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I recommend the not thinking part. It's quieter like that.
[ don't you love just falling into a hole with a friend? isn't this a fun and funky fresh time!
who knows what lbx and date were doing but now, they're in a hole, and a screen projects up in front of them, and before lu bixing even gets to really react, it turns out that it's a moment from his life on display. ]
who knows what lbx and date were doing but now, they're in a hole, and a screen projects up in front of them, and before lu bixing even gets to really react, it turns out that it's a moment from his life on display. ]
[ after lin jingheng and monoeye hawk die, you spend one hundred days locked in your house.
you're working. the eighth is a mess in an aftermath of the battle with the seventh galaxy, and zhanlu has been destroyed. you have to fix him. you spend one hundred days in your house, alone, sending out missives. speaking to prime minister edward, too sickly to do much, taking over his duties where you can. you try and fix zhanlu.
five hundred days into your restart of life, prime minister edward passes away, of sickness, of old age, and you officially take his spot. you, as the new prime minister, host the state affair of his funeral. there was a eulogy. you think you remember people looking at you. staring. watching. you remember the caskets of nothing and the tombstones and now... you're home.
home. for five hundred days, this is where you've spent all your time. five hundred days ago, monoeye hawk and lin jingheng perished, in the battle for the seventh galaxy. five hundred days ago, your entire world ended.
there were no funerals, then.
when you first arrive at the home of engineer 001 and commander lin, as the sign cheerfully reminds you, hanging over the door, you make it all the way inside. you go to the kitchen. the ai of zhanlu, in butler mode, greets you, you think, but it sounds like it comes from underwater. you go to the refrigerator. you think - a drink. i need a drink. and you open the fridge. there's hardly anything in it - supplies in the eighth galaxy are heavily rationed, right now, and alcohol is no exception - but at the back, an unopened bottle of beer, and as your hand curls around the neck, you remember -
you see the mental image, of lin jingheng in his pajamas, bedhead, staring at the beer bottle like it personally wounded him for being so disgusting, and putting it back, and sulking to the kitchen table to a cup of cold tea, instead, and for some reason, the grief and the memory snaps the last remaining piece of your stability in two.
you scream. you just scream, at the top of your lungs, as the image vanishes, the bellow of a miserable animal, and the whole world goes dark as you stagger to the area of the house where the medical capsule is, you bang your fist on the edge of it in your frustration and start asking it, i need a hallucinogen, i need an opiate, i need drugs, give them to me, i need it, i don't want to be awake, i need it, i need it - and the capsule doesn't respond. you're shaking too hard to do anything or type anything and your fingers claw in desperation at the metal. you scream, again, despairing, drowning, miserable, slam your fist against the capsule again.
zhanlu's voice comes over your head. soft, quiet, concerned - you scream at him, too, the AI unable to do anything but warn you. "Headmaster Lu, I can't accept those requests right now, you're too unstable. Headmaster Lu, this is your first warning."
he's an AI. he has to listen to you. you ignore him, shaking, almost hyperventilating, and after the second warning, you snarl - ] Zhanlu, give me a gun.
[ because you've lost everything. in one fell swoop, in one moment, you've lost everything and you can only run from it for so long. you've worked so hard. you've done so much, to not look it in the eye, but the grief is a monster that lives under your bed and in your brain and today it rips you in two. it's all-consuming, like it was when you were a child, and zhanlu can't ignore you, and as the gun is placed into your hands, you start to bring it up, to your head, start to --
then
zhanlu projects footage on the wall in front of your head.A 14-year-old Lin Jingheng was attending the opening ceremony of the Black Orchid Academy. The ceremonial hall was decorated with heroic histories of the Union since its founding, motivational and inspiring. The young boy sat in the corner with his attention being pulled away occasionally. But even then, he still wanted to act cool, and pretended to look around in boredom whenever he remembered he was still in the middle of a ceremony. He then accidentally noticed the small camera beside him that was recording his every move; his face reddened in embarrassment and anger as he slapped his hand down and turned off the recording.
you forget everything.
you sink down to the floor, and you watch the clip again. you watch it again. you watch it again. you watch that clip hundreds of times and you don't sleep, and the next morning, you drag yourself to your desk, grab a pocket knife, and carve a single hatch mark on your desk. you push yourself to standing. you turn off zhanlu's automation function, so he can make conscious decisions, because you - you can't be trusted with yourself, all the time. you know that, now you've fallen and burnt to ashes, and now you have to rebuild yourself. one scratch mark says i fell, and i nearly quit, but i dragged myself to standing.
