[ Probably fair. Grocery day doesn't mix with a giant-ass sword. The often hazy dual presence she senses in him has coalesced once more into something smaller, as it sometimes does, propped politely in her vicinity by a passing Red. He's back on her level, got himself tuckered out and slapped back in purgatory, a crying shame for him. ]
[ He can, to her knowledge, still see, though. So she'll offer him her image, sat comfortably beside her orb. Almost a turning of tables, if only she could lift anything. ]
She ought to have left us with drinks, at the very least. [ Said with equal sincerity, given the last time they considered beverages, folding her arms and grinning. ] You've had an exciting week, I hear.
[ What happened to being open and honest with her??? ]
[ jk she Knows You. But that doesn't mean he's not escaping without being sighed at. ]
That it does. But, if you do not wish to relieve me of a little boredom while you are so indisposed, I shall ask Richie to give me a full report sometime. I have no doubt he will paint your escapades quite colorfully.
[ Wally. That isn't even a passive aggressive guilt prod. Richie's annoying, but at least he chats without feeling like you're pulling teeth. Or she'll check for herself what you've got TiVo'd away up there. Either way, she'll have deets. Anyway, she has other thoughts to press that she cannot outsource. ]
Out of academic curiosity, does it hurt? When you are thrust back inside your vessel. Does that body of yours experience pain of any sort?
[That thread is still in progress, let me live. Anyway he awards her threat to go to Richie with a snort—she's not wrong. Look, he'll happily chat about all sorts of things. Just, y'know, not himself. Which is, of course, the part of that debacle that Sandra chooses to focus on. Still, Sandra's the closest he's got to common ground in all this, so he'll only hesitate a little, before trying to tackle the topic. ...Not that he's going to be particularly good at it. He hums in a hedging kind of way. But then—]
Sort of. Guess it's hard to explain. [It doesn't...not hurt. But it's more in the disorienting full-sense snap-crackle of the Overload kicking him back, or the psychosomatic anticipation of what he thinks he ought to feel that does it. Like the Transistor is just doing its best to provide feedback with what information it's got.] ...Not the way it used to, in any case.
[It would be too much to expect that being able to walk around like himself would be quite the same as being himself again. Feeling just about anything like he's really alive again—pain or otherwise. When it comes down to it, it's still just another function.]
Different for you, I guess.
[Despite the surface similarities, it tends to be.]
[ Too late. You had your opportunity to take advantage of her vagueness and spin the conversation away from you specifically and you spurned it. ]
[ She cocks her head to his response with a quiet, vested interest. The answer is a relatable one, if equally vague, but almost relatable in that vagueness, specifically. Nothing quite feeling right, the line between legitimate sensation and tricks of the mind a hair too thin. ]
Yes and no, I would hazard to say, [ she returns. ] Certainly not when I retract this form of mine, though I do have a bit less to pack away than you. [ Literally as well as... solidly. ]
No, it has been quite some time since I last felt legitimate pain. Besides, I suppose, that which comes with the territory. [ Because I still refuse to believe plunging into the Pyre isn't at least Pretty Hot. ] Though I do think I caught enough for several lifetimes when mine ought to have ended, so it was almost—dare I say—pleasant, for the first century or two.
[ See? Look how easy it is to overshare about yourself, Boxer. She could do it all day. ]
[Seems hard, tbh. Also wow, that's horrific. After a beat, carefully dry—]
Really paying it forward.
[But he'll go on and take the second chance at bait now that she's laid it out for him.]
Territory?
[Mostly a leading question. He knows that she's got some kind of job she's supposed to be doing, somehow. But he'd never gotten around to prying about just how it (apparently painfully???) works. Didn't really ever seem the time.]
Edited (I wasn't done, dw.) 2018-02-08 07:23 (UTC)
[ you lazy fuck. At least after all this time, she seems hardly bothered by her plight. Just casual enough to make it mega awkward. ]
Not the worst conceivable consolation prize, no.
