maskormenace | 010 ♍ text ♍ locked from norman osborn, hazel lockwood

010 ♍ text ♍ locked from norman osborn, hazel lockwood

hope can be such a fickle thing

ive lived my life without it for years and it chooses now of all times to barrel its way back in
but none of that makes it fit in the environment
its only like an ice cube trying to enjoy a summers day

even when im staring at it in front of me i cant seem to conquer the idea that it isnt mine
that im not the one who gets a happy ending its only being borrowed from someone else
another me from another timeline who things progressed more happily for
another me who could look at this and actually feel like shes earned it

i dont know what to do with this feeling
except to know its made a fool of me

[ She includes a photo taken on her desk, some weird black ball covered in candy corn spikes. Is it a Halloween decoration? ]

im going to be a mother after all

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Oh boy. Ok. So this is waaaay too fascinating to pass up and I've got a ton of questions and clarifications to ask for for Science reasons. Seriously, just bare with me. I think you're the first openly alien species I've met that doesn't seem hostile and is open to answering things-- Congrats on the Matriorb, btw. Good luck raising the Mother Grub.

Anyway! You're obviously not human (Qubit called you a troll--is that what your species calls itself? If so, what's a Wiggler? Is that a species/evolutionary step/sect within your society? What would you prefer to be called? I gathered from this that you're somehow biologically insect but with a human-like shape (nice horns--I see they kind of match the spikes on the orb))

Ok, things learned from this post: you sew, you're gay, that spiky thing is an egg/Matriorb (awesome, btw) which YOU did not lay (and the virgin surrogate that did lay it had to die to give birth to it) and the egg will hatch a Mother(Daughter?) Grub (are all of your kind female?) which will be grub-like and won't walk upright until it has emerged from its cocoon (how long?). It technically won't even be your kind, but sort of is (is it a next evolution in your species?). Mother Grubs serve more as incubators than nannies, but are responsible for helping you recover your species (are they like a Hive Queen? Are you a drone? You said you were born/created to do this? Are you technically a Mother Grub too? Are you technically manufactured for your purpose or is your bloodcolor/type genetically passed down from your own virgin-surrogate egg-layer? Were you a Daughter Grub turned Mother Grub who has now produced a Daughter Grub of your own to become a Mother Grub...etc etc?). Beasts (any) would be nannies, some even eat your kind, but I assume you don't have those here because you're going to serve as the nanny/parent. There's about a month, roughly, of gestation/incubation before your grub is hatched.

Right, so, questions:

What is a Lusus (lusus sounds Latin? Matriorb definitely is--orbis ring and māter mother--are these your world's words or a translation into our languages?) How do you know what your grub will look like, that she will have wings and won't have an endoskeleton (are you manufacturing her appearance? what control, if any, do you have over it? how do your species genetics work to dictate the appearances of your offspring?)?

What do you mean when you say that the blood will be externalized? What kind of cardiovascular system do you have? And in what way is the hierarchy on your planet (which is what planet, exactly?) dictated by blood color? Your green??? blood color means you're going to help recover your species by caring for this Mother Grub until it can produce a grub of its own? What kind of ranking does that put you in? Who else from your world (you mentioned one, who you were disinclined to breed with) is here and what kind of rank or status does their blood color indicate?

Wow, that was longer than I meant it to be. But like I said, this is fascinating shit.

Edited 2015-10-12 23:03 (UTC)

Don't forget to breathe, Newt.

[this is a legit concern even though it's not audio]

The issue isn't NOT breathing; the issue here's HYPERventilating.

Do you need a paper bag?

You know, asshole, I might. I just might. You going to portal over and bring it to me yourself or you just making useless wisecracks at my expense?

When you and Hermann start hyperventilating/fangasming over GLADOS or the TARDIS or some techno/timespacey shit, I'm going to laugh.

I don't know, I'm kind of enjoying the useless wisecracks.

[and private;]

Don't start on the TARDIS, though. Did you know there's actually some wiseacre going around saying he's Doctor Who? It's ridiculous.

Get over here so I can flip you off in person.

[PRIVATE]

He's The Doctor, not Doctor Who. Doctor Who is the show, not the guy. Wow. I don't even go here and I know better than that. Does he have any of the things with the plungers or anything?

Hiro told me he met Captain Kirk before, iirc. What's to say this isn't a Doctor? I mean, he does change actors like James Bond or something, right? Maybe it's just not one we've seen yet. You can't possibly tell me that the show HAS to be completely fictional when you can make portals at the drop of a hat. Why CAN'T a blue phone booth travel through time/space and be bigger on the inside?

