lowk what WOULD have happened if she was pregnant? now i’m actually really curious
how would bb react? would he kill it? would he leave the backrooms to take her to a hospital to give birth??
i have so many questions about this😭
expansion on this ask.
the thing is: bb knows. he's old. he's been here longer than the cataloguing system, longer than M.E.G., maybe longer than the backrooms themselves.
he's watched wanderers come through in pairs, in groups, alone. he's seen them huddle together for warmth, comfort and sometimes something more desperate than either. he understands the mechanics the way he understands everything about humans: clinically. the way you'd understand a machine by watching it operate for centuries.
and he knows about you and bobby.
he has never asked. will never ask. but he knows. he can probably smell it on you, or taste it in the air, or read it in some chemical signature your body still carries. because bb's senses don't operate on a human spectrum and whatever he uses to perceive the world has almost certainly catalogued every trace of bobby that your body has ever held. every touch. every exchange. every instance of the original's hands on skin that bb now considers his territory.
and his feelings about that are... complicated is a generous word. complicated implies something that can be untangled. what bb feels about the fact that you shared yourself with the template he was built from is more like a knot that's been pulled so tight it's become a new material entirely.
he resents bobby. not the way humans resent. but older and more structural than that. bobby is the original. bobby is the thing bb was derived from, the blueprint, the source code, the thing bb had to wear to appeal to you and bobby had you first.
bobby had you in the real world with real sunlight and a real bed and real skin at the right temperature and bobby W̴̛͖̝̄́͒́̐́͒͛̔̀̐͘͝ͅA̶̧̡̧̨͇̞͈͓̠̮͍̩̙̫͂̂̋͂̈́̓̈͜͠S̴̲̠͎̘͇̖̘̝͍̻͗͊͋T̶͓͇͙͖͚̻̬̻̳̫͍͎͆̇͐̃̄̀̈̊̅͊̚͝ͅȆ̸̢̧̲̥̼͉̺̠̈͛̿͆̚D̷̨̢̰͖̫͙̼̪̦̝̍͆̀̈́͜ͅ ̶̭̫͔̪̮̄̓̊͗̌̿ ̷̙̜̞̲̮̻̮̬͙͓̹̙̤̟̀͒̋̈́̃̈̊͗̔̕̕ͅit. bobby had everything bb is trying to build out of carpet and fluorescent light and he let it rot through neglect.
every time he looks at you and sees the damage (the flinch, the walls, the way you brace for affection to be revoked) he is seeing bobby's handiwork. bobby built that. bobby carved those grooves into you through carelessness and then bb inherited a girl who doesn't know how to be touched without waiting for the catch.
so the idea of bobby's child. bobby's actual biological child. growing inside you. a piece of the original embedded in the one thing bb considers his.
the first reaction would be something you'd feel before you saw it. a shift in the air. the lights in your corner of level 0 flickering once. that subsonic hum changing frequency for just a moment, dropping into something colder, something that makes your teeth ache. and his face (bobby's face) would do shift that's very fast and very controlled. a flash behind the eyes that isn't blue and isn't black but something in between. that looks like a wound being opened and cauterised in the same instant.
because the thing inside him that resents bobby would SCREAM. would want to tear the evidence out by the root. not you (never you) but the concept. the proof that bobby was there first. that bobby's biology is threaded through the one person bb has claimed in however many centuries of existing in the dark. it would be possessive, ancient, ugly and it would last about three seconds.
and then he'd look at your face.
and it would stop.
because here's the thing about bb that makes him what he is. the thing that separates him from every other entity in the backrooms: he adapts. he learns. he chooses. and he chose you. all of you. the flinch and the walls and the damage and the body that carries traces of the boy whose face he wears.
and if that body now carries something else (alive, growing, something that is half you and therefore half his by the only logic he operates on) then it's part of you. and what is part of you is part of the backrooms now. and what is part of the backrooms is his to protect.
the resentment wouldn't disappear. it would get folded up. put away. stored in whatever bb has instead of a heart alongside all the other things he's chosen not to act on because acting on them would hurt you. it would sit there, small and dark and sharp.
and he would figure it out.
he wouldn't leave the backrooms. he can't, probably, or won't, or the distinction between those two things isn't meaningful when you're talking about a being that might literally be the backrooms wearing a person suit.
but he would make the nest inside the █████ warmer. he would make the corridors safer. he would start paying attention to your body in a different way.
