All right. The over the top trope I'm gonna variate on here is.... PREGNANT OR ELSE!
And now, to draw the triangle.
Let’s try this in stages: Start with a line segment.
--------------------
1
--------------------
At about 5 sweeps is where things get interesting.
The trials are long over, and so the slow wave of settlement. There are enough resources to go around; bloodlust is falling out of fashion with the inexorable change of brain hormones. Suddenly, everyone is interested in figuring out the *rules*.
They're all so bad at it! Not at all like Terezi, who was raised in large portion by a library encompassing such subjects as law, psychology, and how to knot rope. She makes a hobby of tangling her age peers in their own novice logic until they are as bug-eyed and speechless as if she had tightened her physical rope around their necks. (As sometimes she does.)
It's the grey text itself that first strikes her attention. What it says to her is that Karkat Vantas has comprehended one fundamental system their society is built on (Which is a better feat than, eg, Sollux Captor, an otherwise favourite conversational partner) well enough to *reject it*.
He's doomed, of course. But more brazenly and more interestingly (she thinks!) than the vast majority of her peers.
(Eventually, when she discovers the truth, Terezi is angry. As though the betrayal was purposeful and personal.)
--------------------
0
ok then, let’s make it easier.
Start with a blank canvas on which to draw. --------------------
There's not a hole at the bottom of paradox space. Nothing "leaks". Nothing is caught in the dark flow's current to spiral helplessly down.
But there are places where the membrane between universes is thin enough that objects larger than photons can pass themselves through. "Membrane" is an imprecise metaphor, but so is "tunnel" or "wormhole" or even, perhaps, "travel". The wandering object *must* fold itself into one of the higher, *hidden* dimensions (explain troll physicists who sneer disdainfully at the phenomenon) because the unfolding into the next universe results in a chiral inversion impossible in the standard 3 dimensions. Imagine a permeable mirror.
It's not hard to initiate travel across, if only one way. The motive force is simple will, and many trolls have a natural sense for the threadbare portions of reality (largely - but not entirely - in proportion to psychic affinity). But doing so is deeply censured** by their society, condemned as the most cowardly option, an escape far more humiliating than facing one's demise honourably and head-on.
(Why so taboo? I might speculate that psychic activity is largely weighted towards the lower castes, and having a path where the arbitrators of society cannot so easily follow might be a destabilizing force to those who hold power.)
(But perhaps there are other reasons, long forgotten. *Which* dimensions must one pass through?)
--------------------
1
Now. Draw a single, starting point.
--------------------
For the first week, Vriska goads her from the other side of the room, where Terezi has tied her with Terezi’s most unbreakable chains. Vriska thinks Terezi has used justice as an *excuse* to chase her down and capture her, and she thinks that eventually Terezi will let her go so that they can start the game once more.
She is very wrong.
And Vriska realizes it late, not late enough, and treats all observers to a self-pitying, narcissistic rant about even Terezi turning against her (well, *yes*, that’s been a thing since Terezi took on the case!) and since no one wants her here anymore…
And pops out of the universe.
Terezi knows what happened - she smells the breech in the universe, spiderweb cracks like sharp sunlight licking the edge of a knife. A cowardly move! But Terezi has been on the chase for sweeps. She jumps after.
Terezi has travelled often through the medium, the membrane between existence and other and not, but always wrapped carefully in the protective hull of spacecraft. There is sight static - flashes of non-reality - and a sensation of being unmoored. But in a ship, only the navigating helmsmind must transverse the light lines, jumping through tangles of space and time. Terezi remains, herself, stable.
When Terezi was 5 sweeps old, she dreamed she stared into the sun. Not Alternia's sun, cradle warmer, but the true sun at the center of existence, the root from which all branching possibilities grow. All of meta-meta-infinity collapsed into one bright point...
A trick! But now, it feels like she's leaped into the heart of that star. Tangled world-lines crossing and knotting until Terezi cannot tell which are true and which are not. Shadow timelines. West is Vriska never jumping, and instead dying at Terezi's swordpoint on capture, on escape, on verdict. A noose around her throat. Vriska loosed to be chased again, her black proposal accepted.
East, and Terezi has chosen differently long ago. She has not been blinded, and her lifeline is steady and more accomplished, but risk averse, dull. She is standing next to friend-presences on an old ship, slow rot at the edges of miscoloured patches in the walls: not a fleet ship. The troll in front of her turns, and starlight shines on his eyes in dream-bright red. That’s a timeline tasting like satisfaction - much more than the one almost parallel to hers, where she never followed, turned home, stamped Vriska as dishonourably erased - but the knot ahead of it splits into endless branches, always disaster, disaster, disaster, disaster.
