SPACETRAVEL's Serial Thing

Should have written that at work not 3 hours into sleepy tuefel time.

Tama and Dingoes.

Return of the Living Thread in order?

edited 3rd May '11 11:45:18 PM by Lugdunum

Thread was a zombie ever since it began, man.

"What would you do if you could meet yourself?" is a question that has been asked many times, to many different answers. Some people would give themselves advice. Some would have a lighter chat, and others would punch themselves in the face. Of course some answer selfcest. Apparently, Lyon's answer is that he would troll himself.

The real Lyon listened through his speakers for his counterpart. “Let me warn you two,” he said to Lux and Amanda. “This guy is a fucking asshole.”

It took a moment; he turned them up just in time to hear the simulated Lyon's greeting: “Hello again, my previous phase of evolution.”

“You're confusing Amanda,” said the real Lyon, unimpressed. He rose his voice over Lux and Amanda, who had collapsed onto each other with laughter. “You're going to make her head explode—the real one, not one of your shiny copies. Legitimate manslaughter. All your fault.”

“Well, tell her to invest in a very tight hat, because I must condescend to talk to you flesh beings.”

“I'm serious, though. If we're going to be corresponding day and night like sweethearts, we're going to have to call each other different things,” said the real Lyon. “Don't tell me you haven't earned any nicknames from going around being an ass to everyone.”

“None. But how about we can call you 'Junior'?”

“You're supposed to admin a city, and you thought that would work? I can't wait to see your Iosethep and how you drew it all in a paint program and voice everyone in Iosethep yourself, you stick person with a big, stupid line for a mouth.” The real Lyon paused to inhale. “How is we don't make any sweeping changes—maybe, one of us stays Hans, and the other is Hans Prime. Like the languages.”

“Ah—yeah, like those. I'll be Prime.”

“No, I will because I was alive first,” the real Lyon insisted. “Not that you were ever alive at all.”

“You said like the languages, right? Then Oceanic Prime actually came into being second. Like me. And it's also the badass one.”

“Also the one impossible to understand. Fine; have it, Mister Prime. Just tell me what else you want from me,” said Lyon, who no longer needed be distinguished by the substance of his skin. “Tell me if you're not just here to bother us.”

“I am here because I know you,” Lyon Prime drawled smugly. His voice dimmed a bit as he leaned back from his microphone. “It is my guess that, at about this point, you have several times toyed with the idea of tossing the Langley kid out of several doors and windows in varying states of incapacitation.”

“Lies.”

“If I wasn't omniscient, he'd make me uneasy, too, I'll admit.”

“Wait, you mean...so, he can go?”

Amanda held Lux tighter and smiled like she would traumatize Lyon with a hundred dead kangaroo heads if he even thought about it. Lux was not worried. He heard faint laugher behind Lyon Prime's voice over the line. Maybe they were holding this chat from inside the column. Or maybe...somehow, Aubrey was with Lyon Prime. No feeling of endangerment could make it to Lux through that voice. Sure, the real thing could, but he felt fine.

“Oh, no,” said Lyon Prime. “Kid has had enough stress, and he's used to thinking that anyone outside his skyscraper would kill him on sight if they got the chance. Look here, Junior—you are stuck with him. I have eyes in your entire house, and if you don't help Lux out, we will know.”

Lyon's face went teal. “Nobody should be able to break into that shit except for me! TAKE THEM DOWN.”

“Except for you. Wow, you've got some issues, the way you keep forgetting that, if you take the god mode away, the guy you're talking to is yourself. Is that how hard you wish you weren't me? I can't truly feel anything in response to that, but I can simulate being insulted pretty well.”

Lyon steered the subject away in a grave tone. “Hey, Primey-wimey, what do you think you can do to me if you see me doing something you don't like? Like hacking into your house like you did to mine and blowing up your computer?"

“I think that if you do that, I'm going to die laughing and then god mode up a new one. But if you turn away the kid, you're going to make Aubrey here cry. I've never seen someone so worried about the kid of the bitch who murdered him in another timeline.”

That was all Lyon needed to hear. All thoughts of getting rid of Lux, even though he would never have carried them out anyway, permanently sunk. “He's still with you...? I mean, you mean you weren't just saying he was a while ago to push me around?”

“In fact, sheesh—he's already crying. From laughing at my comedic genius.” Lyon Prime's voice faded briefly as he turned away from his microphone and addressed Aubrey. “Still...? Gods, seriously. You are way too easily amused...” He faded back. “I opened another line. Give Lux a microphone and let Aubrey talk to him before I kill him this way.”

Lyon tossed a microphone over his shoulder in what he hoped was Lux's direction; he didn't look. He heard it skid across the floor. “That isn't funny.” Lyon's teal cheeks went greener.

“I believe Aubrey can decide that, and he was the one to speak to me lightly about his, er, condition first—his way of saying he didn't like to see me green in the face over it. Being dead; he's pretty cool about it.”

“Huh...and about you. And you with him, considering...”

“He isn't the Aubrey we did anything to—he swears it,” declared Lyon Prime. “I know it's hard to accept. It was for me, too, but if I want to be able to help him—the closest I can ever get to making it up to the guy I helped kill—I have to keep believing him. I have to so that I don't turn into a useless puddle, which would be a shame when Ghostie just wants to be friends. With me. I know; what the fuck? But though I may have created the column, he's the one who knows what living in it does to a guy. I believe him.”

“You know I never knew him myself...” The Lyons sounded like different people in this moment, with Lyon's voice having gone so uncharacteristically demure and Lyon Prime's remaining at its level sneer. “If you two are all joined at the hip now, you kind of know what he's like, right? What kind of guy did we kill?”

“The hilarious kind,” answered Lyon Prime. “You know what he looks and sounds like right? At least how he's the designated muscle of the Londons' little midnight crew? The way people shit themselves when they see him? I'm not really feeling it. At least not after watching him panic the whole way here when he remembered that the kid would have to cross a couple of streets to get to your house. If only they knew the true horrors...of him being a mass of nervous daddy instincts. You'd think he was dealing with Demetrius instead of some Langley. He's not so scary when you don't count trying to break the universe. I like him.”

“So, it follows that I would have, too, if we'd met...”

“That breath wasn't worth much anyway, was it, Mister Obvious?”

“Die in a fake computer fire.”

Entire update of Lyon talking to himself. This serial has just done a sweet, twirling midair backflip over the shark. Olympic gymnast material here.

edited 4th May '11 2:11:49 AM by SPACETRAVEL

And the Illinois Judge gives it a 8.0 for degree of difficulty, 9.4 for artistic merit and a 9.8 for technical execution.

I don't know why, but I love the idea of someone talking to themselves, especially a snarky someone. This was no exception.

...I wrote a story where I was doing that to myself. I think maybe it was therapeutic. Or something.

Maybe it was just weird.

edited 4th May '11 10:07:24 PM by deathjavu

It is one way of exploring someone's internal thoughts without doing a big, dialogue/action-free update of them just thinking.

Would it be a big deal if I changed to posting updates once a week? Not as in only one update per week, but posting all I work I've done in a week on a single day, whether it is enough for one or more posts.

As I'm used to writing being a more private thing, my feelings about doing it for myself are pretty constant, while those about doing it for an audience can vary pretty widely. It would be pretty rude at this point to just go "lol, not posting it anymore", and yet obliging myself to post immediately after writing a section has become a bit draining and has sort of taken away from how personal writing is for me usually. Doing that has made me feel too much like it's a performance I am firstly putting on for others, and while your reading really does mean a lot, energy to write has to come from within, too—and the balance is kind of tipped against that energy currently. So I think compromising and letting sections have a week alone with me before posting might help me identify with them better again, if it isn't too much trouble. Apologies if this is kind of a selfish idea.

edited 8th May '11 11:04:24 AM by SPACETRAVEL

I wouldn't mind. Whatever works best for you. You're the one doing the heavy lifting here; the readers are just along for the ride. And RLACF: Real Life Always Comes First.

edited 8th May '11 12:03:05 PM by Madrugada

Updates will be Fridays, then.

Or a few minutes into Saturday.

Lyon turned down his sound and listened to see if Lux had found the microphone and got the old plastic headset on right.

He did not turn the sound back up to quite the same volume again. Lux had more than reached Aubrey—he was telling Aubrey everything that Lyon had needed to know from the start. He told Aubrey about things that made Lyon forget about talking to Lyon Prime. About the strange Ginger lady and how all Kenichi had ever wanted to do was help. How Kenichi's skin was rapidly changing color, he had grown a third eyelid that made him look terrifying, and his legs had filled with water (though they had been looking better when Lux had departed). And how just light had driven him manic enough to almost kill gentle Oros, and then he had broken down swearing that he had not wanted to.

Lyon twitched at Oros's name. He had never actually spoken to the duke more than once, but he had always sympathized with the awkward man. He knew that awkwardness in himself, but the difference between them was that Lyon covered the awkwardness up with insincerity. Oros did not know how to cover things. He did not understand the first thing about it.

That time Lyon had spoken to him, he had watched Oro's posture condense and his eyes get wider as he listened. Wider until Oros finally said the first words he had spoken in the entire conversation: “I...have to go.” He had then left the building, and maybe left Cedille. Lyon never saw him again except from a distance; spotting Lyon now seemed to make him disappear.