not the way he already does, which is the territorial attention of a thing that considers your heartbeat part of its ambient soundscape. a new way. a careful, gentle way. cataloguing changes. noticing when you're tired before you notice. adjusting the temperature of the nest by fractions of a degree. finding food. good food, not backrooms sustenance, but food that he has no business being able to locate but that appears in your corner of level 0 anyway. because bb can apparently rearrange reality when he's motivated enough and nothing has ever motivated him like you do.
he would learn. the way he learns everything. from the outside in.
he'd study the biology with that tilted-head focus. he'd understand gestation the way he understands language. from a place that isn't human but can mimic human comprehension so perfectly it might as well be the real thing. and he would be there. for every stage. every change. every moment your body did something new and frightening.
and the child. bobby's child. the piece of the original.
bb would look at it. with those almost-right blue eyes. and he would decide that this is his now. not bobby's. bobby isn't here. bobby stopped showing up long before the backrooms were involved. bobby abdicated. and bb, who's never abdicated anything, who's spent his entire existence becoming what is needed, would look at this small human thing and decide to be what it needs.
he would be better. that's his whole name. that's his whole purpose.
the real bobby would have been a distracted father, a half-present parent. a man who loved his kid but loved his own comfort more. bb would not make that mistake. bb does not make mistakes of neglect. bb's entire pathology is too much attention, too much presence, too much love with nowhere to put it.
he can learn. he can adapt. he can hold a newborn in hands that are the wrong temperature and have torn entities apart and be gentle. he can hum his tuneless song as a lullaby. he can curl around you both in the blanket and keep watch with black eyes and steady hands. not sleep because he doesn't need to sleep and nothing will touch what is his. nothing. not the hounds. not the skin-stealers. and especially not the thing on level ██████ that made him turn around.
he would be the father bobby wouldn't have been.
and the child would grow up in the backrooms. in the warm █████. with a mother who flinches less and less and a father whose eyes are the wrong colour blue. whose skin is always cool and who loves with the kind of totality that is either the most beautiful or the most terrifying thing in the world.
I wrote it in the comments,but that kid is probably going to be touched by Otherness,a bit like River Song from Doctor Who. She was mostly human,except for the Tardis influence that read her as a Timelord and gave her abilities beyond human capacity.
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
It’s really refreshing and affirming to hear these words spoken by another human! Sometimes (often, if we’re being totally honest with ourselves), I feel insane for thinking that people should just be able to be friends with other people regardless of whether or not someone is married or they’re an opposite gender, without having to make it weird and sexual. Please can we just go back to all being friends on the playground and playing in the dirt together.
your name is ryland grace and you are a coward. you know it because it's written everywhere in your story: you are a coward and a quitter and the first one out the door when things get hard. you are good with kids because kids don't expect you to be braver than you are, and because kids respond well to distraction when you run away from a problem in front of them, and because kids are curious and open-minded and ask questions expecting surprising answers.
your name is ryland grace and you are a teacher. you are good at laying out the facts, at disgusing useful information in your quips. you are good at meeting people where they're at and getting them to understand the things that click into place in your brain so easily. you are smart but you love to learn new things and you love to help others love it, too. you used to think you were only good at teaching children. you were wrong.
your name is ryland grace and you wake up alone and with no memory of anything and it comes back to you in fits and starts: the earth is dying. you know how to save it. you used to stand in front of a classroom and help kids understand. there was a woman who believed in you. your friends needed you. your planet needed you. you do not remember being a coward because it is not important when the world is dying and you, ryland grace, are the only one who has a chance to save it.
your name is ryland grace and you remember being a coward but it feels like a different ryland grace. it feels like the ryland grace you are now, who leaps into space to collect a sample and does everything in his power to complete his mission, this ryland grace is not a coward. but you know that your name is ryland grace, and you are a coward. what do you do with that?
your name is ryland grace and you're faced with a choice: accept the fate you were so close to avoiding. go home. be a hero and be welcomed back with open arms. prove to the world you left behind that you could do it, that their faith in you was worth it, even though you are a coward.
or turn back and save the friend who is the only reason you were able to do any of it in the first place. save the friend who saved you. save the friend who can't save himself, and whose planet and people will die without him. and in doing so, make the choice you never made in the first place. make the choice to turn around and leave the earth and your people behind, never set foot on a beach again, never breath the fresh air again, never feel the light of your sun again.
your name is ryland grace and the choice is not hard. rocky would do the same for you. rocky did the same for you. rocky almost died for you. rocky gave up years of his life to make sure you could go home, and that sacrifice is the only reason saving him is even option. your name is ryland grace and you know, now, that it doesn't matter that you were a coward, once. there's more important things to worry about.
your name is ryland grace, and you get to have a hand in saving two worlds.
