[She'll head toward a bookshelf and Junpei's wandering, but he stops upon seeing what looks like a wrench out on the floor.] Hey, Zero, stop.
[He'll walk forward, moving to scoop up this thing and take a look at it. But without warning the barrier begins to close in and he barely has time to say "Shit!" before Zero finds herself witnessing something up to to 10:59:30, when a bomb detonates.]
[ while Zero lives through that weird as hell memory, Junpei gets the delightful vision of:
Every night, I sleep with a knife under my pillow.
It’s a safety precaution I have to take - after all, neither of us are exactly law abiding people. He’s a particularly slippery thief, and I’m- well, I’ve still got a bounty on my head. All it takes is one person getting ballsy, and both of us could wind up dead.
Not that there is a both anymore. There’s a scourge going around - the symptoms start off mild, but they linger, and fester, until you’re eaten from the inside out. It’s contagious too - what kind of scourge would it be if it wasn’t? And naturally I caught it. I wasn’t sure at first, but between the chills, the coughing, the difficulty getting up in the morning… what else could it be?
He left as soon as he realized. I don’t blame him. It’s smarter than sticking around and catching it himself. So as a thanks for the quiet months we spent together, I’ll stick around here, and wait to die. If it gets really bad, I can always put myself out of my own misery. Another reason to keep my knife close.
That’s what I reflect on every night as I go to sleep, what I think about as I while away the hours.
Except, one night, I wake up, senses screaming at me. It’s reflex that guides my hand beneath my pillow, instinct that has my arm lashing out and slashing before my brain can catch up. And then suddenly, I can smell iron in the air. I blink, and I see him. He came back, and I gutted him.
I shift, about to go to him, and I feel it around my ankles. Rope. Something I definitely didn’t go to sleep with.
… Oh, I think I see now. My bounty. And when I search his pockets - yep, one poster declaring a reward for the capture of the “brigand” who broke into my brothel. It seems that he decided to cash in and earn some easy money.
How strange, I think, staring at the confusion on his dead face. In spite of the months we spent together, the closeness we shared, I’m not surprised by this twist. It puzzles me, until I look at the knife in my hand. The knife I’d always kept close, even before I got sick.
I guess I never trusted him, not really. I always expected he would sell me out in the end. That’s the kind of world this is, after all.
I heave myself to my feet, stepping over his corpse. It'll be a few days before anyone realizes there's a body in here. By then, I'll be long gone.
... What an idiot, I think. I'm not sure which of us I'm referring to.
[Wow. Okay. Give him a moment to process all of that because it...strangely explains a lot about Zero, he thinks. It explains her thought process, it explains why she's usually one to work on her own, and it explains that even in other universes there are people who fuck over others. As he blinks away her memory, he turns to her and pauses, trying to think of what to say.]
...I can't say I blame you, I guess. [He's also subtly checking out his feet to make sure he's not actually bound.]
That's because we moved, but another version of us got the full blast. That's just how it has to be. [He looks normal, thanks.] We had to SHIFT again almost immediately after that, but it still worked fine.
Good thing people are impatient. [He'll just go ahead and say it. But...he rubs the back of his neck.]
It's not always jumping straight to another certain death, but yeah. Another version of ourselves switches out to the history we were in. What you saw led to us jumping to another history where we were about to be gunned down for losing the dice roll. And that led to us protecting Akane and dying to save her while Carlos and I jumped to meet her in a different timeline.
... So there's a version of you out there that's accessing your morphing field for the first time and getting slammed with the memory of dying dozens of times.
Still not quite right. That version is still me. [It definitely is. Weird.] SHIFTing only happens if you're in fatal danger, which usually means your other self is dying. I guess I'm kind of the alpha version of myself? Akane would be able to explain it better.
Maybe he does, but...I don't know. It's a whole moral dilemma about if we're killing other people or just parts of ourselves that I try not to put too much thought into. If you think too much, you realize you're subjecting someone to death and they won't even know why. In a way...yeah, that's shitty, but we need to be the ones to stay alive.
[ 'and you don't want to be that, so you run around looking for a way to justify it,' is what she wants to say, but doesn't. the entire thing is confusing enough for a bystander - she wouldn't be surprised if he was just doing shit and scrambling for a reason after the fact. ]
You're going to have to think about that some day, you know.
I've been thinking about it since the last jump I never completed, Zero. We exist, therefore we know we exist. There was no guarantee that the other versions of ourselves would know about every single thing in every other history that we needed to know to get out of the game. That's the thing.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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[ harry whomst
but Zero will turn to head over to another enormous bookshelf... unless...? ]
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[She'll head toward a bookshelf and Junpei's wandering, but he stops upon seeing what looks like a wrench out on the floor.] Hey, Zero, stop.
[He'll walk forward, moving to scoop up this thing and take a look at it. But without warning the barrier begins to close in and he barely has time to say "Shit!" before Zero finds herself witnessing something up to to 10:59:30, when a bomb detonates.]
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]
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...I can't say I blame you, I guess. [He's also subtly checking out his feet to make sure he's not actually bound.]
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[ surprise, Junpei, this is Zero's first memory share! ]
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[...wait.] We never blew up. We figured out how to SHIFT right before that.
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[ huh, she'd nearly forgotten about him. ]
And yeah, obviously. Doesn't change the fact that it cut off right as everything went white.
[ she's going to. keep an eye on him now? scan him surreptitiously for signs of, idk, being exploded? it was weird, okay. ]
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That's because we moved, but another version of us got the full blast. That's just how it has to be. [He looks normal, thanks.] We had to SHIFT again almost immediately after that, but it still worked fine.
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[ but instead he got impatient and greedy and whoops! then his guts were on the floor. ]
So you jump from one certain death to another certain death - except it's another version of you that pays the price?
[ she's just trying to get the events in order ]
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It's not always jumping straight to another certain death, but yeah. Another version of ourselves switches out to the history we were in. What you saw led to us jumping to another history where we were about to be gunned down for losing the dice roll. And that led to us protecting Akane and dying to save her while Carlos and I jumped to meet her in a different timeline.
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[ defend your argument, jumpy. ]
But you can't jump without the risk of death either. [ hm ] So she died alone after you and Carlos kicked the buckets?
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I'd imagine so. I take it you don't inherit memories from the bodies you've jumped in to.
[ that would like. defeat the point ]
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Espers have access to all of their other selves' memories in the Morphogenic Field. Lucky us.
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[ that's rough, buddy. ]
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[ ... does he have a complex...? ]
... Wouldn't he see himself as the true version of... uh...
[ would him or you be most appropriate? ]
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[ 'and you don't want to be that, so you run around looking for a way to justify it,' is what she wants to say, but doesn't. the entire thing is confusing enough for a bystander - she wouldn't be surprised if he was just doing shit and scrambling for a reason after the fact. ]
You're going to have to think about that some day, you know.
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