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Lilian Rook	Over the last four days, travelling on an eclectically assemled space-yacht, bringing the comforts of a middle-range hotel all the way from Earth, has felt more like a field trip than an 'adventure' at times. With ample space, high spirits, good company, and a strangely strong trend of new facets of bonding, getting used to the routine begins to make it feel like a tourist attraction lies at the end, with a weekend stay and an early morning flight back.     Despite insisting on antagonizing the Elite broadband, Ash is happy, and Lilian seems to be unusually relaxed to be rid of it. Sakura is as comfortable as you've ever seen, even if she can only watch, and Nika has been inspired with so much creative energy over a period like a long-distance sleepover that the side tables have piled high with binders, notebooks, and lego reference dioramas. Though none of them really understood why Arthur insisted on doing things this way, at least the Blooms have no intent to complain.     And so, the encroaching terminus of the journey suddenly looms so very, very large when Arthur mentions it approaching. For the first time since departing, people are stuck with the difficult questions once more.     Is it safe?     Is there anything to find?     Is there anything we can do?     Is there any other plan to get back?     Is Dictum even right?     Is it okay for us to be here if they are?     Is this good for anyone?     It's too late now anyways. The last step of the 'math equation' Arthur solves brings it all rushing up to meet you either way. You know the instant that it does. On the uppermost deck, with its view of the stars, everything is awash with an orange glow like an incandescent bulb, layered over all the internal lights until every surface is as if there is a raging bonfire only a few feet away. You blink, and the light o Kepler 1652 turns the little world around you searing gold and glittering amber.     That the star itself-- or rather, the sun-- is still there, is both relief and juxtaposition. You're just close enough that it hangs in the black sky above at twice the apparent size of the moon from Earth. The glow, so much softer than you're used to, is almost bearable to stare directly at. From inside the protective bubble, pale saffrom and mottled flame-blue rays surround a burning white core like the striations of a two-tone iris. It lends instantly to the feeling that you are already being watched.
Lilian Rook	On the other side is Kepler-1652b. Even after the nearly eight hundred year timeloop on Earth, the image of it hasn't changed at all to humanity since its discovery; at least what little they could see of it at all. At 822 light-years away, it will vanish from telescopes in just a few decades, when the reality before you finally catches up with Sol.     An exoplanet one and a half times Earth's radius, twice the visual size of everything humanity has ever known, has been reduced to roughly three million, two hundred and seventy thousand evenly-sized pieces, each a thousand miles from its closest neighbour. They are scattered like motes of dust floating in a sunbeam, drifting through fathomless measures of extraterrestrial space, captured in spherical orbit around a white-hot planetary core that keeps them no closer than the moon to the Earth.     Every one of them is an island flensed from primordial mantle, floating atop the droplets of a titanic ocean, inverted and retrograde in orbit, such that from the surface of any one of them, the sun that once illuminated a thriving civilization is buried deep below the waves, and the incandescent metal that was once its gravitational center is its duplicitous replacement in the sky.     You'd never be able to tell if you didn't happen to be so close to one. It drifts by at such colossal speed that the ship is forced to adjust to match it, 'slowing it down' from your frame of reference, until it becomes a stationary thing which you are moving inexorably towards.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Mention its approach     It's subtle, when he does. He stops by each passenger individually. "Couple hours left." And quiet, too... > Arthur: Solve the last problem     Arthur's Wishmathics Engine finally rotates its last lens into place, and the whole vehicle exits the hypothetical space defined by broad questions about physics and enters the space of reality, with a bass-ey thud that rocks one's ribs and leaves one momentarily breathless as the bubble of oft-observed societal structuring rattles in place. The whole boat groans for a few seconds, metal straining. Then Arthur exhales with relief, as it settles down, and pulls up feeds.     The sun. Screened by distance and by his barriers, of course, but it barely needs to be. "Softer than I expected..."     Once the Relief has gotten pulled into range, Arthur winds up being the one to handle identifying and getting a zoomed-in visual feed on the pieces. But the one nearest, that one's easily visible on its own. He motions to pull in closer. > Arthur: Head out onto the deck     He's still got his bubble of workable atmosphere there, so he's out on the surface. "Almost... orderly. How's that water staying in place with the magnetic field gone...?" He scratches his chin. "The world, turned upside down. Guess it makes, I dunno, guess it makes *poetic* sense or somethin'. Ship's seaworthy enough to rest on some shallows, let's get in there." He checks for the gravity of it all, at least. Can they really just stand on those strange islands?
Angela	Roland, perhaps surprisingly, isn't really worried about his safety or how this will go down just yet. He is honestly feeling optimistic and wants to feel Lilian is blessed and that whatever they find here will not be introducing new problems into her life when she should have more normal things to worry about. And honestly, if everybody on the ship dies due to some horrible circumstance, well, it might not be that great but he isn't so attached to life that he'd mind it that much. That's almost revenge, after all. His main regrets would be that the other people here he doesn't know too well seem alright, and the ones he does know well seem good and decent. But it's hard to really stress out about that right now when he feels like there isn't really much that he can do to affect the outcome of the journey here. He is here to observe because Angela wanted to be there for everyone. And in a way, the journey out was so relaxing and chill that it's hard for him to really shake out of that mindset even now that they are at their target destination. Space is still so strange and unreal to be moving through that it dulls his combat senses and the tension in his shoulders and back. What will be, will be, and he hopes it's good, but if it's not--that's how it is. He couldn't change it. Might as well get mad at a meteor. Tiphereth on the other hand is anxious as they get closer. She doesn't really want to admit it, but she's felt strangely like she shouldn't be up here, that her body ought to be bound to earth like that serpent she made out of stars, but it's too late now. She hadn't really thought about it until she was up here, so that's that. She is thinking about how temporary even a planet can be in the grandness of the infinite. How even the universe will slowly run out of steam and peter out. She feels tiny. And seeing a world in three million pieces doesn't help her feel any bigger. Angela mostly feels it important that she witness. Seeing as Dictum had already fended off an attempt to draw information via a Page before, she is largely relying on her eyes and ears. She is mostly marveling at the unreality of it all. "Well I sure wasn't expecting this." Roland admits. "I hope we find what we're looking for." Tiphereth murmurs, a little creeped out. "Is it safe to breathe out there? I'm a little unclear how the atmospheric conditions would be like shrimply by looking at it." Roland considers the possibility of going outside the ship and immediately dying. "Mm. You got some special gear for us, buddy?" That 'buddy' is clearly directed towards Arthur, the expert--in his mind--of not dying horribly in space for no reason.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Is it safe to breathe?     "Lemme check if it's safe to walk. But if there's water, decent chance there's something to breathe, most cases." Arthur mutters. "Their life got complex so they probably had an oxygenized atmosphere, and I'm not seein' that green green meth-een--" He means methane. "--or nothin'. But I brought some O2 kits and some pressure stuff from the supplies, if people need it."
James Bond	>Get in there      As Arthur's engine does the heavy lifting of bringing the ship alongside the nearest island and matching speed, Bond makes minute adjustments at the helm to set it down in the shallows. Once the ship has 'landed' in that sense, he excuses himself from the helm and joins the others on the deck. Is it safe to breathe out there? I'm not seein' that green meth-een...      "Interesting, as well, that the water isn't frozen," Bond notes. His outfit--a new-wave-esque brown trenchcoat over a stylishly loose-fitting tucked-in rose button-up and chestnut slacks--does little to dispel Ash's accusations regarding his expensive tastes. "I packed a space suit." Of course he did. "Whatever you would have set aside for me, you can give to someone else."
Xion	Xion had enjoyed the travel even if she had gotten a little weird about it in the middle when the cruse ship experience become an experience in 'party'. Xion had some personal hangups about parties, and wasn't actually a gamer type girl. Almost a member of the outdoorsy girlotype, her years of combat child superheroics had given her a restless bounce to her idle animations. That there was a faintly looming threat, of 'unknown', of what could be, made the medallion she took from the probe rest in her hand and serve as her preferred idle-stimming coin. Rolling borrowed power through her fingers, Xion had sat idle at cardgames, not thinking about bids, and then. . . They arrived. Wearing a black coat over a purple sleeved shirt with a grey-silver shooting star printed on the front (making it obvious why she bought it) and black tights into boots, Xion is as combat ready as generally is, but now vaguely prepared for adventure by wearing 'proper protection'. That it's her cult robe, and a hood she pulls up over her hair, doesn't make it less 'protective'. Blue eyes shaded, out on the deck, she looks over the railing and sucks on her teeth. "Yeah," She exhales. "Even for me that's a little weird. What's with the space water? Why's it... Ocean-ing? Is this the water universe? Arthur? Did we pass into a really aquatic themed area? It'd explain..." Tiny planes? An ocean as medium? Isolation, saturation, a sun that could be looked at, an orb that stared back. "No. It wouldn't. The probe came from here, right? This place, that tried to 'address the threat'? Isolate, and..." Of all people, Xion turns to Petra of all and asks, with Angela's pad a close second to question. "Is this 'panopticon'? Each a cell that can be seen, by a central tower?"
Tamamo	With Arthur's warning, Tamamo's properly dressed for anything by the time they arrive. That means she's set out a cushion on a little rug on top of the deck, gotten into her seven-layered rob, and sat down with full regalia. She's even carrying a small bundle of rice stalks in one hand, hidden in her sleeves, though it's unclear where it came from.     She's ready for something mysterious to happen, whether or not it's something terrible. She's been checking the threads since just before Arthur finished the final math problem.     "You know," she says to Lilian, "the true White-Gold Face cannot be seen in the 'layer' that is the world of humans, even when the era persists in the 'reverse side' of the world. This is a mark of the passing of time. The same is like to be true on other worlds, where that passage has led to their own changing from mystery to knowledge, to the withering of fairies and the exhaustion of bronze -- 'oil,' I suppose, is the example to which those of some histories would more readily turn, or 'coal,' or whatever else. Each a mark of the hunger of civilization."     Tamamo looks up toward the planetary core, eyes sliding around it, and spreads open a paper fan with a flick to then shield her eyes. "Still, I wonder. There may be anything that may be found, here among the stars, in worlds far distant, or through the gateways that connect 'Earth' to 'Earth' to 'not Earth.' Someday, perhaps, we will find a star still with its lively spirit, not as Nika hears them, but as She once did. Perhaps it will be one never to have reared children, who knows nothing of 'civilization.' Perhaps it will be a spirit aggrieved, for what grew beneath its watch. Perhaps it will be glad for company. Perhaps it will know not of speech."     She looks down through the sea. "Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps..."
