Re: Epic Clash Final Round - Mnemonocyst Bearers
05-11-2011, 03:37 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Baphomet.
Miles stood dumbfounded on the dying planetoids. He thought time to a stop state to deal with the unfolding crisis, and Thomas's two parting words slowed into an unrecognizable drawl.
"NonononoNOnono," Miles mumbled to himself, arms gesticulating frantically as he pulled numerous panels out of thin air. Each displayed eerily silent, empty areas. An empty black void with more floating panels. The pocket dimensions belonging to all of Bryce's friends. The infinity chamber-nothing there but static. Tied to his life, then? No, he had to be alive... Black panels, black panels, over and over...
With a desperate expression, he waved the entire surrounding universe away with a gesture and appeared in a completely black space. His head darted in all directions, then he waved the blackness away, too. It was replaced by a wood-paneled room, empty. He repeated the gesture. An empty chair. A bare mahogany desk. A house full of frozen beings, none of them Bryce. Back to the spot in front of Thomas. He put his hands together and then pulled them apart, unfurling an exact duplicate of Glere out of nothingness. The young god split into two, and one leapt inside.
Empty. Not even junk. The entire pocket dimension had been erased.
Miles slumped. He remained motionless, save his eyes--darting back and forth, lost in his own internal monologue.
A hand on his shoulder snapped him out of it.
He spun in an instant. "Bry-"
Shock covered Miles's face and he lost his concentration. Time whirred back into motion with the dying roar of the spacecraft's engines and the final crackle of the firework.
"-done." Thomas did a double-take at the unrelentingly black, well-dressed being in front of him before promptly being subjected to paralysis and falling over on his face.
"What a mess," said The Director.
"Director!" said Miles.
The Director nodded. "The Chronicler. I trust your search was as fruitless as mine?"
"I, uh, I can't, I mean, I don't-"
"Stop," The Director continued. "Might as well come clean at this point. I've been watching him through you this whole time. I know you haven't found him, because I saw your search. It was a few years of subjective time shorter than mine, but then I trusted that you would know how to find him better, anyway. If there was one thing he was good at, it was hiding things from me." He paused and looked off into the distance. "Things like how many things he was good at. Guess that's a moot point now."
A swirl of blue, a green cape, a tangle of cloth, and a mess of roots had pulled themselves into the scene as he spoke. The latter held a bottle of champagne aloft.
"So, do we start the party now or later?" Talis asked through a barely-contained smile.
"Just what do you have to do with this?" sneered The Composer.
"And just why would you care?" The Charlatan grinned to The Composer.
Talis popped the cork on the champagne. "My, ah, late employer at the time was responsible for destroying that round 'Bryce' had cooked up originally. Or, should I say, he was responsible for telling me to be responsible for it. Held together by tape and spit, anyway." He filled a few glasses that weren't in his hand a moment ago. "Things, well, haven't gone well for us since. I'd name my suspect in The Executive's murder, but..." he nodded blithely to the pile of ashes that was Glere, "Speak not but good of the dead." He extended a glass to the gathered throng. "Champagne?"
"W...wait, do you mean uh-" Miles began. He was cut off by a green cape sweeping between him and Talis.
"Well," said the Charlatan through his grin, taking a glass, "It's what Bryce would have wanted."
The Stranger, quiet thus far, hobbled forward to take a glass, but was cut off by The Composer upending them all in Talis's face. She advanced on the monocled villain, her eyes narrowed to glowing white slits. "You," she spat, "are a bootlicking lackey to a master who can't even keep his component molecules intact before a man who was just defeated by his own contestant." Talis began to back up uneasily, and The Charlatan's grin somehow grew even wider. "YOU have no battle, we're running it now. YOU have no master, he's dead."
"Um, presumed dea-" Talis began.
"YOU," The Composer repeated, "Have about three seconds to explain to me why you're not worth the effort of scraping your remains off the bottom of my foot, and it took me two to say that."
"Excusemehavetogo," Talis blurted, before disappearing. The Charlatan took a loud sip from his glass of champagne, and The Stranger shuffled awkwardly.
The Director cleared his throat. "So anyway," he began, after a pause that seemed appropriate, "Bookkeeping to deal with. This battle needs a representative for All-Stars." He gestured to Miles. "Naturally, Chronicler, you are the first choice in this situation."
