[log] chips but no salsa [closed]

[mrcreamsicles]

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".

Comments

[mrcreamsicles]

[He lifts the pair of 60s-styled curtains off his bundle and nudges them at Beckett for good measure.]

Go on and borrow them, but I'm taking them back when you leave.

[You don't give up warmth that easily around here. They make good layers for wrapping his tail, and work well enough when using the blankets would get them wet with snow or needlessly dirty.]

After I got that SD card out of Miller's place, I'm kind of wondering where she might answer from, to be honest. He claimed to not know why it popped up when I asked him, but Andromeda's been good about dropping them to me when I asked stuff before. Granted, those were all at her place before; but I gotta do some more testing, you know?

[bookofnope]

[On the one hand, they're 60s-style curtains. On the other hand, they're warm. Beckett is not a creature without very considerable pride, but he's learned to, shall we say measure it out. Pick his battles. He is okay with not battling 60s-style curtains.

Covers and a seat. His lucky day!]

You're welcome to them. I am seriously weighing their advantages to my temperature versus their damage to my eyes.

[Let is not go unsaid.]

But yes. I know. Test everything, leave no piece of rubble and charred bone unturned. It's ironic, if Andromeda also has some power in Miller's house. But sometimes I do wonder if we ought to be more systematic - really go building by building. If we could get the coordination to do that.

[mrcreamsicles]

Beckett, bro, you're sat next to the radioactive, bastard child of a tangerine and a glow stick. I'm orange on top of orange with a little bit of orange to make the orange pop. I've got space patterns and a rainbow sock layered all over my giant noodle tail. You'll live with a little gaudy décor on your lap.

[Let it also not go unsaid.]

But anyway, you know nobody's ever gonna be coordinated enough for that. People have got their own goals. I'm probably gonna try it if it strikes me in a given place, but if you're looking for the rigors of science, then you're asking the wrong teenager.

[bookofnope]

Ah, but at least you're consistent in your gaudiness. [And a pretty good banter for a teenager, if Beckett does say so himself. It makes the harder part of the conversation a bit easier.]

And that is exactly why we're progressing as slowly as we are, though I admit I'm as guilty as anyone. If only we could focus. Or stop getting sidetracked by intense trauma, I suppose.

[mrcreamsicles]

[His jaw tightens here.]

That's the thing right there. I'd like to let go of all the fuckin' trauma we keep getting in, but trauma doesn't want to let go of me. It's like a clingy girlfriend you just can't ditch, except it's progressed into stalking and long, heartfelt rants from outside your window at 3 am, but the only lawyer I've seen here is in the morgue so you can't get a restraining order. Shit's fucked.

[bookofnope]

I'm not calling you out, boy. [Not when Davesprite has blessed him with curtains, certainly. But much as Beckett is often a hypocrite, even he can't pretend he's been especially good with Norfintrauma.]

There are ways to... close things off, so to speak. Not to undo certain experiences, but to silence them. For a while. I've found they work when the hurt is not too... personal. Our trials at the hands of the cult, for example, I've found easy to shake off. But admittedly, that may be the experience of a long, convoluted unlife talking.

[mrcreamsicles]

[Davesprite glances sideways, the look largely hidden by his sunglasses.]

They personalized it pretty well when we were tortured.

[His voice is even, subdued, but purposefully kept so.]

The rest is the easier part for me. Being here, looking for info, learning what we can, moving forward. That's the standard shit. Start seeing weird stuff? Okay, cool, time to put my guard up higher and watch that it doesn't turn into murder again.

[bookofnope]

Well said. [That's really the simplest, best way to cope in his experience. Though his experience - like Davesprite's it seems - happens to be relevant here. Poke for info, stay on track, and keep an eye out for the inevitable weird stuff.

Of course then comes the incessant trauma. He frowns.]

I'd say you're young to have such a sober perspective, but the truth is I have no idea if you're the age that you appear to be. That the parts of you I can peg an age for appear to be, at least.

[mrcreamsicles]

Shit, you think I know? I'm at least 16, but with the amount I time traveled I've got my guess standing at 17 by now, and the hard number's a mystery. But you spend long enough in a doomed timeline and it would sober you up, too, old man.

[bookofnope]

[The frown turns into a full-fledged scowl. Yeah, thanks for the reminder, kid.]

If I knew it was doomed... tell me about it. I'm not sure I'd have put so much effort into the search for information in that case, though, except perhaps on why I had to be doomed. Which in your case is frogs.

[mrcreamsicles]

[He exhales slowly.]

For the one I'm thinking of, the problem was my friend John was dead, Jade was probably dead by extension, and so Rose and I wanted to learn as much about the game as we could before I eventually jumped back in time to stop John from dying. Turned out it was necessary for time to go the way it was supposed to.

[Not that John was especially grateful in the long run, but he's not getting into that part.]

[bookofnope]

You say these things like they're not completely insane even by my standards.

[And his standards are high, Davesprite. Let him tell you. It's just that as soon as you involve time travel, his eyes cross. About which he is frankly a little relieved.]

So time was - supposed to allow you to save John's life. At the price of your own - future? Clearly you were not erased. Which feels a little like cheating, really. Either you're doomed or you aren't.

[mrcreamsicles]

I did cheat. If I didn't turn myself into a sprite, I would have wound up dead somehow. Stuff sourced from doomed timelines doesn't last, and the way it worked in this case is only because it made a stable time loop. Our whole session ran on stable loops like that. I'm not going to pretend it's straightforward; the way things worked out depended on a lot of breaking the rules of how a typical session is meant to happen.

