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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[ 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.

Wait a second, is that the asshole who's in the City and talked like he was gonna take shit over? He sounded like a two-bit mafioso wannabe, told people he was called Spades Slick. But the comms called him Jack Noir. He sounded like an idiot, I didn't take him serious.

Um... well okay, I actually simplified that a little for you, because you seemed like you were getting lost. The Jack from our session was... not actually against us? And it was the black king and queen we had to fight. Is he really here?

If it's the same guy. I don't know, your world confuses the hell out of me, and you already said there were two of him. I don't know which one this is, unless only one of them wants to be a mobster.

There's more than one game session. If I buy a game and play it on my husktop, and you buy the same one and play it, the games are going to be different, even though the characters are basically the same!

But that means there could be more than one of you, too.

There is! Well, I mean-- okay, it's like a game where you can create your own character. And your character is you! But the enemies and conditions for winning are the same in every game. As for multiple versions....

[ she thinks for a moment, then stands up to kneel on the ground, brushing some loose dirt over the sidewalk ]

You start here. [ she makes a dot with her finger, then draws a long line ] And you make your journey to the end of the game. But you don't always get it right the first time, right? [ she looks up, making sure he understands ]

[ Leaning over to watch this drawing. ]

Yeah? So you load from an earlier save.

Or I guess you time travel, cause you can do that. But everyone can't do that, they can't just fix things that go wrong.

...Unless they can, like. I don't know, go back outside the game and go in again at an earlier point...that sounds crazy when you're talking about life.

The role of a time player is generally to fix things that go wrong. [ she draws a small offshoot of the main line ] When things started veering off from the path they needed to travel, I was able to travel back in time and alter the course in the necessary way. [ she caps off the short line with an X ] This creates a doomed timeline. It fixes things for everyone, not just me-- I'm just the one taking care of it.

[ uh-huh... ]

Right, I get that. But you said it was like everyone had their own game to play. So how can you fix...someone else's session? [ is that even the right word, what is he even saying here? ]

Oh, no. There are different sessions that are totally separate, but each session is a multiplayer game! It's actually impossible to play with only one person. So I can't touch the session that Dave and John were playing, but Kanaya was part of my session.

But you knew Dave. Or I thought you did. That's the kid you were dating or something, right?

I'm not dating Dave! Why does everyone think I'm dating Dave? We met outside our game sessions.

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[ action!! ] oops got that wrong im dumb justifies it

[ action!! ] lmao jules is an idiot is always the justification

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