While Barney got to work and Lily immersed herself in a world of data she didn't understand...
Marshall's Perspective
Marshall decided his bridge needed a little physical help. Though he wanted to go to Alyx's apartment and see her, he felt the small nearby gallery made more sense. His hunch turned out to be right.
There she was, Alyx, standing before an abstract painting full of color and fury, arms crossed. She wasn't smoking (logical in a closed space) nor did she have a thermos or coffee cup. She was simply existing, observing the painting.
Marshall approached her stealthily, as if approaching a deer. "Looks like the inside of Barney's head after three Red Bulls and a weird challenge with ballroom dancers," he murmured, positioning himself beside her.
Alyx didn't startle, though surprised, she managed a half-smile. "I think it's a landscape trying to send a message, even if it's a very, very angry one."
"And what does it tell you?" asked Marshall, referring both to the painting and her general situation.
Alyx was silent for a moment. "It tells me chaos can have a form, that it can be contained within a frame... And that sometimes, depending on how you look at it and interpret it, it can even look beautiful." She turned her head to look at him directly. "And what do you see?"
Marshall looked at her, not the painting. "I see my friend standing, as calm as can be, in a gallery on a Tuesday morning, taking time out of her normal activities to stand before something, seeing beyond. And for me, that's the most beautiful painting I've seen in months."
It was too sincere and too Marshall, but this time Alyx, instead of feeling cornered and pressured to open up, felt a more solid bridge beneath her feet and reinforced it by saying, "Well, it's just me, you know." She began softly. "Taking it one day at a time."
"It's a good day," he said, and they stayed there together looking at that painting that expressed a chaos contained within that frame, understanding that this moment wasn't about fixing anything by force. In general, it was about being in the same place, on the same side of the bridge, without demanding that the other person cross to the other side instantly, but rather step by step.
Barney's Office at That Same Moment
Meanwhile, with Barney and Lily, everything was different. Lily felt as if a disquieting song was playing within those four walls as she looked at the graphs Barney had obtained—incredible profit spikes generated at key moments of economic crises that no one could have predicted in so many different situations. She felt the mystery deepening, colder than just extreme productivity to silence emotional pain. All of this was completely outside the norm.
Later at Marshall and Ted's Apartment
The entire group was gathered that afternoon, prompted by Lily and supported by Barney.
There, Lily had spread Barney's printouts on the coffee table—a sea of graphs greeted them, marked with trend lines and figures that seemed more complex than understandable.
Robin observed from her chair with extreme concentration; though she didn't fully understand what they said, her journalistic instinct awoke at this strange pattern.
Ted tried to find an architectural explanation, something about the structural elegance of market cycles without much success, and was already thinking of another based on the linear and necessary processes of constructing a building.
"Look here," said Lily, her voice a loaded whisper, pointing to a specific date with her finger. "August 15th was the day Lehman Brothers collapsed in all the headlines, and the market simply went to hell."
"A black day, I remember," Ted nodded, recalling the general panic among the workers of that company and many others.
"Exactly, and here," Lily moved her finger to an attached accounting record. "That same morning, first thing, it says Alyx liquidated all her positions in the banking sector, but not after the news as others did when it plummeted, but before. You know, it's as if... as if she knew it was going to rain and had brought her umbrella when no one even had a folder to cover part of their head."
An uncomfortable silence settled in the room. Marshall, who had been silent since the meeting began, said, "That could be... luck or a very strong hunch. Remember Alyx has always had a sixth sense for disasters. Don't you remember when she predicted Ted's microwave was going to explode? And it did."
"But this isn't a faulty appliance, Marshall," Robin replied, focused on unraveling the strange success of Alyx's investments, and pointing to another note continued, "It's too precise. Look at this one—the mortgage crisis in October. She started investing in safe-haven funds three weeks before it happened, even before the first analysts began talking about the turbulence they saw. This isn't a simple premonition; it's... it's a vision."
The word vision floated in the air, heavy and ridiculous.
"Vision?" asked Barney, who was enjoying the chaos from his sofa. "Like she has a crystal ball? Because if so, my next Legendary Challenge will involve lottery numbers, and I'll need that surefire advice."
"It's not a crystal ball," said Lily, ignoring him. Her mind, though accustomed to simpler patterns, was connecting the dots in a more dangerous way. "It's as if... she had an instruction manual for the future, but written with ink that fades. She knows big events like those catastrophes, but not the details of her own life, since she didn't know I was going to leave, or she would have tried to convince me not to go. But she was so surprised and hurt—now that I think about it—and even more, she didn't know how it was going to break her heart. But she knows this."
Marshall rubbed his face; this idea was giving him a headache. "Are you suggesting Alyx is... a time traveler? Like in Back to the Future? But then why is she so broken? Couldn't she fix everything?"
"Maybe not," Robin mused, her logical side taking over from her journalistic side to get to the bottom of this. "Maybe the future doesn't work like that. Perhaps they're flashes of it, you know, like a very potent and specific form of déjà vu. That would explain why she always seems a step ahead at work but so lost and now guarded in her personal life."
"Exactly," Lily affirmed, clinging to that theory like a lifeline. It was certainly the least terrifying alternative—from being a dark, dangerous espionage secret to becoming a kind of curse, a burden she carries of this diffuse knowledge of tomorrow or the future. Though it only gives her an advantage in the stock market, it condemns her to see possible tragedies without being able to do anything or constantly wonder if what she does will change something.
"It's horrible," Lily concluded.
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