I know that, it was for clarity's sake. You're going to be picky about the name when you don't even know what a Dalek's called?

[HE'S NOT A FAN, THOUGH, SHUT UP.]

I'm not saying the technology's impossible. I'm just saying it's a phenomenally unlikely coincidence. Bad enough we've got the dead coming back to life, but now I'm supposed to believe we have fictional characters, too? Even assuming there's some version of reality where they really exist, how would someone from our realities know about them?

... Did the man actually look like William Shatner? He doesn't regenerate, I know that much.

Dalek, right. You're as big a nerd as Hermann.

I also demand to see this mathematical work that you're using as basis for stating the PHENOMENAL unlikelihood of fictional and nonfictional space intersecting. I think you're pulling that out of your ass and I like hard evidence over theory too, but how closely did you actually examine this Doctor's story? I mean, look. Already we have the Doctor as an entity whose fictional existence is somehow spread out over multiple versions of the universe. We've established that you and I aren't from the same dimension, but they are similar dimensions--and some pop-culture canon and even PEOPLE apparently overlap (why Shatner, why Morrissey? They're not even fictional (I assume). They're real people, yet they overlap. Are they fixed points in timespace or something? Why do you not have a Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb and why do we not have a Qubit in our world? What RNG decides who stays and who goes when generating a new reboot of a dimension?). How do dimensions diverge and what determines the overlap? or how do those stories travel from dimension to dimension and who is to say that they aren't (like the much-debated Arthurian legend) possibly based on some kernel of fact?

First off, this SOUNDS LIKE a Doctor Who episode, so you know, who is to say it isn't? Doesn't this just totally sound like the premise for one of those things? The Doctor comes to a version of reality where everything he thinks is real is supposedly fictional to everyone else? Maybe we'll get to hitch a ride in the TARDIS? Did he bring it? Man, shit, Hermann would kill to be a Companion. You're going to have to help me convince him not to go with the Doctor because I DID watch enough of it to know it doesn't seem to end well for the people who go with him.

Secondly, didn't the cute Martha Jones go tell a story all over about the Doctor? What's to say those stories didn't spread to other worlds? What's to say other time-travelers didn't take them home and, write down that oral history and record it as a long-running television series?

...I don't know. Hiro met him, I didn't. I can't remember if it was Shatner or new Kirk, the Abrams reboot.

Edited 2015-10-13 00:14 (UTC)

[Okay so maybe he is pulling that out of his ass a little. And didn't examine the story closely at all. He may have sort of ragequit the conversation before it got to that point. ~~Also, Morrissey might as well be fictional.~~]

Many-worlds theory. The number of universes out there is theoretically infinite, but they all result from minute divergences of probability, up to which point any two given universes are indistinguishable, even yours and mine. (For all we know, we may well exist in each other's worlds. But without a Kaiju invasion, you and Hermann might never meet (assuming you're even alive), and without the Paradigm you're unlikely to hear anything about a Qubit (assuming I'm even alive).) Even thinking of them as different "versions" is misleading. The reason it's possible to move between universes at all is because they're not actually separate.

With that in mind, it's not at all surprising that two Earths, which are already identical in being hospitable to human life, and which have identical or near-identical histories up to some critical point, would also have identical or near-identical pop culture. If all the factors leading to the creation of Doctor Who are the same in both, then it's more likely than not that Doctor Who will exist. Do you see what I'm getting at? It'd be stranger if some swath of pop culture happened to be different for no apparent reason. [You know, like their comic books. Not that he knows that.] You have to start from the causes and work forward, not from the effects backward.

For the rest:
Just because our situation sounds like a Doctor Who serial doesn't mean it is.
No, he said he doesn't have the TARDIS, so no joyrides.
I have no idea what you're talking about with whoever Martha Jones is.
And someone rebooted the original series? I thought that was some kind of sacred ground. Perhaps we really are in the end times.

First off: Paradigm is what? Because we've more than explained Kaiju and I don't even know what you did for a living back home short of make portals. :| NOT COOL, MAN. (Also not cool? Suggesting Hermann and I might never meet. That's a world you can take and shove you-know-where.)

I understand the basics of many-worlds theory and butterfly effect and wrinkles in time, and all those fun things, but I'm not sure I see how these/our worlds are not actually different versions. We diverged. We can be the same at a cellular level, but we're moving independent of each other now, like twins, not entangled quantum particles. And if we're not ACTUALLY separate, WHY can we not get the porters to work in our favor, huh? HUH?

