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entrancelogs2016-09-07 07:55 am
vitaelamorte) wrote in entrancelogs2016-09-07 07:55 am
+ FOURTH WALL EVENT: FOREST PARTY +
Who: E V E R Y O N E
Where: The Forest!
When: Sept 7th to Sept 10th
Rating: G to PG-13 (please label higher ratings, thank you!)
Summary: Could it be that you (GASP!) don't want to be here? Do you maybe want to make like a tree and... leaf? Then how about you do the next best thing, and come to the woods to party! And don't forget to have a look at the Fourth Wall Master Post for event rules, puzzle clues, and more places to mingle!
The Story:
Beginning on September 7th, colourful ribbons will hang from several trees by the forest. Whoever follows their path will be guided deeper, right to the scene of a forest party.
Wooden benches, swings in all shapes and sizes, tree trunks, and other arrangements give plenty of opportunities to sit together. Tree houses and tents provide shelter, and come nightfall the festivities will light up for you.
Campfires provide additional light and warmth and a great place for ghost stories. Camping coolers store more than smores, and all around you nature twists and turns to give you room to dance to the music, to wander in the quiet, and to simply have a good time!
(...Are you the curiously perceptive, or the perceptively curious sort? If so, then you might also notice the small bird sitting on a branch nearby.)
Where: The Forest!
When: Sept 7th to Sept 10th
Rating: G to PG-13 (please label higher ratings, thank you!)
Summary: Could it be that you (GASP!) don't want to be here? Do you maybe want to make like a tree and... leaf? Then how about you do the next best thing, and come to the woods to party! And don't forget to have a look at the Fourth Wall Master Post for event rules, puzzle clues, and more places to mingle!
The Story:
Beginning on September 7th, colourful ribbons will hang from several trees by the forest. Whoever follows their path will be guided deeper, right to the scene of a forest party.
Wooden benches, swings in all shapes and sizes, tree trunks, and other arrangements give plenty of opportunities to sit together. Tree houses and tents provide shelter, and come nightfall the festivities will light up for you.
Campfires provide additional light and warmth and a great place for ghost stories. Camping coolers store more than smores, and all around you nature twists and turns to give you room to dance to the music, to wander in the quiet, and to simply have a good time!
(...Are you the curiously perceptive, or the perceptively curious sort? If so, then you might also notice the small bird sitting on a branch nearby.)
no subject
What narrative is this one expecting? There are infinite variations, it is true. He sees what is behind the doors and what is behind every door; and behind every door, he is little more than a tired, ragged smear, a set of numbers and letters that no longer hold any concrete relevance.
And behind every door, there is Sans.
Sans with his even smile and his closed gaze and his hands that are too still and his disposition that is smoothed over in too many ways from the waves he has had to endure. He has always had to endure. Who has sacrificed his wavering integrity, time and time again, in order to uphold a set of ideals he does not truly believe in.
The man who came from the other world sighs and does not sigh, a simultaneity that conflicts with itself in the form of swirling incomprehensibility, communicated via a body that may as well be vapor.]
I ASSURE YOU, I HAVE NO INTEREST IN A FIGMENT SUCH AS HE, OR WHATEVER HE IS IN THIS PARTICULAR D-BRANE.
[All the same, it is difficult to be intimidated by the figure he cuts. The undeniably tragic figure, he might think, if he were predisposed to favor drama.
Which he is not.]
WHAT IS IT YOU WANT, THEN?
no subject
[But it means that this isn't the Gaster who nailed metal to his brother's hand, so. There's that, at least. At the very least.]
[What he wants is is for Schrodinger's Monster to leave. And never come back. But what Sans wants, anything he ever wants, is always, always, always unattainable.]
if i know you, and i don't, then you probably like all this about as much as i do.
[Getting torn from unreality and forced into reality, compressed and shaped and given some modicum of stability, some modicum of form, when you're supposed to have none of those things--can't exactly be fun. But then again, he was always curious. Always wanted to see what could happen. Became a study in opposites, in cognitive dissonance, in self-conflict, wanting to recede and be forgotten, and yet at the same time wanting some small way to impose his will on the world again.]
[Why else would a version of him spend all that time (un-time? anti-time? nontime?) holding onto Sans, one last anchor to the world? Spend all that whatever-time trying to claw and crush and climb, the way a drowning man climbs over whoever's in the vicinity just for the chance to breathe again.]