Lyon had been surprised when he left, not calling for him to return, but just going still in the air over his projector for a moment, trying to make sense of it. He had just scared off the guy who recently had drawn the awe of all outside the west for clearing his cellar of a swarm of bear-sized, toxic slime-spitting bats. Then it occurred to him—Oros had just taken him seriously.

“Come back...” Lyon had spoken ineffectively. Oros was too far away for him to hear. Please—I didn't mean I would really replace Vox Langley's drink with bat slime...it would be too much work! I don't actually think you're a vampire, either! And I was saying that like it would be cool...!

The west did things to a person—that day, Lyon started believing it.

Oros was near the top of Lyon's list of people who needed a hug, but if he ever actually got one, his overlarge heart would probably stop from the panic. That was like a lot of people Lyon took to.

So Lyon's cover started falling as he listened to Lux.

Lux spilled to Aubrey how he had given Nitya the word to stun his friend to stop him from screaming more abuse at an already exhausted Demetrius.

Wait—what? Nitya and Demetrius were with Lux. The two least likely parties in Iosethep. That plunged Lyon back into doubt until he heard that Demetrius had fallen asleep a second after, with his earpiece on. Lyon knew only two things about Demetrius, both secondhand from Amanda. The first was that Demetrius liked the shape of Lyon's nose, a lot. The second was that the boy fell most suddenly into his narcoleptic fits when he was under stress. Lyon started believing Lux again just in time for his cover to be ripped the rest of the way off.

“Of course—I know I can't ever really kiss him,” whispered Lux, “but it would be good enough right now to just see him awake for more than a bloody hour at a time. He must feel like he's having surgery again, many times in a row—I did for my teeth once, and I didn't know what was a dream.”

Lux was watching his first crush turn into a cryptozoological semi-humanoid. Lyon returned half of his attention to his computer and opened up the written innards of Kenichi's augments, poising it to unlock them. There was something in his throat, and listening was irritating his eyes somehow. Maybe if he unlocked Kenichi, he would get his voice back. Then he would use it to tear up Prime for stalling him and taking this lightly. If Demetrius trusted Lux...Lux had needed a break so badly.

“I'm sorry,” said Lux, his voice returned to normal. “It's rude for me to go on and on. What did you want to speak to me about? You sounded worried to me.” He waited a second. “Are you still there?” He fiddled with the microphone's knobs and sliders a bit. “Oh—I said, what did you want to speak to me about?”

edited 14th May '11 1:08:08 AM by SPACETRAVEL

Lyon then, faintly but definitely, heard Aubrey through Lux's turned up headset. It chilled him.

“Anything,” Aubrey said breathlessly, “in the world, as long as you are alive and speaking. I just had to know that you were all right—I—I told you to see the baron and never remembered that you would have to run through districts to get there. After all you say you'd been through before...I'm sorry you had no warning. I don't know what possessed me—“

Lux stopped him. “Maybe not having left your building for fourteen years. I haven't, either, and I never gave a thought to the crowds until I saw the main road.”

“If I could have been there to walk you through...”

“Honestly? When I was leaving, I did wish you were. It's okay; I'm alive.”

“You do know I wouldn't have been of any protection, just a hologram on your side.”

“Shut up; you could have shown me around.” Lux smiled, with his whole face. His eyes smiled the most. “I'm relieved to hear you still alive, too.” At this point, Amanda concluded that this was not going to get any less long winded and stood to excuse herself, setting Lux's feet down. Lux stayed lying down, letting her set them wherever. How far he had run outside was catching up to him late. Long since having caught his breath, his body was slowing down even further. Having eaten so much only compounded it. The combined influences of his exhaustion and Amanda had turned him, functionally, into a talking rag doll.

I can do this, thought Lyon. He's not the same Aubrey. Just has the same voice. I can...one. Two. Three.

Lyon tipped back his chair and borrowed Lux's microphone.

Lux was startled. “Hey—” And then was quieted when Amanda rubbed his swollen stomach once as she passed. His eyelids felt immediately heavier. So sleepy...

Lyon held the microphone far too close to his mouth, probably getting spit on it. Ew. “Aubrey—it's me, the less annoying Hans. You've got to tell me how you work with that kid—he wouldn't explain anything to me. He was so fucking difficult with me that I thought he was an eldritch horror!”

Lyon could hear Aubrey's smile in his softly amused tone. “You don't like eldritch horrors...?” He otherwise didn't have an answer.

Those were all the words Lyon could get out to Aubrey. Hearing him speak so nicely, with no regard for who Lyon was, disturbed him. He handed the microphone back to Lux rather than let himself stammer while Aubrey waited. “Sorry, kid,” he said to Lux, triggering his little drill into Kenichi's augments. The onscreen text blurred as new lines appeared on it at a speed only a computer could read. “We're on our way through to Kenichi's bots. Sorry for taking so long—so long that I needed pestering.” He knocked on his computer's inset microphone, hoping to hurt Lyon Prime's ears, then saw the relief on Lux's face, which made him want to kick himself for not starting the program sooner.

“One moment...” Lux muttered into the microphone's mouthpiece without putting the whole thing on, then spoke to Lyon. “How long will—”

Lyon stopped him with a hand in the air. “Hold on...” he paused for about ten seconds, then looked back at the screen. “Oh, damn.”

“What? It looks like it's still going.”

“That's the problem.” Lyon glared at the screen. “It usually takes no more than ten seconds to get access. Once it takes more, you know it could be a long wait.”

“Kenichi will have to leave forever if the bots finish. I have time.”

Lyon wasn't so sure. By a long wait, he meant it could be hours, or in rare cases, like the one in the corner, years. He wondered, would the world's shadiest augments dealer know Oceanic Prime? He didn't want Lux's face to change, so he did not vocalize that thought. Instead, he opened a desk drawer and took out a half finished bottle of some unidentifiable alcohol—he had peeled the label off at some point, something he did near compulsively with all bottles. He took a sip from it and set it next to his keyboard.

An inaudible whisper came through Lux's microphone, Aubrey speaking from a distance. Lux turned the volume all the way up so that he would not have to put it on again. The outdated plastic hurt his ears.

“...Lux?” Aubrey said. “Have you been through the library yet with the list? If there has been time.”

“No,” Lux responded, taking the printed list from his pocket. “I ran here almost as soon as I woke up, but I did print it last night.” He didn't mention that he had only used call numbers once, when he was about four years old. He had since forgotten how.

Lyon Prime exclaimed, “The hell? That was what you gave him, a list of passages to find? That's not fast enough when Sword Guy is probably half green by now! Sorry, Lux—our friend has this antiquity fetish.”

Lux nodded. “He has a point...our library is poorly organized. A lot of the books are out of order, or not even on the library floor. It would be quick enough in a library of any quality, but our library is really a scattered entity through the skyscraper.”

Said Lyon Prime, “We have a copy.”

“Of which books?”

“Of the skyscraper. Ever wanted to search a building?”

“I spend all my time wandering around floors for no—”

Lyon Prime meant his usual definition of the word. “I mean Function-F keys, and then a list pops up of where your shit is.”

“Have I ever.” Lux's interest was piqued enough for him to stand and lean over Lyon's desk. The whirring text of Kenichi's program tried to steal his eyes; it was hypnotic.

Lyon took another drink. He would need a few more than that to follow Prime now. “Primey, can you Function-F your mom?”

Lyon Prime shook his head in pity. “Tsk, tsk. Still forgetting who I am. What a head case.”

Aubrey squinted a little as he tried to incorporate that into his mental universe. It wasn't fitting very well. He asked Lyon Prime, “Was I always able to do the...search-y thing?” Back when he still had a dependable lifespan, he could have used it a couple hundred times daily, including to help Lux with this very thing.

“Never,” Lyon Prime answered. “That power is for deities only. Man was not meant to know where your keys are. You'd go mad, my boy. Or Ginger would just deem you too powerful and twist your memory back a few weeks.” He spoke to Lux again. “I can do that, and I can print the passages for you for while you're waiting for Kenichi to be fixed.”

Aubrey asked, “Will you need the list from me?” His face had brightened, as much as it was possible for it to do so in its shadowed form. He was inwardly delighted by the mental image of his keys lying in some non-euclidean cosmic hell.

“The twisted up list in your pocket?”

“Yes...” Aubrey had never taken it out of his pocket. He had never shown Lyon Prime anything in any of his pockets. Whether the admin could Function-F his mom was still up in the air, but he could search someone. Aubrey would never say so, but that was kind of hot.

“Then no; I've scanned it in already. Stand back from his printer, Lux. Unlike mine, Junior's is ruined scrap metal painted like a printer. He messed with it so that it would print way too fast, and now it's a bit violent.”

One of Lyon Prime's screens littered itself with images of scanned book passages. Then at his keystroke, a sound just a little softer than a cannon shot sounded over Aubrey's earpiece, which Lyon Prime had converted into a microphone to reach Lux with a slightly painful use of his powers. The sound was followed by the softer thud of Lux falling to the floor under a pile of inked papers.

Aubrey clutched his head, ear ringing. “Gentle...”

Lyon Prime just laughed wickedly.

edited 14th May '11 2:10:36 AM by SPACETRAVEL

The weave has gotten very intricate. Who knows what about whom and how? And I'm intrigued by a weapons-grade printer...

The Friday rule may be broken for special occasions such as cliffhangers too good to bury.