[ Only almost. She'll let him run away with that bait for now. If only because it sparks another academic curiosity she's had kicking around in her head ever since she'd discovered her guestlist was not restricted to participating in the Rites. ]
My duty. Or more literally, I suppose, my space within this Crystal. Do you have anything of the sort, in your Transistor? A place to stretch your imaginary legs, between your jaunts into the physical?
[He hardly talks about it, and people never seem to ask. Studiously avoids the topic, around Red especially. He does, yeah. Though he gets the feeling that's not necessarily by design.
(The Country, or so he sometimes thinks of it. To himself. Secretly, not without some gallows humor, defensive irony...or something a little more apropos than he'd like to think. After all, it is just...calm. Quiet. Enough that he can almost forget it, when his focus is directed solely upward and outward, to the place outside the Transistor. Blue sky and gold grass as far as the eye can see, when he isn't.
The Country...or as good as he's going to get, now.)]
Don't think I'm supposed to be out here, though.
[Unlike her, it seems, who had been given her territory with her imprisonment. Every other Trace they found just got quickly filed away. Asleep. Themselves but not themselves. Capable of no real thought or sense or speech after they were integrated. And he's never been able to find them, here. Not Lillian, or Mr. Moyle, or Sybil. Or...anyone.]
[ It's a little easier to think to ask, when one is in the same boat more or less. And while she may prefer a bit more gumption in her stories than Boxer ever sees fit to provide, how he chooses to word his experience is far more thought-provoking than digging the raw memories out of him on her own... At least, it is sometimes. Sometimes it hits closer to home, and others... Others just serve to confuse her. ]
Out here, you say, while you are still in there. You are beginning to lose me already.
[ Mostly, anyway. There are certainly other spirits in the Crystal with her, and though they are no deeper within it than she, they do not have access to the full span of her agency. They remain far from the Crystal's surface, quiet and recluse, so much so that she occasionally forgets their existence. A good number of them have faded off now, anyway... She can't even admit that she's taken the time to determine which. ]
Anyway, that's what happens when you don't take the easy way out and just mindread him, I guess. There's a compressed pause, after that. A quietly frustrated kind of silence, the kind that gives off the sense that he'd be scrubbing his hands over his face, if he could. (Or that he is, wherever he's ended up in there, where she couldn't see him even if she had the capacity.) He hesitates. Then tries again.]
Every time... [It's slow. Unsure, at first. Like he's finding his footing. Or deciding how much he really wants to continue this conversation. Then—]
Every time a Trace is recorded. I can talk with them. Just for a few seconds. After that, it's just...quiet. Don't know where it is they go.
[Their data is still there. Intact, Recorded. (Save for his. ERROR: SUBJECT DATA CORRUPTED UPON INTEGRATION.)]
[ okok fine. also shrug emoji at both our game mechanics, if this isn't alright lmk, idek what all we've covered ]
[ Look she can do that whenever she wants. It's cute when he talks about himself. Like an awkward teenager. She holds her silence while he goes about trying to articulate himself, trying to wrap her head around the concept for herself. ]
When you say Trace, do you mean souls, of a sort?
[ For the sake of this back-and-forth, she's going to go digging for supplementary information. Finds, for her troubles, a ravaged pale corpse upon a street corner, shouting from beyond the grave in corrupted whispers. No matter his answer, she goes casting about deeper, focusing hard upon the sword across from her, less the man she has come to know it as, and the container it truly is, by design or otherwise. Platt... Platt... ]
[ Sure enough, with attention brought to a single, piercing point, they're noticeable. Though Platt may be a bit of a stretch, one can only assume by context that she is among the souls trapped inside. The souls themselves... are deathly silent. Never has she encountered a mind so impenetrable, let alone so many. Perhaps not so much impenetrable as they are... Well, traces. Nothing to be gleaned from them, aside from their presence. ]
[ She's silent for a moment. Contemplating. ]
If that is the case, would you consider humoring my curiosity once again? It is not as if we have much of anything else to do, and I am certain it would align with yours.
