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Owner	Pose
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Get back home     Arthur says it's going to be a faster trip this time, something about how it's easier to solve the math in reverse or something. There's assurances given that Lilian can have the Wishmathic Engine when they're all done, not that it would do a lot of good in *anyone's* hands for any trip but this one.     It's a new tone, on the way back. Emotionally, it feels odder. Arthur, at least, seems quieter. More time spent constellating, less time spent gaming. More time spent sleeping. It's sort of like a mild flu. He doesn't even do much emphasis. He's pretty focused on getting home at a decent speed, giving some ambiguous explanations about an obligation he needs to handle. He's gotta handle the Noir's Relief, so no Gating home as a shortcut... > Arthur: Get home in time     Can't do that.     During one of the longer stretches of 'calm water,' there's a short rocking of the ship, just like there have been a dozen times. This time, though, Arthur mutters something like, "Gotta check the supermatter." What? "The old Norovich stuff keeps..." He trails off, then heads belowdecks to the engine room, presumably to check in on something. He does not come back, and the first to check on him will find his crumpled shape at the base of the engine room's stairs. He seems to be breathing only very shallowly, and weakly putting all his strength towards pulling himself out of view while still prone; by the time anyone reaches him, he's likely lost consciousness.
Tamamo	Ash and Petra want to take a hit. Tamamo isn't interested. She is, after all, formed on purpose. She gets the hit anyway, and feels something we may as well summarize as nausea. If it were only that, she'd have medicine to spare, but of course, this case is a bit special.     She tries, largely successfully, not to let it show that she's having a bad time, right up until it's over. It's only 'largely' successful because she had to spend it standing very still. After that, she can make a polite goodbye as their host is already leaving/gone, and then see to helping everyone else aboard, in their varying states of likely distress.     . . .     'More than anything in the world.'     . . .     She knew what she wanted to do, while they were underway, but was reasonably certain that a crowd wouldn't help, and asking directly would be...     In any case, Arthur going off by himself (to somewhere not a personal room) is as good an opportunity as could be expected, and Tamamo doesn't take long to excuse herself from her light reading and go to check on him.     Naturally, she announces herself, rather than staging an ambush in engineering. "Hello, I have also come to see..." A natural beat of pause extends unnaturally into silence, first 'by accident' and then out of curiosity for not being called on it in any way. A lull that shouldn't have been. It only takes her another moment to look down to the base of the stairs.     "Ah -- Arthur?" That could have been the rest of the sentence, though it wouldn't have been. "Are you -- no, you are not well."     She half-turns to call back up, "Lilian! I might need your help." To move him. She might not, though. Moving someone who's fallen is, emphatically, not a correct first step. Checking for breathing is, which is followed by a number of other steps she has well-memorized, though they're intended for more ordinary sorts of human.
Petra Soroka	Petra is in pretty fucking high spirits though! Petra thinks this was really really cool!     Like, sure, there's a lot of qualifications to that. Nika and Sakura need particular attention, Ash has a million things to talk about, Lilian's feelings are more important than any emotional or material factor in the universe, but in terms of just Petra? How Petra's feeling? It's *so* cool! She got an *orb*!     She also, never saw the Fruit of the Tree of Crisis in person, or even really heard much about it. So this is a big first for her. A 'voyage' still contains so much time that some gaming is inevitable, but what she's most excited to do is babble with the Blooms wherever they happen to be, at every hour of the day. Conversation which, still, vastly pales in comparison to the amount of time spent on the trip, so she settles into the soothing domesticity of it all despite the insane revelations of Kepler.     Arthur being a little bummed out makes sense, and Petra can... register it? Frankly, given the theology she espoused at Arthur while he was getting worked up on Kepler, him being quiet and unremarkable is the single worst thing he could do in her eyes, but he could also be, like, tired. It's reasonable to be tired sometimes.     Several days into the trip, Petra is tidying up as sexually un-charged as anything Petra does can be. The maid outfit isn't a necessity for the mental posture, or even particularly wanted; over a week of continuous cohabitation in a Bloom-space in a shared facility just makes her genuinely want to clean everything up and take care of the household. She can even feel conflictedly fond of all the horrible furniture Arthur made them buy to decorate it, except for the mouth chair. "The old Norovich stuff keeps..."     "Alright? Yeah."     Petra doesn't think this weird mumbling is worth making mental note of at all. He's tired! Petra does not understand how the ship functions, which is a source of frustration since she often *does* understand how a ship functions, so the details of the issue just fly right over her head. "Lilian! I might need your help."     Tamamo raising her voice at all is unusual enough, even with her being even-toned about it, that Petra puts down her mop and pokes her head into the stairway. Her eyes widen a bit, but being all the way up the stairs, she can't see anything worth unique alarm about Arthur crumpling at the bottom.     "Oh, shit. Was one flight of stairs enough to do him in? After all this time?"
Angela	''Lilian! I might need your help.'' Roland isn't Lilian but he rushes over anyway. Once he sees that Arthur has fallen, he visibly startles. He looks to Petra as she suspects that Arthur was inadequately warned about stairs but he's not really able to crack wise. He actually likes Arthur! Dude got him a knifefist, okay, and once a guy gets you a knifefist you are bros for life. Unfortunately he is a trained mercenary/killer, not a trained medic. "Did he overexert himself, making this whole trip possible? Hey, Arthur... uh...--" He trails off. "Maybe I should go get water." He has bravely sat in the mouth chair a few times until the novelty ran out and he just sat in the more normal chairs since. He crouches down, frowning in an attempt to study his breathing, looking for any hidden--or not so hidden--wounds. If he just fell over, he might've hit his head or something. Can some kind of weird space janitor god get taken out by falling at a bad time? He's uncertain about that. But he doesn't rush in. He's not a medic and he knows better than to crowd.
James Bond	Bond has spent the time almost in the same way as before, when it comes to off-hours. Some of it by himself--reading, indulging in a drink, stargazing. Some of it he spends with others--asking Nika about her games, attempting to sell Tamamo on coffee over tea, or discussing the discovery with anyone who much cares to think about what it means. Between all of that, though, he has checked on Arthur out of a feeling of shared experience, real or imagined. His timing is spotty--he always seems to come by when Arthur is sleeping, or otherwise when he's able to conveniently deflect his change in behavior.     Much as the Bond of some years ago would be loathe to admit it, the Bond of right now is worried about Arthur.     A shift at the helm is marked at one point by a sluggishness in the acceleration. It reminds him faintly of an old MG he had in his teens that stubbornly refused to pick up speed no matter how many hours he spent under the hood. After checking the parking brake, the gas cap, the rear caliper, the clutch and the transmission, he came to the only slightly-less dreaded-than transmission conclusion that it was something to do with the engine. Most of a summer had been spent before he'd isolated several issues--cracked hoses, a bad spark plug and a weak pump.     "Arthur," says Bond at the helm. "Whatever adjustment you made down there hasn't worked. It's a little sluggish, and I've got instruments lighting up at the helm."     No response.     "When I said to consider having a drink, I didn't mean right now."     Still none.     "Arthur?" Bond engages the autopilot after another second or two of silence and calmly, but assuredly briskly, heads to his room to retrieve something he rather anticipated using *at* the destination and not on the way back. Small, hardened carrying case in hand, he runs into Petra and Tamamo.     "R&D insisted I take this along to diagnose any 'acausal' injuries. I can scan him from here," he says, more directly to Tamamo, "So whatever you have in mind shouldn't interfere. It's even programmed to give recommendations based on who's injured and who's able to help."     The case opens up into a small computer, and an array of lenses emerges from the exterior, scanning Arthur across a variety of spectrums. Bond navigates a simplistic menu with the keys, then selects 'ARTHUR LOWELL' and only him from a menu titled 'INJURED'. He steps aside for Lilian while the machine scans Arthur.