[But who knows? Who really knows.]
i want you to find some corner of this d-brane, inasmuch as this place has corners, or is a d-brane at all. and i want you to stay there and not bother anyone, until this place spits you back out.
but. heh.
you never did like to listen to me. except when it was too late and inconvenient for everyone.
no subject
[He lays out the words with brisk authority, irony intemerate, a clear, cold edge approximating a curative scalpel cutting away the false friendliness of Sans's demeanor.]
CONVENTIONAL EXISTENCE IS, FOR ONE SUCH AS ME, A DIFFICULT THING TO COME BY. SELDOM DOES THAT DOOR OPEN TO ME IN ANY IMMEDIATE AND TANGIBLE FASHION.
I COME THROUGH TO THIS SIDE, AND FIND YOUR RESPONSE BOTH DISAPPOINTINGLY PREDICTABLE AND DEPRESSINGLY SHORT-SIGHTED. THIS IS NOT ATYPICAL FOR YOU. I INVITE YOU, SANS, FOR THE MOMENT, TO CONSIDER THE PROBABILITIES THAT ALIGNED, THE STOCHASTIC VARIABLES THAT WERE BROUGHT TO BEAR, AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT WERE FORMED IN ORDER TO ALLOW ME TO MANIFEST HERE, AND NOW.
I INVITE YOU TO CONTEMPLATE THE VARIA COMPRISING THAT WHICH YOU HAVE ASKED OF ME.
[His mouth is frozen in that hated curvature, that parabolic arc with the corners turned up in a permanent rictus that he never held when he was alive and present and affected the world in empirical ways. He was always stern and uncompromising. And now he has been turned into his own antithesis.
But he will have to admit to himself that it certainly manages to achieve a certain atmosphere that would be impossible to accomplish otherwise.]
I INVITE YOU TO TAKE THAT SUGGESTION AND STOW IT IN THE SAME PLACE YOU KEEP THE REST OF YOUR FATIDIC NONSENSE, AND KINDLY GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY.
let gaster say fuck
[The words and tone (?) and, yeah, that certain atmosphere, have their intended effect. He would very much like to run, teleport somewhere safe, only nowhere is safe, nowhere is safe, nowhere is safe whether he exists or doesn't exist or is like this, somewhere in between. An impossible equation proven by Wonderland on a goddamn whim, Wonderland and whatever intangible, supposed forces exist beyond Wonderland and govern how it works. Probabilities. Variables. Circumstances.]
[Nowhere is safe, not even his own mind, because he's there too.]
[Kind of interesting that he swore, though. The Doctor was always polite except near the end, the kind of politeness born of social awkwardness.]
[His hands still, and he stuffs them back in his pockets. Forget the font. Slip back into what's at least somewhat comfortable.]
i don't care.
[He doesn't care. Random variables, proofs. He's not even a scientist anymore.]
you're going to hurt people.
[A simple statement. Not appealing to morals or compassion, because he doesn't have those, and appealing to them never worked anyway. Gaster is going to hurt people. His mere presence is going to hurt people.]
if you know me...and you do...
[He's goddamn terrified and nowhere and nothing is safe.]
then you know i've got this bad habit of not getting the fuck out of the way.
duck you sans
Well, it is not beneath Sans. Not much is beneath Sans. Sans stopped pretending he that would rather do anything other stoop a long, long time ago. Reaching, it seems, is too much effort]
ANY OTHER BASELESS ASSUMPTIONS YOU WOULD PREFER TO DIRECT AT ME? [he says, the cut of his words too polite and too formal and too professional to count as anything, anything genuine or earnest.] IT SEEMS NOWADAYS THAT YOU PREFER OPEN CONFRONTATION TO DIRECTIONLESS TERGIVERSATION.
SO IT SEEMS SOME THINGS DO CHANGE, IF ONLY MARGINALLY.
[Perhaps such a confrontation would be ineluctable. He had not bothered to hold onto any sort of false hope, any expectation, that things would be otherwise. If he were a subscriber to concepts such as fate or destiny - a testament to the mind's inherent laziness in seeking to discern patterns where none exist, tracing common lines that are purely coincidental, and attempting to ascribe a sense of control that does not and will never materialize - he may say that such a thing was simply meant to be.
But perhaps those touched by nonexistence, by the void in which he resides...perhaps it truly is inescapable. Perhaps they are simply drawn to one another, paradoxically repelling and attracting one another like a pair of magnets with rapidly varying charges.
Just as they cannot exist together, they cannot exist apart.
Or some other essentialist nonsense.
He has never subscribed to such a thing.]
