Dying, everyone's reminded, hearts are washed in misery drenched in gasoline [Wed Week 10]

[chiseler]

[It's only Wednesday and already everything happens so much all the time. He should be used to this, but he's not. It's like another prophecy dangling before his eyes, bits and pieces of a puzzle he's receiving but not putting together fast enough and that he's being forced to participate in.

Frankly, it fucking sucks.

But it's Wednesday and now that he has his bearings back he's thinking. He's kept track of the most important people except for one. He wanted to give her a few days to calm down from the trial, but he hadn't forgotten. It's for that reason that sometime around lunch when most people are in other parts of the ship Luke heads back to the rooms corridor. Two sheets of paper in his pocket seemingly weigh way more than they should, but he's decided they should maybe be addressed. Maybe. Depending. As it is he also has a notebook and his datapad tucked under his arm, Backbiter strapped to his back, and a plate with a couple of sandwiches on it in one hand.

He's not even sure this will work, but she had told him where to find her. So with his free hand somehow he knocks.]

It's just me. [He's not sure she can hear him, but he's hoping it's enough.]

Comments

[socloverit]

[It's not even kind of the point of the story, but yeah when she's less distracted she's way more concerned about the poor theoretical cat. For now, she sighs when he smooths her hair and leans her head on his shoulder.]

Something like that. [Her tone carries a sort of "yeah, no, I've got no clue either." But she shifts, shrugs.]

It doesn't. Hasn't. [The second nonary game was not the last, and the story isn't over while she's still here.] But the second nonary game does end. Three men die, one gets jailed for it, and so the men behind the first game get punished. Schrodinger's girl is alive. She runs away with her brother and we don't find them. And the other five of us get to go home. [She almost smiles, thin and shaky, but she's tearing up again, too.] Light and I go home.

[chiseler]

I would almost say it sounds like a happy ending. [Almost, because it's not. Almost, because he's aware that Light and Clover shouldn't have been pulled into this. Almost, because only one of them is still here and that's beyond okay.]

But...you mentioned a third game. Without Light?

[socloverit]

[Almost, and that's what hurts the worse; that they were so, so close to having eked out their own happiness after the first nonary game haunted them for so long and the Pygmalion wasn't even the first place to take it away from them.

So it takes an extra couple of moments and a slow, shuddering breath before she can continue, voice thin.] Without Light. [And it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair.] A year later, I got kidnapped with my best friend, Alice. [The name almost sounds wrong to say and that isn't fair, either.] It was...different, though, it still had to be life-or-death, but there was a prisoner's dilemma sort of thing to add to it...

[She shakes her head; that isn't the important part.]

If...if they're in the same place, a stronger esper can kind of...absorb a weaker one's power. So I—I had to be there. It was...almost that same weird form of timetravel. I had to be there so someone else could use the boost my powers gave him to go back in time to keep a disaster from happening.

[chiseler]

[He's shaking his head pretty much through this whole explanation because that sure is bullshit! Everything in Clover's life so far has been bullshit and he sympathizes more than he should. Being used for someone else's gain doesn't settle well with him, and he wants to ask what a prisoner's dilemma really means but he's more focused on the second part.]

But what happens to you when your powers are drained out? When does the third game end? What if that disaster can't be stopped?

[socloverit]

[That's a lot of big questions at once and Clover needs a second just to figure out where to start; she stalls by wiping her eyes and sniffling.]

The third game is over. It—it ended...it felt like hours before we woke up here... But it ended when that man's consciousness traveled back to before the disaster occurred so he could stop it. But...if it can't be stopped...the third nonary game happens.

[what]

...We were in the timeline that failed. The third nonary game happened forty six years after Radical-6 wiped out most of humanity. [what] The—the rhizome base on the moon we were kidnapped to was a...safe place, a shelter, I guess...

[THE MOON

SORRY FOR MY CANON]

[chiseler]

[...

...

...]

So. You...were in the future...on the moon. [WHAT THE FUCK. If it were anybody else and in a period that was less serious, he'd laugh but he's genuinely too baffled to do much but blink at her a few times.] Okay I...okay. [Give him a second to just rub at his forehead because this has definitely entered "TOO MUCH!!!" territory.] Does that mean there's another timeline with another Clover that succeeded? How does anyone survive on the moon? [He asks. From inside a spaceship.] But you said the game ended and it couldn't have ended if the disaster couldn't have been stopped. [So...this is confusing, finally.]

