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 Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 12:44 am
Chel arrived at the laboratories bright and early with her Lisa Frank notebook filled with scribbles and scrawls. She was very eager to learn (read, not eager at all, she couldn't care less), but she was indeed very excited to spend more time with Jack and less time with other certain individuals.
She didn't bother knocking on the lab door, because knocking was for chumps who needed permission. "Before you say anything I have a cup of coffee and a coupon for another one hidden on my person if you're good."
The cup was very gently set on the lab bench, and Chel let out a heavy sigh. The notebook's spiral ring of metal scraped along the linoleum of the table. "Here. Now please let me stay?" Pretty please? With cherries on top?
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Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 8:35 pm
He turned first at the smell of coffee (notable in that the smell had grown stronger rather than appeared), saw Chel, saw the notebook, and feigned (feigned?) gagging. This shouldn't have surprised him.
"Coupons," Jack said derisively, shutting his binder closed. "With our level of paycheck, that hardly means anything." But he did eye the cup, snatched it, sniffed it, sipped it, smacked his lips, made a face, and set it down. "Adequate enough. Sit."
He made a pointed gesture for Chel to be opposite him and no closer.
"So, you have a few stories to tell?"
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Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 8:54 pm
So Chel sat one seat away from him.
"What do you want to know? I wrote the general gist of it out in that book," she held a hand up to it- "Sorry if it's not um ... written great."
In the book Jack would find a horribly written 2-3 page synopsis of how she and her heroic guildmates played in a dream stasis version of an MMO. She didn't bother to define terms like "aggro" and "dps," thinking that they were merely common knowledge. She touched very slightly on the worlds and their differences (Tulgey Woods, the Mad Tea Party, the glitch world and the Castles, respectively), but didn't go into great deal about any one world; her focus always seemed to wane after she described the scenery with a few lines.
She squirmed nervously in her seat, suddenly feeling very much like her teacher was grading her schoolwork. "I really did try though, I promise I did."
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Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 9:08 pm
He flipped open the book and began to peruse . . . or rather, attempt to translate what Chel thought was the English language. Jack was actually surprised she had taken the notebook idea seriously, let alone jot down several pages' worth of notes. Wonderland, hmm . . . He frowned thoughtfully as he sipped his original mug of coffee as he read. In his peripheral he noticed Chel squinting and took extra care to look stern-faced just to prolong the sight, restraining a snicker.
"The Cliff Notes version isn't usually where I get my information, but I am starting to get the picture," he said after a while in the voice of a teacher reluctantly handing over a C+. "You'll have to explain a few things to me, however." He lifted his gaze and gave her dry look. "for future reference, refrain from using jargon and acronyms unless you know I understand them. Now, tell me more about these queens."
Owain seemed to stir, the equivalent of someone shaking their head from sleep.
"I did not read Alice in Wonderland. Are the colors significant?"
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Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 9:37 pm
Chel tilted her head, unsure of what jargon and acronyms she'd used that anyone wouldn't know, but she noted it for future encounters with the green giant.
"Ummm ... the queens we actually met when they were still caged- they asked us a bunch of metaphysical bullshit like what do you fear most oooh scaryyy~~" Chel rolled her eyes and said, "But then later we ... we found a room we weren't supposed to, and ALICE restarted the game. In doing so, she set the queens free." She put her hand out in a very noncomittaly gesture and said, "So ********' weird- the whole game she's like OOOOOH YOU MUST DEFEAT THE QUEENS and then she's the one to set them loose."
If it wasn't apparent by her tone, Chel didn't like ALICE very much.
Luckily (or perhaps unluckily), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the Looking Glass were two of the only books Chel genuinely enjoyed. She liked their loopy ******** narrative, mostly, completely missing the point of the books. "In the book, the red and white queens are having a chess match that spans like ... the entire kingdom. Alice ends up becoming the white queen and puts the red king into check." It was sort of weird though, in their game they'd ended the white queen.
She waved her hand and said, "As for if the colors mean anything ..."
