Day 1.

Lillina Rain and Julia Mandelbrot wake up for the first time in The Cage.

Something wasn't right... That was the first thing Lillina thought of as her mind began to awaken. Her mind was a blank, memories that were suppose to be there weren't. She didn't know what those memories were, but she knew there was something missing. Her next thought was figure out where she was, survey her surroundings. The instinct to do so was strong, but again she didn't know why. As she opened her eyes she was met with white, blinding white, and nothing but it. It immidiately tensed up her muscles, muscles that she was sure she knew how to use.

Lillina sat up, slowly and carefully, as if to make sure nothing was damaged. She looked down at herself to find that she was wearing white. That's when the panick began to slowly set in. She pulled her legs to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, creating a protective ball. Her eyes darted around, trying to find away out of the panic enducing white. Her search came up with nothing but another woman lying on the floor nearby. Not a door, not a window, just a little hole in the ground and that was it. The room was claustrophobia inducing, just causing the panic to rise even further. At least she learned something about herself. Right now, she was in her biggest nightmare.

Lillina rose to her feet, with a grace that told her she knew her body well. She caught a glimpse of something black out from under her left sleeve, so she pushed it up to her elbow and saw the tattoo. It was beautiful, dark swirling lines and shapes that somehow comforted her. As if someone she trusted and cared about had given it to her. Her breathing slowly returned to normal and her mind settled into an unfamiliar but comfortable stat of guard.

Julia Mandelbrot woke up like a computer powering on. Her mind, becoming aware of itself, did a rapid inventory of its contents. A lot of it was missing. She tried to recall the daily facts of life that one takes stock of on waking: the contents of her kitchen for breakfast? Missing. Where did she work, and did she need to go in today? Missing. Current location? Missing. The further she looked, the more it seemed like every file was missing, except for the name Julia Mandelbrot.

She'd suddenly realized she had no idea where she'd gone to sleep, or where she should now expect to be. But jumping up from this smooth, cold, possibly plastic surface she was laying face-up on, she thought as she quietly observed the sensation from her palms laid flat against the floor, wouldn't help. It wouldn't help to shout at walls or make demands or otherwise get upset. She decided to refrain from opening her eyes yet for a couple minutes, until she was more sure of her situation. If there was anyone dangerous there, noticing she'd regained consciousness might provoke them. She held her breath for a moment. She could hear someone else breathing who sounded female. She could hear the other women gasping short, quick breaths, like she was upset. Julia counted them for several seconds, then worked out an average of about 2.7 inhale-exhale cycles every five seconds, as opposed to an average resting rate of about 1.5 or so.

To Julia, that seemed like more of a problem than the amnesia and strange place. She'd never been very high on what people generally call 'emotional intelligence'. Her own feelings often felt distant and low-priority, and other people's were a closed box. She had a bad habit of not noticing others' moods and states of mind, and even when she noticed, frequently wouldn't know why they were acting the way they were. Given the situation, at least, she could hazard a guess.

As one last mental experiment, she tried recalling facts about other things. Some things were there. She knew what words themselves meant. While she couldn't remember how to drive, she knew that cars exist. She didn't know what country she lived in, but could name quite a few without trying. Most other people's names were missing, and the ones left were famous or other important people whose names would have become common knowledge household references. Julia found she could remember the faces of Errol Flynn and Sir Issac Newton, but not her own family. She knew that force=mass x acceleration, that the sum of the square root of any two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side, that the two bones of the forearm are the radius and ulna, and a whole host of other such things, but not where she would have learned that, or what field she studied. 97 seconds, she counted, after first gaining consciousness, she opened her eyes.

Above her head and around and under her, the six smooth white walls seemed to glow slightly, illuminating the room. Julia smiled very softly with satisfaction. Whoever had brought her here, she appreciated their clean, spartan decorating sense. Slowly, she sat up, counting five heartbeats, and noticed she was wearing two pieces of plain white clothing. She squinted hard, peering around the room and wondered if her vision had always been this bad. She could make out a shadow on the other side of the room, which she was fairly sure was the other woman she heard, but all she could really see was an outline and a darker smudge above it. It could be a houseplant for all she knew. The other woman's breathing had slowed, and Julia couldn't hear her well enough anymore to tell if that was her.