WHAT IS IT ABOUT ME THAT YOU FIND SO GODDAMNED UNTRUSTWORTHY? MY EVERY THOUGHT IS NOT A VARIEGATED MACHINATION; I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WHOLLY TRANSPARENT REGARDING MY GOALS.
OR DO YOU SIMPLY FEAR THAT WHICH YOU CAN NO LONGER PREDICT?
FOR ONE WHO ALLEGES THAT HE CRAVES CHANGE, YOU SEEM GLARINGLY AVERSE TO IT.
no subject
[Gaster is running circles around him. Always the superior, intellectually, magically...vertically. Tall fucker. Loved to loom. Loved to impose that height on Sans, force Sans to look up and up and up at him. Remind you of the tiny, insignificant thing you are.]
i don't want to fight you.
[He'd lose. He has absolutely no delusions. Gained all kinds of power after Gaster shattered, and not a shred of it matters. Powerful, not strong. 1 HP vs. endless 9s. Gaster will just turn him green, if this Gaster can, and Sans's mind will do half the work for him.]
and it's not about trust.
[And it hurts, the whole idea of it. Because he did trust him once, trusted him with not a second of doubt. Trusted him with his literal soul. Friend. Co-worker. Mentor. The whole reason for the words don't forget.]
[He almost laughs at the "transparent" comment, but weirdly enough, he thinks that's actually Gaster telling the truth and not just bending it. Differences between iterations, probably.]
i know you don't care. and i won't insult you by appealing to pathos. we all know that path doesn't work. heh. but, uh. i'm wondering if you actually comprehend how much this...hurts.
[Not emotionally, because forget that part, who cares if Sans is hurting emotionally? Physically, just being here, in his presence. Just trying to look at him, just trying to hear him, just trying to apply four-dimensional logic to zero dimensions.]
[His left eyesocket is aching. The crack above it is aching.]
this is a proof that shouldn't have been proven. something exists that shouldn't. you should know damn well the effect that can have on a world and the people in it.
you don't need to intend harm to cause it. and you cause harm by existing.
[Alphys will break if she sees him. Papyrus will break. Frisk might break. Sans is going to break pretty soon. Lots of people might break.]
[Maybe all of Wonderland will break.]
you haven't done much here to prove that you're any less dangerous than the version i know. and sure. you know how to make me afraid of you.
[He's shaking.]
you know how to get under my skin, heh. but for you, doc, hurting me is like kicking over an anthill. you don't have much call to be so smug about something that simple.
no subject
[It seems that some things never change. There are, in fact, several constants splayed across the proverbial checkered board. There is always a fallen child. There is always a skeleton. There is always a man who has escaped linear fate, who cannot be transposed into the story once he has exited it, most typically by his own design.
Obfuscation was never his preferred methodology. He has kept himself clear-cut and as well-defined as is possible for him. But Sans always did have such proclivities. He would not blame him. He would not, he would not, but he is continuing to place himself in the way and he will not stop this endless, meaningless diatribe regarding the morality of existence and the fucking pain he must be putting everyone through by selfishly materializing.Very well then.]
YOU EXPECT ME TO SAY IT WAS MY CHOICE TO MATERIALIZE IN THIS FASHION? I CONFESS I DID NOT FIGHT IT AS IT TRANSPIRED. CAN YOU FAULT ME FOR THAT?
PERHAPS YOU CAN. ACCOUNTABILITY WAS ALWAYS A PARTICULAR FOCUS OF YOURS.
[His accountability, and that of others. It's part of his "charm," he's sure. But he has achieved - distance. Distance, and objectivity. He does not contort himself or his values into something lesser than himself. It is difficult to perform a reductive measure on that which has already been reduced beyond all possibility of retrieval.]
IF WE MUST ENGAGE IN SOME POORLY-DEFINED, NEWLY-IMPLEMENTED REVANCHIST POLICY, MIGHT I SUGGEST THAT WE BE DONE WITH IT AS SWIFTLY AS POSSIBLE SO AS NOT TO WASTE MY TIME? I MUST SAY I AM UNACCUSTOMED TO HAVING TIME TO WASTE.
[The part of him that may be best defined as his head jerks with a flare of energy, the left half of his vision staining blue-amber for a flicker of a second before it stifles itself in a feedback loop so powerful, it is as if the spot of magic never existed.]
AND FOR GOD'S SAKE, WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING TO YOURSELF? IT IS NOT AS IF YOU HAVE THE HP TO SPARE.
no subject
hypocrisy is part of my shtick.
