I used to think there was no future left at all

[takethatnature]

Who: Wilson P. Higgsbury
What: Last call for pre-endgame threads, open to backtags afterwards
When: January and early February, after the beacon launch and before Tiamat goes to the bridge
Where: Around the ship
Warnings: Pseudo-animal experimentation and death, general doom and gloom, anything else warned as it comes up

1. Let's go down the waterfall

By this point Wilson knows better than to antagonise Darcy or Max Maximum by using the good kitchen knives on things that aren't food, which is why he's using an axe to chop a small pink foam-rubber shoe in half. He has no idea how he'd go about knocking a living shoe unconscious, so the best he can do is make it quick. The shoe has been taped to a table and is doing its best to squirm out of its restraints as Wilson raises the axe.

After the killing blow has been delivered, he cuts the foam carcass into smaller pieces with his shaving razor, to see what he can learn from dissecting it.

2. Think about the good times and never look back, never look back

Wilson is tired of stepping in pastry filling when he goes in and out of the formal dining room to check for fresh meals. The jam gets right into his socks. Nobody else seems to have managed to get rid of Sheogorath's choice of replacement flooring, so Wilson's going to have to do it himself, putting together a pitchfork out of sticks and flints and digging into the crust. A four-foot-square jam turnover pops out of the floor and immediately shrinks to half its former size, which is still a considerable amount of pastry. The space it formerly occupied looks... pretty much how the floor of the ship normally looks, without even an indentation.

"Is this tile-y stuff the ship's equivalent of exposed rock or sand?" Wilson wonders out loud, ignoring the turnover for now.

3. What would I do? What would I do if I did not have you? (Closed to Maxwell)

Wilson knocks on the door of Cabin 117. He's holding a mug of hot spiced eggnog; the mug was the least corny one he could find in Bric A Brac and just says "boat" on it in a comic-strip-style rounded font, the eggnog produced through hard-won, slightly out-of-season knowledge. When Maxwell opens the door, he shoves it at him - not roughly enough to spill it - and says, "This is your bribe to shut up and hear me out."

The thing about those caliginous romance novels Karkat gave him is that he was too preoccupied with the absolute pandemonium of Lieutenant Tayrey's beacon launch to actually read them right away, but eventually he needed a distraction from his anxieties. They've certainly proved to be that, even with the learning curve of deciphering the jumble of obscure English words and insufficiently translated Alternian words to figure out what's even being described.

4. Have ourselves a good time, it's nothing at all

Wildcard. Find me on Discord or Plurk.