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marigoldflame2012-05-29 11:05 pm
veira) wrote in marigoldflame2012-05-29 11:05 pm
Entry tags:
survolt
World: MSPA; Homestuck
Characters: Dirk, (Roxy, Jane, Jake, UU)
Wordcount: 7445
Summary: Living alone in the middle of the ocean is hard. Waking to the political turmoil of Derse is an island of a different flavour. It takes him a while to learn how to navigate.
Black Pebble Wars
You never get to know your Queen. The Condesce has long since usurped her by the time you wake up, ten years old and fresh as a baby. Ten years alone in the middle of the ocean is a long time, and when you wake up that dark first morning, you stand at the window of your dream room and stare down at the hustle and bustle of the city for hours, this whole new world folded out before you that you've never known before and that's been hiding from you this whole time. It's just like the troll girl said, but with the colors inverted. Black carapace people scurry to-and-fro like beetles stretched out and warped at all the wrong angles. They're people. They've got bodies proportional to yours, faces with eyes and mouths and language like yours, but they aren't like you. They're alien. They're weird. And you've seen video of carapaces through Roxy's webcam before, but that still doesn't make seeing them in real life—in real live motion—anything like familiar. Below you stretches out a throng of people all going somewhere, doing something, intent and purpose and society written all over the sparkling purple city like an ancient language you've seen glimpses of in movies but never thought you'd need to actually learn.
For the first time in your life, there are people other than you and Cal. Ten years alone in an apartment with nothing but his imaginary laughter in your ears as conversation, and suddenly all you can hear is errant conversation and radio chatter—and as you learn to identify in the next few days, the endless clanking rustle of presses printing shitty tabloid newspapers, a never-ending flood of bullshit propaganda selling Her Imperious Condescension as the new Almighty Dersite Queen.
You know better than to swallow her schoolfeeding without question. You've been a historian for as long as you can remember, piecing the past together through carapace gossip sites and ancient untampered Wikipedia articles and the life-support depths of Project Gutenberg in your endless, endless spare time. At ten, you can quote the underground, uncensored history of her artful takeover of the entirety of Earth government (courtesy of one Rose Lalonde). The Condesce was a Bad Guy back then and she still is now, and you know her face like a wanted poster. The High Troll Empress. You never thought you'd meet her. And now she's here occupying your dream moon the same as she's occupying your homeworld back on Earth.
So you do the only logical thing. You hide.
The troll girl always urged you to float free from your sparkling purple minaret when you finally woke up for the first time; explore, get to know everyone. Instead you duck down, stay safe and quiet in the lofty heights of your ivory tower, pretending you're asleep instead of caving to that split-second child's desire you'd felt the moment you'd first laid eyes on this city—to cast yourself into the exotic new experience of culture and people and social order with out a glance backward. They sit there tempting like the first taste of freedom you've ever had, real people, real society, something you've watched in movies but never known yourself, and there are times when you ache to experience it. But you know better than to try.
You're a historian. You know exactly what the Condesce has done to your species. It goes so far past simple subjugation, spiraling off into forced cultural extermination and biological experiments and reproductive reprogramming and so much more. Humans weren't people to her, they were playthings, and you know for a fact that if she ever gets wind that you're awake, one of the last little humans in all the world, she will instantly direct her attention from the pretty bug people under her heel to the twin purple towers that rise up above them. The mascots of Derse. If she folds those into her deck the city will fall for her instantly, and it's written all over the history books that she is definitely not above using humans as puppets to bring a nation to its knees, the whole time twisting their minds up to think it was their own idea.
Puppets you understand. You were raised by one, and you have no intention of ever being used by the woman who destroyed your entire civilization and mutilated your species for her own sick plans. You'll never be her puppet. You decide at ten years old to make sure no one else ever is either.
So you do what you're good at—you watch and learn and you bide your time as you try to piece together a plan you can use to your advantage.
Derse is fucked. It takes you less than a year to realize that. She has her tentacles of politics twisted up in everything; the queen gone, the archagent assassins at her beck and call, the people tools for her bidding. For a while you just watch it all in your dreams, studying everything like a live action model—an experiment of real observable society to compare to the control group of movies you've watched all your life. (Sitting on the edge of your seat, knees tucked to your chest and your lips barely parted, breathing so quiet and shallow with your heart pounding fast as you watched the entire crowd of people thronged around the float in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Earth used to look like that and you couldn't help but marvel, a deep jealousy burning you up slowly. All you've got is water for miles and one lone apartment on space-age steel struts: Sealand, Houston, Texas. You've never seen another person in the flesh and you never will, and sometimes the things you watch on your TV screen, throwback gifts your bro left for you, twist your heart up with the absolute empty loneliness.)
You watch Derse for months from on high, tucked away safe in your tower with your wide awake eyes always hidden behind your shades, and then—suddenly—you don't sleep anymore.
