[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

i. Knowledge or Death

[thermalwind]

The elevator descends into a square tunnel, lit by the familiar purple light so familiar with the aliens called Galra. Will he finally have his answers? It's difficult to say. He lets his mind blank as he stands next to a tall man clad in white and black armor, a mirror of his own red and white. They'll know soon enough.

Abruptly, the ride is over and the metal door hisses as it rises up and locks into place. People of various shapes, sizes, and forms wait in neat rows on either side of a long metal room. The symbol that had to give him so much turmoil glows at the center. Negotiations don't go well especially when they learn of his knife. They pin him down so quickly he only has time to defend himself against the accusations of theft.

The desperate need to know the answers burns him up from the inside and he ignores Shiro. The blade has been his all his life. The only clue to who he is. He never told anyone about it and that works against him.

"You seek knowledge? There is only one way to attain knowledge here."
"How? I'll do it!"
"The Trials of Marmora."

No matter what Shiro says or the risks, he accepts. The need to know who he is burning so brightly he sees nothing else. They give him back his blade and fit him special gear. The trials begin.

"Surrender the blade. You can not win." One fighter. Fights never last long. It's short and brutal. Yet they don't take his life. "Surrender the blade and the pain will cease." Each time he passes through the door they tell him he isn't meant to go through he is moving slower, the pain building up. He only sees the way forward. He won't quit no matter how many fighters they throw at him.

But when he notices the doors they are coming through he takes a chance and drops into the hole, escaping the endless cycle of blood and violence. The trials aren't over. Shiro comes to him as he collapses. Give up the knife, he says. He can't do that. He has to know who he was. Selfish. To hear those words from Shiro is enough he would have given up there and then. But the world shifts, pulling back the curtain on the years between him and a person he hadn't seen in ages.

"Keith."

His father. The ground shakes. The inside of the house is like he remembered it. The stack of machines. Radio sounds filtering in and out as his father messes with the dial. Machinery hums. Thud. He wants to catch up. But what is going on outside? Thud. He doesn't listen to his father assuring him things are fine. Thud. They're not. Outside ships use their cannons to carve through people. He can hear their screams.

Thud.

"Don't you want to know where you came from? Your mother gave it to me."

The world goes still for half a breath.

"...mom?"

It's tempting to stay. He wants to know everything. But he can't. Despite his father's warnings he turns away from him and walks into the blaze. Except it wasn't real. Shiro, the real one, pulls him up, his hands carefully keeping him upright. His head hurts. The Marmora don't want to let take the blade. He failed to awaken it. "What does that mean?" They don't answer. Shiro lets him go, dashing forward with purple swirls of light blazing from his metal hand.

No.

He never wanted his answers to come at the cost of his friend's pain. "Wait! Just take the knife!" He holds the knife out, offering it hilt first. No more. His selfishness would only bring suffering. Even if it's forfeiting what he wants more than anything... " The blade awakes, growing longer in his hand, as the Galra rebel leader breathes in. "You have awoken the blade!" The blaze of light dies away leaving him holding the longer weapon as he learns something that cracks open the foundations of his world.

"The only way this is possible is if Galra blood runs in your veins."

[shineinside]

The details of Keith's memory don't mean much to Yuka - there's too much context she doesn't have to parse what's going on in this strange world. However, his emotions, she does understand. His desperation, his panic, his disbelief.

Whatever he discovered, the implications seemed to be far darker than a simple heritage.

"...You don't have to answer this if you don't want to, Keith, but... what is 'Galra' blood?"

[thermalwind]

He stares hard at the fire. He wouldn't have told that story if he'd known the memory would play out. "It means I'm only half human. The rest of the Blades you saw are Galra and I am too." Keith raises his head, thinking over what to say and adds,

"The Galra have been terrorizing the universe for over ten thousand years. The Blades are rebels against their own kind." He'd learned the Galra were the enemy and only just got to accept that some were on their side. "It was a bit of a shock at the time."

[shineinside]

Keith... isn't human?

He looks like anyone else, but that's no real indication of anything, is it? Paragon Diamond wasn't human, either. Looking like a human doesn't mean you're human... and not being human doesn't mean you're automatically an enemy, either.

"Finding out that you had so much in common with something so terrible... That must have been awful. But it also sounds like even among those who weren't half-human, there were good Galra, right? Hopefully that made it easier to take."