Petra Soroka	For Petra, the cozy atmosphere of the trip was never a reason to lose sight of the end destination, but yet another reason why it has to be reached. This is the first time all four Blooms have spent recreational time together, nearly in the same space-- possibly the longest all four have ever been copresent in hundreds of years-- and, Petra can selfishly and shamelessly admit that it's actually pretty great. 'The Blooms will exist together' is the vague promise made by the doomed prognosis of Earth, but Petra will not forge into that future without knowledge of what that looks like, and most importantly, how Petra can be there too.     It's not really about Earth, and it's only partly out of concern for the Blooms themselves. 'Love' is a selfish, obsessive thing, and it demands the present, past, and indefinite future of its victims. What will it mean, and what will it take, for some trace of Petra Soroka to remain inscribed on the hearts of angels after humanity is gone?     Petra is so restless for the last few hours of the trip, once Arthur sets a deadline. Ash and Sakura end up being the ones she gravitates towards before the final jump, with no preparations she can make to have anywhere useful to divert her energy. "I really wonder what they've been doing for the past eight hundred years. If they're still, uh, bothering to be 'in the area' at all."     The question of what actually to do once there is one that Petra's fretted about a bunch during the voyage. Wandering aimlessly is insufficient, cameras would barely be any better, and though she's borrowed some of Dictum's rituals, the vibes of rolling up to a site of a Bloom's victory to immediately start using the tools of their vanquished enemy feel kind of horrible. It's still possible that there won't be 'anyone', by any definition, left to meet at all, though.     "Huh. It's kind of... artsy," Petra murmurs in agreement with Arthur once the inverted world comes into view in front of them. "Three of them, but thousands of self contained little, almost... homes? That are cosmically super close but individually super far apart? The, um, first overall image kind of isn't giving anything clear." "Is it safe to breathe out there?"     "It wasn't." Petra says abruptly, both hands on the railing. "Um, not by the end, I mean. Like, it's sort of, fuzzy, but it was super red and hot and impossible to breathe and there wasn't any water left, in Dictum's memory. So...."     Petra preemptively splits open the mirror in her palm, Beauty of Ash coalescing around her, forelegs propped up on the railing like a dog poking its head out a car window. <So it looks like they made something after on purpose, I guess.>
Angela	Angela immediately gets one person telling her that it's probably safe to breathe and also gets another person saying it definitely WASN'T safe to breathe. So she rubs a little at her face. Naturally, this isn't exactly Angela's problem to deal with but she'd generally prefer Roland and Tiphereth to not immediately step outside and be booked. Roland of course is assuming that Angela CAN'T book him this far out. It's different, right? He thinks it must be at least a little different. "Well--actually none of this matters, Angela obtained a page suitable for this." She draws out a pair of pages and stuffs a glowing one into herself and into Roland as the cool pilot suits of Gygas immediately materialize around them. "There. Easy to use spacesuits that don't waste time with a boost to our reflexes and manual dexterity too." Roland marvels that Tiphereth, at least, doesn't seem to need the 'supernatural decisiveness' element here. "Well one way or another I guess we're ready." Roland says as Tiphereth picks up the Angelapad. Admittedly, the 'power' bestowed upon the user of the Giyges page isn't supposed to be 'a spacesuit' but, well, sometimes thinking outside the box with the pages is the way to go. Angela considers the idea of a panopticon. "Best to assume we are observed." Angela says. "I feel like we are. So uh." Spaceman Roland says.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Did we pass into a really aquatic themed area?     "Don't think so." Arthur says. "I was aiming at normal space and I'm real sure I landed us there. Here. This is where the probe came from for sure." A panopticon... He winces at the idea. "Doesn't look like any prison I've seen, and not secure too, given the only person we know got out." > Arthur: Comment on Tamamo     "Most stars are whalefalls, yeah." He says, inexplicably. "Kind of gotta catch them before that stage, but it's tough." > Arthur: Think about Petra's art critique.     "Way back," He mutters. "I used to know someone who was like that. Was about, I wanna say, maybe three or four 'full' souls swimming around where she spent all her time. But she cooked up this whole library full of things. Mostly-people, people enough. Maybe that's just what you do, when there's only a few of you, and you're like this." He stops, and thinks about that for a little too long.     "Maybe they won their session." He says, inexplicably. "Looks like it to me at least."
Petra Soroka	"Is this 'panopticon'?"     The Beauty of Ash squats its weight lower down to its back legs, trying to take in the whole exploded diagram of Kepler all at once. There's no expression to read off of its face, but every motion in its body glitters in the white light of the planet's core, micromovements throwing off scintillations of silent language as it considers the artistic impression of the world.     <It could also be ¶mobile/dollhouse¶. ¶Kepler-humanity/Precursors¶ are probably completely gone by now. What would they be watching? ... Antegent?>     The Beauty of Ash prowls around the deck until it reaches one of Petra's packed bags. A needle-sharp leg scrapes against the ground and shatters, a million broken shards of glass off the tip swirling around the bag to delicately tug the zipper open through collective effort. The mech noses into the open bag and scoops the strap of a camera up onto its face, catching it in the crack that runs down the center to hold it securely.     <¶Observation/hypothesis¶ is ¶the tool of the enemy¶ here. But, I think 'noticing' is different from that. My feeling is more like... spiderweb?> The telepathy trails upwards, like tape tugging hairs off of skin, with the clear impression that Petra isn't totally comfortable making an authoritative declaration on anything here yet. "Maybe that's just what you do, when there's only a few of you, and you're like this."     <Yeah. Thirteen others, I still kind of can't stop thinking about.>
Lilian Rook	It hardly takes any especial sensibility to know that what you're seeing can't be the result of an impact, detonation, or other 'natural' planetary cataclysm. Even still, closing from astronomical to merely stratospheric distance, even without the slightest knowledge of what Dictum's civilization looked like, nor the original face of the untouched world for which you have no real name, you can tell that what you're seeing still isn't what you should be; that it isn't 'right'.     A spit of rock perhaps twenty kilometers to a side; Wight or Pouandai, uselessly small and pointlessly large. Floating, in the most literal sense, atop another twenty kilometers of water to every side, there is no force that should keep any of it together, yet the others aren't any different, according any instrument that you have. No matter how minuscule it looks from space, liquid water can't be anything but familiar blue-black up close, yet in the moment of your approach from 'outside' where cross the arbitrary boundary that divides the surface and below, where the world flips over its edge as you automatically reorient to what looks the most like 'down', you find that the drop of tideless sea reflects a shade of glowing, hypervivid neon fuchsia, like a photo-saturated sunset gone a step too far.     Without any possible wind, white foam paints the concentric ripples that close from all sides, washing up as a wave on every shore. Without any significant mass, the ship has to compensate for two and a half Earth gravities that cut off completely at the ocean's edge, honed to such a razor fine margin that you can see the water circulating like a fountain on just two inches of its inverse surface. The sight of land is defined by rust red and deep, waxy purple, but the alternative paradigms of an alien ecosystem can't possibly explain how anything living grows under a sky of pitch black hard vacuum, nor why the stars themselves are invisible here, replaced instead by the glittering of its millions of stranded companions and their eerie loop around the pretender sun.     The feeling of being 'watched' comes from 'above'. From that uncanny facsimile of the old heavens. It'd be easy to interpret it as being 'looked down upon', but for some reason, the fine hairs on the back of your neck know it to be 'someone else looking up'; that you fly amongst the stars in their sky. Like every inch of ground that any living being had ever trodden was peeled off and hurled away into the realm of the constellations, so that they could be admired from . . .     A ten thousand degree sphere of blistering, barren metal? Of course not.
Lilian Rook	Where the Relief touches the water, a spreading ripple of stillness splashes from its belly, flattening the shallows into pink glass, reaching a hundred meters before it runs out of stasis and peters out into momentum.     'If they're still, uh, bothering to be 'in the area' at all.'     "Who knows. If they aren't, then at least we can perform a good bit of divination knowing where they were." Lilian says. It feels like a strange release of pressure, because she's been unusually quiet about doing very little, during the entire last hour.     'Someday, perhaps, we will find a star still with its lively spirit, not as Nika hears them, but as She once did.'     "Would that make you happy?" What an odd question. Lilian lingers on it way too long while preparing.     'Perhaps it will know not of speech.'     "That's okay! I can teach it!" Nika happily declares. She's on the other side of a screen, comfortably glued to the edge of a kotatsu, so none of this bothers her one bit. She's greedily absorbing everything like an announcement trailer for something.     'Best to assume we are observed.'     "Man I fucking hope so." says Ash, who has done nothing to prepare at all, except perversely swapping the stolen combat boots for stolen brand-new sneakers. This would literally be the perfect environment for that old helmet they're oddly fond of, and yet.     'Maybe they won their session.'     "Kinda looks like it. But . . . ?" Nika fills in what Ash is still searching for. "'Post game'. Doesn't it look like ¶tutorial island¶ to you?"     'What would they be watching? ... Antegent?'     "While possible, my impression was that Dictum's people dealt with the 'Pandemic Threat' far more thoroughly than we." says Sakura. She was, after all, the only other person party to Dictum's memories at all, and even splitting the work in half, she is still the more skilled at it. "Perhaps the idea even became romantic to them?" Nika adds "Like dinosaurs."     'Maybe that's just what you do, when there's only a few of you, and you're like this.'     "Just say the slur dude."     'Yeah. Thirteen others, I still kind of can't stop thinking about.'     Lilian pauses just before the airlock. "Wait. Weren't there--" She suddenly trots back, just to look out of the deck's 'window' overhead. "Weren't there meant to be moons?"
Lilian Rook	The readings are brief and annoying. According to the instruments, there is no atmosphere at all, which is patently nonsense. Two and a half times Earth gravity remains constant, which doesn't bother Ash at all, barely bothers Lilian, and means a stress test of the Eggpack for the other two. The temperature, inexplicably, is forty degrees celsius, but without actual sunlight causing it . . .     . . . . . . . .     Your first steps onto the surface are heavy and hard. There is nothing like sand for a shore. It's as if the rock has been scoured clean of anything so offensive as a tiny particle, much less billions. Your weight more than doubling is deeply uncomfortable; absent of an immediate remedy, it feels like hiking up an incline just to walk forward. None of you are astronauts, but it isn't Arthur's impression alone that 'the feeling of a lack of air resistance' is eerily absent, making your limbs both feel heavy and somehow 'slippery' in motion. Humidity condenses on the outside of your pressure gear, coalescing into jellylike droplets. And the 'forty degrees' without a sun, which should be sweltering with so much water in the-- how is anything condensing? Your body heat isn't radiating normally, though. The heat feels like touching your own skin, without gathering or dispersing in any particular place.
