Is she mine?
Why the fuck didn't you tell me?!
You were fucking married!
...you're dying.
A gasp escaped his lips as his eyes popped open. Adrenaline rushed inside his body, pints and pints of his blood rushed to his brain, rendering him unable to see anything.
"Deep breath," said Delia in a soothing voice as she took down electrodes from his head, "breathe."
By the time he regained his normal composure, Gary saw all pair of eyes starting down at him. Ash, Serena, Delia, his grandfather, and a weirdo with frizzy blonde hair. The last three being the most curious.
"Did you see anything?" Asked Delia.
You were fucking married!
Gary shook his head, "Nothing you want to know."
Delia grunted in frustration as she glued the electrode back to his head, quite forcefully.
"Are you angry with me?" Asked Gary as he rubbed his forehead.
"Of course not," Delia said with a smile, "it's silly of me to expect results this soon."
Samuel nodded in agreement, "It is, you're a scientist Gary, you know about the 'wait'."
His lips curled into a snarl after seeing Samuel's air-quotes. He couldn't help but rethink them in a twisted manner, which then sounded like a dirty joke.
"Sure," he laid back in his chair. However, his hand got caught up in one of the wires of the electrode and it fell on his lap.
"That... sticker fell," said Ash.
"It's called an electrode, sweetie," Delia tried gluing it back to his head, "Oh my, your skin is atrocious."
Serena and Ash snickered at the same time, Gary couldn't help but frown.
"Stop laughing," he said, "it's not like yours is flawless."
"Actually, hers—" Ash's words caught up in his mouth, for a moment, he had forgotten that no one in the room (or the world, well, except the exception of Charlus) knew about their little 'affair', "—mine, mine is flawless."
"Yeah mine too," Serena said, "maybe yours isn't because I exchanged it for a foot cream."
Ash burst into a peal of laughter.
"Hahaha," the brunet mocked, "why is she here anyway? I thought it was only the three of us who could... I don't know what you want us to do."
The blonde sighed, "I'm only here because your father is talking with my mother."
Delia dropped the electrode once again and Samuel dropped his notepad in which he seemed to write down fluctuations in what seemed to UER on a tiny blue screen.
"Charlus is with Grace?" Delia questioned while exchanging glances with Samuel.
"She's not going to kill him is she?" asked Samuel.
"What no!" Serena fretted, "they're talking about something. It seemed pretty important. He seems like a nice man."
Ash couldn't help but scoff as his mind took a little tour, he remembered the little anecdote the man had told him in the dungeons of Citadark, something about a certain bone.
"That's cause you don't know what he did with your grandfather's bone."
"My grandfathers what?"
"Nothing," he cleared his throat.
"But what was that about—"
The frizzy blonde groaned so loud that her voice overpowered Serena's. All of the eyes in the room diverted towards Molly, on whose forehead was etched a frown.
"Focus please," she angrily put down her clipboard, "it's been at least an hour and we're nowhere! My father is trapped with those... barbarians and..." a sigh escaped her lips as she sat down on the nearest chair, "you know what happens when I get needy near an unown, don't you Ash?"
The raven-haired gulped in fear.
"They're trying, Molly," said Delia as she taped the unown to Gary's forehead, "it'll work, I promise. Dawn will be here in a few more hours and we can have a better chance."
Molly nodded reluctantly.
"But... shouldn't Calem be here too?" Asked Ash.
"He's someone else," she said, "now focus."
The three of them resumed working. Samuel was relaxed back in his chair, tossing poke-cheese-puff's in his mouth and occasionally towards Delia, while reading the UER signals on the blue screen.
Gary didn't know much about radiology but by the looks of it, Molly was reading their brain waves pattern and Delia was constantly fussing over the tiniest details of their little experiment.
Once Molly had left to go on a bathroom break, Gary asked the long-awaited question.
"How are we getting through to Spencer through this again? I mean, isn't he at the base of the Apocalypse?"
Delia didn't look up from the screen or her whiteboard in which she was scribbling down equations like crazy.
"He is," she said, "but where is the base?"
The brunet shrugged, "How would I know? It isn't my job."
"It's not," she tapped her marker on the board, "when we were your age, we found out about their base and destroyed it, we thought that we had destroyed all of them, but we didn't. They disbanded and broke up into little organizations. And then twenty years later, they came back."
"Yeah, but what's it got to do with the base and this experiment?"
A sigh escaped her lips as she took a look back at the screen and rubbed her board clean. "Where are you right now?"
"Hald Fest."
"And where is Hald Fest?"
Gary opened his mouth to answer but he was speechless, just like everyone else in the room.
"I—I don't know."
"Of course you don't," she said, "like them, we changed bases too, and like them, our bases don't stay stationary, it moves."
"What like a moving island?"
"No, don't be silly," she sighed, "the position vectors of this place shift now and then, rendering it impossible to deduce the coordinates and the place. We don't know where Spencer is, we also don't know what power these mutated Unowns hold. But you all said that you saw some memories of the past. That would mean that somehow because of their unimaginable powers these Unowns were present at that time—"
"You're using them to spy on Spencer, aren't you?"
Delia pondered on his decision for a while, "That's correct in a view if we can somehow control them... or maybe open a little window to see Spencer through the one he has right now, maybe we can reverse engineer the location. Got it?"
The three kids were left speechless; their jaws, hanging loose from their sockets. They were having trouble digesting the amount of knowledge and creative thinking that Delia harbored.
Especially Ash, who'd only seen his mother being over-invested in gardening.
"She's my student," Said Samuel proudly.
Gary closed his jaw, still ashamed of the time he'd said that he was the smartest person in the room which had Ash and Delia. Compared to her brain, Brian was just... Brian.
A normal brain, barely used, much like his father's.
The stelae with Alpha Unown was in front of him, mocking and taunting him with the dreams he'd already seen in the Dimension with Dawn.
You have to confront him, it seemed to say, because I can do this all day long, over and over... can you?
Alright, he said with a sigh, today's the day