video | 01

[deformer]

Pfffffff.

[The video starts in on Rua, a young man with green hair, tied back into a ponytail, sitting back in a chair at his house. He has a bit of a grimace on his face. But eventually, he shrugs and starts talking.]

So, uh. I've been kinda stallin' on this. 'Cause I've been lookin' at the network and I basically don't recognize anybody and it just keeps makin' me go like bluuuuuuuugh and close it, but. I gotta introduce myself, so, I'm gonna. Do that!

[He gives a little wave.]

Hi. My name is Rua. Y'might recognize me if you've met my twin sister, she...basically looks exactly like me! 'Cause. Y'know, that's how twins work? She's been here for a lot longer than me, but both of us came from, like. Another dimension besides the one that's actually our home. We lived in a place called the City. And, uh, stuff got super messed up there and we eventually got ported out of there and wound up here. I'm guessin' the answer to this is probably no and I...guess it doesn't really matter a whole lot, but whatever, it's still kinda important to me, so I'm gonna ask. Does anybody else here remember the City? If y'do, I wouldn't mind just, like. Talkin' about it a little bit, I guess.

And to the rest of you guys who like, have no idea what I'm talking about... [He drums his hands on his legs for a second.] I'm goin' to school in De Chima. I do like. Stockin' and stuff at Ball or Nothing. Uhhhhh. [He thinks for a second.] Any of you guys like card games? My world is crazy into card games, it's basically the coolest thing ever.

Comments

audio;

[dragony]

I can't believe you're already calling everyone bluuuuuuuugh. You're supposed to give them the chance to earn that, you know.

[ she's Helping. ]

[deformer]

I wasn't calling them blugh, I was just sayin' the situation was makin' me feel that way!

[dragony]

Well, there are some blugh-worthy people out there, so it's worth getting used to, at least a little.

[deformer]

Oh, so it's okay for you to call them blugh, but not me.

[dragony]

Well, yeah? I already know who's blugh.

[deformer]

You're the foremost authority on blugh.

You're the blughologist.

[dragony]

I went to college for it and everything. My thesis was Blughs in the System.

[deformer]

...

What's that from? That's from something, isn't it?

[dragony]

You know, like... system bugs?

[deformer]

Oh.

You also could've called it Blughs Bunny.

[dragony]

I thought about picking A Blugh's Life, too, but that seemed too obvious.

[deformer]

...
...
...
...
Breaking Blugh!

[Yeah, he's out.]

voice;

[hellrisen02]

'Bluuuuuuuugh' is damn right. Relatable, honestly.

[Duo pauses, the awkwardness of the moment leaking into his voice. Hm. Uh. How to tackle this?]

[Oh right, by being a cloak-and-dagger jackass.]

[private;]

Let's see, I was significantly younger back then.... Lot more hair... Don't know if we ever crossed paths honestly, but I've heard 'bout ya, guess you could say?

[/end private]

Shinigami. Nice to meet you...? [He thinks.]

[deformer]

[...okay, there's a couple things that stick out to him there, but the most important one.]

Is that like, your real name, or your hero alias?

Cause that is freakin' metal as hell if that's your real name.

[hellrisen02]

Oh yeah. Definitely my real name.

[Can he get away with this? Is that something he can do???]

[Probably not, huh.]

...That said, I guess if you gotta, you could call me Father Maxwell. But why would you, yanno?

private;

[deformer]

I'm pretty sure I don't! So I'm gonna stick with Shinigami. [Which leads him to the other part...so he quickly flips this to private, because, well, if the guy made this private, he probably wants to keep it private?]

So, uh.

I guess you probably heard about me from Ruka?

Re: private;

[hellrisen02]

Yeah. And I know you were around, back then, I guess? In a ...vague, tangential way. I was kind of a snoop, back then.

[Implying he isn't now, MM-HMM.]

I remember a couple folks from your world, but not real well. Just names, or just faces. You remember, uh... [He sighs a little- he's not usually willing to bring up specifics like this- bad memories and bad implications, but-] You remember when the Porter was.. kind of a free-for-all? When those HIVE guys made a run on the City, with that giant airship?

Re: private;

[deformer]

The...HIVE? [He repeats it, some vague recollection on his voice.] They were...bad guys, right? I...think I remember something like that a few years ago.

Honestly, I was pretty young when they were around. The guys I really remember...were freakin' Vulcanus.

Re: private;

[hellrisen02]

Yeah. Pretty much an entire City populated with criminals.

--Well, I was going to ask if you remembered something specific about that day, but I guess you don't remember. Vulcanus... I was gone, by that time.

[After a beat] Sorry. That you had to deal with that.

Re: private;

[deformer]

Yeah. Vulcanus did some...really screwed up stuff.

I dunno whatever happened to them, but I kinda -- [He cuts himself off, sighing.] Whatever. I just really don't wanna run into them again. So if they haven't caused any trouble here, that's good.

Re: private;

[hellrisen02]

[Duo pauses, a long hum.] ...Wouldn't count your chickens 'fore they hatch.

You've just gotten here, right?

There's a group in this world, they call themselves Otherworldy Technologies. OTO. They've been the cause of various troubles in this world lately, and last month they tried to nuke the Porter.