And I understand Cause and Effect, but we have the Effects--we don't know the Cause--so we have to hypothesize and work backwards, like being a diagnostician. You don't know what caused the problem, only that it exists and exhibits these symptoms. We don't know what tiny butterfly flapping its wings moment caused our worlds to diverge. Considering we can't possibly tick off the entire list of cultural checkpoints from the invention of fire to the invention of the Jaeger and everything in between, we can't be SURE that the pop culture, or anything, really, isn't different significantly somewhere until we stumble on it. It's like you don't notice you're missing something until you go looking for it, and if you don't know OF it, you don't know you're missing it.

For the rest:
- I know. But it doesn't mean it isn't. And honestly, I'm sitting here living in what basically amounts to a Comic Book world with Comic Book powers I didn't have a few months ago, so I'm not going to write off the Doctor Who episode thing completely. The KAIJU were FICTIONAL until they WEREN'T.
- DAMNIT. What good is the Doctor without the TARDIS, geezus. Did he bring the Sonic? Please tell me at least he brought the sonic, because otherwise he's just a useless humaniod with two hearts who likes to change actors every couple of years for a Christmas Special.
- Martha Jones was the Doctor's sexy doctor companion during Ten's run. idk, I thought she was hot. I only pretty much watched parts of Ten's run, okay.
- Considering the same director had signed to do Star Wars sequels too, yeah, we might be. One thing about the Kaiju to be thankful for, right? Those never got made.

[[ooc: More random stupid trivia that I just remembered: Newt's look, at least, is sort of based on JJ Abrams. (x)]]

Edited 2015-10-19 06:27 (UTC)

The Paradigm is my team. Or was. [Not much of a team with only three people left. And they probably won't keep the name, anyway.] "Earth's superpowered protectors," was the idea. That's not really relevant to this discussion. [Qubit no it kind of is though]

Look, we can sit here debating the nature of parallel universes all week, but that still leaves the question of how any iteration of our universe could perceive what happens in another. Is there some kind of subconscious memetic transmission going on between worlds? And if so, what does that say about creativity? Are all our stories just copied wholesale from other worlds' experiences? Is the concept of "fiction" itself an illusion?

You bring up some valid points, I'll admit. I'm just saying I don't like the potential ramifications.

okay
thats a lot of words without even a hello

so there are in fact a lot of errors here ill need to correct so its probably best i take your uh
slightly overwhelming request one thing at a time

alright to establish some basic facts
my species is in fact called trolls and we came from a planet called alternia
wigglers are what we call our larval stage
it lasts maybe one year approximately before we pupate into the bipedal form you see now
since you ask about externalized blood i should probably add that here because that wasnt actually what i said
in a wiggler it isnt the blood itself thats externalized only the color
what i mean is that you can see it in the body rather than the grey skin youll notice in an adult troll

our circulatory system is a blended system being both open and closed
evolutionary redundancies yes but it serves to make us far hardier than a human by comparison
we survive severe injuries more easily that way
my own circulatory system is a bit more complicated as its cannibalized my digestive tract
but thats only due to very unique circumstances and not something to mistake for typical

on to mother grubs next as this seems to be where you have the most misconceptions
the first thing is that mother grubs are not "sort of" my kind they are an entirely unrelated species
the role they serve is roughly comparable to a hive queen but to actually call them that would confuse the the nature of our relationship
its a cultural symbiosis

the best way i could describe mother grubs are to call them 30 foot tall moths
they reproduce asexually by growing a matriorb within them
i call them incubators and surrogates because they were a necessary intermediary step in our reproduction
they produce specific enzymes that are necessary to our eggs being fertilized
without them we might as well be barren
also they pupate in about ten years and dont walk on two legs
they keep all six but theyre pretty small

i am honestly not sure why youre taking my description of her eventual features as some indication that i can manufacture her appearance
of course she will have wings
of course she will have an blended endo- and exoskeleton
how would i not know that
thats no different from speculating that a human infant would have a head or skin
some features are fairly standard for their species!
and again she wont have the wings until after her pupation
most pupating winged species dont start with them in the larval stages

the rest is really all cultural
you ask what a lusus is but already said stated the definition of it before then when talking about nannies
if you want the latin definition then google will oblige
i dont actually translate anything
what you call "english" i was speaking before earth ever existed

youre really going to make me explain the hemospectrum arent you
i should really just write a book about alternia that everyone could read to get this information
its clear that ive underestimated the interest in it

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010 ♍ text ♍ locked from norman osborn, hazel lockwood

text; id reads "newt geiszler" -- I'm sorry. I read the entire post except the private stuff

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