ablativeholopleather | IC Contact/Inbox/HMD

"Oh....that sounds horrific, actually."

What else do you say when someone confesses the madness of their world? It's frightening, somewhat, but she's glad Wayne made it out alive, and she can hold it as a concept, not yet to be touched.

"I'm glad you had him there - even if such a thing needed to be stopped, no doubt, that doesn't change that people have to survive until it's taken out."

"Yeah...yeah. We got lucky. It coulda been way worse." He won't deny that. As much as he would have liked to just be able to go back home when it was all done the first time around, he knows that it was the right thing to do to make sure that they were prepared for what was likely to come next, or even for some new threat following on the tail of the old tragedies. Better to focus on the good that came out of it than the hard parts, right? "They tried to do it again but we kinda got the jump on 'em."

Wayne walks with his hands in his pockets, watching the ocean through the windows as they go. He's comforted by being able to see the water, even if it doesn't quite hold a candle to the ocean that he grew up with.

"Now I just gotta hope the rest of them are gonna be able to keep fending for themselves. I think they got it though. And, they still have my crew, even if I don't. They'll be fine."

"...Did anyone ever tell you one of the theories of this place? About how we're here at all?"

She has a place she's going with this, she promises.

"I heard that some of the people are actually dead or something, back in their worlds, so this is the better option. It doesn't feel like an afterlife though." Especially if what he's heard is true about them dying here as well.

"That's so, the dead do get to walk among us again. But what I'm referring to is that the versions of us that are here...it's as though someone took a photograph of you, and now there are two. One of you is still where you came from, with your friends, making whatever path you would through your life. And there is another of you here, like a branch off a tree, to forge a new way and make new acquaintance and live as best you can in a new place. That's what I've been told, and I choose to embrace that idea."

She smiles, and the elevator she's called to bring them up to the sports deck opens, allowing them to go inside.

"Because that means that I haven't been forced to abandon my friends. They still have me alongside them."

Want is quiet for a little while as he contemplates this, alongside other theories that he's heard. He's still following along beside Helena, his boots audible on the deck below them, but it takes a moment for him to pull his words together again.

"...well, at least that means someone's gonna be there to feed my cat." Not to mention to take care of his garden and look in on Waynehouse still. "I wonder if that Wayne is ever even gonna know about all this, if that's what's happening. Or maybe I'll end up becoming an Old Wayne here and he can be an Old Wayne there."

"Maybe one day he will. I don't put it past the realm of possibility."

She shrugs, because who knows the rules on what your alternate selves remember? (Never mind that it'll get thrown for a loop when people start wandering into the mind rifts in reality, and then there's the ghost-dream-recollections to deal with.)

"Maybe you'll both be old Waynes and get to talk about what you each experienced."

Memory and reality and the time space continuum are weird here and nothing can really change that, he supposed. But they can try to make the best of it either way.

He smiles again as they find a nice open spot in the middle of the deck.

"Maybe. It'd be cool to get to tell the larvae about a whole different reality that's out here."

She's going to assume that's a Wayne word for kids, and not the reality of what that means. But, jump testing!

Firstly, she has to take her shoes off, for a baseline.

"Okay, this is normal jumping. What I'm used to."

And she hops - it's small, and even when she tries very hard, it's not a double jump of any sort that would put her on a bookshelf. Just an ordinary person jump.

Now, shoes back on, tying the laces in bows again. And this time, she jumps, higher than before - and then jumps again, to reach an even greater arc. The sound of surprise that comes out of her is half a laugh, as she hits the deck again and wobbles slightly to maintain her footing.

"Oh goodness."

He's going to have to sit and describe things for her, some time. It will present a whole lot of silly for her to have to try and imagine.

When she hops, he does the same, getting a good amount more clearance but only able to jump the once. He waits for her to re-tie her shoes, then stares as she does indeed jump, then make the motion and jump even higher. He quickly moves over to steady her when she touches down again, laughing a little bit in kind. If she's got her hat on, he'd straighten that a little on her head.

