Omake: Communion
"Mother, are you there?" Penny stood in stillness before Mother's great shell. Every night she came here to watch Mother. Every night she wished that Mother would answer her.
Silence reigned in the Dream space.
"Mother, I can feel you, but each night you do not answer. What should I do?" Penny asked. Something felt tight, and lumpy, and sour, and awful when Penny stood her vigil here each night. Penny could locate nothing inside herself that should feel this way, but she felt it anyway. And she did not like it.
Simply waiting for Mother to respond might never work. But what more could Penny do? Penny took three steps forward and laid a hand on one of Mother's spikes, by her mouth. Power thrummed deep inside, but it felt distant. Like vibrations from distant noise felt through a wall. Feeling Mother, even distantly, helped Penny feel less of that awful feeling inside, but it made her feel something else, something like the anger Penny felt when Grimm hurt her friends but different. Anger at the wall, the distance, anger at not knowing what to do.
Frustration, Penny recalled. This matched descriptions of frustration in the books that Penny had read.
Penny didn't like being frustrated almost as much as she didn't like that tight feeling she got when Mother didn't answer.
What did humans do when they were frustrated?
Penny remembered the times when General Ironwood expressed anger after things went wrong. He would clench his hands and pace, and he would come up with something new to do.
Penny stepped back from Mother and tried clenching her hands and pacing.
It didn't seem to help.
She couldn't give up yet, though. She hadn't tried something new yet. What new thing could she try that she hadn't done?
Perhaps if she thought like Father. When Father talked to Penny about a problem he had he liked to start by asking what it was he wanted to accomplish.
That was simple. Penny wanted to communicate with Mother. What was next?
Next Father would think of ways he had tried to get what he wanted that hadn't worked.
Penny had tried speaking to Mother, first through their connection and then coming here. She had tried touching Mother, and felt her power deep within, but she could not reach it.
Next, Penny recalled, Father would think aloud about what he had learned from what didn't work.
Penny had learned that Mother likely could not hear her, or if she could hear her she somehow could not respond. Penny could not believe that Mother would deliberately not respond. Mother would not do that.
Penny had also learned that she could not reach Mother's power by touching her in this Dream space.
Once he had thought about what he had learned, Father usually found that these things suggested something new to try. Father was brilliant, but maybe Penny could find something these things suggested to do next.
She needed to communicate with Mother. To do that she needed a means, a connection. She could not reach Mother by speaking to her or touching her power in the Dream. What other connections were there?
Penny stopped pacing and looked at Mother, standing perfectly still. She let her hands unclench, as it didn't seem to be helping anyway. She scanned her memory for Mother and connections, looking for any scrap of memory that might help.
Penny remembered one night in the Dream she had asked Mother how she had given Penny an Aura. Mother had told Penny how her soul seemed to take Mother's power and make it her own. That was how Penny had awoken, by taking Mother's power and making it her own in a steady, endless stream.
The stream was a connection to Mother.
Penny did not need to find an outside connection if she could use her soul as one.
Penny closed her eyes and felt through her Aura. Her power felt different from Mother's, but that was not what she was interested in. She systematically felt every tiny piece of it, as if she were trying to feel out every detail on a statue while blind.
In time, she found a piece that was not like the rest. A little nodule deep within her Aura that did not feel just like her, but like her and Mother. Penny's Aura flowed out from it like the steady flow of an open faucet.
There was her connection to Mother, then. The origin of her soul. But it was a one way connection, and communication needed two directions.
Penny thought about this, and then carefully tried gathering a tiny stream of her Aura and directing it back into the sphere. It was hard. The flow from the sphere pushed back. At first it was far too strong for Penny's attempts to push through it, so she tried taking the flow from a small piece of the sphere and directing it around her little thread of Aura so she could get it close, using her will and control over her own Aura to fashion a breakwater for the reaching inward flow.
Closer.
Closer.
Contact.
Images. Sounds. Feelings. Fragmented. Confusing. Too much. Too much!
Penny was hurtling into a world, her meager power projected before her body in a spike that ripped through the rocky shell and enabled her to push her way into the thick, gooey mantle where it was delightfully warm. Comfortable. So comfortable after so long in the cold void. She fell asleep.
Penny was seeing herself in the Dream, a moment of surprise as she greeted herself as Mother.
Penny felt herself in the void among the stars, wonder about an uncertain future dominating her thoughts as she sought to return to sleep.
Penny was herself as Blake, channeling all the power she dared through her Arbiter's frame while another part of her focus fought Cinder atop Beacon. Spacetime was unstable. A calculated flare of power, trying to hold on without incinerating her Arbiter in the process by overwhelming what her Aura could transform. Slipping. Slipping! Past threshold. Failure inevitable. Uncertainty. A spike of fear. Fear of death. But her Arbiter would not survive without her power.
Certain loss of Arbiter. Uncertain loss of self. What should she do?
A flash of memory. Her promise. Blake had called.
A maw of warped spacetime yawned, and she did not let go. She held tightly to Blake through their connection, and they were drawn in together.
Penny opened her eyes and felt her Dream face covered in wet tears. That had been Mother, and she was Penny. Her mind spun, trying to find herself and make sense of the fragments.
Mother's memories, she realized. She had lived a few scattered pieces of Mother's memories.
Something had gone wrong with time, and Mother was unable to prevent herself from being drawn in. She had not known what would happen. She had been worried about dying. That realization hit Penny like a blow, Mother as powerful and inconceivably vast as she was so fearful of death, of becoming like her siblings, like her Progenitor. Lost.
But Mother did not want to break her promise and had accepted the risk to protect friend Blake. They had gone into the rift together. Mother was still alive, so the worst had not come to pass. But something had gone wrong with time. Why had that happened, and was that why Mother could not reach Penny in the now?
Penny thought that was the most likely explanation. Mother's focus was somehow dormant or lost somewhere else in time even though her body was still alive here.
Crestfallen, Penny realized that she did not know how to help them. Penny did not know how to travel through time. If they were in the past or the future, or scattered among all the years that had been or could be, how could she get them back?
If only Mother had shared a Dream of the Guru of Time, perhaps Penny would know.
Maybe...the answer might lay in the anomaly that had captured Mother and friend Blake. It was the best lead Penny could think of. Maybe friend Ruby would have memories from Melchior that could help, or they could learn something by examining the aftermath. If they could learn how it had happened, perhaps they could make it happen again to retrieve Mother and friend Blake.
In the mean time, Penny could still hope that Mother and friend Blake found their way back. And perhaps she could learn enough to protect Mother from this ever happening again.
If Mother needed her help, Penny would answer.