--
three years pass in the new independent era in the eighth galaxy. you are their leader, the face of their revolution and their prime minister, and no one outside of your home knows the turmoil that you go through. they can't see you that way. in those three years, a group of pirates and black market illegal merchants reemerged, emboldened by the chance to disrupt the economy you've worked so hard to build. it launches the galaxy into a war that lasts three long years, and you command your military forces and your political forces like an expert. you are an expert, you're the prime minister lu bixing. you can do anything.
five more scratch marks are carved into your desk.
you promised prime minister edward before he died this - if you fell seven times, you'd get up eight. these are your falls. these are your dips into despair that are so deep that you want to die. you want to die. locked into the misery of your ruthless job, alone, you want to die. you want to die, you want to die, you want to die.
you can't die. the eighth needs you.
after the first one hundred days on your own, your house is invaded by other engineers who come to help you work on zhanlu so he's no longer just in emergency mode. it takes you all a total of four hundred days to get him online, but the other engineers are so crowded and messy that you force them out, and you need to move things to the attic. the attic is untouched and filled with lin jingheng's things. you could almost see him next to you. you could almost have him there.
you light up a cigarette. you inhale, just for the sake of the familiarity. to feel like he's there, that you could see him, that he's not gone and you were just delusional the whole time, stupid -
- the smoke burns your lungs, and you start to cough, violently, violently, and you take the cigarette and you smash the burning end into your arm until the pain is so bright and smart that it forces you to come back to your senses. he's dead. lin jingheng is dead. nothing will bring him back and he is dead.
two hatch marks.
another day, you find yourself trembling as you inject a biochip in your arm. it's an opium biochip - the kind being used to create 'perfect humans', though the data is incomplete. it won't be, for you. it becomes your pet project. you work. you experiment on yourself. you inject yourself, over and over again. you work. you work. you don't sleep. you rule the eighth galaxy, you unite its forces through carrot and through stick, monitoring public executions and supply rations and economic growth and population happiness all at once, and you pull an entire galaxy to its feet while you tremble on your knees in the dark.
three hatch marks. four. five.
(you download all of the video data of lin jingheng in zhanlu's system. you watch every single part of it. you work. you work, you work, you work, you throw yourself into your duties and at night you take drugs and force yourself to sleep only when you need to, or when zhanlu forces you to, like a tiny hand tugging at your pinky finger when you're about to let loose on the world.)
--
in the seventh year of the new era, one of your students, brilliant, brilliant mint, pilots the first program to travel through the heart of the rose, the wormhole at the edge of your galaxy, your natural barrier. you are told not to go, but you go, anyway. what's the worst that could happen? you'll die? you don't care. you go on your own.
the people in the eighth praise your courage when you return with fresh research for mint's project. you didn't die. instead, you gathered data, and from the inside of the wormhole, the data gathered gets you the visuals on what happened when the seventh and the eighth galaxy fleets, respectively, were destroyed. your father's ship. lin's. gone. destroyed, in the blink of an eye.
you come home from your trip. you order captain turan to station patrols around the wormhole, now that it's active. you lock yourself in your lab. you take a strand of lin's hair you extracted from the couch and you open a breeding tank in a fit of madness nad you think, i could just reconstruct him, because you could, you're a genius, it would be easy, it would be so easy, and zhanlu blows up the breeding tank.
you stay in the dark lab for three days afterwards, but when you emerge, the knife comes out, and you scratch the sixth mark into the wood of your desk.