Angela	''Maybe they won their session.'' "What?" Roland asks while the other two just assume that Arthur is saying shit again because Roland likes Arthur and actually does his best to follow his words. ''Tutorial island.'' "Then a start over from the beginning?" Angela sighs, really hoping this isn't some sort of loop thing again. If she finds another person who is in some sort of time loop situation she is going to scream. "Or perhaps it was simply turned into a game." ''Weren't there meant to be moons?'' "Maybe the moons were destroyed too? Or ... hidden somewhere?" ''Man I fucking home so.'' Angela also kind of hopes so. The long trip which was even longer mentally for Angela was a bit of a bear and 'being watched' meant 'finding answers' sooner rather than later. Or at least getting ambushed, which is an answer too in its own way. Tiphereth doesn't know what spacewalking is supposed to feel like and, frankly, neither is Roland since Roland's experience with space was more the Precure/Marioland style of space adventure and one of those was on a concert world where he didn't need to wear one and the other was REALLY TERRIFYING because he kept getting catapulted places. But eventually, Roland does have to say, "This isn't how spacewalking is supposed to feel like, right?" "It feels like we're trying to walk at the bottom of the ocean if it was also very hot." Tiphereth adds, panting for breath. She's not a boxbot anymore which would have been much more suitable for this environment. Angela is just a video screen but periodically Tiphereth has to wipe them moisture from screen and camera. "Any destination in mind?" Angela asks.
James Bond	?Kepler-humanity/Precursors? are probably completely gone by now. What would they be watching? ... Antegent?     "Maybe nothing at all," posits Bond. "Maybe this was just the last act of someone on their way out. To say, 'we were here.' To make something beautiful out of something sad." Part of him wants to say 'hopelessly.' But is it? Is it even sad at all?     How would he know what happened to these people, or who they were beyond what little details everyone else knows? 'What about me' has gnawed at the edges of his mind since that Herculean effort everyone made to reach Ash. Human or otherwise, what happens to the people left to do the catching up? 'Here' and 'there' are easily defined--but 'from here to there' isn't. Is it a mile? A hundred? A thousand? ...     Bond's spacesuit is sleek, yet silvery and reflective in a distinctly zeerust 80s way. It looks like he should be having a laser duel just outside a supervillain's space station, and the way he seems used to it suggests that he's at least done something similar. The increased gravity is not so burdensome to him as to be impossible, but neither is it trivial. This isn't how spacewalking is supposed to feel like, right?     "No. It's alarming in a different way than this."
Tamamo	'Would that make you happy?'     "Mm..." Tamamo thinks about it in near-silence, and then in silence, before giving a wistful smile. "To think, 'I wonder if I might find others like myself' is a natural thing, I think. To be unique is to experience isolation, no matter the era, ending only when the work to wade rivers and build bridges has been done. It is naive, perhaps, for me to follow such a thing. There is no guarantee that I -- that we -- would find a friendly face. And yet... yes. It would make me happy, only to know that there was someone to meet."     'That's okay! I can teach it!'     "I imagine you would, at that."     . . .     Tamamo-no-mae is, as a reminder, only very mildly superhuman, overall. Her blessings don't cover 'super-strength' as a theme, and she's not naturally void-safe, but she can cover several things that turn out to be immediately useful. Adjusting instantly to the feeling of gravity, she takes a leap for the ground, getting the same sort of incredible distance she did the one time she showed off at Lilian's school, landing with an impact but no apparent trouble -- and then complains of difficulty just in standing about. "Is one meant to crawl, in such a place? I would rather scale sheer cliffs."     The heat is -- odd. It can only be odd. She's not discomfited, herself, but -- "I may need to redraw the resistance talismans. I expected the difficulties present of a lack of wind, but something here is a bit different than that. Do you feel that?"     'Weren't there meant to be moons?'     "Were there? I do not seem to recall."     She looks up. Then, she reorients her sense of place, and, now standing upside-down without having moved at all, looks down.     "It is better that we be seen. One who sneaks into another's home is rarely so welcome. For this purpose do we wander at all, and... moreover, shall we take a trip to that glowing core, if still none see fit to greet us?"     She'll at least take the opportunity to look for anything growing, first. Whether they're greeted or not, she'd rather find 'life.'
Lilian Rook	If it can be said you're 'embarking onto an alien planet', it's in such a toyetic, touristy sense that its aura somehow transcends linguistic and cultural barriers to make everything that should be brilliantly novel seem sort of fascinatingly trite; only as scientifically valuable as expensive CGI.     Laborious steps up a solid stone shore, striated with eons of irrelevant activity and glitterig with mica crystals, take you into shallows choked in translucent organic pearls halfway between agal bloom and jellyfish bell, and then into primordial vegetation drawn straight from ink blots and blown glass as inspiration, shades of retinal red and purple for never having known the atmospheric event that locked Earth's flora into that terribly inefficient molecule called chlorophyll.     The absurdity of coming all this way 'for this' is strikingly apparent for anyone hoping to have their assumptions of the universe turned upside down. Everything is only just different enough from the world you know to feel like you aren't supposed to be here, amenable to your existence only so long as you can protect it yourself, but nothing really comes close to beggaring the human imagination; or at least nothing more than an idle quirk of physics here and there. Rather than exploring the mind-bending potential of what always seems to lurk just below the surface of everything to do with the Blooms-- the Divine trees, the Everse--     Here you are. Clambering out of your boat onto a dark and strange-familiar shore, returned to some ancestral understanding of Odysseus' wary sailors. Every nerve stands on end because you're supposed to be hearing the sounds of animals, and you aren't.     "Petraaaaa! It's so hard to see!" Nika whines, from the other side of the miraculous long-distance terminal. Sakura, tensely quiet, says "It's the camera, to be clear. There is no interference at all." She considers something for mere moments, before saying "Lady Tamamo? May I ask you to remove no more than three of the talismans placed throughout the ship, and replace them as a triangle on this beach, no more than a hand's span apart? When it would be convenient for you."     Ash could scarcely give less of a fuck. Trite or not, once the ramp is down, they are off. The first thing they do is start jumping; ostensibly testing their own weight against gravity, each time getting a little higher, until they take a running swing at the dripping boughs of oily purple foliage high above. Without a helmet of any kind (but only a very subtle limning), they remark on the first thing anyone with one wouldn't:     "Smells like a how sour candy tastes."     "Does it taste like that too?"     "Nah. Doesn't really taste like anything."     "I'm sorry? You're breathing?"     "Ssssomething?"     "Please, everyone. Don't be in a hurry to find out for yourselves."     "God that'd be so funny. Like--"     "Arnold taking his helmet off on pluto!"     "Yeah!"     "I guess you'd just ¶drown¶ though?"
Xion	'Maybe they won their session.' Xion finds trouble wearing a smile, even a fake one. "Yeah." She exhales, not really knowing if she means that or some more neutral by half commitment. "Do you think this is winning?" She bounces back, unsure. It didn't look like winning. 'My feeling is more like... spiderweb?' Xion doesn't know about that, and can't reply to the Beauty of Ash entirely, and so doesn't. The one-way psychic meanderings render Xion unsure about even if they should proceed, not wanting to step on the web and lure out the lurking predator. Was it winning? Was this anything? Their vessel, such as it is having not travelled but mathematically simply gotten there, approaches some line and inverts, and even Xion gasps and holds her breath, puffing cheeks out as if expecting a pressure differential and instead only seeming awkwardly reacting to the open black-void of things being 'normal' and despite Heaviness-like pinch, the final orientation is what takes that held breath away. 'Puh', gasping, Xion's blue eyes widen and the noirette drops held medallion to gape at their position, sense the feeling, look 'up'//'down' and find the orientation revealingly sickening. "It's the other side of the coin. No. It can't be. Is it that literal? Is it--" Holding head as if she was having a prophetic migraine Xion is struck by the sheer weight of the beat and structure of her old metaphor. "The colors of darkness? The opposition in image? 'It is above you, among the stars, and it is looking "down"?' And now here we are, the coin flipped on its back, and 'it' is looking up?" Xion's medallion leaps back to her hand with a weft of purple gravity magics, but by the time it reaches her hand, what was a bright and new and shining as an idea was replaced by something with the working of old and well-loved plastic - a favorite toy. With a little toy motorcycle closing into plastic side-piece and gripped into fist, Xion joins the others with a muted shift of red. Stepping off the ship in a shorter black motorcycle jacket and a red shirt the same silver star on the front, Xion joins Ash in being unbothered in disembarking without suit as she had claimed to be, channeling a pulse of old power to speed up past the weight of the local gravity differential and match pace. "I don't know if hearing it from me helps," After the whole conversation about her space being different and fantastical, she was sensitive to being the candy dimension difference girl. "But no. Space usually is bouncier and floatier. This is the Heaviness. The... um, Star Heaviness." It's gravity but makes a 'bwowowowowou' noise when you enter it.
Lilian Rook	Lilian, who has actually been in space more times than all the other Blooms put together (which is zero), is already far enough up the shore to be kneeling down (in pressure gear) and hacking away at the stalks of ostensible flora with her occult slash utility knife, stowing them in containers sourced just for this trip. Ash comes running as soon as they notice, immediately gravitating to anyone doing something proactively 'outdoorsy', and starts hassling.     "You think it's gonna explode like a deep sea fish when we go back?" "We'll test small batches before deciding on a preservation method." "Yeah? Gonna give 'em all names? Gonna do magic with 'em?" "Quite possibly." "You think any of them get you high?" "I'd assume they're all poisonous." "Oh-- shit, no, I meant-- you. Me. Us."     'I imagine you would, at that.'     "Mhm mhm mhm." Nika happily nods at Tamamo. She scuttles under the Rublecam vantage point, does something just out of frame that sounds suspiciously like changing a VCR tape, then comes running back. "I can try talking to ¶this one/these guys¶ if you want! Someone has to be a ¶repeater/avatar/ansible/divine organelle¶ though."     'Do you feel that?'     "Yeah. It's kinda balmy?" Ash says. "But, like, under the covers toasty, not sweating and bitching outside."     Once Tamamo is up the shore as far as Lilian, 'something growing' is practically everywhere. It's difficult to compare it to a jungle or a forest of any kind, given the bizarre way it all meshes together, like a tangle of symbiotes of parasites so thick that it all amounts to one flowering colony, but it's certainly all 'alive'. What should be tough and fibrous is smooth and partially bony, and what should be soft and leafy is more like touching wet nitrile gloves, but it's undeniably posessed of vital force, despite . . .     It was hard to notice at first, but turning thoughts towards magic makes it stand out much more. Arcane senses remain sufficient to sense the unmistakable presence of a leyline; elsewhere in the cosmos, but not in the Multiverse. One broad, powerful, even overflowingly full, but so placid in its current that it fades into the background unless you look for it. And it's anchored in the center of the island, pointing 'upwards' into space, trailing towards the planetary core like an umbilical connection.     'The colors of darkness? The opposition in image? 'It is above you, among the stars, and it is looking "down"?'     It's Lilian who tenses weirdly at that. "You were thinking it too." she says, like a question with an answer too obvious to even qualify as rhetorical. "The colours seem fine to me. There's plenty of light." "Yeah?" "But the 'placeness' is unmistakable. It's like they had a reference."
