Torrance Stevenson was nearly run over seven different times on his way to the waterfall. He has been counting.

While each of them could be described in pristine detail, the first one is the most important, since it was the poor man's brutal introduction into the world of, 'No, you, the pedestrian, do not have the right of way.' Have no knowledge of the 'Walk' and 'Don't Walk' signs, he'd attempted to cross, logically, when the coast was clear. The coast was in fact far from clear, and he leapt back as a speeding taxi nearly shattered his kneecaps. He screeched like a scalded cat and ran down the street (the sidewalk, mind you), turned into a random shop and sat until his heart stopped pounding in his ears. He was more careful after that, but his excessive wariness or lack thereof still put him at risk. People trying to park, people trying to turn, people trying to beat yellow lights, people trying to beat red lights, people and their monsters. Torrance refused to acknowledge them as 'cars'.

After being unceremoniously dumped at Miss Hekas', Torrance had ate, slept, and then wandered out to explore, memorizing the address and the surrounding area with the passion of a small child who knows his mother's face. But would it really help him, after he'd wandered this far? It did not occur to the man that he was running. He simply hopped a prickly fence into a forest, crept through the preserve like a wild cat, and found the river. He was still in his old clothes, a dirty tan suit and shoes with little holes in them. He was shaven, but poorly, nicks and cuts dotting a strong, pointed chin and a hard jaw line. His hair had been washed in a sink, and, while clean, was poorly brushed and smelled of something floral or fruity. The walk was hard on his muscles, still adjusting to movement. A stagnant century could make for some stiff joints.

How long had he been at the waterfall? It was hard to say. He was lying by it much like a hobo, which he could easily be mistaken for. But he had no booze; the glazed look in his eyes was the residue of memory. He was replaying old reels in his head, and the sound of the water allowed him a form of peace that screeching horns and cursing cabbies did not. He'd only been alive for a day or two. He had so much to think about, so the passing of strangers meant little. Torrance was too old, or too new, to remember shame.

The fingers of one hand lightly ticked off the same number -- seven -- before his fist would clench, and he'd start all over. Still counting. As though this primitive ritual would either wake him up, or keep him awake.

Gods are not much for remorse, generally speaking, and the youngest of them is no exception.

Lynx turns up as a not-quite teenager on the brink of twenty, her bony figure dwarfed by oversized overalls in denim so stonewashed it’s almost white, and her glittery, acrylic nails plucking at the spandex top underneath. Her hair is very dark, and may have been sleek if it wasn’t horribly layered and frittering out here and there like the ruffled feathers of a crow. The tangled crown of lights against the backdrop of black hair looks like the cheap knockoff of a halo.

When she says, “Sorry about that,” it’s supposed to be noncommittal, but the breeziness of it is dulled by the sombre flatness of her tone, so that she sounds at least slightly keen to repent. “They don’t look where they’re going at this hour, and in that much traffic. Work rush. You know how it is.” Except Torrance probably doesn’t, because he appears unemployed, if not from another time. Then again, maybe the god knows altogether who he is, and is playing with him. “They swerved though, didn’t they?”

She steps forward in untied sneakers, her gait deliberate, until she’s arrived at his side, where she sits with her legs folded awkwardly beneath her. Gangly and graceless. Her braceleted arms are smooth and almost without pigment, hands placed palms down on her kneecaps in a faux meditative pose, and she tilts her face up to catch the spray from the waterfall. The stud in her nose glints, and her long neck is glowing beneath the skin. “When all else fails, retreat to nature.” That’s blatant mockery, inspired by something of a vendetta against the au naturel environment.

In short, what has not yet been tampered with begs for the attention of Lynx’s twitchy fingers, and her instincts are telling her that the man is fresh meat—if only figuratively.

Torrance was dreaming about his daughter's seventh birthday party, with all the candles and the cake and the singing, and suddenly there is someone beside him and he sits up so fast it hurt his neck a little.