--
the final hatch mark is the product of your research, nine years into the new era of the Eighth Galaxy.
you stand there on the precipice. you stand there, with your completed opiate biochip research. with this completed project, with all the tests you ran on yourself, you've given yourself those abilities. you are fast. you are strong, you are, in essence, the perfect human, and you've found a way you could transplant it into anyone. tested on mice, tested on yourself. you have learned that the rainbow virus can be used to break humanity down to ashes, and rebuild them as something greater. you know, now, why you lived through that first outbreak.
you could have an army of superhumans, you could take over the IUS. you could take over the entire universe. it has taken you nine years to prove this scientific theory, and you found out that it's true.
(you could wreak destruction, on the people who took your father and lin jingheng from you.)
you stare at the papers in your hands. they tremble.
this time, you don't call captain turan. this time, you don't call the engineering department. this time you don't deliver the research. you go to your office. you work, all day long. you come home, and you stare at the papers.
you walk to your lab, where you've secretly kept those strains of the rainbow virus, papers in hand.
and you set the sample and every single paper ablaze, and destroy it for good.
when you return to your desk, you mark the final hatch mark.
if you fall seven times, you have to rise eight.
with a storm in your heart, you turn away from destruction.
with a storm in your heart, you rise. ]
[ opens my mouth and puts sisi writing in it. ]
[ that's... a lot to take in. especially all of a sudden, all in one go. you don't wake up in the morning and expect to be showing people the deepest and darkest corners of your heart without a warning. you certainly don't expect to be dropped into a literal hole with no fanfare and have it played like a movie for someone's entertainment.
and that irks him, as he watches what he can only describe as raw vulnerability play out in front of him. there's nothing about this that isn't personal -- lin jingheng being dead isn't such a surprise, they're in hell after all. they're all dead. but seeing the aftermath of a person's grief is different, especially over so many years.
they're all dead, are there people grieving them like this?
it prickles under his skin uncomfortably, thinking of that. especially when he's watching this grief play out in front of him with the subject of that raw pain and trauma, and the heavy step by step of living is stood right next to him.
honestly, he tries to open his mouth to say something, but the screen in front of them doesn't give him a chance. it flickers, and then it immediately fades back in on something else (8:52 - 11:18). and i am so sorry you are getting a face full of what the fuck is aitsf out of context right after that raw as hell memory from lbx ]
[ that's... a lot to take in. especially all of a sudden, all in one go. you don't wake up in the morning and expect to be showing people the deepest and darkest corners of your heart without a warning. you certainly don't expect to be dropped into a literal hole with no fanfare and have it played like a movie for someone's entertainment.
and that irks him, as he watches what he can only describe as raw vulnerability play out in front of him. there's nothing about this that isn't personal -- lin jingheng being dead isn't such a surprise, they're in hell after all. they're all dead. but seeing the aftermath of a person's grief is different, especially over so many years.
they're all dead, are there people grieving them like this?
it prickles under his skin uncomfortably, thinking of that. especially when he's watching this grief play out in front of him with the subject of that raw pain and trauma, and the heavy step by step of living is stood right next to him.
honestly, he tries to open his mouth to say something, but the screen in front of them doesn't give him a chance. it flickers, and then it immediately fades back in on something else (8:52 - 11:18). and i am so sorry you are getting a face full of what the fuck is aitsf out of context right after that raw as hell memory from lbx ]
Edited 2023-02-28 18:30 (UTC)
[ NOT MY IRIS
this is a lot. there's the strangeness, then the corpse - then the voices of the mother and the little girl, her scream of pain and agony and her apologies that twist up in his chest in the way someone in trouble always hurts him. it's not something he's intimately familiar with, this particular kind of suffering, but he's too empathetic not to feel it, and, frankly -
frankly, he'd way rather focus on that than his own memories, so he's a little relieved, if very, very confused, and all date gets is a - ]
What in the world...?
this is a lot. there's the strangeness, then the corpse - then the voices of the mother and the little girl, her scream of pain and agony and her apologies that twist up in his chest in the way someone in trouble always hurts him. it's not something he's intimately familiar with, this particular kind of suffering, but he's too empathetic not to feel it, and, frankly -
frankly, he'd way rather focus on that than his own memories, so he's a little relieved, if very, very confused, and all date gets is a - ]
What in the world...?