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Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 9:53 pm
"ALICE, the AI," he said to himself for clarification. "Hmm." He set the notebook down, flipped to a new page, and got his pen to begin making his own version of notes in . . . not quite much tidier handwriting to be honest. Mother always said he should have been a doctor.
"Let's backtrack. Why were they asking questions? What 'metaphysical bullshit' were they interested in?" Jack prompted her. "There doesn't seem to be an overt motivation for it aside from gathering data, but what good would it do them? If I read this right, the queens could have easily crushed you if and when they were freed."
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Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 10:15 pm
Chel decided that since Jack hadn't kicked her out yet, putting her feet up on the lab bench wasn't going to make him any less sour.
"Dunno. I just sort of happened on them and they were like well we're not goin' anywhere, just humor us." She shrugged. "I don't remember most of it. Just stuff like who are you, where are you from, have you been betrayed, what are you scared of ... Felt like one of those middle school questionnaires."
She scoffed and added, "They wouldn't have crushed me, I'm amazing."
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Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 11:29 pm
He wrinkled his nose, grabbed her feet, and attempted to pull them away from his general workspace (which was to say, he moved them closer to the opposite corner). Her feet weren't actually near the notebook or his binder, he was just very territorial. "Yes, so amazing you are beneath the basic level of reading comprehension but not above exploding," Jack replied with a roll of his eyes. "I'm surprised you made it through a book at all."
(It was a joke so old it was practically moldy, but he still wasn't letting it go.)
Downing a gulp of coffee like someone would alcohol, he scratched a few more things onto the paper. "Sounds more like they were amassing the basic structure of each player's psyche in order to harvest their memories quicker," he noted. "Or a roundabout method for ALICE to collect memories for the clones. That seems to be the main power at work there, no? Memories? Glad I wasn't around to spill my s**t to strangers," he added with a dry laugh. What a day for Freud that would be.
"You mentioned they were caged? What was the point of the conflict? Did some extradimensional being decide it'd be a great bit of shits and giggles to throw people against its creations?"
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Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2014 3:45 pm
Chel's spirits visibly dampened as Jack insulting her comprehension abilities. Even if it was true it still stung. Meanie Jack.
He kept going on using bigger and bigger words; Chel was happy to let him prattle on because Jack always seemed most pleased with himself when he was being Mr. Science. "Yeah memories were excalibur's power force back in the other rift too ...." Chel commented idly, thinking about the other world where they fought the shadowy nothingness.
She leaned back and said, "I really don't think there's much point in microanalyzing the queens. They seemed more like ... conduits than actual sentient beings. Like people holding a force that was a lot stranger."
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Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2014 7:54 pm
"No point . . .?" He snorted at the very thought. "There is always something to discover if you examine it close enough, Craft. A conduit has a particular construction, power, resources, usage, all things that can help put the picture back into focus. The small things matter, even if for just the moment."
He even made it a note on his page, as if to reinforce its own importance in their investigation.
"The fact that they were conduits at all should matter, for instance. If your theory is correct, then there has to be a reason the power itself was not fully present. More than likely, they were created as queens in order for our minds to be able to discern it clearly." Then Jack paused just as his mouth parted to continue speaking. Owain was stirring again, though the giant wasn't saying anything just yet; the giant was never this quiet unless deep in thought. Interesting. He pressed his lips together in thought.
What do you need me to press her on?
Owain made a soft rumbling sound. (( I am not sure. Everything about this conversation strikes me as odd. I cannot explain it . . . Go as you will and I will alert you if this should change. ))
"Hmm." Jack drained the rest of his original cup, set it off to the side, and grasped at Chel's gift to keep it going. "What does Excalibur have to do with this?" he asked, openly confused. "What other rift?"
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Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2014 7:59 pm
Chel crossed her arms, indignant that he was lecturing her like a schoolteacher. "Geez you sound like ********' Jesus with all the teachings over here." Well it was true.