[socloverit]

[SHE KNOWS, MAN, SHE KNOWS. SHE LIVED IT. SHE LIVED THE MOON FUTURE

and she's back to the nervous tic of tugging at her hair, panicking now that Luke's starting to lose his cool, too.] I don't know, I don't know! They—they had me and Alice in cryostasis all that time, ev-everything happened while we were on ice, the outbreak happened on Earth and wiped everything out—Sigma went back in time at the end of the game and we were—all the rest of us were just, just left behind...!

[chiseler]

[Without even really thinking about it a hand comes up to wrap around her fingers to pull them away from her hair. He's apparently had practice with this from someone else.]

Cryostasis…Roxy mentioned that when we were snooping around on the top deck earlier this week. I didn't know what she meant at the time but isn't that kinda what happened to us here, too? [Wait.] We better not be left behind because of somebody else screwing around with time, too. We know something happened to the planets and that's why we're here, but…[NO? NO THANKS.] You can't just leave people in a different timeline, that doesn't make sense.

[socloverit]

I-I think so... If...if you cryogenically freeze someone, it basically just...stops everything, so you can set them aside and unfreeze them years or decades or...in theory, maybe centuries later and it's like they just...went to sleep for the night. So I'd basically been asleep all that time.

[Like with the cat problem earlier, apparently talking about nerd shit calms her down; she's quiet, but her voice starts to even out and she wraps her arms around herself instead of trying to claw at her hair again. Finding out she'd woken up almost fifty years ahead of when she should have wasn't any fun even before even she got to the Pygmalion, though, and she sounds tired and miserable as she goes on.]

It wouldn't surprise me if that's what happened here, too. But I don't know. ...I...know it doesn't really make sense, but...you have to believe me.

[chiseler]

[…he's still sort of stuck on the fact that she was on the moon but okay you know what fuck it, it's not like he hasn't gone weird places before like. You know. The labyrinth! Or the underworld! And Olympus is in the Empire State Building so WHATEVER. SURE. THE MOON IS TOTALLY FINE.

He's fine letting her move into whatever position is comfortable for her and he leans back a little to give her space. The idea that they'd all been frozen doesn't sit well with him, but it's the only thing that makes sense.]

Most of it doesn't make sense, but me being here doesn't really make sense either and that happened. [A lopsided grin.] Besides, if you were lying you'd be able to explain it better so of course I believe it. [It doesn't hurt that he's incredibly Clover-biased.]

…on the other hand, kinda makes you wonder if there're some things we can reverse here, too. If we play and we win, what'll we get out of that? That's what I've always wondered about this place. [Maybe they could bring their dead friends back, too. Alice has apparently had practice.]

[socloverit]

[WE'RE ON A SPACESHIP WHY IS THE MOON THAT DIFFICULT

but she's moving to lean against his side again, not especially wanting him to go anywhere. Talking about all this has tired her out horribly; she can't manage the effort it would take to act amused or express her gratitude. But he believes her. Long-rooted pessimism settles and quiets because she's sure, more than anything else now, that she can trust him.]

I don't know. I don't even know what winning is supposed to mean. [She shakes her head.] Maybe there's a way to send us back where we came from.

[Reversing that occurs to her before reversing death does, only because she's already thought so much about the latter and ultimately, she doesn't trust the AI to do it right. Even so, she sounds remarkably unenthusiastic about the idea.]

[chiseler]

[Listen. A spaceship is easier to accept than somebody going through to trouble of actually building a base on the moon because who the hell has time for that? Though it puts the notes about her world in perspective and he wonders if Light's notes would be different.

Regardless, he understands how pessimism is and he understands on a base-level how complicated it is to tell people the unbelievable. Telling people he was a demigod as a kid had proven to be more damaging than helpful. People never understood, and he wouldn't be able to stay long anyway due to monster attacks. They're not quite the same, but…well, he'd be a huge dick not to buy it after watching her completely freak out about it. So he's fine letting her lean into him and he's resettling an arm around her even with a thoughtful hum.]

Winning, I think, would be giving us a choice in what we want to happen. Some of us don't exactly have places we want to go back to. So…they can pull us here. Maybe they can put us back other places and other times. The AI is running under somebody else's operation. Maybe those people are more competent than Alice is.