@stephen.strange | via morningstar network, a couple of days after cassius' post

[rehandle]

[ It isn't real. That's a fact upon a fact: none of it is real, but this even less so.

Usually, knowledge matters. It had for a while here too. Taken him from staggering frantically down part-collapsed tunnels over obstacles whose names he didn't know, calls giving way to bellows, in search first of life and then just of obstacles whose names he did know— to sitting quietly, raking thick air into his lungs, body too beleaguered to be good for more than waiting for the day to end.

And eventually he'd slept. And the day did end. And when he woke and turned on his flashlight to gear himself up for greeting the millions who ought now to be staggering back down into the tunnels, fresh from their reset - he'd found them exactly where he'd left them.

This will not be ending soon. This will not be over until somebody makes it so. But his thoughts won't be gathered into shape. The wall at his back is still hot from the blast. The air is cloying. His skin sloughs under his touch.

The quiet is too heavy. He needs the reminder. ]



Talk to me
Please



[ ooc: for those in the sim, none of the things described in the above brackets will be visible to anyone but him, but Stephen will have been seen by some about half a day before this post searching haphazardly around the tunnels, calling both in general and then specifically for people, then staring very intently with varying expressions of grim hopelessness at patches of nothing, and eventually giving that up for sitting very quietly on the ground in a tunnel somewhere. He's non-responsive to attempts to interact with him throughout and wouldn't previously have been replying to any attempts to contact him via the network either.

Feel free to assume your character has spotted him or been aggressively bumped into by him or heard about him being Weird, or on the flipside to have no idea he's been acting like he's having a really bad trip. ]

Comments

[angerberg]

An illusion. Each of us is alive.
On and off, anyway.

[rehandle]

I know.

I've shown you mine

[ Why does he need to know what it was that brought her to him in accusation? It's certainly not because he can help her.

Which means it's because he can't help himself. ]

[angerberg]

Slow death.

[ it's not the pain that gets to her, but the helplessness of it. surely, he could grasp that, given his present circumstances. ]

Someone must have betrayed us. Someone who was involved in your plan. They told Judas what we were doing.

[rehandle]

[ Paranoia is the one gracious offering he seems to have slipped the noose of since entering his own silent world. There's no need of it here. He's already done more damage that anybody else might have managed to do to him in turn. ]

Doubtful. Even if they did it doesn't matter. Judas created the world we walk through. He ran the experiments. He'd have watched.

Dead already?

[ Or still in the process?

Not that it makes a difference. Collecting information is a habit that's harder to shake when fact is all there is left to cling to. ]

[angerberg]

More to come, I'm sure.

[ she'd thought it would just be the once, when she'd returned from a run most recently and woken up to another death waiting for her. then it happened again, a few mornings later. ]

[rehandle]

[ Oh.

Not good. ]

How?

[ Still the endless push, that need to understand. It's none of his business, not any more, but still he -

He understands his punishment, he thinks, if that's what it is. He can trace back to its inspiration the game that's being played with him. This is the culmination of all the experiments he threw himself and others into, over and over, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, infinite and ceaseless research.

Is Judas curating for her the same way? ]

[angerberg]

Painfully.
I scarcely see the point of painting a picture.
Better to focus on bringing you back into this iteration of the simulation where you'll be of use to us.

[rehandle]

Is it personalized?

[ The next part is slightly more tiring. Thinking about the bigger picture provides some brief clarity, but focusing on his specific situation --

His head aches. His thoughts spin off. No, come on. ]

It's possible. I'm still present in your version. I just can't see past this one

[angerberg]

Yes.
It's personalized.

[ to her mistakes, the ones everyone had tried to warn her away from. she has too much pride to admit as much so easily. ]

Where are you?

[ it's sentimental, perhaps, to imagine that a mere physical presence might open the road to solving his issue. but she's resolved to try; given that he's suffering with her, it makes him one of the only people who she believes with certainty isn't responsible for selling them out. ]

[rehandle]

[ So it's direct. Specific. Either Judas is worried by them or he's laughing at them... chased by the ever-present threat of tripping over the corpse of a friend as his own body dies gradually at a cellular level, it doesn't feel very much like Judas is the one running scared. ]

I don't know. Tunnel somewhere

Not too far from medical.