Tamamo	'Lady Tamamo? May I ask you to...'     "It would be no trouble." Tamamo can make it back aboard no problem, moving in leaps made swifter by the extra pull. It's only when she isn't moving that she feels like complaining about it, huffing like an elderly woman whose back and knees shouldn't be subjected to such things.     She had, at first, planned to collect a few plants, but ends up leaving that to Lilian. Something about the inability to separate out one bit from another is bothering her.     'I guess you'd just ¶drown¶ though?'     "We are under the sea, after all."     'Do you think this is winning?'     "If 'to win' is 'to get what you wanted,' I wonder... if it is not rather irresponsible to say that 'that which you want' must also be 'that which will best bring you happiness.'"     'Someone has to be a ¶repeater/avatar/ansible/divine organelle¶ though.'     "Ms. Soroka will serve," Tamamo says, knowing this to be a true statement in as many ways as it can be taken. "She has been practicing, yes?"     'It is above you, among the stars...'     "Is that something you heard?"     Briefly back aboard, Tamamo takes the time to draw one of her talismans afresh, for later, and then to carefully select and rearrange a few of those Sakura had asked after. There's nothing difficult about going in and out, but this part of exploration in never before seen frontiers includes the sort of tedium chroniclers prefer not to detail, for those who are subject to such concerns as compression and decompression. It takes a little bit for her to get back outside, and then to find a place to sit down and work.
Angela	Roland isn't gonna touch anything. He'll draw a weapon if he needs to but his storied career as a Fixer taught him to not fuck with stuff he doesn't understand until he has to. He's not being paid to eliminate anything or to mess with anything. He's just here 'in case' something happens. aNd maybe it won't. And frankly, even if something does happen, it might be a bit beyond what someone who largely engages the world through physical means can handle. Roland doesn't have any arcane senses. His teacher told him once that he wasn't especially talented and that all he could really adapt to was a physical flow of motion to gently guide his hand from weapon to weapon, motion to motion, to smoothly cleave bodies apart as they come to him. He wonders what his teacher would be seeing here, though, in a world so disjointed and strange. Or is this the sort of place that she's looking for, an unreality that feels so divorced from City existence that one couldn't hope to catch a glimpse through the City lights. Tiphereth feels vaguely uneasy but she couldn't begin to explain why. Angela stares through her camera feed. Without anything to leach power or knowledge off of nearby, she's flying as blind as Roland. "I feel if we took a sample back to the ship, we'd end up in one of Tenant's movies." Angela murmurs. "Could you draw a page from them?" Tiphereth asks. "Mm... Possibly. It didn't work with the probe but that might've been an exception. I'll take such an action if The Dame Commander asks of it, but it may prove uneccessary." ''Do you think this is winning?'' "Depends on the god, I suppose." Angela says. It's not how she would build a world that's for sure, but she supposes she's not so creative.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Doesn't it look like tutorial island to you?     "So did winning the session." He had rumbled. > Arthur: Just say the slur dude.     "It's not always about you, man." No clarity there. > Arthur: Disembark     Going to another world's environment, its gravity, its heat, is something Arthur had spent his own time doing. Heat is something he adjusts for, gravity even more so. He leans on his broom to support a casual posture, looking over tutorial island, then striding on. > Arthur: Do you think this is winning?     "I think it's the byproduct of winning." He says. "Feels like a trophy. Look at what we did. Look at what we came from." He says, shaking his head. "Or, we slipped between the 4D cracks on something kinda like a Matrioshka brain, and we're inside a memory of this spot." It's like, after all, they had a 'reference'.     "One way to see what we can see, I guess." He turns to Nika. "I've got old skills on the repeater business, the old Derse Royalty thing." Yet Tamamo suggests Petra. "Don't wanna cut her off from another chance to eat up a million years weirdbrain, sure." He laughs a little, weakly. Then goes back to staring up and down the shoreline.     "There's no connection I could pick up between these." He mutters. "It's definitely not an ecosystem. So, snapshots, one way or another..."
James Bond	The effort of moving isn't in itself a frustration. That it should be effortful to move, *here,* adds to a building frustration with the surroundings.     "I thought it would be different."     Different, how?     He thought this would be some kind of missing piece that'd answer that question--what does 'catching up' look like? When all the Lilians and Ashes and Sakuras and Nikas have gone ahead and left him behind, what does the winding path look like without them?     He thought that stepping out of that airlock, seeing all of it from the other side, the right side, would cast it in a completely different light, like looking at a painting from the angle the artist intended. Instead... "It feels like I'm on the set of a low-budget science fiction program that wasn't meant to be seen anywhere but from the other side of a television screen, where the fuzz and the lines and the saturation could make it seem as fantastical as it ought to."     I hope that we haven't come all this way just for 'I should have known better.'     Then something else comes to mind. What if it was staring me in the face, and I'm just too old and used-up to see it?     "Petra. What did you mean by 'observation is the tool of the enemy?'"
Petra Soroka	"Perhaps the idea even became romantic to them?"     <Dictum was ¶shocked/mortified¶ by how badly we did, yeah.> There's no way Petra could peer down through the weird foliage to see if there's any animals(?) from this height, but she tries anyways. <It does seem really... sentimental?> "Weren't there meant to be moons?"     <Yeah, but they were colonized, so they probably ¶blew up/metamorphosed¶ too?>     Once the ship touches down, unlike the seafaring explorers stepping onto foreign lands, the Beauty of Ash creeps onto the shore like the first primordial sea creature to venture out of the ocean. She has, of course, her own spacesuit on inside the mech, as any sensible person would to not die instantly if it was broken, but she can't exactly wear the Eggpack inside and still give the two at home a view. Her solution, rigged up on the voyage, is a saddle-like harness that fixates around the spikes on the Beauty of Ash's shoulders and just below the gap between its collar and head, where the Eggpack could, if Nika really stretched its arms, probably grab onto the floating 'ears' made of hardlight.     It's not wounded by gravity, or air, or heat, but it can only be hypersensitive to every variation in the environment. The humidity coalesces on the outside of the mech like a cold glass, tinting it vividly purple from the overabundance of refracted light running through it. The Beauty of Ash tip-taps across the stone and vegetation barely disturbing it, only making a single razor sharp point of contact with each step. "Petraaaaa! It's so hard to see!"     <The camera? Because of the angle, or because of the water...?> The Beauty of Ash's head, disconnected from the body as it is, disjoints lazily downwards to twist and glance over its own shoulder, even though Petra herself is sitting somewhere underneath the Eggpack. "Smells like a how sour candy tastes."     <Like ozone?> Petra says, which is not how a sour candy tastes. The Beauty of Ash's head lowers down to ruffle through the vegetation like it's sniffing, but, of course, can't actually do that. <I want to ¶play in the grass¶ too....>     <Though, don't you think this doesn't feel at all like the ¶main event¶?>     The Beauty of Ash can make paces around the perimeter of this island pretty quickly, without gravity doing much to slow down telekinesis. With the stream of the Eggpack's camera both serving to show Nika and Sakura, and also to record the sort of Go-Pro-esque vision of the expedition, the Beauty of Ash crouchs down to inspect things closely, and zips up above the island to get another top-down view of it before coming back down, landing first on two legs before settling back onto four.     After a bit of inspecting the island, Petra announces, <We're getting ¶caught up¶ ¶on/in¶ ¶afterthoughts/litter/doodles¶. This looks like... ¶dioramas/models¶ of a new ¶Earth/Kepler¶? I think what we're looking for is going to be...>     The mech's head tilts upwards, towards the glowing core. <I mean, I was expecting a bit more ¶black/white/magenta¶>
Lilian Rook	'It would be no trouble.'     "Thank you very much. This will make it much easier for me to keep aware of your position, and to assist Nika intervening if necessary, amongst other things."     'We are under the sea, after all.'     "Yeah. I heard out guys were always theorizing it was some kinda ocean planet. Like, I don't see any mermen or whatever, but doesn't it still have that 'feel'? Keep expecting something to swim past my face."     'If 'to win' is 'to get what you wanted,' I wonder...'     "A lot of games are about ¶escaping/outlasting/defeating¶ the ¶bad guys/elements¶ I guess."     'Ms. Soroka will serve'     "Thanks Petra!"     "Thank you as well, Petra."     "Beg pardon? Practising when?"     'Is that something you heard?'     "From me. A long time ago. About . . . dreams."     'Mm... Possibly. It didn't work with the probe but that might've been an exception.'     Lilian stands up from her herbalist's work, stowing the vacuum vials in a latch-sealed hermetic case that she's hanging off her side. "The Voyager craft was engraved with the 'countermeasure array' these people invented." she says, not unbitterly. "I don't see anything like that here."     'So did winning the session.'     "Okay so yeah I guess they won."     "Nice. Wanna see if we can beat their run?"     'Or, we slipped between the 4D cracks on something kinda like a Matrioshka brain, and we're inside a memory of this spot.'     It's Ash that turns around and looks concerned. The weight of their own hair slaps them in the face in his gravity, which annoys them. "Hey. Hey don't go saying shit like that. That's so possible. That's so fucked up and totally possible."     'I've got old skills on the repeater business, the old Derse Royalty thing.'     "There's a business?!"     Nika is in the midst of imagining probably the coolest thing ever while Lilian is moving up the shore and finally pushing into the 'tree line', not straying too far from Tamamo as she works on the talismans, but, for once, drawn unusually far from her by the gravity of some nameless thing that can be seen clearly even from her wife's side.     'It feels like I'm on the set of a low-budget science fiction program that wasn't meant to be seen anywhere but from the other side of a television screen'     "You're right." Lilian says, eerily certain. "This isn't like the place I remember at all. It isn't even like London." Wearing a helmet, you can't hear the deep breath, but you know its presence by familiarity. "I think this is a set. A stage. A--" "¶Sandbox/Test Vial¶." "--mmh. It's not just you. It's-- why would there be millions of them up there? Why an island?"
