It was - being the latest in an alarming pattern - an acutely unusual feeling that Athena experienced, standing on the edge of the outcropping of trees overlooking the crowd.
She had, of course, attended her mother's burial as a child, but there was little she remembered about the event now, having spent much of her life - intentionally or not - mentally blocking out many of the memories associated with the event.
As a result, and accounting for her recent experiences with time travel, it hadn't seemed entirely unbelievable that the gathering she'd been observing here was precisely that burial, at least until the preacher at the head of the crowd had mentioned her very own name.
In the moments since, the man's words had become a dull sort of drone in Athena's ears, which carried on uninterrupted, yet failed to properly register in her mind.
So, she wondered, what was there to conclude from this?
Based on the immediate look of the situation, she'd gone through another of what she settled on calling a "time warp", for simplicity's sake. It must have been between her leaving the space centre and her arrival here at the cemetery.
But she hadn't passed out this time. Her memory of the trip here was one clear story.
She gave her right arm a generous pinch.
(… OK, I can rule out "dreaming", then… Ow.)
What on earth was she supposed to do? This was, so far as she could tell, her burial service. Did that mean she was back home in her own time period?
She'd spotted several familiar faces near to the front of the crowd. Phoenix, - looking appropriately older than when she'd seen him the evening before, - Apollo, Trucy, and, a short distance back, a very tall Simon Blackquill.
"Oh, God." she mumbled, her hand tracing over her lips.
If this was real, and she was back, how much had she missed?
She vaguely remembered a dream from not too long after all this began. Apollo and Trucy, walking down a park trail together, discussing what she'd guessed in the back of her mind to be her own disappearance.
If there was a formal burial service going on at this moment for a presumed-dead Athena Cykes, what could she do now? She couldn't very well walk straight into the crowd attending. What would she tell all of them? That she'd been kidnapped, or abandoned her life for other reasons?
The thought brought her to considering the other ramifications of her own disappearance. Her apartment, all the belongings she hadn't brought to work with her on that day…
She was at a total loss as to what to do.
It killed her to watch the crowd, seeing the faces of her friends, believing her to be dead. She closed her eyes, trying to make sense of it all.
She'd have to take the plunge. Athena stepped forward, walking down from her spot by the trees, heading straight for the crowd. The preacher was still talking, but Athena still wasn't taking in his words. She had only one goal in mind.
None in the crowd gave her so much as a glance as she circled around them, approaching her friends. Seconds before she reached Apollo, who was standing at the outermost edge of the group, she took momentary notice of the fact that she could hear her own footsteps quite loudly in the grass. Strange.
Without thinking, she reached a hand out to set it on Apollo's shoulder, but at the last moment, she locked up. A sudden resurgence of nervousness was overtaking her. She took a breath, and reached for her friend's shoulder once more.
Her breath caught in her throat as several things happened at once.
Her hand just fell through open air; for a moment, she thought she'd somehow misjudged the distance between herself and Apollo's position, but she was barely a step away. In the same instant, she became aware that she couldn't hear the preacher's voice any more.
In fact, she couldn't hear anything.
There was an impossible silence all around her, like she'd gone momentarily deaf.
"A-Apollo-!" she tried to say, but even her own voice was muted. She brought a hand up toward her throat, glancing downward.
She didn't feel unusual, - not physically, anyway - yet there was still no sound reaching her ears. She felt her breath accelerate, succumbing to panic at the sheer unfamiliarity of what she was experiencing.
She forced her eyes shut, letting herself become oblivious to the world around her. Trying to think about as little as possible, she gradually dragged her breath and heartrate back down to normal. She was fine. This would've been crazy to anyone else, but she'd seen plenty of crazy in the past week, right?
When she opened her eyes again, she didn't know whether to feel soothed or to start panicking all over again.
She was alone.
The cemetery was vacant, save for the occasional fluttering bird. She blinked once, twice, but nothing else happened. An exhale, and she muttered, "What the hell…?"
She could hear the sounds of the city again. There was no voice speaking a eulogy in her name, no air of crushing sadness permeating the very air…
And no memorial.
Without thinking, her eyes had drifted back to the space she'd found her mother's gravesite to be, only to see a clear patch of earth.
She was beginning to wish she was still in bed.
Aura.
The roboticist was the one person Athena needed to see right now. She'd left the cemetery in a hurry, all the while glancing around for anything that might indicate the truth of her situation. A date of birth or death later than the day it had been when she woke up in the space centre, a sign mentioning a year, anything would have satisfied her.
