What happened with this is that I ran out of character real estate and figured I didn't want to wind up stuck with three OCs for 90% of the story. Still not canon. Probably never will be for anything I write at all.

This took forever because I wrote it while simultaneously writing the next four chapters all at once, for reasons that will become apparent sooner or later, and also because I wanted to set up two extremely stupid jokes that won't come to fruition for like fifteen chapters.

Thanks to @fury-brand, @auncyen, @cateringisalie, @themateriodictable, and everyone else I bothered for this chapter because if I missed any details no one else would notice but I WOULD and it would eat me up inside forever.

Four years after meteor-fall and Cloud Strife still isn’t himself. The thing that haunts him comes always at the same time… and when it does, on a distant far-off world, a needle moves. Twisty AU. Warnings for future chapters.

"...dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space, and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, and it lies between the pit of man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge.This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area that might be called... The Twilight Zone." The television cast an eerie glow across the blanket, illuminating it enough to stand out but not enough to distinguish it from the monochrome wash the room had taken on in the dim light. 

At a little past five, more or less, a loud crunch started its occupant awake. The source of the noise licked its paws contentedly, indifferent to the stern glare it was now receiving from its owner, who reached for the remote under the couch cushions and switched the television off.

"You little shit." The cat, being a cat, said nothing.

Aeris Gainsborough sighed heavily and rolled off the couch she had fallen asleep on to go find a broom. The sad, crumpled remains of her peppermint weren't going to sweep up themselves.

It might not've bothered her as much if she had already been up, but now it was too late to go back to sleep. She shuffled into the kitchen and considered getting herself something caffeinated, but thought better of it. She couldn't afford to be jittery, today of all days. She returned to her living room/study and began scraping up the remains of her potted plant and salvaging what she could into a glass jar she grabbed off the counter. Perhaps it had been for the best -- it has been starting to encroach on the rest of her garden.

Breakfast consisted of eight eggs, dumped into the frying pan with a generous amount of cheese and butter. If caffeine wasn't an option today, a protein high would have to do, and there was no point in leaving perishables in her fridge anyway. She ate quickly, going over the cards for her speech and trying not to hate parts of it now that she was rereading it for the umpteenth time. It was too late to change any of it herself -- the committee had already approved this version to air, and going off script on what would probably be the second-most important day of her life (if she was lucky) was a risk she wasn't willing to take, no matter how awkwardly-phrased and corny the bit about humanity's next step into the future was.

She wolfed down the entire pan in about twenty minutes and got an early start on her hair, carefully pulling it back into a braid she thought would look dignified. Not that it would matter much, the makeup people she'd be assaulted with would probably redo it the minute she showed up anyway. They'd told her the pink ribbon she usually wore looked "unprofessional", so she tied it around her arm instead, hiding it under the suit they had picked out for the occasion. They'd never know.

Her cat Cassiopeia rubbed up against her leg, and she had to gently shove her away. The last thing she needed was to show up covered in hair.

She went over her speech again. And again. And another time to be certain. She went back to her desk and looked over her research, which was technically more important, then lost interest in that and went back to the speech. Loaded with plenty of big long words -- the suit, the vote against her ribbon, the speech, it was all meant to give off the impression of maturity. Probably to offset her age (there was a time and a place for milking the wunderkind angle and today was neither), but there was also the matter of her lineage to consider. This was her project now, after all. Today was about that as much as it was about the project itself.

She herded Cassiopeia into her carrier and checked over her luggage again: a briefcase with the summation of her life's work, which she quickly stuffed her speech cards into, and a tupperware container of licorice allsorts. Bringing in fresh produce probably wouldn't be allowed at the facility, but her candies would probably survive a quick sterilisation. The best part about liking licorice allsorts, Aeris had discovered, was that no one ever asked you to share them with you, so one could just eat the entire box undisturbed, though she did include another container of gummy bears for her coworkers as a peace offering. Outside comforts like this would be missed greatly in the coming weeks.

Briefcase, personal effects (outside toiletries had been prohibited as well), cat... on a whim, she rummaged through a drawer and fished out an old Polaroid camera, quickly throwing it into the bag with the candies. If astronauts got to take pictures of space, she wanted to document her work as well.

Aeris quickly piled everything by the door and made one last check around her house -- her house, another one of the perks of this job. It had really started to grow on her, and it was a shame she wouldn't see it for so long. She locked the door, unlocked it while trying to figure out if she had locked it properly, locked it again, and began her walk down Kenilworth Avenue to the nearest bus stop. This was it.

