Davesprite (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mrcreamsicles) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowblindrpg2017-10-08 06:49 pm
mrcreamsicles) wrote in snowblindrpg2017-10-08 06:49 pm
[log] chips but no salsa [closed]
Characters: Davesprite, Karkat, the Cat, Beckett, Angel, Rhys (the dickcheese one), and Enoch
Location: Building 309
Date: Day 285
Summary: A whole bunch of people meet up, tablet chips get handed off, and maybe pancakes happen.
Warnings: Nothing planned.
309: A house, green on the Geiger counter, that probably should have been redecorated ages ago. Everything looks to be from the 60s or 70s. There was carpeting here, but it's gone now, revealing a locked trapdoor in the bedroom. There's a bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom. "зеленый" is written on the inside of the door. A ration box from the convenience store has been attached to the inside of one of the kitchen cabinets with wood glue. On the kitchen wall beneath it, a message has been painted in black: "i left a ration box here for storing food. if you want to leave rations for the people exploring it should hopefully protect them from radiation. any other supplies can go in the cupboard outside the box. contact davesprite (@featherydouche) if some fucker steals it".
Location: Building 309
Date: Day 285
Summary: A whole bunch of people meet up, tablet chips get handed off, and maybe pancakes happen.
Warnings: Nothing planned.
309: A house, green on the Geiger counter, that probably should have been redecorated ages ago. Everything looks to be from the 60s or 70s. There was carpeting here, but it's gone now, revealing a locked trapdoor in the bedroom. There's a bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom. "зеленый" is written on the inside of the door. A ration box from the convenience store has been attached to the inside of one of the kitchen cabinets with wood glue. On the kitchen wall beneath it, a message has been painted in black: "i left a ration box here for storing food. if you want to leave rations for the people exploring it should hopefully protect them from radiation. any other supplies can go in the cupboard outside the box. contact davesprite (@featherydouche) if some fucker steals it".
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I'ma just chalk that one up to world differences and leave it at that. I mean, people were wrong about the Satan thing anyway, but I sincerely doubt anybody predicted the universe was a giant frog or that what we really had to look out for was an angry dog demon.
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...Your universe is a frog?
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[He shrugs, then motions elsewhere in the house.]
You can ask Karkat about it; he helped breed the one Earth was in. And then after the world ended Jade bred a new one, but... she's not exactly around for questioning just now.
[Given the complication of being in a morgue still.]
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...What does that mean for ordinary frogs? A coincidence? Some sort of hint? Does every incarnation of your world have frogs, then, for the people who create the next to know of to breed?
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[So are frogs always the one constant of creation in that universe?]
Ah...Perhaps I should. I recall it was a game?
[It's been a while since he heard anything about Davesprite's world, really.]
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[He motions Enoch to follow, and once they're sitting down somewhere (Davesprite on a loop of his tail), he starts talking again.]
Okay so, Sburb is a game that affects reality directly. Part of it starts with this rain of meteors called the Reckoning that basically wipes out everything on your planet. The players get transported off that planet into the game world. I could lay out all the equipment and processes involved in that, but I'm trying to keep this streamlined. So for me, I went from Earth to the Land of Heat and Clockwork. Each player's got their own Land, but they're all part of the same game session outside the universe they started in. You following so far? The frogs come up soon, don't worry.
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[That would make sense. Ending a world and rebuilding it isn't something you would allow just anyone to do, right?]
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Not exactly, no. Sessions here are... the ones in Norfinbury nothing to do with Sburb, alright? Session is just the word for like, a given set of players going through the game. If another group started it, that would be their own session with their own Lands and everything else. And the creators of the universe have nothing to do with picking who the players are. It's... kind of predestined? There's different circumstances about how the game gets made and who ends up getting copies to play it, but in the end there's stable time loops that mean we wouldn't exist in the first place if we hadn't played it in the future.
[...]
Shit, I'm getting sidetracked. You good with that too before I move on?
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That's. That's deeply horrifying and very sad. No creature of free will should be locked into a purpose like that. He'll hold off on bringing that up, though, because that would completely derail the very explanation they've settled in for. And pity that can't do anything but be present? Enoch's not sure Davesprite would appreciate it as an interruption.
Of course, he's actually gotten worse at controlling his expression in his time here, so the fact that this unsettles him is plain to see.]
Yes, go on- I'm sorry for changing the subject.
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It's cool. But okay, you've got your group of players, they enter the game and have their own lands, et cetera. But each player also has their own title, and that's what's important here. Your title has your class and your aspect and basically shapes your role in the game. I was the Knight of Time, for instance. Every session needs a Time player and Space player if it's going to be successful. And the Space player is the one who's on frog duty. The lands are themed, right? Like I said, mine was Heat and Clockwork, but our Space player Jade's was the Land of Frost and Frogs. So it was her job to use this equipment the game supplied for a process called ectobiology.
