IC contact for lastvoyages

[cactusy]

[If I don't have an active post up, feel free to use this post to have your character call, videochat, text, or knock on Shaw's door.]

Comments

[cactusy]

If someone actually tells you to buzz off, that's one thing, but what's the point in being all defeatist about it and coming into a conversation assuming that's what's about to happen?

[abrightboy]

I thought of it more as deduction than defeatism. I mean, I didn't exactly get the welcome package with my walkie talkie and cool nickname.

[cactusy]

You don't form relationships by looking at ones that already exist and trying to copy them like a pattern, you do your own thing. Forge some new territory, Bright.

[abrightboy]

…That’s what the group does. How do I be in the group in a different way than how everyone else is in the group?

[cactusy]

Hold on, are you picturing us as the popular kids sitting at the lunch table or something? We are not the Plastics, Malcolm Bright.

[abrightboy]

You’re in a group with its own rituals and you chastised me for saying I wasn’t going to try to awkwardly insert myself in them and now you’re chastising me for suggesting that being part of a group means being included in its rituals. How do I fit in the group if I’m not part of it? I don’t, is the answer, and I’m okay with that. It’s not self-sabotaging; it’s understanding what not being invited to the lunch table or birthday party or company bowling team or whatever it is looks like and I know what that looks like. Nobody says you can be on the bowling team - of course you can - just don’t ask why everyone else gets a shirt and you don’t.

[cactusy]

Rituals? We're not a cult, either.

[abrightboy]

[It must be nice to really not understand this concept. He gives up, like he’s started doing with her. Peace over being heard or perceived. The facade of getting along, like plywood buildings in a Western.]

Okay. Good point. Fair point.

[cactusy]

Seriously, Bright, you're overthinking it. You're overthinking it and oversimplifying it, at the same time. We're-- I dunno. They're my best friends, but Caffrey's best friend is you and Eiffel's best friends are Hakkai and Jedao. I hang out at Eiffel's a lot more than I hang out at Caffrey's, and Caffrey isn't keeping score or figuring that I've kicked him out of some mythical group.

This stuff's more porous than you think, is all I'm saying.

[abrightboy]

[If they did kick him out, they’d probably call him on his walkie-talkie using his cool nickname to let him know he wasn’t invited to movie night anymore.]

That’s probably what it is. Yeah.

[cactusy]

Yeah. So are we gonna talk about the breach or what.

[abrightboy]

Sure. What about it?

[cactusy]

I dunno.

[Super helpful, Shaw.]

Did you get the girl?

[abrightboy]

She asked me to teach her how to play that card game. So I guess we had a date? But the Breach ended, so… no. But if it had gone on… maybe eventually?

[cactusy]

Is that weird for you, or-- you don't find breaches that tough to deal with, right?

[abrightboy]

I mean… it’s always disappointing to return to constant nauseating anxiety and intrusive thoughts and screaming night terrors, but… I don’t have a lot of trouble seeing them as… not real. Probably because living without all of the above doesn’t feel real, in retrospect.

I don’t feel like I was personally disloyal to Will while he was in a coma, either. If that’s where anything was going.

[cactusy]

Wha-- you thought I was gonna accuse you of cheating on Will? Hell no.

[abrightboy]

Oh, good. I mean. Probably not least because I don’t think I had the game to get that far no matter how long the Breach lasted.

[cactusy]

My brain might be screwed up, but it's not that screwed up. None of us are on the hook for any of that crap, as far as I'm concerned.

[abrightboy]

They’re different people from us. The people we inhabit there.

[cactusy]

You know, I had no idea how popular that theory was until Belova's post.

[abrightboy]

…There are other ‘theories’?

[cactusy]

Simulations. None of it's real, it's all in our heads.

[abrightboy]

…Like the Matrix?

[cactusy]

Like the simulations I told you about.