[network] @featherydouche; digging for info; text; night 175 [open]

[mrcreamsicles]

sup norfinbury
for those who dont know me the names davesprite and ive got some questions
first off im wondering if any of yall have any info or stuff youve seen or just weird shit that has happened that you dont think is marked down anywhere
or that has since been forgotten about but youre still wondering what the fuck
because ive been doing a lot of reading up on this place and the vast array of nonsense that goes down on the regular to try and consolidate it all a little better
partly to write a guide to help catch the newbies up to speed and part because i want to find out whats going on
so if theres anything
some little factoid that you dont know how it links up but is too weird to ignore
something no one talks about anymore but might have a part in this
anything youre just plain curious about
go ahead and list it off and we can get ourselves a discussion going

secondly
who here can tell me about the trolls that were around
i know there were at least four because ive seen them in the morgues
theyre related to the place i come from but it seems like they were all gone before i showed up
and its kind of weird to think about
on that note
was anyone by the name john egbert rose lalonde or dave strider ever here before
jade might have mentioned them so dont worry about that
im asking if they were in the town at all
thats all

Comments

[mrcreamsicles]

Are you actually going to welcome me into the guild, or stand there sneering at the door?

[This is why he didn't rap at him. Getting jabbed about how he's approaching it doesn't endear Beckett into his good graces.]

[bookofnope]

Just trying to make sure your skills are utilized in the most suitable fashion.

[Snarkity sass, this guy is an ass.]

You know, where I come from, getting in on the guild could sometimes take years. Decades, if you were a slow learner.

[mrcreamsicles]

Okay, I get it, you think I'm a dumbass upstart who doesn't know what he's doing. How about you go lotion your wrinkles somewhere I don't have to hear you complain about it, grandpa?

[bookofnope]

I'm three hundred years old. Everyone in this town is a young upstart.

[Or, as you kids might say, lol whatever.]

But not dumb, no. Perhaps with an unusual perspective. I'm still surprised that you find anything in this town unnerving, from what I've heard of your home turf.

[mrcreamsicles]

So you've got triple the grandpa cred as anyone else, got it.

[He's irritable now. Good job.]

It's a different flavor of messed up than we had there. There were rules and logic to the way it operated, guides for us as a built in game mechanic, whole stupid quests meant to help us realize our potential. Even when our session got screwed over, we found a way out, and according to Jade we win in the future despite everything. The stakes were higher, but we weren't having to deal with our perceptions lying to us, or nanomachines in our blood, and we could actually fight the monsters that tried to kill us. There were ways for us to get stronger. The game tried to make some of the goals like a vague puzzle that revealed itself gradually, but it wasn't a situation where we had to worry about food or freezing to death or not being able to take a basic shower unless we're in one of the few houses that has one that still works.

[bookofnope]

[Look he tried.]

Fair enough, and yet somehow I still prefer worrying about food, freezing to death, or my lying perceptions, than about dooming all existence.

[His tone may be implying that it is not, in fact, any kind of fair.]

Of course, knowing that you are going to win in the future probably helps with that quite a bit.

[mrcreamsicles]

Not really. Not when we've got all this stuff to worry about here, about whether we can find a way out in the time frame we've got left, and what kind of return we can make if we do.

[He's got other issues about the future of paradox space and the alpha timeline in general, more than he cares to go into, let alone with Beckett.]

You sound like you're treating what happened there as a conscious decision, too. Trust me, it wasn't. We didn't know the world was going to end when we started. We didn't know the universe could get destroyed after that. We didn't know how half the things that went wrong happened the way they did until it was too late to change, because we were fated by an uncountable number of interlocking stable time loops into acting in a given way to preserve our own causal reality.

[Which is a more intellectual wording than he likes to use, typically speaking. He goes on to simplify:]

Basically, things had to happen the way they did, or else time and reality would fall apart. And trust me, any time someone failed to do the thing they had to for the alpha timeline, there was an offshoot that happened instead. And offshoots are doomed by nature. I was from one. Because my friend died, he couldn't do the thing later that made us all exist in the first place, so I had to go back and stop him from dying.

