OPEN | prompt seven | ARTHUR

[staircases]

prompt seven | A R T H U R prompt style. start your own thread. leave an image, a quote, anything. receive arthur. open to pre-canon, au, crossover, whatever you can come up with.

 

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( canon crossover amalgam! )

[staircases]

[ Vesper Lynd has a secret.

An obvious statement and not really the best sell for a guy who works in the extraction business, but while everybody keeps secrets, it's not every day that you're expressly sanctioned to poke around inside Vesper Lynd's mind.

(In the end, he takes the job and the considerable pay cut that goes along with it, but Arthur hadn't joined the Dreamshare business for the money so that particular drawback is neither here nor there. Granted, he hadn't joined to steal other people's secrets either, but options had dwindled after Mal's death and it wasn't as if he was simply going to leave Dom to deal with the aftermath on his own. There'd been a window of opportunity then — slight, barely a sliver of one — but a window nevertheless. Just because Dom's credibility had gone down the tubes didn't mean Arthur's had to follow suit, but those sorts of debates only fell on deaf ears.

He helped get me out— that was Arthur's standard reply and there'd never been any hope in arguing the point.)

The set-up's a standard bait-and-switch under the ruse of subconscious security training. Arthur — Nolan Schmidt for the sake of this particular exercise — is filling the role of both extractor and teacher, the lesson two-fold: both high-level conceptual and in-the-weeds practical. Arthur briefs Ms. Lynd on the ins-and-outs of subconscious security: how it manifests and why, with what frequency and intensity. He fields the appropriate questions, choosing to use disinformation rather evasion to sidestep the all-too-relevant inquiries. He even offers her a pillow before they begin. ]

Rule number one, [ he tells her as he gets comfortable, his own arm taped and lain loose on the armrest of his chair. ] Be ready for anything. [ Then the plunger depresses and they're both shoved sharply beneath the slow-moving surface of Vesper's dreams. Given her case history he expects an exotic location, something metropolitan or within a stone's throw of a city.

Arthur blinks and he finds himself on a fog-socked dirt road, the ends of which lead into nothing but indeterminate haze. Sitting square in the road is a big black dog which stares at the both of them silently with bright red eyes. Subconscious security? Rather than point, he takes a step back, hands already reaching for the gun holstered inside his jacket. His tone is impossibly dry. ] Case in point.

/smashes canons together, makes gold

[bankroll]

[ Vesper Lynd has many secrets, both her own and otherwise. She can't say when it started -- this habit powerful people have developed for trusting her with their secrets along with their money. Sometimes, when she thinks back on the past, it's as though there's a stretch of time filled with a little girl with wild hair and skinned knees, perpetually dirty face and ice cream smeared across her chin. And then that stretch of time stops, and a new one starts -- one filled with the woman she is now, with lipstick and suit jackets and LIBOR curves -- and the two have nothing to do with each other. No point at which they ever connected.

It's funny, then, seeing the dog here, funny enough that it pulls her past the strangeness of being in the dream. (Which is strange almost more in how not strange it is. Half her brain keeps trying to supply her with logical explanations for how she got here while the other half is busy reminding her that she is asleep right now.) She steps forward, the first step cautious and the next assured. Mr. Schmidt had said "Be ready for anything," and she is (she's learned that lesson), but she has many secrets, and this is one of them.

When she reaches the dog, she bends down at the knees and runs his hand over the top of his sleek head and then around under his muzzle. He looks up at her with his attentive red eyes. ]

You don't have much to worry about from this one, Mr. Schmidt. Or I don't, at any rate.