[MU] - DECEMBER STORYTELLING / MEMORY SHARE

[lifeaftr_mods]

Something is wrong.

This may not very well be obvious, at first. The Storyteller is not present to put forth yet another diatribe, informative or apologetic, and the backdrop of guttering flame and sandy campfire is as present as ever...albeit briefly.



Those who tell their stories will start to notice something...odd taking place. Indeed, no matter how they intend to begin their tale, the land of Mu will immediately start to warp to accommodate it, or something utterly unlike it, until storytellers and listeners alike may find themselves in an exact recreation of a seemingly random memory, in the most stark and painstaking of detail. There is no altering the memory, nor is there any preventing it once it's begun to play - you will simply have to witness memories that are not your own this go around.

Furthermore, stories that take place in worlds other than LifeAftr will be, frankly, inevitable. Those memories, too, will be recreated, to be relived by the teller and lived by the listener.

---

It is time, once more, for you to tell a story...with a slight twist! This is, in fact, our first player plot, as provided by Dragon! The initial setting will be familiar for oldcomers, and newcomers will recognize it from the introduction they received in their dreams.

Yet for this Storytelling only, people can imagine whatever stories they wish, from both their homes and their time on LifeAftr, as long as they don't mind the fact that others will be reliving those stories in the form of an impromptu memory share.

Even those who prefer not to voice their stories aloud are not safe this time around. If the memory is recalled in essence, Mu will shift to accommodate it in full.

There is, however, a benefit to this: those who venture memories to be relived will receive both a befuddled apology from the Storyteller, who will assert that this was most definitely not meant to happen (they're the Storyteller, not the Rememberer!), as well as a tired promise that the relived memories will be worth two offerings each, as if in compensation.

Not that it counts for much, probably.

Comments

[postictal]

[What kind of right does he have to judge? He knows too many people, too many people, who have had to do terrible things for the sake of themselves or for the sake of others. A body count topping nine hundred, the casual destruction entire worlds. Countless viewers who clicked on video after video, sucked into a doomed man's story.]

[So she incinerated her team. He wouldn't have pegged her for the type, after she risked her neck for his sake.]

You don't...regret that? Or...?

[Does it not haunt her?]

[ratsinadaze]

[Why should it haunt her?]

I told them the place was going to go up in flames and they didn't listen to me. So they burned.

[She's never put it like that before. The words feel dry and mean on her tongue. Gobbet looks away and physically shrugs the thought off.]

But the point is, people do dark shit to save themselves. It's just reality. Why should we feel guilty about it?

[Why waste the life you saved by feeling guilty that you didn't die in someone else's place?]

[postictal]

Because it could’ve been different. It - it should have been. It’s my -

[He shuts up.]

[It’s my fault that any of this happened the way it did. It’s my fault that anyone was hurt. If I’d just done the right thing and burned to death then maybe - ]

[He shuts up.]

Because it didn’t have to happen that way.

[ratsinadaze]

So if you could go back and do it all again, you'd let him snuff you out, is that it?

[Gobbet doesn't wait for an answer. She just keeps going, frustration building in her voice.]

And what about now? After all you've been through since then, all the people you've met and all the shit you've done, do you still wish you were dead and he was alive?

[postictal]

I'd do a lot different.

[Maybe he would have. Or, more realistically, he'd have done the brave thing, the right thing, and made sure that he never brought that thing into everyone else's lives in the first damn place. Smothered himself in the crib, the minute he had the choice.]

[Everything would've been easier.]

It's not that simple. It wasn't a him or me thing, it - [Wasn't it?]

It wasn't supposed to be.

[ratsinadaze]

Oh my god you're actually impossible.

[Gobbet scratches the back of her head furiously before letting her hand drop in defeat. Her eyes fix on the fire, a nice neutral place to stare, if a bit bright in the encroaching darkness of Mu's seemingly perpetual night.]

[What she just saw, as she understands it, was a man who was ready and willing to kill Tim. That man was not going to reconsider. He had made up his mind. There was not going to be a q&a sit down in which Tim could reason with him. If that was a not a "him or you" scenario, she had no idea what was.]

Does your life mean a damn thing to you?

[postictal]

[No.]

