A/N: I know I took a great risk making this with some deviations taken from the canon. I'm finally springing the main meat of my fic. I hope I don't detract some of the game's essence for some with this.

And with respect to rose-engine, I was so caught up in the post-walkthrough hype that I had not known of your statement regarding the world of Signalis being a different reality altogether until recently. My apologies, guys. You created a wonderful experience. Now I wanna dive into it.

DOIKAYT

Chapter 2: Generational Noncomformists

"You're looking for a forger?" the frightened woman asked nervously through the bars of her apartment window. Her block, or at least portion of it seemed to be trashed and ransacked.

"Yes," Elster answered. She showed her the note. "I was given this note on the way."

Her eyes wandered between the note and replika, fear in them told her she was thinking carefully what to say.

"I'm sorry, I don't know any forger," she finally responded. "If he was here he would've left or worst. Will state security arrive?"

Elster shook her head. "I don't know when they'll arrive. The breakdown is all over Heimat."

"Please tell me if they'll be here. I don't think I could last this long." She shut her window and closed her curtains. Another dead end, she thought. Already her chances were wearing thin as the few surviving gestalts who weren't outright hostile to her couldn't answer or evaded her queries.

Each time she tried, when she's not encountering corrupted replikas, the trail was getting colder. Thin leads few and far in between were all she has and they've already taken her and wide around the neighborhood. The blocks felt more ominous and oppressive. She thought she can see the dead looking at her blankly.

Her last lead mentioned someone who might know where he was. Yet another apartment block, a huge concrete edifice meant to house over three hundred people with a spacious courtyard at its center. She approached the entrance booth where its watch officer should be. The desk was empty and a dark man-shaped spot was in its place, chilling her synthetic blood.

She approached a board of intercom speakers across the booth, her eyes scanned the apartment numbers.

201... 202... 206... 223... 235... 240... There it was! Apartment Number 250! She pressed the intercom button.

"Who is this?" a voice asked from inside. "There's a curfew going on." By her luck, a voice!

"Is this Apartment 250? I was told to come here."

"What's your business?"

"I was told Annie Connor lived here."

The reply came three seconds later. "Who? We have no one by such name."

"A friend sent me, his name is Witold Li[1]."

The speaker went silent. The silence confirmed her hunch, this was the right place. Then it rasped back, "Alright, come upstairs and we'll discuss this." This was the first great bright spot in her quest.

She went up the stairs to the second floor, her Type 75 drawn downrange, her flashlight off. She wasn't about to reveal herself for anyone or anything watching from the darkness. She had something else instead.

Hugging the wall, she put on a pair of night-vision goggles she scavenged from a dead Volksmarine, whose chopper crashed at an intersection, cause unknown. The world turned into a green tunnel before her eyes and she can see the numbers of the apartment blocks. Seams of light filtered through the curtains that were drawn as per blackout procedures, the block still had power. It meant many things, either the inhabitants were hunkering down or they disappeared. This block was far from the actual conflict, whose orchestra can be barely heard in the hollow artificial wind. None of the things were there so far.

Elster felt a rumble within her. She then realized she hadn't eaten anything for a while. She shrugged that off, putting her objective first, but remembering to get sustenance later. She approached cautiously, her seemingly ungainly-looking stumps allowed her surprisingly nimble balance, making as little noise in spite looking like springy peg legs.

Every step she take forward, time seemed to dilate, the chances of danger enhanced, seeming to come from possibly every quarter. Some gestalt with a blunt or bladed instrument might pop up from the apartments or corrupted Aras might popped beneath the floor or ceiling. The air seemed thick with dread. She wanted to sprint but her operating system locked that from her. She can only grip her pistol tighter, only keeping to the trigger discipline as she was trained.

She kept glancing at the windows, whose light filtered from seams of curtains dancing lightly by the airconditioning or fans used inside. Each flitting curtain put her on alert for behind was a face taking a look outside which may lead to a door.

The way some of these curtains moved or lacked movement at all seemed to beckon her to take a peak. Elster ignored the urge, her hearing acute as she passed by every closed apartment window. The narrow green glare made it difficult to tell through the light and she thought she glanced the telltale flutter of black ash and ink in some of the rooms. She flicked up the goggles to confirm that it was so. The chilling notion that she might be too late was nagging inside her.

But she can hear sounds in other rooms people talking in hushed whispers. The clash of bioresonance created a tenuous stability for gestalts to remain intact as the physical world warped. So the Leader's Falkes were putting in good value for the costs sunk into them.