Cassiopeia yowled angrily the entire drive over to the kennel. "There won't be any plants to eat if you come with me," said Aeris, glancing around them, trying to spot the plainclothes bodyguards she'd been assigned for the trip. Perhaps they weren't here yet. "There will be lots of other cats there you can ruin gardens with together." She hoped there would be, actually. Perhaps then she'd finally get it out of her system.

After depositing her horrible greenery-chewing roommate and lightening her load somewhat, she made her way down to the train station. It was here she started catching a few stares. Shame she hadn't worn sunglasses or something.

On the train out of Reading, the "find the plainclothes" game she had been playing became much easier. The wiry-looking man reading a magazine she wasn't sure about, but the woman sitting across from her that looked as though she ate broken glass and bullets for breakfast that kept staring at the door next to her was easier to spot. Aeris checked her nails and did her best to ignore them both. It was only for a few more hours.

A woman on her left spoke to her then. "This is gonna sound a bit stupid, but you look exactly like that Dr. Gainsborough woman."

Aeris managed a quick smile. "Ah... that's 'cause I am." The woman laughed and went back to her phone, clearly not believing her, but a few other people on the train had heard and craned their heads to get a look. Aeris looked back, and they turned away.

She’d insisted on using public transport -- she didn’t have a driver’s license of her own yet, and she hadn’t liked the idea of the fancy chauffeur they had offered her waiting outside honking their horn when she just wanted to have a lie-in before the big day. If it was on her own terms, she could get a bit of extra sleep. That would surely be worth a few odd looks from the general public, right?

Stupid cat.

The train pulled into London an hour later, and she was immediately mobbed by more security detail the minute she stepped off the platform. She was at least grateful for the help with her luggage, but with them came the press. She kept her gaze focused directly ahead until they made it out of the station and reached the car. They'd have their answers soon enough.

She drummed on the seat all the way to the university, and stopped halfway through going over her speech in her head to realise that she had forgotten to put the pan in the dishwasher before she left, and the kitchen would probably smell awful when she got back. Too late now.

She was swarmed by hair and makeup the minute she set foot on campus, and was herded into an office they had appropriated as a green room. As predicted, they immediately undid her braid and began combing it out to tie it back into a bun.

"I spent good time on that, you know," grumbled Aeris, and then was forced to hold still while they applied foundation.

"I was beginning to think you'd bailed on us," came a voice from next to her, and Aeris managed to crane her head just enough to see Cissnei in the chair next to her, whose artist appeared to be finishing up.

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thinking about it," she replied. "All this is just for show. We could just go directly to the facility and not waste twelve hours on all this media circus stuff.”

“It’s a proud tradition, though!” said Cissnei, getting up and watching them attempt to herd Aeris’s hair into a fraction of the volume it normally took up, making her wince. “Everything like this needs something quotable. Armstrong, Sagan, Einstein, Curie. You need a line that someone can spend two hundred takes on trying to nail the one that nets them an award when they make the dramatised documentary version of this in ten years or so.”

“This entire speech is the most generic combination of words I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“It’s not the words,” said Cissnei, sneaking a peak at her speech cards, “it’s the delivery. Think Frank Sinatra.”

Aeris grunted as the makeup staff finally peeled off and stopped trying to remove her scalp. “Mum and Dad didn’t have a speech.”

“Well, you’re not Dr. Gainsborough or Dr. Gainsborough, are you? You’re Dr. Gainsborough,” she commented dryly, clearly amused at her own joke. Aeris rolled her eyes.

A voice came from outside the office. “Gainsborough, Sauvage, you’ve got two minutes!”

Cissnei flashed her a quick smile on her way out the door. “Bonne chance!”

Aeris went over her speech another time, liked it even less than before, then followed CERN’s interpreter out to the auditorium.

A smattering of applause greeted her presence, a few camera flashes, and then silence. The world was watching now. Cissnei was there waiting by the podium with the other interpreter, and gave her a curt nod.

“There are times, in the course of human history, that are known to change our world, our society, in profound and irreversible ways,” she began, with Cissnei beside her, repeating what she had said in French. “From the discovery of the double helix which let us understand where we came from, to the first splitting of the atom, showing us where we are, to our first steps as a species into the Earth’s atmosphere, inviting us to all the places we could go from there. They’ve yielded medicines, and knowledge, and prosperity… as well as destruction, and conflict, and loss of life. Our world is a product of these changes, benign or otherwise.