"I beg your pardon," he says, and his tone is not delicate so much as excessively polite. "I don't believe we have met." His fingers have stopped tapping on the green grass, and he observes Lynx with the wariness that he met the cars with. He has not met her -- the only people he's met are Moira and Kits, really -- and can't begin to imagine what she's apologizing for. Torrance has never really been religious, though like most hard-working men he's somewhat spiritual. "I think, miss, you have mistaken me for someone else." Though he wishes to lie back down again, he remains sitting up attentively. To pass the time, he strains to guess her age, and fails miserably. He's out of practice.

“Pardoned,” she allows very literally, changing views from the waterfall—she has seen better constructed with pipes and a recycled flow—to her bewildered company. She’s smiling plastically, having stolen the expression off a mannequin she spotted in a store window, and nothing seems to be going on behind her greyish eyes, which have a tad more blue in them today than usual. “We’ve met. Just now.”

Yet she doesn’t divulge her name; in fact, she acts like she doesn’t have one.

Her even voice is somehow a reminder of the miscreant cars on the road, an echo of tires and burnt rubber, but it must be a trick of the imagination. “Who are you? If I know who you are, I can tell you whether or not I’m mistaken.”

It’s disconcerting for the god not to know the specifics. The majority of people can be identified with a quick scan of her memory (it’s more of a database really), but Torrance doesn’t show up in any records. No digital papers or licenses or bank loans, no information online.

A handful of grass blades meet their end between her grasping fingers as she tugs them loose from the loam, scattering earth, and the verdant scenery isn’t faring well with Lynx.

Torrance is vaguely reminded of a car, but he's thinking of a Model T, and the mental image is that of a faulty vehicle, stopping and starting and sputtering all the way home. It's a disconnected ride, and he's still a little jittery from his consecutive near-death experiences. The other sensation is that of being conned, a charlatan talking so fast he doesn't have the time to dismantle the pieces and see the catches and the lies.

"Oh," he offers. Then, having finally been presented with a prompt he can use, "Torrance Stevenson, miss. I think I would remember meeting someone like you." It's not sarcastic or biting -- it's honest. He rearranges his posture to lean over his knees. Apparently he won't get back to memory lane anytime soon.

Lynx immediately processes the name through her detailed bank of who’s who, like a checkout girl at the supermarket, and when the barcode doesn’t register she clicks her teeth in a parody of frustration, and watches the man a bit more closely. He could be lying.

The feeling he gives her is both young and old, as though he’s a forgotten toy been left to gather dust and only now brought out of the box (literally, as it turns out, but she can’t know that).

Shifting, she puts a hand on his knee (which requires sneakiness, what with him draped over it), still with one on her own; it’s a gesture she uses to ground people, because the waterfall is yearning for adulation. “If I had been searching for somebody who could cross the road, I would have been mistaken. You’re fine. Why have you come here, Torrance Stevenson?”

He could be, but Torrance hasn't remembered how to lie. He's remembered how to feel awkward, and indebted, and shy, and a great number of things all at once, but even when he'd been alive before, deception was not his strong suit. He could edge around subjects, and maybe distort the truth to soften a blow, but his golden heart cancels out dreams for a silver tongue.

The hand on his knee feels like an electric shock, but a little one, the kind people get when they drag their socks along the carpet and touch a doorknob. Static electricity. Torrance doesn't shake it off though, just kinda looks at it and blinks. "To remember," he says simply, eyes shining with truth. His eyes are like deep pools of clear water, untouched by modern grime. Gray-green, like the sea. "I can't remember much of anything with all the noise. It's quiet here." The fact that he is revealing this to a complete stranger does not seem to bother him.

Empathy is heavy and rainwater-dense, perhaps too far on the associative horizon for the god to handle, but Lynx nods along all the same. It is encouragement, a nod, and it shuffles people onward to whatever end they may meet, as it shadows intrinsically sought for approval.

She’s intimate with noise every hour of every day; it’s buzzing in her head as he speaks, and the sound of his voice is nothing in comparison. Coming here does not change that for her, but if it does for him then she has a sudden and straightforward understanding of why it should make him duck across teeming roads.

