Through the white gate up the stairs, something of a corporate feel surrendered the place, with desks and tons of papers flying around, computers' keys clicking sounds, important phone calls and the like. If Anas had been able to feel anything,with an atmosphere such as this, he would have most probably felt familiar with the place.
They made it through the crowd and the weird gazes alike, and went straight to a specific office room to the left, which was one amongst many but probably the last in that row. Maj took a look at his clothes and brushed his hair as if to look tidier, then knocked twice and straightened up his back when he heard the woman's response. He opened the door carefully as if he was scared to make a sound with it, and when he heard her urge him to just come in, he put some power into his grip as if to will himself to do it, but then hesitated for a moment and took a deep breathe, a cold sweat ran down his forehead as he was stuck in the moment and frozen in time, but soon he busted the door wide open after she urged him again with a harsher tone, he drew a smile on his face and showed Anas with a "Ta-da!!!"
The woman had a complicated expression on her face the moment she laid her eyes on Anas' motionless body and said in a monotonous tone, "I have one question. Be sure to answer it right, cause I'll know if you were lying. Did you fool him with the "curse" thing, too?" Maj swallowed his saliva and shoke his head slowly, but when she followed that question with "Are you sure?" he shook his head again by accident, but managed to change it quickly into a nod. As sweat was pouring down his face and amidst a strange silence that followed, she finally asked, "Well, which one is your answer?" In a busy tone while she began to look through some documents, as if to signal to him to use his words instead. Maj knotted his eyebrows and touched his chin at that point and started to wander around in his head, but suddenly and out of nowhere, he seemed to have found an idea enough to make his eyes glow in enlightenment. "Ah ha ha ha... I forgot what the question was... "
Maj got smaller and smaller as the silence that followed continued to stretch on and on to seemingly no end, until he felt so light that he could fly away with the wind. But she didn't seem willing to do anything about it. She took off her glasses and hung them around her neck, then went past the two of them and closed the door to the office, and opened a different door placed behind her desk. With that, Maj let out the breath he had been holding onto all this time and followed her inside.
In a white room with different equipment, Maj laid down Anas on something akin to a hospital bed, while an operation light was directed to his face, while Aurora had worn a lap coat and put her glasses back on at that point, and with a somewhat clumsy motion began to take off some black gloves she had covering her hands. The purple ends of her fingertips suggested some problems with blood circulation, but she didn't seem bothered by it, to say the least.
She first directed her hands with her arms to Anas' heart and chest, then guided them towards his head, and began "drawing" across his face with her fingers delicately as if she held a brush on each end, until she found the swelling area. The fingers gathered around like moths to a flame, and the swelling kept getting bigger and bigger when they were all placed on it, until it popped and released different forms of liquid, but most importantly, a single apple which she signaled to Maj with her eyes to pick it up with a glove and put it on an iron tray next to her when it dropped to the ground. Then, she held her breath and went back and closed Anas' left eyelid with a gentle motion while grabbing with her other hand at the back of his neck, and pressed with her fingertips at his spine. She let out her breath and went to wash her hands, and waited nearby as the feeling throughout his body was coming back and was able to regain some feeling in his limbs, as if his senses were all getting rebooted, in some sense like being overstimulated in the blink of an eye then easing up into reality again.
Anas' tried to get up right away but was feeling a bit like lagging behind in what he commands his body to do versus what it responds to, so Aurora took the chance to ask Maj if he had told Anas anything, which Maj just shrugged to in response as he was not sure whether he had heard anything in that state he had been.
She made her way back to Anas, and having interpreted Maj's answer as neither a yes nor no, she began talking from a different angle than what would be an introduction necessarily. "There are three types to what a seed transforms to, one of which is what we have here, that is to say a "fruit type." It's not yet clear what the types' difference entails. Whether you interpret one as more offensive or more abstract in nature, there will always be some inconsistencies to some extent. And so, looking at one's own desire is the easier course of action, for no reason other than it says more about the person themself, which then would lead us to learn how they've shaped the seed and its resulting power." Listening to that woman talk, Anas felt somewhat familiar with that tone, as it was, in some sense, almost identical to Maj's, or perhaps more simply just the same academic serious tone that Maj was using. So, Anas began to wonder if Maj was imitating her after all.