[No, it doesn't. It's obvious to everyone who looks at him - except, it seems, for someone like her, who has spent so much of her life fighting for everything she has that it doesn't occur to him that someone might not.]

[And he doesn't.]

What do you think? [He manages to snap it out fiercely, almost defensively, shoulders hunching.]

[ratsinadaze]

[What does she think? Gobbet wheels on Tim, fists clenched tight.]

I think I wasted my time saving your ass back in those caves!

[The words come out sharper and louder than she means them to. Gobbet winces, but doesn't try to redeem herself. It wasn't a lie, really. If she saved a man who wouldn't have saved himself, it was wasted effort, plain and simple. She had done it almost on a whim, anyway. They had a common enemy back then and it seemed like a shitty thing to do to just let the man die.

[Hell, thinking back on it, maybe she was just spiting the stupid crystal monsters by saving him.]

[Whatever the case, she knows she's just said something she can't take back. No need to dig the hole any deeper.]

1/2

[postictal]

[That's the bottom line, isn't it?]

[He clawed his way out of years, years of that pained, desolate struggle, because the instinct to survive was ground into him in the glance over his shoulder and the blurring of trees into linear, green-brown streaks as he ran. This can finally be over! echoed in his skull like a klaxon when the blade slammed through neck, and he watched the red spurt out in a grotesque fountain.]

[And it was. It was over.]

[It was over, and no one made it out but the man who least deserved to make it out; the only one of them whose death would have solved something, and whose life had singlehandedly ruined so many innumerable others, simply because he happened to be.]

[Was there ever anything that wasn't broken, just for having him there?]

[It's a question that doesn't belong to him and was never pointed at him, but it resonates, nonetheless.]

2/2

[postictal]

[A smile hooks one corner of his mouth upward, as bitter and pained and tired as every defeated line etched into his features.]

[That's the bottom line.]

Now you're getting it.

[ratsinadaze]

No, that's... That was stupid to say. I just don't get why you specifically don't deserve to live. What did you do that was so bad, so damaging, that everything you've done in total should be erased?

[She doesn't know, of course.]

[But Gobbet has seen a man with good intentions ruin thousands of lives, including her own. That was pretty bad, and she didn't necessarily think he needed to pay with his life. Life is such a valuable thing, it affects so much more than just the one living it. How could you want to discard that? How could you not want to protect it?]

[postictal]

[What did you do that was so bad, so damaging, that everything you've done in total should be erased?]

[He existed, mostly.]

[He walked out of a hospital with his head ducked and his hands thrust in his pockets and his shoulders hitched to his ears and picked up a job and attended college courses like some sort of normal person. And, even worse, he did something unforgivable.]

[He made a friend.]

[He made a friend like Brian, who flashed grins at everyone and was personable to a fault, who encouraged him to audition for a student film with a godawful script and a pretentious-as-all-fuck director, who introduced him to people like Seth and Jay and Sarah, and one by one, each of their lives spiraled into disarray, before they met the inevitable end that they were always going to meet, once he entered the picture.]

[Whether it was consequence or fate or cosmic irony - whatever he chooses to call it - it brought him into contact with the one person who could eradicate him from the story entirely. The one thing that could invite an End so absolute, that it would chokehold the presence in a hospital room at the source, and reduce it all to a world where everything is exactly the same, except he never existed.]

[They asked, and he accepted.]
["You are coming with us, aren't you?"]

[Oh, yes. Yes.]

[He wants that more than anything.]

[He can't quite look at her, eyes flicking shut, his mouth pulling into a grimace that nearly, nearly wavers and breaks - but doesn't.]

I brought something terrible into everyone else's lives.

[ratsinadaze]

I knew a guy who ruined thousands, maybe millions of lives, including my own shot at anything but a life of crime.

[Gobbet rests her chin in her hands, closing her eyes as the memories of the Walled City flood back to her.]

He doomed us to a slum where the energy itself was so dark and so...evil, that it tore open a hole to another dimension and let a demon goddess through to our world.

[Normally, she doesn't let it get to her. But she watched so many people die in such horrific ways growing up. She killed people herself. She sifted through trash heavy with rot and used needles for her next meal. She slept in the sewers because the streets were too dangerous. Because the rain was too icy. Or the junkies were out in force. She couldn't always hold down the ache in her heart where a better life could have been.]