Beside her on the floor, a single piece of glittering metal caught her eye, and she reached her hand out to it. Her palm met a sort of thin square shape of cool, light steel. She picked them up and brought them close to her face for inspection. A pair of minimalistic wire frame glasses, about 4 inches across, 6 long, 1 high, weighing about 5.7 ounces. They were about as familiar as these white pajamas. They felt odd in the hand and on her face, not like something she would have been wearing her entire life. She doubted they were really hers. She tried them on anyways. Everything jumped into perfect clarity. The lenses were her prescription.

That was the one fact she found startling. Her eyes began to widen, as she thought of the possible implications all coming form that one little detail. These glasses were the right prescription, invisible bifocals calibrated and everything, particular to Julia. She started looking furiously around, trying to add more information to what she'd just learned. The walls were so clean, they didn't even have wiping marks from a rag, or fingerprints. As much as she approved, that was basically too clean. That's hiding-something and covering-tracks clean, to not even have the marks of having been cleaned. Not even the pock marks of paint and drywall interrupted the smooth whiteness of the wall. Which brought up another issue: how did they get in? She had no answer for that right now, and it bothered her. It bothered her almost as much as these glasses.

Only now did she bother really looking at the other woman, beyond noticing that she was present, and in white clothes as well, and had about her the usual human numbers. She seemed like she might be in some sort of distress, Julia, thought, but given the situation that's pretty much a given. Lost in the rush of her own thoughts and hypothesizing, Julia, gestures loosely around her at the white walls, and at her glasses, tapping at the edge of them. She seemed distracted as her thoughts began to accelerate, making her social awkwardness that much more apparent. It slipped her mind, as it did when she was like this, to go through the carefully learned and intentionally acted social motions people expect from her, and then tended to say things that made sense to her, but wouldn't to other people, not realizing people couldn't fill in the missing information by them selves without her saying something about it like post people. She looked 1 girl square in 2 eyes with a slightly alarmed expression, putting 1 finger on the corner of her glasses, and said 6 words.

"Do you realize what this means?!"

Lillina heard the tiniest shifts behind her as the other woman seemed to awaken. Her senses seemed to be sharp, she must had trained them in the past. Even though it was quiet in here, she could hear the other woman's breathing, every shift of movement, even her heartbeat. She could make out details along the walls, the tiniest of marks and blemises that most wouldn't have bothered to notice. She had a feeling that if there was any wind in here, she would have been able to feel the shifting of the currents, or know what a person's clothing was made of just by touching it. She had definitely been trained to do something in the past. But what she didn't know. There were no words that came to her mind for the skills she possessed. Or better yet, there were too many. She hadn't figured out all she could do yet, so the list of things that she could have been were too broad.

Lillina's right had travelled underneath her shirt, running two fingers across her skin. She was searching for a needle mark, the two small burns that would indicate tazing, anything to tell her how she had gotten here. So far there was nothing, a few places where there was scar tissue, but nothing recent. What did she do that would mean she had scars? Maybe she was a clumsy child or something? Her thoughts froze completely as her fingers brushed against a newer, more jagged scar. The sensitivity of this one told her that it had happened some time in the last three to five years. It was long as well as jagged, going from her right collarbone to just above her breast. She couldn't tell exactly what had done it from the size and shape, but it was obvious it was something bladed. Somebody didn't like her. Her head hurt, as if her brain was trying to get her to remember something, but nothing appeared in her head. Her memories were still an empty blank.

She knew that if shock caused the memory loss, then it would definitely come back over time. Though perhaps not the event that caused the shock in the first place. But if it was medically induced, then there was less of a chance of it coming back. Something told her that her past wasn't a happy one, so maybe her brain had shut it all out in order to protect her. From what she could remember, the brain did strange things to stop one from losing it. Even if it involved a complete shut down. In any case, she was glad that her brain didn't do that. It was better to live without memories than to be an empty shell.

The sound of the other woman lifting metal caused Lillina to whip around, her hand going to her waist as if searching for a weapon that wasn't there. She reacted purely on instinct, but it seemed like the right thing for her to do. Relief went through her as she saw that it was only a pair of glasses. Something told her that the other woman wasn't much a danger to her, at least not at the moment, but it would be better to play it safe. She locked eyes with the other woman, trying to find her face somewhere in her mind. But there was nothing, either she was somewhere in her memories, or they hadn't met before this. Lillina blinked as the woman spoke. She hadn't said anything before this and her question didn't make much sense to Lillina.

