((no longer pfp, sorry about the slow response but had to work late today and there was no way I was going to type this thing up on my phone))
I think back, back to before the Games, back before I met anyone, back to the memories I was gifted at my birth, memories from before I was born, and then from among them to the oldest memories I have. Memories of how my world was made.
<I used to be what I've been told you Entities call an Outsider. I was one of a group of ten, and though we were limited to that single universe, and individually far weaker than an Entity, together we were able to accomplish anything we wanted. We were there before our universe properly existed, and were the ones that built it up. Together, we made our stars, our planets, our moons, the rocks and plants and animals and... well, literally everything that exists... or existed anyway.>
as I tell him this, I'm also sending the memories themselves, which seem to have a darker and older feel than anything from Irine herself. my mind literally can't handle all of the memory at once, so I send it in limited fragments, focusing on one aspect of it, then another, then another. each individual segment composing a tremendous amount of data. when speaking of the stars, my memory shows not just the image of them in the sky, but their true locations, compositions, ages, inertia, the gravity fields they emit and how they interact, down to the tiniest detail, and even that is the simplified version of the full memory, and the memory shows its active links to further information, though I'm not sending what those links contain simply because even though this exact kind of thing is my specialty, I still can't handle the full weight of the data involved all at once.
<We chose to delay implimenting a single specific aspect of physics until we had nearly finished the work of creation. We didn't activate the flow of time until the world was mostly complete. I literally cannot say how long it took to build the world, because time itself didn't apply. Depending on your persepctive, it took an eternity, or no time at all. I don't really know my *true* age either.>
during this I'm showing pieces of the creation of physics itself. the function of gravity, of chemistry, of mathematics, of biology, of time, of "magic", even fragments of how I, as an Outsider, worked upon the world. but still, only in pieces. the information is all there, but I can't access it all at once. there's just too much.
<During this delay, whilst deciding upon the finishing touches to make, I spent some... not-time, evaluating myself, and I realized that I was lacking. I carefully thought upon what I had built, and what they deserved, and I realized that I couldn't handle the responsibility. I knew that in order to be a good god or goddess for them, I would need to be able to handle either directly or indirectly performing injustices upon those I was responsible for, and yet that kind of leader, one that would knowingly do the wrong thing, was someone I absolutely could not stand. So when the time came for us to put the finishing touches on the world, and to create avatars for ourselves, the last step before we activated the flow of time, I created... Me... and stepped down from my position, giving up all my remaining power to another, making myself into nothing more than Irine.>
during this, I focus mostly on my (Outsider) actions, on the non-instant of the decision, and the handoff of power, and don't really bring up my memory of my own creation. that comes later.
<Each of us original ten had own own personal moon, a small planet really, and I had made mine into a cavernous world of trial and wonder. one designed to test its inhabitants and push them to excel, without overwhelming them. I was hoping to find someone there worthy to replace me, to help them grow into the strength of character needed to handle what I could not, and to be able to live and enjoy myself without the responsibility of being the god or goddess of my own creations.>
the memories sent alongside this segment are all about the creation of my personal moon, my, Irine's, home and where I had spent all my life before the games.
<When I made myself, I made a point of limiting my perception of the world around me, attempting to limit myself to my own eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and so on. I wanted to make my experience as authentic as I could, to let myself honestly just Be, without the responsibility of my true position. Yet, I needed to be able to look after myself, so I gave myself a special data dump at birth, Each time I was born, I would reach out to the world around me, using the bonds of creator and creation, and learn everything there was to know about where I was and how the world worked. to learn most of what I had been before, and to be able to remember what I had done and why. In a lot of ways it was my final gift to myself, and it's how I know all this at all.>
my memories of my own creation are very complex, because I was made first as a framework, and only at the very end was the framework, the special manipulation of the rules of the universe itself, filled in with the details that made me Irine. It is the single most complicated, most detailed, and most intense memory of creation I had yet, and it includes all kinds of complex tie-ins to the laws of my universe itself, my flame manipulation, my shapechanging, my conditional telepathy, each of these are there, but in an abstract form, a complex framework that includes all kinds of conditionals and linkages allowing for literally any element, any creature, all of it robust and able to be changed every time the frame was reset, but still carrying over just a small piece of what had been there before, to shape it into what it would become. acompanying this, is a sense of pride, a sense of being overwhelmed with what I had wrought. Irine's creation, was my (outsider) very finest work. Something that I would never be able to outdo. something that even though I was focused on a single small creature, was so overwhelmingly detailed and complex that I still cannot fully put together even a single aspect of the system, let alone all of it at once. All I can send is partial segments, and general overviews. Though I do have a firm understanding of the practical results, the how is another thing entirely.
