three. video. id: the Outsider. later tonight.

[crypdick]

[ It's traditional, when asking simple, broad questions to the Network to do so in a text post but that's not nearly melodramatic enough for the Outsider.

He's in the desert in the outskirts of Jeopardy, night has fallen and he's looking not at the communicator but up at the stars. There's some faeries nearby he's bribed to leave him alone with pizza, but they make it cold enough you can see his breath glittering on the air. ]

The places you come from are varied, where even the things that you take for granted may be different here, or for other imPorts. Even this reality is changing week to week.

With that in mind, I have a question for you.

[ Now he turns to look at the comm, eyes empty and black. He tilts his head. ]

What do you think makes a god a god?

(( And regular reminder that if you respond with video, you are completely free to include a vision for him to see if you want! ))

Comments

[crypdick]

Time itself?

[fremde]

Not an entity, but a law. The beginning and the end of everything that will ever be. All that people have ever prayed for is really an appeal for time. More of it for themselves. Less of it for others. It's hopeless, of course. Time is unstoppable. We can move through it, but it also moves through us, and this is what people have named Fate.

[crypdick]

[ It's not quite the answer to the question that he meant, but an interesting enough sidebar that he'll roll with it. ]

I have been outside time and I have seen more time than most. Men, women, children, mountains, cities, empires, the creatures of the deep. Time comes for them all, eventually.

But time can also be fragile.

[fremde]

[ Jonas could have said, "God is a dumbass fake concept," but other people have that covered. ]

Time comes for everything.

[ Even you, honey. ]

Would you call water fragile?

[crypdick]

If you play with water you cannot fracture reality. But then, perhaps that makes reality the fragile one of the two.

[fremde]

I don't know what you mean by fracturing reality.

[crypdick]

The manipulation of time, for example, changing the past, creates hollows in the world. Places, things, people who want to exist in different timelines simultaneously. Cracks in reality where the past and present, or two or more different pasts echo in the effected.

Though the rules of this world may be different. [ He's learned that what he often takes for granted in his old world does not often apply here. ]

[fremde]

The "rules" you're describing refer to naïve realism, which is an outdated concept even by the standards of my world. Reality is not only that which can be observed locally. In fact, quantum mechanics has proven that such is not the case.

On that note, the manipulation of time does not "create hollows" either. The future can affect the past, the way the past affects the future, but what that means is not that something has been broken. It means that something is fixed. Constant. A causal loop which has always been occurring. Or, if not that, then a branch in the tree of infinite outcomes that always were and always would have been.

To put it simply: If something has happened, it is reality. What has been broken by that event was only your flawed understanding of reality.

[crypdick]

Do you think I was speaking fiction? Of hypotheticals?

I have seen the flickering of the hollows in the world, I have watched a man grow mad in his empty carcass of a mansion as the hole in the world he helped create eat at his mind. I gave a woman the opportunity to change the events that transpired there. I have seen the present change due to the actions of someone who was not supposed to be in the past. A healthy man, sanity not restored but never lost at all. And all the rippling effects of that change creating places where the world is thin.

The world we are in now brings beings from across worlds, some of which have magic, some which don't. Some have creatures of immense power,some trek the stars, encompassing planets. Some claim that gods don't exist while others claim to be the children of gods.

Is it that my understanding of reality is flawed, or is it that your perception of reality is limited?

[fremde]

Nothing you just described contradicts my statement. When the impossible is possible, it was never impossible at all. If such an event has occurred, it's not in defiance of reality. It is reality.