Miles stared blankly back at The Director for a moment.
He glanced down at his feet.
He looked back up.
"Hell no," Miles replied. "W...With all due respect, I mean." He nodded, then disappeared.
The Director turned to The Charlatan and Composer. "Hrm. Well, as you two have already...shall we say, 'commandeered' another battle, I would say you're out of the running. I'd throw this one to The Observer like I'd originally planned for Battle Majestic, but..." He turned to The Stranger, who held his swaddled fists up to his chest and began vibrating excitedly, "I'd say we have someone else here who may prove himself capable."
The Stranger hopped about a foot off the ground and made the sort of sound you'd expect a chimpanzee to make when you tickle it. "YES! Wait, really? Super really?"
The Director paused a moment. "You're making me regret my decision already, but yes," he cleared his throat pointedly, "Super really. I skimmed The Exalted Exchange. Good stuff there. Well handled, good round choices, good characters. Solid all around. So, do you think you can-"
"YES," The Stranger blurted. "I mean, I'm sorryforinterrupting, it's just, I will do a good job I swear! Not as good as you I mean WOW, you're The Director and youstartedallthis and-" he smacked the mass of accessories where his face would be with his gloved hand and continued, "-rambling, yes, I would absolutely love to!"
The Director, despite not needing to breathe at all, took a long breath. "As I was saying, do you think you can wrap this one up for-" he gestured to where Thomas had fallen to the ground paralyzed moments ago, "-wait. Where is our contestant?"
Thomas stood and rubbed his forehead where he'd hit it on a dying psychic space monster moments prior. Not because it actually hurt, but more because it seemed like it should have. He quietly lamented the lack of creativity in his new environment. It was always all black or all white with these extradimensional beings, wasn't it? In this case, it was the latter. Very white, with some sort of dull hum in the background. What was he supposed to do here? It didn't look like any of those beings that were talking had taken him here. The last thing he had heard was the first half of The Stranger accepting his new position. Perhaps his analysis had been right about The Overseer setting things up in advance, and some preset teleportation had been triggered by the end of the round?
"Yes, that exactly," said a monotonous voice from nowhere in particular. Thomas spun around to find a disinterested-looking man at a desk where there definitely hadn't been one a moment ago. He was dressed in what looked to be officewear, and was unhurriedly transcribing something on a piece of paper in front of him while holding his head up with one arm. For the first time since Thomas arrived, the man looked up from his work. "Teleportation triggered by an outstanding account concerning you."
Thomas took a cautious step back and adopted a defensive position as he quickly processed what the man was saying. "So we owe you something?"
The man looked back down at the paper and began writing again. "No, backwards. You're owed something. Let's see..." He licked his thumb and flipped a few pages in the stack, "Here we go, page two, last post, 'With each death, you survivors are one step closer to freedom, and your one greatest wish... as well as I can carry it out. You'll find most reasonable requests to be within my grasp, and yours, if you win.'" He looked back up to Thomas. "You're owed one reasonable request."
Thomas's eyes widened, and shifted from blue to brown. "So, since we're promised a request as well as The Overseer can carry it out, and we're here being offered one request, we can assume that The Overseer still exists."
"I can see why you would think that," the man responded in monotone.
"I take it you won't be more specific than that," Thomas replied.
"It's possible that certain requests would be made possible by his previous existence, even if that existence is not ongoing."
"And you've still failed to answer our question."
"But I haven't lied to you."
"Will you?"
"No."
"Is The Overseer alive?"
"No."
Thomas paused. "Was he ever?"
"Define alive."
Thomas sighed. "So at some point, he could have qualified for some definition of alive, but he currently could not. That doesn't tell us anything. How about this, does The Overseer currently exist?"
"No."
"Will he exist again in the future?"
"Stranger things have happened. I can see we're not getting to that request anytime soon, huh?"
"We just want to know if it was all worthwhile."
The man smiled, subtly. "It was."
"And that's not a lie?"
"No."
Thomas exhaled audibly and stared down the man for a few silent seconds, lost in a four-way internal monologue. "We want a year," he finally replied. "When we left, where we left, plus the time passed from our point of view and the distance our ship has traveled in that time, respectively."
