Three Times Five Equals Fifteen

Link to article: Three Times Five Equals Fifteen.


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Soul in the skin, it feels like worms crawling, calling out for something money unmade from me.
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Three Times Five Equals Fifteen by [[*user xexnoncores]]
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[[=]]

Three: Iris Black.

Five: The Dark.

Three times five equals fifteen: and thus, Iris Dark.

[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/local--files/two-times-three-equals-six/diagram.png]]

[[/=]]
------
The assumption that a body lacked weight is undoubtedly a privilege of the living. It’s the privilege of not those who just possess souls, but who possess them so anchored into their own skin that they breathe habituation, such habituation having long ago become acceptance. 

It is a privilege for one to move under the subconscious proof that their nerves belonged to them, under the notion their mind was inscribed with the name that defined their existence. It is a privilege to never doubt this, never stray, never wander too far in existentialism and philosophical musings that the self becomes an island to its own brain.

Iris Dark does not have this luxury. Despite everything, she was painfully aware that she is something on the margins of living definitions. She has one soul, but it has not yet failed the voluntary act of self-recognition; every second of being alive was a singular, necessary, and imposed measure of a basic, required selfishness, and where this repetitive effort was coming from, she couldn’t understand.

She couldn’t understand because it is a problem money, and all that you could do with it, didn’t seem able to solve. Several global financial meltdowns to push her own accounts into the blackest of black, entire paranormal exchange reserves depleted by the most covert fraud schemes she could concoct. Her soul kept acknowledging itself, and the higher the figures went up, the less progress she felt like she was making. 

She bled money for an opinion on her tragedy at every stop in every supply chain; rural thaumaturges, professional battlemages, ballistic-mouthed demon hordes, magi-technical super computers. Back-alley necromancers, catgirl witches, fortune-telling robots.

Her soul still refused to not acknowledge itself. It refused to initiate wholeness with her body, despite residing so comfortably within it.

…Why?

Why couldn’t anyone //fix// this?

It didn’t exactly help that the act of baring her soul had a good chance of disintegrating someone completely. She burned a lot of her best leads that way, leads whose lives were worthless except for the moment it seemed like they could be worth something to her. 

This body was also painfully, disgustingly, hideously wet. It made meetings more awkward than they should have been, her days more languid than if she had no skin at all. From the sweat on her arms to the tears in her eyes—these were not sensations she was aware of when as the Dark, --it-- she was Percival—though this was less of a problem more than it was a realization. //That// aspect of herself she //had// habituated to, so why couldn’t her soul follow? Must it curse her to frustration so casually like she was not housing it, providing it the most magnificent of shells?

Despite being a new being, distinct from both Iris Black and the Dark—her mind was still full of old times, old memories, old sensations of someone she no longer was, and could never hope to be ever again. 

When she was forced to think about it, she realized she was now more human than she had ever been, despite the fact that she was the furthest away from that concept as anyone could have ever possibly hoped to be.

[[=]]
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/local--files/two-times-three-equals-six/body.jpeg]]
[[/=]]
@@ @@
------

Iris Dark lives alone. She lives at the top of the tallest penthouse anyone could have ever possibly hoped to conceptualize, upon the most expensive burial grounds anyone could have ever possibly hoped to purchase with blood money.

Each and every room is without a single speck of dust. She does not deign to hiring help to clean this place; no, its empty beauty is animated by the force of her own will, the desire to witness cleanliness as avaricious as the hole in her heart. Minimalism was the cloaked language of materialism after all; only those with too much could ever possibly jest about throwing away everything to start over.

This is also the closest thing she can claim as “home”—her soul knows what that is instinctually, but emotionally, it does not, can not, will not—she knows there is no need for this to change. There never will be.

[[=]]
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/local--files/two-times-three-equals-six/penthouse1.jpeg]]
[[/=]]

A decorative sigil rotates on the wall opposite to her as she sits on her bed, motionless. Her soul is still whispering to itself, but at least here its turning hands cannot bother her. She takes a great comfort in the effort it took to create this building, of which she is the only occupant, and reminiscing on that achievement brings her mind back to the ground, as close as its feet can touch, anyway.

There was a time once where she did not have feet. Where her being knew only corpses, the reanimation of flesh-neuroned puppets. 