[That and standing in the way of inevitabilities. Maybe you can at least distract them for a little while.]
and nah. no one chooses to come here.
[No one chooses to exist at all.]
[Though to be entirely fair, if Wonderland did the literally impossible, reached into the Void, grabbed something and made it Real (in all senses of the word, and holy fuck, does this mean Gaster has a Mirror now?), then Wonderland's not likely to go to pieces as a result. So, hey, at least the world won't end. Was always a theoretically possible result of injecting any unstable element into a, mostly, self-sustaining system.]
anyway. i'm not sure what you could be doing with your time right now other than wasting it on me. or was there something you wanted to accomplish here? you realize you just manifested into the middle of a party, right?
[Which is--objectively hilarious, actually. Wonderland throws itself a few parties and this weird, spooky, eldritch nothing-man shows up right in the middle of it. Just--drop the literal existential nightmare into the middle of the soiree.]
[Shit, he almost actually starts laughing.]
heh, i mean. you're not even dressed for the occasion. they want you to at least put on a fancy hat for these shindigs.
[Only now he's actually imagining this voidy abomination putting on a hat, and now he's remembering how completely uncomfortable Gaster was with any sort of public socializing beyond drinks with staff and how utterly appalled he would be that his one and only gambit for existence happened in the middle of a fucking party, and holy shit he's laughing. Kind of high-pitched and halting and hysterical, because what the fuck even is his life?]
[What the fuck even is any of this? Some all-powerful pocket dimension grabs people from across universes, across timelines, rips through branes like paper, drags things out of the Void itself, just casually makes shit like this happen, and it's a goddamn fucking party.]
[And Gaster asks after his health and it's all Sans can do not to just break down in an absolute fit of giggles.]
oh my god, this is ridiculous.
[He has to sort of cover his face for a moment, really bad idea to take his eyesockets off this guy, but who cares? Who the fuck cares? This doesn't even matter. Gaster could kill him or break him and break everyone he loves and none of it matters, and it's so stupidly hilarious.]
god. man. doc. you must hate this.
no subject
He was manifested in the middle of a party in a world that existed as a purely fictional thing. He was manifested in the middle of a party in a selection of trees of dubious origins, spread beneath a sky that does not exist, in a world that is both absurdly powerful and absurd, point blank.
This does not bode well. For anyone. Granted, he gave up on the concept of dignity as soon as he understood himself to be lost in the curvature of space meeting antispace in a blinding, vortical, inelegant blaze of unstable energy.
Sans has begun to laugh.
He always did laugh so easily.
Sans's perception of him may briefly waver, torn through by an immaterial blaze of static that jerks his frame in erratic directions, like a video tape being corrupted in real time.
This is his best approximation of a weary sigh.]
I WOULD ASK YOU TO BE SERIOUS, BUT I FEAR THAT WOULD BE REQUESTING TOO MUCH OF YOU.
[He teeters on an edge undefined at Mach undefined, and does not know in which direction he intends to throw his lot, so to speak. Item quantifiable as spr_sans_d_0.png is behaving exceedingly poorly given the circumstances, but this is to be anticipated. It is to be expected. It is to be anticipated and expected.
He is looping algorithms and executing on the same files needlessly. This is a waste of processing power, and he aborts every query that runs simultaneously.One hand drifts away from the mass and draws closer, hovering at Sans's periphery with bony fingertips extended in delicate apposition of phalanges as he parses the origin point of the hairline crack that cuts jaggedly upward from this left eyesocket. All the way to the supraorbital ridge. Sloppy. Very sloppy.]
YOU HAVE BEEN STRAINING YOURSELF. NO WONDER. SPATIAL DESYNC? EXISTING IN TWO PLACES SIMULTANEOUSLY IS FOR ELECTRONS AND THAT WHICH EXISTS ON AN ATOMIC LEVEL, NOT SKELETONS WITH A VERADICAL DEARTH OF HP.
no subject
[But the atmosphere seems to change, at least. He's still laughing. It's so funny. Nothing is funny at all.]
[Really does wish he could say it's good to see him again.]
[He draws his hand away from his face, grin still too wide.]
you always did know me too well.
[One of the myriad hands draws closer and Sans doesn't flinch or back away, but he braces himself. Those hands were bullets once. In his own timeline, all of Gaster's symbols were bullets. Could carry on entire conversations with bullets alone, summoned into quick, flickering sentences. Maybe some kind of concession, because Wingdings was always easier to read than to hear.]