Xion	'Taking the hit' was something Xion couldn't comment on, was breathtaken by. Having, now years ago, pulled something more gently charm-cast and clasped on keychain, held onto the seed she had been called to, folded it into herself and the blades she held in hand, Xion was caressed by an ache of yearning she couldn't aim more accurately. The Tree of Crisis, the things sit spoke to her, the 'language of trees' she traced in Lilian's yard and the one that drew her to London Town, the thing rooted in her heart that draped black chain around wrist, was something that she had peeled a slice from and now was seeing a full slice of pie be carved off. It is want, and Xion watches Ash hold it, and give it away, and understands at least, that token isn't for her. Her hand closes around the sworling-interior'ed crystal bead of hers, and soothes mood and mein with the thought of going home with it. Then, there is a flowing-forward and a quantum interchange with her atoms, the quarks trying a different dance, her body ashudder as it tries to reaffirm which logic to run with. For a third of a second which seems to last and last, Xion's Will, the defining part of her existence, is directly interacted with and she becomes Different. The atmosphere she is directly exposed to is sweet, perfectly sustaining, and her Candy Dimension physiology threatens to make the leap over. What if she just let the other presence drive for a second? What if the wheel could smoothly be gripped by all of them? Did she need both hands to drive? Did both hands have to be her? Di-- The hangover smashes Xion into a retching moment of coughing, wiping at her face and spitting despite the very space around her being the poison. Bitter, automatic, Xion awakens quickly, having to try and shotgun a fake grape soda only to once again forget she's effectively underwater and has the can explode in the 2.5 atmospheres a moment after summoning, causing Xion to at least forget the worst of her contact with her own steering wheel (and make sure she's doing laundry after the trip). Used to seeing the fringe-sight of primordial terror, of all things, Xion manages to get back to the ship and immediately make for a shower and a toothbrushing and then another shower and then another toothbrushing. --- Xion had been worried about Arthur, despite his vague assurances he'd be okay for a while yet. She hadn't really believed him -- she believed him and also had eyes to see and ears to hear -- and remained gently vigilant after Kepler. She had been light on the gaming and heavier on the we-won't-call-it-hiding on the path here, so the reverse from her and Arthur seems almost ordered if not for the dysfunction presented. Xion had tried to keep an eye on him, but... She was distracted, by Petra's Orb. She wanted to see the orb! But she wasn't trying to be weird about it! Following Petra, Xion's a little late and moseycore, picking up Arthur's distress only shortly before she visually acquires him from Lilian and Tamamo's exchange. "Wait, hey!" She calls, "Everything okay?" It's not. Standing around like a useless bozo at a construction site looking into a hole, Xion crosses her arms and looks down at James and Tamamo checking out and/or lifting Arthur. "Should we get him to a bed? What's... good for him? What was he even doing down here?"
Lilian Rook	The way back has been weird.     The way here had the benefit of being a brand new thing on every front; a new environment, new destination, new adventure, new purpose, and a new combination of people under new social paradigm. Now they've been here for days, been there, and done that; so all that's left is the formality of going home.     Sakura and Nika feel the least effect, but even then, the return journey has the faded energy of an afterparty or a sleepover that's lasted slightly too long, and the restlessness of waiting for someone to leave the room before starting an important talk. Ash and Lilian feel it more; having been there themselves, and getting the full effect of the moment that things stopped seeming so charmingly doable with just the right people, has put an invisible stressor on the cautious but otherwise positive bond that was forming between them.     Nika is impossibly eager to talk to Petra about Kepler, but overloads very quickly and has to shut down before long each time. Sakura spends her conversational time mostly nodding along and seeming very distracted with, judging by her energy, feeling both very relieved and moderately upset about something too late to do anything about. Ash ends up evading Lilian for most of the trip after the inevitable 'what the fuck was that about?' comes up at the wrong time on the right subject, and the former assumes the latter feels 'owed' an explanation and retreats to barely deniable stalking lonertude. Lilian obsesses over the 'fruit' to a degree that involves mostly attempting to preemptively study as much as possible before it spontaneously ceases to exist for some comically 'Elite' reason.     None of them seem to have much room for anyone else in their thoughts at the moment. The closest it comes is Lilian taking a weird moment aside to thank Xion for 'everything' in a difficult-to-pin tone, and not bringing it up again. She appears to be the only person Lilian is fine with handling 'the New Fruit' directly.     But Lilian appears when she is called for. Shouted in Tamamo's urgent tones, she appears at once. She doesn't even ask; she sees Arthur Lowell, of all people, unbloodied yet unable to stand, wheezing as if on his last legs without a grit vial in sight, and the little switch behind her eyes that is responsible for panic under its umbrella of other emotions visibly switches off. The first words out of her mouth are "Tell me what to do." The first action that follows is tying back her hair and kneeling down in the same motion. Even Petra gets "Not the time!" for the crack.     'Maybe I should go get water.'     "Get ice and the medical kit under the sink in the first dorsal corridor bathroom while you're at it." she says. Having no idea what's going on, she's already removed the sterile gloves from her bag and pulled a pair of them over her hands.     'Should we get him to a bed? What's... good for him? What was he even doing down here?"'     "Not yet. I don't know. Checking on the engine." Lilian catches herself on her words, correcting "We can't make him eat one of those horrid healing gushers like this." but doesn't break from snap-finger summoning her hands-free 'flashlight'.     'R&D insisted I take this along to diagnose any 'acausal' injuries.'     She even looks only mildly relieved at Bond. "They can do that now?" is nearly rhetorical; anything is better than nothing. "Petra. Please get Sakura. Don't let Nika see this."
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur:                        .     Lilian gets a quick, weakly withered look right in the eyes, and a whisper of, "Going to be--" Right before he's unconscious. Arthur can't do that right now. His breathing gets shallower and shallower, and stops with *startling* quickness. Surely a man so aware of the perils of stairs couldn't have been done in by one flight and a bad fall, right? Petra's right, he's *always* talking about how dangerous stairs are!     Roland's close examination can find that his eyelids are fluttering, and light under them is making it clear that there's something supernatural going on. No visible injuries besides a few bumps on his knees and elbows from the fall... Tamamo's quick first aid measures find, apparently, no response, but it allows her to have a close observation of the *rapidity* of the decline, something that seems more like he's already dead somehow, and his body's just trying to catch up. As Lilian starts to work, her knowledge of anti-antegent tactics will be the only one who's able to detect that his skull seems to be actively getting lighter by the minute.     Bond's is the best: His MRI-in-a-briefcase quickly diagnoses that Arthur's brain is currently experiencing the development of a geometric fractal multi-brain within the skull, and is folding entirely out of the world. Lesions along its structure show that this has been happening for years, irregularly, based on the scarring.     There is a line of text on the screen, but not in the software; a series of spirographic geometry-designs, custom-built into the minutiae of Arthur's local electromagnetic field through spatial warping (seemingly eons ago) says:                               "IF YOU CAN READ"                                                           "THIS WAIT 5 MINS IF"                                                          "NOT HEROIC OR JUST"                                                                                                                                               "SORRY"                                         Xion's sense for hearts will find that this situation's closest analog is "far-geriatic cat, attempting to find a private space". A clock is ticking somewhere, and that seems to be 'intentional', if anything could be. Sickbay or a bed wouldn't go amiss.
Tamamo	Tamamo gives her answers without looking away.     'Maybe I should go get water.'     "Be sure to bring a bottle, a bowl, and a cloth."     'It's even programmed to give recommendations based on who's injured and who's able to help.'     "Please do."     'Was one flight of stairs enough to do him in?'     That one just gets a scoffing sound.     'Everything okay?'     "No." Her voice is tight. Not harsh, but concentrating too hard.     'What was he even doing down here?'     "He mentioned supermatter." Tamamo doesn't know what that's about. 'Norovich' doesn't pop from her memory.     "We shall move him if he is uninjured, but must take more care if he is. The risk is in disturbing anything broken."     'Tell me what to do.'     "I left my handbag upstairs." It's by the couch, and a little heavy, on account of all the things it holds taking up more space than the bag occupies. "After that, please wait a little longer. Something to support him without moving him, perhaps." She's still working with the risk that's something's broken or bleeding. If it's nothing like that, she can ask Lilian and Roland to carry him up.