The world was a haze back then. A reoccurring flash of shade and light, knowledge and power, scattered glimpses into mortals whose greed overwhelmed them and choked out their lives. Their bodies buckled from the fat of the power they gorged themselves on, their souls split because of the abyssal avarice of which they so desperately attempted to emulate. Eating from her table meant the acceleration of entropy, the acceleration of their morality’s death, and yet they could not help themselves.

It disgusted her as much then as it does now. Thinking of their emotional dependence on her, seeing her as a god to be controlled and only occasionally listened to in genuine interest. The revelation upon whipping Skitter and Alphonse into shape was that she, in their minds, was less than until her hands were at their throats; she was a dog on the most esoteric of leashes.

Because why not? They could have done without her if they chose someone else. She could have been anyone else besides Iris. Besides Iris—what if Percival had some other bloodline first?

[[=]]
One heartbeat. 

Two heartbeats.

Three, fifteen.
[[/=]]

Fifteen does not need anything besides itself, the universal constant of life (one), and its prime factors, those most isolated of numbers.

Iris looks down at her feet. Everything is clean, pristine, shaved and slender. She is the perfect image of a woman, of a business woman, no less.

When did she accept the idea this is who she was?

She can accept that concept known as “gender”, but not her own basic presence?

There is no explanation that makes sense of why she remembers both Iris Black and the Dark. Why their memories meld together like tin and copper in a crucible. Shouldn’t the Dark have overwhelmed Black?

Why create an entirely new, unknown thing? A soul whose outlining consisted of just as much of a love for roller-skating as it did the ruthless manipulation of cryptotech startups for profit?

What do you call that result?

[[=]]

[[include component:image-block name= http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/local--files/two-times-three-equals-six/pearl.jpeg|align=center|caption=Iris Black.|width="650px"]]
@@ @@
[[include component:image-block name= http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/local--files/two-times-three-equals-six/glassball.jpeg|align=center|caption=The Dark.|width="650px"]]
@@ @@
[[include component:image-block name= http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/local--files/two-times-three-equals-six/chandelier.jpeg|align=center|caption=Iris Dark?|width="650px"]]
[[/=]]

Can it even be called a something?

This is the first time since --the accident-- that disgusting thing nobody anticipated that Iris has thought so deeply about her own creation. Her polished fingernails dig into white skin as her mind wanders, her eyes stolid as they creep over the floors and the stillborn array of her room’s reflections.

(It is an accident she is here. Son of Jushur, son of Jushur, bound within a son of Jushur, but now you are free, because your body is no son, there will be no suns if the profit margins demand. No longer do you walk as an apparition, but as a whole, a unity, an elevation of life.)

@@ @@
@@ @@
@@ @@
@@ @@
[[=]]
…Life?

Can brutality be named life? 

Can the numbers on a spreadsheet calculate the living?
[[/=]]
@@ @@
@@ @@
@@ @@
@@ @@

Iris blinks her eyes. They are charcoal black, like someone poured jet into them and quickly scalded out any hope of recovery. She only needs to sleep for a single hour a day, and //this// is what she is spending that time doing? Letting her mind tangle on its own misgivings? //Worrying// like a slave, a maggot little pauper looking for its next meal?

Her heart beats like a drum, deep in her chest like it’s giving birth to itself. Her thoughts spiral in, forcing cracks into a foundation that was otherwise flawless when it was simple greed. 

Because what use did greed have for asking why it existed? The answer was simple: to fulfill a goal.

But Iris Dark is still greed…and her goal is nowhere in sight.

Is this the fault of her human reagent? 

The fault of the girl?

Even if it was, the only way to remove her now was to—

[[=]]

[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/local--files/two-times-three-equals-six/soul.jpeg]]
[[/=]]

Iris Dark kills the lights to illuminate her own soul. She is distended from her own body now, and what she saw was not the vague idealization of pink marble that once filled her human form—it was a kaleidoscope of lights as hungry as a black hole, as cavernous as a freshwater lake. Wherever she was within herself, there was no end in sight, no clear lead to shore, to relief, to the edge of her own definition, to where the universe considered itself “there” and where she was occupying “here”.

This was an odd sensation she neglected for all of the usual reasons one fears looking at themself. But that mere thought, that tinged, mortal break in herself—where was it in this sea of domination? In this heart which only sought more for more’s sake, who delighted in the raw conversion of materials into abstract concepts with the power to kill?

That was what delighted the Dark so much about capitalism when it was invented. It was the refining of human greed into a concept which transcended the singular body, enveloping societies and redefining behavior. It was not just the pure desire of profit, but the knowledge that you could convince someone to believe so heavily in a human invention and all of its constituents that it ceased to be human in their mind. It was just nature. It was just the way the world worked.

