Hijinks Mingle

[potentite]

Who: Everyone!
Where: Anywhere around the hub!
When: Days 103-105
Open/Closed: Open mingle!
Notes: See this post for details on the moon prompt and this one for the telepathy/dream/spirit prompts!



[A | Flower Gleam and Glow]
[The nearby moon is still passing close to the hub island, meaning the effects are still in play. Perhaps now is the time to stop and smell the large lit up sparkling moonflowers that have bloomed? Or be annoyed by the mosquito-like insects that came with them.

Alternatively, the deer seem to draw some sort of energy from the moon's light. Given their size, at least their sudden aggression and proximity to the base camp isn't the worst thing in the world but a kick would still break a rib or other bone so be careful! Possibly help each other deal with these cute but troublesome fauna.]



[B | Eavesdropping]
[For some reason, the telepathy will suddenly get rather wonky. Characters won't know why it's happening, though of course no doubt there will be ponderings, but it means characters won't be in control of their ability to broadcast — or more specifically, not broadcast — their thoughts. Time to find out secrets of an embarrassing nature. Or maybe something sadder is going on in your character's head.

If this wasn't bad enough, the area around the signet might experience burning or tingling. Just try to keep a lid on your brain for the day and distract yourself from any annoying pain.]



[C | Talking In Your Sleep]
[Or maybe your character just doesn't have the most interesting thoughts. Maybe they're busy thinking about pie instead of their upsetting childhood. That's fair. Pie is great.

But surely sometimes it haunts their dreams. With the telepathy running amuck, it's no wonder dreams and nightmares are leaking through, too. Of course, it doesn't have to be an accident. Feel free to grab a friend and share a fanciful dreamscape together on purpose! But for those nuts that are tougher to crack, accidents can and will happen.]



[D | Who You Gonna Call]
[Last but not least, as Friday rolls around, there seems to be something odd going on with the island. If your character is inclined towards the spiritual or supernatural, they'll no doubt notice the strange heavy thickness hanging around. There are whispers in the air and all of new energy just feels solemn. Might be good to give people a heads up and keep an eye on it.]

Comments

[splinten]

[Wryly,]

I'm really fuckin' good at saying 'no' when that's what I happen to be desiring. My friends used to call me a pain in the ass for being aloof and mysterious.

[He wasn't really. He was mostly pretty transparent, even if he used more than his fair share of defensive irony. But he tried to seem aloof. He tried to be like the family he had worshipped across four generations, as cunning and inaccessible as a dead hero.]

[rebells]

All right.

[A slight smile that quickly turns serious. He looks out towards the water again. Dirk had said he grew up here, presumably after the takeover of Earth was complete and most of the world's land mass sunk into the sea.]

What happened to the rest of humanity?

[splinten]

It's a fairly long story, and an even longer process. You have to understand, the Condesce didn't just show up with her battleships in the sky and take over humanity. She started her invasion with subterfuge, posing as the leader of a baked goods company. She used that company as her way in and leveraged its resources to start warping human culture. Over the span of decades, she undermined humanity from within by using its own institutions to control public opinion and even brainwash the populace. It led to the election of her human collaborators to key positions of power, where they engaged in various efforts to dismantle the protections we'd built into our laws. When she showed her warships, it was only to frighten the human population into the authoritarian-aligned instincts that are activated in the presence of a threat.

It was a false show, of course, but no one knew that. The human population was approximately seven billion people when her human agents came to power. Their reign of terror, later called the Hilarocaust, ultimately killed five billion of us. By the time she finally stepped in to take power, we lacked the ability to resist.

Initially, the Condesce hoped to kill off the humans and replace them with clones of her own species, but her lusus, a creature bonded to her due to the conventions of the troll race, would always kill them. As a result, she turned to humans to attempt to make us more like trolls. This is where the genetic experimentation came in. She also banned human families and normal human reproduction and forced humans to contribute genetic material in the same manner that trolls do, donating them to imperial drones to be recombined into offspring that would be raised completely disconnected from any family but the droids she constructed to raise them. She ultimately decided she preferred Carapacians, who are a third species with a tendency towards unquestioning loyalty, over humans, and completely neglected humanity. With the planet flooded, the remnants of humanity were unable to adapt. By the year 2422, 411 years after the Condesce revealed herself to humanity and approximately five hundred years after her arrival on Earth, there were no humans left.

