The Mods of LifeAftr (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lifeaftr_mods) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
lifeaftr2018-08-18 08:46 pm
lifeaftr_mods) wrote in lifeaftr2018-08-18 08:46 pm
Entry tags:
- coco: héctor rivera,
- fragile dreams: ren,
- hollow knight: the knight,
- hyper light drifter: the drifter,
- marble hornets: tim wright,
- mass effect: legion,
- original: mira delacroix,
- pokemon sun & moon: guzma,
- pokemon sun & moon: luna,
- undertale: asgore dreemurr,
- undertale: chara dreemurr,
- voltron: keith kogane,
- ✖ no.6: shion,
- ✖ original: nari reno,
- ✖ pokemon sun & moon: lillie,
- ✖ undertale: muffet,
- ✖ voltron: hunk,
- ✖ voltron: pidge gunderson
August Aftermath: Plants Solidify Sunshine
AUGUST AFTERMATH: OVERGROWTH
Who: Everyone
What: You're back, for better or worse
When: August 19th and onward
Where: The Storyteller's Temple on Ensō, and anywhere else
Warnings: Please mark as you go!
What: You're back, for better or worse
When: August 19th and onward
Where: The Storyteller's Temple on Ensō, and anywhere else
Warnings: Please mark as you go!
Optimism Doesn't Change the Facts
By the end of the 17th, the last of those suffering from the Overgrowth have either pulled through or succumbed entirely. For the next two days, their bodies will decompose and the flowers will feed on their remains, flourishing into bright patches of color.
If you perished and choked on your flowery words, never fear. Come the 19th, you will be stirring awake in the Storyteller's Temple. You will be experiencing a few...side effects, as it happens, while your body readjusts. It will take something like a week for those symptoms to disperse, though the Storyteller isn't around to inform you of this.
What is around? Aside from your own freshly revived selves, there are a great deal of flowers, and all of them are sickeningly familiar. Scarlet gladiolus. Blushing dog rose. Soft yellow buttercups. Garnet-colored geraniums. Dark nodules of fly orchids. Rich violets. Periwinkle hydrangeas. Peppered yellow speckles of goldenrod. Jade green zinnias. Red spears of snapdragons. Pale begonias. Pink spangles of mountain laurel.
Don't be concerned. These ones certainly aren't going to be spreading to your flesh anytime soon.
By the end of the 17th, the last of those suffering from the Overgrowth have either pulled through or succumbed entirely. For the next two days, their bodies will decompose and the flowers will feed on their remains, flourishing into bright patches of color.
If you perished and choked on your flowery words, never fear. Come the 19th, you will be stirring awake in the Storyteller's Temple. You will be experiencing a few...side effects, as it happens, while your body readjusts. It will take something like a week for those symptoms to disperse, though the Storyteller isn't around to inform you of this.
What is around? Aside from your own freshly revived selves, there are a great deal of flowers, and all of them are sickeningly familiar. Scarlet gladiolus. Blushing dog rose. Soft yellow buttercups. Garnet-colored geraniums. Dark nodules of fly orchids. Rich violets. Periwinkle hydrangeas. Peppered yellow speckles of goldenrod. Jade green zinnias. Red spears of snapdragons. Pale begonias. Pink spangles of mountain laurel.
Don't be concerned. These ones certainly aren't going to be spreading to your flesh anytime soon.
If your character died during this event, please let us know if you have not already. Death penalties have been reduced for this event, but we still need to account for them!
( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )
no subject
"Treating the symptoms of 'Overgrowth' requires honesty."
I can't get any icons to load so this is my cryptic solution
"Honesty? Have I been dishonest?"
He's smiling, but he sounds... concerned, in an oblique way.
But Legion, are you calling him a liar?
no subject
They aren't necessarily calling him a liar. He could also just be lying to himself.
"Our symptoms abated after discussing a ...difficult topic."
no subject
"The only secrets I know aren't my secrets," he says finally, shrugging his shoulders as if to dislodge the weight of that suggestion--and whatever imaginary burden SEELE's secrets could place on him.