But what comes before may be a tremendous drag to read. I probably should have introduced at least the first of these tales earlier on, considering how much they mean. And I'll just say that, for now, the really horrible bit is supposed to be horrible because that's how Lux actually felt thinking about it.

At first, the documents Lux read seemed to be a compilation to demonstrate how warped the Langleys were. What was Aubrey trying to show him, something he already knew? Lux doubted he would dig all of these up just to make a punishing statement about the Langleys and then claim that they would be enlightening. Aside from not being real, Aubrey's horror at discovering the column's purpose and his concern for Lux had felt too real.

After that was all he got out of his first, quick scan of the pages, Lux reorganized them and started from the story of the earliest Langley—the first to mentally diverge from the rest.

It had happened in the seventeenth century, and it had not been his fault.

Continents away, before the mother country had yet extended its reach into the south Pacific, Hadrian Langley was one of several sons in the archduke's large and very kindly family. They passed out gold to the poor by the bucketful. They planted flowers all around their city and beautified it by supporting the artists' guilds. They took in stray puppies off the streets. They gave their aid to the sick when the Plague hit. They gave their evenings to read bedtime stories to Plague-ridden children. They opened up a wing of their palace to house the infirm when the city's hospitals overflowed with Plague victims. They all quickly died of the Plague. Except for Hadrian.

Hadrian never got close enough to the Plague to contact it, despite the palace's conscious place in the center of the epidemic. He did not like to leave the house, and did not like to leave his room if he could help it. When his family died, he saw fit to lock himself in the latter until he perished with them. He missed them, and he had no patience left for waiting to find out if he could join them on the other side. His fearful reclusiveness had reduced his capacity to contribute to many of his family's good deeds—he could not plant flowers from his window or make money without walking out the door. They certainly were alive again in the beyond, but Hadrian was not so sure about himself. He was desperate to know, right then, if Nux the ferryman wanted to drown him with the bad or let him see his brothers and sisters again.

Just not desperate enough, because when a strange lady pirate broke into his boarded up room, she was able to bring him out. He was the last of his family left, she said, a good family that shouldn't die. And so she coaxed the impossible Hadrian Langley out of his home and onto her ship with nothing but words. And some alcohol. Actually, quite a bit more alcohol than that. And maybe some ropes and blindfolds.

She and her crew took him far away, as they were convinced that the only thing the Plague could not reach was an island. He spent the duration of the trip in the lowest, drippiest, darkest, most rotted storage unit of the ship, sitting across from his similarly confined rescuer. They were locked down there as a form of quarantine, as she had recklessly run into the mainland's haze of Plague to steal him.

For months, the most Hadrian saw of anyone but her was a finger slipping them food under the door. He did not see sunlight or anything to mark the passage of time—the only thing he had to rely on for a clock was her, and she was the worst clock in the world.

She did not sleep at all, confusing his internal clock, and yet the dark and the isolation never wore on her. Up to the last day of the voyage, she was singing all day with the same energy she had had on the first. Midway there, listening to her while he tried to sleep, Hadrian began to wonder whether it had not been as long as he thought, that maybe his fatigue was the product of some time-stretching hallucination of his.

One time, he shared a long kiss with her, and when it was done, noticed a stack by the door of three days' worth of full plates of food. While she did not appear to give it any notice, he panicked. If he had ever had a correct sense of time, it was gone now. She had never given him her name, and he was no longer fazed by how long he had gone without knowing it.

Then one day, he woke up on dry land—very dry and hostile land, miles inland with no sea and no ship in sight. He would never see his rescuer or any of her crew again.

His only countrymen on the island continent he would be dumped on were poor colonists who would be humored by the sudden appearance of a noble of their own. Particularly because of his awe and screaming horror toward the twenty-four hour diurnal cycle. He described his pirates and their ship to him, asking if they had ever seen them, but they never had, not one of them.

If his descent into madness had begun on the ship, his new home was a great place to finish it. While he never saw the pirates he had met again, he sometimes saw their ship around corners on the beach, sometimes perched still on the horizon, seeming to watch him from afar. However, by the time he had run and dragged a colonist back to see it, it would always be gone. He had reason to wonder if he imagined the ship, as he had never experienced a desert before nor learned how to live in one, and sometimes the temperatures here pushed him to hallucinations—in fact, he invented the myth of the desert's Green Man this way. Living in the colonists' bare tents did not help. And the fauna was all different here from that he had known in the mother country, and it all seemed to be more poisonous. He spent the rest of his life running from snakes, dogs, and insects, and watching the trees for even larger and more hostile creatures. Most of those creatures were, granted, fictional and invented by his colonist caretakers just to scare him, but he never knew.

His sense of time never quite recovered. Sometimes it would try to, but then it would be knocked back down by his dreams. He would dream of his unnamed rescuer, of being in the ship's quarantine with her and enduring her unchanging oddities. These dreams would last one night to the desert sun outside, but inside his head, they were hundreds of years each.

His reclusiveness back at home, though many perfectly healthy people prefer to be alone, had been a sign of his mind's vulnerability, and eventually, his new residence exploited it to hell and back. He married the only south Oceanic woman genetically insane enough to stay with him for any length of time, and the union produced children who would all marry one another because the colonists were “gross”. The Langley family grew again, but not not into the same thing as before.

Not that the children did not try to escape their fate. Some of them tried to leave the island, blaming their bleak family on the heat. None of them succeeded—their ships all sunk before any could get more than a few miles out to sea, sunk by cannonfire from a decaying vessel that always disappeared before anyone else cold see blah blah blah blah surely Aubrey wouldn't care if I skipped the rest of just this one.

Back in the present, Lux skimmed all of the above after seeing the title and rolling his eyes. He already knew this tale, though maybe not in quite the detail it was printed in here. It was a story held up as an example of why not to play destiny—because you are not as good as destiny, and the details you overlook might collapse your plans for something you thought would be magnificent. Magnificent like those seafarers had thought they could make the Langleys, as a reward for their kindness or something. Figureheads of the future commonwealth, ha; that had turned out great. Lux resented his entire family line being the product of either the grandiose stupidity of a few criminals, a lame fable, or both.

As it turned out, so that Lux would remember it as he read through the rest. Aubrey was nowhere near as fine working with words as he was with imagery, and his skills at composing a thing translated shakily from one to another, but he had succeeded at organizing these passages, roughly, like a single story instead of fragments. As Lux read each bit, he could not help but recall what came before, because they were clearly all supposed to be the same thing.

As Lux read on, he began to suspect that Aubrey was trying to tell him that the Langleys were still being forced by fate—or by someone playing it—to go on as the continent's archdukes. Lux slowly began to gather a respect for his ancestors that he had never had before. Not a total respect, because they were still all very unpleasant and ineffective, but a respect for how they never gave up wanting out. Hadrian's intermarrying children and their doomed ships had started a tradition.

In the eighteenth century, reckless Marius Langley joined an expedition to the Polar Holes to escape a marriage arrangement with a cousin suffering much worse from the Langleys' now characteristic mental malaise. At the time, the earth was thought to be hollow on the inside, with an entrance—a Polar Hole—at either ice cap. Marius and the other explorers planned to descend into the hole in the south pole and explore what lay beneath, wondering who and what. The south seas were a stormy, watery graveyard, and Marius's men were not expected to return, but he was ready to face the narrow odds for the chance to distinguish his family with something better than the chaos they were known for.

The week before departure, however, an anonymous stack of documents was dropped on the desk of several great names in science, and those documents debunked the Polar Holes. The expedition was called off, and Marius had no time to enact a backup plan before the wedding date. Whoever wanted the Langleys to live so badly, the resulting child did not live a life that would have pleased them.

There was Tertia Langley from the nineteenth century, an only child who took it upon herself to produce no children and end the family that had soured itself for her through her dysfunctional parents. She left Iosethep and obtained a miniature palace in the desert, the only one for miles. She took a few servants with her and lived there in peace for three years before it was burned to the ground—arson, with the perpetrator having covered their tracks perfectly, leaving not even a footprint. She was the only survivor. Upon returning to Iosethep, she found her parents unwilling to let her back into the skyscraper until they died as punishment for her abandoning them, and no living space in the city would take her except for some filthy Ring District apartments. She spent years covered in bedbug bites and being shunned by her neighbors.

Eventually, she gave up her old vow because one person finally let her cling to them, and they had a child. Not a very capable child.

The next century, Luce Langley was born, a startlingly intelligent child who wanted to use his talents to begin building a nuclear doomsday weapon. He never gave his reasons why, but he would accept no less from his device than the ability to destroy at least an entire small continent, and by now, Lux could guess which continent and who he wanted dead. Up until he was sixteen years old, his work went perfectly. He attracted the attention of newspapers and of politicians who hoped he meant to drop the device on the north.

Then something went wrong—gradually, he started getting sick more often, and his skin blistered all over in spots. He swore this poisoning was impossible, that he was just following the plans he had always followed, the ones that had worked safely before. There was nothing wrong with those, multiple scientists agreed, and they were right—upon closer inspection, the answer was that the device was being tampered with. Tiny pieces were being cut inside, and the effects were genetically destroying the one who worked with it most closely Luce. The facility's protective clothing left much to be desired, but its security was too tight to let anyone though—except, it was assumed, spies. For safety, the project was shut down, and the continent waited in fear for the north to obliterate them with a completed device, assuming Luce's plans had been stolen. It never happened because they had not been stolen. Who had really sabotaged Luce's device went down as a recent historical mystery, and Luce survived to pass his destroyed genes on.

