Welcome to Gaia! ::

Maebe had been fingering her folded up letter for some time now, her legs swinging as she sat on the desk and waited for Dawson's final touches. She'd even kissed hers, but then she grabbed his before he could say a word and left a red kiss mark on it, too. Some things were better said without words.

She hopped off the desk and headed out the door, eyeing the hallways for a moment before she tapped into her other self's memories and figured out the direction to the room with the gurneys they'd woken up on. "This way.

After about a minute of walking, she spoke. "Isn't it strange," She asked, taking his hand in hers and holding it loosely by the tips of three fingers. "That your horseman self has its own fancy schmancy name, all weird nordic lettering and stuff, and yet me.. I'm still just Maebe." She scrunched her nose up in annoyance. "Does that mean I'm just not creative in the head? Is that where they got all this s**t from?"

His hold was so much firmer than she could ever manage. Just like the rest of him, Dawson's hand in hers made her feel safe in the unsafest of conditions.

"Isn't that better, though? Would you really want to have a personality that fits so perfectly into the world of the Horseman, that it's almost impossible to distinguish between the two? I might as well be one of them. A murderer bent on the destruction of the human world, and yet still her biggest worry is what she was going to wear that day."

Maebe snorted, amused by her own self-deprecation. "Girls like us never change."

She took him up a flight of stairs, her hand never leaving his, even though she took the lead.

"Do you think everyone's here? Not just us, I mean?"

"Eeeennh." She turned her hand side to side in a gesture that indicated 'maybe so, maybe not', and then let it go. "All right. I should know better. I mean, I didn't think you were anything like your guy. In fact, I would go so far as to say you're a lot unlike your guy, when it comes to his interest in me. And ain't that a damn shame."

At least now she was grinning, which could have easily been hiding the pain behind its flashy exterior, but there was never any way to tell for sure.

"I still wish my imagination had come up with a cooler name rather than just used my own. Like.."

And of course, she came up blank when she tried to think of one.

"Well, like, whatever. Names are stupid, anyway. The lab's this way."

She paused when he called her an unmasked villain, and looked down at her collarbones, where her skin very subtly began to shift and morph into bandages. "Not inaccurate." She muttered, no longer disturbed with her current body. After all, she'd been worse.

She'd been a tree, once.

A ******** tree.

"I can't think of a name." She admitted, a little sullenly. "I think that's why I'm Maebe here, too. Whenever I try to think of a name that might suit me, the only thing that comes up are other horrible puns my mother would have made. 'Canbe. Sandy. Dinar. My head's not really in the game for this, right now." Or ever.

Maebe paused, a little surprised that Dawson was apologizing for his quip. It was funny, she just - found the truth in it. Now she felt bad for making him feel bad. What a loop of nonsense.

"I don't think anything you ask is dumb. And for the record, I think I'm totally like a Scooby Doo villain. So yes. Undercover. Let's try to find out what these kids are up to."

She really hoped she'd gotten that right.

Walking up to a Famine technician, she lifted her fingers in a coy wave, and tried her best to look pleasant. "Heya. Any updates on the memory losses? Hoping for some good news, but I'll understand if the answer is no."

The Famine horseman leveled them with an unimpressed look. Clearly, questions weren't welcome here.

"You know everything we know. The crystal is failing, and we need to adapt to keep things running. So instead of asking useless questions, why don't you go collect Fear like you're supposed to and actually do something helpful?"

The attitude was strong with this one. Snippy and cold, and clearly uninformed. Maebe couldn't be completely surprised - whoever this was, wasn't a Hunter, which meant there was a fair chance she was speaking to someone who didn't really exist.

It was a pointless endeavor. But their visit to the lab didn't have to be.

"Yes. Of course. Sorry to bother! I'll just grab one of those surveys you gave us earlier, since I couldn't fill it out before. Thanks anyway."

"I'm a great actress." She corrected him with a prideful smile. "That is because I am a great liar. It comes in handy, sometimes. Acting is just lying for a role, after all. I think I could have been a good actress, in the normal world. But it comes in handy a lot more often than you might think."

She took her own piece of paper, and sat down on a gurney to read through it. "She has messed with our memories before. That's why I'm like, wondering why all these weird memory sucking deities keep taking on the shape and name of Disney characters. Like, is there a conspiracy with Walt Disney? Man, wouldn't that be ******** up."

She read through the questions quietly, and her brow furrowed. "What purpose could somebody have for convincing us that we're not Hunters anymore, but Horsemen? Maybe Dorothy is on Halloween's side, and Alice is, like, her major opponent."