The man's smile broadened. "So specific, Greg. Can't just say 'put me back where I was,' you have to compensate for the idea that I might put you in the cold of space where your ship used to be."
"And we want no more or less than a year. We want to know when we will be leaving for the next battle, and we want time to prepare," he continued.
"You'll have it. No funny business, this isn't that kind of deal. I'm not your enemy."
Thomas's eyes shifted red and he stood up taller. "Then whose side are you on?"
The man stood up and the whiteness that was everything flickered briefly. "I'll tell you," he replied, "but I won't let you know. My next sentence will be the last one you remember from our interaction. You'll have your year, and something else, on me."
Thomas stumbled as he landed in a dimly-lit, brushed-steel room packed full of shelves of whirring computers. The Director replayed the recording of his arrival again on the panel, while a number ticked away in the corner.
"About an eighty trillionth of a second," The Director said to the bundle of multicolored cloth behind him.
"Woooow. An entire year passed there in that time?" The Stranger asked.
"EXACTLY a year, and time just stopped afterwards. That entire universe is on pause, with respect to frames of reference in every other universe as far as we can tell. Someone's put the reins on his local time flow. We can't extract him from any other moment."
The Stranger shrugged. "Do we want to?"
The Director sighed. "I suppose that's up to you."
"I'm not really worried about it, mister The Director sir," he replied. The Director nodded.
"Then I'll let you know when the all-star battle starts. Best of luck to you." He extended the black smoke that passed for his hand, and The Stranger shook it vigorously with his glove.
"Same to you, sir!" With a multicolored puff of smoke, The Stranger disappeared.
He appeared in a dark place, where he chuckled giddily. "Best of luck, best of luck. Heehe." He took a few waddling steps forward and began shedding clothes. A scarf. A jacket. Oversized boots. "Oh Director, Director. Best of luck, Director." Gloves. Socks. Another Jacket. Another scarf. Blood began flowing freely from him with each step, pooling on the suddenly-reflective surface of what qualified as the ground here. The rest of his clothing sloughed off as The Stranger rose into the air, rising to the center of what was now a large cube, each face mirrored on the inside.
In every direction, his reflection looked back at him.
Black eyes smiled. White, sharp teeth menaced. "Best of luck, Director. You're going to need it."
Miles stood dumbfounded on the dying planetoids. He thought time to a stop state to deal with the unfolding crisis, and Thomas's two parting words slowed into an unrecognizable drawl.
"NonononoNOnono," Miles mumbled to himself, arms gesticulating frantically as he pulled numerous panels out of thin air. Each displayed eerily silent, empty areas. An empty black void with more floating panels. The pocket dimensions belonging to all of Bryce's friends. The infinity chamber-nothing there but static. Tied to his life, then? No, he had to be alive... Black panels, black panels, over and over...
With a desperate expression, he waved the entire surrounding universe away with a gesture and appeared in a completely black space. His head darted in all directions, then he waved the blackness away, too. It was replaced by a wood-paneled room, empty. He repeated the gesture. An empty chair. A bare mahogany desk. A house full of frozen beings, none of them Bryce. Back to the spot in front of Thomas. He put his hands together and then pulled them apart, unfurling an exact duplicate of Glere out of nothingness. The young god split into two, and one leapt inside.
Empty. Not even junk. The entire pocket dimension had been erased.
Miles slumped. He remained motionless, save his eyes--darting back and forth, lost in his own internal monologue.
A hand on his shoulder snapped him out of it.
He spun in an instant. "Bry-"
Shock covered Miles's face and he lost his concentration. Time whirred back into motion with the dying roar of the spacecraft's engines and the final crackle of the firework.
"-done." Thomas did a double-take at the unrelentingly black, well-dressed being in front of him before promptly being subjected to paralysis and falling over on his face.
"What a mess," said The Director.
"Director!" said Miles.
The Director nodded. "The Chronicler. I trust your search was as fruitless as mine?"
"I, uh, I can't, I mean, I don't-"
"Stop," The Director continued. "Might as well come clean at this point. I've been watching him through you this whole time. I know you haven't found him, because I saw your search. It was a few years of subjective time shorter than mine, but then I trusted that you would know how to find him better, anyway. If there was one thing he was good at, it was hiding things from me." He paused and looked off into the distance. "Things like how many things he was good at. Guess that's a moot point now."