...I've been wondering if they might be connected to Vulcanus in some way. It's hard to tell, with the lack of direct contact, but their motivations feel... they might be similar. They seem to want to harness imPort power, rather than simply destroy us outright.

Re: private;

[deformer]

...

Yup. That sounds basically exactly like Vulcanus.

So, they're here too. Cool! Cool.

I'm just gonna go spend the next year under my bed, if that's okay with you, hit me up when this world starts blowing up too!

Re: private;

[hellrisen02]

Uhhhhhh yeah, my bad.

Figured you should probably know about that, before they try another 'nuke a city out of the blue' thing again. Which I'm sure they're gonna, eventually.

...Hey, at least it's not your first rodeo, right? For what it's worth.

[It's something like an attempt at comfort?]

Re: private;

[deformer]

Blurrrrgh.

Sorry, I'm just.

I'm still kinda. Gettin' my head around what those guys did when we were in the City, y'know? I was kinda hopin' we were done with that, but apparently they're still all the way crazy and trying to screw literally everything up.

Re: private;

[hellrisen02]

It's okay. Really. [Duo's voice softens; he wasn't totally sure how pissed off Ruka might be, if he tried the same extended olive branch to her brother that he had with her, but he can't help it. Even if he hadn't been there when the worst of it happened, the stories were enough. And this kid... he couldn't be much older than Ruka had been when he was there.]

[That in itself... was hard to imagine.]

As far as the exacts go in this place, it's not nearly as ...drastic, as things always were in the City, even in the best of times. Not as often, certainly. It's less mass chaos and more periods of simmering and boiling over.

Here, you... You can avoid the kinds of damage that the City inflicted on everyone. Sometimes. And I don't think anyone would blame you for wanting to.

Re: private;

[deformer]

[Rua should feel relieved about that. He really should. He can just...avoid all that awful stuff that happened in the City and live his life? He should be ecstatic about that, right?

And yet, he's hesitating.]

...yeah, but I'm guessin' like.

Not everybody can, huh? There's still stuff that's gonna drag in other imPorts and the normal people that live here and make things awful for them, right?

Re: private;

[hellrisen02]

[It was a good sign, Duo thought, that Rua thought of the natives so quickly. Maybe it was just experience, seeing what imPort influence had done to the City for so long.]

...You're right about that. Those 'boiling over's I mentioned...

[He sighs] This government has some things in place to help quickly recover from ...imPort-incidental disasters, but obviously that's never really enough. Native deaths... It's not ever an acceptable loss.

Us aside. That's a whole other problem, huh. Uh, I guess you could always try going off the grid. [He laughs humorlessly.]

video

[khajidont]

Rua, huh?

[ Ruka and Rua? Cute. ]

It's nice to meet you. There was a version of me in the City, but I don't remember it - and, honestly, most people don't. If you're looking for people that do, you'll want to contact Tony Stark, Mitchell Hundred or Peter Parker. I think that's all of them, though. Or at least all of them that don't mind it being spread around. [ He sees you, Shinigami! ]

Sorry. I know that's probably not the answer you wanted to hear.

[deformer]

Geez. Only five people, huh.

[He looks off to the side for a sec, a grimace on his face.]

It's probably for the best that most of everybody else got to go home, anyway. I was just curious if anybody was left, I guess.

[He shrugs.]

Whatever. It's not a big deal. [It kind of is.]

What's your name?

[khajidont]

[ It is a big deal - but he won't press it. Poor kid's probably got enough on his plate without some stranger emotionally terrorizing him. ]

It's Jaime. Nice to meet you. You're probably better equipped than some of the other newbies to deal with this place, but if you got any questions, I'd be happy to answer 'em.

[deformer]

[That makes him a little uneasy, but he's not exactly surprised.]

Eheh, how crazy does stuff get, exactly? Do we get bounced around to other dimensions here, too?

[khajidont]

Um, nope! A lot of crazy stuff happens here but I can'ty say that going to other dimensions has ever been one of them. Let's just say that when something crazy happens here, nine times outta ten, it's because of another imPort.

[deformer]

Hhhhhuh.

So no crazy bad guy organizations?

[khajidont]

I mean, there was an crazy bad guy imPort organization, but that got taken down a few months ago. There's another group of people that are... okay, pretty evil, but we don't really have a handle on them yet. They're called the OTO.

[deformer]

....okay, what does the second one do.

[khajidont]

Um. They made a bunch of evil clones out of our DNA with our powers and let them loose on the porter cities annnnnnd we're pretty sure they're behind trying to fire a bomb from space at Heropa? It's kind of been up in the air for a while. Nobody can get a read on them.

[deformer]

...okay, do they know firing a bomb at Heropa is probably gonna blow up the Porter, which would probably do some insanely crazy and bad shit?

[khajidont]

Actually, that's exactly what happened. It kept hitting but the Porter kept us in a time loop until a bunch of imPorts figured out how to stop it. So... win-win, I guess?

[deformer]

...

...

I'm a little torn between thinking that's really cool and screaming.

[khajidont]

Yeah, um, it wasn't great. But it's over now! If it's any consolation, I don't think it'll happen again anytime soon.

[deformer]

That'd be really good! Bombs from space are bad!

...but they're still out there and they're probably gonna do like, somethin' eventually, right?

[khajidont]

I mean, probably. But people here are trying to keep that from happening. They always are.