It's often owing to the difficulty of naming one's own billow that life's problems arise. The opened identity of you is one that must be contended with, yet can be rejected or affirmed, respectively, by whatever arbitrary standards others might deem. In the grip of that pressure, we are but objects to be beheld, no matter how our personal philosophies may try to negate its clutch.
This was the case with Diego Sandoval. He had often said that he believed it best to make other work for him, better still if they did so without realizing it. But he had made a good living as an agent for the government and did not believe in interrogating that which was working; information was something to be ripped from others rather than ruminated on internally.
His brother had died to a Revenant, and yet he had not once sought out his killer. He appeared disinterested in it, for he was a lonely man who had cultivated his loneliness. Individuality was something useful insofar in what it could extract from others, but otherwise his self was delineated by his interactions with other selves.
His wife had died in childbirth, and his daughter is Isabelle Sandoval, who we last saw in passing in ARC 27: A HOST IN THE FAMILY. Like her father, she was on-track to become a federal agent, after he had pulled enough leverage to have a particular Revenant transferred to her when she was 12. She had been directed to embark on a delivery to Konosuke Yamashita alone, as it was unlikely she would be granted a protege for the upcoming year; whether it would be useful to her future development was yet to be decided by others.
When she met with the museum curator to pick up the artifact, he had spoken incessantly about the history it contained, yet Isabelle did not care. Whoop de shit; a carved stone mask that survived a thousand years. She thought that to value the past in this sense was childish, though she was only 19 herself. As with many ideas she believed, it had been taught to her via her father.
Diego's work was naturally never specified nor explained to his daughter, although he had set the expectation that all her action should be explainable to him. For Isabelle private action was permeated by her father; if she were to violate that mandate she would become panic-stricken, for she feared his gaze even in situations that it could not enter. Friendships, though she had little and even these in the most trivial sense, were filtered by his perception and not her own.
She had nursed an obsession with celebrities for several years, and rationalized that such an interest allowed her to blend in better with other students. Yet in people such as these, there was an ability for her to escape from the rigid morass that had sapped at her life. They were a crystallized mode of expression that Isabelle desired, and she felt jealous of Rochelle Beasley in magazines, for she could move and Isabelle could not.
She had once seen her having dinner with the woman who was later President Swarm, and this is what they said:
"Some people need that sort of guide to tell them how to live, or who to date. They treat it similar to religion, but I do think it's usually harmless in comparison. People always want to imbue some sort of meaning into meaningless things."
She went up to go to the bathroom, and when she was back she listened again.
"No, she always wanted my approval. She worshiped me, you saw she had that tattoo of my name. And she projected some things on to me just because she thought it was mutual. I never looked down on her, or liked to."
"To be honest, I've never understood what you saw in that relationship. She was shallow."
"Well, but she was mostly nice. Some days she was really *on*, you know? And I hate how my family never liked her, but she was real pretty."
"Yes, and how was she to sit around with?"
They continued to talk as Isabelle listened, and she heard Swarm leave. She looked over at Rochelle and saw that she was reading something on her phone: perhaps a book or a text message. A tear pooled in Rochelle's eye, and Isabelle wondered what it was that had made this woman who had killed hundreds of criminals so affected. Despite a host herself, the stereotypes of them had dictated to her both how she viewed them and herself; that to show vulnerability was not weakness but impossible for a host. Thus to Isabelle's mind this display of weakness made Rochelle less genuine, yet she decided to like her still.
She thought to approach Rochelle, to offer up what she had done for Isabelle. She could not be envious of Rochelle for long; sometimes she would realize that she was as subservient to forces outside her creation as her father was to those in the government. Then she would forget it. And while she wished to approach Rochelle, if she were to indulge her emotions, then she thought it inevitable that she would become sloppier and fuck up her father's expectations of her.
So she watched, until a young woman approached Rochelle to offer some words to her, to which Rochelle replied: "I guess so."
Then she was in a diner much like it, years later, present again. She finished her meal alone, and she recalled that her mentor's sister was going through some illness, although Isabelle had never asked for specifics. When another opened to her, she had a vague sense of manipulation take hold of her; the concerns and emotions of others approached her as things that were used. She had been advised by her father that attachments were traps, as was emotion. For herself self was delineated by her own internal interactions.
She was halfway up the sidewalk outside and carrying the artifact's pouch when she heard behind herself a shout of: "AANEWAN!" & "D'AANGIN"!
'Andromeda.' Her body went out-of-phase; nothing in this world could see it and only Revenants could touch it. The more of her body she transfigured the more energy it took; the base of her boots was all she let stay, until she had turned to see the two brothers 30ft away and returned in-phase before exhaustion took her.