[And if he hadn't become a sprite, he almost certainly would have died, but he doesn't say that.]

We had to deal with what was handed to us and act with the best hopes we could. It's basically a goddamn miracle that there was a timeline where we won at all.

[bookofnope]

[It's more than he was expecting, and Beckett falls silent for a while, turning the tale round in his head. Trying to imagine what that must be like - though, actually, it's not too hard.]

If I understand correctly, from what you describe, there would have been no possibility of you failing. Because things had to happen the way they did - and as it turns out, you did win.

[His tone is cautious, willing to concede that he may not have understood correctly. Congrats, Dave, you got him in Research Mode now.]

Though that must be a cold comfort to one who comes from one of the doomed offshoots.

[mrcreamsicles]

You're kind of missing the point. We didn't know how this was going to turn out, and every other timeline but the alpha is doomed. Any time anyone does something that goes against what the alpha demands, bam, doomed. The dream bubbles are full of their ghosts. I don't know that I'd call it comfort. I'm not sure what to call it at all. Besides, from what Jade told me, time had to be fixed a second time by this other friend of mine before they could win at all, and I wouldn't even know it if she hadn't been here to tell me. Even then I don't got the details.

[bookofnope]

[It's a fair answer, but one thing in it catches his attention more than the rest. Possibly because contemplating the thing as a whole makes him nauseous.]

The dream bubbles - I recall Jade mentioning those. But if the ghosts of lost timelines are present in those, would this mean that the souls that are lost are not truly gone into oblivion? Or is it only those involved in your game that are granted this privilege?

we never see sprites in the dream bubbles directly so I'm presuming/headcanoning here

[mrcreamsicles]

I think it's just the other players. I didn't really dream about them, and they aren't a direct part of my knowledge base about the game, so I'm just going off what I've been told.

[Sprites are weird, and if not for a player from a different session Feferi the dream bubbles wouldn't have existed at all. Not a normal game process, and so therefore not something becoming a sprite informed him about.]

[bookofnope]

[... that again. Beckett is very glad that Davesprite can't see him. He takes a moment to stare down his own response, to break it down and know it and attempt to dismiss it. To swallow the proverbial frog. It mostly works.

Mostly.]

Well, aren't you the lucky ones.

[mrcreamsicles]

[Davesprite takes a pause, then sighs out slow.]

Depends on your definition of lucky. So we've got a ghost realm to go to after we die, but we've got a countless number of doomed kids running around who all died before they could hit adulthood because they picked the wrong choice in what to do. And it's not like we know ahead of time what the right one is. We've got the free will to choose what we want to do, and the course time needs to take depends on certain ones, but how much does that matter when anything outside that path means you fall into the doomed timeline pit trap? I was a time player so I knew it, because I had to, but why's everyone else gotta have this big memento mori hanging over their heads? And what about all those ghosts sitting in the metaphysical holding cell with no more than an implied 'sorry, y'all fucked up' from paradox space at large?

[bookofnope]

[He was ready to shrug at most of it, but the last part gets him. An afterlife filled with the ghosts of tangible failures...]

Still. None of these ghosts are you. Is that not the point? You are the version that didn't 'fuck up'. The ghosts are the mistakes you didn't commit. I stand by what I said to Jade. [There's a quiet, but set inhale.] You are the lucky ones. If there had to be one version in which, inevitably, you succeed, you might even say that you are the destined ones.

[mrcreamsicles]

[The thing is, he doesn't know that he's the version who will succeed. Jade is from the future, from another timeline. Supposedly a version of him gets brought to that one, but how can he know it's him? He's been brought here to Norfinbury, and he can't trust paradox space to have accounted for that. Moreover, saying those ghosts aren't him runs too close to his identity issues. He doesn't know if Beckett has ever had to deal with being a second edition of someone else, but it's sure left him with problems.]

[All that, however, is not something he wants to say. Instead Beckett gets another sigh from him, light and resigned.]

Alright, I get your point.

[He doesn't agree with it, but he understands what he's saying.]