voice

[anklets]

[This query brought to you by a pretty handful of missing puzzle pieces, not that you'd know, since Lenalee has no intent to justify or explain that imagery, nor to keep picking at scabs until they fester.]

We've already seen how the smallest change made can rewrite the entire history of this world. People are unborn, warheads are undropped... because we've cut out the circumstances which led to their happening.

How do you think that it might be the same for us? Transports come and go so often here and no one knows why. Whatever we do, we are always altering chances, there is no reason not to consider they could also be our own. That someone arrived on a day no longer existing may suddenly leave, or return by new circumstance, or forget they were ever here before.

It may be that we don't "go home", just. "Never arrive".

[ about ten minutes after broadcast, through careful squinting and experimentation, the feed is locked from Gilbert Nightray ]

Comments

[selfequipped]

[Kate considers the meaning of this for a moment, and it actually ... makes sense.]

That lines up with what I've learned here. People don't remember anything when they go home, right? So it'd make sense, but the time loops would have to be tidy. Very tidy. I'm not sure they are.

Voice; private

[maddeninghatter]

[ He sounds terse; annoyed. ]

Could you kindly lock this from Gilbert?

[ Not that he's in any shape to be monitoring the Network, but really. ]

voice, private, jfc!!!!

[overclocking]

[ Not picking at scabs? No, this is ripping open new wounds, to go with disappeared prophets, blonde idiots, sobbing young girls.

He doesn't mean for it to come out as an admonishment, but perhaps there's an edge of it, despite his best efforts. ]

Lenalee.

[anklets]

[Aha. She'd hoped it wouldn't, so she takes a moment to get over the tight pang of disappointment.]

Nothing about this seems very tidy at all. It would be nice to know what we're doing to ourselves.

Voice; private

[anklets]

[Won't kid herself into thinking she'd seen his name and expected anything different, with how quickly they always fail to match up. ]

Yeah.

Voice; private

[maddeninghatter]

And Alice, too. And Ahiru. And —

[ Now he's angry. ]

Lock it from everybody, you selfish girl!

1/2 ha ha ha...

[anklets]

[anklets]

[ tinily, almost- desperate: ] I need to know if that's what I'm doing to everyone.

[She's lost one too many people to the whims of the history they're making, and is tired of feeling her way through the dark.]

[anklets]

[Lenalee thought she had swallowed it down quite admirably, the ache in her throat that comes with trying to make it through painful words.

Maybe not so much. She can't be cross with Break for this one.]

Aren't I?

[overclocking]

What if Alice sees this? Or Rosette-

[ In fact, this is the part where the audio feed becomes muffled, as of someone drawing their tablet to their chest. A distant conversation, brief- he deflects Rosette's interest and sends her on yet another chore. Put your tablet down. Walk away. There's nothing on the network tonight.

Another long pause, and then the voice returns at proper volume. ]

I understand, [ quiet, not unkind, ] but you're not going to find your answers here. Just hurt faces and voices.

voice;

[permit]

. . .

[ in steady baritone, tempered and calm. ]

What other choice do you propose we have at our disposal?

[anklets]

[Each name a little stab of its own, so it's with remarkable restraint that she holds herself until the end of it, bruising her knees with her fingers because maybe then her voice won't creak and crack, but it still does.]

It will hurt no matter when I ask, or where, or who. [ someone will have always just lost someone else, she has lived it often enough, don't waver, think towards the future, carry that weight ] I don't want to move blindly forward anymore.

[maddeninghatter]

[ ............damn.

She's a kid, she's just a scared kid, trapped in a world she didn't make, afraid and alone. Forcibly orphaned, like all the rest. Too prickly to let anyone look after her, too determined to seem like the grownup she isn't.

Oz had probably worked his way under that frosty interior, brought a little bit of sunshine.... ]

Saying things like this....

[ He had just dressed her down, hadn't he, for wanting to save those pitiful few doomed Initiative people. She was wrong, of course, but a child can't be expected to know that. A child only feels loneliness and pain. A child blames herself when bad things happen, or when people leave her. ]

The way Time works... the past and the future... these things are too big for any one person to grasp.

voice;

[anklets]

[ weakly: ] I don't know.

[Doesn't know how to do much that isn't painful in some way.]