“It is difficult to accept the world for what it is, to comprehend the scope of how deeply these changes have affected who we are, but it it is harder still to understand our place within it. It can be daunting to know how much harm they could cause, and how much potential for good they might have had.” She kept her gaze on the audience. Not the words, the delivery. Aeris hoped whatever charisma she had managed to dredge up for this day was having an impact on anyone. If anything, she probably sounded vaguely threatening.

“Today, I believe we are on the cusp of one of these changes. And I believe that, not only as a nation, but as a people, we have understood our capacity for greatness. In taking our first steps into exploring another world, we shape the boundaries of our own.” She paused, and dipped her head briefly to some of the men just offstage. “It is through this understanding that has allowed CERN to lead the world forward with this groundbreaking research. Every nation has banded together for the invigoration of the human spirit.”

It was barely an overstatement. It had been the project of the twenty-first century, and nearly every country in the UN had pitched in. The confirmed existence of other universes, of other worlds, had ripped through the scientific community. Thus far the data they had was mostly numbers, but the trail blazed by the late Doctors Ifalna Gainsborough and Hugo Gainsborough (the latter more commonly known by his name before marriage, Gast, for the sake of easy distinction) had left them with something significantly more concrete, and suddenly the prospect of a physical presence in these worlds was alarmingly, startlingly real.

For the last year, billions of euros had been dumped into the construction of a massive compound in the French countryside. Though Aeris had been largely in charge of the project, there were other scientists contributing to its building as well, and she had yet to set foot in it herself. She’d be on a plane to Cannes in the same day if she could just get through this speech.

Eventually, she finished up with another line about being inspired by everyone to make the world better. Utter schlock. Waste of time. There was a warm applause from the audience. Good. That was squared away, at least.

She nodded to one of the general directors of CERN waiting offstage, and retreated offstage herself. Official questions were their problem. At the very least she could ditch her stupid speech cards and wait for Cissnei to finish up the presentation; the other interpreters had been hired specifically for this event, but Cissnei was part of the project proper. If they found anything, it would help to have an expert at hand in case any messages were exchanged. Aeris was a physicist, not a linguist. And of course, there was the more practical side of things being lost in translation between the multinational team they’d assembled from the top scientists in the world.

Personally, Aeris would have been satisfied with a few interesting matter samples, and maybe some microbes if she was really getting her hopes up. At the very least, they had finally confirmed there was something on the other side of it all to begin with.

Truth be told, this project had been in the works for nearly twenty years. Aeris had been the one to rekindle it after the accident that had claimed the previous directors’ lives. Everyone had been leery of the prospect at first -- never mind her age, the word “nepotism” had been on their lips from day one. She’d had to work twice as hard as anyone else to prove she was worthy of the project on her own merits, and then four times that to forge ahead with the data her parents had managed to collect in the bridging experiment before it had all gone to hell.

And to think they’d called it pseudo-science nonsense five years ago. She’d show them pseudo-science…

No, she wouldn’t. That’s the opposite of what she wanted to do.

Eventually Cissnei returned from the stage as well, and from there they were herded back into a car and to the airport. No time to waste.

On the plane, Aeris went over the roster of who they’d picked out for the project.

“Tseng, Wu, biophysicist,” said Cissnei, leaning in to check the paper she was holding. “China’s pick, probably.”

“I remember him from the meetings,” replied Aeris. “Sort of stuffy. Do you suppose he’s any good?”

“Good enough, I guess. I’m not a biophysicist. He’s got three doctorates, I think, which is apparently the minimum,” She adjusted herself in her seat and gestured to Aeris’s peanuts. “Do you want those?”

“How many do you have?” asked Aeris, as Cissnei opened her peanuts anyway. Cissnei shrugged.

“One, for now. Not all of us skipped seven grades. I’m just here on the charisma factor.”

Aeris snorted. “Oh, only one doctorate. How old are you?”

“Is it a contest now?”

“Only if you want it to be.” She looked over the list again. “These are some flashy dossiers, though.”

“Well, let’s hope they’re nice.”

After they touched down, there was another hour-long car ride north from Cannes to the facility. The roads eventually thinned from eight lanes, to four, to two, to a thin strip of dirt that would allow the bare minimum of passage.

It was a bit strange, seeing the sleek new building positioned in that vast, empty field. Cissnei stepped out of the car and voiced what Aeris had been thinking: “It looks like a fortress.” 

