[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

[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.]

[bookofnope]

Because I may be a lucky one. [Goodness, is that a straight answer?]

If you can call this lucky. I'm never quite sure. But we have this survival in common, and I am sometimes stunned by how you appear to have managed to cope with it.

[mrcreamsicles]

Because I didn't have any other option, Beckett. If you nearly get killed by a giant goddamn space meteor and live through months where the only people around are you and your sister, you take what you can get. Even when I think reality is getting tired of me, it goes, "Surprise, asshole!" and I get an extra round. And now we're here, and I kind of don't want to die again after doing it like five times now. And I don't want the other people who've gotten another shot here to just go off to die again, either.

[There's a bit of an irritated edge to his tone, but it's a fair return for that accusative air Beckett put to his words earlier.]

[bookofnope]

I don't mean how you continue to function. I can do that, by sheer contrary stubbornness if nothing else. Give or take the occasional nervous breakdown, but I blame those on the flu.

[He takes that edge and he runs with it. Now this is how his interactions usually go. Touch a nerve and grab hold and keep pulling.]

I mean what it makes of you. What... debts it leaves, to everything that didn't make it out. Doomed timelines, bollocks. It existed. To leave it behind is to surrender to the inexcusable arbitrariness of fate.

[mrcreamsicles]

[This is... annoying feels too mild, somehow. It's not enraging or anything on that level, but it worms in and picks at all these points of irritation.]

Then what do you want from me, Beckett? Everyone who's been here from paradox space has to be doomed on some level, because since when would the game have taken Norfinbury into account? If I go back, I'm dead. You talk like you're assuming I've got any choice in what timeline is or isn't the alpha, and it doesn't work that way.

[bookofnope]

[The deflection throws him. Normally he's quite good at spinning such questions back into questions of his own, but this is actually a good one. What does he want?]

No - I don't think you have any say. It's happened and done, for both of us, and I'm just as dead as you. I suppose, [he passes his tongue over his fangs,] what I want is to know that it mattered. How does one make it matter, rather than simply survive it and move on.

[mrcreamsicles]

God, you sound like House.

[He reaches up, rubs at his forehead, then runs his fingers back through his hair.]

I don't know, dude. You're asking a 17-year-old like I can unlock the secrets of the universe for you. You want your meaning of life? Go fuck yourself. That's what life keeps telling me. There is no meaning; you only ever deal with what you're handed.

[He holds his hand out to him, open-palmed.]

I want the curtains back.

[bookofnope]

No.

[It's a petulant grumble that he doesn't really mean. He's going to hand the curtains back in a minute. He's not that petty. But as long as he's got hold of them he can maybe pull out just a little bit more, and damn the consequences. For a minute, at least.]

I don't sound like House. Is that all it is for you? The undoing of your reality as you know it - just the universe saying go fuck yourself, deal with it? Don't you feel compelled to preserve some... some legacy?

[mrcreamsicles]

You do too, Beckett. He called me one night when I happened to be dying and tried to get me to do some kind of experiment so it would "matter". Maybe I don't want it to matter. I don't want a "legacy"; I just want my life to chill for once so I can have some shred of normal. If you want help with your mid-unlife crisis, then go harass someone else, and give me back the curtains.

[He jostles his hand in the air insistently.]

[bookofnope]

[It's amazing how effective a deterrent "you sound like House" can be. Especially when he's had his own very similar experience with the doctor. Beckett grits his teeth, and seethes, and mentally curses normal, but he pulls the curtains off - a measured gesture, trying to make it look like no big deal - and hands them back.]

Fair enough. Your life. I can't force you to think the way I do. But don't tell me I'd have used your death to further my - curiosity. Not me.

[He might have. That's the worry.]

[mrcreamsicles]

[Of course it's a bigger deal when he was the petulant one keeping them on his lap just a moment before. Davesprite rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses, but takes them when they're handed over, and rises from the couch to collect his other things. He's not leaving this house today after the long night traveling through the tunnels, but he can at least move to another room.]

The dying wasn't the point; the point was insisting somebody else's life you're not living has to matter in a way you think it does. Go worry about your own self, Beckett.

[It's a bit of a mess to try to haul everything at once, and most of his layers get draped over his back and shoulders like a pretentious asshole's cape collection to free up his arms for his bags. If that's all from Beckett, he'll scoot on over to chill in the bedroom.]