Roskullsprite—Rose— appointed guardian and non-player tutorial for the Uracil session, shut her charge’s husktop and took to floating over the Land of Colors and Creativity. Ordinarily, she made use of the device to pass the time while Calliope was asleep. The multiverse that tumblr afforded her was something of a godsend, with universe of infinite possibility and discussion before her at any moment. Lord only knew she needed the option for discovery in her new role.
Lord, indeed, she thought with a grimace.
The mangling of perfectly good colloquialisms was perhaps the one thing she hated most about The Game. One could hardly take a deity’s name in vain without unintentionally adulating a petulant brat. And being fully aware of his destiny—and how he was to attain it—only made it worse.
He could have at least had a different title—why Paradox Space chose to inflate his ego even further may forever baffle me.
The thoughts turned her attention skyward. She scanned the bright blue for a multicolored flash of a sign—something of a futile gesture. Jack would arrive precisely when he always does, and without warning, like he always does. When it came time for LOCAC to give way to mayhem, there was nothing she would be able to do about it.
Which isn’t to say she never tried to stop him. She did, even the times when she knew it was the most hopeless (which is to say, all of the times. All of them). Angling toward one of the few rocky outcroppings on the planet, she rested in the shade and considered her most recent history. With her near omniscience, it hardly took a second for thousands of images to flood before her eyes. It was a surreal experience as she very literally watched her thoughts pass by.
She closed her eyes—not to stop the images, which merely continued to flash in her mind’s eye, but to calm herself down. It was easy to slip up, to lose control of the knowledge. As much as she regarded trite metaphors with disdain, the image of a breaking dam, with its rushing, flooding waters, was apt. And she didn’t need to be all seeing to know that in the tangled mess that was the Uracil’s timeline, at least one of herselves had lost that control—had lost herself. She wasn’t a cue ball genetically designed to handle omniscience; she was just two teenage girls brought back from the dead.
One teenage girl, she corrected. It’s just me in here.
Had she felt particularly dramatic, she might have thrown in a questioning “right?” to the end of her thoughts. But she wasn’t feeling dramatic, and she wouldn’t admit to herself that she had such doubts about her existence. Which is not to say that those doubts weren’t there, of course.
For all of her omniscience, for all she had to deal with the threat of being consumed by the knowledge, she understood very little about herself. She was at once Rose Lalonde and Vriska Serket, and yet, hardly any Vriska at all. There was the forced quirk, yes, and she had access to all of the cerulean troll’s history for good or ill—her emotional burst toward a Nepeta showed full well how powerful a simple memory was—but as far as she could tell, she was full Rose in mind.
Except for our distaste for clowns, she thought, a smile creeping on her face.We can both shoulder that one.
She wasn’t sure where Vriska was. This fact, more than anything else, puzzled her. While her own memories extended from her unusual birth to her revival as a sprite, her more Alternian memories ended with a dead spider troll on a meteor. None of her other half’s time in the dreambubbles was accessible. It was a curious puzzle she’d been working on in her time in the session. She’d taken brief moments of time out of her day to mull over this hole in her mind, and slowly at that. Again, she was no cue ball, and when one has omniscience thrust upon them, one savors any dark pocket they can.
Like a sweet, sweet, precious, dear, sweet candy. It must be savored, and not devoured all at once.
Her eyes still closed, she settled onto the soft grass of LOCAC, her back to the ground. A warm breeze blew over her. Though Calliope found the climate frigid—and she could be forgiven for it, given the nature of her old home—Rose found the land to be pleasant. Neither Alternia nor her home on Earth provided her an experience like this. It reminded her of her own land, if a fair bit more dry.
Opened eyes scanned the sky once more. She liked to keep up the futile habits. She needed them to stay grounded; If she kept acting on what she knew she wouldn’t be any more than a game construct, a tool for dispensing information to a depressed cherub. She wouldn’t allow that, even if it meant dying again and again; even if it meant waking up over and over with the memories of another dead Rose fresh as a dream; even if it meant fighting a hopeless fight against an overpowered dersite.
Some things will never change, I suppose.
A crash resounded in the distance, with cries filling the air. A frog village had just been decimated.
Jack Noir was on LOCAC.
Rose floated up from her resting spot. She could feel the raw power in the air—the power of an angry god, of an angrier demon, coursing through the unstable frame of a carapacian. In time, the unrefined power would overtake Noir. He lacked control, lacked the discipline needed to wield limitless potential. And like a dam bursting forth, he would flood the world in one final blast of chaotic energy. Creativity would give way to malice; colors would fade into the turgid grey of mayhem. LOCAC would be no more, until Caliborn rested and the cycle began anew.
Flying toward the sound of destruction, toward the village Jack arrived at every time, Rose found that the smile on her face had never really left. Maybe it was the anticipation of another new beginning, or the imminent rest she would take. Perhaps it was the dark pocket that lie before her—how would she attempt to stop him this time? How would he respond?—or perhaps she had simply gone mad at last. She was smiling, though, and she didn’t know why.