A swirl of blue, a green cape, a tangle of cloth, and a mess of roots had pulled themselves into the scene as he spoke. The latter held a bottle of champagne aloft.
"So, do we start the party now or later?" Talis asked through a barely-contained smile.
"Just what do you have to do with this?" sneered The Composer.
"And just why would you care?" The Charlatan grinned to The Composer.
Talis popped the cork on the champagne. "My, ah, late employer at the time was responsible for destroying that round 'Bryce' had cooked up originally. Or, should I say, he was responsible for telling me to be responsible for it. Held together by tape and spit, anyway." He filled a few glasses that weren't in his hand a moment ago. "Things, well, haven't gone well for us since. I'd name my suspect in The Executive's murder, but..." he nodded blithely to the pile of ashes that was Glere, "Speak not but good of the dead." He extended a glass to the gathered throng. "Champagne?"
"W...wait, do you mean uh-" Miles began. He was cut off by a green cape sweeping between him and Talis.
"Well," said the Charlatan through his grin, taking a glass, "It's what Bryce would have wanted."
The Stranger, quiet thus far, hobbled forward to take a glass, but was cut off by The Composer upending them all in Talis's face. She advanced on the monocled villain, her eyes narrowed to glowing white slits. "You," she spat, "are a bootlicking lackey to a master who can't even keep his component molecules intact before a man who was just defeated by his own contestant." Talis began to back up uneasily, and The Charlatan's grin somehow grew even wider. "YOU have no battle, we're running it now. YOU have no master, he's dead."
"Um, presumed dea-" Talis began.
"YOU," The Composer repeated, "Have about three seconds to explain to me why you're not worth the effort of scraping your remains off the bottom of my foot, and it took me two to say that."
"Excusemehavetogo," Talis blurted, before disappearing. The Charlatan took a loud sip from his glass of champagne, and The Stranger shuffled awkwardly.
The Director cleared his throat. "So anyway," he began, after a pause that seemed appropriate, "Bookkeeping to deal with. This battle needs a representative for All-Stars." He gestured to Miles. "Naturally, Chronicler, you are the first choice in this situation."
Miles stared blankly back at The Director for a moment.
He glanced down at his feet.
He looked back up.
"Hell no," Miles replied. "W...With all due respect, I mean." He nodded, then disappeared.
The Director turned to The Charlatan and Composer. "Hrm. Well, as you two have already...shall we say, 'commandeered' another battle, I would say you're out of the running. I'd throw this one to The Observer like I'd originally planned for Battle Majestic, but..." He turned to The Stranger, who held his swaddled fists up to his chest and began vibrating excitedly, "I'd say we have someone else here who may prove himself capable."
The Stranger hopped about a foot off the ground and made the sort of sound you'd expect a chimpanzee to make when you tickle it. "YES! Wait, really? Super really?"
The Director paused a moment. "You're making me regret my decision already, but yes," he cleared his throat pointedly, "Super really. I skimmed The Exalted Exchange. Good stuff there. Well handled, good round choices, good characters. Solid all around. So, do you think you can-"
"YES," The Stranger blurted. "I mean, I'm sorryforinterrupting, it's just, I will do a good job I swear! Not as good as you I mean WOW, you're The Director and youstartedallthis and-" he smacked the mass of accessories where his face would be with his gloved hand and continued, "-rambling, yes, I would absolutely love to!"
The Director, despite not needing to breathe at all, took a long breath. "As I was saying, do you think you can wrap this one up for-" he gestured to where Thomas had fallen to the ground paralyzed moments ago, "-wait. Where is our contestant?"
Thomas stood and rubbed his forehead where he'd hit it on a dying psychic space monster moments prior. Not because it actually hurt, but more because it seemed like it should have. He quietly lamented the lack of creativity in his new environment. It was always all black or all white with these extradimensional beings, wasn't it? In this case, it was the latter. Very white, with some sort of dull hum in the background. What was he supposed to do here? It didn't look like any of those beings that were talking had taken him here. The last thing he had heard was the first half of The Stranger accepting his new position. Perhaps his analysis had been right about The Overseer setting things up in advance, and some preset teleportation had been triggered by the end of the round?