These stories and the others, Lux had to remember sounded like the makings of an indefensible, stupid conspiracy theory because if they had come from anyone else's hands, they would have been one. Aubrey knew Ginger—he knew where she had come from and what she had to hide, and he knew something definite about her. He only gave these stories to Lux because he could not say the thing out loud. Logic was not an issue; he was just trying to make Lux guess the message.

Finally, when Lux reached the recent past, his own grandfather and Lux II. This was a newspaper clipping, Lux Langley I's overwrought obituary. Most of it was scripted worshipping penned by Lux I himself and given to the paper for them to print in case of his death. Some speculation followed about what might happen to the bears in the skyscraper, and then a section quoted from Lux II concerning the cause of death (Lux II himself, and he made no mystery of it).

The article ended with Lux II quoting his father's final words: “As you were always to be.”

Lux II's response: “Damn right I was meant to rid us of that nihilist. He thought the Langleys could never be anything better—I'll make you forget him. Soon, I'll have something more powerful than whatever he thought doomed us.” The Fates, of course. And then he had ended up too busy struggling against his melting body to ever use them, or to ever let them out of their isolation for a breath.

Lux's grandfather had probably suspected something, this was meant to say—something that wanted the Langleys to be something they now, deep in insanity, no longer had a chance of being. He was said to have been a deeply depressed man beneath his obnoxiousness. Perhaps he had given up, wanting nothing more from life than to just show the conspirators how miserably they were failing. Sarcasm was the only reason why someone that lucid would nonetheless cohabit a skyscraper with a guard of bears.

After him, however, Lux II...had not fit in with any of this at all. Aubrey's composition collapsed for Lux here. He was an artist, but Lux had to remember now that he did not work in things that made earthly sense.

The Langleys who had come before had all been either trying to end the family or risking their lives and its continuance. Not Lux II—he had not been planning to sail an eighteenth century ship or run away, but improve the Langleys here. Not that he had been going about it the right way, but he was doing roughly what the conspirators—what Ginger—wanted. So, why did she then go and compromise him so severely? Because stealing the Fates wasn't right? Out of anger at him for killing Aubrey, so it had nothing to do with the plans for the Langleys?

Lux was getting too tired to untangle this all, and he was given no clue what the conspirators even wanted from the Langleys. To return them to their former philanthropic glory? Maybe that was the piece for Demetrius to find out.

He had expected even this piece alone, though, to be a lot more earth-shaking from the way Aubrey had talked about it instead of a tangled web of stupid. So, there were some people throughout the ages who violently wanted the Langleys to live alongside all who wanted them to die, and who occasionally attacked. Didn't every figurehead have some of those? Now that Lux thought about it, he wondered if calling them conspirators in his head gave them too much credit, because they were bad at what they did, only helping to make the Langleys worse. Playing fate and getting undermined by the details. And Ginger was the least effective of them? Wouldn't she have to be smarter than that to be an augments dealer? How did Lux I relate again, and why was he so bothered?

Gods, he could never sell Ginger out with this shit; he would stumble over it and never know where to begin with it. He did not even understand what Aubrey was trying to suggest about her. Speaking of Demetrius, Lux's brain couldn't handle keeping track of so many inept people any longer and channeled Demetrius instead. That is, did not let him finish his last thought before going to sleep.

He slept for maybe half an hour, not long enough to dream, but long enough to let the information rest. He might have slept longer if not for the noise.

Thud.

Something heavy fell a floor or two above Lyon's basement. Lux's mind awoke, but his eyes resisted opening. He wanted to go back to sleep; he didn't feel good.

Something like a gunshot, and then another thing fell. He was not going to be allowed to go to sleep, whatever was going on. Damn, the knot in his stomach...he kept listening and heard Lyon still arguing with Lyon Prime and knew the noise was nothing to worry about. But he did feel tense for some reason; it wouldn't go away. It was like he had just woke from a bad dream—he tried to remember the dream, but came up with nothing but the terrible stuff he had been reading when he had fallen asleep.

Thud.

Ah—the unwell feeling he had woke up with was anger. Stupid, stupid people trying to make something of the Langleys but only steering them toward worse every time they intervened. Stupid unless they wanted to make something destructive of the Langleys.

He tried that idea out in what he had read, and he discovered what he was angry about.

If they had wanted to mess up the Langleys, Hadrian's pirates had been clever. They had succeeded—selected the least stable Langley and dropped him in a situation where his troubles could do nothing but sharpen and define his bloodline forever after. Marius's expedition had been halted so that he would stay and compound his family's damaged genes with his cousin. Tertia was punished for walking away by being driven back into a city bound to mistreat her until she would become like all the rest—and possibly breed in more errant traits. Luce was stopped from killing off the family, and in the same act, made twice as unhealthy.

Lux I's depression now made more sense, and Lux II fit in. Aubrey had not just been murdered to her, but murdered by a killer she had helped to engineer. No wonder she had snapped.

Most importantly, Kenichi made sense now, too. Kenichi was the agent of Lux's recovery, and his transformation was meant to take his influence—and him—away.

Why the Langleys were wanted this was still was unknown, but this was clear enough now to stand on its own while it waited for Demetrius's piece. If Aubrey had not meant that someone wanted the Langleys this way, Lux did not know what he had meant.

BOOM.

Something upstairs has exploded, and Lux could hear something like shrapnel scattering against walls. Okay, what the fuck was going on? Lux sat up. Being so startled had sharpened his anger, and he felt like tearing to pieces whatever was responsible for the noise.

Lyon did not look up from the computer when he answered calmly, “That would be all of the air conditioners in the house being blown up simultaneously by wall-mounted irradiators. I saw this coming.”

edited 18th May '11 3:28:31 AM by SPACETRAVEL

It isn't Saturday yet until I go to bed. More may be yet to come after these.

Lyon Prime had started it. A while after Lyon had got back to him , he himself had dropped out of the conversation for a moment.

“Wait a moment,” Lyon Prime had said, “I'm trying something.”

A moment later, Lyon had heard the first explosion, and immediately, Lyon Prime's laughter. “Aha! It worked!”

“What the fuck was that?” Lyon demanded.

“That was what used to be one of the baroness's creepy 'roo heads. I improved it.”

Lyon brought up the sitting room security cameras. The first one was no longer running—oh yes, he had done something. The view from another revealed the room's central kangaroo head, camera, irradiator and all, to have been reduced to a pile of ash on the floor by another irradiator. But Lyon Prime was right—it was an improvement.

Lyon gasped, “If Amanda had got so much as one speck of singed fur on her from that, then fuck Ginger; I'd be finding a way to delete you so damn fast...did you get into that the same way you got into my computer?”

“Exactly. So convenient that you have every mechanism in your house hooked up to it. Still think it's so great to be able to turn on your kitchen coffee pot from the basement?”

“What are you doing with it?”

“Nothing yet, but good idea.”

“You know,” said Lyon, “who is going to have to be the one to clean up that sitting room rug, don't you?”

“It will be worth the lesson. I am helping you detach from the relics of your past.”

“That can be done without destroying them!”

“I am teaching you impermanence. Quiet down; you'll wake the kid. Don't you have to dump him off at the train station first or something?”

Lyon seethed. Everyone knew he was never going to do that. Besides, Lux didn't look so bad anymore with his devilish blue eyes closed. “I'll teach you to shut the fuck up...”

“Sure you will,” said Lyon Prime, leaning back in his chair. “Ginger made this environment, and she is the best of the best—don't question it until you know how she got there. Let's just say you'll never get through.”

Lyon had nothing to say to that, and Prime initially thought he had convinced his counterpart, but then the silence stretched on a little too long.

“Watch your flowers,” said Aubrey.

“He can't do it,” restated Lyon Prime. “He's going to be trying all day now.”

Lyon's voice then returned. “Sorry—she didn't make your world so that you guys could talk to us, though, did she?”

“Not exactly, but—“

“Yeah, thanks for carving that hole for me. Watch the fifth floor bathroom, Aubrey; I am about to prove you are working with a chump.”

Faintly, a sound came from upstairs that did not sound like an irradiator blast at all. It was a long creaking that rose and then suddenly became a tearing and snapping of metal and tile.

Lyon Prime brought down the screen for the room as fast as he could, and when he saw what was happening on it, could do nothing but worldlessly open and close his mouth. His eye did not move, but his hands took another label-less bottle of liquor from his desk drawer. As it was his version of the bottle, the liquid inside glowed blue and oozed heavy smoke from the top and onto the floor.

Lyon laughed. “What's the one thing I can control in your world that you can't touch in mine? Answer it, fishface...object placement!”

The fifth floor's square bathtub had been ripped straight up from the floor and now hovered Amanda's height above the resulting hole, dangling severed and dripping pipes. It began to move toward the doorway, which it was too wide to fit through.

“No,” Lyon Prime said blankly.

Lyon forced the appliance horizontally through the doorway, tearing a hole in each side of the wall around it and the door off all but one of its hinges. “Oh, yes. You can just snap your fingers and fix it, right?”

“But you know we can't snap our fingers very well—damn it, Aubrey; this is not funny!” Lyon Prime dialed up his home phone on another line to leave Amanda a brief message: “Amanda, do not go to the fifth floor. Whatever you do, stay away.”

