snowblindrpg | [log] Event: Lavender's Green, Part Two [open]

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[log] Event: Lavender's Green, Part Two [open]

Characters: everyone
Location: mysterious, white hallways
Date: Day 193-194
Summary: Find friends. Get lost. Don't look.
Warnings: Potential for gore and psychological horror. Please note any specific warnings in your subject lines!

While confusingly similar, the area is split into a few different sections:

The Core
The hallways here are narrow and twist at a rapid rate. With how dazzlingly white everything is, it's easy to not realize you're coming on a turn and slam right into the walls. There are no rooms here--no one starts here, though they may find it while they wander. At the center is a large, round area, like the center of a spiral. There's a lot of air pressure here.

The Inner Hallways
The largest area, filled with dead ends, gentle slopes and twists, and, occasionally, difficult-to-see drops where a higher hallway intersects with a lower one without a wall to separate them. The whole place tastes vaguely like blood. Most rooms are here--most people start here.

The Outer Hallways
The outer ring of the ball of yarn. It's not as thick with halls and twists as the other two areas, leading to a lot more boring walking in one direction. It's totally possible to circle around the same path multiple times without realizing it, as everything is so similar here. Occasionally, footsteps can be heard just outside the farthest walls. Sometimes, something breathes. There are a few rooms here--some people will start here.

Remember to note what kind of eyes your character has in their top level!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Don't bullshit a bullshitter, Strange. You're out of your league.

You're no fun.

[He leans back against the wall, taking a moment to stretch out his arms and protesting hands before settling in and making himself more comfortable.]

What is a scaramouche? For real this time, no lying if you don't know.

[Is... is it even a real word? He has to wonder.]

It's like a kind of clown.

[Not actually a lie.]

[A... clown. Davesprite blinks behind his shades.]

That's the thing I don't get about the song. So this dude was all carefree until he shot somebody for mystery reasons, and he has to go on the run and leave his mom and everything. Then he gets caught, and there's punishment waiting for him when he dies, but—

What the fuck does inviting a clown to dance have to do with it? Or Galileo and that opera dude?

[He means Figaro.]

And what was I replacing with basilisk and the other stuff? I feel like it started with a b, but I have no clue what word it is.

Edited 2017-01-03 11:41 (UTC)

I wouldn't say carefree. 'No escape from reality,' remember?

[He's not going to have a lot of solid answers, but he's game.]

Bismillah - in the name of God. The thing with Scaramouche is a kind of interlude, I guess. Maybe it's about having to put on a show for the people around you. Mostly you're supposed to figure out a meaning for yourself, because whatever it meant to good old Freddie Mercury, he never shared it with the class.

Yet 'easy come, easy go,' and 'any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me.'

[He could argue further, the intricacies of escaping the reality of a dead body and how that easygoing nature may have disappeared in the wake of his terrible action, but he doesn't care that much. Besides, as Strange points out, it's up to interpretation.]

So either he forgot, it was dumb and he didn't want to admit it, or he didn't have any real meaning in mind when he slammed those words together; and now we have to deal with the narrative roller coaster ride.

[Strange would probably actually enjoy debating that point further, but he's a goddamn nerd.]

Or it was very personal, or it's entirely self explanatory and we're overthinking it. A wise person once told me that not everything needs to make sense.

You're telling me. I'd say my life stopped making sense a long time ago, but it pretty much never did in the first place. Slime babies, Strange. They ruin everything.

Didn't you say you were the slime baby?

Yep. One of them.

And Jade was another one of them?

Mhm. There were eight of us total. Four for our team, four for our guardians, more or less. My bro, Rose's mom, Jade's grandpa, John's nanna, except they were all our biological parents—Bro and Mom for Rose and me, Grandpa and Nanna for Jade and John. We didn't know about that until after we started the game, though. When a baby drops out of the sky on a meteor, you don't interrogate the crater on what relation to call yourself if you adopt the kid.

Wait, wait. Your parents were slime babies, they got together and made more slime babies, but the second generation of slime babies still arrived via meteor?

No, you're giving them too much agency in this. They had no decision in it at all.

[He wishes he had his drawing pad or that his tablet was working for him to illustrate this with.]

So in the game there's this thing called ectobiology. My friend John got saddled with that job. Basically, this machine tries to transportalize someone from the past, but because that person is destined to go do other stuff, instead all you get is this goopy paradox slime. John hit the buttons, got the slime for our guardians, and the machines popped out the babies. Then it mixed the slime from our guardians in the pairs I listed, and that made us. All of us, our group and them, got sent back on the meteors to Earth at the time we first arrived there. Stable time loop.

