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driftfleet2016-06-22 04:37 am
isocelesmonster) wrote in driftfleet2016-06-22 04:37 am
Entry tags:
the devil in the details
Who: Bill Cipher
Broadcast: none
Action: Anywhere in the fleet
When: The night of the 22nd, and ongoing.
It'd take a careful eye to notice the only other change: the same sharp instrument has been used to carve little eyes of providence, no bigger than a fingernail, in strategic public places around the ship. They're shallow markings, not deep enough to interfere with any of the working parts of the craft, and no great works of art - each little scrap of graffiti is a matter of five lines at most. But they're there - and if sometimes the way the gold of the metal hull glints in the pupil is strangely canny, it's probably nothing to be worried about.
(It's not that Bill doesn't care about the flesh puppets that make up his new crew - oh, he does, they're all going to get very careful scrutiny over the coming days - but more important is finding out what his new playground looks like.)
When the fleet sleeps, their minds open and blossom like night-blooming flowers, each one illuminating a new section of the shared dreaming plane. For all of their poetry, few humans realize that the state of dreaming is as real an exploration as whatever meaningless actions they take while awake. It's irrelevant to their survival, most days, so evolution has never sought to provide that particular revelation. They're a young species. Five senses, auditory languages, limited psychic potential, and as far as they know when they dream they're just watching random electrical impulses fire in their brains. Ha!
(There's an expression about a one-eyed man's status in a land of the blind, and Bill intends to make it a reality.)
He steps sideways out of the material world into the closest dream as easily as a three-dimensional being can move along any of their limited axes. He makes himself invisible, at first, just to get his bearings.
[Bill is visiting dreams, as a way of saying hello! His permissions post for this ability is here. I am treating this ability on an opt-in basis. If you didn't give me the okay, he won't be spying on your character at all tonight ~but where's the fun in that~?]
ZOGSLFTS GSRH DVZP ZMW RWOV GSVNV
Broadcast: none
Action: Anywhere in the fleet
When: The night of the 22nd, and ongoing.
Although ostensibly the Golden has a new crew member, there's no new person in attendance at any meals. No new faces in the hall, nothing additional in the laundry. One of the standard crew cabins has been sealed up as tight as a tomb, the brass nameplate on the door unhelpfully scratched out with something sharp. No noises at all come from inside.
It'd take a careful eye to notice the only other change: the same sharp instrument has been used to carve little eyes of providence, no bigger than a fingernail, in strategic public places around the ship. They're shallow markings, not deep enough to interfere with any of the working parts of the craft, and no great works of art - each little scrap of graffiti is a matter of five lines at most. But they're there - and if sometimes the way the gold of the metal hull glints in the pupil is strangely canny, it's probably nothing to be worried about.
(It's not that Bill doesn't care about the flesh puppets that make up his new crew - oh, he does, they're all going to get very careful scrutiny over the coming days - but more important is finding out what his new playground looks like.)
When the fleet sleeps, their minds open and blossom like night-blooming flowers, each one illuminating a new section of the shared dreaming plane. For all of their poetry, few humans realize that the state of dreaming is as real an exploration as whatever meaningless actions they take while awake. It's irrelevant to their survival, most days, so evolution has never sought to provide that particular revelation. They're a young species. Five senses, auditory languages, limited psychic potential, and as far as they know when they dream they're just watching random electrical impulses fire in their brains. Ha!
(There's an expression about a one-eyed man's status in a land of the blind, and Bill intends to make it a reality.)
He steps sideways out of the material world into the closest dream as easily as a three-dimensional being can move along any of their limited axes. He makes himself invisible, at first, just to get his bearings.
[Bill is visiting dreams, as a way of saying hello! His permissions post for this ability is here. I am treating this ability on an opt-in basis. If you didn't give me the okay, he won't be spying on your character at all tonight ~but where's the fun in that~?]
ZOGSLFTS GSRH DVZP ZMW RWOV GSVNV
RH ML NLIV BRVOWRMT YFG Z WIVZN
DSVM NLIMRMT GZPVH BLF UILN NB GSIZOO
YV TOZW R OVG BLF DZPV ZG ZOO
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WELL, PFT. OPPOSABLE THUMBS, FOR ONE!
[Big eyeroll.]
BESIDES, I'D LIKE TO THINK I'M A LITTLE MORE ORIGINAL THAN THAT! THIS FORM DOESN'T NEED TO BE CONSTRAINED BY ANY OF THE RULES A BODY BASED ON THE REAL WORLD WOULD HAVE! LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!
[In a whirl of color, Bill puts on a rapid-fire show of shapeshifting. He stretches and expands into an exact copy of Al, then splits into a dozen pieces and scatters as a flock of bare eyeballs with tiny bat wings on them. They fly in circles and briefly become a Sierpinski gasket made of blue fire and obsidian. It cracks like an egg and pours down a cascade of oily, psychedelic bubbles.
A few other forms follow, most of them too strange to exist outside of a dream. He snaps back to his usual flat yellow triangle at the end and takes a bow with his arms spread wide. His little black hat for some reason hasn't changed back. It's still stuck in the form of a chocolate gateau. Bill doesn't notice.]
TA DAAA!
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It also violated the laws of alchemy, of course, but that didn't necessarily matter in a dream. And so, he gave a round of applause.]
Your hat still looks like a dessert, but overall... that was impressive! I guess I'm used to being constrained by the laws of alchemy. I couldn't just... disassemble myself and bring myself back together like that, for example. Or make myself bigger. Conservation of mass and all.
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THANK YOU, THANK YOU! YOU'RE A GREAT CROWD! - HUH?
[He looks up, then frowns at his uncooperative hat. He plucks it off of his head and flicks it a little. It glitches like a badly-calibrated video display but refuses to not become a dessert.]
THERE'S NO MASS HERE! IT'S A DREAM! NO LAWS, NO REALITY! EVERYTHING'S AN ILLUSION!
[Bill blinks and his single eye turns into a sharp-toothed maw. It is far more cavernous than his flat shape should physically allow for. He pops the cake inside whole and swallows.
A beat. Then his hat, back to its normal shape, pops back into existence, hovering over his top point again.]
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Yeah- I guess it's hard for me to turn that part of my brain off, though. Even in my subconscious, where barriers don't matter.
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SURVIVAL MECHANISM, KID!
[He suddenly appears directly over top of Al's head, and reaches his little black hand down to knock on his skull lightly.]
YOUR BRAIN DOESN'T WANT YOU TO TAKE ON MORE POSSIBILITIES THAN IT CAN COMPREHEND!
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[He HAD seen the Truth, after all- it was like getting all the world's information dumped into his head at once.]
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[That's a lie, he totally knows how to cure that.]
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[No you're not, Bill.]
HMM. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH THIS ALCHEMY, KID? NOTHING YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BE COMFORTABLE WITH, OF COURSE!
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Well... what did you have in mind?
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IT'S PROBABLY BETTER I DON'T GO AROUND WITH YOUR FACE ANYWAY, HAH! IT'D GET CONFUSING!
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[A symbol draws itself over Bill's head again, this time traced in blue light. It looks superficially like a circle for alchemy, but the odd little drawings around the edges aren't like anything you'd find in a textbook.]
THIS MAKES A LITTLE PORT-HOLE BETWEEN THE REAL WORLD AND THE DREAM WORLD THAT WE CAN TALK THROUGH!