Lilian Rook	'Though, don't you think this doesn't feel at all like the ¶main event¶?'     Oddly, despite knowing absolutely nothing about Lilian's point of reference, Ash pushes their hands through their hair, gets smacked on the neck by every 2.5x weight pin and band in it, breathes out slowly, and says "Yeah. I never grew up in an Urban Center. I went back and forth across the states a few times. I walked most of the way from there to Japan. And I gotta say none of this looks like Antegent-stuff. It's just kinda like . . ." They motion in the certainly wrong 'direction' of Earth. "Seventeen year-old alien Nika."     'The camera? Because of the angle, or because of the water...?'     "Both." Nika huffs. Sakura pats her on the arm, and says "Tamamo will be finished very soon. Then it'll be much better."     Indeed, her request isn't all that difficult. Sakura's hyper-clairvoyance is, itself, a one in a billion kind of thing, but the principle of triangulation is exactly the same anywhere in the universe. Asking for Tamamo's hand doesn't seem to have been for any reason other than her reputation for delicacy and precision, her ability to use magic, and basic trust. It's work she can finish in two minutes. Once she has it just right, on the flattest part of the shore she can find, she can very faintly feel a familiar arcane signature, and the others can see Nika tilting her head to a brand new angle on the screen.     'Dictum was ¶shocked/mortified¶ by how badly we did, yeah.'     "Good to know that humanity is the fuckup species." Lilian says, wry-serious. "It sounded like their planet didn't have an Enlightened slash Unenlightened schism either. People just used what they had. Does that make our planet's defining feature 'violent uncooperative chaos'?"     Getting an aerial view that is closer than 'from a spaceship' has at least some modest utility. Once again, the inconvenient size of the island is striking; enough for a modern town to have ports and parks, or for a very small one to actually support itself with farming, and no more or less. The ocean is just enough to go sailing around on with a high wind-- far more than what's available to the Dragon's Garden-- and yet there's no conceivable reason to actually do so. It's hard to tell if anything even lives under the water either. But zooming around the island on close air recon, a shallow angle to the heaped-up flora and just the right momentary timing gets Petra, Nika, and Sakura (the latter two of which clamour to point out) a glimpse of a clearing beneath a netted purple canopy, inside of which two things can be seen:     A sliver of some black, semi-metallic facade, and the telltale shimmer-displacement of a recently formed Warpgate.
Petra Soroka	"But no. Space usually is bouncier and floatier. This is the Heaviness."     The Beauty of Ash props itself up on one of the weird trees to stand, looking out above the canopy at the millions of other tiny islands. They're all too far away, but, <I wonder if it's different on each? Arthur? Are you able to tell?> "If 'to win' is 'to get what you wanted,' I wonder..."     <Isn't it by definition? For Blooms more than anyone else? Not too be too pro-apocalypse or anything, but this is ¶everything you wished for¶, I assume. Even if this is imperfect for whatever reason, I kind of can't imagine how this would be anything but winning?> Ms. Soroka will serve,")]     <¶Yup/Yes Ma'am¶.> Petra doesn't even need to know what Nika's actually asking of her for the unspoken response to immediately come through. When the Beauty of Ash comes to a stop looming behind Lilian, it goes from picking through undergrowth to perfectly still without any inertial swaying in between, frame perfect. It crouches down, head outstretched to investigate the plant samples Lilian's gathered, and to give Nika a clear view between the ears to see it 'face to face'. "Don't wanna cut her off from another chance to eat up a million years weirdbrain, sure."     <Pfuh. Are you ¶jealous/freaking out¶?> The Beauty of Ash twists around, a few pings of cracking glass accompanying the contortion, to find where Arthur is just sort of lingering on the outskirts of the island. <Is the whole space creation thing going on bothering you?> "It didn't work with the probe but that might've been an exception."     <Well, that was because of the ¶array/It Is What It Is¶, right? Not that Dictum explained too much of how it worked to me yet.> "Petra. What did you mean by 'observation is the tool of the enemy?'"     While Nika's doing whatever Nika does, or asks Petra to do, the Beauty of Ash folds its arms in front of itself and sits down, resting its head in the sharp valleys of the facets of its arms. <Dictum was a product of how all of Kepler viewed the ¶Blooms/Vectors¶. Not just as 'dangerous', but as ¶statistics/3D model/test subject¶. They had whole facilities for studying them, big enough and well-staffed enough that most of them never even saw a potential Bloom in person, I think. I'm pretty sure almost the whole planet was realigned towards doing that, to minimize the threat.>
Xion	'You were thinking it too.' "It's not exact, any more, in me." Xion admits, but right now it feels like it was shouted, an echo that didn't leave a mark or medallion but drew closer the memories of the Antegent and the black keychain that hung down from wrist while rubbing back of neck under tighter jacket-collar. "But I've never really stopped thinking about it. 'Have you ever thought about it'," And they had. "-but it's not quite like being on the other side of the spectra. We should be. . ." Xion doesn't know how to explain. "We should be seeing differently, if we can see at all. This feels... a dark sun, the looking-up, the *liquid*, like we're not just inside the ocean..." Xion doesn't traverse or travel the same way as walking, not in their liquid medium. In fact, she's *floaty*, buoyant in her motions, gliding around as if on thick-syrup spacewalk, the bearing-down washing around her. She was almost native of this, almost the ideal shape and structure, wobbly a little and stretchy, a Dark-native by construction and habitation, and as she waited, floating in the alien solution, she leans in to Lilian's collection, the keychain-bead of her Pylon-themed keyblade charm pinched between fingers, presented as if critical key item. "It's like we're on the inside of one of those nerve-ends, doesn't it? That we passed through the surface and flipped in, and now we're under... Liquid pressure, water pressure, a pressurized *vessel*?" 4D cracks are also possible. There's something to that. "Maybe it wasn't a crack, but a membrane. As soon as we went through it, we oriented, which means there isn't just pressure but a gravity and a 'down'. If we're 'up' and falling or 'down' and sinking, this surface, this island... Is there a deeper to go? Could we reach the perspective-point from here? Maybe we need to reach the viewer, whatever that is." Then, Xion returns to something Ash was saying earlier. "You can smell it? I thought you 'couldn't be reached', using your ability?" And then a beat. "... And if so, can you smell it anyway?" A little more concerned. Xion was 'holding her breath, in the water', which didn't preclude her from talking, for Candy Dimension logic reasons. She was just glad she didn't get a mermaid tail. . . . What *would* 'fitting in' here look like?
Angela	Angela isn't given a go-ahead. But honestly, but 'low budget science fiction program' and 'one of Tenant's crappy movies' is about the same idea so she's pretty pleased with herself for getting this Correct despite the unusualness of it all. She'll probably be pretty annoyed upon seeing there's a Warpgate straight here while Roland will see it like one of those end-of-rpg save points that let you teleport back to the final dungeon entrance so you can do last minute shopping or sidequests or whatever. But these inevitabilities are on hold due to nobody here having flight and Angela unwilling to use an Audrey page to make traversal simpler when there's already an Arthur present. ''I'm pretty sure almost the whole planet was realigned otwards doing that, to miniimze the threat.'' "It is strange, isn't it? That they haven't made any sort of move, if they are still here? Or perhaps there is nothing behind The Eye here anymore." ''Good to know that humanity is the fuckup species.'' "Mm." "Number One in fucking up, how about that, aliens?" Roland chuckles wryly.
Petra Soroka	"Seventeen year-old alien Nika."     <Yeah. Yeah!> The Beauty of Ash's feet tik-tak in place to dance energetically, prancing around some of the vegetation. <It's got that ¶pick it up¶ and ¶put it down¶ like her!> "Good to know that humanity is the fuckup species."     The impression of a snicker comes through along with the Beauty of Ash's silent communication while it prowls around the island to fill out Nika's fog of war. <I guess so. Which is surprising, because I feel like most people on every world are more ¶humans¶ than not, except, like, a couple. Maybe on Calvin's world, all the humans died when the bombs dropped, and everyone that's left is like Kepler.> "That they haven't made any sort of move, if they are still here?"     <Oh, no, they're super ¶dead/extinct/RIP bozo¶. Dictum's the only one that escaped. Even if anyone was still alive when they uploaded themselves to Voyager, eight hundred years is way more than enough time to finish the job.>     Then flying over the island, Petra alerts more readily to Nika and Sakura's shouting than she does to seeing anything herself, having no especial acuity in seeing or scanning in her mech without relying on her cameras. The Beauty of Ash dips in the air, then excitedly zips right back to the treeline where the others are gathered.     <¶Hey/Look¶! There's a fucking warpgate or something deeper in on the island! Come see, come see!>
Tamamo	Finding a flat area was Tamamo's first instinct, and aligning her work with leylines her second, but Sakura hadn't asked for any extra juice, so she doesn't take much extra time. "Just a moment, now, as I..." she calls out, more for keeping Lilian aware than anything else.     'Isn't it by definition? For Blooms more than anyone else?'     "That is the premise, Ms. Soroka," after taking a moment to realize what she was responding to. "The conclusion is the point. And to that, we can say, 'the two are distinct, for if they were not, our Sakura would never find vindication.'"
Tamamo	Petra explains the matter of observation to James.     "Were there people on these islands, once? I have not seen signs of such. Would they have left them here, to be observed, or is it more of a... reflexive desire, to have such a terrarium? I suppose we know how it ended, in either case."     'There's a fucking warpgate or something deeper in on the island!'     Tamamo rejoins Lilian, after setting her talismans down, to go and see. "Where...? Ah, I did not prepare familiars. Lilian, have you...?" A camera drone would do, really.
Lilian Rook	'¶Yup/Yes Ma'am¶'     "Okay! Thanks Petra!" Nika says, again, technically unnecessary the first time, and most certainly the second. "You probably shouldn't get out of the ¶Beauty of Ash/float glass¶ for a second!" As if she would, under the circumstance. "It's always way way easier when there's ¶light¶ and stuff."     'Dictum was a product of how all of Kepler viewed the ¶Blooms/Vectors¶. Not just as 'dangerous', but as ¶statistics/3D model/test subject¶. They had whole facilities for studying them'     Ash scoffs, throwing out "Degen shit. Planet of the CIA." Their tone only changes to that of 'suddenly realizing'. "I ever tell you about the chief? Guy was always talking about how the alphabet ghouls would do that kinda shit to me if oooooonly if weren't for him nobly 'sponsoring' me as a NAZCA asset. I mean I totally believe the old man that they'd want to, but like, that's not even NAZCA. That's NAZCA's overseas boss who you only ever see on conference call playing golf. The fuck are they going to do? Put out some cheese under a box on a stick?"     Lilian's body language is muted by her suit, but the disqueted tone to her voice is still obvious. "I suppose. But you're the only person on Earth who can laugh that off. You wanted to be the indivisible particle more than anyone else in any situation that could have made them that way. If that description is accurate, then I can only imagine that something must have happened to scores, or maybe hundreds, of the planet's unchosen and abandoned, and if they really could detect them before they matured, they must have had far less power than we do now."     'That we passed through the surface and flipped in, and now we're under... Liquid pressure, water pressure, a pressurized *vessel*?'     "I had thought only from seeing that it looked to be 'contained' in some way." says Sakura. "I thought that it resembled a snow globe, at first as only musing, but what use would it be to make so many pieces yet hang on to them like this? There's such a clear 'inside' and 'outside' to it all; it's only that someone must have decided to invert them for a reason of their own; to focus the attention of the world towards it center rather than its boundless unspoiled lands beyond." 'You can smell it? I thought you 'couldn't be reached', using your ability?'     Ash, responding to Xion's movement, speeds up to catch up with Lilian at the front. "It's not really that kind of thing. It's more like 'Okay? Why do I have to take your word for it? That's just a description. It's not real.' It's like . . ." The question is so simple, so out of left field, and so 'coming from Xion', that all the semantic poisoning dissipates for a second. Ash looks back repeatedly as they talk, using both hands to try and convey some kind of intangible shape of connected words, picking up a faster verbal pace and softer timbre.     "So there's the platonic instead of dialectic way of viewing things, right? The 'thingness of things' and the material things that make them work. Like, your car is a little beat up but runs smooth because it's 'dependable' and 'robust' and that makes it a 'rugged old gal' or whatever, even though it's actually because of like five hundred different pieces of metal shaped a certain way interacting with eight different fluids in a thousand places, but saying that just sounds so pedantic it doesn't actually mean anything."