"Don't sleep," she heard a whisper passing by Apartment 236, "don't sleep or it'll take you away." The anguish was palpable in that voice. Her approach had not gone unnoticed as she can indeed see eyes and face peaking through the curtains and flitting back to cover. Wary occupants already on the edge of their nerves as the strange and fearful occurrences dominated the night.

At last she was at the threshold of apartment 250. She took off the goggles and looked at the resident's nameplate: ISAACHAR JIN. She knocked on the door. It slid open and a young man stood before her.

"Guten abend, Protektor," he said neutrally, never expecting a visit from one. "How may I help you?" The man tried to hide his anxiety in his face as he faced the replika and failed.

"Witold Li ask me to search for Annie Connor." He showed him the note.

He gave it a glance. "That's unfortunate, you've come all this way," he replied, trying to keep his voice calm. He looked to the direction of the entrance. "How bad is the situation outside?"

Elster followed his gaze. "Fluid. Near-total anarchy. The entire situation is dark, the only things of certainty is the Nation has no idea what it's facing." Please not let anything else in...

He nodded his head a bit. "Doesn't sound particularly pleasant, does it?" Elster noted the shaky discomfort in the man's voice. A Protektor's presence caused a fair degree of tension among gestalts, her armor didn't exactly help. And he couldn't stop looking at her gun.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she placated and holstered her weapon.

"Nothing to worry about. Oh! Please come inside, " he offered, visibly relaxed, "I'm sure you'd like to sit down and talk about it."

Elster was taken aback. This was the first time in her journey in Heimat where she wasn't told off or even threatened by a living gestalt. "I would indeed."

Beckoned in, she followed him inside. The apartment was small, adequate for at least four people. The furnishings and appliances were in the simple, drab style of Rotfront with few variations, the Ministry of Trade and Industry discouraged the use of bold color palettes and assymetrical patterning. A few houseplants here and there.

Her stomach growled. A surprisingly persistent misconception prevalent among gestalts was that replikas don't need to eat. In fact they do as their biocompetents still need sustenance. And she had not picked up any food along with way, so focused was she of trying to get to her beloved.

If she can blush, her face would show it. "Excuse me, Herr Jin. If it isn't too much for you... you wouldn't have any food on hand?"

It was his turn to be taken aback, hearing a replika make such a request, not to mention the surprisingly soft tone of the voice. "I think I do have something in the kitchen. Sit down down and I'll pick it up for you, Protektor."

"You don't have to call me that. You can call me Elster," she suggested. The only reason she's addressed as Protektor was because of her scavenged armor and weaponry. She did straddle the Protektor and Technikal classes in their functions and capability.

"Elster...? That is the acronym of your unit, is it?"

"Yes - Landvermessungs-/Schiff-Techniker Replika -'Elster'-."

"I see. It's strange to see you this far from the orbital batteries or the naval yard." There was a slight look of relief on his face. "I'll get you a meal."

Her host went to the small kitchen/dining room. She took a sit on the couch near the alcove to observe the contents of the room even further. There was the appropriate propaganda poster that seems it's meant to be seen by anyone coming in. In the alcove were a set of books and knickknacks in a shelf. It included some toy imitations of spacecraft of old Imperial design. The books in question included a mixture of literature proscribed under the 4th Cultural Protection Act. Among of those were Green (approved) books such as How Steel Was Tempered, The Rout, Kani Kōsen, The Seventh Cross, Every Man Dies Alone, The Shape of Things to Come, and The Damned Agitator and Other Stories. There was also a lot of Yellow (undetermined, cautioned) literature as well: works by I.B. Singer and Sholem Aleichem, Henryk Sienkiewicz's epic historical trilogy, Jacob the Liar, The Caine Mutiny, The Laughter of My Father, The Man on High Castle, The Trial, Camel Xiangzi, Pharaoh and The End of Eternity, His Master's Voice. And last, there were a few Red (banned) works, mainly at the bottom as worn paperbacks: The Naked and the Dead, Steppenwolf, Keter Malkhut, Noli Me Tangere, El Filibusterismo, The Black Book, Dr. Zhivago, Dune, Ningen Shikkaku, Night, Blood Meridian, Legion of the Damned, and Neuromancer.[2]

From what she can deduce from the authors' names, one thing the literature had in common was that they're ancient, going back centuries. At least before the Empire. Moreover, most of them likely one way or another belong to the category of ethnische Literatur, one that the Nation highly discourages as antithetical to the Gestalzertgeist it espoused. Isaachar Jin must've been well-read enough to have these books, not to mention having the likely means to obtain some of them. Could he be the forger?