[rebells]

[Wow. On more than one level. He shakes his head.]

That's diabolical . . . she was a conqueror from the beginning, then. She was trying to reestablish her race?

[splinten]

Yes. Amongst her people, she was the undisputed tyrant and leader because of the colour of her blood. They have a caste system based on what they call the haemospectrum, ruled by those rare trolls with fuschia blood. You can imagine her experiments to replicate that in humans didn't go well.

[He pauses, and deciding out of explaining the 'she originates two universes ago from ours' bit, he just explains,]

Her lusus released a noise called the Vast Glub that wiped out the entire troll population. It's why she fled to our planet and sought to repopulate. But even before that, she was a conquerer. The Alternian Empire stretched far across the galaxy. They have an extremely violent and acrimonious culture, for reasons I've been led to believe are due to external influences.

There are a few troll survivors, like there are a few surviving humans. Unfortunately, we mostly only got to really meet the shitty ones.

[HE KNOWS THERE ARE COOL TROLLS OUT THERE. MEENAH SEEMS COOL. THE NUBBY HORNED ONE SEEMED HILARIOUS? INSTEAD THEIR SESSION WAS HAUNTED BY GAMZEE.

At least their was Fefetasprite. Dear, sweet Fefetasprite. Not technically a survivor, but cool.

Arquiusprite will not be commented on.]

[rebells]

[There's . . . so much in that . . . give him a moment.]

Not surprising, if you met them in that context . . . external influences? [He tilts his head.] Like gods?

[splinten]

That's technically us. [The Gods thing, you know.] It can be complicated to explain, and I don't know how much you really want to get into the dynamics of alternate universes and simply different ones. To go from an example I've already partially explained, the Condesce was an external influence. An Earth without her wouldn't have turned out the same way, and we know that because we were able to see that version of Earth.

From what I understand, the same thing happened with the troll species. You can tell that something interfered by looking at trolls who didn't experience this interference and comparing them to the ones that did. Based on the haphazard and long-winded explanations of a dead troll, I believe that the influence was at the behest of a demonic entity known as Lord English that seeks to destroy every universe he enters.

[The order of meteor appearance also mattered but he's trying not to kill Jay with Homestuck here.]

[rebells]

[He'd forgotten for a minute, honestly. Or--well, part of him assumes there must be higher gods than the kids.]

. . . right, your multiple instantiations of universes. I'm assuming time travel was involved. [Still, this is all very confusing.] I wonder if all universes are like that, and we simply don't know because the majority of them haven't been breached, if you will, in that way.

[splinten]

It's hard to say. By experience, I'm inclined to imagine such a thing. At the same time, if it really is possible for universes to exist outside of Paradox Space, which seems likely to me, then those rules that control my universe wouldn't carry over. I think it's reasonable to argue that there would only be one possible flow of time in the absence of time travel. However, there's plenty of science in recent history that points to the existence of multiple worlds that all interact on the level of quantum physics.

[A bit of a pause.]

I've assumed by this point that your culture hasn't developed quantum mechanics or its equivalents.

[rebells]

[A slow smile spreads across his face.]

I have no clue what that is, so I doubt it. But then again, I'm no scientist.

[splinten]

You're right. It's possible there's a whole wealth of time travel research that you don't have access to. There might even be active time machines that you're totally unaware of. It's your own damn fault for not keeping up with science.

[Yeah, Dirk suspects quantum mechanics is not even a twinkle in the scientific eye yet.]

[rebells]

Should I want to? From what you've told me, time travel sounds like a bit of a pain.

[splinten]

You're right. You can live totally content knowing there's a body of knowledge vital to the running of your world that you have no access to.

[rebells]

[You know him too well, Dirk. He doesn't argue that it could only be so vital, if the entirety of recorded history makes sense without it, or anything like that.

Instead, he just makes a face.]