[itt: sggs staring bleakly at commitment to game mechanics. yolo, ig, you're great.
He hums a hard to say to her first question, unaware of the digging she does to supplement it. Could be. People here can deal in terms that don't always translate. Ghosts, souls, magic. In the end, it all seems to be relative.
The second, though— As slow as he is to let her pry answers out, it's not out of unwillingness, necessarily. Just...unfamiliarity, compulsive caution. (The kneejerk assumption that no one needs to know or no one particularly cares to know and he's better off keeping things under wraps where he can.) And she's not wrong—it's a mutually beneficial kind of curiosity. Inanimate Objects Anonymous.]
Yeah, go ahead. [He can try, anyway. Of course, he assumes it's another question. Not much else for the two of them to do.] What'd you have in mind?
[ If he worries about looking the fool, atop his reservedness, for being so uncertain, he should have no fear with her. She would like to see anyone handle being confined to an inanimate object half as gracefully as he seems to. Richie just about pissed himself just being invited inside, it doesn't instill a whole lot of confidence in her. But Boxer, he's already got a foot in the door, as it were. ]
Concentrate over here, would you?
[ And with that uselessly vague instruction, she sets about latching firmly into his consciousness and giving it an experimental yank. Truthfully, she's making an effort to grab hold of the lot within the sword, but just as her attempts to penetrate their thoughts slide off like an icy surface, her claws barely scrape across their surfaces. In the end, all that she can lift from the sword remains the one that got away in the first place. ]
[ And so when next he wakes from a world gone dark, he'll be standing alone on a blackened court—you know the place—shrouded in swirls of green and gold hue. Well, alone save for Sandra, standing opposite him before an inset of stained glass much like the one at his heels, but much more alone than she had been academically intending him to be. The figure, solid as it had once been in the simulations, gives a shrug. ]
["Graceful" is a generous descriptor. But he's always been pretty good with rolling with the punches. ...metaphorically or otherwise. He's not all that sure what to do for her when she asks him to concentrate in her direction. But it must have worked, because for a second there—he seems to black out.
Just for a second. The facsimile of the ground (such as it is. was.) is back under his feet before he can even realize that the feeling had been missing it. He blinks hard to clear his vision. Hands at his sides, the Transistor—for once, nowhere in reach. He opens his mouth. Takes a breath that smells like embers. And—]
...Um.
[Eloquent. He takes a step back to take in the surroundings—the field below, the strange stained-glass sigils. Landing finally on the not unfamiliar shape of Sandra in front of him. (Or...unfamiliar, but only in that she seems more and more alive this way. Like she had when they met.)
[ He doesn't bitch and moan about it, honestly, that makes him look like a professional dancer. Even if his commentary does trip and stumble immediately out of the gate, it's still better than the manic cackling she'd gotten the last time she tried this. ]
[ While he collects himself, Sandra's attention returns upward, briefly, to see if she can't tug at the Traces within the sword with Boxer out of the way. But again, same as before, the Crystal's influence pecks like a bird's beak against glass, without so much as the tiniest hole to peek through. Sighing, she drops her gaze back to eye level and begins padding lightly toward center court, as it were. ]
To field a frequently asked question, you are not trapped here with me now, [ she offers, as if it's any comfort. ] But, as with your space within the Transistor, this is my space within the Crystal.
[ She throws her hands to the side in a half-hearted ta-da gesture. It's more of a shrug than anything else. ]
I've been curious as to whether or not this would work on a spirit like yours. Though it seems your friends are too tightly sealed away to join us, you were correct.
[Good thing Sandra's got a curiosity to occupy herself with, because it takes him at least that long to stop staring at get his wits back around him. A handful of long seconds, maybe more.
(Helps, maybe, to have done this sort of thing once before.)