She reached the space centre lot in short order, though still unable to run on account of her leg's injury.
Nothing seemed amiss here. The halls were mostly vacant, as seemed to be their habitual state, and Aura's lab door appeared without any interruptions.
Athena threw the door open.
Instantly a startled voice sounded from near the back of the room.
"A-Athena." Aura said, looking surprised and slightly annoyed by her sudden appearance.
"Sorry, Aura," Athena said, crossing the room. "Didn't mean to spook you, but we need to talk."
When Aura didn't respond, Athena clarified with, "Now."
"… Alright." Aura said. She was seated at a work table near the back of the lab, and beckoned for Athena to sit down at the next chair over.
"I'm having a problem." Athena said immediately, wasting no time with small talk. "Like, more than usual."
"About?"
"I think I… Nngh… Well, it's hard to explain, just like everything else has been." Athena responded, feeling frustrated by the thought alone. "I just went for a walk, and I decided to detour through the cemetery,"
Aura gave an exaggerated eye-roll. "Here we go." In another situation, Athena might have appreciated the bit of levity Aura tried to inject into the conversation, but not right now. "Sorry, go on." Aura appended, noticing Athena's mildly frantic expression.
...
By the end of her explanation, Athena wondered whether it had made any sense at all. Aura was looking thoughtful, which could go either way.
"… Anything?" Athena inquired. She didn't like interrupting Aura's train of thought, but her own anxiety over this was grating on her very quickly.
"Your cell phone." Aura said simply, not moving from her position, eyes still looking elsewhere.
"My… Oh."
Athena thought she understood. "You're thinking of that text I saw the other day."
"That's right." Aura said. She stood up and began to idly pace around the vicinity of her chair. "If I had to guess, - and let's face it, I do - I'd say that what you experienced was the same basic thing, but on a larger scale."
Athena nodded, eager to talk out the idea. "You think things from the future are being pulled here?"
"Just like you were, but it wouldn't explain why you've been stuck for so long, nor why there hasn't been an uproar all over the world with people seeing time fold over onto itself."
"Hmm." Athena drummed her fingers on the edge of the workbench. "Hey…" An idea had struck. "What if I'm the only one seeing them? I don't know if it makes sense - I mean, I was sent back here, and everyone else can see and interact with me, right?"
"… It's an idea." Aura commented, returning to her seat. "Aside from you, all I've seen is Widget phasing right through my hand when you had one of your little attacks."
"Right." Athena said, recalling her earlier mention. "So maybe we can't make sense of all of it, but that's… Aura…? What's that look for?"
Midway through Athena's previous sentence, Aura had suddenly acquired a startled sort of expression, which jarred Athena out of her remark. "Athena, did you… hear what you just said?" the roboticist asked.
"What?" was Athena's only - and now equally confused - response.
"Y-Your voice, it was like… like two of you were speaking at once." Aura went on. Athena's confusion only heightened.
"Nothing sounded off to me." she said, instinctively touching her fingers to her throat regardless. It took barely a moment after the words left her mouth for Aura to suddenly react with surprise again.
"There it is again." she said, gesturing. "Be quiet for a second."
Athena sat in silence, wondering what Aura could possibly be searching for. After a short break of silence between the two, Aura suddenly reacted again, though Athena had noticed nothing.
"Didn't you hear that?"
"Aura, what are you talking about?"
Aura practically jumped from her chair. "That's-!" She took a moment to relax. "Alright, maybe you can't hear it, Athena, but what you just said - 'what are you talking about' - I… It's like I heard it early. You didn't move your mouth, but I heard those words, and then, when I reacted, you said them yourself."
Athena shook her head slightly. She thought she knew what the sensation Aura was describing might be like, but so far as she had noticed, nothing seemed wrong.
"Look, just… Come here a second," Aura said, sounding frustrated. She rose from her chair and, gesturing for Athena to follow suit, attempted to take a hold on her sleeve.
Instantly as Aura's hand made contact with Athena's upper arm, something went very wrong. A terribly uncomfortable and yet eerily familiar feeling was rapidly creeping up Athena's body. She gave a frightened noise of protest as a deafening cacophony of what sounded like every voice on earth suddenly roared into her ears at once. She wanted desperately to cover them, yet her arms refused to move, like they'd suddenly become disconnected from her body entirely.
Just like when she was back in the courtroom. the sight of the lab seemed to dissolve in her field of vision, her surroundings melting into an unrecognizable mass of malformed shapes and blurred colours.
