The Many Faces of Tully

We kick the twins off of the large TV and Jace starts to hook it up to his laptop. He connects the camera to his laptop and starts fiddling around with it. His laptop screen pops up on the TV and I don’t understand what’s on it. There are a bunch of charts and graphs, but then I recognize a picture of a brain, and then a body. My CAT scan and my X-ray.

Jace studies those for a second. “Huh,” he says. I look at him and the light from the screen is reflecting off of his glasses.

Toshi walks up to the screen then. He studies it too. I don’t understand it. It looks like a brain. My body looks like a body.

“Everything is normal,” Toshi finally says.

“Yes. But everything she does is abnormal,” Jace replies.

“Her body isn’t blurry like Toshi’s is, but she can change her appearance,” Zazu states, examining it too. I’m starting to feel awkward.

“It isn’t voluntary,” Jace says to him. “I think it happens when she explodes so I’ll be studying the video closely.”

“No parts of her brain are bigger than average like ours are,” Hutsi remarks. “Something in our brain is abnormally large, but she’s average.”

“She’s only different when she’s active. Watch her vitals as she’s building up to the explosion.” Jace taps a few buttons on his laptop and the picture on the screen changes. There are a bunch of rows of waves. There are numbers written by the waves.

He presses the play button and you can hear my heart beating over the speakers. It’s steady at the moment. I see one number, it’s a percentage. My oxygen intake. It’s seems good to me right now.

“It’s completely normal,” Toshi says, somewhat disappointedly.

“Just wait,” Jace tells him, never taking his eyes off the screen. His chin is cupped in his hand and his pointer finger taping on his lips.

My heart rate starts to accelerate. The beeping increases. Actually, everything on the screen seems to go up. Except my oxygen intake. It starts to go down. The beeping is steadily getting faster, and I look at the number. It’s passed the hundred point now, but keeps going up.

“Whoa,” I hear someone say. I don’t know who.

“Just wait,” Jace repeats himself.

The beeping is almost constant again. My oxygen intake is very low and all of the other waves seem high, but I don’t know if that’s normal or not.

The beeping stops. My oxygen intake is at zero. The other waves turn into flat lines.

“Wha-” someone gasps, and then all of the graphs say ERROR.

“Did she just…” Toshi trails off, he turns and looks at me.

“Die?” Jace finishes for him. “It seemed like it, huh?”

“How is that even possible?” Zazu questions.

“I have a theory,” Jace says. Everyone stares at him. “Let’s watch the video first.” He clicks some buttons and then walks over to stand next to Toshi.

Everyone stands up and crowds around them to get a closer look. They’re blocking my view. I try standing on the couch to see over their heads but it doesn’t work.

I hear my voice come out of the speakers.

“You tell me.”

I try to force my way through the crowd, but they’re too absorbed in the video.

“What else happens?” Jace’s voice comes through the speaker.

“It feels likes the world is crashing in on me. My heart accelerates. My ears ring. My chest hurts. My heart accelerates more,” my voice says.

Someone grabs my arm and tugs me through the crowd.

“Here you go, Shorty,” Nash says, pulling me to the front.

“Then what?” Jace’s voice says. I can see me now. I’m sitting in the chair next to the machine. The beeping is already rising.

“Everything goes silent. Everything stops, including my heart.”

“Your heart stops?”

“Yes. Then I realize I’m holding my breath, so I breathe out. That’s when I explode.”

“Is that what happens every time?”

“No. I turned into a snake once. My venom killed her.”

“You morphed into a snake?” I see myself nod. I can see the pain on my face. “What happens after you explode?”

“I run. My bags pack, my features change, and I run. I always run. I erase their memories. No one remembers me,” I watch myself wrap my arms around my chest. The beeping is still increasing. “I leave them. I leave them broken and dead for someone to find. They would hate me if they could remember me.”

I watch myself breathe heavily, and then fall out of the chair. It looks like I’m trying to curl in on myself. The beeping increases.

“Tully?” I can hear clearly now, and Jace does sound concerned. I would be too if I was watching this for the first time, which technically I am, but I know what’s going to happen.

The beeping stops. I watch myself raise my head to look at the monitor. I see myself release the air in my lungs and everything goes white. The camera focuses again, and I look how I look now. I watch myself pull out the mirror, but then the video pauses.

I look to my right and Jace is at his laptop again. He makes the video reverse, and then he presses more buttons on his laptop. The video started playing again, but in slow motion.

My racing heart beats are seconds apart now and the video creeps forward. The line goes flat and my head slowly inches upwards towards the monitor. My lips part slowly as I blow air out of them.

I seem to glow white suddenly. My whole body looks to be expanding with the white light. I start to break apart. My skin appears to explode into tiny pieces and then the screen is white. It takes a full minute before we can see again, and I’m still sitting in the same position but I’m different.

“That was my theory. She’s like a Phoenix. She is a Phoenix. She dies, but comes to life again. She’s a never ending cycle of life and death,” Jace says. I trace my snake tattoo.

“Shouldn’t her name be something else then?” Toshi asks.

“She said she’s also morphed into a snake. I think her name is perfect. Powerful people. She is more than one person, and she is very powerful,” he answers him, looking over his glasses. I was never a glasses kind of person, but they look good on him.

“I wonder how that works..?” Toshi asks no one in particular.

“We won’t know until it happens,” Jace says. He stares at me now. His gaze is hungry. Not in the 'I want to tear off your clothes' hungry, but in the 'I want to unravel your deepest darkest secrets, cut you open and see what color you bleed' hungry. I’m a problem for him to solve.

“As fascinating as this all is, my TV show is going to be on in a minute,” Haides says.

Jace taps another key on his laptop and the video disappears, and his home screen is displayed on the TV. The background picture is of him and a girl. He disconnects it quickly from the TV so I don’t get a good look at it.

He looked a few years younger in the picture. I wonder who the girl is. Then I realize that we are all here. Where is everyone’s family? Do they know they’re here? Does anyone have girlfriends, wives, kids? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to.