by Prometheus
Two purplish ocular orbs, roughly imitating the size of eyeballs, studied the flux of quarks within five-hundred different DNA strands simultaneously.
"Well?" the female voice purred in Latin. "What do you see?"
The face, in which the orbs were located, contorted with slight disgust. "Primitive chains of genetic code."
The woman, whose raven-black hair billowed in the night breeze, arched an eyebrow as she peered down from her rooftop perch, following the gaze of the orbs/eyes. An ocean of people pulsed through the tight corners of Venice, the Carnevale in full swing. She brushed a flailing bit of her hair, locking it behind her left ear. "No, no, no," she sighed, staring at her companion. "You're going too deep. Just... bring your perception back a bit, eh?"
The purplish orbs/eyes stared at her in a perplexed fashion, then refocused on the crowds below.
She stared at her companion. "Not too deep," she reminded. "Just... look... at them, you know?"
Her companion nodded, withdrawing his perception down to only four dimensions. The chaos below drifted up past them, passionate musical rhythms and loud voices coalescing into an orchestra of humanity.
"Well?" she finally asked again. "What do you see?"
"One-hundred, forty-nine humans present will release their souls in the coming ten temporal frames. Twelve will receive fatally damaging injuries while operating mechanical transportations. Twenty-four will--"
The voice halted abruptly as the woman, throwing her hands up into the air with a huff of annoyance, jumped up from the edge of the roof and pulled out a Cuban cigarillo. The being turned, his gaze following her pace along the rooftop. "What?" the voice asked in a harmony older than light.
Sheaths of silver-white moonlight illuminated her slender form, lightly glinting off her black leather bodysuit. The cigarillo puffed to life as she snapped the silver lighter closed. "You just don't get it, do you?" she asked with a slight smile. "All I ask is for you to look at the crowd below and tell me what you see."
The being slowly walked toward her, the natural dust of the rooftop peeling back from each footstep, as if nature itself sensed the power residing within. "As I have done," the voice responded, an ethereal opal coat flowing from his form, billowing against the temporal breeze of time's natural progression.
She snorted a burst of smoke from her nostrils. "No. All you did was examine them. I asked you what you see! I mean, come on! The smell... the FERVOR of excitement? It's practically engulfing this city! It's a party! It's fun!" she tried to explain, the passion of her words rolling through smiling lips.
"It is primal chaos."
"IT'S LIFE!" she shouted with a burst of excitement, throwing her hands up into the night air, palms grasping for the stars themselves. She stared into the stars above, gripping the cigarillo between a smile, hands still held high.
The being shook his head in a dismissive fashion. "This is irrelevant." The voice resonated lightly on seventeen different audible frequencies.
Malvana slowly lowered her arms, her smile fading a bit. "I was right, X..." she began, puffing on her smoke, "...you're no fun at parties."
Prometheus X tilted his head slightly, the aura surrounding him shimmering randomly between five shades of photon entropy. Malvana simply stuck her tongue out at him. "Yes," he stated, lightly grazing her timeline with his omnipresence. "You will appreciate my mortal counterpart more than you do my present form."
She pursed her lips a bit. "You enjoy doing that, don't you?"
"Doing what?"
"Oh, dropping these little hints of things to come on me!"
"I am from your future. Thus, I am merely stating a fact, woman."
"Ri-i-i-i-i-ght," she said, mocking him. "That's probably the tenth time you've mentioned this 'mortal counterpart' to me since we... met." Her voice dipped a bit as the memories of ancient Peru slid past her thoughts. The disappearance of her husband, Pala. The abduction of her son, Ry-Chyrd. Her baptism of... the X. And this being. This enigma, that reminded her of her husband.
Prometheus X merely studied her for a moment as he pondered her words, while simultaneously analyzing the natural collapse of thirteen alternate timelines.
"So... what's he like? Your future mortal," she finally asked, folding her arms against the sudden burst of night breeze.
"He is me, and I am he."
"...And I'm the Walrus, koo-koo-katchoo," she recited cheekily.
Prometheus X shook his head. "No, you are not the Walrus. But you will encounter him," he responded, completely missing the musical reference.
She just sighed, shaking her head with a smile. "So... what are we doing here, eh?"
The X turned and walked back to the edge of the rooftop. "We are here because that is what is destined."
"I don't believe in destiny, X. You know that," she said, walking over to join his gaze at the ancient stone structures, jutting up over the Venice skyline.
"That is unfortunate, as you cannot escape it."
"Ridiculous," she retorted. "Fate is not preassigned. Hell, especially not for YOU, anyway."
The X looked over at her. "My destiny is as permanent, if not as simple, as yours, woman."
"What? I don't believe it!" she exclaimed. "You're telling me that, with your knowledge of the future, you CAN'T change your own fate? Rubbish!"
The X pondered her for a moment, searching for an explanation that she could comprehend. "The fact that you are aware of where a road leads does not give you the ability to alter the road itself," he explained, funneling a glint of his wisdom across her cerebral cortex. "I may alter the direction I travel, my velocity, and the circumstance around the events within that road, but the road remains the one I walk."
Malvana studied him for a moment. "Okay. You've completely lost me."
"You will understand, in time."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Was that... a joke? Did you just make a JOKE, X?"
Prometheus X turned back toward the crowd, his all-awareness grasping the event he came here to observe. "It begins," he stated.
"What?" Malvana asked, turning toward the crowd. "What begins? What's going on?"
The X felt the metahuman presence of multiple beings within the crowd. "The formation of the future," he simply stated. "Their time has not yet come. But this is the first stepping stone of humanity's final line of defense."
"Defense?" she asked, crushing her smoke out under her heel. "Defense against what?"
The X turned to meet her gaze, his opal orbs/eyes shining with the glow of tomorrow. "Against everything."
Then, with a swirl of star matter, the X turned, ripping open a spacial tear. "Come."
Malvana cocked her head back. "What? That's it? That's all we came here to do?" she asked impatiently.
"Observation ends for now."
She began following him through the spatial tear. "Damn it, X. You never explain anything."
"Do not worry. You will understand, in time."
"It's not funny if you keep saying it, X."
The spatial tear warped and slowly sealed, the occupants of the Carnevale never having been aware of the godling, nor his newly acquired companion's existence.