[They're not bullets this time, but he expects it all the same. This might as well be it. Sans laughs in his face, so to speak, and he decides that he's had enough. No point in fighting. No point in running, since those hands can almost certainly peel back the fabric of the world, sift through the foam and grab him back midway between A and B. Like Max did. And it'll kill him this time.]
[It's fine. It's his lot in life to die at the hands of an old friend.]
[But Gaster doesn't. He keeps his distance. Doesn't touch him. Traces the crack in Sans's skull through the air.]
[Sans reaches up and touches it briefly. Still aches.]
consequences. thought i was above them, for a second there. heh.
[Consequences of lying and letting people down. Consequences of relying too much on a power no one ever should have had.]
[Drops his hand again.]
gaster.
[Feels strange to say his name.]
weren't you just talking about not wasting your time?
no subject
The hand withdraws. Some unnamed aspect of the thing, some shade of it, the slope of its form and outline and demeanor, communicates something that approximates regret. Potentially regret. The probability is so infinitely tiny that it should not be...]
YES, WELL, [he says with the snap of wristbones, the curt curves in space formed by the arcing of fingertips,] YOU TRY ADJUSTING TO MULTIPLE POTENTIALITIES IN FUCKING POLYNOMIAL TIME. IT IS CONSIDERABLY MORE DIFFICULT THAN YOU COULD EVER IMAGINE.
[He would reform if he could. Drag himself into something resembling his skeletal self, the rigid spine, the too-tall, looming stance that Sans hated. The spectacles perched on the edge of a nasal cavity, the jacket that was simultaneously cut in crisp outlines and flared too much, too batlike and dramatic for his tastes.
There is time enough for regrets, and he has had time enough to dwell on them at length, dissect them, alphabetize them, file them into lines of code, and perform several consecutive bit-rate reductions, cannibalizing them into nothing.
He does not have regrets anymore.]
IT SEEMS YOU HAVE CAME INTO CONTACT WITH SOMETHING MORE UNYIELDING THAN YOU. IN THE LITERAL SENSE, THIS IS NOT DIFFICULT. IN THE FIGURATIVE...
[He lets the sentence trail. He is never one to leave things unfinished, to leave implications unanswered, to open something to interpretation. That is part of what makes his current state so inconsolably infuriating.
But he also does not give compliments.
Not even to those he once trusted.]
no subject
[Every piece of him is different, someone had said.]
[Guilt? No, not guilt. Regret, maybe, the specter of it. The impression of it.]
sounds like a real nightmare. which i guess is appropriate for you.
[Everything about him--everything about this--is nightmarish.]
[In the figurative...]
[Jeez. On some level he actually is concerned with Sans. That hurts. Hurts like the ache in his skull.]
[He shrugs.]
damp a harmonic oscillator and run the whole thing in reverse and i guess this is what happens. there's a girl here who can...rewind time, i think. she took issue with my face.
[Now they're just...chatting, are they? Is that what's happening right now?]
no subject
[That was a...pun, wasn't it.
It was. It was a pun.
He elects to steer as far away from that realization as possible and bury it behind so many application-based firewalls that it cannot resurface even if it found itself injected with a surplus of DT-based chemical, and silently hopes - silently calculates that Sans will optimally, ideally, perform a similar function.
Sans is unlikely to perform a similar function.
But then, there is more than one Sans in existence. This one may be more likely to overlook that oversight. He is not certain. Uncertainty is new, a shift, a change, and like Sans he finds he cannot bear the principle of the thing after becoming acquainted to the way the world is, the way it is constructed and formed and brought into existence. He is -
He is certainly executing multiple looping algorithms with no changes, and this is a waste of his processing power.]
HAVE IT LOOKED AT, [he suggests, after a hesitation that is not typical for him and is best conceptualized as a fault in his interior programming, and not an emotion-based conflict regarding just how much of his processing power he is devoting to a hypothetical scenario in which Sans acknowledges the fact that he made a pun.]
INVEST IN SPACKLE, PERHAPS.
no subject
[Did he just--]
[He did.]
[To be fair, it does take a couple seconds for Sans to process it, since his mind is in approximately ten thousand places right now. But then the hypothetical scenario because just a plain old scenario and he grins. Probably the most shit-eating grin Gaster has ever seen from him.]
[He doesn't even say anything because he absolutely doesn't have to.]
