Metaworld HopeCore

The room dissolved.

With herself in the scene, the effect was doubly as potent, for Derek’s body grew suddenly stiff, as if he had actually died. Eppie’s Lavinia dug into her husband’s body, then she rose with her wide-blue eyes misted over with disbelieving terror. Her Lavinia looked at her own hands in horror, at the invisible blood that was elbow deep—the precise place where Demetrius and Chiron would hew off her hands—and let out a guttural, bestial sob.

Grief, stark and sudden, rippled into the darkness.

Demetrius stepped up behind Eppie and, with one hand, took her by her glorious, glistening hair. He pulled, not too hard, for Eppie’s [Physicality] reacted to Joshua’s borrowed [Physicality], forcing her from the body of her husband.

DEMETRIUS

Stay, madam; here is more belongs to her;

First thrash the corn, then after burn the straw:

Her Lavinia’s grief turned to shock, her body grew rigid with fright, then she looked up upon her husband’s killer with incomprehension. On Valorie, the aesthetic was paradoxically pitiful yet seductive. On Eppie, with her petite frame, enormous eyes, and tiny face, the visual aesthetic was nothing short of criminal.

Then Chiron came in as a tour de force of pure, unmitigated villainy. Charles was a good-looking young man, and yet, he made the most punchable expression anyone had ever seen.

CHIRON

Drag hence her husband to some secret hole,

And make his dead trunk pillow to our lust.

With his shirt collar open, he knelt beside Eppie and ran a hand along her tear-stained cheek.

Her Lavinia finally understood, and the comprehension turned her grief to desperation. [Act Natural] [Vocality] and [Physicality] fired every cylinder. She looked to Tamora, her eyes brimming with hope, while knowing that her pleas were futile.

Tamora dared not meet Eppie’s eyes. “But when ye have the honey ye desire…”

Eppie pulled her hand from Joshua’s, leaving a few golden strands still clinging to his fingers. She half-dragged, half-crawled over to Elizabeth to hug her red dress. She pleaded with the Goth Queen, woman to woman, a mother to a daughter, her eyes equal parts disbelief and despair.

LAVINIA

O Tamora! thou bear'st a woman's face—

Her cries were a whisper, but her [Vocality] filled the black box practice room as if they were on stage. Cooper’s vocal lessons were evidently paying dividends.

TAMORA

I will not hear her speak; away with her!

Elizabeth’s performance, that of a woman caught between primal revulsion, empathy for a fellow female, and her grief and vengeance, came out perfectly as well.

LAVINIA

Sweet lords, entreat her, hear me but a word.

Eppie crawled back to the boys, praying to them as they were the vengeful, cruel Gods of an uncaring Pantheon.

The boys mocked her pleas.

They circled her like wolves, their eyes licking her exposed neck.

She begged Elizabeth again, beseeching Tamora for a smidgen of humanity.

Elizabeth threw her dress so that it whipped Eppie’s face. “I know not what it means; away with her!”

Eppie exploded. Her tiny body seemed to, for a second, stand over the giantess that was Tamora as she delivered the final, FINAL lines she would ever speak from her own tongue.

LAVINIA

No grace? No womanhood?

At the designated line, [All the World’s a Stage] deactivated.