“Someone doesn't understand impermanence.”

The bathtub drifted down the hallway and around a few corners, reflecting the light of the billiards room's flames as it passed. Lyon Prime breathed a sigh of relief when it passed that by, but then took several drinks as it rose up and over the narrow stairway to the sixth floor, ripping long, diagonal holes in the paneling above the stair rails. The sixth floor was dark, and it disappeared for a moment...then reappeared in the brightly lit atrium containing the swimming pool, which in Lyon Prime's house was about a mile long with a beach at the far end and a school of canary fish in the water.

As Lyon maneuvered the bathtub straight over the water, one trailing pipe brushed the surface, scattering fish. Good, because none would then get trapped when he dropped in the whole thing. The splash was great enough to speckle the sand of the beach.

Lyon Prime gasped, “Put it back.”

Lyon cackled back, “An eye for an eye; a large plumbing appliance in a swimming pool for a disintegrated kangaroo trophy. Equal exchange, fucker.”

“For the love of me, Aubrey—stop laughing! This is the second least funny thing that's ever happened to me! You don't understand!”

“He just sees the irony," said Lyon. "A bathtub taking a bath, so to speak. Which is also some sort of deep metaphor for your face. Have some appreciation for modern art.”

Meanwhile, this only made Aubrey laugh harder—and indeed at Lyon Prime's face as he glowered darkly at his blank screen, a vengeful storm in his eyes.

“This is war, my inferior,” said Lyon Prime. “You'd better hope to live to dearly regret this move...and to pay for a fuckton of household stuff.”

“Do your worst, Primey...oh, shit. Is that...what did you do to the sixth floor coffee machine? Oh gods, you're going to flood the whole floor—you know it already has mildew! You are going fucking down.”

edited 21st May '11 2:38:02 AM by SPACETRAVEL

By the time Lux awoke, the breaking through of Kenichi's augments still was unfinished, and both Lyons' houses were rather trashed.

Lyon Prime had, among worse things, destroyed the rest of Lyon's sitting room's kangaroo heads, shot through a nice bay window, turned on all the microwaves in the house for ninety-nine minutes and ninety-nine seconds, used another irradiator to burn the words “JUNIOR'S ROOM” into Lyon's bedroom wall, locked all of the bathroom doors except for Amanda's, blown up all of the air conditioners (of course) and activated Lyon's house painting robot, employing it to paint rude graffiti all over the alley side of his house in Cascade Frost Off-White. As well, the contents of Lyon's pool were about fifty percent coffee the last time Lyon Prime had checked.

Lyon had thus far made him pay for it by, again, among worse things, moving all of his dining room furniture onto the roof, giving separate bodies to the cats from the cat room and sending them to roam the house, programming the sitting room flowers to sing annoying songs, switching furniture into the wrong rooms, turning the water in the sea-closet to vegetable soup, removing the seventh floor ceilings, adding the attic sharks to the swimming pool and, most unforgivably, remodeling the second floor atrium with a spacious southward addition and modern sky bridge over the alley that he actually kind of liked.

Lyon claimed that Amanda was outside, gleefully watching his painting robot; Lyon Prime's Amanda appeared to be out of the house. She had refused to stick around the basement and warned that she might go out, in case Lyon Prime would worry when she went missing. Aubrey frightened her, she had said, and she did not care what he thought about that. Lyon Prime, wondering whether she might have ever seen a darker side to Aubrey than the one he knew, asked Aubrey if he had ever met her. No, he had answered, confused and worried—he had never even seen her before.

Lyon Prime's powers confirmed that both Amanda and Aubrey were telling the truth—he would never know what had happened, but he knew that Amanda was not the type to reject someone on grounds of appearance alone. Oh, well, he thought. His friends couldn't always like one another.

Then he forgot all about it—Aubrey holding one of the freed cats helped with that. His hands were covered in her fresh scratches, but Lyon Prime didn't reckon he noticed.

Lyon Prime grumbled, “You're cuddling with an agent of the enemy. Stop that.”

Aubrey didn't hear. “...maybe a hundred of them,” he beamed to Lux, who was understandably cranky about what he had woken up to and had begged for some placating distraction before he could talk about what was on his mind. The cat was as black as Aubrey's eye, and he held his microphone up to her nose, which she sniffed. “She's purring; listen.” He looked up at Lyon Prime, who was working on making Lyon's doorbell ring nonstop. “Can I name her?”

“No,” said Lyon Prime. “I already named her, just now. Her name is Mister Traitor's Kitty.”

“Mister Traitor's...Mister...Missy. That's your name, Missy dear.”

Lyon Prime groaned. “Stop being cliché. Big, spooky people liking little, cute animals has been trite forever—not that you have me convinced of your spookiness one damn bit.”

“I've always wanted a cat, and Demetrius adores them as much as I do.”

“No pets allowed in your building?”

“Oh, no. They just make me nervous, too, is all. They're so small; I'm afraid I might hurt them by mistake.”

“You'd be surprised,” said Lyon. “Cats are made of furry steel.”

“No—they're not. I...I sort of have...I definitely have before. Bones was taking care of a friend's kitten once, and she let me hold him because of course I was just in love. He had just woke from a nap and wanted to run about, but Bones had snuck him into the bar, and there were a thousand places he could get lost or hurt if he got away.” Aubrey's voice sped up and dropped further and further in volume as he spoke.

“Hmm?”

“So I tried to hold him still, but then I heard something crack, and he began making these terrible sounds...Bones treated him for several broken ribs.” He was just a note above whispering now, looking at the floor. “I...don't have any idea how I did it, but I have been rather terrified to handle any cat since. But Missy—ow—“ Aubrey flinched as Missy swatted his hand again, drawing a few more drops of blood. “—she doesn't let me hold her too tightly, does she? Do you, lovely?”

“She is a mean one...” Okay, that was more than slightly spooky.

Lyon and Lyon Prime are fun. Sick, twisted and weird, but fun.

Monday updates are fine, too, I guess. I get the most done on weekends, so it makes the pacing less indiscriminate.

Fun with Aubrey this time.

Lux smiled for the first time since he had awoke. If he ever became safe enough outside of the skyscraper to be able to talk to the people out there, maybe he would bring a kitten home with him someday. “I can hear...that means she's happy, right? I've never seen a real cat before.”

“About something,” said Aubrey. “Maybe about having my hands for chew toys.” He sounded like he did not mind in the slightest if she did.

Aside from that, Lux had assumed a new appearance, which Lyon wondered about as he worked out on his screen how to switch Lyon Prime's fourth and seventh floors. Lux had fallen asleep the way Amanda had left him—spread out and docile across the sofa. Now, however, since he had woke, he had sat up and curled up in one corner of the piece of furniture, arms wrapped around his knees as he held his microphone. There was a new crease in his brow that he would not let rest for a second, even when his mouth smiled.

The longer he held the supposed message of Aubrey's documents in his own head, the more he doubted his head. He had to ask, as much as Aubrey wanted to keep loving the cat—”What would happen if you just told me what you're trying to say to me with all of these articles?”

“Probably some sort of alarm going off in Ginger's place and my quick deletion—of all the contexts and the words that are disallowed in here, Lyon says these are the only ones he cannot unblock. It is wise of her to keep singular control over what I gave to you and Demetrius to find out—you have to know it to understand the magnitude of what she risks by putting the knowledge in someone else's hands. Even I ask that you please use it only to protect yourselves and not for anything wider spread—you will understand.”

“Fine. I don't care.”

“But I do not have much time to live before she finds out anyway. Certainly not enough to help you any further, as she does watch everyone, even Ryu...if you are at a loss, I can just tell you. Perhaps I should have to begin with, rather than make you read through so much.”

Lux did not take half a second to decide upon that. “No. You don't know what help you could be if you don't sacrifice yourself like that, even within little time.”

“But giving you information is all I have the ability to do for you.”

“Maybe if you didn't have a voice or a face.” Lux rolled his eyes. More people liking him had the potential to save his life. It would have been a godsend. Was it really that hard for anyone else to handle it when one person liked them? “They're good for more than that—especially because I haven't seen many kind ones. You could have done nothing but fool around with my security console settings and still have helped somehow.”

“You...I'm sorry...but what on earth can I say to that? You keep making me realistic—leaving me without words, dear.”

“I understand why Demetrius was lucky to have found you—is that enough?”

“Not that.” Aubrey's voice almost fell into a nervous laugh. “Never, ever that. Maybe him and I coexist peacefully now, but you know him—he has always been that way. What if he were an actual child in a child's body rather than such an old soul like himself? Who actually cried sometimes and was not able to teach himself to speak, or to use irradiators, or to comprehend all of my nonsense? It would be so completely different...would he even still be with me by this time? I don't know. As though I am any good already at keeping up with every new way he finds to imperil himself...” Aubrey had fallen into a nervous monotone, but then regained his expression as though he had been talking in his sleep and suddenly awakened. He remembered what only one other person in the simulation knew—what he was. “...this is not the time for me to go off like that. Remember that I was modeled upon the true Aubrey's deeper interior without several moderating pieces. He was a badly damaged man—you may stop me if I begin to do that again.”

“I'm from Demetrius's future,” said Lux simply. “He survives.”

“Not under my care. I die.”