Arthur Lowell	> ==>     LATER...     The lightshow of divine revival was a bit much, when Arthur's corpse finally returned to life in the sickbay. Arthur himself, now breathing properly, stares up, averse from others' gazes, almost... embarrassed, in a way. The MRI-in-a-briefcase's display still has the electromagnetic message, but the brain seems no longer a fractal. Actual medical aid will be useful now, and surely not be squandered, if the mostly-empty HEALTH VIAL display above him is anything to go by.     The silence in the air finally gets interrupted by an awkward repetition from the meeting. "The gaps keep getting shorter." He says. "Figured I had more time after the last one." He sits up.     And, weirdly, cracks a shitty grin. "You know what I think is *weird*?" He laughs to himself, weakly. "'I'm dying.' You don't say that when you *are* dying right then, on account of you're dying. You say that when you're *going* to die. Sure don't say that when you're calling it a habit. Like you do with other stuff, you know? There's distinctions. 'I'm being real with you' is, you're telling truth now. 'I'm going to be real with you' is, you're telling it in a little bit.     "Only dying is the verb that gets to be, y'know, present-but-future. Is what I mean." He says, unfocusing a little and staring out the window at too-dense passing stars. "They don't have an, 'I'm dying' for the *habit* of dying."     He laughs a little more. "This is so fuckin' stupid, man." He mutters between the chuckles. "So *fuckin' stupid*."
Angela	"Oh geeze... Somethning's going on alright, this isn't a normal fall, but at least he didn't break his neck." Roland says with his cursory examination. ''Be sure to bring a bottle, a bowl, and a cloth.'' ''Get ice and the medical kit under the sink in the first dorsal corridor bathroom--'' "Aye aye, captains." Roland quips, rushing off to do just that. Thanks to his handy dandy coat he can shove a bunch of stuff in there without worrying about having the hands for everything! It's weirdly come in handy for reasons beyond weapons. rEventually he returns, summoning the items one by one out of his hand, even including the bowl, that he just places down near Tamamo as if expecting she'd know what to do with them. [ansi(243,"Did I miss--oh there we go?")] Roland doesn't really know about the JUST HEROIC dichotomy even if he knows where he'd lie. "Huh? ..." He pauses. "What? I don't--I don't think I get it, man. You've seemed pretty fit," He hesitate,s wondering if Angela saw that in the pages she drew and was just respecting privacy or something. "What do you mean you're dying, huh?"
Tamamo	It did turn out, after all, to be a case in which Tamamo can simply direct a couple of able-bodied people to carry Arthur up. Or just one person, even, with a few different choices -- Petra's silver would be handy -- but for reasons she's not even hinting it, she'd rather more people be directly involved than fewer.     LATER...     Refilling vitality can be done lots of ways. Healing charms. Medicinal powders mixed into teas. Soft, roughly body-temperature foods. Tamamo goes about handling all of this, while directing others to fetch or mix items for her, and not minding too much what other aid is brought up. As long as someone's there to point out any glaring mistake, this is the sort of thing that (she thinks) anyone can handle. 'Recovery' is the easy part, even if it requires effort.     She won't let him mix his horrendous gamer fuel into her herbals, though. This must be gently, but firmly, rejected.     'This is so fuckin' stupid, man.'     "I suspect that sentiment was shared by a great many people in the moments of their death, and so you are, at least, in company, even if they do not usually have a chance to say more after remarking on--" That nurse-like calm breaks for a moment, with a soft but shuddery breath, eye contact avoided, "--the unfairness of it all. On how it should have been something else, something that would let the bards roar and laugh and weep."     She's not quite ready to say she understands it, but she might understand something.     "I told you I would listen. If you would rather -- but, no, you do want to tell a story." He'd said as much. "Tell me a story, then. After you drink this."
James Bond	"Good God." It isn't the kind of thing you want anyone looking at a medical screen to say--especially not someone with Bond's usually-sedate delivery. He doesn't move to hide it from anyone even if he doesn't overtly turn it over for anyone else to see. This is so fuckin' stupid, man.     "It isn't how I thought things would turn out, either, if that's what you mean." He would've considered himself the first to go between them, at one point. At another, he would've thought it a toss-up, but certainly not one that would have its ultimate result culminate in a sick bed.     There aren't any flowers here to give, and no get-well-soon cards to give. They'd be predicated on a lie, anyway--the way the device displayed it, and more importantly, the way Arthur says it, this isn't something that kind of gesture can handle. Now, at least, he understands what Arthur meant by 'the gaps.' The time between these little episodes.     "I'm sorry." What a stupid thing to say. Sorry for what? That this isn't something I can tackle him out of the way of?
Petra Soroka	"Not the time!"     Petra's face falls, and she hurriedly slides down the stairs to join everyone around Arthur's body. Everyone pulling out *medical equipment* changes the whole tone of Arthur's Family Guy Death Pose, once she's close enough to see it.     "Oh. It's serious. Okay." Petra. Please get Sakura. Don't let Nika see this."     "Yup, on it." Petra scampers right back up the stairs, leaving Arthur behind.     In the main room, Petra slides sideways from the inertia of sprinting, with the big screen for Nika and Sakura looking down on the empty room. She scoops up the Eggpack and swings it onto her back, not slowing down as she explains to the two of them. She can grab Tamamo's purse while she's up there, too.     "Something weird's going on with Arthur. Sakura, I'm gonna bring you over; and Nika, I think this might be ÷work÷, so I'll let you know what's going on once I know. Aaaand, hup-!"     Petra trots into the sickbay after Arthur's already revived himself, laden with the Sakurapack on her back. Not being a medical professional, or being aware of the total state of his collapsing brain in the interim time, the fact that he's sitting up seems like an unequivocally good thing at first blush.     "Oh! You're talking!" Sakura gets sat down on the closest bed to Arthur's, screen facing him. "That's, uh, good, right?" "The gaps keep getting shorter."     Maybe it's not perfect, though. Petra's history with death is weird and abstract and overwhelming, but her understanding of it is still helplessly mundane; the trappings of human mortality and metaphor are art necessary for her to comprehend it at all.     "Well." She leaves it there for a few seconds, standing awkwardly beside the sickbay bed. She probably should have a lot to say, but Arthur's situation makes everything slip indistinctly through her fingers. "Why?"     "I mean, is this a physical condition, because of the thing that you are, or are we basically talking suicide? Because, like, let's face it, you've never really come across as 'old', so you're not getting points for 'the natural cycle' or, 'having lived a good life already', you know."
Xion	'A deeply-old cat finding a quiet, secluded place' is an energy that Xion comes upon and feels a different fear, no less primal, but in the hauntingly cautionary. The business that Arthur had tried to find some dignity for, his own mortality, is something that Xion is drawn away from her thoughts of strange new becomings and other-side revelations and a feeling beyond what could be felt by her atoms in this arrangement. The overwhelming impact of the sublime splashed coldly by blunt mortality. That it was a god isn't material. It was her friend, and to think him actually dead... 'The final departure of a dignified yet creaking companion' remain lodged in Xion as she stood, cross-armed, tight in, worried, haunted. She couldn't mantra that he'd be okay -- it wasn't until Bond's special anomaly determining Q-tech that she even feels a hint of relief. The proximity to 'death' makes Xion distressed in innumerable ways. It wasn't like changing, it wasn't like leaving. She had voted against it completely. She reads the words on the screen and closes her eyes. She feels like swearing. She doesn't even know what the right swear is, never having used them. It would have been a good time for it, but she never picked up the tongue. "Jerk." She grumbles, of the gamer god, like a hiccup as she helps move him. LATER... Xion is still crossing her arms but it's cooler now and she's not as dark-ringed about the eyes and drama shot in all her contexts. She's still a kind of cross with him, in a way she knows she can't blame *him* for, and yet... "You weren't joking about 'holding on'. You didn't mean... years or months. You're dying closer and closer to dead, and that's..." Awful. "... I don't think I'm at 'sorry you got found', but you need a solution. And it doesn't sound like more miracle save-the-hearts-of-the-world projects are going to get you right, either."