[ He hopes. He's been trying to find his way back there for a while now. ]

[angerberg]

Don't move.

[ she foregoes her work at the daycare — the children can manage themselves, for now — and makes her way in that direction. ]

[rehandle]

No trouble there.

[ There's not exactly anywhere for him to go and he's fast approaching the point at which he hasn't the energy to go anywhere the first place.

Though in their shared reality all he has to show for his steady cellular death is pale, clammy skin and the drying remnants of a messily smeared nosebleed. ]

[angerberg]

[ he looks pitiful.

at least he isn't staggering around blindly, wandering the tunnels like a madman. but that distant, absent look in his eyes, and the way his body seems to slowly give up on itself. he looks like he's fading away.

yennefer waves her hand in front of his face first, as if testing his vision. ]

Stephen?

[ he can't hear her, of course he can't hear her. he had said as much. but she puts her hand on his shoulder anyway, two layers of fabric separating them from one another. just a test of contact, to see if he reacts. ]

[rehandle]

[ He's started to learn how to tell the difference now. In the beginning, when he first woke, every impact was a tunnel wall and every lighter touch a passing of rubble or of breeze, perhaps of nearby hand reaching for help, the potential promise of life. Now, still as he is and waiting as he is, it's easier to isolate pressure that comes from no clear source.

There's a chance that Judas is observing still and will tune that small sanity out too. But for now, it's enough to have him straighten slightly, attention earned, eyes casting around in the mottled torchlight for somebody he just can't see. ]

Is that you?

[ His voice is rough with dehydration and sounds strange in his ears. It feels like it should echo off of hard walls and endless hallways. Instead it's swallowed up by softer tissue closer at hand.

Either it's her and she'll answer or it isn't and he'll look a fool to a passing stranger - at this point, what does that matter? ]

[angerberg]

It is.

[ a moment after saying this, she recognizes that ... he's not really here, with her. not really processing what's happening around him. her hands pull back briefly, but then steady back on his shoulder, as if that at least anchors him closer. ]

Can you hear me?

[ this comes through both the morningstar network as a text and aloud. they're working with a barrier, here. she needs to use the tools available. ]

(belated) tw: blood

[rehandle]

No. But I can feel...

[ A hand lifts to point up at his shoulder: this. He's careful not to go too close to anywhere he thinks might hold risk of skin contact. He'd rather give himself some kind of warning before initiating any risk of glitch. The return hasn't proved the most manageable kind of whiplash.

The hand, once raised, moves to rub its thumb and forefinger over his eyes. No use in wasting a perfectly good bit of energy. God, he's tired.

A thought tugs his lips up at one corner. ]

How do I look?

[ He laughs. And it catches somewhere in his throat, snowballs into a few wet coughs that he covers limply with a hand until his eyes scrunch shut and his torso convulses and blood spills through his fingers. ]

[angerberg]

Better than ever.

[ wryly put, at least. which either sounds like 'you don't look that good to begin with, stephen' or 'really fucking terrible.' in either case, it's not real. that's the important part. yennefer holds onto this, setting aside the effects of his dissociation from his own body as best she can. ]

How would you like to see for yourself?

[ she raises both hands. it's unfortunate, knowing what will happen. this is a two-way street. but it will likely glitch the simulation, give him some kind of momentary relief, anchor him in what's real and what's not — maybe it'll even permanently re-anchor him. a more conscientious person about the autonomy of others would probably ask first; a better planner might consider that he'd already tried it. but yennefer just sees the benefits and judges them worth the danger of the unreliable connection and the overflow of her own feelings.

she folds her hands around his, and the blue light pulses in an uneven flicker. ]

[rehandle]

[ The question loops around once or twice as his addled mind tries to grasp for it. He feels for a snatch of maybe a second the warmth of her skin on the undamaged parts of his hand and then it's too late.