Lilian Rook	"Basically everyone thinks about everything platonically, because basically everyone is still a highly evolved fish that just wants berries and fuck, and they gotta misapply that kind of natural hindbrain animistic tool to every situation even when they know all the material factors. And it's so stupid and so wrong and it works so never ever ever that it kinda drives you crazy."     "Because you start with shit like 'Why are you so messy? Aren't the Japanese supposed to be clean?' or 'Wow you're real well-spoken for a black guy! That's street smarts for you!' at the top, which some people kinda understand is just playing with concept-dolls, but you go down the rabbit hole far enough and you start getting to 'Why the fuck does hitting my head on a rock hurt so bad? Because it's 'hard'? What the fuck does that even mean?' and if you think about it long enough, even 'material factors' is just an infinite rabbit hole of factors behind factors."     "The idea of a fact makes no sense. 'Objectivity' isn't a real concept. Humans are blind and confused and stupid and stuff just keeps hitting us in the head and we come up with explanations that mostly predict if it'll happen again, but for all we know we're right about that by accident. We don't get to see the engine at all, we just guess. And I think that's fucking stupid. So if there's a rock I just say 'oh I don't believe in all that'."     "Oh my god. Oh my god I finally understand why you're a Peruvian American Buddhist. Holy shit."     "Says the Bri'sh Potato chasing Shinto meemaws."     "What do any of those words mean?"     'It is strange, isn't it? That they haven't made any sort of move, if they are still here? Or perhaps there is nothing behind The Eye here anymore.'     'Oh, no, they're super ¶dead/extinct/RIP bozo¶'     "Even if they aren't, we've no reason at all to assume that they're capable of anything at all." Sakura says. "We wouldn't have been given such a grave warning from the far-off stars if everything were under control, no?"     '¶Hey/Look¶! There's a fucking warpgate or something deeper in on the island! Come see, come see!'     "You're joking."     "I forgot! I forgot we were Multiverse!" "Please be careful, but do look." "Do you think we can ¶come through/catch up/couch coop¶?!"
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Try to form an opinion about language     "Hey!" He calls out to Petra, in the Beauty of Ash. "Anyone ever tell you you're like one'a those old 'Pokemon' guys from way back, when you're doing this? Wait, a whole-ass warpgate? Damn, let me see." > Arthur: Repeating is a business?     Arthur will head over in a bit. For now, he stops near Tamamo to explain, leaning against his broom for support. "It was. When I started my session, it was-- bunch'a proper noun shit. My dream-self was a prince of the moon of Derse," He makes wavy fingers and then seems to dismiss it. "Basically the self-I-was-when-sleepin' was close to some stuff in the in-between-space, and if I didn't listen to them yammering about destinies and futures and the infinite Furthest Ring, I'd die." He sighs. "We keep in touch still, a lil'. Lots more proper-noun reasons."     He grits his teeth, muttering at the treeline. "Good chance these aren't like that. This isn't about going horrormode." Then a fast headshake. "*Anyway*. Petra's frolickmoding. I'll repeat for ya if you want."     Whether that needs to happen near Tamamo's array or further towards the Gate, he'll offer the service. The Noble Horrorterrors may not even reach this far, but Arthur has other expertise. He's been somewhere like this, made something like this, before, and so he remembers *being* the ascended maker and remaker who forges a new world out of the remains of the old. He also knows the life lived inside of memories, the Dream-Bubbles he still experiences nightly. And he remembers the flickering edges of consciousness of the Ultimate Self.     All that to say: He's got a lot of bases covered. So when he closes his eyes to focus, humming a soft series of handshake-prompts in dream-music, and patterning several artificial-reality-interactions with local gravity in a communication-protocol format, he hopes to find something responding, and ideally it'd be something Oreshnika could start leveraging a repeater for. The giant dog-cat-deer-scamperer has other stuff she's doing, Arthur might as well see if there's anything there to work with, while he either rests near Tamamo's array or moves to the mysterious gate where applicable.     Probably the latter. He's also a Gate guy, he's gotta investigate that with magic-senses.
Lilian Rook	. . . . . . . .     It's such a small island. It's too big to be 'a desert island', but a barely competent off-road vehicle would take you from end to end in an hour.     The shade of the alien flora makes it no cooler. Shades of bioluminescence beneath create the sense of the blackest parts of the sky being the brightest, where illumination divides glowing shadow, yet looking up reveals only the cold void. You still hear the sounds of waves even a kilometer away from the shore, far beyond where the stone ceases to be a smooth shore and instead breaks into bizarrely water-worn bluffs and spires and arches, encrusted in symbiotic vines. And evne then, the first thing amiss stands out as if it's on fire.     There are scratchings on the side of one of the more towering 'plants' here. Over there, rocks have been stacked upon one another to make a marker of equally unclear meaning. The ground a bit further in is scraped clean and clear, caked with fine dust. They're signs. Tangible. Easy. So fundamental that it doesn't matter that you can't pin anything so familiar as residue from smoke or shavings from wood; neither of which are possible to find or produce here. That there is anything primitively purposeful at all means everything and nothing specific.     So the questions last up until the clearing.     Perhaps a hundred feet wide, the underside of the canopy is obviously artificial once you're there. You can see where the flora has been hacked down, painstakingly, bit by bit, from the roots up, until the living mesh above was thick enough to support itself through further expansion, like the absurd effect of cutting the trunk out from under a tree in a game without a physics engine. It almost wholly obscures the surreal sky; more so than anywhere else, as the barren ground is place for no glowing land-algae and no telltale rustling in the dark.     If it was ever used for building or keeping anything, though, you wouldn't know.     The only thing moving is the shimmering oval pane of unstable space, drawn taut across the hollow of a natural stone arch. It emits the soft white non-light characteristic of a connection to one of the near-infinite 'temporary' destinations in the Soft Expanse; a phenomenon currently believed to be a limbo state of new connections that haven't settled into the inconceivable sprawl of the Warpgate network, for those with a point or two invested in gate-lore.     But that isn't quite the only thing here. Though it takes a while to even notice, under the gloomy conditions and the obvious, critical find, the object Petra saw from above isn't far either. Right at the edge of the clearing, overgrown almost completely in underwater-inside-out foliage, you find a structure half-buried in the ground, jutting out from it at a meteoric angle; something like black beetleshell metal and monochrome mother-of-pearl, coiled into the unmistakable shape of a spiral, with its far end swallowed entirely in the pitch black 'treetops'. It's been abandoned for so long that it's almost completely coated in solidified dirt and algae.     Under its shadowed side, invisible without light and close searching, there is a rough, nearly-vanished 'desire path' worn into the thick plant matter. You barely have to follow it before the ground beneath you suddenly drops out completely; not a hidden pit, but a sharp gap as clear as a hole punch, up through which the neon sea swells up incandescent into the shaded crater, and the murky shape of a humanoid silhouette can barely be seen meters below the surface, lashed to the bottom.
Tamamo	'My dream-self was a prince of the moon of Derse.'     "You know, I had wondered... about a few things. And I had not asked, for I thought, 'he would surely speak of it, if he so wished.'" Arthur has struck Tamamo as having more 'things he'd rather not mention' than most people. In lieu of a clear, direct follow-up point, she finally says, "It is interesting to know."     '...if oooooonly if weren't for him nobly 'sponsoring' me...'     "This seems a bit familiar, somehow."     'Says the Bri'sh Potato chasing Shinto meemaws.'     'What do any of those words mean?'     "It sounds as if they are calling you lazy and myself old." Tamamo's only mostly sure about most of that, but doesn't feel obligated to clarify which parts.     'Do you think we can ¶come through/catch up/couch coop¶?!'     "Perhaps--however! Not every gate works in quite the same way, and it would be prudent to first check. Appearing in the same galaxy is hardly a guarantee of a direct line." She's learned this purely from a regular traveler's experience.     . . .     "This will not be terribly useful to us, I expect, apart from... firstly, the fact that there were, to be sure, people who were here, after these islands were formed. Secondly, they wished not to be exposed to the sky. And, lastly, they did escape." When, exactly, she couldn't say.     "Despite finding signs of stay, there are no... tools, did you notice? Not a single item upon which to try a divination. Only the signs of tearing away, of walking and scraping. I could attempt it with these edges, but 'a space' is a poor substitute. 'An emptiness' does not remember itself. These plants, perhaps, but they are unlike to wish to help."
Lilian Rook	You know the exact instant that Arthur gets 'something' on the line.     You know it because Nika suddenly sits bolt upright, and through the display of the Eggpack, you see her gaze snap well away from the camera and stare off into a corner of the ceiling of a house nearly a thousand light-years away.     Arthur knows it, because he hears it first. Not from inside his own head, but with a distinct sense of directionalty; from the molten scar that hangs at the fulcrum of heaven far above; the bloodstain of a living planet turned into a mythopoetic star.     Then you feel it, because 'being watched' isn't anything like 'someone's eyes upon you', and the moment the atmosphere of your travel goes from feeling uncomfortably public to feeling like someone has been following you, everything around you is tinted in their colours. The samey hues shift as though refracted through an invisibly prismatic dome. The 'taste' of the air Ash described finds your tongue, but becomes nothing like it the very next moment. Where you were headed in the same direction before, your paths have suddenly diverged unconsciously. The objective consensus shared between you is revealed as a blank canvas at the first thing that stains it.     The colours are exactly like your home town's landscape.     The taste is exactly like your most calming, indulgent snack.     The way you walk is exactly like the way home from your workplace.     You, specifically, and no one else.     º<What are you?>º     The question is undoubtedly for Arthur. The one that follows is for everyone else.     º<Why? You were not <sent for/idiated>. Please <Keep off of the Grass>. This <kalpa/stage/vessel> is out of use. Don't <wash up> here.>º     It's easy to compare the experience to hearing the bits and pieces you're used to from Nika; but it isn't. When Nika does it, it's like hearing another language compressed into a non-semantic burst; like your brain has just absorbed an in-depth explanation as to a foreign culture's 'word for exactly this' in slightly folk-mythologizing terms, echoing comprehensive and exotic.     This is a different 'voice'. The approximate meanings that come to mind are yours. Every single thought you've ever had in your entire life was asked to vote on how appropriate every other thought would be to describe an intangible concept, and those freeform associations that were propelled to the surface on a swell of collective heuristic agreement pop into your own train of thought, in your own mental voice.