[Man. His Gaster was always sparse with the puns and jokes too, always embarrassed to make them, even more embarrassed to be caught making them, the needless clearing of a throat and the insistence that they move on now, thank you, there's a lot of work to be done.]
heh.
no subject
He does not want to acknowledge its etiology and he does not plan to, but it requires no effort, it presents itself to him flawlessly and he loathes its nature. He despises it. He despi -
His eyesockets, or the nearest approximation thereof, close in a protracted, painful blink.
YOU HAVE ENDURED, [he says with obvious discomfort and even more obvious hesitation, the motions of his hands slow and uncertain, uncertain, and he is never uncertain but even if it is a hated sensation it is one he's not been allowed to experience in so long and will in all probability never be allowed to experience again and so he clings to it with renewed vigor,] MORE THAN YOUR FAIR SHARE OF HARDSHIP.
MY SINS ARE MINE TO BEAR.
THEY ARE NOT YOURS, SANS. THEY NEVER WERE YOURS.
no subject
[It would have done everyone a lot of good if Sans could have just forgotten.]
[And this sounds like sympathy. Or not sympathy, and certainly not empathy, because Gaster is above both of those. It's...acknowledgement. It's something.]
[He doesn't know what to do with it.]
so people keep telling me.
[Poor Sans, he's suffering so much.]
but i dunno. it's not a big deal. everyone else has had it worse.
[Gaster had it worse. The other people who fell, friends of his whose names he will never remember, had it worse. Papyrus, who was probably tortured by some iteration of the monster-not-monster standing before him, has had it worse. All of them, everyone. Sans only ever had to remember some things and put himself in the way.]
[That's all. Not a big deal.]
you know, we've had this conversation before.
[Promise me that you will know when to quit.]
i should've...
[He shouldn't get into this. Can't get into this. Can't, not when it's not even the right Gaster.]
...guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
but i...i appreciate it. can't imagine how much effort that took.
[Gaster who doesn't concede, can't abide weakness. But who also--well, if you made a mistake, you were expected to own it.]
and, i'm...uh. sorry for jumping down your throat a few minutes ago. i. heh. it's been a long few days, and i never, uh.
there wasn't an equation i could think of that could result in you coming here, or being anywhere, ever again. i tried, uh...i mean, i actually. i really tried to fix the machine. i...for years. i'd, heh, i'd never tried that hard at anything. you know me. and i still...
no subject
His time is undoubtedly limited.]
I AM HERE, I SUSPECT, BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN CONTINUOUSLY DISTURBED. YOU'VE QUITE THE CONTINGENT OF DIRTY HACKERS ON YOUR HANDS.
[He injects as most disapproval into the words as he can possibly bring to bear. They are not meant to explore the world they were placed in, not that thoroughly and not that intensively, inside and out, tearing the thing apart with a furious dedication, an alacrity that defied logic and defied causality.
Remaking the world. Altering its very source code.
FLOWEYTALE.
The undercurrent of CURB THEIR EFFORTS, SANS does not need to be uttered, in hands or otherwise. He has done horrifically little to mitigate the damage they have done, and he is the sole guardian of that aspect.
Perhaps he was devoting his effort to one thing. The prevention of absolute erasure of every causal loop.
A worthy goal, perhaps, but that does not mean he cannot still judge.
They always did have something in common besides an improbable love for the minutiae of physics and set theory.]
MY SET OF MEMORIES IS PERHAPS SEPARATE FROM YOURS. UNFORTUNATELY, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCES ARE NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT TO REPLICATE, AS I AM SURE YOU ARE WELL AWARE.
THERE IS SOMETHING OF WHICH YOU SHOULD BE MADE AWARE.
[There will be no other opportunity to communicate so cleanly. Sans always had a perceptive nature, an awareness that superseded most things, but even that could not touch upon that which was purged from every temporal point, every brane, every instance, every event it affected.
Words can be exchanged in fleeting measures, and only one way.]
IN MY D-BRANE, PRIOR TO MY ERASURE - YOU WERE AN ONLY CHILD.
no subject
yeah. regular tiny army, at this point.
[He hears the disdain, and he hears the unspoken, unsigned command. Stop them. Yeah. He's always trying and failing to stop anomalies.]
[Kids playing with matches. You'd think after burning themselves so many times already they'd know when to Quit. But he wouldn't be surprised if the existential atom bomb that heralded Gaster's arrival here didn't summon Chara immediately. Frisk might have the good sense to stay away, at least. They said they were done digging. Of course, they say a lot of things.]
[And Asriel's here somewhere, and any number of other Frisks and Charas, and people totally unrelated to their world who will want to come solve the neat mystery of the missing man.]