As Aurora noticed his eyes resting on her hands, after she forgot to wear her gloves back on, she adjusted herself and extended her hands to Maj to help her wear the gloves. "You see, the seed combined with my personal desire cost me the feeling in my hands, but so in return, whoever I touch with those hands gives me partial control into their nervous system. Your eye, for example, we could say it's completely done for, but I was able to restore some connection back with your spinal cord. That is to say, you're still blind in that eye, but you could still move it around without any problems with my own nerves as a cable connecting with your system. As for your skull and the swelling, it's interesting how it recovered on its own, but that could be due to the seed's position being there, and the risk of its placement being compromised had it not used any power to cover itself, especially since it hasn't fused with your desire yet."
Maj suddenly jumped in to add, while looking smug, as if to show off, "Mother is so knowledgeable." which she responded delightly to with a smile. "It's just an educated guess, only with what we know so far, so it's bound to change with time and prove one way or the other."
Anas started focusing on the part that the fruit popped out from, and tracing with his finger the hole's supposed place, but as soon as he heard the word "mother" being uttered towards that lady, he got immediately distracted from his condition. In his eyes, the young lady seemed roughly in the middle of her twenties, and looking back and forth between Maj and her, Maj certainly seemed younger but not by any chance to be her son. The word kept playing on and on with Anas' head until he found himself mumbling it unintentionally.
"It's just a tradition." Aurora answered shortly, but Anas didn't really understand what that meant exactly, so that only made him even more confused, as it showed all on his face. "Well, to learn more about a tradition, one has to practice it to fully understand it. Are you willing to do such a thing? that is to say, are you willing to join?" The first thought that came to Anas' mind after hearing her proposal is the fruit, which could be traced back to the scene he found himself in against his friend's lifeless body in that apartment, mixing in and being devoured by those strange roots coming from the ground, and at the face of a world like that, and in front of a choice to follow a grassy path with insanity hiding from every corner in every bush, or to look the other way, and pretend to be deaf while the whole world is inching towards insanity, both of them seemed competing which one is worse than the other.
Aurora suddenly decided to cut off his line of thoughts and said in a careful tone, "You don't have to make a decision at the spot, but the room for choice is very little."
Anas tossed his head back around between ideas, as he wasn't inclined to one option by nature, so the only thing he could do was weigh carefully the consequences. Although, at that point, if he was to describe how he was feeling about all of this, it would be most accurate to say that he doesn't care, either one of them is fine, none of it matters. And if he was given the time, he might sit still until the patience of everyone in the audience had evaporated all around him. But seeing as though he cannot do that, and that he has to, in some sense, to put both feet out of whichever door he choose, the only thing "choice" he saw he had is to justify whichever one he picked in such a situation, "I accept, it's not like I'm planning to go to work anymore, so I have no plans to do really about anything else. I'm still somewhat clueless about the specifics. If I chose to look the other way, I might get hit at the back of my head while not paying attention. Little room for choice... you're pressuring me to get cold feet and picture my own death, all the while showering me with all this information just to push me to seek protection from the unknown. But it's fine, I don't mind it. I couldn't care less what happens either way."
Aurora's expression stayed the same, but the next minute she stood up and directed her left hand towards Anas' throat, her index finger grew something like a a small twig out of its tip that penetrated the black glove and lightly pierced through Anas' skin, despite that, Anas didn't seem to bother with it, he simply tilted his head backwards enough to meet her eyes, as a small drop of blood ran down his throat. Aurora maintained her stance and composure both at that distance for a minute. then turned her attention to her hand, "You'll need some of my blood, which also contains the grandfather's blood. It's a tradition and insurance to join the family tree which gets passed down through a generation of adoption by blood. Essentially meaning, your life belongs to me, and the family tree by extendion. You may not be scared of death for now, but all that awaits either option is not simply a dog's death. You might find it better not to have been born at all in the first place." Aurora's image reflected on Anas' left eye for a moment, then he closed both of his eyes after a minute of thought. Aurora interpreted that as a white flag surrendering to the whole thing with little to no resistance, so she began injecting some of her blood through the puncture wound she made in his throat, with using the twig she managed to make and rested in Anas' throat like a syringe.