Lilian Rook	'I left my handbag upstairs.'     It's almost kind of freaky to see. Tamamo has barely mentioned the thing before Lilian is handing it to her, as if she were describing a colour of wire to cut or a specific surgical tool to take off the tray. She--     'Something to support him without moving him, perhaps.'     --drops a thrifted wedge cushion as if pulling it out of thin air.     'Going to be--'     "Fine. I know. Quiet." She doesn't. She just can't imagine him saying anything noticeably different, and certainly not anything helpful. Talking will only make it worse. Panicking when the weight of Arthur's upper body trickles away as if through a crack she can't see won't help either. If she wanted to know what to do herself, she'd 'divine' it, but she can't even make herself keep her eyes closed; the memory of the Storm is too recent and the space all around them all is too unreal. Lilian shuts her mouth, accepts the nausea building up along with her heart rate as a bleak inevitability so that she can stop thinking about it, and decides to trust Bond and Tamamo, because trusting Arthur to begin with meant accepting none of this would ever be changed by crude matter alone; that wishes don't involve particles.     . . . . . . . .     'Figured I had more time after the last one.'     "Say that earlier you stupid fucking asshole."     Five minutes is a nonzero amount of time, which means that it's 'enough' time for Lilian, left to her own devices, to feel as much anxiety as she's going to feel, then get as angry as she's going to get, and then settle on a kind of lukewarm resting state of inertial bile after the shakes go away, short of only a night to sleep on it and a day to rev back up again.     "If you're going to try nobly hiding it from me, don't say anything at all. If you're going to try and meet me where I am by being honest for a change, say something other than cryptic bullshit you've trained everyone to ignore."     Nika knew better than to stick around for 'work'. She only expected to be on-hand to solve it, while everyone was still on board a spaceship, light-years from home. It was one of the few times Petra has seen her actually confused-upset to date, and she hasn't come back again so soon after swallowing that she'd be banished from the quiet emergency. Sakura is alone with the monitor, having been relocated to the arboretum so that Nika can still make use of the room with most of her things in it. The strangely candid angle from the outdoors table makes her look a lot less 'recently shaken' than Lilian. She fidgets out of guilt for being relieved that there's nothing for her to do in the end; for now.     'They don't have an, 'I'm dying' for the *habit* of dying.'     "They do, Arthur. And it goes 'I can't take this anymore. I can't stand living like this'. Have you heard it?" On this subject, she can pass over even Lilian's noticeably heightened tension, resting her hands in her lap and breathing in the fresh air of Earth while the other woman crosses her arms and orbits off near a corner. "You've said as much in different words not long ago, haven't you?"
Lilian Rook	"For a moment, you'd hoped that someone might tell you that it was only impossible to bear because you were doing something wrong, or lacked some important information, or otherwise were subjected to it in ingorance, rather than damned to it by karma. You will find that there's nothing to be gained by evading speaking of it now. I'm much too familiar with it."     Lilian, lost on the topic, agitated because she doesn't have to be, but doesn't want to think about it, tries to reinsert herself with "Who is Norovich? What's made of Supermatter? You've taught me to ignore all your prattling on to yourself before, so I'm not going to fall for it this time."
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: What do you mean you're dying, huh?     "I'm a kind of weirdo, type that comes back if I die." Arthur says, putting hands over his face, rubbing it a bit. "Lot of stuff gets around it, this doesn't. I'm dying. Habitual. Gaps getting shorter. S'why I was..." He gestures around. "All of this. Figured, if I found someone here, they'd know, you know? They'd know the secret. Have the knack. Couple hundred years, transcendental mind, if I could still hold a conversation, they'd," He slumps a bit, palms on the bed now. "Know how to not be like this." > Arthur: Tell me a story, after you drink this     Arthur drinks it down. His meters inch up. "There's this theory. They call it the 'Ultimate Self'. Theory goes, more you *experience* things, the more you crack yourself into parts, fragment, go all bits-and-pieces. And the Ultimate Self is this sort of way of being, where all those bits and pieces you cracked into are still a continuous whole." He says. "It's based on a friend of mine. Valentine Turner. When we were finishing our big session, you know, *the big one*, she..." He exhales, annoyed by saying it. "Fuck, she *disintegrated*, I guess. Had so much Aspect in her, her body just came apart, particles just scattered. She was still there, still somewhere, just not like a person. So how can a person be a bunch'a things all at once, and still one thing? How can there still be a self if it's discontinuous or whatever? She was a god, just like me, so they had to do theology about it."     He looks back out the window. "So," He says. "Lot of answers." > Arthur: Why?     "S'cuz, the common part is, they're not gonna have much of a regular meat-type brain that thinks with, you know, neurons and shit. That's for sure." Another long sip. The brain-display roils like ferrofluid. "Most guys aerosolize, or they encode into a bunch of mysteries, or fuckin'... turn into a robot or a vampire or some shit." He jabs a finger at Petra, as if accusing her of something, because of how often she is turning into things or being affected by situations deeply. "I don't gotta explain *that* to you." He says. "But it means they fit more of *them* into things. They got more pieces, sure, but they got the room to fit it into." > Arthur: I'm sorry     He laughs a bit at that. "I might be one'a the luckiest motherfuckers in the world." He says to Bond. "I'm just ungrateful. See, could 'cure' this any time. Just gotta decide to be a star, or a hologram, or disintegrate, or whatever. And one day, *I'm* the bitch tree everyone's wondering why it's causing problems." He gestures around, apparently referring to something about this situation. Maybe Lilian's world? > Arthur: It doesn't sound like more miracle save-the-hearts-of-the-world projects are going to get you right     "I can't be gotten right. The world's *trying* to get me right. But it's not right." He says, laughing weakly. "Because we know how that is. What happens when I get right." His next words are incoherently inexplicable. "Optimus Prime used to run this shit."
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Who is Norovich? What's made of Supermatter?     Arthur raises a hand up, turning it around as if examining it for the first time. "I'm going to answer your questions, and I'm gonna try to tell you something important after that." And he does his best: "Edith Norovich is a dead woman I don't know in a town called Litchfield I've never been to in an Earth I don't know the sector of. 'Supermatter' is a kind of engine core for a space station I don't know the orbit of, star I couldn't place on a map."     Then, the 'tell you something important' stage. "I know you know what it's like. Cracks in time and there's light shining through. This," He waves his hand. "This is the crack. This is where the light leaks in. And this," He taps the side of his head. "This isn't wide enough. And this," He does... A strange motion with his hand. A moment of tension, a weird noise of pain-yet-not-pain. A *surge of memory*. "This is that light that's shining through. It's shining through the past, and the present, and the future, for most'a the Blooms. It's shining through a lot of places, for me. Petra, it shines through mirrors and refractions. Probably a lot more going on." Imagine trying to explain Xion's hearts and shadows. That might involve reading text. Imagine explaining Bond's personal history, as represented by many faces.     "The light wants to come through. It'll burn, and sear, and tear the cracks apart, to be everything it's supposed to. The 'Ultimate Self'. Hell," He cackles obnoxiously for a moment. "We've got *Ash*, that's the crack-in-the-surface that *wants* to break! Nothing *but* the light coming through after that."     "But I don't want that. I don't wanna do any of that shit. I just want to be this. It's stupid as hell, but I can't stand going that kind of way. Still, learn enough, get enough lessons, eventually all those big truths form some kind of circuit. And there goes your brain, unless you put yourself in something else."