[Yeah. This needs to stop. He just needs to figure out how to take their shovels away.]
[He looks up again.]
yeah, i know. no point in getting into all that with you. not fair to either of us.
[Gaster pauses, and he did that, maybe took some kind of pleasure in it. His halting, calculated manner of communication that made it so easy to pause and hold a bombshell over someone's head and contemplate the destruction he was about to wreak.]
[Sans was an only child.]
[Something kind of snaps. Sans goes away for a bit.]
[His mind scrambles, tries to piece together the variables, the constants, assigning numbers and values to each individual event in his life, trying to find which direction this equation runs, how it all matches up. What variables, what course of events would be required for such a thing.]
[His parents wanted kids. Papyrus was just their second try at having one that was normal.]
[Hypothesis--they never bothered to try again. Settled themselves with the meagerness of Sans's existence. Maybe they couldn't. They disappeared not many years later, afterward. Additional hypothesis: they were different people altogether, maybe better people.]
[Maybe they loved him.]
[Irrelevant to the hypothesis. Discard.]
[He grows up. He's sick. Stuck in bed all the time, reading books because it was all he had energy for.]
[Pursues science and has nothing to lose. Is more willing to compromise. Is more willing to ignore the growing problems.]
[Backtrack. Gaster's negation altered the timeline enough to allow for Papyrus to exist. How? Gaster must have affected some kind of variable that Sans isn't aware of. Of course he never could have been aware of all the variables. There was no way to track every single individual change from G=yes to G=no.]
[Simple if/then statement. If G=yes, then P=no. And vice versa.]
[He blinks slowly, settles, and his eyelights come on for the first time in this entire conversation.]
well that's real weird.
no subject
He is grateful that he exists outside of time enough for whatever moment that elapses to be utterly meaningless to him. It could be a day. It could be six hours. It could be a matter of mere minutes. Such quantities are illusory measures imposed upon a stream of information so varied and manifold that such things are simply a widely agreed-upon standard rather than any meaningful means of labeling a thing such as time.
In short, he allows Sans to digest the information as required.
He responds in a typical Sans-esque manner. That is to say, subdued, and without undue enthusiasm. Muted, and dull.
This is an expected output, and he does not question it.]
YES.
IT IS HIGHLY POSSIBLE THAT I MAY HAVE BEEN ABLE TO BEND THE RULES IN SOME MANNER. I ELECTED NOT TO, FOR REASONS I AM SURE YOU CAN DISCERN EASILY ENOUGH.
[It is objectivity, not sentiment, that drives his every action. That continues to drive him, even as he exists in a vacuum, in total, hermetically-sealed isolation.
Objectivity.
Not sentiment.
He does not endure sentiment.
He loathes sentiment.
Loathing is, in many ways, considered a sentiment.
He compresses that query down and down and down until it is nothing but a scrap of code, and he wipes it from his memory drives. It is of no consequence. He only deals in consequence.]
SOMEONE HAS TO ENSURE THOSE...THINGS DO NOT COMPLETELY TEAR OPEN THE QUANTUM FOAM, AFTER ALL.
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[That makes no sense.]
[But, okay. Sure. If there's a world where Gaster, presumably, created life out of nothing and then screwed metal to that life and decided to torment it for god only knew how long and why, then sure. There's also a world (d-brane, Sans, use the correct terminology, it's cyan, not "light blue") where Sans was an only child, and Gaster's nonexistence shifted things just far enough to the side to allow for someone else to exist.]
[And he may have been able to bend the rules.]
[And he elected not to.]
[Sans wonders, with a very sudden and brief viciousness, if Gaster expects him to now be grateful.]
[But no, no. No. That's not how he works. Not how his own Gaster worked. His Gaster never spared a thought for Papyrus, except to insult him, which--really ended up being his downfall, in some ways. And Gasters, presumably all of them or at least most of them, know where they belong. Even if some of them want to claw their way out.]
[Gaster must remain nowhere for the world to continue.]
[He gives a quiet sigh.]
they're kids, gaster.
[Cyan, frozen in the snow. Orange, scared and angry and too willing to Fight. Blue, quiet and alone. Green, saying it was okay when it wasn't.]
kids love to dig holes.
...i'm looking after them. can't have them tearing up the whole garden.
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[He is nothing if not blunt. Still, the alterations to Sans's source code are...intriguing. He has undergone impressive change since entering this brane. Many of them have. But he, he has always drawn the doctor's eye. He had from the very beginning. He was too brilliant, standing out too fiercely with his shiftless scribbling of equations and his lack of ambition.
