snowblindrpg | [network] Event: Long & Lost [NIGHT 217]

its a whole lot less troubling than the other stuff ive been through
i dont care how the universe happened so much as that it did happen
ive got a whole mess of thoughts about my existence and the game in general but the whole set of reasons and topics behind them is broader and more complicated than just the frog universe made by teenagers deal
though if i have to say something im more comfortable with the people that made my universe being knowable instead of some distant divine force i can only guess at

Perhaps I do see how that would be appealing. You can bring your questions to them, and they can answer. To the degree that teenagers can answer anything with any wisdom, of course, which seems to put the lie to the whole exercise, but at least you can know why the world is as absurd as it is.

how do i put it
its like everything is more forgivable if i know its just some dipshit alien kids who bred a frog and had barely any more idea what they were doing than we did
compared to some omniscient omnipotent supposedly loving god
like hey god why the fuck do war and suffering exist
how come we just got apocalypsed into extinction
why do hot dogs and hot dog buns not come packaged in the same amounts
compared to riffing with karkat about how our worlds sucked and how theres somehow a troll will smith for reasons im still not clear on
karkat is here and hes one of the people responsible btw

Karkat? I thought Jade was the earth mother of the cult of the divine frog. Perhaps I should talk to him.

[But then, perhaps not. Perhaps talking to a clueless teenage troll god would be the most luridly horrific thing he's had a chance to do yet.]

Have you ever asked them why they made you?

i dont know if youre joking but there is no cult

[He may have rolled with that one better if not for the loss he has in place.]

jade was our space player and responsible for making the new universe yeah
but it was the trolls who made the one with earth that we lived in before it got killed
youre imagining it more personally than it happened though
the trolls didnt sit down and individually craft us one by one
they didnt even decide humans were going to be what lived on our planet
like
we just sprouted to life because thats how evolution turned out
though technically me and my friends were created?
but that was by one of them pressing a bunch of buttons on this machine in a lab
which was basically just part of a huge stable time loop because if he hadnt done that then he wouldnt exist to go do that in the first place

Pantheon, then. The great amphibian Olympians.

[He's joking. Because the other option is a creeping nervous breakdown. As usual.]

But when you put it that way, it may well have been an accident after all. If all they did was - what? Germinate some type of seed, which then grew on its own? Determined basic physics and let matter and energy run their course? That's hardly divine creation.

[Are they back to square one? The fact that Davesprite doesn't seem bothered by any of this is slowly driving him up a wall.]

And less so if it's all part of a predetermined loop. No one had any power or agency in that scenario. You exist because the default state of the universe is your existence.

one of the goals for the game is achieving this thing called god tier
its not necessary
but it makes you immortal and gives you a power boost and everything
so if you want to look at it that way its divinely empowered eternal gods who fought the chaos of monsters and their own personal problems to come together and breed the genesis frog in a grand act of creation
but at the same time its still a bunch of dumb teens who played a video game together
religion was never really my thing so im not about to say prayers to jade or the trolls
and whether theyre what gods are "supposed" to be is a moot point when they went on and made the new universe regardless
but youre kind of missing the point about the other stuff too
the loop is predestined because the alpha timeline demands it
but the loop would never have happened that way if not for the decisions we made
besides
youre talking to the guy who literally saved the person responsible for making us
he died in my timeline so im like a walking paradox
but me going back in time to stop him from dying was necessary for it to happen in the first place
also
alternate timelines are still a thing
people make different decisions and their lives go different
those timelines are doomed because the loops dont line up right and paradox space cant allow that to persist
but its not the same as always being destined to do one thing and one thing only

Edited 2017-03-26 14:26 (UTC)

The bottom line sounds the same to me. There is only one true path, and that is predetermined. Everything that exists outside of it is doomed to eventual non-existence. You say that the loop happened because you made decisions, but a causal relationship demands, as you may note, cause and effect. Hence linearity. Hence at least a beginning, if not an end. Unless there was a point in which you first made these choices, without predetermination, then they are not choices, merely the illusions of such.

[He'd be enjoying this kind of debate if it weren't a matter of more than life and death. But there is one thread he spots, and pulls on.]

You mention an alpha timeline - and for the matter, the rules of the game. Who made these rules? What determined that one stable outcome? Even if the game made the universe, someone made the game.

not non existence so much as death
but youre probably going to argue the same thing back at me still so nvm
if you want to answer the Ultimate Riddle that way its your own prerogative
ive still got my own issues with the way it works even if knowing the details behind is is literally programmed into me now
i keep worrying that just being here means ill be doomed if i ever go back

[Lousy, stupid fear confessions.]

i dont know how the game was made
the stable outcome is determined by all the other stuff that already depends on it
i dont know how to put it its just loops on top of loops like a giant gordian knot of weird time shit
except theres no sword that can cut through it all because science reasons

I don't see the connection. Is it because this is a "doomed timeline"? That would imply that it is a - shall we say branch on your own time tree. From the same root. Created by a frog. I'm going to need some convincing.

[This is not, in fact, an invitation for such convincing. Just because he is not challenging the frog thing just now doesn't mean he's remotely okay with it.]

But there was a beginning. There was a maker. There has to be. I can perhaps accept that the raw matter and energy of the universe came to be through random unknown physical processes. I can't accept the same of a video game.