Angela	Roland is well acquainted with death, but a young shouty punkish guy like Arthur? The idea that he's dying is pretty shocking. And then maybe a bit confusing as Arthur indicates that while he is dying, he keeps being resurrected too. But the time between deaths seems to be getting shorter. What does it mean when the time becomes so short that he is, essentially, always dead? Will that be the end of it? Or will it stall out at some point? ''There's this theory. They call it the 'Ultimate Self.'.'' Roland has heard a little bit about Angela as being a 'piece' of Carmen, it's largely been spoken of like a theory rather than a fact, but some of the Sephirah are pretty casual about it and even Angela sometimes talks to him about it. It's a little unerving to him sometimes how easy of a time he has talking with her--well, it makes sense on his side. He's aiming for that. But thue fact that it's working... He suspects that if Angela was connected right now, she'd be as anxious as Lilian seemed to be but worse since she can't even fetch the bowls. He probably shouldn't contact her about this stuff. It's just stress her out and the plan he's made with the Redshifts--well, he doesn't want to sabotage their hopes. "Hey, I think you hold a conversation just fine. It's not always easy to follow but it's not impossible." Roland frowns. ''Valentine.'' Roland looks uncomfortable thinking about the idea of a lady's body 'coming apart' like that. Even if they still exist in some sort of method. Is Angela seeking some sort of Ultimate Self? Or is that Voice? He rubs at his eyes, looking like ten years older by the time he lets his hand drop. ''*I'm* the bitch tree everyone's wondering why it's causing problems.'' "Is this the origin of Big Tree?" Roland asks. "Well I don't blame you for not wanting to be a Star..." He rubs at his neck. "Stars get to shine brighter than anyone, but inevitably they fall." It's old City philosophy there. ''I just want to be this.'' Roland sighs again and adds, "But you're gradually being nudged to not being this. And eventually you're gonna have to make a choice or just... Man..." He sighs. "I don't want you to die, man, but I don't got answers."
Tamamo	'Because, like, let's face it, you've never really come across as 'old', so...'     '...cryptic bullshit you've trained everyone to ignore.'     Tamamo thinks about it for a while before telling Petra, "The make-up fooled you."     '...but you need a solution.'     'The world's *trying* to get me right.'     "Do you think it 'unnatural'? To live so long, to experience so much, and not to turn into something that cannot fit into a human's shape."     'For a moment, you'd hoped that someone might tell you that it was only impossible to bear because you were doing something wrong, or...'     'They'd know the secret. Have the knack.'     Tamamo nods. "They... still do not. They are still young, as stars measure time, and would not have spoken to us without Nika there... no, never mind that. The reason they lack the answer is not important. How they might look in another eon is not important, now. For now, the matter is..."     'They got more pieces, sure, but they got the room to fit it into.'     'Just gotta decide to be a star, or a hologram, or disintegrate, or whatever.'     "Or... a vampire?" No, please, no vampires. "Or a robot?"     'We've got *Ash*, that's the crack-in-the-surface that *wants* to break!'     "And even they feel uncomfortable with the idea of loneliness, and what is 'being alone' but 'being unable to converse'? That non-connection, that... cutting of the threads."     'I just want to be this. It's stupid as hell, but I can't stand going that kind of way.'     "No." Tamamo frowns. "That is normal, no? You wanted to be down here," Down where? "and not up there, without... them." Us. "You have torn the binding threads your past made you outgrow, but the same are the threads that hold to others. Is that not obvious?"     Speaking a little too quickly, "Arthur, I -- you know what I am, yes? You know I could not possibly criticize someone for that. I may not have Her full perspective, but I know enough, about what that is like. About being too much to be allowed to live a life like this. I am here because of--" She takes a breath. "Well, do not mind those details of my own circumstance. Another time, maybe. What I meant to say is, that, it is not stupid at all."
Xion	"Oh," Xion begins, a sort of sigh that falls out of her. The emotional reality of it, the corners and angles and sharp pieces and unsaid drippings of the felt-things that are dredged up from Arthur's explanation if it give a context to it that Xion tries to handle gingerly. Sympathetic - feeling it clearly - to the bile of the words, the acid of this truth, she doesn't have Lilian's sharp heat or expectation. "They 'had to do' theology about it." She repeats, a kind of commiserating, because there wasn't any kind of answer. Even the gods were just people, unless they weren't, and that was the problem, the difference. There were a lot of answers, but nothing usable, nothing true. Was it helpful to ask if 'human' was what Arthur wanted to be? It seemed like he was clinging to it, and yet, was so clearly not it. And a god, what was a god? An incredibly capable perpetual gaming teen? "Arthur," Xion lifts chin, looking at him, propped up in bed. "I don't think you'd be 'that bitch tree', any way you'd do it, as you fish for and peel constellations and concepts, and you build a paradise for communication, and you reach people. I don't think, but, I don't know. I wish there was just a potion to brew, or some. . . special . . . key I could swing to make it right." The words fail her, tightening eyes dipping blues down, and she rolls her keychain charm through fingers. "Even the Triskelion can't wave away the truth. And we went to Kepler, and," They had been there. The *presences*, the forces, the interactions at layers that weren't possible to be met or touched across their forms. She could 'go' anywhere, but she could not bridge the gap from where she was with one long step towards where that was, couldn't reach after lunging but not leaving the improbable footing on what she was. A second step, a journey beyond, and she could, but, Not while remaining as she was. The answer she got, 'maybe not here, maybe not now', seemed to echo in her as she looked at Arthur and failed to look at him and listened to Lilian and Tamamo and pressed thumb into solid surface and scrubbed into smooth with finger-rough. "--Kepler wasn't where the answer was either. Or, it was the same answer. Wasn't it? The same answer you'd been ducking, because, you didn't want 'that', even as you learn a little more and crack a little more." Maybe calling him 'pretty cool' and talking about 'learning to win' was a pleasant rise and an astoundingly poor choice of words simultaneously. She hadn't read and known at the time, and now... "Maybe there's a way for us to help you... Get to being more, yourself?" Though the comparison to Ash (negative) set such a tone the noirette's words are weak.
Lilian Rook	'Couple hundred years, transcendental mind, if I could still hold a conversation, they'd, know how to not be like this.'     "You're so fucking stupid." Lilian gasps, deeply annoyed, almost not knowing why. "The fact that we had as much as we did was a miracle. It's so miraculous it almost feels cartoonish. The holding a conversation part was all us; we were teaching them how to do it; or at least Nika was, because a wish isn't supposed to work based off particles, remember?" She starts to say something else, then changes tracks with an angry shake of her head.     "You heard them. As much as any of us did; more than some." Lilian says. "They gave up something. They let go of all sorts of things to be more of something else. Whatever they would call, it's a conflict that only ends in release."     'Fuck, she *disintegrated*, I guess. Had so much Aspect in her, her body just came apart, particles just scattered. She was still there, still somewhere, just not like a person.'     "I'm very sorry, Arthur." Sakura says; soft, eyes in her lap, without expression, as though she meant something very much more specific than 'because she died'. "It's not something we're meant to see. It only seems like such a grand thing once it has been beautified by age, after many have done the work of turning it to myth and legend, in which to find meaning. To see it for yourself . . . all there is to think of is the jarring unfairness; the absurdity that it could end in such a way so similar to 'but it was all a dream'. That you're left behind as the dreamer wakes; and then what?"     'Most guys aerosolize, or they encode into a bunch of mysteries'     Lilian squeezes her arms to herself, rocks her weight from one foot to the other, and then says "I hope Emery is hapy." without explaining. "I should . . . I need to talk to them. Somehow."     "Is that really what troubles you so much about it?" Sakura says, raising her gaze back up to the camera again. She pauses, making time to reach forward and brush away a flower petal that has blown halfway onto the sensor, obscuring half of the screen with blurry pink. "That you would miss 'the brain'? Is it solely your hope to revolt against the changing of your context and its ways? You don't sound as if you're afraid of being alone, beyond that threshold."     'And one day, *I'm* the bitch tree everyone's wondering why it's causing problems.'     "I'm certain we caused the problems for the tree."     ". . . And you've never much seemed to mind causing trouble to begin with."     'Edith Norovich is a dead woman I don't know in a town called Litchfield I've never been to in an Earth I don't know the sector of. 'Supermatter' is a kind of engine core for a space station I don't know the orbit of, star I couldn't place on a map.'     Lilian throws her hands up. "Oh! Fantastic! That's so helpful!" They slap back down against her thighs. The catharsis of petty annoyance about something concretely understood to be inconvenient helps her. "For a moment I was going to go and apologize for being presumptuous, seeing as I actually mistook your meaning all this time and I had no clue what I was talking about, but we're back to the poison."
