towerofanimus | Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles

Characters:

timegame & Open
Setting: Twelfth Floor
Format: I'll follow your lead!
Summary: Aradia thinks maybe watching other universes 'die' might give her a clue as to what's really going on in the tower
Warnings: Depends who answers, really!

There went another one.

Supernova-bright one second, ashen and dead the next, and yet still, no sign of what night have happened to dim that many stars and planets all at once. Maybe whatever it was moved on a spectrum her eyes alone couldn't see. Maybe it was some strange power like the one they had not been meant to face.

Or maybe these holograms of system after system meeting an end like a universal flash-fire were as fake as the flimsy excuse the tower's notes gave for their being here.

She turns to another sector of the tower wall as another batch of stars appears across the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and floats toward where the system's sun is. She watches it glow, closing her eyes and pretending the glow flickering from it is Green instead of blue-white for a moment. Pretending things are (as bad as they were in her world) back to normal. Another moment, another flash- it was a quick one this time- and the glow dies out and she sighs, eyes opening as the next set of stars flickers into being.

She finds the sun again, but doesn't face it, instead reaching out to trace a finger between stars.

"...just what is this supposed to mean..?"

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She crept through the door and stopped still. The stars were disappearing in flashes in the sky. She stumbled out into the room, reaching for a blossom of light just as it faded. She turned, seeing her first troll in this tower and it didn't even matter that it was one barely old enough to shed the title of wriggler.

"What's going on? What happened to all the stars?!"

"That's what happens, I think. Or what this place would have us believe happens, when it 'rescues' us. It's-"

She had started speaking before she turned, but when she did she stopped in surprise. There was no way that could be her... but the similarities- they were a little off-putting, to be honest, not to mention that she wore the same symbol wrapped around her so proudly. But it couldn't be Nepeta- the girl would have tacklepounced her immediately for the answer. That left very few options, and none that Aradia was going to settle on just yet. Instead, she cleared her throat and motioned to the walls, where new stars were flickering into view.

"It's always happening. Or that's the way it seems, anyway."

"The letter was true? That's...that's pawful, why--I was trying to..." Disciple's words trailed off and she watched the stars flicker out one by one.

"So Alternia is...gone?" She turned back to her fellow troll, looking for the same sort of despair and perhaps comfort.

"True is sort of... a relative term," she began, putting her fingers to her chin in thought. "Because you see, before I came here, Alteria was already gone. Or at least, everyone on it was dead, and Gl'bgolyb had released the vast glub so just about everyone out in the universe was probably dead too." She paused there, considering. "Well- everyone but the twelve of us, even if the numbers are starting to dwindle..."

She looked back over at her, face openly curious.

"Though you... you might be from a timeline where none of this happened at all."

"...What..." She tried to absorb the idea that everyone on Alternia was dead and gone. It was a little easier when she realized that she had assumed that the other had died or at the very least been taken into services nearly as bad as death. But the entire world they had tried so hard to change...

"A timeline?"

"Um... well, let me see if I can explain this so you'll understand," she began, folding her legs and holding her closed hands apart. "Let's say my left hand is an event that's supposed to happen. Now- there's a number of things that could go 'wrong', and really only one way it can go 'right'. Now, for each of those possibilities, there is a timeline that's created- that is to say, an alternate but concurrent reality in which things went 'wrong' alongside the one where it went 'right'. Regardless, each one of those now exists," here, her hand unfurled, each finger representing a timeline, "and then within each of them, more events come up, and again, more timelines are created based on the possibilities of what could and what should happen."

She snaked her other wrist under one of her fingers, spreading the fingers of that hand as well. "And so on and so forth, until the timelines where things go 'wrong' eventually end. Usually much sooner than the timelines where things go 'right'. Um... Did that make sense?"

Edited 2011-09-05 17:55 (UTC)

Dicsiple stared at this, trying to work her head around it. Why would it matter if there were other timelines, the one she was in was the one that mattered...And...There could be millions right. They can't all exist at once.

"I don't...So...you think Alternia wasn't destroyed in my time?" She tried to skip past all the timey-wimey to the root of the problem. Was her world destroyed or not.

"It's a possibility that it wasn't until long after you were pulled here," she replied, making a helpless motion with her hands. "It's also possible that this place did save you from some sort of annihilation, and you were from a timeline that was meant to be doomed."

She didn't really like insinuating that someone was doomed, of course, except that sooner or later that 'doomed' tended to kick in pretty aggressively.

"Is there...a way to figure out if I am or not?" Disciple tilted her head, "I'd hate to think...that all our work was for nothing."

"I'm sorry, but without being able to go back to your timeline and double-checking, I couldn't tell you for sure..." And she really is sorry- she knows what it's like to try and try and try so hard only for things not to pan out in the long run. "I wish I could be of a little more help."

Edited 2011-09-07 08:17 (UTC)

She shook her head and smiled, "I know it's not your job to know everything. Tell me have you heard of Signless or seen this symbol?" She lifted her necklace from under her clothes and dangled it out. The cancer symbol was obvious enough.

"I know it's a long shot if I'm from a doomed timeline."

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles

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