orderfromchaos | 8. Public + messages

Entry tags:

8. Public + messages

[Public, video]

So, uh. Some of you who frequent the eighth floor common room might have noticed. An extremely geometrical tree where your coffee table used to be.

I can fix that. I mean, I'm going to. Fix that. Unless you guys like it? I mean. Whatever. It's not my floor. Let me know.

[Private to Vin]

[There's a long period of silence. Okay, it's only like ten seconds, but that feels like a lot.]

So. That. Happened.

[Private to Elsa]

...have fun?

[Private to Rogue]

A while back you offered to help people work with their powers. Is that still a thing?

[Private to Helena]

You, uh. Don't have to respond to this at all if you aren't comfortable, or anything. But if there's anything you want to ask me, I'll try my best to answer. And I won't be mad or anything.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It'll hurt. And try to resist the changes.

[He hadn't really known until he said it, but as he does, he's sure, the same way he's intuitively sure about patterns, about the vectors, about souls and lack thereof.]

It wasn't made in the same conditions as the rest of the universe. That's it's nature, to be like that.

[None of this, precisely, is a protest. He's not arguing for it to live, one way or the other. It's just an explanation of what will happen. If, then.]

It's in this universe now, though. And life's meaningless without pain and resistance.

...that's not to say I feel all right with inflicting it for me own comfort, mind. No, you're right, I should just get used to it.

[She's still touching it, as she has been the whole conversation. It makes the hairs on the back of her neck rise.]

It just feels so wrong.

I never liked that idea. That pain and resistance have meaning, sure, but not that nothing else can without them.

[Which isn't to say he's ever figured a way around it, but he's from this universe too. Whatever he is, whatever he does, is still channeled through a human boy. But maybe there are other kinds of meaning.]

Anyway, it's not immune to pain or resistance. It's just...antithetical to disorder. And decay.

[And it only took the two of them. He wonders for the millionth time what would have happened if Deanna hadn't died, if they hadn't been fractured from the start. It would probably have been just as disastrous for civilization as they knew it, he realizes. But at least what came next would be - he can't really imagine it. Something new.]

I don't like the idea of a vodka bottle getting empty when you drink it, but it's still part of 'ow the universe works. This universe.

[She keeps reaching to touch it again, shivering and withdrawing her hand as though it burns.]

It's done. I think we should keep it. But I worry what we might end up learning from it.

I know what you mean. I made a river run backwards back home, and it's messing up. Everything, basically.

That was an accident too. I can't -

[Help it. Stop it. He was trying to stop, at the dam. Die, and wipe out his poisonous influence. But it didn't work out that way.]

It's my nature too. Partly.

It's a good thing you're 'ere, that's all. You're almost as terrifying as this tree. It's only less 'cause you can think.

'Ave you met my bus yet? Promise not to do owt to 'er, I think she'd like to see you.

[He barks a laugh. It's not a happy one.]

I'm worse. The whole suite of human insecurities and temper and selfishness and carelessness and fear, trying to aim a firehose of laws-of-thermodynamics-what-laws-of-thermodynamics. I can do it to people, you know. Just push a little and smooth all their pain and doubts and nicks away. I don't always even have to push. It just happens.

The admiral suppresses me like an inmate, you know. It's the only way I could let myself walk around here. Everybody's so broken and even knowing it's wrong I just want to sink my teeth in and fix it.

[He covers his eyes with one hand. How did this happen, why is he talking about this. He misses confession like someone scooped the comfort of it out of his chest. And part of him wants her to be horrified, like the priest in Los Angeles was horrified, wants a definitive sentence, even if it's condemnation. It just feels so wrong. He swallows.]

Sorry. Sorry. This isn't your - whatever. Problem.

[Quietly. He sort of expects her to take it back, but she should have the information she asked for.]

We brushed thoughts, when she first came back. Bowled me over a little. Chatted, kind of. I wouldn't change her. I mean. Since I can help it, here.

[Just a little bit bitter, that.]

Temptation aside, I really don't like doing it to people. And she's people, in her way.

[She is absolutely horrified, but not by Dillon in himself; rather, she's horrified on his behalf, that he's lived all his life with this splinter in his soul, this purity that shouldn't touch anything alive and real.]