Her hand (and the connection that comes with it) leaves his leg while she wipes what scarce grains of dirt are on on her fingertips across the near-white denim, smudging it up without a care, and giving it, ironically, a more earthy feel, like she’s just been out gardening. “Is it worth remembering? For each span of breath you spend in the past, the present is moving forward without you.” Lynx is subtly probing for a wish, or a request of some sort; her mouth is full of sparks and answers and revelatory heat, but she keeps her distance until provoked.

The heavy philosophy drags away the last wisps of reverie that had been hiding in the corners of Torrance's head, and as the hand moves away he sits up a bit straighter. He's given a bit of thought to his circumstances, but not much, and hasn't yet begun the practice of veiling his origins. The nod is enough to merit more truth. "But the world has already moved on without me. It left me behind and I have to catch up." He is an entire century delayed in all areas -- history, science, art, morality.

"What about you?" It is a habit to want to talk to the people he meets, really, and know them, if only a little. "Have you ever felt left behind?" There's something about her that says 'no'. It will take a few more questions to really get a wish out of Torrance. He had been wishing for peace, and got it, and now he had someone to talk to. He wouldn't do much wishing until someone illustrated how much he was missing. Nice clothes, for example.

Between then and now the smile has faded, and a newfound genuineness crops up to account for the loss. The smooth, unworried style of her face suits, eerie though it is. Monitoring Torrance with eyes that have slid down a slippery slope of grey to blue, he reminds her of an astrolabe: fascinating in an old-timey fashion, underappreciated, and worth something as of yet unvalued. That has her sticking around.

“I am in pace with the world, and have been for much time,” admits Lynx, who would like to say she’s one step ahead, but is unsure of how true that is, and while they’re both being barefaced it would be in bad taste to cheat. “I remember the then, though not as you do. I don’t lay by waterfalls and relive.” She replaces the hand on his shoulder, and the higher up and closer to his brain it is the more of a soothing effect it should have, rearranging certain—not malevolent, without a body or motive—electricities into a neater, nicer flow.

The hand on his shoulder is, indeed, different from the hand on his knee, and Torrance still isn't sure whether he is comfortable being touched by a complete stranger. What he does know is that there is something about Lynx that is different, and being very different from almost everyone at this point, it's something he values. So he doesn't shrug the hand off, or stare at it.

"That must be nice," he comments, even though he thinks most people are, or should, be in pace with the world. The rewiring of his electrical pulse causes him to blink and say suddenly, "How old are you?" He gazes up at the sky and muses, "I am over a hundred." He pulls his mouth to one side, and murmurs, mostly to himself, "I suppose I should go back to how old I was before." Now he has to try and remember that.

She does something clever with spare fingers, runs them through her hair, and it results in a loose bun of the same flittering design as before, snagged up in lights. Appearances, with Lynx, are less about vanity, and more to do with marketing toward the right audience. There’s more than a tuppence of the artificial about her, and a whole lot of that can be owed to media.

The other hand glides from Torrance’s shoulder to near his clavicle, tapping out a rhythm a crafty distance from his pulse point, as the needle of a gramophone might do. “Depends on your definition of ‘nice’. Is this nice? The water and the grass. Nice for a painting maybe.” The quiet could be nice. Her eyes spark—literally; she chases them off with a bat of her lashes—at the question, and supplementary confession.

Lynx is touchy about her numbers, but Torrance has unwittingly planted a seed of need-to-know in what feels like her pores. “Is that so? You look good for your age. Best not to be flaunting that,” she is kind enough to advise, if he doesn’t know already. Poor lamb. “I’ve seen the turn of four centuries. Time will confound you, if you let it.” The god generally stays in a young mould. Again, it’s audience-oriented.

“You can’t go back.” She’s being patient, and likely she knows what he means, but she’ll twist his words. She will push him for progress. “How old were you then?” Yes, it is palpable, rises to meet her palm, and it is a memory of dead cells and the triumph of renewed galvanism. No wonder he is comfortable on the ground; he’s been in it.

Torrance had been staring at the ground, back to moping a little, but it's polite to meet people's eyes when they speak. He's beginning to think Lynx is a little unusual; maybe it's because he's yet to get her name. The spark causes him to start, and for the first time he looks at the hand that has made a point of touching him. What is it?

