[Possibly, she's not sure anymore, but it might be the first time she's on video while communicating with Strange. She's spent the day getting herself back together, trying to make sense of what happened, and trying to find Beckett, to no avail.
And now, she wants to make sure people are okay. Because they have not found Beckett, and it looks like he isn't the only one who didn't make it out of the maze.]
Hey Bey, it's Claire. [With a slight 'duh' expression on her face, she waves at the camera.] Just wanted to make sure you're okay. Checking up, you know?
[He'll do her the courtesy of matching formats. He still doesn't recognize her even when he sees her face, wonders how often they even crossed paths back in New York. His is the face of someone who's tired as hell; there also happens to be a yellowing bruise on one side of it.]
Who's missing? I've run into a few people, but I don't have any traveling companions, if that's what you mean. I was alone when we were taken to the other place.
Right. Beckett was with us before we woke up in that other place. And now, he isn't - he's nowhere to be found, and not responding to messages.
[It's very obvious on her face that she's very worried about that, because the idea that he might have got stuck in whatever place they were in is terrifying.]
None at all. They were like two paperweights at the end of my wrists.
[The exact same thought immediately occurs to Stephen -- but he remembers, too, the static. The place had been torn apart behind them as they ran. He doesn't know anything about Beckett beyond the various claims that he's a vampire, but he wouldn't wish that on anyone.
And enjoy that grimace at the description, Claire. Paperweights.]
The penalties, or whatever they are -- it doesn't make sense. Not unless it's acute MN poisoning; we know the regular kind presents a huge array of symptoms.
None of it makes sense. It's not death, either, it can't be. I'm leaning towards comas, of some sort, and being fixed behind the scenes. But they always leave something behind, like it's too much to completely restore us.
Or like restoring us overloads the system and brings on its own symptoms -- if MN poisoning is a result of the nanomachines active in our blood, presumably higher levels of repair activity mean higher levels of poisoning.
[He's not going to touch the question of whether it can be real death. He's pretty sure it is, but he's also pretty sure she needs to believe it's not.]
Yeah, or - restoring us takes a toll on the nanomachines, which then have to disregard a system for a while. I don't know. Or it's just punishment. You shouldn't have died!
[She waves her finger at the camera, her voice taking in a scolding tone.]
Cool. That'd actually require us to meet in person someday though. Which boy, am I looking forward to. I love having like half the people who know me as Hawkeye squint at me and tell me I'm supposed to have brown hair.
You're going to have to teach me sign language while you're at it. No teaching my cloak to swear in a language I can't speak.
[They are going to teach it to swear, right? Because that would be hilarious.
Hawkeye, Hawkeye...he's still kind of drawing a blank. He knows there are more Avengers than he has names for; not all of them got a bunch of publicity and he's not exactly a fanboy besides.]
Yeah? That one of the dividing lines between universes?
I'm not entirely sure what they're trying to accomplish. What any of these experiments are trying to accomplish. Davesprite's, I get - it was for his sake, to make sure, to himself, that he was real. But jerking around with life and death, it's so pointless.
[Part of her knows that some of it is due to House being so anti-religion and wanting to stick it to the faithful, but whatever. It still doesn't accomplish anything.]
Yeah, I will. [ Or he'll try, anyway - currently, both of them are having issues with the whole moving their fingers with any sort of dexterity thing. ]
But yeah. I mean, I'll take brown hair over the fact that one dude said I look like a mushed potato in the movies he was watching of the Avengers. [ :T ]
[He does get it. He knows perfectly well what House is planning, and why he's planning it.]
Once we know what's real we might be able to change the way we interact with it. That's the idea, anyway. I just don't know that the little tidbits we learn from it are worth anything like a human life.
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