Indeed it did; apart from of the building where the entrance would be, there were almost no windows. The compound was circular, with three levels stacked on top of and within one another, with a large rectangular structure the size of a supermarket on its own functioning as the front entrance, like an immense closed stadium. A wall had been erected around it, and the whole layout was compact and centralised. All likely necessary, to minimise risk the second time around.

The compound was meant for living in over a period of three to four weeks, and the place was kept tightly sealed in case of any sort of contamination, so only absolutely necessary personnel would be dispatched to the site. Therefore, the team was fairly small, to avoid straining resources, and most of the more mundane functions would be more or less fully automated. They were expecting six or seven members -- from what she could recall, the rest would be arriving tomorrow.

They had each been issued a keycard the week before, and then it only granted them access as far as the lobby. The security was a bit unnerving, and served as a reminder of the threshold she was about to cross. This was it. The culmination of billions in investment and twenty years of work and two lives. The lobby itself was largely empty, with reception being little more than a vacant all with a plaque on the wall detailing procedures for unpacking luggage for decontamination, which was where the only other door led.

They funneled, one at a time, into a chamber at the end of the lobby, where they removed their clothes and placed them in a separate compartment in the wall with the rest of their belongings, which they carefully unpacked. Aeris reluctantly parted with her ribbon and closed the door, and then stepped into the shower that had just switched on. It seemed a good deal of the process was automated. Both she and her belongings on the other side of the wall were exposed to quick flash of UV, and it occurred to

Aeris she was probably pushing it a bit with the candy. After the spray switched off, the vents in the room opened, vacuuming out the contaminated air and pumping in filtered oxygen, before the next chamber opened and she was treated to another chemical shower and another radiation purge, this one searing off the very first layer of skin.

After three more rooms, she reached the antechamber of the final decontamination room area, where she was to remain for 24 hours while inhaling low levels of antibiotics laced in the filtered air. Uniforms were provided on the wall until her clothes had finished baking (she worried briefly about the camera surviving the trip), and she hastily put hers on before stepping into the temporary living area and waiting for Cissnei to finish up behind her.

The room was sparsely furnished -- three beds (most likely why they were having the rest of the team file in the day after, as well as to avoid gunking up the machinery all at once) with sterile cotton blankets and foam mattresses; a few chairs; and two lamps; one of which that was fixed into the wall, upon which a compartment opened, allowing her to collect her research, her possibly-ruined camera ,and her mildly-irradiated sweets. There was a simple desk with a screen built into it that connected to the database waiting further inside, to allow review of the materials during downtime, and a rather tall man sitting at the desk watching her expectantly.

“Dr. Gainsborough,” said the man in greeting, rising from the chair and giving her a polite nod.

“Dr. Tseng,” she returned politely. If he was part of this project as well, then most of this section of the building would have been his idea, to prevent forward contamination. Just in case.

He nodded again. Very formal, this one. “Well met. Though just ‘Tseng’ is fine.”

“Then I’m fine with ‘Aeris’,” she replied, then turned around as Cissnei passed through the door from the airlock behind them, her hair on end nearly as badly as Aeris’s. “And this is Dr. Cissnei Sauvage, linguist and interpreter.”

“Hen gaoxing jian dao nin,” was Tseng’s curt reply. Cissnei returned it with an equally reserved, “Nin yeshi.” The stiffness in the room was palpable. Aeris rolled her eyes.

“Well, if we’re gonna be cooped up in here all day with each other, we might as well get to know one another,” she said, pulling up a chair and pulling her hair over the back of it.

“There are very few people in the world that do not know who you are by this point… Aeris,” he said slowly, clearly uncomfortable with the familiarity.

Aeris shrugged. “So what about you?”

“I volunteered for this project because I felt it held potential,” he said shortly. “It had been my goal to contribute to it for seven years when the late Dr. Gainsborough published her first paper, but as you can imagine the ensuing complications made this impossible for some time. This is a rare opportunity for me.”

Aeris and Cissnei exchanged a look at this news. If Tseng was being truthful, that would mean his interest predated the bridging experiment. Back when the project had been a wild goose chase searching for something that most like didn’t exist, and held no more water than a television psychic claiming they could speak to the dead -- a career-ender for anything it touched.

“Well… we’re glad to have you,” she replied, not quite sure what to make of this.

Cissnei pulled up a chair for herself next to the desk. “I had worked with Aeris before this, six months ago. She recommended me for this. I thought it would be fun.”

Tseng blinked. Cissnei continued.

“Yes. Being part of all this work, being there when we start finding things. It’s exciting.” She gestured to Aeris. “Getting to spend time around people with the mental capacity to understand what you’re saying. I think it will be very enjoyable.”