[thermalwind]

"Of course it did." It was how Allura had reacted that really made it harder. "I'm just mad that I didn't get the chance to tell that myself. I was just going to talk about the Blades and their mission." Not his father. Not his emotions that were on display for everyone around them. It's exposure he really didn't want. Keith rakes his hand through his hair.

"I thought we were just telling stories. Not...seeing what really happened."

[shineinside]

"I thought so, too. The way other people described it was nothing like this..." Does that mean that some of her own memories will end up on display in the same way? There's things buried in there that she doesn't even want to see again for herself, let alone show them to everyone else.

"Do you think something strange is going on? I mean, strange even by the standards of this place."

[thermalwind]

"Yeah. I guess not even this is unaffected by weirdness." He draws his knife and it melts, expanding and stretching into the familiar long blade. He holds it up to let the fire's light play across it. "I'd refuse to keep participating but I need the boons we can get from this."

He needs more equipment to help fend off the Night Creatures. "At least we can pick what memories we want people to see. We just have to think harder before we talk about them."

[attheclocktower]

The trials are... intense. Hard to watch, in some ways. Both physical and psychological, it well... it reminds her of the Tower, a bit, but it reminds her a lot more of something else.

"It's funny. We go looking for answers, and get... a lot more than we imagine," her voice is soft when she speaks, and carefully neutral. Answers about themselves, she thinks but keeps silent, because that's only a guess, based on the information revealed at the end, and because it was why Xion herself had gone looking.

She's also not sure if it was good or bad for him. Truthfully she isn't sure if her own discovery was ultimately good or bad.

[thermalwind]

“I sort of...suspected it since I first saw the symbol on their blades.” So many times he’d sat in his room and stared at the symbol and wondered what it meant. Keith stirs the fire up sending sparks rising towards the dark sky over their heads. “It changed things.” He wants to find out what happened to her but he has a war to fight.

The fire’s light plays over his face and the dark armor a mirror of the Blades of Marmora’a own. It makes him look younger until he moves and shatters the illusion. “Was it a good thing what you found?”

[attheclocktower]

"I... no. I don't think I can ever really think of it as good." Not if she's being really honest with herself. Someone like Sora could probably see the bright side in her situation, but... she wasn't Sora.

"But... after all this time, maybe I don't think of it as something bad, either," she adds, thoughtfully. Just... something. A fact about her, about her existence, that couldn't and didn't really change.

[thermalwind]

“It just is?” He echoes her thoughts and leans back. Being half Galra isn’t a bad thing but his time with the Blades exposed him to the world his mother must have lived in. It made things far more complicated than they had been. He has no idea who he is without a lion’s controls in his hands.

“We’re still us. Guess that’s all that matters.” Whatever they are.

[attheclocktower]

"Yeah..." She can't help but crack a bit of a smile. The words sounded like something like Sora would say, but the tone generally sounded a lot more like how she felt.

Bracing her hands on either side of her seat, she leans back, looking up towards the sky. It was still kind of unnerving at times, not having a roof over her head; knowing that there wasn't one there. "I'm not human, or... a normal person. I'm a puppet, a replica made to control a special weapon on my worlds. I haven't been there so long though, it's... almost weird to think about."

[thermalwind]

He blinks. Not what he'd expected to hear. Keith peers up at the stars. Well, she's alive and a person. That's all that matters to him. "Feels kind of...like it was a dream?" Or like it isn't home anymore.

It's a thought he's had off and on. He might...leave again if he goes back to earth. The stars are home. In a strange little way. "Where do you feel home?" The words slip out, his voice soft. He hadn't meant to but what's done is done.

1/2

[attheclocktower]

That question is actually easy. "The Tower."

You know, that place she mentioned? With the awful experiments and monsters and mental manipulation and things like that? Yeah. There. She kind of realizes it's probably a weird thing to say, in light of their previous conversation, so...

"It was awful in so many ways, but... It's where I met my family, where... I learned so much. And I've spent most of my life there..."

2/2

[attheclocktower]

... oh. Right.

"I'm three."

Please don't get weird about it like Waver did.

[thermalwind]

"I'm eighteen." If they're trading ages, he might as well share his. Keith - master of failing social cues. "I get it. It was a bad place but that's where you found what matters to you." A pang in his heart is a grim reminder that he's very far from those he holds dear. "...and it's not like being from a bad place, or how you were born determines anything."