<The thing is, when I was truely born, when I sacrificed my power to protect the world from myself, and I got this information, I found out something more. somehow, without it ever entering my sight as an Outsider, an 11th presence had changed the world slightly. There were a few creatures in the world that I was not linked to, something none of us ten had made, and they actively attempted to hunt down and kill any Avatars we made or champions we chose, including myself and at least one of my people. When I went to my village, to observe and look for someone to teach, or maybe even simply play with, to spend some time living a simple mortal life, the village elder brought me asking for help, showing me a scroll containing the image of a vague dire peril attempting to unmake the world, something I couldn't wrap my mind around fully and which I knew none of us had made or would ever make, linked to the creatures none of us had made. and yet, I did nothing. I refused to try to fight these invaders, playing innocent and attempting to just go on with my own intentions and life, trusting that the remaining nine would handle any threat that would try to unmake the world. And I just went about my business attempting to better myself and locate someone worthy of replacing me.>
during this, the memories I send don't quite match up with what I'm talking about, focused mostly on my initial dump of information. showing how I was born already an adolescent child, and how I actually have barely aged if I've aged at all since then. How I spent my first hour of life unconsious, with a massive amount of information being organized in my mind, including the memories that I'm sending now. only after I've sent quite a bit of this do I move on to the actual information I'm talking about, of Larrbears and of that... thing. and of my refusal to act against them.
<River, I understand that D at least, and possibly several other of you entities are Bond-Formers. I haven't been told, fully, what that is, but I've been told enough to be reasonably sure that they aren't that different from me. The thing is, I don't just have one bond, I have a lot of them. I'm bonded to every plant, every animal, every piece of rock and stone, my predators, my prey, everything that I had a hand in the creation of. Put another way, I'm bonded to my entire home universe itself.>
As I send this, I send him my memories of my link to the bit of moss a couple feet up the right hand wall near the entrance to the cave of my birth that reacts to the trace toxins in the air emitted by my hot spring and converts them into chemical energy it uses to grow, with a byproduct of visible light that gives it a faint blue glow. the memory of my bond to the spring itself, the flow of water heated by my moon's core and the slow conversion of some of it to steam. my bond to the individual hunters of my village, to the slugs, to the pebbles, to the spiders, to the foxes, one by one by one, showing him what it felt like to be bonded to dozens of unique individuals, and how I felt them and they vaugely, without having the proper senses to fully realize or understand it, felt me.
<And as a result of my inaction, now every last one of those bonds-mates is dead.>
What I send now is no memory, it's a simple live feed of what I am feeling right now. the way that my flame manipulation, an extension of my own body, has been essentially cut off and replaced with a prosthetic, similar in result, but unnatural in feel and still somewhat awkward to use. the way my ability to change forms is twisted, malformed. something corrupting it and preventing it from happening like it's supposed to. the totally dead link to my name. the way that flame, which should be innately a part of me, and I of it, isn't quite... right, like it could actually hurt me. How all of the intricate detail work I had done in my creation, all the intricate manipulation of reality and the framework I had been built around, had been essentially rubbed away. but the centerpiece of it all is from my dead bonds. not a simple dozen, or hundred, or thousand of them, but trillions beyond trillions of dead links. I was bonded to almost everything in my entire universe, and my entire universe has been wiped out.
<I couldn't accept seeing you do the same thing I did. I couldn't accept that the right thing to do was to not act this time when I saw you trying to sacrifice yourself. I couldn't accept losing one of the five that I've decided to trust to something that I could remotely prevent. And so I did exactly what I wanted to avoid all this time, and betrayed you and Theri in order to protect the two of you, exactly like I was afraid I'd have to do if I'd never given up my power. I made myself into the exact monster I was afraid of the most...
and I ended up killing everyone, failing everyone, and ruining everything when I did it.>
acompanying this is what I saw and heard and thought when I threatened Theri to prevent River from killing himself. including the fear of his reaction, the condemation of my own decision, the understanding, even then, that what I was about to do was exactly what I hated and feared for so long, the understanding that the only way it would work, that I would have even a chance of not having to actually hurt Theri to stop him, would be to be ready to really do it when I said it, and to make it clear to him that I wasn't bluffing, that I couldn't bluff, about something like this.
and despite all of this my decison to do it anyway.
<Hi, I'm Irine, baby monster and self-destructive goddess. Maimed slave of the entities stuck looking for a home and the mass murderer who made it all happen. Who are you?>
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Topic: Special People: Mechanical Syndrome (Read 1146984 times)