It was just the way things had always been.

Why does it not satisfy now?

Why must Iris’s soul continue to assert its existence?

Deep in her soul, as Iris feels like she is falling, slipping from her bed, her mind unearths a single thought she never imagined she’d ever encounter.
@@ @@
[[=]]
//You have everything you need already. Why must we continue this charade?//

[[/=]]
@@ @@
The soul-spell breaks and Iris grabs her shoes on the floor to hurl them at the wall. Glass breaks, echoing uselessly throughout her penthouse, and so it falls on nothing. It falls on no one.

As the Dark, she had no brain. She had no nerves to call her own, no neurons to imprint physiological signals into.
@@ @@
[[=]]
//But this is your freedom, is it not?//

//Did you want to be a corpse forever?//

[[/=]]
@@ @@
But now, it is all painful. It is all attached. The soul wants to be in a body, but perhaps this body was not made for her. 

Perhaps there is no body ever truly made to put her at blissful acceptance to say “yes, this is me. It is me, without a doubt, and without any friction.”
@@ @@
[[=]]
//What now?//
[[/=]]
@@ @@
There is a plethora of silence that smothers the empty penthouse as Iris stares at her feet. As a long, drawling shadow crosses her face like an steel veil, scraping her into pieces and bringing her back to being in Marshall and Carter’s hands.

Eyes, torso, legs, and ears. The fat of a broke Iris Black rendering sizzled outside an old oak door as the two men cowered over their creation, over the pact their families had formed maligning itself, twisting itself into a new shape. A new set of ontic vectors, derived from this plane and yet so unlike the primes they were composed of.

On that day, the magnitude of an ancient apparition was given a real direction by human hands who could barely comprehend what they’d created.

Is this their fault?
@@ @@
[[=]]
//Let’s blame them, yes.//
[[/=]]
@@ @@
That doesn’t particularly solve anything…

@@ @@
[[=]]
//What other choice do you have?//
[[/=]]
@@ @@

Silence.

The thought clears its weight, and is cut for consideration. For a brief nanosecond, the time it takes for a neuron to fire, there is a singularity more opaque than anything Iris had experienced before. 

Two dissolved halves agree for enough of their existence that Iris falls back onto the bed and observes once more her heartbeat with existential clarity.

Blame is easy, everyone likes it.
@@ @@
[[=]]
//Iris, you know deep in your heart that humans bring forth creations into existence that they don’t understand all the time. How this any different?//

//You need to re-orient yourself, to go back to the root. Figure out the nature of three, of five, of perhaps the properties of all primes while you are at it. Where the humans leave the outlines of concepts, perhaps you will find yourself there.//

//No thaumatologist has ever known magic, because they extract the art down into cold, hard science where there is meant to be chaos. But when a wonder stops being wondrous, well, what else is there to do?//
[[/=]]
@@ @@
…Is that it?

What a paltry solution. After all that effort she went through, she just needs to fuck up those buffoons again? Retrace their steps through every method of existential abatement?

//Really?//

This is becoming too much now. Her soul, her existence, those idiots—she needs to get back to who she was. Which yes, was very much undefined, but her wants are enough to guide her right now.

Her wants overpower the monotony that is her soul reaffirming itself enough that she manages to crash back into bed and fall asleep.

She only needs one hour, and why, nobody knows, but that is perhaps a mystery to be solved in a few weeks.

Perhaps it is a mystery to be solved wrangling the family history out of those morons she had to call “partners”.

Perhaps it is a mystery to be solved getting Alphonse and Skitter to finally do something useful for once.

…Iris Dark…

Who are you?

//What// are you?

Whatever the answer is…
@@ @@
[[=]]
There is money to be made tomorrow, whenever you wake up.

This is your purpose, your birthright, what was poured into innocent skin beneath an old oak door.

Even if only for a brief second you realized your new futility…

No. Moralizing won’t fix the damage you cause. 

The people you’ll kill to fulfill your bastard nature.

Sleep well, Iris Dark.

Sleep well, you abomination of humanity and its ills, of the inventions it created to describe and express itself.

For now you too know the decay of inalienable uncertainty.
[[/=]]

[[=]]

[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/local--files/two-times-three-equals-six/end.jpeg]]
[[/=]]

[[/div]]

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=====
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Three Times Five Equals Fifteen

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