Xion	"Lilian," Xion gently raises her head, eyes soulful for a moment as the taller knight throws her hands up. "You have Tamamo and me and Arthur and everyone else that's reliable. Finding an impossible object, and going to an impossible place, are just the starts of a journey of legend. A name, and a thing. We can start to relate to it now - can't we?" This whole trip was about... relating to things, in a new way.
Lilian Rook	Sakura looks at her, through the angle the screen allows, and Lilian doesn't need to hear her ask the obvious question to know what it is. "Being too accomplished, too successful, too mature; being resolved, like mere mortals can't be." She tightly folds her arms again, looking away from Sakura.     "And you went looking for answers from the mere mortals who wound up that way because they never got to be any of those things. People who learned enough lessons from trying that the big truth in the completed circuit was 'everything is doomed; give up'." She falls to self-conscious muttering. "What's wrong with you?"     'Is this the origin of Big Tree?'     Lilian is visibly In No Mood. Sakura takes it with a gentle rise of her hand and patient words. "The so-called 'Divine Tree', yes. The object at the center of the Himorogikage's worship, self-same of the set which Miss Xion tapped into in the ruins of London, under the pooled blood of Mors Caelorum." Lilian seems to blink at how easily Sakura throws out the Latin; as if it were just slightly a slur.     'They are still young, as stars measure time, and would not have spoken to us without Nika there...'     "Though I find no fault in anything you've said, Lady Tamamo, I must clarify one thing." Sakura says, with odd reluctance. "Nika was able to do so because of the nature of her 'wish', as we've taken to calling it. Those two came to . . . recognize their own, when Ash did as they have learned to do; and when Lilian 'spoke'. Whatever it is that 'the human design' must seem to them, I can only think that it is a quality that covers and obscures that which they recognize beneath, which we struggle to describe."     ". . . I say this only because I have seen that recognition before; on Earth, in the past." There are only three people she could mean, so it's easy to imagine why she swallows hard and skips the particulars. "I believe it is that they can see the differences, between stars and men, and what they lack is care enough to try. So long as Arthur remains more man than star, it would be impossible for one of their host to imagine why he continues to struggle at all."     Lilian looks up, unnerved, when Sakura says "And those two that we spoke to were kind and patient only in their 'fascination'. The less that he, or any of us, are 'something new', the less telling there is . . ."     'And even they feel uncomfortable with the idea of loneliness, and what is 'being alone' but 'being unable to converse'?'     "And thank god for that." Lilian sighs, strangely heated. She scans the room again, as if Ash could sneak up on any of them, and says "They know 'lonely'. They were just, gassed up, I suppose, with the idea that it didn't have to be forever; and now the reality is complicated. This is just about everything they'd hoped for, and they still haven't ditched us. I keep feeling like it's-- unfinished business. Like a ghost that wants a runback at being a person? Like they want to steal the concept of 'being friends' from humanity and take it with them."     'What I meant to say is, that, it is not stupid at all.'     "Of course it isn't. There would be no meaning in the divide if there was no occasion for preference."     "Wanting one thing or the other is sort of the least stupid thing in this situation either way."
Lilian Rook	'I don't think you'd be 'that bitch tree', any way you'd do it, as you fish for and peel constellations and concepts, and you build a paradise for communication, and you reach people.'     Lilian scoffs. Sakura smiles. Both are somewhat toxic-deflective ways of agreeing with Xion without wanting to seem like they are.     'I don't think, but, I don't know. I wish there was just a potion to brew, or some. . . special . . . key I could swing to make it right.'     "I'm afraid that it is not within our realm of freedom to decide that there isn't one, Miss Xion." Sakura says. "This journey wasn't merely to satisfy our curiosity, or verify Dictum's story. It was to learn more of the . . . 'process', that, averted by miracle once before, we are told still lingers about Lilian even now." That makes Lilian herself go quiet. "As for the three of us as well, given time. Though, perhaps it is more than poetic, despite only two points of comparison, that this as well was forestalled by 'love of'."     'Maybe there's a way for us to help you... Get to being more, yourself?'     "Thus I would appreciate the opportunity to try. If there is any such similarity that 'one who has passed above' could relate anything to him, then there is an alignment of interests before us."     The way she chooses those words-- 'alignment of interests'-- feels very different from her usual. They aren't to be polite, or usefully vague, or bearably imprecise. The way Sakura speaks is, for a moment, startlingly bare; almost cold; stripped of empathic care or pretense.     "If Arthur is so desperate to reach for any means that may prevent this, then it suits all of us to aid him by whatever uncertain means we might seek to prove. To some degree or another, we will learn of what we need, he will cease to decline in this miserablefashion, or nothing will change. I see no reason to waste the opportunity."
Petra Soroka	"Theory goes, more you *experience* things, the more you crack yourself into parts, fragment, go all bits-and-pieces. And the Ultimate Self is this sort of way of being, where all those bits and pieces you cracked into are still a continuous whole."     It feels sort of like a grotesque glimpse into Petra's own future, in a way. She wasn't inclined to think that way at the start, even with Arthur throwing up so many abstract suicide flags, because of the just-different failure to directly connect to any concepts Petra already had in her mind, but she can't very well ignore the *metaphor*.     Petra's issue, up until very recently, has been the light guttering out, the color leeching out of the glass and becoming inert. Her vacuous consumptiveness of everything and everyone is what feeds more quarters into the machine to keep the timer above zero-- or so it goes, or went. It's only in the past year that she really reconciled with living longer than the imminent future, and the long term ramifications of that are still...     Well, she still has to die at some point! The idea that, at some point, the stained glass mosaic reaches *saturation* is existentially horrifying on a level beyond simply dying. In that way, Arthur becomes instantly a thousand times more sympathetic to her. Being pierced and spread across the wall like a butterfly on display, frozen in the moment of her explosive artwork, isn't the worst outcome of 'oversaturation', but Arthur still having the endless greed to experience more even at capacity is exactly what Petra would expect to do in that situation.     Having processed a dozen thoughts in a row internally, what Petra says after a long stretch of silence listening to Arthur has no context to lead up to it at all, and also doesn't really need to. "The Beauty of Ash can't talk by default. But it's useful, so I rely on Lilian and Nika for it to be able to talk, and if I went away from them for a long time then it'd forget again."     She mumbles, after another pause, vaguely disdainful of the word, "'Discontinuous'...." "See, could 'cure' this any time. Just gotta decide to be a star, or a hologram, or disintegrate, or whatever."     "But you're having fun. That's, like, the issue, right? You've got second day of the sleepover brain."     Petra wasn't unaware of the vibe the four Blooms were getting off of the return trip, she just feels fundamentally differently about it. The second day of a sleepover, when the light is battering at the curtains and footsteps threaten to end the dream any time they come close, is exactly when you have to double down as hard as possible and make sure it never ends. As long as it tastes even a little better than ashes, you have to cling and cling and cling to the unreal haze of spending time with people you love until you can warp reality around doing that forever.     "Well, damn, dude. Then you have to lock in one way or another, right?" Petra puts a hand on the edge of the bed and sighs, rocking back and forth on her feet. She's getting, inexplicably, a little bored, despite the weight of the conversation? Because obviously the horror of accumulating too much and entering some form of unreachable stasis is quite bad, but also, Arthur seems like he's been fucking terrible at working around that in a way that's plainly obvious to Petra.