She is six and fighting a monster in a strange coloured world, and Vriska's blood spilling down from the future, a stain, and she dies at four in an Flarping accident. Her lusus, beloved dragon, never speaks to her after she loses her eyes, and she's culled at eight sweeps when they come for Sollux early (he’s ruined the wrong network line, not as good as he thought and) *Hide* he tells her, but she doesn't, standing by his side. But she does, and they find her. But Sollux refuses her, pushes her outside, where she is caught fully by the morning. But she dies slowly, later, hungry and and angry and useless.
Terezi yanks back, and her sword spills red, not cerulean blue. Spills teal. Hers or not hers. Terezi stares through at her co-descendant and one of them is dying because the legislacerators only make open one position per sign, and in this timeline they had both *wanted* Redglare’s legacy. A heir and a spare...
Terezi is sitting in a stolen throne. Terezi is rich, has power, has an empire, commands and is obeyed.
She could spend an eternity here, tracking down the best choice. All worlds possible. All worlds untrue. But Terezi is on a mission! She ignores the other possibilities around her and runs forward on the one path she knows must be real, the one comprised of every decision she herself has made, the one on which she's travelling. Forward, and on to the next scene. Forward, straight, and *through*.
--------------------
2
Lift the pencil. Draw a second Point, some distance from the first.
--------------------
When Dave was a kid, he used to joke - and here I mean "ironically" joke, making a statement while keeping plausible deniability about any level of true belief - that his Bro was a demon hunter.
Well, Bro had the weapons, skills, and scars for the job, plus a handy (& exceedingly rare) Skaianet device to track intrusions to the plane. Well, the things Bro tracked down had the right look for it: horns and claws and laser glow eyes. You can watch youtube videos of them growling and hissing, saliva droplets glinting from fucked up, dentist’s heart attack teeth. Shrinking from the sun.
So yeah, let me be more precise, Dave'd tell whoever that his Bro was an awesome ventriloquist rapper with a sideline in hunting demons, and no one ever once got confused what he meant about that *last* part.
When Dave was 16 or so Bro decided he was trained up enough to come with, and the stakeout started with Dave nervously blocking off an alleyway, fingering the hidden, reassuring grips of his gun and his sword and his extra strength mace ("If the situation calls for one - Pick the right one"), and the stakeout ends with a small creature - a child, that's what it's gotta be, years younger than Dave - bleeding dark from a blown out eyesocket and backed into a corner as far away from Bro as it can shuffle. It moves wrongly, not like a spider crawly movie ghoul, limbs with the wrong sorts of hinges, but like a broken thing. One leg dragging, the hand covering its elbow dripping, and it's *small*. Smaller than Dave, and he's just hit average for his age with the last growth spurt. He's seen how the adults measure up in the news, or standing next to Bro as he looks down from the window, and they get bigger than this. It's hurt and terrified and so very *young*.
Bro is making strange soothing noises at it - words he made Dave memorize, repeat over and over because he never quite got the yawning vowels - but it screeches when he inches closer, hissing through bared fangs *just like* on the youtube horror clips, but it twists his heart in a different direction than he'd expected. His hand drifts over sword gun mace, and he pulls it from his pocket, feeling ashamed.
Bro calls him forward. Say “hrauuuughtkahp”, he says, and Dave says “hrauuuughtkahp”, vocal chord memory taking over. The kid looks at him. “hrotcap”, he says again, inching forward. It means something like, "Not gonna hurt you." Maybe closer to, "Don't want to hurt you". Kid stares at him in incomprehension, he must be fucking up the words pretty bad,
"That was a bad one," Bro says, after the alien's been deposited with the alien processing people, who've been waiting a safe distance radius away. (Crowd too many interested minds too close, and things go badly.)
Because that's the thing, 90% of the bleedthroughs are kids, scared, confused, very often injured, *always* out of options. They don't know where they are, half the time they don't know *how* they got here: It's some kind of instinct, Rose says, some kind of last gasp for survival, nonsensical since they can't *breed* here, and thank fuck to that. Earth is Alternia’s reject dumping grounds.
It's the adults who arrive prepared. They’ve made the cost/benefit analysis and decided they'd have more power or more lifespan or just more fun in human-land. And from what Dave's understood of the flip side culture, people who opt out because it’s not *permissive* enough, not open enough to violent tendencies… people are willing to go into self-exile... Yeah.