"I cannot answer your question, because I don't have enough information about the situation." She said in a blank, almost robotic tone. "I know about my own part in this, but not yours." Lillina thought it a good answer for the situation. As it spoke the truth plainly and simply. The thought of going into some long explaination about why she could or couldn't answer didn't seem like the right thing to say.

"Not much information...but not none, either. But not none. Not none..." she said, trailing off into her own thoughts for a moment, before standing up, and beginning to pace back and forth in the room, counting off her steps mentally as a measurement of the size of the room.

"So..." Julia continued, "What do we know? We know we don't know--unless...How old are you, at what school did you complete first grade, and without looking inside your sneaker, what is your shoe size? But then on the other hand, you know the number between 8 and 10, I presume, how to use a straw, and can picture to yourself what a German Shepherd dog looks like, yes?"

She nodded distantly, expecting the other girl to know about as much about herself as Julia did. She walked three last paces to the wall, standing almost nose to nose with it, trying to see if maybe she could see something, like you can if you put your face against a two-way mirror.

"And aside from knowing the things that we don't know, we also know the things we don't see. This place is clean. Has been cleaned. Is perfectly clean. Even the cleaning is cleaned," she glanced sharply at the other girl, "So what then? This place is intentional. Meticulously planned. This isn't a prison, not in the usual way. They wouldn't bother scrubbing their own fingerprints out of a simple cell." Julia turned around and faced her again. "And of course, if you haven't noticed," she gestures around at the four blank walls, "No obvious way in...unless...unless the walls were put up around us? Unless the whole floor raises and lowers like a trap door, making the room look solid when it's closed....not enough information for that yet."

Julia was getting excited, with thoughts flying through her mind almost faster than she could think them. She spoke them out loud, puzzling them out, glad they'd at least put her here with someone she might be able to bounce ideas and talk through this issue with. Julia glanced at her sometimes, inviting suggestions or input or other thoughts, but forgetting to mention that's what she was doing, and for that matter, forgetting to even give her own name or ask for one, or the social convention of introductions in general. She took off her glasses, looked them over, and put them back on, tapping at her temple with a couple fingers of one hand, a thoughtful gesture she wasn't fully aware of.

"But these...like I was saying before. They gave me glasses. Not my glasses, but glasses. And they're my exact prescription. They custom-made my glasses prescription. So, they want us not to be in distress, at least for now: They didn't have to give me any glasses at all. So...so this has been in planning for a long time, and specifically for us, by someone knows everything about us. Even down to details like the exact prescription of my glasses. So whoever is outside this room--and someone must be--we know they're someone who's meticulous, exacting, in control, and thinks of everything, no matter how small. And we know they're human."

Julia paused here and glanced away for a moment, as if she was embarrassed to bring it up, then back to her.

"I mean...it's not that crazy, right? Look at this place: they could be aliens? Robots? Maybe the world ended and we're in Purgatory surrounded by immaterial beings of perfect light and darkness? I just feel like we can't rule out things for being crazy when this situation clearly calls for crazy." she explained, looking for approval. "But giving me glasses, and giving us clothes that fit, and a...uh...I think that might an outlet for "the facilities", which is why I'm rather avoiding looking for information in that corner yet." Julia looked at the corner distastefully, trying not to imagine it becoming a necessity. She had an expression like a cat forced to walk through a puddle of water. "But...but...she continued. It means they're human. Or at least, aware of the facts of human life. Not something we can take for granted here."

She sighed, looking expectantly at the other woman, still not thinking of names at all, but hoping she'd follow Julia's reasoning. Julia felt like most people are generally easy to work with, as long as they understand what the logic is of what's going on around them. If not, they could be...troublesome to her. Of course, right now, Julia didn't really even understand what was going on around them, or who was on the other side of those walls.

Those walls...

Julia stepped back over to the wall, and started knocking on the wall, taking a step or two, and knocking again, occasionally stomping on the floor. She listened carefully trying to determine which parts of the wall sounded thick, and which hollow, trying to determine where the rooms beyond this one might be.

"Do me a favour, uh..." she realized names had been on order some time ago, but awkwardly tried to sidestep it, a bit embarrassed by the social mistake. "If you wouldn't mind, look at the inside of your shoe, and check the collar tag of your shirt and pants. That might help. Look for any marks like a brand or logo, a "Made In" tag, whether the pants and shoes are in American or UK sizing, even just if it's in English. Hell, at this point I'll analyze washing instructions if I can."

It's not like there was much else to do in the blank, empty white room, at least until something changed.