Then there were the pictures. One of them was a younger Witold Li resplendent in a green Imperial uniform, the forage cap bearing its gold hexagonal crest, shoulder straps and collar tabs on his tunic indicating his unit in Chinese and German lettering:

第 17 海马特轻步兵团 (Dì 17 hǎimǎ tè qīng bù bīngtuán)/ 17. Heimat Leichte-Infanterieregiment

It must've been before the Yoneda Incident. The look in his eyes, however, told her how much he felt being in uniform. The term leichte-infanterie carried strong connotations of auxiliaries raised mainly to fight away from their homeworlds, almost always used in suppressing anti-Imperial revolts that often mark the interregnum of empresses, usually in support of their more professional or elite counterparts within the Imperial military such as the marines or jägers. Second-class troops. Cannon fodder.

She noticed the picture of an older Li, which was before he was sent to Sierpinski. It was nestled atop a bowl of small flat stones. Some of them had six-pointed stars or seven-branched candelabras that were carved on them. Seeing this she recalled his dialect and realized something about her host and Li.

HISS!

The doors slid open! The replika swung her head to the right, alarmed as a party of four entered unhurried: three men and a woman.

"I see you're looking at the deceased," one of three men in the group spoke out to her. "The dead don't go anywhere. They're all here. Each man is a cemetery. An actual cemetery, in which lie all our grandmothers and grandfathers, the father and mother, the wife, the child. Everyone is here all the time."

"Rab- Herr Zhou!" She heard Jin exclaim from the kitchen. "I didn't expect you to be here-!"

"Don't be alarmed, Sacha, it's just us," he replied as his companions spread themselves out in the small room in what she recognised as to cover the room's interior. "I just got word that the Railway's party is coming in at ten minutes at least. Get ready to leave." Their stances suggested combat readiness, the woman stood guard with her back against the wall covering the door from the right.

They don't seem unduly alarmed with her presence but they cast wary eyes on her. In fact, one of the younger men went straight to the kitchen and began a conversation with Jin in the same dialect as Witold's; the two seemed close as they discuss her presence, the occurences, the news, and food in a lively banter and in no particular order.

She turned the man who spoke to her, the leader of the party. An old gestalt, his face was worn with wrinkles, a line of white crowned the fringe of his otherwise black hair, eyes behind the glasses that told her how weary he was, and stubble adorn his chin. His clothes were creased, which meant they had not been ironed. An ID tag was clipped on his brown jacket, which told her he was a part of AEON's staff, his duties being an archivist assigned to low-level security records.

Tuvia Zhou.

"Gutn ovnt," he greeted amiably. "Has AEON sent you to pick me up?"

"No, no one sent me here," she answered, bracing herself for the unknown. "I am, however, looking for a forger."

"You're looking for a forger?" he repeated. "What interest does an LSTR unit have for a lowly forger in the midst of a moonwide disaster?"

She decided to be straight. "An inmate from Sierpinski told me to look for a forger in Heimat. He's the man in those pictures." She pointed the photos of Li on the shelves.

Zhou turned around slowly, then picked up the photo atop the bowl of rocks with hesitant fingers. "Witold, Sacha's cousin on his mother's side... he was a fiery one in his youth... had to keep him out of trouble dozens of times, a real hitsiger, but his heart is in a good place. The Yoneda massacre in Kitezh broke him to pieces and he fell into a shady crowd, spending the last days of the Empire and first days of civil war as a contraband smuggler... he turned those skills to help our people... and all who are decent in these black days."

He sighed as he put back the picture gently atop the stones. "He died eight years ago at that pit at Leng."

That would explain the date disparities. He hadn't made it after all. "I'm sorry to hear that."

He nodded. "It's alright, meydl. He wanted to make up for his ill youth and to put to sleep the demons from Kitezh... I advised him against volunteering, he'd have none of it, headstrong to the end, backbone all the way." He shook his head. "What else has he shared to you?"

"He gave me this." She handed him the scrap of paper bearing the name ANNIE CONNOR.

He examined the scrap. "Witold has much faith in you, even if you barely met him. Name comes from an old language, not a lot of speakers out there nowadays. Moreover this is a wordplay derived from one of our ancient songs: ani kinnor - I am a violin."

The final piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. It has to make sense! "Are you the forger?"

"Correct," he affirmed. "Quite a journey for you to get here."

Sacha and his friend came out of the kitchen and began handing sandwiches and tea to everyone. "Not exactly Shabbat dinner but it will have to do." He handed Zhou and Elster mugs and poured tea into them, then gave them their sandwiches. "On the house, Elster."

"Thank you, Herr Jin."

"Please, call me Sacha, if you will."

He put a plate of more sandwiches on the coffee table between the replika and AEON forger, the latter motioning her to take a seat, which they did.