"Yes, that exactly," said a monotonous voice from nowhere in particular. Thomas spun around to find a disinterested-looking man at a desk where there definitely hadn't been one a moment ago. He was dressed in what looked to be officewear, and was unhurriedly transcribing something on a piece of paper in front of him while holding his head up with one arm. For the first time since Thomas arrived, the man looked up from his work. "Teleportation triggered by an outstanding account concerning you."
Thomas took a cautious step back and adopted a defensive position as he quickly processed what the man was saying. "So we owe you something?"
The man looked back down at the paper and began writing again. "No, backwards. You're owed something. Let's see..." He licked his thumb and flipped a few pages in the stack, "Here we go, page two, last post, 'With each death, you survivors are one step closer to freedom, and your one greatest wish... as well as I can carry it out. You'll find most reasonable requests to be within my grasp, and yours, if you win.'" He looked back up to Thomas. "You're owed one reasonable request."
Thomas's eyes widened, and shifted from blue to brown. "So, since we're promised a request as well as The Overseer can carry it out, and we're here being offered one request, we can assume that The Overseer still exists."
"I can see why you would think that," the man responded in monotone.
"I take it you won't be more specific than that," Thomas replied.
"It's possible that certain requests would be made possible by his previous existence, even if that existence is not ongoing."
"And you've still failed to answer our question."
"But I haven't lied to you."
"Will you?"
"No."
"Is The Overseer alive?"
"No."
Thomas paused. "Was he ever?"
"Define alive."
Thomas sighed. "So at some point, he could have qualified for some definition of alive, but he currently could not. That doesn't tell us anything. How about this, does The Overseer currently exist?"
"No."
"Will he exist again in the future?"
"Stranger things have happened. I can see we're not getting to that request anytime soon, huh?"
"We just want to know if it was all worthwhile."
The man smiled, subtly. "It was."
"And that's not a lie?"
"No."
Thomas exhaled audibly and stared down the man for a few silent seconds, lost in a four-way internal monologue. "We want a year," he finally replied. "When we left, where we left, plus the time passed from our point of view and the distance our ship has traveled in that time, respectively."
The man's smile broadened. "So specific, Greg. Can't just say 'put me back where I was,' you have to compensate for the idea that I might put you in the cold of space where your ship used to be."
"And we want no more or less than a year. We want to know when we will be leaving for the next battle, and we want time to prepare," he continued.
"You'll have it. No funny business, this isn't that kind of deal. I'm not your enemy."
Thomas's eyes shifted red and he stood up taller. "Then whose side are you on?"
The man stood up and the whiteness that was everything flickered briefly. "I'll tell you," he replied, "but I won't let you know. My next sentence will be the last one you remember from our interaction. You'll have your year, and something else, on me."
Thomas stumbled as he landed in a dimly-lit, brushed-steel room packed full of shelves of whirring computers. The Director replayed the recording of his arrival again on the panel, while a number ticked away in the corner.
"About an eighty trillionth of a second," The Director said to the bundle of multicolored cloth behind him.
"Woooow. An entire year passed there in that time?" The Stranger asked.
"EXACTLY a year, and time just stopped afterwards. That entire universe is on pause, with respect to frames of reference in every other universe as far as we can tell. Someone's put the reins on his local time flow. We can't extract him from any other moment."
The Stranger shrugged. "Do we want to?"
The Director sighed. "I suppose that's up to you."
"I'm not really worried about it, mister The Director sir," he replied. The Director nodded.
"Then I'll let you know when the all-star battle starts. Best of luck to you." He extended the black smoke that passed for his hand, and The Stranger shook it vigorously with his glove.
"Same to you, sir!" With a multicolored puff of smoke, The Stranger disappeared.
He appeared in a dark place, where he chuckled giddily. "Best of luck, best of luck. Heehe." He took a few waddling steps forward and began shedding clothes. A scarf. A jacket. Oversized boots. "Oh Director, Director. Best of luck, Director." Gloves. Socks. Another Jacket. Another scarf. Blood began flowing freely from him with each step, pooling on the suddenly-reflective surface of what qualified as the ground here. The rest of his clothing sloughed off as The Stranger rose into the air, rising to the center of what was now a large cube, each face mirrored on the inside.
In every direction, his reflection looked back at him.
Black eyes smiled. White, sharp teeth menaced. "Best of luck, Director. You're going to need it."