“I suppose that angle could be appreciated, too,” said Tseng. He returned to his seat as well, and looked at Aeris. “This may be a bit obvious, but you’re…?” She shrugged. “It was their project, yeah. Lots riding on this.”

He nodded, then turned back to the desk. “We may as well be on the same page. This is mostly just an archive of the date we’ve collected over the last few years,” he said, gesturing to the screen. “I believe we’ll be adding to the data stored here once we get out of decontamination.”

Aeris pulled up her own chair to the desk and leaned over it with him, with Cissnei hovering behind them curiously. The test data itself was a bit beyond her, it seemed, but Aeris found it helpful to have someone to explain concepts to out loud, forcing her to organise her thought process. Cassiopeia never asked the right questions, and was more prone to chewing up her chives and vomiting them on her rug than she was to asking what supersymmetry was or why one shouldn’t call the Higgs-Boson the “god particle” because it was a stupid terrible name that nobody really used.

“What do you think we’ll find?” asked Cissnei, after another hour and a good old rousing round of explaining what a top quark was and why nobody could find it despite enormous mass. “On the other side, I mean.”

“Hard to say,” said Aeris. “I’d be happy with recognisable matter. Maybe some microbes, if we can find something that helps us know what to look for.”

“Just microbes? If it’s another universe, you’d think there would be people there too. Maybe Rome never fell. Maybe we all do Carrousel. Something like that. ”

Tseng cut in. “It could be. There could, in theory, be an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of permutations, if my understanding of the situation is correct. However, you are assuming worlds like this are the majority, when in all likelihood -- and likelihood is the important word here -- they are not.

“Thus, life is thought to be quite common,” continued Tseng dryly, watching Aeris rearrange her belongings around her bed. “But complex life exceedingly rare. If we are correct in assuming that a world like ours is the odd one out, while there may be trillions of permutations of worlds with complex life, there will still be a far greater number where conditions were not favourable for life to evolve beyond the unicellular stage.”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s a kind of life we don’t know exists yet,” said Cissnei.

Aeris expected Tseng to rebut her, but he merely nodded. “Perhaps. That is why I am here, after all. Why you are here, and why the rest of us will be here tomorrow. There is no telling what we will find. If it were practical, I believe they would have imported hundreds of experts here. They still may, depending on what we uncover in the coming weeks.”

“They’ll reevaluate the staff after the first period’s up and they clear us out of here to do safety checks,” said Aeris. Her hair had finally begun to un-frizz, and she set aside her ribbon and began to carefully rebraid it.

“Then they’ll send in more people if they think we need it. Or maybe if we ask. And then we get to check things out for ourselves. Eventually. Most of the groundwork has already been taken care of, over the years,” she added, trying her best to emphasise the silent “by me as well” at the end of her sentence.

“What if we only find a bunch of rocks?” joked Cissnei.

“Then we get to call in a really excited mineralogist,” said Aeris. “We won’t be able to go right away, though. Have to make sure where we’re going is safe enough to send someone through. Run the numbers.”

“See if any lab rats come back inside out.”

Aeris made a face. “...Yes, that too.” It was probably for the best that they weren’t meant to eat anything for twenty-four hours. Cissnei remained nonplussed and got up from her chair, stretching out on one of the beds.

“Anyone got a phone charger?” she said after a moment of silence. Tseng opened the one briefcase he’d brought with him and produced his, looking at her curiously.

“What do you intend to do?,” he asked. “There’s no signal in here.”

“Just some background noise, maybe.” She unplugged the other lamp and put her phone in. “It’s too quiet. Feels like an interrogation room in here.”

The room dimmed with the removal of one of their light sources, but Aeris actually did feel her shoulders unknot a little once the space was filled with a noise other than the buzz of fluorescent light bulbs. The song was vaguely familiar to her -- seemed like a much older one, maybe from the nineties. Something indie and obscure. Maybe French? She couldn��t make out many words under the heavy distortion from the track itself and the speaker. She found herself humming along, until it occurred to her she was probably driving Tseng nuts, who probably didn’t care much for rock music and was probably jet-lagged into hell, something he more or less proved by shuffling over to a bed and crashing right then and there.

The lack of light and the music made her eyes heavy. She spent another hour reading at the desk, before Cissnei had to nudge her upright and direct her to a bed to keep her from drooling on the screen. Perhaps now she’d finally catch up on the time she’d lost thanks to her shithead cat.

Besides, tomorrow there was important work to be done.