maskormenace | Anonymous Text

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Ever feel like you may be a bad luck charm? Or I guess maybe a good luck charm for people who want to go home? I think I might be. Whenever I get close enough to someone that I start to trust them a little they get ported out.

Maybe I should start offering my services, huh? Get close enough to me that I think you're a generally trustworthy sort and BAM, you're back home.

Maybe it's confirmation bias or whatever. Which is why I'm asking if anyone else is experiencing things like this.

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I'm sorry.
Someone I cared about left recently as well, though it was the first time it happened.
I'm still not sure how to process it.

It sucks. I hope you don't have to go through it as many times as some people have. Even I'm comparatively lucky to a lot of the people here. I've just noticed there's a tendency for people to port out soon after I trust them, and I don't trust easy so it's not as much as some experience.

I'm sorry. It sounds like it's very rough.

This place is too unpredictable.

It is. I'm used to people going beyond where I can go, but normally it's not held over my head whether or not they'll come back, or if they'll even remember me.

Life is unpredictable, but this place adds unpredictability that I don't think humans like myself have the full ability to adapt to. It's hard enough to adapt to death being impermanent.

I think even non humans wouldn't be able to adapt. These are not normal circumstances and no one has taught us how to deal with any of it...

We just.
Go with the flow. And don't really fix anything.

It's true. A lot of us would like to fix things. And some have tried in the past, but the porter appears to be sapient and doesn't like it when it's messed with.

It would be nice if we had warnings at least! A heads up that we're going away, or that someone we trust is being sent home. something, you know? Then it would feel more like someone moving away than someone maybe being basically dead, but maybe not for long, or maybe coming back without any shared history.

Then we shouldn't try anymore?

If the Porter is sort of sentient, couldn't we just ask it to do that? Just asking, without messing with it?

We should always try to find some way to make this less of an issue. But I think we need to be smart about it. Just trying to mess with the porter without an idea of what we're doing could go badly.

I guess it's worth asking again? I don't know how we'd go about it. The last time I checked the porter isn't letting anyone near it, but a lot has happened since then.

Oh, absolutely, all the time. I'm still not all the way used to it, and I've been here five years(ish).

I'm sorry it happened to you

At first I was sort of okay with it. That's life you know? You can't choose who stays or who goes even without the porter being around. But it started to get to be a little much when it seemed like within a month of me deciding someone deserved my trust they got ported back. It just seems like a pattern at this point.

I'm sorry you have had to deal with it too.

It is life, yeah, and the porter definitely amplifies that awareness. Knowing that they could also come back without memories of previous times here, which at least where I'm from, doesn't happen there.

I think the hard part of it is that you have no idea if they'll come back, and if they'll have their memories of you or not. When someone dies in my world they stay dead the vast majority of the time. It's easier to move on. Here it's different, and I think that it's harder because of that.

All of the above there too, yeah. I've met multiple versions of my family members (from other universes), who have all been here with a clean slate of memory each time, and while I loved all of them, the relationships were always slightly different each time too. Which was a bit weird.

A situation where even if you value the relationships equally, they're still different relationships and you miss the people. Right?

Precisely that. The same, but different.

It'd be ideal if we could stop the porter (gates??) for people who wanted to be stopped.

I recently met a younger instance of one of my friends. It seems like coming in as a second or third or-so-on iteration has its own hang ups.

I agree. There's got to be some way. I have no idea where to start though. My tech capabilities are mild. I don't want to leave this world, but I've got no way to stop me from doing so.

At least there's not multiples of the same people running around. Small mercies?

A few years back, some people tried to mess with the porter and it went badly. Given, that was well before this world had ... er, been through what it has over the past yearish, so who knows if the exact same thing would happen now.

I wouldn't mind there being multiples of some people, but multiples of others would get to be a real pain.

I heard about that. I'm not even sure we're in the same timeline as we were this time last year. Gates instead of porters? No more tattoos? For all we know the porter isn't the same one.