"Dang, you get up there," he announces with clear amusement. "No wonder you got stuck. Maybe next time you wanna find something high up, send me a message, huh?"

"Will do, if only so next time you can see what happens."

But it's that grin of something cool happening, thrilled because it happened, and now that means that as long as she knows where she'll touch down, she can jump different places. Maybe even up the stairs, to surprise someone at the top. Oh, Erin's getting a heartfelt thank you for passing this part of the mail onto her, for allowing this to happen. (Maybe, if she gets a better grip on this, she can even see what it would be like to go on those shelves on purpose. She can think of a few people she'd like to surprise like that.)

"Magic shoes. I think I read a story about them once, but they weren't like this."

"Magic shoes." Yep, that's exactly what they were, and it's an amusing notion to say the least that they had specific shoes for that. He's wondering if there's such a spell for his boots, now. "And you're totally getting use out of them even if it's just to be silly with so that's like, even more of a bonus right? Totally worth it."

"I'm sure if I can figure out how to properly use them, they'll be that much more worth it. Just imagine!"

Being able to get things from higher up. Being able to explore more -

"Oh, if I had these earlier, I could have climbed to the top of the ferris wheel, probably...the other man and me couldn't reach where we'd need to go to get more than halfway up, but that was still a great deal of fun."

"Wait, you're supposed to climb that thing?" He was assured that they would have a long ride all the way around it, not anything physical involved. Now he kind of wished he'd done that his first day there.

"...No. You're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to just ride it."

Listen. It was an idea, a longing, and no one had told her no.

"It wasn't in motion, if you were wondering."

On one hand, that seems like something that he should be quite concerned about. On the other, she's clearly fine, and had someone else there to spot her, so no harm done.

"I've climbed up stuff I probably shouldn't have, I'm not gonna judge. Scaled a wall because I got lost and ended up in a prison once."

"Were you arrested, or did you just come across the prison?"

No judgement either way, just an open curiosity about his story.

"Kinda surprised I didn't get arrested actually, but nah, it was more of like a prison break situation? Long story but the guy running New Muldul got usurped and locked up and like, he's a good guy and I needed to talk to him anyway but I got real lost trying to find a way in to where he was being held. So I kinda climbed the outer wall. Fell into the ocean a couple times in the process."

"You must be a terribly strong swimmer, then." Magic shoes would have helped him, no doubt, but everything about her speaks to Wayne having her attention - she's fascinated by whatever he chooses to share, and the idea of breaking into a prison is a move only a daring hero would make.

"I can't imagine how surprised he'd be to see you when you came in."

That actually gets a bit of a laugh from him. "Nope, I can't swim like, at all. I just also don't technically need to breathe all the time so I just kinda...sink? And then walk back to where I was going?" That's not alarming at all, right?

"Oh yeah, he had no idea we were coming. I had to kind of uh, fight the guy that put him there? It wasn't great. We kinda fibbed when we found him and said Viewax had offered him a pardon."

"...You don't need to breathe?"

That more than anything else takes priority. She knows that constructs don't need to breathe as much, but they were made like that. Wayne has been existing in her head as somewhere between human and not, but she'd never thought about breathing in that.

...okay yeah he could see where such a sentence would be alarming. Anyone chatting with him here might have had something to say about, in hindsight.

"I mean I do to be able to talk and stuff but yeah."

"....Huh."

What she's about to ask next will make more sense considering who she's close to, but...

"Did someone build you that way?"

A degree of politeness has been suspended in place of her disbelief.

A blink.

"Build- oh like a construct? Oh, nah man, nah. Been this way since I was a larva. All of us are."

Edited 2023-03-12 01:38 (UTC)

"And when you say larva, is that just your word for baby, or is it something else?"

Beat.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Wayne, if this is something terribly obvious I'm missing or really rude, but since I can't see you, all I can go on is what you tell me."

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