"Athena." Aura said, seeing the girl's eyes grow wide, her pupils suddenly dilating. "Athena, what's…"
She grunted in surprise as Athena's legs seemed to give out from under her. The girl slumped forward, Aura only barely managing to catch her in time to prevent a nasty meeting with the hard floor.
"Damn it…" Aura tried to push Athena back into her chair. For a moment, she thought to get her phone and call for help, but she rationalized the idea away.
(What would you tell them? "This girl needs help, she's suffering from friggin' time travel sickness"?)
"C'mon, Princess…" she muttered, redoubling her efforts. Athena looked to be a fit girl, so why did she feel like she weighed twice what anyone would guess?
With considerable effort, Aura was able to force her back onto her chair. For just one awful moment, Aura half-expected her to pass right through the chair and hit the floor anyway, but thankfully, Athena looked to make the landing comfortably.
By a relative measure, at least - she still wasn't moving, and her eyes looked no better than moments earlier.
"Out of sync…" Aura thought back to her theory on Athena's incident in the courtroom. "Do I just wait for it to stop…?"
Things were not improving for Athena. With no noticeable pattern, her ears were repeatedly assaulted by alternating explosions of incomprehensible sound and lengthy periods of utterly isolating silence. She was having great difficulty with piecing thoughts together, and the discomfort was only increasing. She was wrong - this was unlike what had happened in the courtroom. In the midst of the blurred images filling her vision, she began to spot momentary flashes of clear and familiar sights.
She saw the halls of the space centre, and the courtroom lobby… Nothing lasted more than a second, even as the images became more and more distinct as memories in her head. She saw familiar faces and moments from her past that she remembered clearly, yet all the while she was unable to think clearly about them as the ongoing assault on her hearing continued.
Was she screaming again? Was she sitting in silence? Athena had no idea one way or the other.
A different sort of image flashed through her vision: a little girl, one with red-orange hair like her own, shyly pointing towards one of several downward-facing playing cards. Within a second, the vison was replaced by a simple view of her own hands, slowly prying a small box open to reveal a startlingly beautiful ring.
But then this image was gone, like all the others. Even in her clouded state of mind, Athena wondered whether this sudden nightmare was ever going to end. She thought that her sense of hearing ought to have been damaged beyond use by now, as the raging roars of sound continued to besiege her.
At long last, she found herself able to wrench her arms up from their position of hanging uselessly at her sides long enough to clamp them over her ears.
Silence.
A beautiful, perfect silence. Unlike the uncomfortable stretches between the bursts of auditory abuse, this was a calming and very much welcome absence of any and all invasive noise.
If she could feel it, Athena would have registered the release of a long and soothing breath. But still, she couldn't move beyond the effort to cover her ears.
Her eyes were closed. She thought so, at least. She tried to open them, and once more a familiar sight met her gaze.
The entryway to the building she worked in. Barely a step into the doorway, she could see.
A thought sprung to mind, and she wanted to laugh. For a second, she'd thought she was going to be late to work. She recalled the same feeling just minutes before discovering that she had been sent back in time, days ago now. If sitting here like this meant escape from the torment she'd just been feeling, Athena thought she might be content to wait forever.
Yet something seemed to draw her back to her senses.
"Athena. Damn it, Athena, would you-…?"
Aura trailed off. Very abruptly, Athena's clouded eyes returned to normal, taking only a few rapid blinks. The girl straightened up in her chair.
"Jesus, Athena, don't do that." Aura snapped.
"Th-The office."
Aura blinked. "… What?"
"My office, Aura. Where I work."
"Now you're the one who isn't making sense. I need full sentences, Athena." Aura replied. Rather frustratingly, instead of elaborating on her comment, Athena pushed herself to her feet.
"I have somewhere to be."
"Athena-… H-Hey-!"
Aura scrambled to her feet as well as Athena turned to head for the lab door without another word. She didn't know what to think, aside from immediate doubts regarding the girl's mental health. The way Athena spoke was abnormal; her tone was flat and almost lifeless in a way - it made Aura think of a person who couldn't speak English being made to read out a sentence phonetically.
And she was fast. Athena was going at what was, to her, probably just a brisk walk, but Aura had to make a considerable effort to keep her pace. She hoped no one was out in the hall.
"I'm not gonna be able to stop you, am I?" she asked as she followed Athena into the hall, in the direction of the entrance.