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

[snowblindmods]

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!

Comments

[mrcreamsicles]

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.

[thewarningafter]

Didn't you say you were the slime baby?

[mrcreamsicles]

Yep. One of them.

[thewarningafter]

And Jade was another one of them?

[mrcreamsicles]

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.

[thewarningafter]

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?

[mrcreamsicles]

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.

[thewarningafter]

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?

[mrcreamsicles]

[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.

[thewarningafter]

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.

[mrcreamsicles]

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.]

[thewarningafter]

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.]

[mrcreamsicles]

[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?

[thewarningafter]

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.

[mrcreamsicles]

[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.

[thewarningafter]

[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?

[mrcreamsicles]

[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?

[thewarningafter]

[He can't help a little grin at that -- he should have expected an answer along those lines. The kid was literally born from a paradox; of course it wouldn't be the only one to shape his life. The rest is more interesting, smacks of predestination.]

That's starting to sound like it was about par for the course.

[The tremors aren't subsiding. He studiously ignores them.]

Less than that. I rewound something that shouldn't have happened; imposed an unstable time loop for a while. Nothing very complicated.

[mrcreamsicles]

Probably the best way for it, to be honest. If I'd just made them on my own I probably would have sat around second guessing myself forever before I jumped. The trick is you have to roll with it, not overthink it, and get used to seeing doubles of yourself hopping around from other points in time.

[He pauses briefly, considering. He's definitely noticed the tremor by now, but pointing at it directly isn't the course he wants to take.]

You say not very complicated, but 'unstable loop' means nothing good where I'm from. I know time doesn't work the same in every universe, though, so I kind of have to wonder what happened.

[thewarningafter]

I figured the best way to learn was to try, too, but then I got a lecture about the dangers of temporal obliteration.

[And then he did it again later anyway.]

Maybe unstable is the wrong word. It wasn't self-sustaining and I ended it when I'd done what I needed to do, let time flow again from the start like nothing had happened, because it hadn't. It was fine.

[mrcreamsicles]

[Davesprite leans back against the wall again as he regards him. Like nothing had happened, because it hadn't. It was fine. It's a kind of quiet insistence that sticks out like a sore thumb to him, because time is never so simple, and the things lost to a missing timeline never just stop being a thing for the person who went through them.]

You could say that about the stuff I went and changed so it didn't happen in the alpha timeline, but I could sit here and tell you about it all day. Stuff worked out. Doesn't mean it's gone from me, or you'd be talking to a guy with legs.

But I'm not going to press.

[thewarningafter]

[He hasn't told anyone about this, not even Wong after it was all said and done and they dispersed back to the sanctums to begin the work of rebuilding the shields. He got the job done. That was what had mattered.

He's silent for a few moments, thinking those thoughts, not looking at Davesprite.]

You died here once, right?

[mrcreamsicles]

[Davesprite lets him have them. It's a delicate thing, time, and having seen the ways things can go wrong has a very lasting effect. He thinks of Homura. He hasn't heard from her in a while; he hopes she's doing okay.]

[When Strange speaks up again, it's not a question he expected, but he answers still.]

Twice, if you count back when our eyes first went weird.

[thewarningafter]

Twice. Right. Sorry.

[The funny part is that everything went right, after that first try. Everything happened according to his own plan.]

I've died....

[He pauses for a second, thinks about it.]

I don't know how many times I've died. More than twice.

[mrcreamsicles]

[Davesprite's eyes go wide.]

That... is not how it worked for me.

[He runs his hand through his hair, muttering 'Jesus' to himself.]

If I ever saw a dead Dave lying around, it meant that was the version of me who took whatever stupid idea I was just thinking about and died because of it. Wrong idea, jumped at the wrong time, jumped the wrong amount of time, whatever. Tried to avoid that as much as I could.

Can't really imagine being the guy who had to die directly and then go back and do it all over again anyway, let alone that many times. Just... shit, dude.

[He shakes his head.]