He moves, quicker than he looks, and takes her hand with both of his, turning it over as though feeling for mechanical gears beneath the skin, or wires. "I know," he says, tone slightly admonishing, 'I'm not stupid.' Like a doctor, he gently tests joints and searches for an answer in the skin. In fact, it's more of an obsessive observation; he'd died adjusted to the detail-oriented nit-picking of his editor. Looking for cracks and holes in the wall is a habit that was resurrected with the rest of him.

"Can I?" He lifts his eyes from her hand, though he's still holding it. "I heard time machines haven't been invented yet." Thinking of the cars, he gives a distinct, collected exhale, the great uncle of laughter. "But, for the record, thirty-five." He /feels/ younger, and there's something about him that makes his age easy to mix up, but it's the truth as far as he knows it. And finally, "I didn't catch your name, Miss...?"

As far as she can tell, the ground isn’t nearly as interesting as Torrance is making it out to be; Lynx follows where his eyes go, and the grass, while not in a state of lawn-ish perfection, doesn’t stand out to her. She can understand why he trades it in for scrutinising her hand. What oddities he could uncover within the flesh varies from day to day, as she’s more human on some than others, and then it’s not unheard of for her to exist without maintaining a solid form, on which occasions the god wafts about like an airborne virus.

Judging that enough time has passed, although she is not shooing him off so much as participating in his almost ritual examination, she asks, “Find what you’re looking for?” Yes or no, she slams to her feet in an instant, and rather than wrenching her hand away curls sparkly nails around his wrist to help him up. “Not yet, but we’re working on it. I can wind it up or down; backwards is significantly more difficult.”

‘Miss’ isn’t really required, or appropriate—she is only a miss half the time. “The name is Lynx, Torrance Stevenson. Unless you’re planning on sending out roots here and sprouting leaves– Do you have some place to be?”

What had he been looking for again? First, a place to stay. Then, a place to go. Now, he was looking for an answer, and this hand seemed to offer as many answers as the grass. "No," he says, wishing to be curt, but his tone striking the middle ground between clipped and forlorn instead. Then he's being pulled up, and he rises accordingly, though Torrance doesn't remember saying he wanted to leave. But then, wanting seems to be irrelevant, in the case of What Happens To Torrance.

Because he doesn't know what science is capable of, the 'up and down' part doesn't come off as too unnatural. However, he notes the 'I can', instead of 'we can'. He'll think about it later. "Lynx? Like the cat? How unusual." The last bit is tacked on before courtesy can swallow it. Rushing forwards as though to forget, he shrugs. "I have a place to go, I suppose, but nowhere to be." No job, no family, no friends, and most terribly, no money. And he still looks like a hobo! "What about you?"

Hunkering down on the bank of the conserved river and sulking his heart out is not conducive to a breakthrough, or so she thinks. “You could be looking in the wrong direction.”

Differing from the rest of the rabble has its penalties for Torrance, such as having an interest taken in him by Lynx and thence being puppeteered at her whim, and the restless god circles him, calculating his measurements as she pats turf from his shabby clothes.

“Like the stars that can be seen with the eyes of the cat,” she corrects, pausing as though waiting for him to throw down the wry and overdone line about Canadian lynxes. He doesn’t.

“I have a bash to be at.” If she had tone, it would be said with the airiness of a five-year-old who is trying to give the impression that she knows all there is know about parties.

Then she wavers, in the strictest sense of the word. Her particles become unstable, break up and fuzz, so that her silhouette is like the white noise on a television screen. It lasts for scant seconds, and then she’s back in one piece, wearing a baggy suit that would look identical to Torrance’s if it wasn’t cleaner and brand-new. She’s gotten the shade of tan and the cut of the jacket down to the letter.

Stepping out of the outfit, still in her denim and Lycra underneath, she kicks off the dress shoes that have replaced her sneakers, and holds the bundle out to him.

"Where is there to look?" Now he's starting to get a bit anxious, so his tone is the smallest amount of snippy. He shrugs helplessly, becoming more and more conscious of the notion that she is a chess player and he is a pawn. Torrance still hasn't put it down yet; his mind is pregnant with the idea, and it lingers and grows, especially as Lynx circles and observes him. He's only been alive for a day or two, and has no witty verbatim to spout.