Come 'ere. Come 'ere, sweetheart. I'm going to to put you on me filter, and I'm going to take you to see 'er. Not that I need to take you there, but she's attached to 'er body.

[It's not just in him, is the thing. It is him. They're too much soul for their skin, all of them, too much for their three-pound brains. His vast fragment of soulstuff is alive just as he is, and real, but crushed and concentrated down into his shape until it twisted inside out and made something that violates the rules governing everything else, the way matter does when it's crushed down into a black hole. He blows out a breath, looks away.]

Alright.

[He comes easy, slumps a little with hands soved into his pockets, leans against the doorframe. He is capable of deliberate asymmetry, but on some level he's very like the tree. His hair, his clothes, probably the arrangement of his pores are all interminably neat - hell, even the faint white scar spiderwebbed across the bridge of his nose and one cheek, apparently an aberration, is on closer inspection a perfect branching pattern, Pascal's shatterglass.]

[It's a wrench, for Iris, to try and look at Dillon and only see the uncertain human boy. Time and entropy exist in a tightly coiled symbiosis, and his disruption of it jangles her senses almost unbearably.]

Sweetheart.

[It's the equivalent of screwing her eyes shut, clenching her teeth and holding her breath, and there's so much of it that he still makes her skin crawl.

But side by side with that, there's a lost boy that she wants to hug breathless.

She doesn't. She's not entirely sure that getting that close might not make her retch or seize, and not entirely trustful of his limits either. But she does reach for his hand, and doesn't allow it to be reluctant.]

Come with me. She's got summat I want to show you.

[There are two timeships, now. There's a raw eggful of pure new singularity putting out its feelers in Iris' bedroom, and she has a feeling it'll find him interesting.]

Edited 2014-07-19 18:06 (UTC)

[Dillon is careful about touch the way that poison dart frogs are: without flinching, but also without slipping. When he was younger, when the power first started welling up in earnest inside him, something twisted and hungry latched itself onto his spirit. For over a year before it was purged, all of his influence was tilted toward destruction, toward unraveling the systems that lay so vulnerable to him, reaping the energy coiled in them for it to feed on. A perversion of his nature. His touch was dissolution then, and a thousand addled moments erasing his parents' faces like sand against seaglass.

The dangers are different now, subtler and broader, less immediately terrible and less relentlessly cumulative. But he still has the habit of it, the way of grinning and accepting, ducking into her space and ambling through it without touching anything at all.]

Your bus? Or something else?

[Iris is fiercely tactile, rarely able to keep her hands off anyone very long, but she doesn't push the issue with Dillon. It doesn't help that part of her remains relieved. It makes her ache to hug him more.]

Yes.

[She opens her cabin door, and they're there: Iris' bus, warm and wise and wondering, her mental touch reminiscent of one of Digby's decorous hand-licks.

She's visible, which is uncommon, and her doors are open. Inside, an apparently-living dodo peers out at Dillon, head cocked in perfect avian cranky curiosity.

(Dodo is a machine, a human-made machine designed to pull the warp and weft of reality into new patterns, and his shape - genuine, flesh and blood and beak - comes from his having turned his function whimsically on himself. He's part of the bus, knitted inextricably into her physical shell and her extradimensional realities.)

The dodo has made a nest of couch cushions, discarded lingerie and music and fashion magazines inside the bus' living compartment, and he sits defiantly on top of a blue-speckled egg that's larger than he is. This is the something else: it's plainly the same order of being as the bus, but new, raw, tenuous and unformed. It takes nearly all of its energy to keep itself contained and safe, but the remaining strand of its awareness positively vibrates with delight and curiosity. Dillon is a New Thing! It craves New Things with a passionate hunger that echoes itself in the bus and in Iris.]

I thought it'd like you.

Edited 2014-07-27 23:15 (UTC)

Whoa.

I, um. I like them too.

[He's staring, staring in a way that makes the energy that emanates from him pulse a little faster, a little stronger, pushing the universe to reveal itself to him event though everything is is seeing is so far removed from his experience, too far to interpret. It's like he's trying to read hieroglyphics in the dark with his fingertips when he knows neither ancient egyptian nor braille, and also they are painted rather than carved. He gets a faint idea anyway.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

8. Public + messages

[video]

[video]

[video]

[video]

[video]

[video]

[video]

Re: [video]

[video]

[spam]

[spam]

[spam]

[spam]