It's a gradual thing at first, confusing and unsettling as something in your consciousness unsticks itself in spacetime. You start to get these moments of lucid wakefulness right at the edge between dreaming and the real world, moments where you can open your eyes and see purple paisley wallpaper and the pony posters taped to your apartment walls at the same time. Layered over each other, but not. Twin consciousnesses operating in tandem. One week you sleep sound, a solid dividing line between Derse and Sealand; the next week you're splintered in half constantly, that other self half-awake and listening to the noise of Derse as you chat with Jake about the Three Stooges movies and how Curly Joe was never ever an acceptable substitute for Shemp.
That's not how dreaming is supposed to work. The troll girl tells you as much when you try to explain it to her, and even though she says she'll get back to you about it after she does more research, she never turns up with anything interesting. Apparently you're a special case. You don't need to sleep to dream. And even though your real self does still need sleep to function, your dreamself never gets tired.
Suddenly you have twice the time you used to have. No matter what you do on Earth, you're always awake on Derse, always in the middle of that treacherous mimicry of a society you've never known but always wanted to, the susurrus of the Condesce's propaganda and the idle carapace chatter always in your ears. You've heard all there is to hear about the princess of Derse and her tendency to sleepwalk right out of the upper atmosphere and into the Veil for days on end. They've seen you shambling around your room before, pretending to be asleep whenever they were watching. So you decide to take a gamble.
One quiet morning you slip off the sill of your window and float down slowly into the streets of the city below. Down to the level of the very people you've been watching through magnification for months on end. Your feet never quite touch the pavement. You float an inch above the pretty purple cobblestones like a ghostly phantom. The Dersites part before you, peeling back in the middle of their errands and their conversations and the endless complication of their lives to stare at the prince now in their midst. (You have entered the equation; observation changes behavior every time, and even if they don't know you're watching them, the fact that they all want to watch you and bask in the cool wonder of their mascot among them changes everything for a good long while.)
You amble through the winding streets and the artful gothic architecture, lingering at the corners of the markets and the wide open plazas you'd marked out in the city planning months ago. People stop and stare, whispering that turns to gossip that will make its way into at least one of the hundred pulp magazines Derse pumps out every afternoon like clockwork. Soon everyone will know the prince of Derse has joined the sleepwalking world. Children point and scuttle through the crowd to touch the hems of your clothes, spinning away and giggling like they've stolen a spark of your fame. You watch it all through a straight face and the concealment of your shades, never letting them know that you're capturing every shade.
The moon doesn't know what to make of it at first. Of you, finally out of your tower. Roxy tends to ricochet off the buildings and giggle in her sleep, collapsing over inopportune pieces of infrastructure and generally behaving like a faerie trickster, eager to swipe shiny things and hide them a block away or to tug people's hoods down over their eyes. They're used to her making an idiot of herself. You're a different story, with the silent act, floating an inch off the cobblestone pavement and never once touching anything, just watching the milling of the marketplace for hours like a marble sentry in the background. For a few weeks people flock to see you—a living tourist attraction as you float from market to market trying to lose the crowds. You expected this but it's not what you want. You want to watch them after they forget about you, when the normal hubbub of the city returns to what it was when you were watching from on high. When observation becomes so commonplace that it ceases entirely. It takes a month or so, but slowly Derse gets bored of you. The plazas that had filled up with gawkers clear out again, turn back into quiet markets where Dersites sell vegetables and paper and colorful clothes, sitting in shops and sending their children off to school every morning like nothing special is happening at all.
But you never get bored of Derse. Your research slides up a notch.
Back on Earth you scribble notes down in the notebook on your desk, endless jaunty pencil scrawl on college ruled paper. The salty warm breeze flutters in the window and ruffles the pages, and you're split in half, watching the purple backdrop of Dersite society with ultra-sharp eyes. Teaching yourself how people behave, how people talk to each other and trade items and how they walk and move in group patterns without ever seeming hesitant to be in the presence of hundreds of people at once. You've been at this for months already but now you're in the thick of their society, incognito and free to explore. You write faster and faster. You learn shorthand. This isn't scripted humanity like the movies you've watched all your life, and you know it's not actually humanity at all, but it makes sense to you in a way movie logic doesn't. This is reality. These are real people. You find yourself getting invested in their lives as you study them. (And sometimes you flip back through your notes when your dreamself is tucked safely in bed, and you ache that you are trapped here in your apartment so far from your friends; trapped in your tower on Derse by the queen who would paint a neon bullseye on your back the moment you cast off your sleep-act and try to integrate yourself into the people you watch so often you know some of them by name—shopkeepers and bakers and school teachers, regular people she is slowly bending to her will while you just watch and do nothing.)
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You've been quieter than you usually are on Pesterchum. It's finally Roxy who calls you out on it and asks what you've been so wrapped up in. It's not the first time. She's known you to spend days on end threading copper wire through the steel framework of a robot's nervous system and only coming up for air when your hands start shaking too much from raw hunger to complete the job. This is bigger than robots set to kill mode, though. A lot bigger. So you tell her.