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p1
Date: 2013-11-11 07:09 am (UTC)And now, to draw the triangle.
Let’s try this in stages: Start with a line segment.
--------------------
1
--------------------
At about 5 sweeps is where things get interesting.
The trials are long over, and so the slow wave of settlement. There are enough resources to go around; bloodlust is falling out of fashion with the inexorable change of brain hormones. Suddenly, everyone is interested in figuring out the *rules*.
They're all so bad at it! Not at all like Terezi, who was raised in large portion by a library encompassing such subjects as law, psychology, and how to knot rope. She makes a hobby of tangling her age peers in their own novice logic until they are as bug-eyed and speechless as if she had tightened her physical rope around their necks. (As sometimes she does.)
It's the grey text itself that first strikes her attention. What it says to her is that Karkat Vantas has comprehended one fundamental system their society is built on (Which is a better feat than, eg, Sollux Captor, an otherwise favourite conversational partner) well enough to *reject it*.
He's doomed, of course. But more brazenly and more interestingly (she thinks!) than the vast majority of her peers.
(Eventually, when she discovers the truth, Terezi is angry. As though the betrayal was purposeful and personal.)
--------------------
0
ok then, let’s make it easier.
Start with a blank canvas on which to draw.
--------------------
There's not a hole at the bottom of paradox space. Nothing "leaks". Nothing is caught in the dark flow's current to spiral helplessly down.
But there are places where the membrane between universes is thin enough that objects larger than photons can pass themselves through. "Membrane" is an imprecise metaphor, but so is "tunnel" or "wormhole" or even, perhaps, "travel". The wandering object *must* fold itself into one of the higher, *hidden* dimensions (explain troll physicists who sneer disdainfully at the phenomenon) because the unfolding into the next universe results in a chiral inversion impossible in the standard 3 dimensions. Imagine a permeable mirror.
It's not hard to initiate travel across, if only one way. The motive force is simple will, and many trolls have a natural sense for the threadbare portions of reality (largely - but not entirely - in proportion to psychic affinity). But doing so is deeply censured** by their society, condemned as the most cowardly option, an escape far more humiliating than facing one's demise honourably and head-on.
(Why so taboo? I might speculate that psychic activity is largely weighted towards the lower castes, and having a path where the arbitrators of society cannot so easily follow might be a destabilizing force to those who hold power.)
(But perhaps there are other reasons, long forgotten. *Which* dimensions must one pass through?)
--------------------
1
Now. Draw a single, starting point.
--------------------
For the first week, Vriska goads her from the other side of the room, where Terezi has tied her with Terezi’s most unbreakable chains. Vriska thinks Terezi has used justice as an *excuse* to chase her down and capture her, and she thinks that eventually Terezi will let her go so that they can start the game once more.
She is very wrong.
And Vriska realizes it late, not late enough, and treats all observers to a self-pitying, narcissistic rant about even Terezi turning against her (well, *yes*, that’s been a thing since Terezi took on the case!) and since no one wants her here anymore…
And pops out of the universe.
Terezi knows what happened - she smells the breech in the universe, spiderweb cracks like sharp sunlight licking the edge of a knife. A cowardly move! But Terezi has been on the chase for sweeps. She jumps after.
Terezi has travelled often through the medium, the membrane between existence and other and not, but always wrapped carefully in the protective hull of spacecraft. There is sight static - flashes of non-reality - and a sensation of being unmoored. But in a ship, only the navigating helmsmind must transverse the light lines, jumping through tangles of space and time. Terezi remains, herself, stable.
When Terezi was 5 sweeps old, she dreamed she stared into the sun. Not Alternia's sun, cradle warmer, but the true sun at the center of existence, the root from which all branching possibilities grow. All of meta-meta-infinity collapsed into one bright point...
A trick! But now, it feels like she's leaped into the heart of that star. Tangled world-lines crossing and knotting until Terezi cannot tell which are true and which are not. Shadow timelines. West is Vriska never jumping, and instead dying at Terezi's swordpoint on capture, on escape, on verdict. A noose around her throat. Vriska loosed to be chased again, her black proposal accepted.
East, and Terezi has chosen differently long ago. She has not been blinded, and her lifeline is steady and more accomplished, but risk averse, dull. She is standing next to friend-presences on an old ship, slow rot at the edges of miscoloured patches in the walls: not a fleet ship. The troll in front of her turns, and starlight shines on his eyes in dream-bright red. That’s a timeline tasting like satisfaction - much more than the one almost parallel to hers, where she never followed, turned home, stamped Vriska as dishonourably erased - but the knot ahead of it splits into endless branches, always disaster, disaster, disaster, disaster.