For lack of anything better to do, he follows behind her as he recovers. Long legs catching up quickly as she ables onto the field, despite his slow pace and her head start. Neck craned to get a load of the surroundings—the general vague void, the odd patterns on the ground. There's a decidedly different feel to it. But it's still...strange, and quiet. Dark and confined and painted in vibrant colors, as if in direct contrast to the endless empty fields in the Transistor. Unbidden, a chill creeps up his spine.]
"This?" [Parroted back, like he's still wrapping his head around it. That she sounds so casual about pulling him in for a visit. If only because...how is it, then, that this isn't a one-way street? He has little reason to doubt her certainty. But—not hard to guess why he might have a vested interest.] ...Sounds like you've had a lot of practice.
[Like she's done it plenty of times before, brought herself some company. Somehow. In a way...it's kind of nice to know she doesn't have to be alone, here. He, at least, can watch the world go by from his (imprisonment) vantage point. Sandra hardly has that option.]
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[ Probably fair. Grocery day doesn't mix with a giant-ass sword. The often hazy dual presence she senses in him has coalesced once more into something smaller, as it sometimes does, propped politely in her vicinity by a passing Red. He's back on her level, got himself tuckered out and slapped back in purgatory, a crying shame for him. ]
[ He can, to her knowledge, still see, though. So she'll offer him her image, sat comfortably beside her orb. Almost a turning of tables, if only she could lift anything. ]
She ought to have left us with drinks, at the very least. [ Said with equal sincerity, given the last time they considered beverages, folding her arms and grinning. ] You've had an exciting week, I hear.
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See her he can, though from a different perspective, in a different way. He hums in a hedging kind of way.]
Word gets around.
[Mildly. If still pretty noncommittally. You'll need to be more direct than that if you want deets, Sandra.]
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[ jk she Knows You. But that doesn't mean he's not escaping without being sighed at. ]
That it does. But, if you do not wish to relieve me of a little boredom while you are so indisposed, I shall ask Richie to give me a full report sometime. I have no doubt he will paint your escapades quite colorfully.
[ Wally. That isn't even a passive aggressive guilt prod. Richie's annoying, but at least he chats without feeling like you're pulling teeth. Or she'll check for herself what you've got TiVo'd away up there. Either way, she'll have deets. Anyway, she has other thoughts to press that she cannot outsource. ]
Out of academic curiosity, does it hurt? When you are thrust back inside your vessel. Does that body of yours experience pain of any sort?
[ Or is it like a ghost with better hands. >:| ]
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Sort of. Guess it's hard to explain. [It doesn't...not hurt. But it's more in the disorienting full-sense snap-crackle of the Overload kicking him back, or the psychosomatic anticipation of what he thinks he ought to feel that does it. Like the Transistor is just doing its best to provide feedback with what information it's got.] ...Not the way it used to, in any case.
[It would be too much to expect that being able to walk around like himself would be quite the same as being himself again. Feeling just about anything like he's really alive again—pain or otherwise. When it comes down to it, it's still just another function.]
Different for you, I guess.
[Despite the surface similarities, it tends to be.]
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[ She cocks her head to his response with a quiet, vested interest. The answer is a relatable one, if equally vague, but almost relatable in that vagueness, specifically. Nothing quite feeling right, the line between legitimate sensation and tricks of the mind a hair too thin. ]
Yes and no, I would hazard to say, [ she returns. ] Certainly not when I retract this form of mine, though I do have a bit less to pack away than you. [ Literally as well as... solidly. ]
No, it has been quite some time since I last felt legitimate pain. Besides, I suppose, that which comes with the territory. [ Because I still refuse to believe plunging into the Pyre isn't at least Pretty Hot. ] Though I do think I caught enough for several lifetimes when mine ought to have ended, so it was almost—dare I say—pleasant, for the first century or two.
[ See? Look how easy it is to overshare about yourself, Boxer. She could do it all day. ]
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Really paying it forward.
[But he'll go on and take the second chance at bait now that she's laid it out for him.]
Territory?
[Mostly a leading question. He knows that she's got some kind of job she's supposed to be doing, somehow. But he'd never gotten around to prying about just how it (apparently painfully???) works. Didn't really ever seem the time.]
