Scene 4.16 - Violet
EXT./INT. Wine Cellar - Night.
(We hear a pounding of the door at the top of the stairs. At the third thump, the locked door busts open and VERNE, not expecting a stairway of all things to be behind a locked cellar door, tumbles down the staircase completely, knocking over a rack of wine, which, of course does a domino effect to three other racks. Luckily, these were just the racks by the staircase containing the table wines and bottles of Bubble a la Vernasty. His tommy-gun doesn't go off, and he is showered with spraying wine.)
VERNE
Puh! Grapefruit juice! Aww, and my best ten-dollar suit! It'll never come out!
(A noise and some quick scurrying is heard. It wasn't a mouse. It's LEAH dragging AZALEA'S coffin from the submarine with a bit of rope found near the docks.)
VERNE (Cont'd)
(Levels gun at hip:) All right, who's back here?
LEAH
Is that you, Verne?
VERNE
Am I talking to Leah, or Azalea?
LEAH
Leah. (We see her, in all her blueness, emerge from the shadows.) Azalea’s busy in a time-closet getting it on with some guy named Lonnie.
VERNE
You mean Ronnie?
LEAH
Lonnie, Ronnie, Johnny, she was screaming his name, that's all I know.
VERNE
Her name. Ronnie's a woman. You say they were sharing a time-closet?
LEAH
Last I checked. Hmm, if I knew Lonnie was a girl, I might-a joined them. Oh, well.
VERNE
You're saying Azalea has somehow turned Ronnie into a, into a-
LEAH
Lesbian. I told you already, I like girls. Are you gonna help me with this or not?
VERNE
What are you doing?
LEAH
Fixing something that wasn't broken.
VERNE
That's your coffin! How'd you get it from my ship all the way down here?
LEAH
(Smirk:) It wasn't easy, now can you give me a hand?
VERNE
The docks are a half-mile away... What's this about, Leah? Where are we taking her?
LEAH
To where she belongs.
VERNE
I don't understand, is this about The Baron's secret project?
LEAH
Ah, so you've seen it already, have ya?
VERNE
No, I just got wind of it from my last assimilation. Or was it the one before that?
LEAH
Just how many of you are there?
VERNE
More than I want to think about. How about you? Did you find all of your phans?
LEAH
There's still your Azalea, this one and she really needs to go on a diet, me, and her.
VERNE
Her?
LEAH
Violet.
VERNE
Violet? Who's that?
LEAH
Pull the ninth bottle on the third row of the sixth rack and you'll find out.
VERNE
The wha? Ninth bottle on the- this one? Glacier Gold? What kind of name is that for a wine? Elderberries? What, is The Baron terminally constipated or something? He might as well have bottled prune juice... or celery... Elderberry wine? No thanks, ladies, I'd rather drink the Arsenic straight-up.
LEAH
Oh, hush! Just pull it already!
(The walls slide away to reveal a large, subterranean laboratory lit in various shades of blue. More types of devices than can be described succinctly are seen here; wires and cables all leading to a metal cube, four sides of which have waterfalls of red, yellow, blue and green. The floor of the cube is opaque black and the ceiling is transparent white. A sickly, maroon-and-black aura moves about inside the cube. Inside that, a blurry, nude, completely shaven body of VIOLET is seen, air-brushed dark-muave and black. Let her natural skin breathe plenty though; this ain't Goldfinger.)
VERNE
Of all that is unholy! That's a para-dimensional hypercube! What has he done to her?
LEAH
She's in a state of temporal flux. She can't hear us or see us, but she's conscious.
VERNE
I built a model of this as a kid; I kept fireflies in there. Why is he doing this?
LEAH
He's nailed the paradox down to me, I could use your help, Verne. This is his version of trying to save her. She's the power behind it. That thing uses her psychic energy to bend the fabric of time.
VERNE
I- I see how it could save her life, uh, your life -- but- This isn't a medical procedure you just wake up one morning and give the college try. What the-? He's had to have run into quite a few dead ends before eventually coming to this conclusion. Nah, nah... He's up to something else here.
LEAH
I don't want to find out. (Taps coffin:) That's what she's for.
VERNE
But she's not a dead end. She's the one who made it through the operation intact.
LEAH
I know, she's the only one of all of us still dreaming. She's lucky. She has no idea that anything has even gone wrong; she's been asleep since take-off. (Wipes condensation from porthole then draws a tiara on the glass over AZALEA'S head.) To her, she just breathed in some funny-tasting gas in Vegas and thinks she's gonna wake up on Halceron and win herself a tiara.
VERNE
Well, let's not shatter those illusions prematurely. You may not win a pageant on Halceron, but if we get all of you back together again, you'll still be Miss Universe to me.
LEAH
Aren't you sweet.
VERNE
Look, Leah, I've given it some thought, about us.
LEAH
Us? What about us?
VERNE
Well, when all of us Humpty-Dumpties get reunited and you're you and I'm me, perhaps we should have a clean slate, because there will still be a little part of you that-
LEAH
Fine. Clean slate. I like it.
VERNE
-That loves me. Err, okay, we've dragged her over here, what should we do now?
LEAH
I was hoping you could tell me.
VERNE
Huh?
LEAH
I remember all the safety manuals from school on what to do if you find a lost phan, but this is way out of my jurisdiction. I'm out of my depths. I never saw a picture of one of these on a milk carton. That thing doesn't even look anything like a quantum generator.
VERNE
(Chuckles:) Believe it or not, they all used to look this way, except that red wall used to be brown. They knew it should have been red, but they lacked the red-room equation to make it fit as a conduit to Oblivion, so they substituted brown, which took out the garbage most of the time, but also hatched wonderful things like time-anomolies and our infamous Phantom World.
LEAH
So if he's so savvy on this red-wall thing, why are we all still in a paradox then?
VERNE
He isn't savvy on it. We invented the red room; but he's forgotton a few key details we picked up later, before we got good at it. Or maybe -- he never... learned them. (Less under breath:) He needs to add an extension from that wall into an area of space that isn't occupied by anything else, or it won't work right. Now, if I could get all of you into that box-
LEAH
Uh-uh! There's no way I'm goin' in there, you've gotta open it up and drag her out!
VERNE
Come on, this is old-school, it's made to look scary to keep the tourists away! We'll have infinite space in there to fix it all, and limitless time! Didn't the aftermath reels from the Patriot Act teach you anything? There's freedom in our captivity!
LEAH
Nope, I'm not going in there. That's not freedom. That not why we all live free.
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