shadowdive | 38 // video

38 // video

Nhhhhhh!

[A medium pitched whine is what opens the feed up today, big yellow eyes frowning childishly into the screen. That is definitely Vanitas' face, but he's looking a little... off. While the face hogs the screen, there's a continuous sound of metal clashing on metal in the background, but Vanitas doesn't seem to be paying any attention to it. Instead, he's starting to make a few silly faces!

Crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue, then wiggling his eyebrows and blowing a raspberry, he's just amusing the hell out of himself, judging from the chittering chuckles. Jerking with a surprised yelp a moment later though, there's a large puff of smoke with the gear clattering on the ground.

Black and red streaks away before Vanitas is picking up the gear again with a very solid scowl.]

Little shit, using my face to look like an idiot...

[Oh was this thing on? Not anymore 8D]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Oh is it time to play the Exposition fairy? ]

Tavros was my teammate before the game; we used to flarp together - that's a kind of live-action roleplaying - against Terezi and Vriska, back before the teams broke up. [ She'll just. Skip mentioning the paralyzation of Tavros and her own death for the moment, because wow Vani probably doesn't need a crash course on revenge cycles and the complexities that is their team. ] He's really good with animals; a nice guy. He's dead in my timeline, but we hang out sometimes still!

Feferi's a seadweller. She's the empress-in-waiting to the empire - she would have had to challenge the current Empress for her position when she came of age, if we hadn't played the game. We never had much to do with one another, really, since we lived pretty far apart. She and Sollux were quadranted, though! Actually, from his timeline he should be from that time with her. She and Eridan used to be moirails, too, but she broke it off when the game started.

Then...Terezi. I knew her better than Feferi, since we used to play together. She once gave me good advice that I ignored, with...disastrous results, although they were necessary. She's smart. Funny. Blind, too, but she can taste colours to see. She and Karkat were pretty close before the meteor left.

[ She's going to pause for questions before going into the game. Because. That is going to take a bit of explaining. ]

So there really is a variance in the troll species, other than just blood colors. Fins or no fins. Were the blood colors the same for the seadwellers, or could they have anything? [More curious about that bit, since there's landwellers who hate water ~~aka Karkat screaming in the lake of rage~~ and seadwellers who actually live in it. It's the last bit that has him quirking an eyebrow.]

Pretty close?

Oh, yes! Seadwellers are only really fuschia and violet-bloods. The colder your colour, the longer your life-span, too; the warmer your blood colour, the shorter. I'm - rather, I was a burgundyblood, the shortest. ...Well, I'm not sure how long Karkat's would have been, but he's not really on the spectrum, so.

Yes, but that would've been nearly an entire sweep ago. They shared a keyboard once! In retrospect that was pretty funny, although I didn't care when it happened.

[Thinking on that and storing the thought for later, Vanitas scratches his chin a little.] A sweep is about two years, right? I guess that is a pretty long time.

About two and a half! It's been about two human years since the meteor left, I think. [ Pretty near there, anyway. ] I've only seen everyone in the dream bubbles since then. [ Which is not exactly the same. ]

Two years on a meteor. Damn. [MUST BE PREEETTY BORING.] What are dream bubbles?

They are places where the dead players can reside, and the living can interact with them.

Like an after life?

That's more or less the case! Living players can access the bubbles either by going through them physically or by dreaming. I stayed behind to assist the dead in navigating the bubbles.

Interesting. So you're acting as a sort of spirit guide then. Why not go with the rest of the group?

Only someone who has mastered the flow of time can properly navigate between dream bubbles! So I had to stay behind.

Mastering time itself. [Color him a bit awed here.]

Well, I'm a time player! Dave is the humans' time player. Karkat's a blood player, by the way.

What can a blood player do?

Karkat hasn't really become a fully realized Knight of Blood yet.

So that means no one knows yet. [Curious about these titles, mhm.] It sounds dumb, but I wonder what I would have gotten had I been part of your world.

Yes and no! There are versions of him who did manage to go god tier, but how each person utilizes their talents can be different. Classes come into it, too; Dave's the other Knight from our two sessions.

[ And she shrugs. ] I don't think I know you well enough to say, yet!

Knights are protectors, usually. So for a Knight of Time, would he be a guardian of it?

[Blinks, he didn't think she'd take that seriously and snorts quietly, shaking his head.] It's fine, it just sounds like it's something that explains something neat about a person. [My vote is Thief of Void 8D]

The knight of time is a powerful warrior class which exploits the flow of time as a weapon!

[ It kind of does, although Aradia won't even begin to get into that nonsense. ] Anyway. The game that we played - "we" as in the trolls in this case, since the humans had a slightly different name for it - was Sgrub. While it it loaded as a computer game and you do utilize computers in your role as server player, it's...not really a computer game.

Offensively, rather than defensively? [He's trying to think of how it works is all; if he had time powers, he could dodge or redo just about any blow that was coming his way, and in a way, be pretty damn immortal. Can't die unless hit, right?]

What happens when you run it and finish being a server player?

He could use it either way, but on the whole tends to use it to defend the other players! [ From what she's seen, anyway. Besides, god tiers are pretty darn immortal anyway, so long as they're careful. ]

The first player in a chain has to be a client player, because to enter the game you need a server player running your game. We started out with two teams - or, rather, everyone else believed we started out with two teams. [ she was madam puppetmaster for half of the game, although she was also being directed by the dead, so. Yeah. ] A red team and a blue team. [ ...and there's a small smile there. ]

The first player for the red team was Karkat; for the blue team it was Equius. The server player - Terezi and myself, respectively - is responsible for deploying game-relevant items and building upwards towards the "gate", which takes you to the next level. The thing about the game is that it is, in essence, a way to save the lives of the players from meteor strikes - and, to skip a lot of plot, it is how we were all born!

So once you get someone into the game it is imperative you get into the game, or you'll, well, die. So each player is a server player to another player and a client to another player; it forms a chain.

Makes sense, if you and he can just jump back and move people to avoid attacks. [He quiets down to listen to the explanation though, and really, it sounds all sorts of ..... interesting, honestly. A game that literally starts destroying the world, except for the players who manage to get in.]

What's the purpose of the game that it destroys your world as it takes the players into it?

We created ourselves through the game. And a new universe.

I mean that quite literally. It was inevitable we would play, because we always were going to and always had done. Karkat got the job of sorting out our births.

A new universe, on top of ... what would it be, some sort of paradox loop to create yourselves? Fated to always repeat the same things?

How did he do that?

Yes and no! After all, we're not repeating it. It just had always been something that had and would happen.

Ectobiology.

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video; filtered; sorry tavros, he's like 'whose this douchebag' and listens but no questions..

video; filtered; look tavros is like one of her favourites >(

video; filtered; SRY MANG

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video; filtered; good question vani, no one really knows yet

video; filtered; karkat mostly flips his shit about whatever is happening does that count

video; filtered; nope 8( also disney joke can you find it

video; filtered; man i love ariel

video;filtered; i half ship her with riku just cause both were like NEW WORLDS LETS GO

video;filtered; ...stop giving me new ships

video; filtered; I COULDN'T HELP IT, I ALWAYS WONDERED IF THEY MET, THEY'D HIT IT OFF WELL FOR THAT

video; filtered; is there fic for this

video; filtered; maybe, i never found any when i looked though baw

video; filtered; SAD

video; filtered; quick go write some-

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