Edited 2017-03-28 11:18 (UTC)

i dont know how time here works exactly
but from every other time traveler ive talked to stuff is complicated and messing with it tends to get you screwed over
the thing bugging me is more that i dont think the alpha timeline accommodated for my feathery ass getting dragged to alaska for months on end
so if i got back its probably going to be some thing that the timeline decides cant stand
like
i already know what happens to me or a version of me in the alpha timeline because jade told me
and ive got plenty of reservations about that too
but unless that somehow involves me keeping my mouth shut until after her trip here then im likely bound for death if i step foot back in paradox space

[Even if the phrase wasn't meant genuinely, Davesprite's fingers tap it out anyway. Between the compulsion to share fears and his own loss of an emotional filter he has very little choice. He hates it thoroughly.]

but listen youre just getting into another chicken or the egg scenario
the game got programmed by a company on earth and everything
but the stuff that prompted that to happen was probably seeded by the mechanics of the game retroactively just like everything else
we the players didnt exist without playing the game and causing it
theres this whole green sun thing that came into existence because of game stuff that was necessary for a lot of other stuff to happen
like theres this thing called a first guardian that relies on the green sun for power
you can ask jade about that because now she and her dog are the same being like me and this crow
the way our session went down affected stuff for the trolls too
which in turn affected us in the past when they bugged us about how we fucked them over
like i said dude
gordian knot of weird time shit
and as the former owner of a fancy time sword i am telling you that you cant cut that shit apart
im not even denying that things are more complicated than just the game
because im still not sure where we were these three years jade and john and i spent on this flying gold ship
or even that gods are a thing that could exist more in the traditional sense in other universes
but if a literal angel of the lord couldnt convince me to bow down and worship then a crotchety old vampire isnt going to be the one to bring me into the fold
religion just isnt my deal

This isn't about religion.

[Well. He can't make the case for complete denial here and he knows it, but if he truly lets it spill through, the departure from philosophy into emotion, into what feels like the terrifyingly real implications of the theoretical God -]

It's about meaning. Not merely revolving in an endless loop that exists simply because it does, where everything may as well be a game, not even your own game, only furnishing in a scenario you cannot understand because there is no understanding, it simply is, no reason fo

[ - well, he might not be able to stop in time.]

If nothing else, it was possible for you to be taken out of the knot. If the loop cannot account for your absence then it does't necessarily mean you are going to be unmade. It could also mean that you have escaped from it and its control and constraints. Can't it?

[Can't it?]

ok i honestly got no idea where you were going with that one run on sentence
just ran itself right off a cliff
now its little legs are freewheeling in an endless dive into the abyss
whats down there you might ask
as you watch that long chain of verbal hash tumble down predicate over subject
but thats the thing
its the unknowable unknown
like asking the meaning of life or how they get the dust on cheetos so radioactive looking
anyway beckett part of my existence is literally coded from the game
im the helpful guide npc except im also a person
the navi over your shoulder going hey listen until you sock that fairy fucker in the face
except purposely less of a nag and a lot more straightforward than the programming wants me to be
its kind of hard to fathom being severed from it entirely
partly because part of my own mind is devoted to knowing how the game works the way it works and a devotion to facilitating that

I'm so sorry that I cannot make the unwanted results of an invasive mental compulsion more grammatically elegant.

[Don't start with him right now, birdboy.]

Just like you can't seem to manage to express yourself without resorting to pop cultural references in order to turn your discomfort into glibness. But if you can manage, as you say, to act differently from how your "programming" wants you to, isn't that already proof that you have some independent existence? We are all defined to a degree by our origins, but that is not the same as being metaphysically bound to them for all existence and time.

dont call out my defense mechanisms
rude
but its not like im ever going to unbecome a sprite
im always going to have that programming
youre not going to stop being a vampire anytime soon either are you
like
how does that even work
do you still have to drink blood here
i take it there has to be a way around the sun problem too unless that was media getting it wrong

Ah, self-awareness. I like that in a man. But I honestly don't know whether I am still a vampire. I mean, look at me. I'm a teetering wreck of a mortal. Feeding didn't even cure my bloody cold

Damnit, I'm doing it again.

maybe we should just hang up here
im still curious how vampires work but im not going to make you go into it if you keep spilling stuff you dont mean to
i dont want to drop all my deep insecurities to some dude i barely know either

Damnit, no. I refuse to let this manipulation get the better of me. It's a cheap bloody trick and I've overcome its like hundreds of times before. I have that much strength left.

ok cool but i still dont trust it
ive seen norfinbury make other people do some things they absolutely wouldnt normally
and ive already told other people a bunch more than i want to

We can't retreat from each other every time there's this risk. Or it becomes one more way to control us. The best way, since we enforce that control ourselves. Would you agree to that? Are any of your secrets really so terrible that revealing them is worse than being at the mercies of this place?

[He's asking himself the same question as they speak. And it's a lucky thing he's a born contrarian, or the answer would be yes.]

considering the kinds of things that can be part and parcel of this places mercies im going to say no
but that still doesnt mean i want to go disgorging my issues like fresh verbal vomit without my own discretion
just talk to me later beckett
blame this one on me because i literally am the one backing out

Will you speak with me again when the effect blows over, then? Assuming it does. They ordinarily do. I suppose I'm tempting fate as we speak.

yes
youre frustrating to talk to sometimes but not enough that id avoid you
plus i am actually curious about the vampire stuff

[It's more than he meant to say, his loss forcing the honesty out, but it's nothing enough to make him cringe or try to cover.]

[network] Event: Long & Lost [NIGHT 217]

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