“Fuck it—you are worried about something that will never be no matter how much the baron Prime fucks with your timelines. Demetrius isn't normal. And neither am I—I'm a complete basket case, and I'm not dead under your watch. I'm thanking you, before you go anywhere. For everything down to messing with the consoles, got that?”

Aubrey sighed in the friendliest way. “Do I have anything to lose anymore by saying I have?” He paused for a few seconds after that, and Lux had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing at what sounded, over the microphone, like a very poor attempt of Aubrey's to purr back at the cat.

Lux asked, “Have you experimented with that status bar you took home with you yet? What happened to it at the edge of the column?”

“Oh, that...it exploded in my pocket. The baron Prime enjoyed that.”

“He would.” An idea popped into Lux's head too late, but better than if it had never appeared. “If I asked you about the books, you wouldn't be sensed as suspicious if you just said yes or no to me, would you? There's nothing wrong with those words!”

“I don't see why I would. I would try it.”

It was safe enough for Lux, too. He asked, while curling up even tighter to stop from shaking: “Does someone want the Langleys the way they are? Sick like they are?”

“Yes,” said Aubrey.

“Is Ginger one?”

It took a moment longer for Aubrey to say yes this time, but he did. Then, before Lux could say anything more, he gasped. The sound of microphone plastic being jostled rasped through Lux's, and Lux heard a cat scream and run off. “Missy—!” Aubrey exclaimed at a distance. “I'm sorry—didn't mean to—“

“Are you still there?” Lux put his microphone back on so he could hear everything, anything from Aubrey. “What's happening—are you all right?”

A clatter of the microphone being picked back up, and then, “Yes...I think...all of a sudden the house looks even odder. I look different—please excuse me for a moment; I think your Lyon has done something that we must straighten out.”

“Different?”

“The color here is all wonky, but I think we'll be fine. I'll be back as soon as I get my bearings here—”

+1 ADDENDUM

Wonky indeed. The color of everything in Lyon Prime's house, everything around them including Aubrey, had inverted itself. Blacks were whites, whites were blacks, blues were oranges. Lyon Prime alone was unaffected, standing out brightly in a largely darkened room.

“Junior!” Lyon Prime cried into his microphone. “Careful; this is starting to get detectable! Do you want to deal with Ginger? Have to fix this right damn now...” He asked Aubrey, “Did it get you?”

“Don't look behind you,” said Aubrey, confirming that he had changed, too. “Please. Not until you fix it. I look embarrassing in white.”

Lyon Prime was too busy to look, anyway. He brought down a whole new screen to search for what Lyon had done. “But isn't your hair black now, so it doesn't clash?”

“Still. Don't.”

“It's my admin powers that makes it leave me alone. You should get some; the simulation considers it a promotion up from being scenery.”

"But did you see Missy running out? Did she look like she was limping to you?"

"Yeah, saw her. I didn't notice a limp. Trust me; I'm all-seeing. You didn't hurt her."

Lux put down his microphone, sighing angrily. He did not have time for this. "Baron, quit it."

"What?" said Lyon. "I'm not doing anything. These floors...adding new stuff to his house is one thing, but changing these around is getting too deep. Don't tell Primey, but I don't know if I have the energy for any more of this."

"Every time you do something to that house, you're hitting Aubrey, too. I think he's getting tired of it."

"Huh? No—these floors are way above them. I'm keeping everything away from him and their Amanda. It's called class, kid—you don't trash buildings without it."

Lux tapped his microphone impatiently. He just said you did something to all their color...I don't know. Why don't you explain how you bothered him like that?"

"Color...? Hell no—if I could get into that, that would be a big deal. Too big—there's moving their furniture, and then there's toying with their very reality. Someone would notice." For once, Lyon sounded completely serious. Something about what Lux had suggested shocked him. "I want to soak Primey in the raining fists of my wrath, not get those guys in trouble with Ginger. I'll be damned if I kill Aubrey London a second time for a dumb prank war."

"They think you're doing that. If they're wrong, who is toying with their very reality? Someone is," Lux insisted.

"I don't know. Let me handle this—I'm going to try to get visuals. This...this could be pretty bad."

Lyon Prime hit one key, with a loud, sweeping motion. “There.” The colors in the house returned to their original selves. “How's that? All back to normal.”

“I don't know,” Aubrey quickly said. Lyon looked at him—he had gone very still, barely even breathing. His eyes shifted around the room anxiously. Then, very, very slowly, he listed one hand into the air and delicately moved it about through the air. “I feel strange...do you?”

“Again, nope.” Lyon looked around, too, but could see nothing different about the room and could feel no change.

After a second's silent consideration, Aubrey brought his hand gently back down, then picked up his microphone between two careful fingers and lifted it up. Then he let go of it. The microphone did not fall, but stayed right where it was in the air, only spinning a little bit.

Aubrey breathed, “I thought so.”

“Damn it, Junior,” said Lyon Prime. “Don't you know you keep missing me with this environmental fuckery?” He stood and approached Aubrey, his feet still as firmly attached to the floor as they had ever been. His colors brightened, and his animations became more lively with his excitement. “Try getting up!”

Aubrey clung to the sofa as hard as he could, wide-eyed. “Oh, no. I...I do not...I do not float prettily.”

Lyon Prime normally would have left alone a gentleman ten years older than him at such a request, but Aubrey was a fun gentleman ten years older than him. He went to the end of the sofa opposite Aubrey's, extended one little finger and with it, tipped Aubrey off the now weightless piece of furniture. He set the sofa back down, as otherwise, it would have stayed on two legs.

Aubrey did not follow it. He had been so startled not to feel himself falling that he had let go. His hair rose from his face as if it were underwater, showing him to be blushing up to his forehead. His coat went mad with his slightest movement, billowing and wildly distorting his shape—he looked like the worst hot air balloon ever. The weightlessness had nothing to do with it, but his eyes were as wide as Lyon Prime had ever seen them, who only just now noticed the second blue eye Aubrey had brought out of the immersive.

Aubrey removed the end of his scarf from his mouth and melted into whispery, nervous laughter, going as still as the microphone. “Haha...okay...not really so bad...actually a bit nice...hahaha...” He looked down at the floor from an angle that would normally have been physically impossible for him. “...I'm dizzy.”

Lyon Prime roared with laughter. He could barely stand. “Amazing—!”

Almost able to hold back a smile, Aubrey pulled his coat around him tighter. “Oh, you.”

“Careful—you're over the floor,” said Lyon Prime. “If Junior does something else, you could hurt yourself if you—“

Fall. Except that there was one safe possibility Lyon Prime had not thought of, and that was Aubrey turning into a cat and landing on his feet. In the time it took Lyon Prime to blink, that was exactly what happened.

The cat was exactly how he would look as one—white and fluffy as a huge cotton ball, with two blue eyes and cobby little legs. After standing and blinking for a second where he had fallen, he toddled up to Lyon Prime's feet, looked up at him and gave one quizzical meow.

“Hang in there, kitters.” Lyon Prime picked him up and placed him back on the sofa, then returned to his computer. “I am going to make Junior cut this the fuck out; he should know he's endangering you...” He found the setting—he thought so. Or the house had returned to normal on its own. Either way, he heard Aubrey lie back down behind him, no longer the size of a cat. “Okay, I think that's it. Better now?”

"I think so..."

Lyon Prime would just have to turn around to notice otherwise—way otherwise.

Have a visual approximation of Cat Mode Aubrey Prime, ripped off the internet: "??"◊

edited 24th May '11 2:40:37 PM by SPACETRAVEL

In this case, I have to admit that I'm lost, and not in an "oh, ok" way. I've genuinely lost the thread of who's doing what to what? I've lost track.

On Lux and Lyon's side, Lyon isn't doing anything but working on switching two of Lyon Prime's floors around. Then Aubrey suddenly drops out of his conversation with Lux when something very different happens instead.

On Aubrey and Lyon Prime's side, as far as they know, Lyon is still toying with the simulation of Iosethep. They think he is just getting into more pervasive effects, like changing the conditions of reality in Lyon Prime's entire house, when he actually isn't the cause.

I'll look over the updates and see what I can do to clarify that.

Okay, I added a short addition to the very last post that will hopefully help clarify things.

edited 25th May '11 3:34:34 AM by SPACETRAVEL

Yeah, that helps.

Friday paste dump for now. More when I'm awake.

“Amanda—you came back! What's the...“ Lyon Prime turned around and did not see Amanda. His details lagged almost to the point of freezing—that had not been Amanda. That had been the opposite of Amanda—a large woman with Aubrey's eyes and as well, his hair, but the simulation seemed to know that if he were her, she would let it grow down to her waist, so there it touched because he was her. It also knew that she would wear a dress beneath her coat that fell past her feet, even though the hem would go greyish with dust from the ground. It was a sickly greyish there. “...you...are...not Amanda.”

“That is true,” she said. Lyon should have known outright that that new contralto voice could not have been Amanda's. “What is it? Is there something still going on?”

“Oh, yeah.” Lyon Prime was only able to bring down the screen monitoring the basement because he remembered that well where it was. Aubrey...he was having some trouble getting his eyes off of her. This was awkward. Why couldn't she have come out with a few inches less hair, or a little bit smaller—at least on top? She looked like the baroness in just a few ways, but they were unfortunately all the right ones.