One man was holding a mirror and the other a marker drawing upon the mirror, and she saw a line drawn through her head in the visage; she pointed her finger to his right and a black hole shot out of it that pulled his mirror aside, staggering them enough that she could rush up to the next store and duck inside, rushing across the room and seeing two bathroom entrances ahead.
Wisps of green & white flame emanated from her hands.
'Two targets. His mirror is a Revenant, and Revenants expend energy. I wonder what will occur when it's forced to contain far more than usual.'
The men's bathroom was at the left and the women's to the right; she heard the brothers enter the store behind and ducked into the women's restroom, then phased through the wall into the men's restroom.
She heard them rush into the women's restroom; this was good. She placed a portal on the north wall and one on the south, facing it; as she stood between them she saw the back of herself infinitely arrayed and duplicated in the north. She heard them confusedly searching the other room, then rushing out. Behind her, she heard them enter the room and rush towards her, and as one shouted "D'AANGIN-"
- her torso phased-out and revealed the northern portal; the world's image became infinitely arrayed in his mirror, and in the next instant -
- his body exploded in a shower of gore, and in his compatriot's confusion Isabelle fully phased-out. Three, two seconds soon separated them.
She phased-in behind him and pointed at his four limbs and placed four black holes at his ankles & wrists, pulling, yanking and tearing away as his flesh twisted under the cosmic winds -
'Andromeda.'
- and his body exploded in a mess of gore & blood and his headless & limbless torso fell, soon to be returned into the eternities from which it had been borrowed. She scanned their two hearts, then waited for them to disappear via government Revenant.
[AANEWAN: Sketches upon the other world.]
[D'AANGIN: A mirror that places its victim's into a secondary world.]
She wondered if her father was allowed to know who from the government picked up these Revenants, or the Revenant janitor, as other students called it. Isabelle thought the name childish, although when she attempted to argue it logically she was not really sure why she thought other students immature. But Isabelle had many such structures of rationale towards her measured life, and to be able to distance herself in personality was a skill she had been taught was useful.
On her drive out she passed a museum of evolutionary history, and this was something Isabelle liked. At the exhibit of insects preserved in amber, she stopped at them for a while. She thought that perhaps in these insects still laid a primitive function of thought, one that allowed them to speak further than their bodies and be replied to by nothing but the rotting amber.
As she left the museum and had wasted her time there, she felt again those alien eyes that crawled upon her always. Individual action and observation was a walk through a hallway of many groping hands. He knew things that were beyond his daughter: he seemed a series of knowledge made to move and envelop others. He had taught to her three proverbs:
"Make people ask the wrong questions and you won't have to worry about your answers."
"People only believe what they are allowed to imagine."
"Freedom is rescindable."
His work was secretive, and whenever she would believe she had caught glimpse of it, later events would reveal to her senses that she had noted only one gill of a larger creature. She had known it through the work assigned to her: she would kill criminals; she would torture; she would subtly alter radio signals to induce calm or panic; whatever was required. Her individuality was forced into subservience by outside forces that required her to be turned a certain bend.
Neither did her father have hesitation for what he did. Throughout it all he did not blink. With each day there was a draining of himself of old emotion, to be replaced by new patterns, although Isabelle would occasionally see him in a moment of disgust after a private call or before he was to leave late at night. But whatever his disgust, whether at Isabelle or others, he was embedded within the system of relations as well.
From this cold push of remembrance she glanced up and saw Rochelle sitting a few tables across from her in this restaurant: she was alone, yet possibly waiting for someone. She had not read of Rochelle in years, for no magazine had booked her and her social media was all defunct. She had heard there had been a particularly nasty breakup with her girlfriend, who had potentially pressured Rochelle into sex, and it was no surprise Isabelle had been drawn to such. Details of her post-Urasaria life were sparse, as was any psychological intrigue.
But, there she was again, and Isabelle thought to go and ask her about all this. Was it true that she had taken the loss of her celebrity harshly and delved into the substances that most famous youth did? Had her girlfriend truly cheated on her? Facts and trivia flitted past Isabelle, until in an almost impersonal pattern she walked past Rochelle and out. Yet she stood outside and still watched Rochelle through the glass, who glanced up at the table to where Isabelle had sat only a minute earlier.
Again Isabelle felt a need to seize upon such a moment, but she has lingered, conspicuously; she became anxious and she left. She was frustrated afterwards, and she felt foolish for doing so. Events had unfolded so unfairly that her happiness seemed to be lacking from his design, and she needed to thrust a knife into the walls of this life to see if there was aught beyond it. She had appropriated tokens of existence, yet they were only tokens, and she desired the thing itself without the mediation of existence, a thawed scrap of wilderness where she could bend over and think:
'I am here.
I am.
I.'
[END OF ARC: STRANGER I REMAIN]
[END OF URASARIA ACADEMY: YEAR FIVE]