I'd hoped someone might say "that isn't how this works", but no one really seems to know how it does, much less how it cannot.

[That's why this scares her.]

video.

[debtor]

[He's never been sure what to make of time travel and timelines and he's only became increasingly wary of the way they've taken to casually mucking about in history, the longer he'd stayed in this world. He's at fault, too. He's definitely at fault. And what they've done now, what they've "accomplished", is unthinkable. It frankly makes him ill.

They erased the city they were trying to save.

...What she's said makes sense. It's terrible, but they have to face the possibility. They're part of the timeline here as well, after all - are they really immune to the alterations they've made? But it doesn't line up entirely, either, with what he's seen. Heard. He still doesn't know what to think; he only has one counterargument.

And he sounds calm enough when he responds. (It wouldn't do not to be.)]

It's to do with the Transporter, I was told.

It snatches us up, but it can't hold on forever, sometimes it loses its grip. When we return home, it's all... reset.

[And isn't that what happened to him?]

None of us really know, but...

[But troubling time-hypotheses aside, it's what prompted this that concerns him the most right now.]

Private.

Lenalee, where are you now?

[overclocking]

[ And he understands that, too. It's so easy to stop moving, when there's nothing ahead of you but darkness. But stopping is the same as burying yourself alive. All you're doing is wrapping yourself in it. ]

If you stopped running [ "Running," it's how Rosette would describe it. Perhaps for Lenalee it's something slower and more sombre than that. It seems fitting. ] right at this moment, what would you do?

[anklets]

[She is a child of war, but only of one war, so unfortunately it hadn't done much to set her up for anything other than. Everyone involved with the Order-- the Finders, the Science Division, those who supported the Church... they all already had their losses plotted out and planned for.

Here, it hadn't been clear what the extent of their losses could be until they'd spilled out in nuclear wastelands and then snowdrifts.

Her cheeks burn with all that is losing friends to something she doesn't understand. Death left no room to question, not like this Time and Chance business. There's no Earl here to keep her at a wary distance.]

It's... awfully fragile. [ as her voice is now ] If there's the possibility we may be part of the reason people keep coming back and going again, how are we meant to fight?

audio

[werewolfing]

Way I heard it, we can change things here because we don't belong. If we did, we'd change along with everything else. This time isn't our time, this world isn't our world.

[a pause.]

But people still go home, don't remember, live parts of their lives, come back and do. Fuck if I know how that works.

text;

[thorny]

[OH LOOK SOMETHING OF A SENSITIVE TOPIC FOR ROSE]

More likely their actions have made them unacceptable for intended events. That's how the universe worked in the one I resided in before being pulled here, and I don't see any reason it should be different here.

Mistakes create multiple timelines, and there's only room in existence for the correct one. It's a simple concept.

[onehundredswords]

Ouch. That's pretty grim thinkin' you got goin' on there.

[And it's something he's considered a lot. It worries him.]

Maybe there's just more than one of us.

Voice

[tergiversant]

[This one has no judgement, just detached interest.]

Hath ye found evidence to support this? Or be this a question of philosopher's debate?

[taggingwomprats]

[Luke's reminded of Han, of Leia, of his father, of the people who have vanished.]

I wish I knew.

voice;

[wilder]

[Kaneis is a little irritated to see this entry. He had figured out a little less than a year ago they were erasing people by their actions. It sickened him, he hated it. But he couldn't think of another way, and so he kept quiet about it. There was no need to advertise such a wretched fact to children like Allen who had even less ability than he did to stop it. It would only destroy them.]

[Now he can only hope everyone will keep being as selfish as Lenalee here, only focusing on the idea of Transports being erased instead of the millions already gone.]

If that logic was true, then neither of us would be here right now. The Exsilium we arrived in doesn't exist anymore. The circumstances and people that brought us here are already gone, but we're still here and we still remember.

So whoever made you think about this just went to wherever they were before, to no fault of your own. Stuff like this just happens, alright?

video;

[braavado]

Are you talking about the way people forget they were ever here?

[She wishes there was a solid explanation for the things that happen here.]

[voice;]

[sorrowfulcry]

[he vaguely recalls this voice...]

Wouldn't that be better? All of us probably had better things to worry about than this war. [this war, like he expects everyone else to have been caught in their own conflicts and fights] Never arriving means never having some other world dump their baggage onto you too.