"Oh," he says, and adds, "I should probably get back to where I go now. The woman I met -- she looks like my wife -- she brought me there, and I'd like to talk to her." Suddenly it occurs to Torrance that two people have believed his wildly unbelievable story. Maybe people can detect honesty in the future. Or maybe... But conspiracy is too far-fetched for the rational Torrance, and he sweeps the concept away.

But it's back in an instant, and he is backing away as Lynx becomes something else, stumbling a few steps back and gaping, eyes wide, heart racing. That's just -- that's just not human! To hell with a passing century, it wasn't normal, and Torrance abruptly decides to leave. But then Lynx is back, and holding out clothes, and there's no time to run. So he just stares.

There's silence for a while, true silence, with only the waterfall and forest sounds to fill it. And he reaches out and says, "Thanks." And he says, "Who are you?" A very different question from, 'What's your name?'

Lynx believes baby steps are to be reserved for games of cat and mouse. If she’s not playing, she works in leaps and bounds, and has few reservations about giving too great a shove. The creatures she entwines herself with are fragile and will break one way or another, so she figures there is no tragedy in testing which models can stand the heat. That’s not to say Torrance’s mental health will go absolutely disregarded, but she might misstep in overestimating how much a revived corpse can mesh with eldritch antics.

His gawking doesn’t stop him from accepting the change of clothes, and she lifts a finger and waves it back and forth in front of his nose, as an optometrist checking how well a patient can stay on track. “You,” she means mankind as a species, “have halved sight. One hundred and eighty degrees. Rabbits can see more at once than you can. But if you move, if you don’t come to a standstill and stagnate, you can see all around you. Every degree of difference is a new direction.” Does he need a compass?

The suit should be a perfect fit and the shoes are in his size. “You look good for your age,” she repeats. She is referring to thirty-five this time, not the period he spent not quite preserved in the earth. Planted in her head is the notion that she’s going to escort him to wherever she means to go, as if she has happened upon a housewarming gift. “Why would you like to talk to her? Do you suspect her of being your wife?” It’s a logical train of thought, for Lynx at least. The man came back, and maybe his spouse followed suit.

And the god is, “Innovation.”

Now that Torrance realizes he's dealing with a superior, not an equal, his mind has automatically begun to completely recalibrate the situation, and he stares straight ahead, at Lynx's face, instead of bothering to follow the finger. He had died something of an agnostic, but 'god' pops into his head before he can stop it. No, no, no. But hell, he'd risen from the dead! Wasn't it about time to think there was more to the world? But stubborn and nervous, Torrance stonewalls against the thought and focuses on the here and now.

"Rabbits have eyes on opposite sides of their faces," he retorts. "And until I have eyes in the back of my head, or I become a rabbit --" Oh oh oh he better not say that, lest it come true. Shutting his mouth, there's something else that's come back to him. He exhales, rearranges his thoughts, and says, "My wife is dead." Moira simply had a little something in her, something very chameleon, and when Torrance squints at it his wife is what he sees. Ex-wife? He's not sure.

Innovation? That made her a g-- No. "I see," rocking back on his heels. "You too," on the age. "We hadn't met, had we?" He's looking at the clothes as he speaks, wondering if he /really/ wants to wear something identical to what he was /buried/ in. But what choice does he have?

Had he been a comet, she still would have the spryness to catch his tail. “Is that what you want?” Lynxes have rabbits for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and while he has the prudence to trail off before the irreversible is said, there’s a chance he has goaded her into a creative mood. If nothing else, the reality that the suit wouldn’t fit him as a hoppity bunny stays her hand.

“How dead is dead?” Death gets dubbed as such an ultimate end, but she knows it’s considerably relative, having made Death’s acquaintance. In a word, he’s negotiable. Torrance should by now have more than an inkling that the buried sometimes change their minds. “This other woman is not your wife, so why does she take precedence? Come along.” He does have a choice: funereal suit, or a pair of lop ears and a spectacular bounce in his step.

