capeandcowl | 009 [ Voice ]

Entry tags:

julian keller | hellion

009 [ Voice ]

[ So Julian's been gone somewhere close to a week. He finds that out from a newspaper stand. For him it's been a hell of a lot longer than a week, and his head is spinning now. Memories he hadn't known were there are rising to the surface, fitting back into place. Friends, enemies, people from other worlds. Events he'd thought he'd never forget. Skrulls, Vulcanus.

God, this is weird.

And last time he'd been here, he hadn't looked like this.

He's walking through the City, metal hands concealed in his pockets. Every part of this is a mess. His powers are holding the phone to his ear, and there's no video.

He sounds like he's bored. ]

This place has good timing. I was almost in math class.

So I'm back. You can all stop missing me now. Since nothing's in pieces I'm gonna guess no one tried to destroy the place this week. Did I miss anything worth telling?

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[ giving up is not in Aradia's vocabulary. She doesn't get there much after he does, having cheated a bit on the way ]

You showed up!

[ That didn't take her long, man she's fast. He tries to remember if she can teleport, but then thinks that was Kanaya. ]

Yeah. Cause it's you, you would've found me even if I didn't show.

That is an excellent point! [ she looks him up and down, trying to figure out what's different. everything looks the same from here! but she patiently waits for him to bring it up instead of asking ]

[ He sighs and rolls his eyes, then takes the metal hands out of his pockets to let her see them. He hates this, but he's absolutely going to pretend like he doesn't. ]

See? Different. I told you home was shit.

[ she looks at them with polite interest, but no shock. She knows at least three people who've had metallic prosthetics like that, one of them herself ] Are they robotic, or do you have some sort of telekinesis?

[ Wow, okay. He stares at her. And, for once he's forgotten all about his hands, because did she really just ask him that? ]

You didn't know I had telekinesis?!

I've never fought you! Or even with you. How would I know?

Cause I flew up to your window one time!

[ she puts her hands on her hips ] All that means is that you can fly! There are lots of ways to fly that don't need telekinesis.

[ She has completely distracted him. He doesn't even know why he was hesitant about seeing her, she's not acting different with him at all. ]

What, you think I sprouted magical invisible wings I never told you about?!

[ he can always count on aradia for some nonjudgmental sass ]

Well-- sure, maybe! Or maybe you could fly with your mind! Like a really specific kind of-- oh, this is just getting silly!

[ He's shaking his head at her, but smirking too. ]

It is with my mind, genius. It's telekinesis. [ He holds up the hands. ] All of this is with my powers. Droid arms weren't my style.

Now how were you a robot one time? I still want that story.

[ she throws her hands in the air with a sigh, but she's smiling. She sits down on a nearby park bench and pats the seat beside her ]

I told you how my friends and I played a game, right?

[ Fine, he sits beside her. His hands can just go back in his pockets now. ]

Yeah, you mentioned that once or twice. The game that’s not a game, right? Like a video game that sucks you in. Literally.

Yeah. It's a game, but it's real. I died a little while before we started playing, but because I was needed, my soul stayed around as a ghost.

As a ghost. Inside the game, which you play on a machine.

So a ghost in a machine. [ Skeptical... ]

No. Equius, who was a... [ complicated matter ] one of the other players, a friend of everyone's, he built a robot in my image. Meanwhile, I merged with a game construct, and also a frog, and in that spirit form, I possessed the robot! It's really pretty simple.

[ oh god what the hell would she be like if he wanted her to explain something complicated... ]

You possessed a frog, and a robot, at the same time.

Unless you're slimier and greener than you look, you lost the frog form. So what happened? How did you fix it?

[ REALLY OBTUSE is what she'd be ]

Nope again! A game sprite is like a guide, and each player has to prototype it twice. Mine was prototyped with myself, and with a frog, for very important strategic reasons. And here is where my time powers come in!

[ she takes a look at his face ]

Okay, maybe that's not important. Basically, each player in the game has two lives-- and your second life is held in your dreamself, on another planet.

[ He wonders if she knows how freaking weird this all sounds, or if she's as casual about it as she's acting. It's hard to tell, cause she always acts like this.

How is she always so happy? ]

Dreamself on another planet, right, of course. That was my next guess.

Aradia, how much of this is real? It's like you're talking about...magic, or some kind of twisted reality deal. That shit can't happen in the real world, but you're here. So how?

[ God, he has no idea if that question even makes sense. ]

Maybe it can't happen on your world, but it did on mine. It's all real, even the parts that you wish weren't, or the parts that don't make sense. Anyway, when my dreamself died on my quest bed, my two selfs came back together and I made the god tier! Which is a real thing, and a way to come back from the dead in simplest terms, and is just part of the way the game works.

[ Okay thinking about this in video game terms... ]

So that's what, like, reaching the next level? Is making god tier how you beat the game?

It's kind of like the top level you can reach-- or a series of top levels, I guess. You don't need to reach it, it's just an extra bonus level! Only three out of the twelve of us ever made it in the alpha timeline. And it has nothing to do with winning-- you beat the game by defeating the final boss, of course.

[ Of course. ]

...Okay. So who's the final boss?

An archagent of the black queen called Jack Noir. It involves a lot of game mechanics that would probably confuse you even more, so I'm just going to skip all that! What you need to know is that we beat him, and we won. And then another Jack from another game session entered ours and prevented us from receiving the ultimate reward.

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