Who is he trying to convince with that? Maybe both of them. Keith lifts his shoulders in a small shrug. "It's you who decides that. Right?"

[attheclocktower]

"Yeah, right." She gets that a lot better now than she used to. The feeling's been undermined a bit by the drastic change of plans that was this whole new place, but... still.

She sighs, leaning back forward towards the fire, holding her hands out to warm them a bit. "Did you find something too?"

[ungrieved]

Call him curious. Call him morbid. Call him whatever you want. He preys on memory, gorges himself on it, feeds on it. And this - this is ripe for the taking, right here. This is a feast, is what it is. An arsenal of confused misery and physical agony and exhaustion and then...

The spurt of envy that colored his veins the first time they met - that frosts over, rime creeping up through to his heart and wrapping his throat in a ghastly claw. The gabble of formless radio chatter. The tramp of something oddly militant on the horizon. A chorus of rising screams.

Your mother gave it to me, says the man Gabe can recognize as his father, immediate and without question.

This - normal?

This isn't normal.

He didn't even know his mother. He didn't even know her.

Gabe tries for a laugh, hard and mocking. Something else curls up in his stomach instead, like the lump of pain that caught itself there in the tangled, snarled loop of his intestines and set him crying and crying and crying and crying. He's trying not to laugh, and he isn't laughing. Something else is happening instead.

Something
Something else.

Something that scrapes up against his throat like shards of glass.

"This was home."

[thermalwind]

Silence.

Keith watches him across the flames of the fire like a hawk sighting movement below them. He’d thought there would be scorn or mockery. It takes him a moment to realize what part might be referred to. “Never knew her. Dad I haven’t seen in years. Been on my own ever since.” Until Shiro. Until the rest of team Voltron.

He could reach out to them whenever he wanted while he sought who he is. He glances about the space around them. “Sorry a I hurt you when I dragged you to the other side of the island. Even if my head was being screwed with. Wasn’t right.”

[ungrieved]

The apology barely registers. That's not the important thing here. Does Keith really think that's important? That hardly matters, compared to this. Compared to this world, this life.

He turns his stare on Keith, his eyes flashing.

"You lied." He jabs one finger out to sweep at the fire, to indicate the memory that's since faded. "That wasn't normal."

[thermalwind]

Anger rises up so thick that he nearly chokes on it. His personal thoughts and worries exposed like this makes it too easy to want to snarl and dig his heels in. “No. I didn’t!” He snaps. “I only told you I gather intell! I didn’t tell you anything else and you didn’t ask!” Normal. What the hell about him came across as- his temper frays and he leans forward.

“Look at me! What about me says I’m ‘normal’?? I carry a sword. I scan for threats no matter where I go and I’m wearing combat armor. What did you think my life was like?” He has to hear this one.

[ungrieved]

“You got to live,” Gabe snarls, because god forbid he admit to making completely unfounded assumptions about other people’s lives so he can construct a justification for the utterly baseless envy he won’t acknowledge that he has.

“You had parents who could stand to look at you!”

This is all very rational.

[thermalwind]

“Do you know that?” His voice is like ice, cold and sharp. “Because let’s remember I never met my mom.” He needs to put the breaks on this before his temper snaps and he loses it. He breathes in and holds it for a second. Get a grip.

“Look. You thought I was something I’m not. That’s fine. We’re both alive right now. Focus on that.” It’s an attempt at pulling this back from the edge. He’s not sure what his mom was thinking when it came to him. One day he really wants to ask her to her face. That is not a thought he needs to turn over in his head right now.

He rakes a hand through his dark hair and points a finger at Gabe. “Don’t waste what you have.”

Cw ableism

[ungrieved]

“What I have?” His expression breaks. What he has is - it’s nothing! He saw the memories this world sought to recreate, and what were they? His all-too-brief life, his suffering, his premature death, and then the fantastical delusions of his batshit mother!

What does he have?

“You have no idea,” growls Gabe, “what it is I have.”

And whether or not he should be fucking grateful for it.

[thermalwind]

"You just said I got to live. What do you think you're doing right now?" He leans back and forces his anger down. It isn't going to help anything. "You seem pretty alive and capable of choosing what you do next to me."

So long as they don't go back to the subject of his absent mother, who may or may not be alive to ask what and why, he'll be fine. Keith pops his shoulder. "So. What do you want to do next?"