They can’t have met in his lifetime without her awareness; her memory is crammed but photographic. “No. Not directly.” She was there in every bulb’s filament (a baby invention back then), every rotation of a Benz Patent Motorwagen’s wheels, but humans give higher regard to meeting in the flesh.

"To be a rabbit?" He's started up a timid scoot, a nervous train-like inching that propels him backwards, even though Torrance doesn't really believe it will be missed. "No." Is it rude to take the suit and not the girl? He really is grateful, but Torrance is made up mostly of common sense, and the instinct that threads through it is telling him to go far, far away. Not even a park was safe. Better go 'home' and hide.

"How would I know? I was dead." Snappy again, even as the statement doesn't make sense. "And now I'm not, and Moira was the first person I met when -- when --" 'When I came back' remains unsaid, still too groundbreaking to be uttered. Torrance really doesn't even want to talk about it. He's started to believe that his life before was just one long dream, and if he could just change clothes, and get a job, and start living, he could forget it ever happened...

"Come where?" There's a good amount of space between them, and Torrance seems to be gearing up to bolt. "I think I should -- You know, get back." His mind sneers, 'You aren't my wife either!'

Torrance thinks right and it isn’t missed, but she does not make any move to follow him aside from with her eyes. The volume at which she sets her speech does creep up a notch, and experiences a spit of squeaky static before it smoothes out again, “If you were a rabbit, you could live here.” She motions around her, turns in a childish circle on the spot, and the colourless smile flares back onto her lips, like her inspired slogan has done a duty to real estate agencies everywhere.

Her hopelessly brief attention span is thinning out by the second, and she is on the brink of spiriting him away whether he approves or not. Appealing to him is shaping out to be an exercise in futility, but then a familiar name leaps off his tongue and strikes a note of recognition with her. “Moira? Moira Hekas?” The god is momentarily puzzled—she mightn’t be able to work out why he is acting skittish around Lynx if he has already met Moira, believing herself to be the less intimidating of the two.

“Come with me. After, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” She’s not being loose with her language; anywhere means anywhere, and she figures she can pencil a pet project into her hectic schedule. Who’s going to rebuke her?

"I don't want to be a rabbit!" He exclaims this passionately, looking increasingly flustered as time goes on. "It's a nice place, but I would be a rabbit." Torrance seems to think that being a rabbit is about as bad as being dead, and while he's still very confused over his current state, he's quickly grown fond of it and has no desire to relinquish it without a fight. "I can always visit, if I like." This bit is added tentatively, waiting to see if Lynx will threaten otherwise.

The familiar name causes him to pause in his inching, blinking once, twice. His mouth, the most expressive thing on his face, twists and turns and is finally set in a wavy kind of line, his emotions mixed. "Yes," he says slowly. The Moira he'd met hadn't been whimsical and flamboyant -- well, maybe a bit whimsical, but she had handled Torrance brilliantly, all things considered, and never once hinted that she was more than she appeared. Perhaps he was still feeling the acute difference between god and man, and the gap was highly influential on his behavior.

Offering to let Torrance see the only person he (barely) knows is excellent bait, and a step forward is taken. Baby steps, one at a time. "Where are we going?" Implicitly, he's offered his consent.

Torrance is unmistakably distressed at the thought of migrating to a burrow, so Lynx lets sleeping rabbits lie, to reward him for crawling forward again. She is jotting notes down in an internal scrapbook on the range of expressions the man utilises, most of them dominated by his writhing mouth, but hers doesn’t go beyond the close-lipped, silicon smile. It’s the trademark belonging to women too afraid of wrinkles to stretch their lips any wider.

Now she is supposed to claim, ‘Any friend of Moira’s is a friend of mine,’ but under these circumstances, it could be pushing the envelope. So she answers his question without connivery, saying, “To the Triskele,” as though they are going for a stroll through the park and not to a seriously exclusive club.

The god is at his side where she wasn’t there a second before, hooking her arm through his with all the finality of plugging a cable into a socket. She starts off at a humanly amble once she remembers who she is dealing with, because oftentimes she doesn’t mean to be showy, but she can forget herself.