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]

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.

[abrightboy]

Oh. Does that make Breaches easy or hard for you?

[cactusy]

It makes them harder to distinguish from reality.

[abrightboy]

Even though the environment is completely different? Or is that how you do sort them out in your head?

[cactusy]

Yeah, the environment being completely different helps, it's more the mundane stuff. It's not hard to remember I didn't spend my whole childhood in Texas. It takes a second to remember I wasn't adopted as a baby. That kinda thing.

[abrightboy]

Is that because of the computer thing that happened to you at home? That you have trouble holding on to yourself?

[cactusy]

[Her first instinct is to correct him; to tell him that she has trouble holding onto reality, not herself. She knows exactly who she is.

But then again, if she sometimes struggles to remember which basic life facts actually happened to her and which were artificially implanted into her brain - does she really? After 7,000 simulations, it's only logical that some of your old memories have been replaced by new ones, Lambert had told her. Now the two coexist side by side.]

Yeah.

[She says, after a pause.]

Because of that. And all this Barge stuff makes it worse.