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Not the worst conceivable consolation prize, no.
[ Only almost. She'll let him run away with that bait for now. If only because it sparks another academic curiosity she's had kicking around in her head ever since she'd discovered her guestlist was not restricted to participating in the Rites. ]
My duty. Or more literally, I suppose, my space within this Crystal. Do you have anything of the sort, in your Transistor? A place to stretch your imaginary legs, between your jaunts into the physical?
no subject
[He hardly talks about it, and people never seem to ask. Studiously avoids the topic, around Red especially. He does, yeah. Though he gets the feeling that's not necessarily by design.
(The Country, or so he sometimes thinks of it. To himself. Secretly, not without some gallows humor, defensive irony...or something a little more apropos than he'd like to think. After all, it is just...calm. Quiet. Enough that he can almost forget it, when his focus is directed solely upward and outward, to the place outside the Transistor. Blue sky and gold grass as far as the eye can see, when he isn't.
The Country...or as good as he's going to get, now.)]
Don't think I'm supposed to be out here, though.
[Unlike her, it seems, who had been given her territory with her imprisonment. Every other Trace they found just got quickly filed away. Asleep. Themselves but not themselves. Capable of no real thought or sense or speech after they were integrated. And he's never been able to find them, here. Not Lillian, or Mr. Moyle, or Sybil. Or...anyone.]
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Out here, you say, while you are still in there. You are beginning to lose me already.
[ Mostly, anyway. There are certainly other spirits in the Crystal with her, and though they are no deeper within it than she, they do not have access to the full span of her agency. They remain far from the Crystal's surface, quiet and recluse, so much so that she occasionally forgets their existence. A good number of them have faded off now, anyway... She can't even admit that she's taken the time to determine which. ]
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Anyway, that's what happens when you don't take the easy way out and just mindread him, I guess. There's a compressed pause, after that. A quietly frustrated kind of silence, the kind that gives off the sense that he'd be scrubbing his hands over his face, if he could. (Or that he is, wherever he's ended up in there, where she couldn't see him even if she had the capacity.) He hesitates. Then tries again.]
Every time... [It's slow. Unsure, at first. Like he's finding his footing. Or deciding how much he really wants to continue this conversation. Then—]
Every time a Trace is recorded. I can talk with them. Just for a few seconds. After that, it's just...quiet. Don't know where it is they go.
[Their data is still there. Intact, Recorded. (Save for his. ERROR: SUBJECT DATA CORRUPTED UPON INTEGRATION.)]
I've looked around. There's just...no one.
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[ Look she can do that whenever she wants. It's cute when he talks about himself. Like an awkward teenager. She holds her silence while he goes about trying to articulate himself, trying to wrap her head around the concept for herself. ]
When you say Trace, do you mean souls, of a sort?
[ For the sake of this back-and-forth, she's going to go digging for supplementary information. Finds, for her troubles, a ravaged pale corpse upon a street corner, shouting from beyond the grave in corrupted whispers. No matter his answer, she goes casting about deeper, focusing hard upon the sword across from her, less the man she has come to know it as, and the container it truly is, by design or otherwise. Platt... Platt... ]
[ Sure enough, with attention brought to a single, piercing point, they're noticeable. Though Platt may be a bit of a stretch, one can only assume by context that she is among the souls trapped inside. The souls themselves... are deathly silent. Never has she encountered a mind so impenetrable, let alone so many. Perhaps not so much impenetrable as they are... Well, traces. Nothing to be gleaned from them, aside from their presence. ]
[ She's silent for a moment. Contemplating. ]
If that is the case, would you consider humoring my curiosity once again? It is not as if we have much of anything else to do, and I am certain it would align with yours.
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He hums a hard to say to her first question, unaware of the digging she does to supplement it. Could be. People here can deal in terms that don't always translate. Ghosts, souls, magic. In the end, it all seems to be relative.