Good point. I mean, on both counts, but especially the last one. Shortly after we got back in the late summer/early fall from that alternate universe whatever we were in that I don't really remember but have heard people talk about, when those names and things changed. I'm not even being a little sarcastic when I say that I want to believe some of us are trapped here in another timeline (again?), because that would mean maybe we'll be back to where we started out and that people who have ported out since the changes aren't just lost forever to porting out back to their home worlds. But I've lost most of my friends in the past few weeks, including someone I was married to, so I think my bias there is understandable.

It would be nice if we were just in one of those alternate timelines and our friends are just being ported back to the one we all shared earlier last year. It really would be. I think I'll hope for that, even if it's not likely we'll be that lucky.

I think I'll join you in hoping for that outcome too. It's easier and hurts less, and even those two facts alone probably make the odds close to zero -- but at this point, we need a damn break, so I'm trying optimism.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My experience has been more in line with planetary invasions or similar disasters. Because there's obviously no need to limit yourself to bad luck that only affects others at an individual level.

It's been mercifully absent here thus far, but if you suddenly wake up to find a hostile fleet overhead or the planet about to explode it's probably my fault.

This is actually the best evidence that this has nothing to do with my own luck. If it was my luck everyone would be dying in horrible ways while I had to pretend I was okay with it.

From what I understand we nearly had the whole universe here torn apart. Were you here in 2019 around October? If not, you wouldn't be the first case of something triggering world-ending danger.

I arrived a few months prior to it.

So, really, I should have expected something like that to happen.

I think this was well in the works before you came. Maybe it's less your luck that you bring world-ending events and more that you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and you're accidentally sniffing them out.

So... Less "It's my luck I would draw an invading force here" and more "It's my luck I would choose to vacation on the planet scheduled for invasion this week".

I make my own luck. There's only either opportunities or situations. Everything else around me is inconsequential until it's a new level. I don't think it's any one of us, specifically.

I'm more superstitious than I give myself credit for. Logically people going back has nothing to do with me. I have no power over the porter. I have no power over whether or not I go back.

Sometimes logic gets overwhelmed though. The Porter is sapient. Maybe it decides who goes back based on criteria that includes what connections they make. Or maybe what those connections lead to is what it's looking for, and I'm just good at leading to that. I have no way of knowing, and all the data we've been collecting in these parts doesn't make any patterns clearer, so there's not really any way to know how to manipulate things, or to make our own luck when it comes to that.

Believe me, if I knew how to do it I would make it so that I and those I know who don't want to go back would never be ported out.

Uh, kinda... but not in that exact sense.

Sorry you're goin' through it right now. Even if it means people get to go home, it ain't a great feeling to be the one left behind.

In what sense do you feel it?

I'm glad that those who wanted to go back got to, but I feel like if this is just going to happen, maybe I should only get close to people who want to go.

I went through what ya might call a rough patch. I lost someone close to me, and after that it seemed like it was just one thing after another gone.

That said, there was no teleportin' across dimensions involved.

Think you'd be happier that way?

You have my condolences. Before I came to this world I experienced a lot of death. I'm sort of the reason why I lost a lot of what I had, as I was actively working to get rid of it for everyone's good, but it was still hard. It's probably even harder when you're not prepared for it.

Probably not. But at least someone would be. I could justify getting close to people if I knew it would do them a service rather than make them go when they wanted to stay. I can survive and accept just about anything so long as it has a net positive.

Hmm... doing them a service, huh?

You know, I've been talking to some of the people here. How they feel about livin' lives here, when they're not gonna remember any of it when they go back. How I'm gonna feel when they're not around any more, and vice versa.

To be honest, it's something I never thought I'd have to worry about.

There are a lot of people who want to go home. If they'll never know they knew me, then it's not like I'd be doing harm.

Never have to worry about it in what way?

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