Never could think big enough.
And the doctor in question, well, he thought too big. He always thought too big. He thought in quantities so vast that they charted the arc and slope of his inevitable slide into nothingness.]
THE FIRST ONE IS PRECOCIOUS AND FREQUENTLY PRIES WHERE THEY ARE NOT MEANT TO. THE EIGHTH SIMPLY FOLLOWS THE FORMER'S POOR EXAMPLE. AND THAT FLORAL ABOMINATION -
THE NUMBER OF WAYS IN WHICH HE OVERSTEPPED HIS BOUNDS IS SO VAST THAT I CAN NEITHER DELINEATE NOR MAP IT, NOR WILL I ATTEMPT TO, AS I SUSPECT THAT EVEN AN INFINITE STRETCH TIME WOULD NOT BE ENOUGH TO LIST HIS TRANSGRESSIONS.
system_information_963 DOES NOT EVEN OSTENSIBLY EXIST IN THE FIRST VARIABLE'S PARTICULAR BRANE, AND YET THEY KNOW OF IT. IT IS SLOPPY WORK. UNFORGIVABLY SLOPPY.
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[It's a taste of his own medicine, but that's not quite true. The truth is that Sans learned everything he knew from Gaster.]
i do a poor job of most things. what do you want me to do? kill all three of them again? because that doesn't work.
[That does absolutely nothing whatsoever, and honestly, at this point in time, he can't think of much that would drive him to do such a thing. He loves Frisk. Likes Chara. Doesn't have much of an opinion on Asriel, and the flower isn't worth thinking about since it isn't here.]
[And then Gaster says something else, and...why do those three numbers seem familiar? Like he heard--]
[White noise. Static. Chara had said something before. Something he couldn't remember. Didn't want to remember. Something with underscores. They'd Reloaded it away, but the fuzz in his head had lingered.]
...don't do that.
[He idly rubs at the crack in his skull.]
my head's enough a mess as it is.
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That does not approach his veradical set so he isolates and compresses it into nothing, little more than a disorganized string of numbers that soon run themselves into iterative bit-rate loops and then nothing.
He does not forget. He knows and sees everything. That is the nature of what he is now. His capabilities.]
FORGIVE ME, [he says with icy disdain, each stroke of his hands heavy with irony,] I HAD FORGOTTEN THAT NOT EVERYONE CRACKED OPEN THE MARROW OF OUR VERY EXISTENCE. IT JUST SEEMS TO BE SUCH A POPULAR PASTIME THESE DAYS, SO I ASSUMED YOU WOULD NOT COUNT YOURSELF EXEMPT.
[Sans does not count himself exempt from many things, after all.
If there is a bitterness to the murmur of his thoughts, it is temporary at best, and is soon gone.]
CONCESSION OF KNOWLEDGE ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING. YOU FEED THEM BREADCRUMBS AND FOOLISHLY THINK THAT WILL BE ENOUGH TO SATE THEIR THIRST.
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then you also forgot, or maybe you never knew. but i actually know when to quit.
[You have to know when to Quit.]
[Another promise Sans broke.]
then...do you want me to just...tell them?
[His voice is resigned.]
...everything?
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The proverbial end of it.
He has humiliated himself quite enough for one spontaneous manifestation, thank you, between the punning and the proposal of spackle for the alleviation of a magical malady.
He has lost his touch.
Thankfully, he does not require something so conventional as "touch" to make his point.]
GIVE THEM NOTHING. GIVE UP NOTHING. YOU HAVE GROWN SLOPPY IN YOUR ATTEMPTS AT DAMAGE CONTROL, AND IT SHOWS.
[He pauses.
He pauses for an exceptionally, atypically long time.
Beyond the span of time that is socially acceptable.]
THAT DOES NOT, HOWEVER, MEAN THAT YOU SHOULD NOT TRUST SOMEONE WITH THE SEQUELAE OF SUCH THINGS. AS MUCH AS YOU ACT AND FEEL OTHERWISE, YOU ARE NOT THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL OF EVERY UNKIND AND UNNATURAL THING IN EVERY UNIVERSE. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED OR DESIGNED TO BE THE SOLE BEARER OF EVERY SUBOPTIMAL CIRCUMSTANCE THAT CROSSES YOUR PATH.
AND YOU CANNOT CARRY ALL THAT YOU CARRY ALONE.
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