[How many times is he going to talk about weird time shit today? Enoch already got him once.]

[bookofnope]

[Beckett contemplates this briefly, eyes faraway - perfectly still in that unnerving, inhuman way of his - before breaking the spell with a shrug.]

I understand that's what you do if you want to get anywhere. Break the rules, break the cycle. Hope that you are, in some way, still the ones meant to be doing that after all. Honestly, sometimes thinking about it makes me very tired.

[mrcreamsicles]

[That is unnerving. Davesprite is starting to consider poking him or grabbing the curtains back just to get some reaction, but the shrug happens first. Beckett can keep his makeshift blankets for now.]

When you're living it, it's basically all you can do. I spent three years somewhere that I have like... zero understanding of how it relates to Paradox Space or where it is, except through a big electronic window we busted through. Which makes zero fucking sense to me either, but it worked. All that while Jade shrunk down some planets to tennis ball size to carry along with us, because when you're cheating a hard reset that's supposed to wipe you out of reality, you might as well go all out.

[bookofnope]

That is true of anything when you're living it. [Just look at their current situation. What else are they supposed to do - die?] It's later that you look back and wonder how in hell's fires you've managed any of what you have. Though I imagine knowing it was all part of a preordained loop rather takes the wind out of one's sails when it comes to self-congratulation.

[mrcreamsicles]

[His turn to shrug.]

Stuff being preordained by the loops doesn't always take the emotion out of it. You can't always trust things are going to go right, either. I never saw it myself, but we had an afterlife full of all the doomed alternates from timelines where people did the wrong thing.

[bookofnope]

[Beckett nods slowly. He can't say he gets it, as such, but he can imagine.] Because you are living it, yes? You respond to what's in front of you. [He'd pick that apart, as cynically as anything, but his imagining here is pretty good.]

Jade... she mentioned afterlives, I think I recall. Your version didn't seem too bad a fate. It must be nice to know you get an existence of sorts even if your timeline is doomed.

[mrcreamsicles]

[He'd shrug again if he hadn't just done so.]

Better than nothing, I guess. It's made up of memories, though, so I'm not keen on going back. Nobody needs a secondhand dose of Norfinbury.

[bookofnope]

You don't need to. You got out. [There's something... hungry may be the wrong word here, considering Beckett, but something fierce in the look he gives Davesprite with this word. Like he wants to look under his skin, into his bones, to see what made getting out possible.]

Do you think you were meant to turn into a sprite?

behold as Davesprite spectacularly dodges giving a real answer

[mrcreamsicles]

[Davesprite turns his head to look at Beckett, absorbing that intense gaze, with an expression that's guardedly flat. For all no one's giving him shit about the idea of not returning (some have even suggested it to him), this is the first he's gotten such an emphatic response apart from maybe Karkat.]

... "Meant" is kind of a weird word for it, Beckett.

[He'll leave the topic of his future to sit there.]

Time loops say it was going to happen anyway. I'm the living loophole the game counted on to get some shit done. Friend died? Oh fuck, better get this teenager to turn himself into a bird. Better have him around to go get this sword made, too. Our whole session was built on loopholes and metaphorical cheat codes the whole time, though. If you want to go by the standard flow of the game, what all this Skaia-given knowledge in my head tells me is supposed to go down on the player's personal quest, then fuck no, this wasn't "meant" to happen. But the alpha timeline says wait a sec, yeah it was. Milk a doomed timeline for all you can get, then evade the death price. Do a hard reset, but transfer for the data before it can be wiped. Invade a whole other session you were supposed to be erased to accommodate, why not. So.

[He gives into that shrug he denied himself a moment ago.]

I picked it my own self, if that counts for anything.

I salute his athletic ability

[bookofnope]

[It's a heated subject. They're talking about worse than death - about oblivion, erasure. And about fate, and helplessness, and hope. And anyone who doesn't have strong feelings on these questions is to Beckett's mind the strange one. He knows much, much more is hiding behind that flat expression. And he is exactly the kind who force his way through and digs deeper, even when he's digging into living flesh.]

So yours was the session destined to survive. By being different, by breaking the rules, but still by the rule of inevitability. The others were... failed experiments. Fodder. The universe probing out its own limitations for the loopholes.

[He says it all like it's a fact. If he's wrong, Davesprite would surely correct him; if he's right, the next question would have the better punch.]

Does it ever bother you, knowing what your alpha timeline was built on - the corpses of worlds?

[mrcreamsicles]

[His eyebrows scrunch mildly.]

You're getting mixed up. Like... Earth got wiped out by meteors, and the universe itself died later because of shenanigans, but the universe dying wasn't supposed to be a thing? And the real main sessions were our session, the trolls before us, and some stuff relating to hard resets people had to pull for the chance for anyone to win at all. Like, there were other people on Earth who had the game and tried to play it, but in the end they were just as doomed as the rest of people who got wiped out by the Reckoning—the meteors. The other timelines weren't, like, other sessions. One session itself can branch at any point if somebody fucks up, and those branched timelines will die out, while the alpha just goes on doing its own thing.

[bookofnope]

Mm. Terminology. Timelines, sessions, worlds - it's all the same to the people dying with them, so the alpha timeline can, as you say, go on doing its own thing. You're still the lucky ones.

[It's a weighty term, when he uses it like that. There may even be a touch there of something close enough to accusation to be mildly disconcerting.]

You'll excuse me if I keep getting back to this point. I have an interest in the experiences of people who survive apocalypses.

[mrcreamsicles]

Why?

[A simple return, because fuck it, he's getting tired of the inquisition going on here and Sburb was complicated even when he was part of it.]