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[burger_king]

The year is 2018 and the Red Scare is alive and kicking. Worlds collide as we're brought here under mysterious circumstances, given gifts we couldn't dream to prepare for. Trapped without hope for escape we ask ourselves - will we ever see our homes again? Our loved ones? Will we embrace our new lives and is it a question of when - not if - that these powers turn on us? So many questions, and yet the biggest mystery is something else entirely.

Best burger joint. Give me your suggestions. Bonus points for cheap menus.

Comments

[burger_king]

You're absolutely right.

It was like that back home too. If you don't fit in, if you don't conform you're better off looking out for each other than rely on any kind of government protection. Anything else is just a waste of time.

You got people to rely on now?

[fehus]

you should have seen the response from the government, when the Porter broke and people were getting mortally wounded and dying. spoilers: there wasn't any.

yeah. archie's one of them, honestly. betty, too. i've yet to meet anybody from riverdale who wouldn't help me out, if i needed it.

[...]

[well apart from Reggie but... he thinks Reggie would... probably help him. if he was like. bleeding, and dying. probably? yeah, probably]

[burger_king]

[ Yeeeeaaaaah, don't get your hopes up about Reggie. ]

Archie and Betty are hands down the best friends anyone could want. They'll never let you down.


[ Even when one of them sent the other to break up with him in possibly the most painful way possible. ]

[fehus]

what about you? you a dependable guy, too?

[burger_king]

[ This shouldn't be a difficult question to answer but lately he's been making some really bad decisions born out of some poor priorities. It takes a while before he responds. ]

You'd have to ask them about that.

[fehus]

that's fair.

what are your other burning questions?

[burger_king]

To pick one... do powers ever backfire?

[fehus]

is this a sociological or physiological question?

[burger_king]

Lets say yes.

[fehus]

sociological answer: imagine a thought experiment where a bunch of people from a bunch of different worlds with varying levels of trauma and baggage suddenly got magic unique unto themselves and existed in a society with no way to either teach or control them besides a gimicky nationalistic schtick relying on the idea that everyone likes heroism. imagine in this thought experiment that some people are dicks, and others are stupid. imagine some of these powers do fucked up things, like affect someone's inhibitions and will or invade their mental or emotional privacy. how do you think this total hypothetical would sometimes play out?

physiological answer: anyone with nanite-given powers has been shown to be vulnerable whenever the Porter breaks. some people got boosts -- and used those boosts to fuck with people. some people had fatal wounds from their past suddenly reappear for round two. i knew one guy whose fire powers literally slowly burned them alive.

short answer: yeah.

[burger_king]

That's more or less what I was already thinking but seeing it spelled out like this? It's messed up.

The pamphlet they gave me on arrival said that there were schools and training facilities for imports. I'm guessing that's not something they enforce.

[fehus]

yeah. that's not even getting into like, the 11 year olds that get Ported in, and how nobody's actually like. checking in on that officially

and let's put it this way: i've been here for half a year, and it's the first i'm hearing of it.

[burger_king]

It's their insurance. If it's available and they inform us about it, we can't complain no matter how poorly implemented it is.

This is wrong. All of it.

[fehus]

who's complaining? i don't need their handouts and half-assed attempts to keep a lid on a population way outside their paygrade.

the only new wrongness here is the power creep, really.

[burger_king]

Right. You're right.

[ It's interesting how Jughead has yet to reach that level of distrust for the government. He's been let down, but not far enough. ]

So we keep our heads down, look after our own and do whatever we have to to survive?

[fehus]

i don't think keeping your head down is an option as an imPort, really. and there is something sort of

[...]

i dunno. dumb and wasteful about imPort heroism, which is always like, punching a thing or flying in space or some #CoolHeroShit like that. even with the powers people have, even if they're good people, nobody thinks outside the box much, about stuff like feeding or clothing people that need it, helping out with conservation shit, blah blah. some imPorts try to make foundations and shit like that i guess. but it's weird how few.

[burger_king]

I hadn't even thought about it that way. Guess it depends on what you can do.




What can you do?

[fehus]

i don't have porter powers. i came in as is.

[...]

and my "as is" is kind of wild shit for mortals. how weird do you feel like getting on your first week?

[burger_king]

You just called me a mortal so I think I have at least an idea of how wild this could be.

Try me.

[fehus]

oh. shit

i'm a dead pagan demigod. well, i'm atheist actually, but my dad's a pagan god, i mean. i'm immortally dead, already in my afterlife back home, which is ironically mostly a temporary gig until the end of the world.

i usually parcel my weirdness out sort of slowly, but you seem like a guy who gets right to the point, so. ta da! i'm a ancient magic zombie eternateen.

[burger_king]

[ You know that thing where you see the three little dots blinking and then they disappear and come back and disappear and come back as if the person is typing out War and Peace on the other end or maybe they're just repeatedly deleting a reply they weren't happy with? There's a lot of that. A LOT of that. There's probably enough time to go make a sandwich. ]

Okay.

I wasn't prepared for that.

Kind of don't know what to say to it.



Cool?

[fehus]

if it makes you feel better the first time your girlfriend met me, it was in the middle of the woods while i was holding an ax, and my boyfriend was being a cheetah, so it was even worse.

this is it. this is your life now. just constant kicks to the head of how you understood reality.

[burger_king]

Still sounds preferable to home.


Wait.

Why was your boyfriend a cheetah

threadjacking im sorry.

[athnvas]

[ M A G N U S. ]

There were better ways to go about explaining this, Magnus.
Like roughly 50 others ways.
Am I going to have to follow you around and jump in every time you end up bringing up your parentage to people?

[fehus]

how do you do it?

do you not say "ta da"?