[ :thonk:
and, well. ouch. he doesn’t like being reminded of failures — who does? but this one is fresh and niggles under the skin a little. not being able to pull mizuki out of her trauma, not doing the right things in her Somnium to unlock the seals that her psyche had placed on her heart.
stepping out and knowing he hadn’t managed to cure her aphonia, and the niggling discomfort and fear of what he’d seen making him worry about iris just has much…
… mm. ]
I could ask you the same thing.
and, well. ouch. he doesn’t like being reminded of failures — who does? but this one is fresh and niggles under the skin a little. not being able to pull mizuki out of her trauma, not doing the right things in her Somnium to unlock the seals that her psyche had placed on her heart.
stepping out and knowing he hadn’t managed to cure her aphonia, and the niggling discomfort and fear of what he’d seen making him worry about iris just has much…
… mm. ]
I could ask you the same thing.
[ he senses a deflection in the abyss. ]
No, it’s not my world exactly. And no, my world doesn’t look like that.
No, it’s not my world exactly. And no, my world doesn’t look like that.
I'd be surprised if you could.
[ just stares at him. no. ]
[ just stares at him. no. ]
We're both dodging pretty hard here, aren't we?
None of it was real.
[ ... he tilts his head. ]
Well. None of it there was real. That's a Somnium.
[ ... he tilts his head. ]
Well. None of it there was real. That's a Somnium.
Like a dream, sort of.
It's a dream influenced by memories that you can access through a specific machine, and working through the memory locks in the Somnium can help them remember something, or help soothe a trauma.
It's a dream influenced by memories that you can access through a specific machine, and working through the memory locks in the Somnium can help them remember something, or help soothe a trauma.
I see... so, a bit like therapy?
[ whoa. that's fascinating - his nerdy little brain wants to understand that immediately and ask about fifteen thousand questions about the actual machine, but he will not do that to poor date. ]
It sounds like the sort of thing we would use. Or, at least, the kind of thing that might be a part of Eden. Do you work with it often?
[ whoa. that's fascinating - his nerdy little brain wants to understand that immediately and ask about fifteen thousand questions about the actual machine, but he will not do that to poor date. ]
It sounds like the sort of thing we would use. Or, at least, the kind of thing that might be a part of Eden. Do you work with it often?
If you're thinking of "therapy en route to solving crime", then yes. The girl who that Somnium belonged to found a body -- and traumatised herself mute in the process.
[ :( ]
...
[ he briefly looks amused. ]
It's in my profile. It's my job.
[ :( ]
...
[ he briefly looks amused. ]
It's in my profile. It's my job.
[ a shrug. ]
That's a side effect of the investigating. Sometimes we focus on it though. [ he'd be a terrible therapist though. ]
No. That was a surprise.
That's a side effect of the investigating. Sometimes we focus on it though. [ he'd be a terrible therapist though. ]
No. That was a surprise.
I see...
[ well, that kind of makes sense. this he can contextualize - if it's someone's brain, then yeah, maybe they wouldn't see the same body, but someone else they just knew...? who knows. he won't pursue the line of questioning though, instead just pursing his lips briefly, thoughtful. ]
...Did you end up helping her?
[ well, that kind of makes sense. this he can contextualize - if it's someone's brain, then yeah, maybe they wouldn't see the same body, but someone else they just knew...? who knows. he won't pursue the line of questioning though, instead just pursing his lips briefly, thoughtful. ]
...Did you end up helping her?
... The girl?
[ ... ]
She regained her speech a little while afterwards.
[ ... ]
She regained her speech a little while afterwards.
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