She is six and fighting a monster in a strange coloured world, and Vriska's blood spilling down from the future, a stain, and she dies at four in an Flarping accident. Her lusus, beloved dragon, never speaks to her after she loses her eyes, and she's culled at eight sweeps when they come for Sollux early (he’s ruined the wrong network line, not as good as he thought and) *Hide* he tells her, but she doesn't, standing by his side. But she does, and they find her. But Sollux refuses her, pushes her outside, where she is caught fully by the morning. But she dies slowly, later, hungry and and angry and useless.
Terezi yanks back, and her sword spills red, not cerulean blue. Spills teal. Hers or not hers. Terezi stares through at her co-descendant and one of them is dying because the legislacerators only make open one position per sign, and in this timeline they had both *wanted* Redglare’s legacy. A heir and a spare...
Terezi is sitting in a stolen throne. Terezi is rich, has power, has an empire, commands and is obeyed.
She could spend an eternity here, tracking down the best choice. All worlds possible. All worlds untrue. But Terezi is on a mission! She ignores the other possibilities around her and runs forward on the one path she knows must be real, the one comprised of every decision she herself has made, the one on which she's travelling. Forward, and on to the next scene. Forward, straight, and *through*.
--------------------
2
Lift the pencil. Draw a second Point, some distance from the first.
--------------------
When Dave was a kid, he used to joke - and here I mean "ironically" joke, making a statement while keeping plausible deniability about any level of true belief - that his Bro was a demon hunter.
Well, Bro had the weapons, skills, and scars for the job, plus a handy (& exceedingly rare) Skaianet device to track intrusions to the plane. Well, the things Bro tracked down had the right look for it: horns and claws and laser glow eyes. You can watch youtube videos of them growling and hissing, saliva droplets glinting from fucked up, dentist’s heart attack teeth. Shrinking from the sun.
So yeah, let me be more precise, Dave'd tell whoever that his Bro was an awesome ventriloquist rapper with a sideline in hunting demons, and no one ever once got confused what he meant about that *last* part.
When Dave was 16 or so Bro decided he was trained up enough to come with, and the stakeout started with Dave nervously blocking off an alleyway, fingering the hidden, reassuring grips of his gun and his sword and his extra strength mace ("If the situation calls for one - Pick the right one"), and the stakeout ends with a small creature - a child, that's what it's gotta be, years younger than Dave - bleeding dark from a blown out eyesocket and backed into a corner as far away from Bro as it can shuffle. It moves wrongly, not like a spider crawly movie ghoul, limbs with the wrong sorts of hinges, but like a broken thing. One leg dragging, the hand covering its elbow dripping, and it's *small*. Smaller than Dave, and he's just hit average for his age with the last growth spurt. He's seen how the adults measure up in the news, or standing next to Bro as he looks down from the window, and they get bigger than this. It's hurt and terrified and so very *young*.
Bro is making strange soothing noises at it - words he made Dave memorize, repeat over and over because he never quite got the yawning vowels - but it screeches when he inches closer, hissing through bared fangs *just like* on the youtube horror clips, but it twists his heart in a different direction than he'd expected. His hand drifts over sword gun mace, and he pulls it from his pocket, feeling ashamed.
Bro calls him forward. Say “hrauuuughtkahp”, he says, and Dave says “hrauuuughtkahp”, vocal chord memory taking over. The kid looks at him. “hrotcap”, he says again, inching forward. It means something like, "Not gonna hurt you." Maybe closer to, "Don't want to hurt you". Kid stares at him in incomprehension, he must be fucking up the words pretty bad,
"That was a bad one," Bro says, after the alien's been deposited with the alien processing people, who've been waiting a safe distance radius away. (Crowd too many interested minds too close, and things go badly.)
Because that's the thing, 90% of the bleedthroughs are kids, scared, confused, very often injured, *always* out of options. They don't know where they are, half the time they don't know *how* they got here: It's some kind of instinct, Rose says, some kind of last gasp for survival, nonsensical since they can't *breed* here, and thank fuck to that. Earth is Alternia’s reject dumping grounds.
It's the adults who arrive prepared. They’ve made the cost/benefit analysis and decided they'd have more power or more lifespan or just more fun in human-land. And from what Dave's understood of the flip side culture, people who opt out because it’s not *permissive* enough, not open enough to violent tendencies… people are willing to go into self-exile... Yeah.