The connection is weak but not so weak as to spare her the soft-edged rendition of all that he's feeling: the cloying dread, panic held only barely at bay by a mind too stubborn to be entirely overcome in the presence of others, intense claustrophobia, stress, pain and of steady decline, exhaustion, confusion, all of it a mess and hardly processed for how indecipherable one intolerable sensation is from the next. A few things take on different color: guilt, regret, impotence, shock. Grief is a strange beast all of its own and lurks somehow apart.

There isn't long to spend with it. Even this weak link is enough to tear them out of the old world and back to the new. He's looking up. There's light, daylight, bright sky peeking between dense branches. A breeze. Grass between his fingers.

His mind has just a moment after that to register a capacity to clear and then he's gone, back into the thick of it, submerged with devastating swiftness into the clog of everything that came before.

Stephen heaves in a breath that leaves in a helpless sob as his body burns anew with its slow death. He begins to hyperventilate, staring through dreary torchlight in search of comfort and finding only the silhouettes of things that could be bodies or could be rockfall. But he's done this before. It was hard then and it's hard now but this time he isn't alone. His hand slips from any lingering grip to seek purchase somewhere less dangerous, a forearm or a shoulder or whatever there is to find, some proof of company, and in turn some unspoken assurance that he's present and he's finding his way back. It just might take him a moment. ]

[angerberg]

[ the pitch in his breathing concerns her. yennefer grips him more solidly on his shoulders once he slips the grip of the empathy bond — for the best, as it had startled her too for it to activate thus. but he's less prepared. less aware. less solid. it earns him the scarce chance of prompting some second-guessing of her decisions. maybe she hadn't done what was best for him, surprising him with that. ]

Are you alright?

[ it has not brought him back to this tunnel, to the original simulation. not in the slightest. he's still trapped there, and it seems that the shock to his system hasn't done him any favors. ]

[rehandle]

[ No answer, but the answer to her question is obvious without the clarification. There's desperation in the way his tremors amplify as he holds her forearms tightly, keeping her rooted where she has him held, trying frantically to grasp reality and keep it close enough to hold himself together.

Too tight. Might be hurting her, he realises for the briefest second before that thought too is consumed by a selfish urge to survive. It's certainly hurting him, but at the moment that pain is good. Out of everything he's feeling, the searing hurt of reconstructed bones and once-ruined tissue is a familiar face in the crowd.

He urges himself to pay attention to it. To the sensible pain. The enduring pain that exists outside of this layer, outside of this simulation.

Finally he manages to acclimate enough to remember the rest of his body, that it functions outside of all that's crushing it. A nod in belated answer to her question, unconvincing perhaps for the breath that's still yet to fully slow and the eyes squeezed tight shut, but it's something. He's even managed to relieve one of her arms of his hold, pressing his fingers instead into the dusty ground at this side to keep the pain burning him a path back to stability. ]

[angerberg]

[ pain is a familiar friend of yennefer's. she has had only one constant companion in seventy years of life. so when strange grips her tightly, she only sets her jaw and shifts her weight to balance more solidly. weathering it has always been easier than ending it. there is no need to begrudge stephen causing it, either. who can she claim to know that has not caused her some level of pain? that, too, is familiar. ]

A failed experiment.

[ this is the closest he'll come to getting an apology. ]

Another to add to the list.

There's talk of one of us pulling people out. Maybe you ought to look into getting out of here while the getting's good.

[ step back from the fight and let the rest of them handle the interior. ]

[rehandle]

[ Another to add to the list. The faint trace of a private smile steals over his face. Yes, he knows. ]

He's had me out once. The freedom only lasts as long as the physical contact and he's more use to us without having to hold my hand 24/7.

[ Tony can't get him out permanently, and without a way out of the city there's little hope of him escaping the simulation altogether. He can't ask the others outside of the city to mobilise to get him out for the sake of his avoiding discomfort.

"Discomfort" undermines the reality, but it's just not feasible. The risk is too high and the benefit too localised. ]

I'll manage.

[angerberg]

There must be a way to make it more permanent.

[ looking at him like this leaves her exhausted and furious, makes more pronounced the powerlessness of their circumstances. she won't be powerless again. she didn't give up everything about her life just to be powerless. ]

[rehandle]

It'll be permanent when we're all out.

[angerberg]

There's nothing noble in suffering for suffering's sake.