come_sailaway | A Being of Duality (OTA)

Entry tags:

A Being of Duality (OTA)

Who: Sheogorath and YOU!
What: Life on the ship, feeling the fallout of the past month, one for being generally aware of the emotional aura of the ship in the aftermath of Valdis' murder
When: October 1st onward
Where: Various
Warnings: Discussions of murder; likely discussions of grief, depression, violence; reflection on loss of memory/identity; overall a darker tone to start the month (though there is one light one in here)

My Future Seems Like One Big Past [various, stern of ship]

It seems like the stern is the part of the ship he reserves for the emotions that are too big for him to keep inside his skin. Though perhaps that's not entirely a correct assessment, as he's keeping to a humanoid form as he scratches images of birds into the deck with the sharpened end of a pool net handle. Every so often, he stops, looks up at the sky, and shakes his head.

Its one of those days where he can feel another god's skin inside his own... or perhaps outside of him, and he's the one crawling around in the dead skin. Memories and feelings that aren't his hammer at the mausoleum door like a throng of the dead, driven single-mindedly to escape and feed. But Sheogorath is nothing if not a well-constructed prison for such things.

They rattle the bars and claw at the doors but the only thing that slips through is a wistful thought and a craving for emotional catharsis.

"Tell me," he asks, out of the blue, "Does it ever rain, here? Does the wind ever howl, of its own accord?"

It's the Only Thing That Slowly Stops the Ache [various, response to Valdis' murder]

He notices the change in the mood on board, but he doesn't know why. The anger, the grief, the pain, all of that reaches him through the filter of madness; loss of control, overwhelming emotional, seeing red or white or flashing lights.

The question arises: does he help to cultivate those emotions, or does he treat them? Certainly, he has the power to do both. In the short term, it would be kinder to ease their pain, but what had that Being of Order said? The ship runs on misery, runs on pain, runs on hurt. He was almost definitely summoned here for those purposes. Would it be better, to unleash one great and terrible burst of pain, one that could sustain the ship for a long time, and feed his Sphere as well?

Perhaps the mindset of the next person he speaks to will sway him, one way or the other.

Leave Me All In Pieces [Outside Stellar]

With all the chaos on board, it becomes better for him to be many things. He settles into a fungal grotto outside his usual place, in the entryway of the Stellar. More fruiting bodies are sprouting from him than is typical, each one like a tiny ear and a tiny brain, processing the ambient chaos. That isn't to say he won't form a mouth and try to converse with someone if they come closer.

Put Me Back Together [The Laundry Room]
As much as it's nice to have all this ~~free real estate~~ madness floating around, it almost makes him start to feel uncomfortable, like when you get sweaty and bloated after eating a meal that's way to big and way too rich. The solution?
Cat's going for a ride in the washing machine to get himself cleaned up.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

It's going to be hard for anyone in the facilities not to notice the sound or the smell of hot, wet cat.

Sheo doesn't care though, he's having a great ride.

Tell Me Reality is Better Than the Dream [Promenade]

At some point, Sheogorath has managed to set up an entire tea party in the middle of the Promenade, long tables made by pushing together shorter ones and covering them with a tablecloth. The tables are laden with everything he deigned to scrounge up from the shops and the restaurants. He's sitting at the end of the table, leaning back in the most ostentatious chair he can find, with his feet up on the table.

If, at some point, you decide to sit down and join him, he'll greet you with, "Good mornoonafterneevening. I'm not sure whether to pour you tea or cut you apart! Which shall it be? Cake or death?"

I Guess I'll Save the Best for Last [Wildcard]

(Despite the gloomy tone of these, I'm absolutely up for silliness and cosmic weirdness, reading the recap of the Valdis incident has just put me in a mood. HMU on Discord- you know who you are ;) )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"No idea who that is," Ava figures it's more of a twisting of her comment than anything significant though.

"My appetite? Food here is fake anyway," Ava says with no delicacy that she would typically give the subject. Some people are better off not knowing.

"And pointless death comes with consequences I rather not deal with." She's avoided the tax so far, but she's heard from others that they don't always wake up quite the same.

"Did you never have an imaginary tea party as a child? Not even once? Sometimes fake food is the best food, if you really talk yourself into it!" His tail swishes, leaving hairs on the leg of her pants that persist across quantum states.

She has tea parties on a regular basis, thanks, but she's not in a mood to share that information when her distrust of this shapeshifter spikes sharply.

"My childhood involved very little whimsy or make believe," she responds instead. "But reality is merely a suggestion, so the novelty of- hey, stop that." She reaches down to brush at the fur clinging to her sweatpants.

"Little whimsy? Little make-believe? That's terrible! Oh, but you still turned out just fine, it seems, what with you not putting much stock in reality."

He pauses, flicking her pants leg with a few more hairs.

"But you do choose an interesting reality for yourself then, don't you, Agent Starr?"

Edited 2023-10-03 22:54 (UTC)

The hairs are getting annoying, tickling intrusively at the corner of her awareness. Especially since they continue to cling despite her efforts to brush them off.

"Existing as a theoretical quantum anomaly does that to a-"

She pauses. Fists clench and shadows leak out between her fingers. Him knowing to call her that. The emphasis he uses to address her when she hasn't given him a name at all. "And what exactly do you mean by that?"

"I mean whatever it means in your head. Which is quite a lot of things. Crawling, scampering things, bumping into one another, rubbing against each other, tearing one another apart into fractals and swirls." His voice grows more and more layered, a three-dimensional expression of sinusoids made auditory.