With that she took a sip of the tea and bite. It was sweet and flavored with lemon. She took a bite on her sandwich. It was rye bread filled with some sort of fish paste, tube ersatz cheese, and various pickled vegetables. The taste of the sandwich reminded her of military rations, brought back memories of time spent in a lonely foxhole in Vineta, shared with another woman whom she loved as deeply as Ariane before and whose loss was felt just as crushing.

She didn't notice how hungry she was as she ate through four sandwiches and downed three cups of lemon tea. The memories they stirred caused her to stare down at her empty cup.

"Longing for something, meydl?" he asked. She looked up at him, puzzled . By then, the bookshelf behind him had been stripped of its contents, which were methodically packed away.

"Huh?" She looked up at him.

Recesses in the shadows revealed now-empty niches for concealed weapons and munitions.

"I know you're not reading your tea leaves for your fortune with that look."

She shook her head. "I was just thinking about how far I got here from Leng. Eight years felt more like a few days for me."

He nodded thoughtfully. "The dedication required to take up a quest often causes our sense of time to warp. Sometimes our sense of place. Days, weeks, and faces would be a blur until we fulfill it. It often takes us to unexpected places, meet unexpected people, do things we never expected ourselves to do."

"Like taking tea in the middle of this breakdown of reality," she observed, "in the company of civilians including an AEON employee."

"Strange, isn't it? Reality hasn't fully broke down yet, by the way, it's fighting to stay alive."

"It is indeed so. I'm just wondering what lead me here to you, that's all." Her eyes turned to back to the empty shelves, where its questionable book collection, toys, and the pictures of Li once stood. "I was also thinking you, Li and Sacha. I realized there's actually more to you than just an AEON archivist who engages in forgery and had ties a smuggler. I just couldn't find a polite way to tell it."

He smiled in slight amusement. "Meydl, you've been nothing but polite the entire time I'm here, and no doubt with Jin, it's part of who you are as opposed to being programmed. I'm thinking your mind-donor was the same, a gut mensch so to speak. Nu, vos hot ir eyngezen vegn aundz?"

The assurance was all she needed. "You're generational noncomformists."

He nodded in confirmation. "One of AEON's favorite pet terms. Which one? AEON has documented dozens of those."

"You're Jews."

Her answer was above a whisper, unguarded to be heard by all.

"Took her long enough," she heard one of the men say.

"Be polite, József," chided the woman. "We could be Lanternites to her for all we know."

"At least this one didn't disappear on us this time."

"She's nicer than a Storch, and with bigger brains too..."

The old gestalt relaxed. "You've caused something of a stir during the first few hours of this breakdown back at AEON. I never thought I'd meet at least one of you." He offered his hand. "I am Rabbi Tuvia Zhou, at your service."

Elster took his hand shook it, first time since in a distant memory she did in response to having won a trinket called a medal and a promotion. Not quite the hands of her beloved but his firm and warm grip communicated by touch the quality of being that he is.

A/N: By now if you're sharp enough you'd realize that some of the terms used in my first chapter and the fic's title point to Jewish themes. You're likely halfway between interested and worried in how I handle this. The strange sort of copium (that's a new word) I'm engaging led me to this. While the game has no direct Jewish material, pareidolia has ensured that I'll be inspired by patterns in-game to make this.

This is what slurping up SIGNALIS content, Jewish culture from various sources and Wolfenstein does to you. You think adding something with bleak, tearjerking potential in a game that's already bleak and tear-inducing counts as self-harm? Or is it catharsis? Still a journey worth taking and one that should be done right to the best of my abilities.

A more detailed explanation is available in an addendum later.

[1] If you hadn't realized at this point, Witold Li is based on Witold Pilecki, Polish resistance fighter and Auscwhitz survivor who deliberately allowed himself to be captured in order to infiltrate the infamous concentration camp so as to document the horrific atrocities there before escaping and passing it on to the Allies, giving them their first glimpse of the Holocaust in wartime. Apart from the first name and similar deeds, they shared nothing in common as Pilecki was a highly-esteemed army officer compared to my troubled rogue Li.

[2] Unless noted, here are the authors of the books in order of appearance:

Green - Nikolai Ostrovsky, Aleksander Fadeev, Takiji Kobayashi, Anna Seghers, Hans Fallada, H.G. Wells, Mike Gold.

Yellow - Jurek Becker, Herman Wouk, Carlos Bulosan, Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, Lao She, Bolesław Prus, Isaac Asimov,Stanisław Lem.

Red - Norman Mailer, Hermann Hesse, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Jose Rizal (2), Vasily Grossman, Boris Pasternak, Frank Herbert, Osamu Dazai, Elie Weisel, Cormac McCarth, Sven Hassel, William Gibson.