Lilian Rook	'It sounds as if they are calling you lazy and myself old.'     "I'm saying she has a type."     "Excuse me?"     "Come the fuck on. Is everyone seriously too stupid to notice most times?"     "For fuck's sake! Not you too!"     'Perhaps--however! Not every gate works in quite the same way, and it would be prudent to first check.'     Nika, halfway to jumping up from the kotatsu, pauses to consider a very strange and simple fact. "I only ever used a Warpgate the one time to go to the beach huh. And that was just the ¶fairy mound¶ Lilian built." Then, something even more strangely profound occurs to her. "I gotta use those to catch all the fish."     'Only the signs of tearing away, of walking and scraping. I could attempt it with these edges, but 'a space' is a poor substitute. 'An emptiness' does not remember itself. These plants, perhaps, but they are unlike to wish to help.'     "It is conveniently comprehensive, is it not?" Sakura says to Tamamo, raising her voice a little as if it'll help her seem more conspiratorial about it while still having to broadcast from the Beauty of Ash. "Does it seem likely that they may have been Multiversal, and retreated immediately, leaving nothing behind?"     All of that gets put on hold the moment Nika tunes into that. She doesn't even have to shush them; Sakura goes quiet and stiff for being right next to her, Lilian naturally tenses up at the sudden disturbance in social energy, and Ash goes on alert at the sound of silence. Lilian is the one who makes a sound into her helmet com; harsh, surprised. Ash looks around as if they're still expecting to see something, and nothing is jumping out at them.     "Nika . . . ?"     "Yeah. Okay. Um. Sorry. Kinda nervous. Do I ¶look okay¶?"     "There's no dress code. You're fine."     "That's kinda negative."     "Then how about reminding you that you're the 'best dressed' here?"     "Okay true."     The Eggpack finally uses its little arms to pat Petra; or rather, the Beauty of Ash representing her. The hard-light crystal boosts the volume with a kind of glass-whining harmonic reverb that has nothing at all to do with its appearance, Nika's voice, the device playing it, or the magic transposing it over unfathomable galactic distance.     ¶<<Hello World>! I'm from <freshman year/our hometown>! I want to <compile/interpret/express> for the other <beings>. Is that going to be <kind/helpful/necessary>? I would be really happy if <we> could be friends.>¶
Xion	'it's only that someone must have decided to invert them for a reason of their own;' "It's that." Xion declares, quiet but sure. "Someone," Or someones? Could it have been many? "-decided to invert the world, for a reason of their own." There really was only one conclusion, the inevitable one, the one they had been pointed to. A result, what the probe departed to warn about. Ash closes the distance between them, and Xion looks to her fellow in being native (or belligerent) to this atmosphere(s) of pressure and mix, faint in her little puff of a smile. First, before responding, she listens for a while. Eventually, though, she gets a thought worth sharing back. "It's as real as anything else, I'd say." A beat passes. "Which isn't saying much, is it? But I think it's more... Hopeful, to think platonically, in that way? Rather than expecting everything to actually be nothing, to render to void all context, why not expect context for everything? What wave, what motion brought this into position? A car's made up of five hundred pieces of metal, paint and polish, cloth and gears, every little thing, and also it has a character and context. You wouldn't say 'a chicken is comprised of parts' without being equally pedantic, and that's because the chickens have context. It doesn't mean anything to place things alone without their surrounding and spun-through contexts - that's definitely true. So," Xion's floating shifts to a half-crossed-armed dialogue as Ash speaks so clearly to her. "If you want to look to the five hundred parts and the eight liquids, each has a context. Together, the machine has a total context. That context imparts behavior. We don't have to talk about if behavior means someone's 'got the divine spark', but I think we can both agree that chickens have *behavior*. Berries and fuck, like fishes. And the more context there is, the more forces are acting on someone, the more that context develops into... a wave? And not points on a line? A signal, that can be decoded, followed, understood." "Those five hundred parts came from a foundry. Those foundries were stocked by mines. Those mines came from places. Those places came from geological events. Those geological events were sparked from planet creation. Planet creation happened after cosmic accretion. Cosmic accretion happened after a big explosion, probably. If you want to reduct past the part you pause, there's no separation from you and what is in front of you - ultimately, you, and it, are part of the same original energy system. You look upon yourself in a different shape, a different context." She shrugs. "I think platonically understanding behavior into personalities is the same as using language to communicate ideas. It's not a word, it's my context for a word. I mean it a way, because of how I learned it, and how I imagined it, and through knowing me as an image of your own self, you could condense a meaning from the void of principle." "Like cotton candy! Really, the sugar is in the air to be tasted, but how would I describe it to you? Sugar from where I'm from can't possibly be described to someone who's never had it. You've had... Something that is like a fizzless soda compared to the stuff I'm used to - raw, vibrant, effervescent inside, like tasting joy. I know what joy *tastes* like, because, it's sweet - like *real* sugar. But the image of it here... It's not got the same context. And I can't explain it any more or differently." She tilts her head, wondering again. "Would you like me to have never had? Do you... care? Or not? I can't quite tell. About rocks, sure. I'm not a fan of being hurt by rocks either. But about everything?" "Hard might just be you telling yourself something, if you keep going, but I think you found a power in stopping and demanding the void explain itself. I just don't know if it will answer the way you're listening." She laughs. "But I get it now, too, why." That they're Buddhist. ---
Tamamo	The colours are exactly like your home town's landscape.     The taste is exactly like your most calming, indulgent snack.     The way you walk is exactly like the way home from your workplace.     This is, Tamamo knows, a trick. It is a trick she has been asked to play on herself, that she fill in each detail on her own. She can do this, of course, without revealing what those details are. That wasn't asked of her. It's not necessary to argue about the request.     Why?     "Nothing will be accomplished through inaction. Do you hold this axiom?" It's necessary that she speak aloud.     You were not <sent for/idiated>.     "It is not so. I was summoned by one whose path leads here, in which I am entwined."     Please <Keep off of the Grass>. This <kalpa/stage/vessel> is out of use.     "Is there one who is inconvenienced? We shall make due efforts to respect hospitality."     Don't <wash up> here.     "My path continues onward, as do these others. Your concern is appreciated."
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: It is interesting to know     "It's nerd stuff." Arthur mutters idly. "You know? Nobody wants to hear all those proper-ass nouns. You know how many guys my age I used to hear talking a bunch of shit about the matrices and the lines and the cycles and glorious game of whatever the fuck? It's bullshit. But there's answers." He sighs a bit, and smiles. "You know, if you're into that shit."     Time to go, though... > Arthur: What are you?     "I'm-- hold on." Arthur reels a little from what hit him there. "I'm-- Christ, my pronounciation's so off this dialect. I'm ºArthurº." He squats near the pit, face falling. "ºI don't want to change anything.º I just want to ºlearnº" His words are a strange struggle, and where Nika is used to communicating on distant frequencies, Arthur's communication for *this particular* subject is on a level of reality-systems. He's giving *them* access to *his* dialogue tree, somehow, in a direct restructuring of the concept of a conversation. "Someone we know came from here, and we wanted to close that loop. I won mine, I'd like to ºadmireº."     "We didn't come here with a purpose, and I promise we won't be finding one. But I'd love to know what you have to say anyway."
Petra Soroka	"So if there's a rock I just say 'oh I don't believe in all that'."     Petra is a little bit frolicmoding, but she'll still strafe by to get in on any Bloom-conversation that sets off pings for important words and feelings. <Oh yeah. Really I feel like so much of material science stuff is burying the lede on abstracting the 'why' of how anything works instead of answering it. People just find comfort in rational explanations they don't understand as a replacement for ¶faith/animism¶.>     <A rock at least ¶asserts¶ itself. I think people understood things better when they assigned a little spirit to everything that happened, because the collective ¶atomic/bullshit¶ reasons why your car breaks down don't make any sense, but your car *does* work better just because you love it. That's just true. You're just ¶iconoclast¶ about it.> "Says the Bri'sh Potato chasing Shinto meemaws."     The one glowing pupil in the Beauty of Ash's face dims and flattens, like it's side-eyeing Sakura over its shoulder. "I'm saying she has a type."     Petra has a dilemma now, between humiliating Lilian by agreeing that she obviously does and anyone paying attention would notice, or undermining Sakura's charnel march towards destined romance by providing the psychological foundation for Lilian to claim that she doesn't have a statistical fondness for older Japanese women at all. Deftly, she decides to walk the middle of this razor wire of a love triangle she is not part of.     <You can't ¶two nickels¶ Lilian for having good taste.> "Do you think we can ¶come through/catch up/couch coop¶?!"     The Beauty of Ash could dart back over to where the warpgate was spotted quicker than anyone but Lilian could follow, but Petra doesn't wanna do that and go alone. So while the others make their way laboriously through the woods in double gravity, the Beauty of Ash is restlessly prancing in place while keeping up with the group, barely disturbing the vegetation around it as it does.     <That'd be awesome. We'll have to make sure it's stable and everything before ¶putting all our eggs in one basket¶ it, but I was *so* not expecting warpgate speed extraterrestrial Bloom access.>     The Beauty of Ash crawls down close to inspect every trace of human interaction with the landscape, obsessively curious. The warpgate is prowled around a half-dozen times while others get a look at it, and then the metal structure too. Hypersensitive to the shifting moods of the Blooms even when they're contained in a screen mounted on the back of her mech, Petra freezes up the moment Nika's attention alerts before she's even said anything about it. "Kinda nervous. Do I ¶look okay¶?"     A shiver runs down the spine of the mech, glass squealing and snapping upwards before settling like a cat's fur. Similarly nervous, realizing yet again that she has an astounding zero for four record on making good first impressions on Blooms, Petra's anxious thoughts burble towards Nika before addressing the voice.     <You're very, um, ¶pretty/artful/high definition¶. I wonder if not being physically present might make it harder for them to, uh, recognize or communicate or whatever... but I'll try to stand in for that, so ¶use/ride/equip¶ me however you need.>
Petra Soroka	"You were not <sent for/idiated>. Please <Keep off of the Grass>."     The voice of 'Petra' in her own mind is among the most untrustworthy there is. Instead of responding at first, Petra considers, extrapolating off of Nika and Lilian, why someone would possibly want to speak 'this way' out of all ways, while the Beauty of Ash delicately tucks its legs up to float just off the grass.     As it's a matter of language, Petra feels automatically somewhat qualified to analyze it. People, atomized within themselves, can only be convinced by their own perspectives. To speak at them using their own voices-- like the Girl in the Mirror-- could only be out of obsessive desperation to reach them and disillusionment in any other way. This is the desire of 'taking what parts of a person could align with the intent I am projecting and bringing them to the forefront'.     <¶Okay/No Problem¶.> Petra wonders if, assuming she's somewhere near the mark with her guess about this Bloom, if someone could stop understanding the experience of not being agreed-with. <I'm ¶Petra/Unchosen of Space¶ and our why is to make friends with the people here.>
Xion	Xion continues to approach the Gate, fails to skip to the end, feels slightly unsure about slipping through 'nowhere' or the Corridors here. Would inverting through inversions cause leaks? Would the deeper darkness flood this place? Would this place flood the other way? She was talking, too. Trading thoughts, while trying to reach out for the Heart of this place, to sense and find an empathic connection. It arrives. Feeling it, Xion is unconsciously dropped to the ground, and then stops, because she immediately begins to Taste it, and-- It would be easier if the questions came to her in a different way, but instead they come to her as her thoughts, a slice of heart inserted like relay interface, and reflexively, no, wait, her hand is doing something different actually. --Xion walks, casual, and has//had drawn a Keyblade to sling across shoulder, so she almost fumbles that reaching for her chest with her right hand, across, and switches to her left with an stutter of uncertainty at what 'she' was doing, attempting to pull the Medallion loose from now-within her, but her affliction is truly layered. Walking in the Keyblade Graveyard, beneath a clocktower on a high hill and a shattered window, Xion isn't sure why she's back, and isn't sure why the air tastes of properly-sugared chocolate syrup and taffy-caramel, all of the senses changed by such a contextual insertion that she is simply here, now, and Ash's point seems to be made for them in the most blunt of ways. '<Why? You were not <sent for/idiated>.' Xion's keyblade, the twisted-helix rod of her Antegent based weapon, bounces on her shoulder, reminding her, as if locked into vision by 'herself' or herself, seeing the dangling chain of its red-filled nerve-liquid bead charm off hilt, and pauses. Or keeps walking? The terrain continues to turn around her, undecided now is a boot crunch into dream-lost and scattered ground at the Graveyard or the monochrome terrain of the World that Never Was suited her better. She holds her breath, because, otherwise she'll taste chocolate. She closes her eyes, because otherwise, she'll be a little nauseated while her heart sorts out hometown from logic. Finally, she stops walking. She still feels 'out', still finds the relationality of things, can follow the others by their place in space, unless they were completely diverged and not sensorially diverged... 'We followed a path, to learn. Something was sent.' What was sent as a forward wave, the message, the other-inverse world. Xion opens her eye to peer and see about if she's standing on grass, but it's a cerebral truth. So really, it means... 'I'll be careful. Is this your what came before?' Kalpa was telling. 'Don't <wash up> here.' Xion smiles, closing back her eyes and carrying on. 'You//this place is very gentle. Comforting. Thank you//the blessings are appreciated.' And then, of all things, Xion queries the memory of seeing a sign in a national park speaking to taking only memories, leaving only footprints as illustration. With the questions answered, it was easier to ease back into indulging in the chocolate air and more stably monochrome landscape. To simply disagree with the world as presented because it was inconvenient would defeat her own point to Ash completely. Allowing the images to proceed, opening her heart to this relay-slice interposed into her, she lets her own reflection be accessed, a medallion being made *in* her and leading heart along. She'd follow her nose but then she'd wash up on chocolate shores with a caramel sea. Certainly she was being projected the images for a reason.
