therookery | crystal; fighting evil by ___

FORM: sending crystal
SENDER: Abella
RECIPIENT: the whole gremlin collection
NOTES: Likely discussion of a battle royale, potential discussion of possession/monstrosities.

Good evening, Riftwatch.

( There's the sound of wind in the background - it's not too hard to tell she's outside. Some might be able to guess she's up on the ramparts, exposed to the harsher winds lashing in from across the sea.

She isn't looking at the sea, though. Her gaze is on those two moons. If she lets her focus drift it's almost like that leering smile stretches across them, before she comes back to herself.

Despite all that, she sounds warm and upbeat. )

I've been thinking a lot about time. How it passes, specifically, in our worlds back home. I've tried to do some reading in the library and looking for older communications on the network, but there's so much and I don't really know where to start or what names to look for.

When I got here, I left a situation where myself and some others were on a countdown, and... I know it's naive to hope they'd arrive here too, when even one person getting here seems like it would require so many variables coming together. Getting multiple people from the same world would be remote, let alone ones that know each other.

( Unless there's some factor about that first person that would be shared by people they know that might increase the likelihood? She sips the glorified vinegar masquerading as wine - sad new rifter budget, etc - and pushes logical enquiry out of her mind, for now. )

The point is that with how unlikely them coming here is, I'm stuck on how time works. I need to at least try to figure out if it's been weeks for them, or if maybe a month here is just a half hour, back home.

( Or something. Anything, really. )

If anyone knows, I'd really appreciate it.

( Abella tries to inject a little upbeat energy in at the end, like it can mask all the worry and everything else. )

Unless anyone else has turned up talking about a real jerk of a moon. If that sounds familiar, send them my way.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Maybe. Dunno what your tolerance for the existential is.

So to start with the fact part. I've had people I know come and go, here. None of our timelines matched exactly. A couple from my future, but longer in the future than the time I'd experienced passing here. One from a little way back in what was past for me. [She exhales.] I've been here twice, and remember both times, but we have rifters — who appear a second time with no memory of being here before. For me, it felt like about a year passed between the first time I came, and the second, in my home world; it had been longer than that in Thedas. And we have rifters who don't vanish, but receive new memories of home. The amount of memory, as far as I've been told, doesn't correspond in any particular way to how long they've been in Thedas.

So I think it's safe to say there's no reliable link between the time you experience here and what's happening where you're from. I'm sorry, that's got to be a bit frustrating. First time I was here, I was also under the gun for a time-sensitive problem at home and I know that can eat at you.

( There’s a long pause. Predictable enough, she might thing, but she’s wiping away the tears that had spilled down her cheeks with the heel of her hand.

She feels a wave of nausea settle cold and heavy in her gut. )

Fuck.

( It’s possible that she covered that she’s crying well enough, although it’s obvious she’s upset. )

What was your time-sensitive problem?

[Whether not Cosima has clocked that Abella is crying, there's still clearly sympathy in her tone.]

Um, first time I was here, I'd been working on a cure for a terminal genetic illness. Here in Thedas, spirit healing was keeping my condition stable, but I wasn't the only member of my family with it and spirit healing isn't, uh, a thing where I'm from.

[She doesn't know enough about Abella's world to know if there's any kind of magic there, but it's not important to press for now.]

Came back cured, the second time. I remember finding the cure, at home, too. I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a major relief.

[Even with what she knows, and what she suspects ... she still believes there's a world where her sisters exist and where they have a cure now. It matters.]

That’s right, you mentioned it before.

( She should have remembered. She isn’t even sure what spirit healing is, yet, or at least can’t remember right now. That’s a tangent she’ll step over for now, as much for the sake of her own strained mental alacrity as for Cosima’s patience. )

Do you have any memory of the times between you being here? I mean, not of home, but of… existing separate from that? Someone else said we’re like a separate form of ourselves that’s been dreamed into being, so… do you remember?

No. [Not unkind, but definitive.] In my subjective experience... I was home, came through a rift the first time, lived years in Thedas. Went to bed here one night. Then nothing at all until I'm coming through my second rift. It didn't feel like I'd been asleep, even. I don't know if your world has general anesthesia, but like that. As if I'd just been transported directly from a few years earlier to the year I came back through again, plus some new bonus memories from my home world.

I've not experienced it. Ether seems a miraculous discovery, though. The losses in the Second Great War would be even higher without it, that much seems certain.

( They aren't here to talk about science. It would be a welcome distraction, honestly. )

So... if you came back, it doesn't seem like rifters just stop existing when we disappear. And yet, if we disappear-- it sounds like electricity power on and off. It's still there, just not in use, so the bulbs don't light up.

I've done some studies with the Fade, though I'm still far from an expert. I want to be clear that I'm moving into theory, here, a bit. But I know I'm not the only one who thinks the most likely thing is that the Fade touches people's minds. Not only in Thedas, but in other worlds. Independent of chronology, clearly. And your original self is still where you were.

People in Thedas have reported encountering people who have died, in the Fade. Some cultures here think the Fade is a place souls move through on their way to some other afterlife. Other think they stay there. Evidence suggests to me that, at least as a rifter, my memories of my time in Thedas before lingered in the Fade somehow. So this second time, it drew not only my memories from home, but also from my first time in Thedas. That said, I suspect my body ... I don't think it's continuous. Haven't found a good way to test it, but I vanished last time. And I came back well, even though in Thedas I hadn't been cured of the disease I cured at home.

crystal; fighting evil by ____light

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