maskormenace | [Video]

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[Video]

[Duncan looks like a perfectly ordinary Earth dude, if you ignore the fact that he's dressed in some fancy looking leather armour that makes him look like he walked straight out of a fantasy MMO. Mostly what's visible is the gold mantle of his cape and a black hood, both trimmed with white. He's got the hood pulled up, but it doesn't hide his face. Behind him, you can see the obvious decor of a bar.]

So, I would be doing this over text, but apparently good keyboard layouts and slide-out keyboard phones haven't been invented yet and this is too fucking urgent for me to have the patience for that shit.

[deep breath, intense look into the camera]

How the fuck are you supposed to get drunk with a healing factor in the way?

I timed it. I fucking timed it! Three shots, completely sober in five minutes. [he holds up five fingers to emphasize that] Five minutes! That's fucking ridiculous! How am I supposed to live like this?!

[With a frustrated groan, he sets the phone down against the table; the picture goes black and stays that way for a few seconds.]

[then he lifts it back up and gives the camera a more subdued, resigned look]

Heimdall, by the way. Welcome to here, me, I guess.

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Video game monsters. [reluctantly, like he doesn't actually want to confirm it.]

Yyyyup. [S I G H. he will own his nerdiness but that doesn't make it sound any less sad] To be fair, it's not the kind of expertise you ever expect to be useful outside of the game.

You know how weird that sounds, right? [ Shut up kaidan u are a video game ]

I mean, how does that even happen? Video games coming to "life". It sounds like something you'd see in a children's vid or something.

Are you fucking kidding, of course I know how weird it sounds! I lived through it!

Do you even know how hard it is to convince your mom to wire you money from halfway across the country to buy a rifle so you can kill monsters with it? Me either, because I fucking lied and told her it was for textbooks!

I honestly don't even know where to start with this shit, the entire thing is just absolutely fucking crazy.

[jeez Duncan, breathe for a second.]

[which he does, giving himself a moment to wind down out of rant mode and swap gears into actual-answer mode.]

Okay. So. Alternate universes, right? Obviously, that's a thing.

Apparently they sometimes collide with each other and merge into one universe. And the video game was not actually a video game, but an alternate universe in process of doing that with our own. And the people in the know decided for some reason that the best way to make this happen smoothly was to introduce that world into ours as an MMO?

Honestly I don't know if having the explanation helps at all, it's going to sound crazy either way.

So... it's like if that... [ He sounds more thoughtful than actually talking out loud. What he means is that it sounds like if his world and Galaxy of Fantasy collided -- except that couldn't be any worse than what they already had to deal with. The reapers would probably just take care of those with them.

But he can kind of get it. His face looks pinched -- pensive. Or what some people call constipated. ]

Right. That's... well, it sounds crazy, but... I mean, I've heard worse. [ Seen worse, but then you tend to when you know Shepard. ]

Too bad they were all hostiles, right?

If what? [it's almost automatic, the question. he can tell it's just thinking out loud, but he's curious. he wants to know things about these people, even if he's been doing an awful lot of talking about himself here.]

Not all hostiles. I mean, the monsters were mostly just displaced wildlife with some aggressive tendencies. Dangerous mostly because we didn't have the means or experience to deal with them, you know?

But we got their people, too. And their magic. And that part is pretty fucking cool.

All things considered, the merging of societies didn't go nearly as poorly as you might expect. [which is not to say that it went smoothly, either. but the worst of it feels distant to him, since he was on the Earth side of the divide until the divide stopped existing at all.]

Oh, just some game they always advertise where I'm from. I kept hearing it around back whenever I'm on shore leave, but... it never really interested me. I'm not exactly a gaming type.

[ A pause, then. It doesn't sound...bad? Now. He doesn't know what to think about that, other than he wants to ask, because he's curious but the guy is new and that's not fair to just ask about his world over and over.

But still, this is so weird he wants to ask all of the questions about it! ]

Okay, so now it's not...so bad? Like things worked out okay?

No? That's too bad. I'd tell you you should get into them, but, ha ha ha... [Duncan hasn't felt comfortable playing many video games since the merge started, for, uh, obvious reasons]

Yeah, I'd say so. Once all the dust settled, anyway.

[pause. SUDDEN CHANGE OF HEART] Actually no, things didn't work out okay!! I got locked out of becoming a spellsword and I'm still not fucking over that!

Jaime's already tried, but I'm still bad at them. [ Who would've thought soldiers would be bad at call of duty?? ]

But uh --

Uh -- What do you mean "locked out"?

I sort of wound up becoming the cleric guild leader instead by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And guild leader's not exactly the kind of position you can resign from, if you get my meaning.

So good-bye all my spellsword dreams, forever.

Uh huh.

[ He doesn't get that at all. He sounds like he's talking about some video game, but this is real life, right?