The second, though— As slow as he is to let her pry answers out, it's not out of unwillingness, necessarily. Just...unfamiliarity, compulsive caution. (The kneejerk assumption that no one needs to know or no one particularly cares to know and he's better off keeping things under wraps where he can.) And she's not wrong—it's a mutually beneficial kind of curiosity. Inanimate Objects Anonymous.]
Yeah, go ahead. [He can try, anyway. Of course, he assumes it's another question. Not much else for the two of them to do.] What'd you have in mind?
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[ If he worries about looking the fool, atop his reservedness, for being so uncertain, he should have no fear with her. She would like to see anyone handle being confined to an inanimate object half as gracefully as he seems to. Richie just about pissed himself just being invited inside, it doesn't instill a whole lot of confidence in her. But Boxer, he's already got a foot in the door, as it were. ]
Concentrate over here, would you?
[ And with that uselessly vague instruction, she sets about latching firmly into his consciousness and giving it an experimental yank. Truthfully, she's making an effort to grab hold of the lot within the sword, but just as her attempts to penetrate their thoughts slide off like an icy surface, her claws barely scrape across their surfaces. In the end, all that she can lift from the sword remains the one that got away in the first place. ]
[ And so when next he wakes from a world gone dark, he'll be standing alone on a blackened court—you know the place—shrouded in swirls of green and gold hue. Well, alone save for Sandra, standing opposite him before an inset of stained glass much like the one at his heels, but much more alone than she had been academically intending him to be. The figure, solid as it had once been in the simulations, gives a shrug. ]
Worth a shot, I suppose. At least you made it.
no subject
Just for a second. The facsimile of the ground (such as it is. was.) is back under his feet before he can even realize that the feeling had been missing it. He blinks hard to clear his vision. Hands at his sides, the Transistor—for once, nowhere in reach. He opens his mouth. Takes a breath that smells like embers. And—]
...Um.
[Eloquent. He takes a step back to take in the surroundings—the field below, the strange stained-glass sigils. Landing finally on the not unfamiliar shape of Sandra in front of him. (Or...unfamiliar, but only in that she seems more and more alive this way. Like she had when they met.)
Just...give him a sec. At a loss—]
...What—
[Nevermind.]
no subject
[ While he collects himself, Sandra's attention returns upward, briefly, to see if she can't tug at the Traces within the sword with Boxer out of the way. But again, same as before, the Crystal's influence pecks like a bird's beak against glass, without so much as the tiniest hole to peek through. Sighing, she drops her gaze back to eye level and begins padding lightly toward center court, as it were. ]
To field a frequently asked question, you are not trapped here with me now, [ she offers, as if it's any comfort. ] But, as with your space within the Transistor, this is my space within the Crystal.
[ She throws her hands to the side in a half-hearted ta-da gesture. It's more of a shrug than anything else. ]
I've been curious as to whether or not this would work on a spirit like yours. Though it seems your friends are too tightly sealed away to join us, you were correct.
no subject
(Helps, maybe, to have done this sort of thing once before.)
For lack of anything better to do, he follows behind her as he recovers. Long legs catching up quickly as she ables onto the field, despite his slow pace and her head start. Neck craned to get a load of the surroundings—the general vague void, the odd patterns on the ground. There's a decidedly different feel to it. But it's still...strange, and quiet. Dark and confined and painted in vibrant colors, as if in direct contrast to the endless empty fields in the Transistor. Unbidden, a chill creeps up his spine.]
"This?" [Parroted back, like he's still wrapping his head around it. That she sounds so casual about pulling him in for a visit. If only because...how is it, then, that this isn't a one-way street? He has little reason to doubt her certainty. But—not hard to guess why he might have a vested interest.] ...Sounds like you've had a lot of practice.
[Like she's done it plenty of times before, brought herself some company. Somehow. In a way...it's kind of nice to know she doesn't have to be alone, here. He, at least, can watch the world go by from his (imprisonment) vantage point. Sandra hardly has that option.]