Lilian Rook	'It's as real as anything else, I'd say. Which isn't saying much, is it?'     "Yeah. But saying anything isn't saying much, so like, the bar is on the ground."     'Rather than expecting everything to actually be nothing, to render to void all context, why not expect context for everything?'     "Sure. It's fucked either way. In case you couldn't tell, I'm not exactly a gigantic fan of the set of senses we get and how our brains want to project them. But 'hoping' for something is always good when you use the word 'hope', and starts getting sketchy when you call it 'wish'."     'And the more context there is, the more forces are acting on someone, the more that context develops into... a wave? And not points on a line? A signal, that can be decoded, followed, understood.'     "Yeah. Everything we know about everything is stochastic. Everything interferes with itself and science is for gradeschoolers because they think it only happens with subatomic particles. There's a probability that has a number nobody named yet that every single quark in the universe stops existing all at the same time in one second and everything vanishes. But that's the whole thing, isn't it? 'Trends', 'biases', 'probabilities', 'tendencies', those are the things that humans are the shittest at; like, notoriously. And what do people do with waveforms and random functions? They gamble. They do little rituals. They hope. And hope sounds sketchy when you're playing lottery for a really good reason."     'I think platonically understanding behavior into personalities is the same as using language to communicate ideas.'     "Which is something that drives everyone crazy. Right? Communicating ideas with language is this whole insanely complicated skill, with all these sub-skills. Writing and poetry and speeches and riddles and jokes and context and subtext and metaphors and allegories and lies and investigation. It's ninety percent of our brains. And how much is understanding behaviour into personalities? Is it even one percent? Point one?"     "Fuck no. There aren't even words for it, like right now we're both fumbling around it, never mind an art-form. Almost nobody knows how to care about interpreting any other wave in the ocean of summed existence, and it's because they don't have anything they care about being interpreted as a reference! If they ever found it between the gears and oil and bones and nerves they wouldn't know what to do with it. They'd lose their fucking mind that they can't even tell anyone it exists. Going crazy is the logical outcome of being sapient."     'Would you like me to have never had? Do you... care? Or not?'     "No idea. Humanity is all rocks and no cotton candy."     'I think you found a power in stopping and demanding the void explain itself. I just don't know if it will answer the way you're listening.'     "I know. What's why I'm so tired of it. If you stop and demand a human being explain itself, it bursts into a smear of blood. Don't ask me why. I just know there's at least four people that don't, and I tried it on one."     'That's just true. You're just ¶iconoclast¶ about it.'     "I'm just smarter and righter than everyone else. I'm like if Marx was Jesus and they crucified him for saying being a landlord isn't a real job and craft beer is ass."
Lilian Rook	'I wonder if not being physically present might make it harder for them to, uh, recognize or communicate or whatever... but I'll try to stand in for that, so ¶use/ride/equip¶ me however you need.'     Sakura lays her hand on Nika's wrist, and tugs the Eggpack controller gently to the space between their laps. Nika takes a deep breath, and says, in her bravest voice, "Okay. I'll try."     'Nothing will be accomplished through inaction. Do you hold this axiom?'     ¶<Like. Um. <Growing towards the light> in a <dark room>.>¶     'It is not so. I was summoned by one whose path leads here, in which I am entwined.'     ¶<That's <the foreign exchange student>! She's a friend! She's <into the same music as you> too!>¶     'Is there one who is inconvenienced?'     ¶<Sorry if there is!>¶     'My path continues onward, as do these others. Your concern is appreciated.'     ¶<Thanks a bunch!>¶     You don't hear the reiteration of your own words, in the same way that you can't see your own eyes unassisted. Nika's additional 'context' is enough to know when she's said them, even if otherwise indecipherable. It remains questionable all the way up until the last moment how well what you have to say is perceived as coming from different people; or people at all. Until . . .     º<I only hold axioms. <Proof> is a <weapon/leash/battle-standard>. My <hands> are empty, and I am happier for it.>º     Even translated by your own life-experiences, the meaning is less direct than with Nika. Less topical. There's too little to inform with context or culture. It all feels like it begs hearing twice before replying once.     º<. . . I thought <you were> another <finite set/restless ghost> sent to one of the others by <Chiral Nescience>. I think am <lost for words>.>º     Even speaking in your own words-- or, the unformed precursor to 'words', encoded in signifiers too abstract to be called upon in their entirety-- you can feel the searing emphasis of a proper noun. A designator, or a name, denoting a thought that comes to you as a void of any past experience at all, described as a space in which no prior experience applies, drawing an outline with no colouring-in.     º<It is <inconvenient/a rainy day>. My concern is that you are <trapped in our house>. I will <fetch/ask/invoke> the others and <open a window>.>º     You'd think that the entity doesn't seem to understand that Nika exists at all, except then Nika pricks up with the exact manner of someone being directly spoken to out of a crowd.     º<Where are you? I can <hear> <lips> that <praise> a <childhood name/cognizance of god's plan>, but they only speak as you do. Are you <young/small>? Are these your <progeny/disciplines/petals/sparks>?>º     ¶<I'm <1.0 AU » Sol>! <Petra Soroka> is my <baby sister/foreign friend/English student> <kinda/approximately>. Can you <see> me on the <pictographic representation>?>¶     º<. . . This isn't something I can understand. <Underived Conviction> will know. Please <wait/make yourselves comfortable/don't touch anything>.>º     'You//this place is very gentle. Comforting. Thank you//the blessings are appreciated.'     Nika must have relayed that one directly, because she has no notes for it. The presence has already withdrawn part way, dragging a hundred disparate hue and contrast sliders back towards their centerpoints like so many hooks to a net, folding the uncrossable distance between your disparate paths into narrow slices of ambiguous territory which nearly touch. Then it says,     º<Thank you. The <Three Moons/just us> were those who <did it>.>º
Lilian Rook	Despite the most tenuous possible threads of any 'first contact' that could ever be dreamed, those 'words' instantly render remaining calm an utter impossibility for Ash. They rush towards the Beauty of Ash as quickly as the sluggish gravity and thick air allows, lunging to take both the Eggpack's little robotic hands in theirs in a spur-of-the-moment giddy burst of momentum, and practically bounce out "Three?! From just here, right?! And, like, sent?! From somewhere else?! Nika! Nika you have to ask how many! Nika we've gotta know! I-- Oh fuck, fuck, should I show them? You think that's okay? Is that rude? Is that like getting naked?" Nika's response is an excited yet temporarily drained "Ash . . . how would I know that?"     Lilian's focus remains squarely on Arthur. At least, all of it that she can spare. No matter how privately she keeps it, she can't be rid of the fact that the feat being performed before her eyes is one that she has already accomplished once; one she knows from ten thousand nights of forgotten dreams, and found she already knew in the forty she remembers since. Even if the idea of another planet having more 'Blooms of Humanity' is what propelled all of this into motion . . .     It's still Arthur. And it still hurts her a little to hear. It means everything and tells her all she wants to know about the presence that subdivides the world into an infinitude of personalized truths, when she hears,     º<That's so sad. I want to <change everything>. All of us do. I've never had a <pilgrim/leper/egg/endling/one good man in Sodom and Gomorrah> come to me, or speak their <troubles>. I don't want to <do nothing/be as heaven and earth>. You're <our> <neighbour>.>º     The hesitation at the very edge of withdrawal hangs in multiple axis of sensory silence, suspended in breathless pause and emulsified in internal narrative.      º<Are you scared?>º     Lilian breathes in deep, caught by her pressure suit's helmet speaker. The following rasp of the air leaving never makes it past the switch. When she opens her mouth, the words don't come out like that; not in any way ever meant to be grasped by the tools of mankind. Their meaning is conveyed by encapsulating every possible meaning of every possible thing that she could ever possibly say, and then cleaving away every single thing she doesn't mean, until exhaustive, instantaneous elimination leaves only a single, perfectly honed possibility still standing.     §<Every <now/them> and <again/him>.>§