He'd say they don't matter here, but some of them do: the forbidden knowledge SEELE used to unlock metaphysical science. Knowledge of that which forms the backbone of existence is by its nature applicable anywhere. The skeleton shape of it that he knows could very easily lead to the application of that knowledge elsewhere. Which isn't his business, per se, but it's still something he doesn't want to advertise. His own existence is very much the result of that, after all... humans would inevitably find some way to make use of that.
That said, SEELE's only matter to him insamuch as they involve him. Here, where SEELE has no presence... his involvement really is irrelevant.
no subject
"Your illness suggests otherwise."
Not that they're going to like, force him to divulge them, though. It's his choice whether he wishes to survive.
"If you do not wish to discuss this with us, that is understandable. However, if you wish to survive, we would suggest finding someone with whom you do."
no subject
Kaworu smiles faintly, the same gentle, benign kind of smile that he often wears during conversations about what he knows and others don't. Then he grimaces, because his hands and feet still hurt. He shakes his head.
"Lilith, the mother of Lilim, who inherited the earth...... Lilim also inherited the Fruit of Knowledge from its mother, and became known to itself as humanity. But Lilith is the usurper, and her arrival cast Adam into slumber and sealed the earth's fate. Adam's children, bearers of the Fruit of Life, will usher in the end of mankind. Lilim calls this Third Impact."
With the heavy flowers Kaworu was bearing gone, there is no way to know whether this secret is even remotely relevant. It's not the whole secret, of course--it's not even the important part of the whole. But listen, it's a really long story, and Kaworu is not the best storyteller. He's just a really powerful tape recorder.
"Lilim's wish to change its fate is how I came to be. Lilim's servant, born from Adam."
Still, maybe if he hadn't violently ejected the roses into the ocean a few minutes ago.
Too late now.
"The ability to self-determine after one's birth... and the ability to determine one's self before one is born... these are known to Lilim as the Fruit of Knowledge and the Fruit of Life respectively. I couldn't explain it when first we met, but that is why I do not possess what you call 'sapience.'"
Kaworu is making a very large assumption about how well Legion is following his explanation.
Then again, he is using the words Legion gave him back then to explain it to them now.
no subject
"Your interpretations of sapience and self-determination differ from ours."
This does not mean that Kaworu is wrong: such abstract concepts are bound to have differing interpretations. It's not even particularly surprising: it is becoming clear that although Kaworu appears outwardly human, he is distinctly alien, a mind more distant than those of Humans and Geth.
It does, however, mean that Legion still believes that Kaworu should be able to choose whether or not to serve, since it seems clear that he is an intelligent being capable of making choices and having feelings about said choices.
"Is this what you desire?" To be Lilim's servant, that is.
no subject
It's such a bizarre question that his repetition is sincere; no one has ever asked it of him before. What he desires.... he can't really think of anything. The Dead Sea Scrolls have already predicted the outcome. He will die, and Third Impact will follow.
He shrugs, and the green sprouts of roses to come push dark beads of blood out of the holes in his pale skin.
"All will be as Lilim directs it."
It's really just that simple. He pauses, then smiles, brightening a little.
"Do you want to know my name? Not the name Lilim gave me to disguise me as one of its own. My other name."
You know, because he can. He can just tell you that. It doesn't matter if you know.
no subject
They consider pointing this out when he offers a different truth.
"Yes."
no subject
"By giving me the name Kaworu Nagisa, those old men created a fiction of the Fifth Child, disguising the twelfth Angel in human form. Pretty clever, right?"
no subject
As to the second bit, well.
"Perhaps." Judging by the brief flash of red, there are probably less positive descriptors they would rather use.
Those old men sound like a bunch of dicks.
no subject
"They'll have the world they desire, and my objective will be complete." A half-second before he realises.
"Oh, that's right.... you wondered why I was important. Now you know that, too." More or less, anyway. He didn't explain Adam, but does it really matter?
No.
"It's all part of Lilim's design, in the end."
no subject
That it works they can accept. That it was an efficient, ethical, or optimized plan they are unsure of.
However, their knowledge of the situation is limited: judgement is likely to be erroneous.