[Gobbet shakes herself out of the reverie. Looks hard at Tim.]

You know what he did with all that guilt and shame? With the weight of every life he ruined? He turned it into the will to live just so he could fix it. So he could make up for some of what he'd done. He could never fix it all, hell I sure didn't forgive him when it came down to it, but he tried to do as much good as he could. It was his responsibility to live because he ruined those lives. You can't fix shit if you're dead. Death doesn't solve anything. It doesn't solve your problems or the problems you've made. So what gives you the right to chicken out?

[She's rambling a little, not all the points fit together the way she wants them to, but she's kind of pissed. Pissed that someone's philosophy can be so objectively wrong to her. That this life she saved was looking to be wasted.]

[That his lack of desire to be alive invalidated her own convictions about living and surviving. And rendered her a murderous asshole by comparison.]

[postictal]

Because it's not that simple.

[There's a crack to the words, a breaking desperation, and one hand snaps up as if to ward her away. It instead latches onto the back of his neck, digging into the tensing knot of musculature there, and everything she says is - true, isn't it?]

[Coward. Coward and liar. He can be as sorry as he likes, but that doesn't fix anything. Nothing he does will fix anything, except for the meager possibility that the pills really will serve as the shield he desperately needs them to be for others; a synthetic talisman to ward off the thing poisoning all their minds.]

[He can't know. He can't really know.]

It's not just what I did.

It's - what I am.

[It turns out that some people - some people are just born wrong. And there's nothing you can really do to fix them. All you can do is hope that you can mitigate the damage, and, failing that - cut away the infection at its source.]

[I thought it was me, but you're the source.]

[ratsinadaze]

[Gobbet pinches the bridge of her nose with an exasperated sigh. Her body tenses when Tim raises his hand, but she doesn't move. She can't keep up this...sincerity. This letting herself feel the frustration and pain that she usually just ghosts past on the daily. That dismissive, aloof posture returns to her shoulders as she drops her hand and looks at Tim through tired eyes.]

What am I missing, Tim. [It's rare she calls someone by their real name, but so far her nicknames include Timmy (unused but on the table) and Timbo and neither feels...appropriate.] What are you, then? And I swear to god if you say something like "a mistake" or "a plague upon the world" I will personally throw you into the fire.

[postictal]

[It'd be easy.]

[That's the scary thing. It'd be so goddamned easy, and he doesn't know who that comes from - him, or me. Just...backslide. Let them hate you. Let them think you're stupid, and a poor planner, and not worth knowing. Sever every tie that has even the remotest chance of becoming something untenable, something you'd be unwilling to give up.]

[It would be so easy.]

Oh, what, 'cause you've been so understanding up to this point?

[And it is.]

[ratsinadaze]

[Gobbet's hands curl into fists. Her fingernails bite into her palms and the pain is dull and bitter, like the irritation bubbling in her chest. Understanding? No, maybe she hasn't been.]

[But she's not good at this. Not...not good at making space for other people. Her world contains her and a handful of people that know better than to try and change her. One person who succeeded in leading her to change herself. And here was this man - practically a stranger, really - who whether he knew it or not was asking her to be a different person for him.]

[Humor is her bandage. Aloofness is her painkiller. Dismissal is her shield. And to be understanding, sincerely understanding, she'd need to drop all of that and let herself hurt. For his sake.]

[No, no she won't do that. That's insane.]

I tried.

[She stands up abruptly, turning her back on him as she makes her way to the next person she wants to talk to.]

Come find me when you're done, Timbo. I'll wait.

[Done. It's nice and vague and means whatever he wants it to, exactly as Gobbet intends it. Is she done with him? Maybe. That's up to him, she tells herself. She's still willing to walk you to a better end, Tim. And failing that, a different one than the one you've chosen.]

[postictal]

[He discards the words with a wave of a hand, this time less nervous, less anxious, less uncertain.]

[It's easy. It's so damn easy, and it makes sense that it would be. Cut his wrists and he bleeds gasoline; strike a match and he'll burn you down. Something to that effect. The nickname feels like the jab it's doubtless meant to be, but at least this time, he doesn't flinch.]

[He's good at this burning bridges thing. Even brought his own kerosene.]

[And it's easier to be angry than it is to try and quantify how badly he's screwed up.]