Usually being in the basement, Lyon Prime seldom had to look through its cameras, so the screen had to drop down from astronomical distances. It arrived after a few minutes, dulled with moon dust. He focused its view upon Aubrey, who sat up and stared.

“Oh...” She giggled audibly, a range of sound her usual voice did not allow. “...how fun!”

“You are a better sport than I'd be,” said Lyon Prime, struggling with his eyes. He was glad for his mask. “I mean it when I say this time that your patience is going to pay off in just a minute. I want to know if that fucker knows how far he's going.” Like Lyon, Lyon Prime turned truly serious. “As well as you are taking this, if there's any way to get Ginger's attention, it's messing with you—you're her thing. Junior will bloody stop, even if I have to turn off his paint bot. Moron. I'd still be smarter than him written in Basic.”

He searched through the most basic properties of his house for Lyon's activity, typing furiously and occasionally having to delete the baroness's old pet names. Damn it, Junior...moving all of my toilets into the billiards room was one thing, but now you're just trying to distract me.

Speaking of distracting, he froze when he heard Aubrey gasp right behind his head. She leaned over him, hair dropping into Lyon Prime's eyes, gesturing a few screens up. She exhaled, “I think this is more understandable by camera.”

That screen monitored a wiry, burnt out-looking Oceanic woman in the phone booth by the railroad. Dust tinted her hair, which hung straight into her eyes, from black to a deep grey. She was talking to someone hysterically, her knuckles white on the phone and her other hand gripping a fanned out stack of twentieth century rectangular computer disks like a hand of cards.

Lyon Prime observed, “An emo girl. Yeah?”

“Named Ryu Takei. The inspector.”

“Oh, fuck.” The environmental effects—the colors, the gravity, the species toggling, the thrice-damned sex toggling—they had all happened throughout the entire simulation. Most careless, difficult, dangerous thing...“Fucking Junior—and I thought the first thing wasn't funny.”

“If you know better, shouldn't the real you? Listen to her.”

Lyon Prime focused his sound on Miss Takei. She wasn't very prettily spoken, with a slight lisp and a drunken slur. They tuned in to her in the middle of a sentence.”

“...anachronistic nonsense....I told you, Deva, Demetrius sent me these—sent me the directions to find them.” She waved the disks in the air as though Deva could see her gestures. “No, I don't. I'd love to know how the fuck he discovered these, because they were in Ginger's bloody trash heap in the bloody catacombs.” Lacking Lyon Prime's and Aubrey's awareness of the simulation, Takei was not aware that Demetrius was a young girl right now, and surely overlooked Deva's male voice on the other end of the line. “If not for him, these shitty disks would've rotted there under the bones—and judging by what's on them, I really think she wanted them to. We never knew her...let's just say that. We never knew any damn thing about her, and for that matter, there were some things she withheld from us about how the damn universe works...no, I'll tell you what it is after I talk to Demetrius first. Please let me—I left him so many messages! I have to tell him to make sure I didn't just hallucinate these files...he is? Then wake him up. Like that's ever bothered him before...what? He...oh, not now. What do you mean you can't wake him up? He always...”

Aubrey turned the sound down herself and said, “It's what I gave to Lux, to give to him and Demetrius. Ginger's secret has been across one of the most familiar phone lines to her perhaps fifty times by now; Ryu does messages that way, the silly stalker...”

“Sorry, Junior...oh shit. Oh, shit...” Lyon Prime had not actually needed to concentrate; all he had needed was the pair of eyes for visuals sitting right behind him. “I can explain the dress now—timeshifts like the column don't get system updates. They get out of date compared to the rest of our simulation—annoys the hell out of me. Things perform a little slower inside them. If someone changes the whole environment, like...like makes everybody animals, there's going to be a little lag in those regions; they'll change a few seconds after everything else. It's a clever way to find a missing shifted region. Someone's looking for you, and it's not Junior.”

“That's the part I know.”

Lyon Prime thought, how long did you know? Maybe that was why she had been so oddly calm. If an insufferable blue man kicks you off the world's ugliest sofa into weightless midair on any old day, that's a nuisance. If it might be the last thing that ever happens to you, then, welp.

“Attic wardrobe,” said Lyon Prime reflexively, whether it would do any good or not. “Go. Now. There's got to be a boat up there somewhere, and you can hide out on that sea forever now that it's edible.”

Aubrey shook her head. “If the column is deleted, it doesn't matter where I am.” As well, she did not like soup. “I think she wants to see me first, but it isn't necessary to update me.” She kept watching Takei's face, which, soundlessly, shifted from crazy to worried and crazy. She mumbled to no one in particular, “Something has gone wrong with Demetrius. The real one, since I sent him his message. Not for me to know...Bones. Bones can walk through the column; she'll be with him.”

They both noticed at the same time that Lyon Prime had been tightly gripping Aubrey's hand since a moment or two before—an accident. It was just like the baroness's hand, up to the dark fingernails. Lyon Prime went greenish and abruptly let go, putting both of his hands back on his keyboard to look for Ginger very, very intently.

Aubrey put her freed hand over her mouth, almost covering her wry smile and with no hope of covering how she blushed.

Now? Lyon Prime's body simulated nausea perfectly.

edited 27th May '11 4:56:08 AM by SPACETRAVEL

brb soon; silly computer. I'll make up for it with extra material.

edited 30th May '11 4:51:18 AM by SPACETRAVEL

Oooookay, this attempt to finish the rest of the chapter before posting isn't panning out. This is an important scene and being very difficult to write, so at this point, I've got to admit that if I actually did finish before going to post, I'd find that my thread had been eaten by the robot.

So here's a fragment that's pretty short for 3 weeks, but more will come along a lot quicker. What it lacks in length may it make up for in a savory blend of revelation and record-breaking screwed up-ness. It might be a little confusing and overworked—you know what I mean by that by now. Let me know if it is, and I'll see what I can do.

“Prime?” Lyon questioned into his microphone, leaning in closer to it every time. “You there...? That's it,” he said to Lux.

“They're not going to respond anymore. They're...oh, shit; maybe I broke them. Got her attention or something.”

Lux held up one hand to stop him. The other held his microphone up to his ear. “Quiet—it's still on. Aubrey's microphone is still on. I hear it.”

“If I was in their place, I wouldn't even be thinking about—“

“Shut up. He would, especially if it were a bad idea.”

It was a terrible idea on Aubrey's part. They did not have to wait long: “Lux, I have been detected.” he said conversationally, placidly. And he was a lady all of a sudden, but it sounded like that was the very last thing that mattered to him right now. “That is why I sound a touch different—you know her. Or, no you don't—don't worry. And don't let the baron think he he has anything to do with it. And do not make a sound. Whatever you d—”

“—o, listen if you find reason to record this event, but do not be...heard...?” Aubrey looked up. Her microphone had just gone silent; the smooth hum from the speakers that told her that her voice was reaching Lux had flickered away in the middle of her sentence. She looked up, however, for another reason—because Lyon Prime's basement had just lost its color. All infinity of his screens had gone blank but for the one in the corner employed to save the Fates. That was not tied to Lyon Prime's control over Iosethep, which had just been severed. His appearance showed the loss, too—the shimmer, the mask and the animations of his digital form gave way to the look of his scrappy and sandy-haired real counterpart. The only unearthly detail left on him was his blue skin.

Aubrey had looked just in time to see Lyon Prime fall to the floor on his backside, no longer able to float and having no chair.

“Ah—there,” Lyon Prime said, just looking up at his blank screens, not turning an eye to Aubrey. “And that means Ginger just took full administrative control. I'm not getting any commands to shut off the column, though...oh, shit. Kenichi was here the last time she took control from me like this...feeling any murderous urges? No? That's because the sims might be targeting you this time. I'd just update your column if I were her, but...maybe...oh, fuck. Please, no...”

“Would you be among those targeting me?” asked Aubrey. She did not move to prepare to defend herself from him. If anything, she looked even more placid than she had a moment ago.

“No; I'm not feeling it, either. I can only guess now what she's up to, but my guess is that she's decided to have them cut down both of us for collaborating. The whole city is about to pay us a visit, and in my timeline, Duke Oros is in town. Fuck, he's the best she can get. Imagine the bloodiest zombie movie you've ever seen, except the zombie has the chainsaw, there's only one of him, and he kills off the whole cast before the opening credits are over. At least it'll be quick...chance I took by hiding you...”

Aubrey responded to that with only silence. Getting killed herself was no worry, but with Lyon Prime also endangered, the button had been pushed. She finally ran out of words—no more quasi-drunken outpourings. Lyon Prime stood and let his invasive memories of the baroness compel him to put one arm around her shoulders, unaware that a metamorphosis was beginning under it.

He hoped she didn't feel him shaking. Probably not—she rested her hand on his arm. Eep, a little too comforted—gods, she seemed to really like something about admin power abuse and careless blanket setting toggling. But on the other hand, he was glad to see her remain her weird self to the very end. “I'm omniscient; don't you forget,” he added. “I knew what I was getting into. It's okay. It's her damn problem that she left her admin capable of imitating friendship...and that she let me turn this house into a labyrinth of physics-breaking stupid. This is going to be fun, girl.”

Something a floor above pounded the outside of the building, throwing itself into it. As it got louder, Aubrey wrapped her fingers around Lyon's arm where they rested.