Ugh, that's confusing. ]

I think...I probably don't get it? But that's okay.

[it is both. a video game setup that is actually real life.]

Eh, don't worry about it. Even I think it's complicated, and I live with that shit now.

Yeah. I mean, I'm...used to complicated?

This is just... weird complicated.

But good for you, for being adaptive. And taking on responsibilities like that.

[HA HA YES GOOD FOR HIM. RESPONSIBILITIES. HE DEFINITELY TOOK ON THOSE RESPONSIBILITIES WILLINGLY AND DIDN'T JUST MURDER HIS PREDECESSOR SO HE COULD RESURRECT SOMEONE HA HA HA...]

[which is to say that the comment makes him seem vaguely uncomfortable, and he is managing a faint smile that seems strangely nervous. Duncan has a lot of Guilt Issues about how he wound up with his guild leader position; nobody else went the extra step of personally killing their predecessors and they all just kind of accepted that his circumstances were the same. No One Must Know.]

Yeah it's, you know, life throws some shit at you and you gotta deal with it or you break, and I don't--I'm not interested in breaking, you know? So I fuckin'--I do what I have to do and I fuckin' deal.

[HOW ABOUT LET'S NOT CONTINUE TALKING ABOUT THIS, THOUGH.]

What's complicated look like for you? I've talked about myself enough, what's your situation? You're from a space-faring future it sounds like?

[ He takes the change in topic as humility more than discomfort, and just rolls his shoulders. After all, most people don't like to talk about how good they are.

And compliments are hard, in his experience. ]

Yeah, something like that. You know, spaceflight -- humanity's moved out to the stars, and found all kinds of other species out there.

And all life in the galaxy is being exterminated right now. That kind of complicated. [ As light as he's trying to make it, there's definitely a Look on his face. It almost looks...constipated. The downturned mouth, furrowed brow, and pinched eyes that say very clearly that he is Not Happy to be away from that sometimes. ]

[GOOD MAN, KAIDEN]

[Duncan looks excited for a second at the part about finding other life out in space, but then there's the part about all of it being exterminated and wow that's fucking dire]

Holy shit. By what?

Uh, well?

Giant...sentient ships. Kind of.

It's complicated, but the reapers are artificial intelligences that apparently...do this every fifty thousand years or so.

So we're trying to...stop that. Right now.

Jesus. [he's seen sci-fi, he gets the whole AI trying to destroy life thing]

Every fifty-thousand years? So...who the fuck made them in the first place?

We don't...really know? [ He sounds a little lost. ]

Just all of the sudden, one showed up, enslaving the Geth, and trying to take over the Citadel, and we...killed it.

Two and a half years later and there's an entire armada of them exterminating us. We had warnings, but... it kind of sounds crazy when someone's running around yelling that the reapers are coming.

They're mostly just a myth.

Holy shit.

['the Geth' sounds like an entire species which means probably a whole planet, and 'Citadel' is not a title you give to something small and easily conquered.]

Just one sounds like a nightmare. A whole armada, that sounds like...

That sounds like Hell.

[not a comparison made lightly. he's experienced Hell. the natives call it something different, but that's what it is. so when Duncan compares something to Hell, he's looking at the worst experience he's ever had, the worst experience anyone could ever have, and saying "yeah, that sounds about right."]

Yeah.

Uh, that's putting it mildly. They can brainwash you, and they generally set whole groups of the population after each other.

They've kind of...perfected overtaking galactic civilization. Which is really distressing to think about, actually.

No fucking kidding. I mean the first questions on my mind are, who made them, why, and are they still around?

That last one's probably the worst.

And that's what you have to look forward to going home to, huh? I'm sorry, man.

Well, you know. Before I came here, it was reality.

I'd really prefer to finish this. We might -- I mean we have a chance of getting out of it okay. So...

[ A pause. ]

Anyway, when they exterminate society, they do it pretty well. Who knows how many millions of years it's been since they were started? How many societies they eradicated? It's probably something that's lost to time by now.

Good luck, man. I mean that.

Time's not running in parallel, right? I mean, if you go home, the amount of time that will have passed without you isn't going to be the same as the amount of time you spent here, right? That seems like something folks here would've figured out by now.

[because whether or not you're losing your chance to fight back the longer you're here is kind of an important detail]

It's -- Yeah, time stops? My, ah -- a few friends of mine have gone and come back, and time apparently just...stops until you get back.

Which is reassuring in some respects, but I guess it means they aren't exactly going to save the galaxy while I'm stuck wasting time here.

Yeah, I figured it was something like that. [he used to RP, he knows how these things are supposed to work. though he doesn't quite realize that's the reason he's making that assumption, it just seems like the logical thing.]

Hah, be nice if you could get off that easy, huh?

But I guess it also means you're not going to go back an empty galaxy, either, so there's that.