Petra Soroka	"Your whole fucking *bit* has been to shrug off everything and everyone and act like an unchanging piece of terrain, dude. You've already been star-LARPing. If you want to stay active, either you keep burning and remaking parts of yourself in self-destructive cycles of clinging to the thing that makes living 'like this' worth anything at all, which is, um, ephemerality as a constantly shifting discorporate vessel for the people around you, or you commit to the other thing and find a new way!"     "Like, Underived Conviction was learning new things from us! The most important thing we learned for sure on this whole trip is that becoming something different doesn't make you unchanging and incomprehensible without any alternative! You're not talking about making a circuit, you're talking about making a short!"
Angela	''Big Tree Lores.'' Roland blinks slowly. He has successfully learned the origin of Big Tree and has no idea what that means. Maybe this is the truth of Big Tree, when Lilian said don't worry about it three or four times he should've just accepted this. But people keep bringing up the damn tree! He's still hearing about shit from before he interacted with the multiverse at all. And judging from Angela's obliviousness to Big Tree, even before LobCorp did. But now, like having stolen a piece of Prometheseus's sapling from the gods themselves, but without the proper knowledge of how to use it--thus bringing civilization and destruction to humanity. "Thanks for telling me." He tells Sakura and decides to maybe ask Xion later what the fuck that all meant and why it's a capital T Thing. ''If Arthur is so desperate to reach for any means that may prevent this...'' "I'm a guy who can swing a sword pretty good." Roland admits. "And I can carry stuff. So if you want me to take a thing in one place and put it into another place in a way that helps Arthur out, I'd be down. If we gotta do some kinda quest, I'll fumble around. So uh, you've got my Knifefist Arthur." He offers a fistbump, then seems to remember he just mentioned the Knifefist which is decidedly not fistbumpable, and he awkwardly lowers his hand after.
Lilian Rook	'You have Tamamo and me and Arthur and everyone else that's reliable. Finding an impossible object, and going to an impossible place, are just the starts of a journey of legend. A name, and a thing. We can start to relate to it now - can't we?'     Lilian doesn't want to think about what Sakura's saying. She doesn't want to think about where she learned to say it, or why she chose to now. Instead . . .     No matter how many times she has been the pessimist, or the realist; the one from the different genre than everyone else, who is all-too familiar with how it is when things 'just don't work like that'; these are the words that she wants to hear at times like these, and the ones which she seeks in Xion, and feels rewarded enough to almost smile in hearing them.     "We play to our outs. Same as always." Lilian says, in a language that isn't trees nor tales nor swords, picked up in traces from a place of pernicious habit. "We've already accomplished something never done before, and it started just like this; going right off the path we were meant to be on and asking the flowers by the road for secrets." She looks fondly at Xion's medallion; the notion of the key that all of them represent.     "Dictum studied this. Sakura has seen it before. Nika speaks the language. Ash knows all sorts of things I know they aren't telling me yet. You're right; I'm only fussing myself about it because I can tell what a pain it's going to be in advance."     'Your whole fucking *bit* has been to shrug off everything and everyone and act like an unchanging piece of terrain, dude. You've already been star-LARPing.'     That puts Lilian into cough-laughing. She's too frazzled from Arthur appearing to have dropped dead to make it look subtle. She turns her head, but the emperor's court would frown. "Perhaps that's a better way of saying it than I've been using." she snickers, just a little. "You know, it's funny to say, seeing as Petra is sort of in the opposite of this whole alignment of fatalistic issues, but I think she may be the expert on this part."
Tamamo	'They let go of all sorts of things to be more of something else. Whatever they would call, it's a conflict that only ends in release.'     "They chose the threads to cut, and they did cut."     'Whatever it is that 'the human design' must seem to them, I can only think that it is a quality that covers and obscures that which they recognize beneath, which we struggle to describe.'     "Yes." Tamamo sounds a little weary, "It is... not to my taste, this attitude they take, though I would not mention this to them."     As if worried someone would then take a specific and extremely esoteric logical leap from that statement, necessitating clarification, she turns to Lilian to add, "I love all of you."     'They know 'lonely'. They were just, gassed up, I suppose...'     Very quietly, and suddenly gossipy, "They are insane with jealousy."
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Is this the origin of Big Tree?     Arthur laughs a bit. "Hell if I know, man." He grumbles. "And it's not a matter of falling or not falling. It's a matter of... Man, they just fuck a lot of shit up. Pillars of salt or rainbow sociopathy, doesn't matter. It fucks things up." > Arthur: Do you think it 'unnatural'?     "Having a person-mind. Being able to be a hero. Tamamo," He turns to look at her, directly, focused; this is a peer, this is someone who has shared at least one key experience. "You feel like a hero? I know you're *good*, but are you a *hero*? Someone who understood the Odas and the Pendragon clan, same way you understood Lilian Rook? Felt that same sympathy? If you wanted to, if you *tried hard*, would you still know how to cry about 'em? Are you knowing there's good reasons and complicated purposes, when they feel like they do, or do you not care about that and mess yourself up to share the feeling useless-style? You're humanish, but are you still down here, on Earth?" He smiles weakly, non-judgmental if there were any leg for him to stand on about it. "Or are you up in heaven?" Asks the man who made the FTL-ship they're on. > Arthur: You don't sound as if you're afraid of being alone     Arthur's oddly quiet for a minute. Sakura's remote-access stuff gets some averted eyes, some hitched breath. "Being alone would--" He starts, then goes to a reluctant-to-speak place -- and then rubs the bridge of his nose a bit. "Last time I was in one-a those fuckin' shitty little stay-here-forever fantasy worlds," As if that were a regular occurrence. "I *was* alone. Rest of it's a bunch'a bullshit, but that... that's not what I'm afraid of." > Arthur: You've never much seemed to mind causing trouble to begin with     "I don't wanna be part of the world's shitty unfairness. All its *unsympathy*. I want," He pauses to wring his hands for a little. "To *feel like shit* when people feel like shit. I want to retch when I see a dead body. I wanna cry and feel sick when someone on the ground can't see why something so big is good from above."
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: What's wrong with you? > Arthur: But you're having fun     "They built the world wrong on purpose." Arthur mutters resentfully. "They didn't paint the lines clear. They didn't publish the rulebook. You don't know who the refs are. Nobody can see the score. And I feel like I'm the only part that's right."     "*You're* **not** having fun. Doesn't that suck shit? Isn't it *bad* that you're not having fun? It's that fuckin', isn't it *infuriatingly unfair*? And the only way to be the kind of right I'm supposed to be is to be down here, same court as everyone else, not know the fix just as much as everyone else doesn't know the fix. Keep it fair."     "I want to pick the world up and smash it over the ground and rip its fucking ribs open and pull the rules and numbers and bars out like meat and marrow. Have my whole pack, every other person who's ever looked at the world and said this shit is wrong, this shit sucks, this is broken, it's unfair, *you're cheating*, have them all come circle around my kill and eat with their hands and their teeth until they're not hungry anymore and all the ambiguous world with no rules and no scores and no clarity is just bones." He eventually trails off a bit.     "Also my brain's bad and I played M-rated games when I was 13 years old." Thanks. He leans back, staring at the ceiling. "Maybe you've got something different, I guess." He says, contemplating his light-and-cracks metaphor more. "Maybe I'm already losing my touch for being the right type of miserable about it." > Arthur: Maybe there's a way for us to help you... Get to being more, yourself     "These days, I'll hear just about anything." He says, sincerely, still staring at the ceiling. "You come up with something, I'd hear it. Might talk a bunch of weird shit if I'm trying to keep it cool in public but I'm-- You know. I gotta try. Gonna look at just about any option I can, you can probably tell." He gestures around at the... everything. The entire Kepler expedition.
