So Cain comes up out of the plane, jet-fuel-afterburners blazing hot hwoooooooch in his sockets, and he looks around, and THIS IS IT! He knows it! He's on the plane, all out front and all there right in perfect synch. And the other passangers are all dead in the straight world, crushed by the Combine, but not where he is they aren't. He's in a new place, that next dimension, seeing the strings and their hidden vibrations, where they aren't dead but rather they've just
forgotten how to move
and he can remind them. He can pull them into his movie.
::::CONTROL::::
Cain pauses a moment and looks around at the wreckage and down at himself. He actually has what may be jet fuel on his leg and the hem of his robe (robe?) and then the potential movement of all those people just overwhelms whatever it is that he was thinking. They bizz and they buzz and they resonate at him. They have some kind of movement that's trapped in them and it nags at Cain. Nags at his eyes, ticktocks and hums and buzzes in his skull. They won't stop ticking and then they just fall into his movie so naturally... they are his to do with as he pleases. All this Control. He knows it's dangerous. He takes a moment to promise them that he'll take care of them. He actually goes so far as to make a little ritual out of it. He makes a solemn promise, a formal promise, and it comes out sounding like a bedtime prayer under his breath. He grinds his toe into the grit on the polished hull of the plane and scratches something permanent, something vital, something real... a symbol. The shape of it comes to him fully formed, more like remembering something than inventing it. Perhaps it's a long-forgotten letter from a strange and dangerous alphabet he knew in the womb. The shape is
And then he raises his hands. His thin and meaningless country-boy-gone-city-boy skeleton bends its elbows and pulls his hands together. Then, feeling the rightness of this initial gesture, he brings his hands together over his head and he squares and settles his feet on the hull of this incredible burned and destroyed ship of which he is now unequivocally the captain. :::the caption:::
At this point there is nearly nobody to scorn or praise his performance: most of his audience is thoroughly deceased. Tragedy abounds in both aisles and in every row. Here, an enthusiastic stereo installation specialist was hatching a brilliant scheme he called "octaural crossfolding". It would have made your world fresh. There... lies the unavoidably severed torso of an air marshall, who had been dutifully monitoring the behavior of the passengers, looking for terrorists... but boy was his profile wrong, and there's terror all right, and right at the middle of it is nothing less than a newly minted Lord of the Previously Dead who has no real idea what's going on.
And inside Cain's head is running his movie, and in his movie he can start this air marshall back up. He can stick the two pieces of him together in his mind just by pushing them with his eyes... like this! And it works! And he can make him start right back up. And he does. Like a prophet from the olden days (why not?!) he asks this former Sky Marshall, with his .380 Sig Sauer pistol and discreet body armor tucked beneath is shirt and jacker, to stand up and by goddamn he does. But what then? Have to keep going! The bus is rolling! Everybody stand up! And they do! The flames spit and hiss all around them, and Cain stands like a magician, like a prophet, like an ancient Lord and raises his hands above his head and over the crackling of the flames booms out "Rise!"
And they do!
Watch the fuck out world!