That does make more sense.

[He says it like he's being sarcastic, but it does actually explain things more or less satisfactorily so long as he accepts the basic premise. Given Davesprite's general existence, he's not going to argue with the core concepts much.]

Just to clarify, the paradox slime was from trying to...transportalize...within your own group? Was it your guardians the machine was trying to take? Or did you outsource that to someone else from history?

[Davesprite sits up straighter as he takes in the span of what Strange's questions imply about how much he understood. He doesn't say it, but this, he feels, is why he was the time player.]

No, man. Didn't you hear me say stable time loop just now? The ectobiology is how we got made. We went back to the past, our guardians and us, to be the people who eventually grew up into whoever we were at the moment John hit all the buttons to make us. So no, you're not talking to John Keats' distant grandson or something like that. The machine tried to summon the past versions of our guardians, which it then created with the slime it got from failing.

Right, I got that.

[And he's a little annoyed at the implication that he didn't, regardless of whether it's justified owing to the fact that what he's about to describe to justify himself would be much less likely to be stable.]

But it's still a time loop if you use resources from within the history of your own world that would have impacted your own timeline.

But it wasn't outsourced, whatever you meant by that. Are you thinking of this as some separate timeline thing? Like the machines targeted a different one? Because that's not it. None of us would have existed in the first place if not for John doing that, because then we wouldn't have been made at all. Break that and you've got a doomed timeline full of paradoxes.

[He would know better than anyone.]

It wouldn't be a loop if it was targeting a separate timeline. You wouldn't get paradox slime, either, because by definition it wouldn't be a paradox. I was trying to clarify whether you meant you came from genetic material that previously existed on the earth or if you're an entirely self-creating Heinlein kind of thing.

[Which had never done it for him, really. Genetic material has to come from somewhere, except when it apparently doesn't.]

[Davesprite cocks his head to the side in a distinctly birdlike fashion.]

First, it's called paradox slime not because the slime is a paradox, but because it's what you get instead of the paradox that would result if you jerked the actual person out of that point on the timeline. And you don't need to explain to me how time loops work, dude, I've been through more of them than you can dream.

But the Heinlein ref goes beyond me, so how 'bout you start over from the beginning? Walk me through it. What do you think is going on here?

Like hell you have.

[It's a knee jerk reaction, his frustration over talking past each other making him snap at what he hears as a dismissal of experiences about which he's deliberately not informed Davesprite (or anyone else) anyhow.

Stupid of him. He takes a deep breath, reorients. He can and he will parrot this back.]

The four of you were raised by a total of four guardians. At some point in your timeline your friend John accessed a machine that could theoretically transport -- sorry, transportalize -- a person from another point in time, but when he used it to target your guardians it gave him slime instead to prevent a paradox. The machine used that slime to create babies, then to create more babies from a mixture of the original genetic components, and you and your guardians were sent back in time on meteors to Earth, presumably with your guardians arriving a few decades before you did.

[Davesprite's expression pulls flat for that snap, flatter even than its usual. He holds off on his response just to hear his answer, which is better than he expected.]

Okay, you've got it.

But listen, Strange. I'm my game's time player. Time travel was my entire thing. I'm a living, breathing paradox who spent ages in a doomed alternate timeline making more jumps back than I can count that bloated out what would have been a few months into maybe like a year. I lost track. Then I went back all the way to before the timeline split, stopped my dumbass friend from getting himself killed, and basically performed a critical loop needed for John to go on and do the baby cloning. I know what I'm talking about.

[To his credit, Strange does listen, reminding himself silently that he doesn't know what he doesn't know and that it's pointless to ask a question if he isn't open to hearing the answer. He notices that his hands are shaking and spreads his fingers where they rest on his lap, trying to relax them.

So instead of arguing, instead of justifying his outburst, he absorbs what he's hearing, nods, and asks another question.]

How did you learn how to do that?

[If Davesprite notices the trouble with his hands, he doesn't comment on it.]

Kind of stumbled into it, but it was my assigned role so it was inevitable. The game does this whole thing of trying to guide us players into the roles assigned to us: Heir of Breath, Seer of Light, Knight of Time, Witch of Space. Those were just for my session, but you get the idea. You hear yourself called that long enough and you start to wonder, and some kind of happens on its own as you develop as a player... But I'm not gonna bog you down with all the cryptic sprite bullshit packed into my head about it.

You want the simple answer, a me from the future showed up when I was alchemizing some stuff and told me what to combine to make my timetables, then I jumped back and told myself. Self-sustaining loop.

[He shrugs.]

You want to tell me about the time travel you apparently did?

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