She could explain it better than me, but it's like... You've got this machine and you can point it at a specific frog and try to summon or appearify it to where you are. Except if that frog's going to be doing something else in the future, say you're gonna go out and catch it yourself in person, then actually appearifying it would fuck up the timeline. So instead what shows up is this stuff called paradox slime. And somehow that's got that particular frog's genetic code in it. From there it's like, trying to breed frogs out of the slime by combining it or nudging the genetic code the right direction and stuff like that? Until eventually you get the Genesis Frog, AKA your brand new universe.
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[He's confused - of all the things to be a universal constant. Frogs.]
What does-...what does the time player do, then?
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[Does he look like he knows the first thing of frog genetics? He doesn't. He's a weird teenage bird dude who's orange. He shuffles and refolds his wings before turning his attention.]
The time player keeps the timeline going the way it's supposed to, more or less. Not all of it is on them because paradox space has so many interwoven stable time loops that it's like a Gordian knot made of other, tinier Gordian knots. If you've got someone who can buy more time and go back and prevent things from happening, or do stuff that you wouldn't have enough people to get done otherwise... It helps facilitate everything, I guess? And at the end, if you go and win the game and get your Ultimate Reward in fancy ass new universe form, you're going to have to be able to time travel to a point where you've got someplace actually livable in it. We're more background workers than the Space player.
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[He doesn't know it, but the punchline to this joke is that he kind of plays the role of a space player, viewed through this lens.]
I suppose time travel is useful in many of the same ways. But... It's terrible that-...that all of you must go through such a thing.
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I wouldn't exist without it. Plus I'm a sprite now; I'm a living, breathing guide to the game. There's.... There's not really a point getting all regretful about it. Like, yeah, nothing went the way it was supposed to, and a lot of it was...
[He wipes at his mouth, then forges on.]
It is what it is, Enoch. There's a timeline where people win. That's the best I can ask for.
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[Now that the explanation's out of the way? He can actually voice his misgivings about all of this.]
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[His voice goes a shade firmer.]
I don't want to get into the whole Ultimate Riddle right here and now, but just trust me when I say personal choices have a part in how it all shakes out. Plus debating about it doesn't exactly change it? You're not the one who went through it. I'm the one dealing with all this aftermath.
[For better or worse. His feelings are complicated, not all good, and he has a weirder position than some would.]
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[Beckett had recently called attention to the way everyone's free will was being mercilessly betrayed, denied, violated. It's a more sensitive subject to him now than most, between the reminder and the tower. But he doesn't go on, because his own sympathetic pain is clearly hitting a nerve, and hurting others is something he can't abide.]
...How is your choice honored?
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Even if there's objectively one timeline for the way things have to go, the way that timeline was shaped was still by the decisions of the people in it. My friend got tricked into dying, I spent months leveling up and learning about the game, I went back in time and saved him, then I turned myself into a sprite—the thing I am now. The timeline had to go that way or he'd have stayed dead and not been able to go onto do the stuff that made our team exist in the first place. But do you think I just did it because I had to? That I even knew dick about how time works when I started out? I'm the one who chose it.
The Ultimate Riddle is this whole question of like, how much is free will and how much is left to fate? But it's both. Time has to go the way it goes, but it wouldn't go that way without you being you. That's it.
[It doesn't get into the real meat of doomed timelines, but talking about them isn't something he wants to do at all with Enoch. Not when he's so set on being sad and sympathetic about it; not when the weight of that pity feels like a burden to carry for him. There's times he can take it, but when it's about the decisions he had to make, it's too much.]
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[He still doesn't like that there are living, breathing humans whose sole existence is for a certain thing. He could have said no when invited to Heaven and he would have just lived and died like a normal person. Any of these youths say no and...they were never born? Even if they are all people who wouldn't, that's what strikes him as unfathomably cruel, that they exist for a single express purpose, in a way that humans very specifically should not, by the things in humanity he holds most dear.
Sorry, Davesprite - on this subject, he must be horrified, and pitying, and sad; it goes against the grain of who and what he is.]
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No. There's one alpha timeline. There's an afterlife if you fuck up and make the wrong decision. Can we cut it there?
[He gives him a pointed look, albeit from behind his shades still.]
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Subdued, he just nods. He feels bad and feels bad for feeling bad, even though he can't feel any other way about this, however much Davesprite accepts his fate and the way of things.]
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Thanks.
[For not pushing further.]
I'm gonna go look around some more, alright?
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