It got louder, and Lyon Prime's grin got wider, the most sincere smile he had worn in a long time. The corner of it twitched as Aubrey squeezed his arm harder, cutting off its circulation and numbing it, but nothing could dim him anymore. “Let's give them the best chase they've ever had.”

Louder—and then something tore through the front door. That door was thick and reinforced with layers of metal; for that, it only went more loudly.

At the sound, Aubrey also snapped through Lyon Prime's arm as she jumped to her feet. He felt a sting upon his arm, then a tingle running down toward his wrist—blood dripping from one of the deep little crescents her fingernails had left in his skin. Every one of them had drawn at least a drop of blood.

Those nails weren't even very long—blood. He couldn't stand blood. The sight dizzied him, so he looked up at her face for the first time since the screens had gone off. What he saw when he did was what frightened Amanda about her.

He saw the black lens of her scarred eye—the blue from the immersive had worn off. Had it just now? Her hair had been shaken around it, making it look like the eye of a storm encircled by the cyclone's white whips. The holes in his arm stung again. Their throbbing was trying to tell him that the calm Aubrey he knew was this: the still central column pinning down a tearing storm that was just as much a part of her. It warned him of another meaning to the duality of her irises.

There was a reason she was the muscle of her crew, the watchdog. It was the same reason why many, like Amanda, felt her dangerous: what happened when the black eye took command. Whoever had just kicked the door in, she was about to go and quietly rip their head off.

“No,” she said. “Promise me you won't go out there.”

Lyon Prime could not lie and say he wouldn't follow her, but just the same, he could not open his mouth to defy that eye.

She left the basement in one stride, without closing the door behind her. “Please. I'll be back.”

“Here's something!” Lyon cried after a moment. “Come here—” he beckoned to Lux, who rushed over to see what he was working on. “Prime was in the middle of messing with my doorbell when they disappeared, and now I'm into his, camera and shit! We probably can't see anyone from here, but I can see the front door!”

So could Lux. It was blurry, lit in gentle colors from the flowers. Either things were moving, or the camera was poor. “We can—”

They both gasped, and Lyon almost fell out of his chair. Someone had just stepped in front of the view, abruptly, smothering it with their hair. Not Lyon Prime's hair and not Aubrey's hair; it was black and loosely curly.

Before Lyon could say “what”, a crash then seared his speakers. There was a man's angry scream, a flash of an unfamiliar, wide pair of eyes. Whoever it was then fell out of sight, followed by a plume of white hair that Lux and Lyon definitely knew.

When Lyon Prime got to the sitting room, he didn't see anyone at the door at first. Aubrey had thrown them well away from the kicked through remains of the door. It was just one man who had intruded, and not Oros—from what Lyon Prime could make out in the dim light, conventional and boyish in appearance except for the purpling face. Aubrey had pinned him to the floor and had her hands around his neck.

Aubrey's hair fell in both of her eyes, shadowing them and making them both look as black as the one. She was trying to force his consciousness out into dream space. When simulations died on their own, as opposed to being manually erased from the program, their minds were archived in dream space and never came back.

The man was understandably silent in response; he did not even struggle. His still feet were buried in Aubrey's dress—he wasn't tall enough to be Oros.

Lyon Prime cried, “Who is he? Where's the murderous horde?” No answer. He started forward. “Okay...just one, not Oros...so I was being a little overdramatic...Cee?” he accidentally called her by the baroness's nickname. Her name had been Lucille. “Aubrey? Hey—”

Then the man under Aubrey stopped him. He slipped one arm under Aubrey's and held out his open hand, motioning for Lyon to stay where he was. Then he brought down one finger. Then another—it became clear to Lyon that he was counting down to something. Three...two...one...

Aubrey let him go, reeling backward and falling into the flowers. Lyon Prime had never seen so much expression on her face before, and he had never seen someone look so aghast. She had just recognized the man—that was what he had been expecting to happen in five seconds. “Ginger...?”

She was not used to seeing Ginger with hair in its natural dark state, without the orange color. That was why he went by the name “Ginger”, of all he could have chosen for Aubrey to call him. But the simulation had come to the conclusion that had Ginger been a man, he would not be wearing it right now.

Ginger dropped his arm. He had known it would take Aubrey a moment to notice, but still had forgot to come in without a warning. He was a little preoccupied—outside the immersive, someone was potentially ruining his life. They had the tools to, all of a sudden, and he would not be simply melodramatic to declare that they did not understand how big of a deal that was. “I'd have told you it was me if you'd given me a second,” he said, deadpan, as much as he could with gasps in between the words. He was barely audible, sounding like his throat was lined with sand, and one of his eyes was trying to move in the opposite direction of the other as it filled with blood.

Aubrey extended a much gentler hand halfway to Ginger's head. It bobbed at bit in the air hesitantly. She was prepared to get hurled through five floors by Ginger's little finger for her mistake—not because he would do it, though he certainly could and more, but because she was sure she deserved it. “Ginger...” She brought her hand the rest of the way to his skin when she was met with no resistance, feeling his neck for damage with a shaky touch that would not have disturbed a single hair on a kitten. “Did I...”

“Nothing...” Ginger's voice had lowered even more. It sounded like it was on the last sounds it might ever make. “...that I can't reload.” He flickered a little bit under Aubrey's hand. If the light had been brighter, Lyon Prime and Aubrey would have noticed that the mole on his cheek switched from one side to the other, and that his eye with the slightly larger pupil and the side of his coat with the pocket on it also switched sides. The red marks on his neck and the throbbing veins in his forehead disappeared completely. It would have been handy to be able to do in real life. Both Aubrey and Ginger were stronger than they themselves could always handle or remember; weird injuries that no one recalled inflicting happened. Nitya's temper would always shorten for the rest of the day when she saw the marks on either of them.

Ginger sat up and looked up and down Aubrey, both eyes looking and operating properly now. “Damn,” he said in a fully recovered voice. “I knew you'd come out of this setting looking nice. You'd do that with your hair...really, if you were an old girl? And those...” He made no effort to hide his glance at her chest. “Heh, just like Bones. A London thing. Erasing you will be such a shame. I'd rather just squeeze the batshit rogue sim games out of you.”

If he wanted to, she knew he really could. A tiny smile quivered its way onto Aubrey's face, meeting little waves of resistance. Neither knew who took the other in their arms first; both were surprised by it.

Ginger said, muffled by Aubrey's volumes of hair, “You don't have to cry...” She cried funny. The same way she did everything, actually—no sound, no shaking or gasping; just resting her head on his shoulder like she might on any other day, except for the growing little puddle of tears in the bend of his neck. He felt the moisture right next to his own eyes; maybe they were shedding something, too. “I'm okay...sweetie?”

He had never seen her like this before. He had seen her get slightly misty-eyed over Demetrius on occasion, but it never left her eyes. He'd seen her go totally unresponsive with shock a few times, staring at some M6 corpse whose skull she had discovered her fingerprints caving in—immovable, unhearing, only seeing. Never, though, this totally shattered.

“It's just that dim in here; the dumb flowers aren't worth shit as a lighting source...I promise I'm okay?”

“I...never...thought...it...would...be you.” Aubrey whispered, having lost her voice.

“Because I usually don't go after misbehaving sims myself? You were almost right—I was thinking of sending a few rabid sims rather than stepping in myself.”

“I mean after I've bothered you every day about fearing I'd hurt Demetrius one day...not him; it was you. This never occurred to me not even once. Oh, gods, I...I think I feel much less in control than I even felt a minute ago.” Aubrey let go of Ginger and retracted her arms.

Ginger could see her eyes now—her eyes weren't even bloodshot, though the tears were clearly right there on his shoulder and enough to drip down his shirt. So much like the real Aubrey.

She said, “I wouldn't force you, but truthfully, I'll go more peacefully if you stand back to delete me. I...might panic. I've never faced such perfectly certain oblivion before. Close, but...it may not be rational, but I'm...”

“Scared you'll go at me like an M6 again.”

Correct. Aubrey broke eye contact with him; it looked harder every second for her to maintain it. "Please stay away."

However, Ginger did not stand back. He did not even stand. “There doesn't have to be an 'again', love. Listen—there can't be an 'again' if there was never a first time. As much as I discourage it, remember what you are right now, little lady...I can have Hans delete the last couple minutes from the city logs.”

Aubrey's eyes locked with hers again immediately.

“I put you in a world,” Ginger continued, stroking Aubrey's face with one finger. He explored all the new female angles. “Where we can more than just forget something—we can make it so it never happened at all.”

“But aren't you here to erase me in just a moment anywa—“

Ginger snapped the finger over Aubrey's lips, sealing them. “That's why I'm so happy right now that I didn't just send some sims after you.” He smiled to demonstrate. “I can reconsider getting rid of you. I can take away these few minutes instead and leave you alive—alive and having never laid a violent finger on me before. If you do one small thing for me, I'll do that right away.”

“What small thing?” Aubrey breathed around Ginger's finger.

“I will allow you to open the voice line to Lux again. You will tell him that most of the documents you gave him were fabricated, and that the conclusion he drew from them was all in his head.”

“And Ryu's piece?"

“I'll take care of Ryu's piece of trash disk myself,” said Ginger. “Don't worry; I won't do anything with his mind—without a little archduke to back him up, would you believe him if you didn't know me? If crazy Ryu started raving to you about a thousand year old woman?”

edited 18th Jun '11 2:53:06 AM by SPACETRAVEL