"However, we asked if you desire this."
no subject
"....you keep asking me that. Why? It's not even your world. It has nothing to do with you."
Or your humans, for that matter.
no subject
Legion remains calm, seemingly nonreactive.
It is their nature to ask questions such as this, to concern themselves with such things.
CW fatalism
"Do you think I should? Lilith, the usurper who took the world from Adam.... maybe I should want to take it back?"
But he doesn't. Why would he? He still dies. No matter whose Impact, whose vision of God... whose definition of 'life'... it's not an earth he'll inhabit. So why should he care?
"Truthfully, I don't care either way... whether or not they get what they want. The future has already been read. If there was something else I wanted, maybe... but there's nothing like that."
His is a practical fatalism. But what would he even want?
No. If it's a life with no future, then ending it is kinder. In this, he is the same as any animal.
no subject
They headtilt. The why goes unspoken.
no subject
"Humans are compelled to understand the world by their minds, because of the Fruit of Knowledge... which I do not have. And they experience feelings like longing, loneliness, and love... because they are prevented from truly understanding each other, and so suffer from their hearts. It is a contradictory, confusing existence... but they continue to struggle because they need each other, even if they can never open their souls to each other." He pauses, searching for the language to use. It's... difficult. He isn't meant for this.
"Without others, Lilim is incomplete."
A lonely little piece of a vast whole, a singular Angel comprising billions of parts.
He, however, is one whole unto himself, and his only other part is... the body of Adam itself. Reunion with it, however, would be the death of Kaworu Nagisa, the death of Tabris.
Third Impact.
That's not something he wants either, so there's really nothing.
no subject
Especially about something like this.
"Yes."
They stare at Kaworu for some time, headflaps rippling.
"However, separation is not the sole source of desire."
The Reapers were perfect and complete, and they still desired: their desire was the destruction of organic life, the completion of a vast and unknowable cycle that had been going on for longer than many planets had been lifebearing.
no subject
Their place, taken by Lilim and by Lilith, the usurper.
But...
He doesn't care whose planet it is or whose planet it becomes.
It all ends the same way no matter what he does.
So it was written in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so it will be.
His brow furrows slightly, his smile again vanishes.
"The source of desire is pain," Kaworu replies. "If pain comes from lack, then what Lilim lacks is completion."
Ergo, Lilim's wants stem from that suffering. What does Adamkind lack?
What does he lack?
no subject
Not that Legion contests it: the goal of the Geth, after all, was to ensure that no Geth had to endure the pain of separation.
They do not possess sufficient understanding of organics to speak authoritatively on their desires.
"Do you experience pain?"
no subject
"This hurts," he says simply. "That's why I want it to stop."
Where are you going with this, Legion?
no subject
Admittedly, this is obvious, given that Kaworu just stated that he desires for the flowers to stop.
Speaking of flowers...
"They grow in response to dishonesty. It is as we told another: your perceptions do not match reality."
no subject
That gets a strong reaction. Strong for Kaworu, anyway; he lifts his hands, staring with incomprehension at the deep green bud in its bed of dark arterial blood.
His perceptions do not match reality.
His brows crease.
If Legion is patient enough, several actual minutes will pass like this, as Kaworu works his way through the big, decidedly Lilim-calibre question. His perceptions do not match reality. His perceptions... do not match reality. His perceptions do not match... reality.
A human would probably have a much less difficult time determining the problem; Kaworu takes several minutes to decide the problem might be his perception of reality. At which point it is necessary to understand reality... the power of the Fruit of Knowledge. What is he supposed to do? He has a brief sensation of something that might be called 'unfairness.'
When he speaks, he doesn't look up.
"What is reality?" He's asking an extremely literal question.
no subject
...
This is a difficult question.
"There are many possible answers to this question. The projections of higher dimensions. A persistent illusion. That which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away."
They could attempt to explain the nature of the universe and the forces that interact to create it. They could also explain how the world perceived is actually a result of how the brain perceives these interactions, and not how things actually are.
"None of them are relevant to the current situation. The reality you fail to understand is your own: judging by this conversation, it is likely you possess a desire of which you are unaware."
(no subject)
(no subject)