Ava spends a lot of time observing others, deconstructing behaviors into predictable patterns. What they're motivated by, threatened by... but she's never experienced inside of anyone else's mind (yet) to truly understand how they operate. So fundamentally different from her own intricate tangle. So his description of the inside of her head doesn't feel specifically personal. At first. Like he's describing any given troubled person's way of thinking.

But the fractals splinter and crack violently in warning as she realizes the intrusion, the swirls dissipating into formless static that engulfs the landscape of her mind. Color drains until all that's left is shadowy black on glitching white. And the deafening buzz of thousands of bees ready to protect the hive.

"You don't want to play mind games with me."

"Doesn't matter if I want to. You're already playing yourself- I'm just along for the ride. And what a ride it is! What a mind it is! Most mortals stick to two or three dimensions at once, but in here, OH, in here I'm riding on at least five! And they're all crashing into one another and buzzing from a lack of sleep. And it's exhausting and it's exhilarating and you wouldn't have it any other way, would you, dear?" He purrs.

Maybe her mind has fractured into so many jagged planes to cope with the erratic splitting of her physical form, transitioning from one possibility to the exponential next her brain has to process that much more information. Maybe being raised on quantum theoreticals from too young of an age never allowed her to develop a good grip on reality, so there's no solid basis. Being isolated from the outside world and society, only exposed to coercion and manipulation tactics by her captors... her mind became her entire world, her only safe haven as her body itself deteriorated. And her greatest weapon. The reason why she flourishes here while others rot away into nothing.

No. She wouldn't have it any differently. Even if she would like better sleep...

"Oh. You want a ride?" Ava challenges. She's stopped in her tracks, reaching down to scoop the cat up if it allows. There's no intended physical threat.

"I rather would, yes! Where are we going? What theories are we following today? My, my, I was quite wrong when I said you must not be hungry, you're just on a steady diet of ideas!" He allows himself to be scooped up. He's incredibly soft, following her from one flickering possibility to another.

"Down the rabbit hole," she responds in a whisper before dropping right through the floor. Except a ghost of her lags standing behind without having fallen at all, flickering with instability as the possibilities further diverge with each deck she passes through. Petting the cat idly.

Until she reaches the final deck 0. A possibility of herself catches them before they fall through, landing with that superhero ease and holding the cat to her chest so it doesn't go flying.

Her final instance crashes into the water half a second later, transforming into an octopus that wraps tentacles around him.

"Pick one," Ava's mind communicates across all three moments. She can only hold this for a brief second before she has to merge back into a singularity.

The second one. Purring, purring, purring.

"My hero!" he'll cry dramatically, his little kitty heart pounding.

Her mind rapidly collapses and compresses like an accordion back into the limited space occupied by her body on the lower deck. She grunts slightly as the landing becomes solid and real, and she blinks rapidly as her vision readjusts to one field. Afterimages still spark behind her eyes.

"Not a hero."

"My not-murderer!" he correct himself, still purring.

She lets out an amused huff despite herself, lifting the cat to stare him in the eyes, unblinking. She's pretty sure most anyone else would have puked up on her after that, but he did imply he wasn't mortal. But he's hardly unique in that. Most of the ship's population is some sort of impossibly powerful being that she stands no chance against.

The shadows flourish in that insecurity, of being too weak. She refuses to allow him to read it from her mind, obscuring it under layers of complex algorithms.

Ava boops the cat on the nose. "So what's your deal. Why cake. Why death."

He licks his lips as he's stared at, luminous purple eyes sparkling with a hint of gold. Or perhaps they're gold eyes, sparkling with a bit of purple? Or perhaps they're misted over with a pale haze of starlight, blind and staring out into infinity.

"Why not cake? Why not death? Cake is cake, death is death. Sometimes a spoon is just a spoon. But if you must know, it's a question I heard a mortal pose before, and I found it funny. And when you think about it, aren't cake and death basically the same thing around here?"

"Only if you're Siffleur."

"Really? I'd think it's true for quite a few of us, if I'm to understand the anxieties of this place correctly- which, isn't to say I do. Self-understanding takes time and patience, both of which are in inconsistent supply for me! But I'd be curious to know why you think cake and death are different things here. Or we can just sit here, a hair's bread away from drowning or being eaten by soggy hot dogs." That wasn't a typo, by the way. He did actually say "hair's bread."

Something doesn't sound quite right about hair in bread, her nose wrinkling slightly. But it reminds her of the cat fur still clinging to her clothes, and she drops him back on the floor to try brushing off again.

"Death is a temporary experience that we suffer, some of us willingly. To provide heightened emotions as fuel to continue powering our existence upon the ship. Cake is simply one of the many byproducts of the power provided, a small unnecessary indulgence that helps us enjoy the fleeting moments we have left."

"Right, so if death makes power and cake is made from power, isn't cake just death when you really think about it? Or is this one of those logicks that only goes one way? 'All cake is power and all death is power but not all cake is death?' Eeugh, I don't like how much that statement doesn't taste like cake, I'm sure ol' Jyggy would love it..."

"Only if you're being deliberately conceptually reductive. Connected through an energy cycle, yes. But made from is not the same as the same as." And she doesn't like the wording of that statement either. But it doesn't taste like anything, luckily.

"Hm. What do ye think about that, by the way? Generating heightened emotions? Existing?"

"I was doing it for free before."

"Really? How surprising! Most mortals aren't so lucky."

His form ripples a little, and when he speaks again, it's with a different voice. Cold, restrained, professional.

"But was it really so free, Agent Starr?"

"Don't recall them ever paying me."

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