She stuck her tongue out and said, "You can kiss that coupon goodbye unless you're nicer, okay?" Sighing, she realized that even that wouldn't matter. There was nothing she could hold over Jack in the slightest. She just liked trying to be on top for once. Well she'd like to be on top in a lot of other ways-
-But that was a story for a different day. "No, they were probably queens 'cause of the gosh dang story." She eyed him as he sipped his coffee, wondering if Jack's stomach was just an endless vat of coffee, swirling around forever. "Finally you let me talk about the good stuff. A while back there was a big uh-" She paused, looking at him. "Wait, do you know what distortion is?"
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Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2014 8:21 pm
"Not religious," he stated flatly, missing the point. "I am simply stating my method of interaction with the world." He did have a penchant for staring at things (and people) for a little too long at times . . .
Like right now. Was she really trying to use the coupon as leverage? Jack's pointed silence attested to how little he cared as he flipped the page and smoothed it down with deliberate, slow motions.
"I've heard it come up, but I haven't seen it in the field," he replied. "Give me the full rundown."
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Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2014 9:06 pm
Chel hid a smile at Jack's first comment. He was so literal sometimes it was just hilarious. "Me neither. It was a joke."
She knew the coupon would do no good, and neither would threatening to leave. He'd just find another test subject. What she would give for some kind of leverage over Jack. Maybe she'd actually ask that Stormy chick for some. They were exes, right? Maybe Stormy had the dirt.
"Distortion is like ... I don't get your lifer lingo, so sorry for my incompetence- distortion is like when FEAR gets uh ... gets like bottled up? Or something? It has to do with the power of memories too..." She scratched her head, unable to remember the rest of the jargon that life hunter in the infirmary had fed her. "Something like that- you can probably get the deets from some archive." She shrugged, figuring her definition was good enough. "So this dude, Excalibur- yeah like the one who used to shield our island- used our memories or some s**t to combat Merlin- like the one who used to be in our basement- who was being a d**k." She rolled her hands and stretched a bit, already antsy from sitting for long. "But there was ... some weird time skipping stuff. It made a big rift and everybody got sucked in, and we had to sort of ... rebuild ourselves. We did all these tasks to recollect out memories ... but the memories just made Merlin and Excalibur stronger."
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Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2014 10:10 pm
Ah. "You're a joke," he snitted back, purposefully shifting his gaze to the ever enjoyable coffee instead; he desired perfection to the point that even little blips like that bothered him a great deal. As Chel began her second story, Jack jotted quick notes, at most three words for the moment per row. His brow furrowed.
Any of this triggering something?
The giant only made a musing sound.
"The weapons were fighting each other?" Jack prompted, a thousand questions swimming in his head between the two of them. "I thought aside from the shield that they were dormant. And what do you mean rebuild yourselves?" He was going to needle Chel until he got every last detail.
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Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 12:33 am
Wow, great comeback Jack. Chel covered a laugh behind her hand, giggling at the beanstalk's immaturity. So even Jack was still a person. Not robot, confirmed (for now).
Chel stood up and began performing some minor aerobic stretches, if only because she was the type of person who needed to move to think. Surprisingly, her thinking was more competent this way.
"It's ... hard to wrap your mind around I guess. You remember hearing stories about Arthur and his knights of the round table or whatever those dumb shits called themselves? Well hey surprised just like all the other monsters and myths, they were real too. They started a lot of s**t way back in the day." She bent over to touch her toes as she talked, not breaking her eye contact with Jack. It was actually kind of impressive how in tune she was. "In the rift we ... started as little shadow people kind of. We didn't even remember our names- I though i was Chaesel for like half the time I was in the rift."
She put a hand on her chest as she struck a warrior yoga pose, breathing deeply in and out. "Except we had a glowing heart that grew brighter and changed colors based on what we remembered." She rotated her body lightly and continued, "But yeah, we did all these tasks like climbing to the top of a mountain or doing a gauntlet of enemies. Every time I beat one, I got a ... well blessing. It was like a pretty light and I felt more ... whole.." That sounded so lame. "With each blessing I remembered something else about my true self too. Just dumb little memories. Excalibur then used all this generated enemy to try to imprison a bunch of artifact .... thingies that were trying to wake up. I'm still not really clear on that part- I only heard bits and pieces from other people. Everything was kind of a blur at that point. Then there was a door and ... we went through it and came home."
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