Lilian Rook	'I'm a guy who can swing a sword pretty good. And I can carry stuff. So if you want me to take a thing in one place and put it into another place in a way that helps Arthur out, I'd be down.'     Lilian laughs at the same time Sakura does, which has a shockingly menacing affect for how innocent it is. "Roland, you genuinely have no idea how important having one normal guy who isn't a total fuckup around is." "Ah, and with Mister Bond, we have two, in fact." "Mhm mhm, you can be in this together, right?" "And show one another 'the ropes', no?"     Sakura sighs pleasantly, puts her hand to her cheek, and says "I can scarcely imagine how things may be if it were Grimm with us instead; bless her for all the efforts she paid to our cause thusfar, of course."     'They chose the threads to cut, and they did cut.'     ". . . Hey Sakura?"     "I know. But please not now."     "Of course. But, when?"     ". . . Soon. You may ask everything, when I have spoken to Dictum myself."     "Okay. Thank you."     Nothing of further value nor specificity can be gleaned by watching the two. It's a conversation. It happens. So much is encoded within layers of 'I already know what you're thinking' that it wraps back around into the realm of pleasantly unassuming mundanity.     'It is... not to my taste, this attitude they take, though I would not mention this to them.'     "Admittedly, my understanding thusfar paints Kepler as a place I might charitably call 'far less chaotic' than Earth. Perhaps it's easier to consider people very little for their differences under those circumstances." Lilian says.     'I love all of you.'     Then she turns a little bit red, and hipfires "Thank you again for being so understanding her indiscretion." as if she can get away with it just by going really fast.     'They are insane with jealousy.'     She weirdly brightens up at that. "Oh they so are. But I would be too in their situation, so like, I get it? But I can't just say 'yeah I get it; I had a time like that' because the way Ash is normal is in the way they respond to that like 'ew, get over yourself'. I'm leaving the 'sorry about your Handler keeping you out of feeling any sense of humanity' stuff to Bond."     'Last time I was in one-a those fuckin' shitty little stay-here-forever fantasy worlds'     "Well now, there's no good in that." Sakura says, somewhere between Petra and Tamamo in tone, which is a tiny bit frightening. "Even 'those two' spoke of others they were acquainted with across unimaginable distances, and perhaps centuries of time between them; and yet they still felt joy at the thought of meeting more as well. Perhaps Lilian may have been right, that you are unusually acquainted with those who begin to fester before they ever become immortal?"     'I don't wanna be part of the world's shitty unfairness. All its *unsympathy*'     "So then." She even folds her hands in her lap again. Clinically. "It is that you fear that with a vast and unbounded perspective, cruelty and dishonour will follow. What stays your hand is the thought that you will turn on your principles and attachments the moment you are liberated from the wheel of birth and suffering, and in finding them quaint and irrelevant, become monstrous."     Sakura looks at Lilian. Lilian looks away.
Lilian Rook	'They didn't paint the lines clear. They didn't publish the rulebook. You don't know who the refs are. Nobody can see the score.'     '*You're* **not** having fun. Doesn't that suck shit? Isn't it *bad* that you're not having fun? It's that fuckin', isn't it *infuriatingly unfair*?'     'I want to pick the world up and smash it over the ground and rip its fucking ribs open and pull the rules and numbers and bars out like meat and marrow.'     Lilian widens her eyes a little, holding her head in posture ready for a low, appreciative sort of whistle that never comes. "Perhaps I should be asking Nika more about her 'magic circle' hypothesis after all." she says. Sakura, taking it as a given, says, "If Dictum knows anything at all, then it may be best to ask them of the 'wishes', as best they could describe, of the three that we now know of as well. It surely cannot be coincidence that the girl who agrees with you so deeply is the only one in the world who can so easily 'hold a conversation' with them, whilst remaining human; or even less than that, as an image on a screen."     'have them all come circle around my kill and eat with their hands and their teeth until they're not hungry anymore and all the ambiguous world with no rules and no scores and no clarity is just bones.'     Lilian sighs, but only repeats, with some deeply uncomfortable, utterly arcane emphasis, "'Perfect beast'."     'Also my brain's bad and I played M-rated games when I was 13 years old.'     "Your feng shui is poor and you are quite stupid, but I'm certain we may be able to teach you all the same." Sakura says. "Ah, I should fetch Nika, shouldn't I? We've been at this a while."
Angela	Roland cracks a smile at Arthur. He is a man who believes that a bitter laugh is sometimes better than no laugh at all. He thinks he's past the point where he's upset at other people's happiness but he sometimes worries if he's betraying her by not getting upset. He knows what Lilian would do, in his shoes, but he hopes he never has to see it because he'd really rather them just be happy. Is something wrong with him? That he didn't get jealous? All he wanted was what he had and, if he could grab it, a better life for his family than what he had to go through. He wanted his kid to never be stolen away from the Outskirts and tested on by some Wing. He wanted them to never know the bitter smoke-filled taste of war. He can't speak much about the fear of being alone, because Roland did have that fear. And then he lost that fear. And now it's just ... nothing. ''I don't wanna be part of the world's shitty unfairness. All its *unsympathy*.'' "Yeah, sometimes it feels like the world's demanding that, right? Like, 'there's nothing else for your hands, so you might as well. It'll feel better than sitting still.'" Roland says. "But you never seemed like such a bad guy to me that the world won you over like that." ''They built the world wrong on purpose.'' The more that Roland learns about the Library and its denizens and its reasons for doing what it does, the more true a statement like this becomes to Roland. It doesn't feel like something he learned, rather it feels like something he always knew and deluded himself into thinking there was anything else. But there's Tamamo and Lilian right there. The world is wrong, but it's not invincible is it? Somehow true love happened. How can he be jealous, he thinks to himself, when if they weren't there he'd just think it was some kind of lie he deluded himself into believing for a while. But he doesn't feel like he's the only part that's right. Maybe once long ago he could be, but he isn't a godling, he's a man inching ever closer to middle-age. One day he'll die and cease to be and find himself engulfed in the same unfair black silence that gets everybody else. And he doesn't expect he'll reach forty before that happens. "Knowing from the start what they try to take away." He manages, quietly. ''I want ot pick the world up and smash it over the ground--'' Roland can't voice his agreement here. But rest assured. He agrees. And he disagrees. And he's being torn in half deciding whether he wants a better world, or if he just wants to eradicate it. Out there, in the multiverse, with Lilian right there--it feels like such a common belief and that only makes the agony linger. Roland approaches Arthur and wraps an arm around Arthur's shoulders. "Hey man, Lilian's right, you should've said all this sooner. But I'm glad you're saying it now. If any crew's gonna help you out it'll be that one, arright?"
Tamamo	'You feel like a hero? I know you're *good*, but are you a *hero*?'     Does she?     Tamamo can't recall the last time anyone had something to so strongly stop her in her tracks.     'Someone who understood the Odas and the Pendragon clan, same way you understood Lilian Rook? Felt that same sympathy?'     No. She knows the answer to that. She can't treat them as deserving the same, even if she added many people together to weigh against the one.     "I..." She'll later think that there was no reason to confess to this extent. "...have never thought myself a hero. At most, I could only be 'someone who helps.' I could be... the hero of one heart. 'That is enough for me,' I thought. To be a hero to many is..."     'If you wanted to, if you *tried hard*, would you still know how to cry about 'em?'     "I might." More quietly, "There are so many for whom to cry, but they are all so far away."     'Or are you up in heaven?'     Her gaze lowers, focusing somewhere that isn't now. "Mm."     Eventually, she says, "Is that it? To be 'a hero' is something that only one who is 'on Earth' can do? That is the proof you chose, in refusal of another role."