You tell about the purple planet wrapped in a city, populated by thousands of the same carapace people she lives in the middle of. Of the invading troll queen that rules them and is slowly bringing them fully under her power. You're dreaming a mimicry of what went down four hundred years ago, living it and studying it and somehow staying apart from it at once.
It's funny how it looks once it's all down in text, orange words and descriptions and heated condemnation spilling all over your chat window, and for a moment you think to yourself that it all sounds like a fairy tale. It sounds like you've becomes so obsessed with the past that you're detached from reality—Sealand; Houston, Texas—and inventing something better but just as bleak in your dreams. It doesn't surprise you when she doesn't believe you, even though it stings. You sit for hours at your computer trying to convince her otherwise, using all your logical constructs and argumentative prowess to sway her closer to your side. You're good at getting her to go along with your plans to keep Jake and Jane in the dark about their sad future for the time being. Before Roxy leaves for the night she says she'll try to wake up and meet you in crazy purple dream land, high five you in your digital sleep. (You don't tell her how much that image hurts. It leaves you frozen for a minute, reliving that instant when you'd seen her fly by fast as a jetcruiser over a marketplace, mere yards from you but so so far for the physics. The only human on Derse, and you can never break your cover to catch her by the pretty striped ankles and say hello.)
The troll girl from another universe backs you up. She chats with Roxy for a while and when she finally gets back to you, Roxy asks you things about Derse. Casual questions, interest at the tip of her tongue, testing you to see if you're for real all the while. You answer and she seems satisfied with that. With truth. But she's not as interested in your dream land as you'd thought she'd be. She has a whole slum to provide for. She doesn't have time to chase a purple fantasy in her dreams. (You have nothing but.)
The troll girl is the opposite. As long as you've known her, she talks about Prospit like it's the most perfect thing in her world. She's awake on another planet just like yours, but one that doesn't orbit out in the cold lonely black of the Veil—a glorious golden city filled with people who have always welcomed her and loved her and treated her with boundless kindness, and a Queen who has invited her to her side. You feel this sting of jealousy when she tells you about it sometimes, the smiles on the people's faces and how she's been invited into the banquet hall time and again to have dinner with the King and the Queen. How she's sat with the White Queen for hours, perched on a pillow next to the throne and listening as the Queen taught her stores and truths and anything else she could ever want to know about anything in the world.
Your queen is dead, her reputation dragged through the mud and her throne occupied by the very alien that destroyed your world. You have no choice but to hide. You have to fight to fish your information out of the censored depths of the internet, and then verify it three different ways before you believe it's real. And you're not bitter, but sometimes you lay in bed at night listening to the noise of Derse, and you wonder what it would have been like if you'd been awake before the Condesce usurped the government. Maybe then you could have had a say in the matter, sword in hand and revolution on your side. Maybe then you could have slipped into your brother's shoes and taken up the mantle he left grafittied across history for you to find.
Life goes on. In 2007, your bro's second movie comes out, and for days Jake raves at you over and over about how great it is. Jane sees it too. You watch your copy of the DVD over again, and then bask in a dumb proud glow as they pick the nuances and hidden messages apart with you through Pesterchum. Your hands calmly reel in mutated mackerel off the side of your apartment as you chat through your shades.
And then, a month later, the troll girl says something you never would have thought of yourself. It's a passing thing, her constant vague head games somehow softened by the British slang—you're talking about Jane and her new bullshit Betty Crocker chat client, and then she suggests you visit Jane on Prospit of you're really so very worried.
Leave Derse atmosphere, not for the black of the Veil that attracts Roxy like a moth to flame, but for Skaia? You sit back in your chair on Earth and blink at the walls, reeling at the reality that you'd never thought of that before. You can leave. The inception of escape is striking in its clarity.
On Derse, you're perched on the slick tiles at the very apex of a roof, overlooking the marketplace that folds out before you. In that moment your fingertips grip the roof tiles, every other inch of you still as sleeping, and you tilt your head back and stare up into the deep black sky, imagining the sheer beautiful rush of zipping up and away into the stratosphere like you've seen Roxy do three or four times.
(The Dersites hate watching her leave. They watch her pretty speck of purple disappear into the black beyond, and the whole moon exhales in one voice, going about their days but waiting for their princess to return. You have to be smarter than that; deduce an escape they can't witness. That's not hard now that you finally have a goal.) On the roof, the plaza of the marketplace scattered in front of you like a tapestry of multicolored tents, you hatch a plan. You refine it overnight as your real self drowses in the only half-sleep you can accomplish anymore, and then the next morning you set off early before all of Derse is awake. You slip from your dream room and fly through the streets, keeping low and unseen until you climb up the chain that connects the two orbiting bodies and slip away into the dark of free space.
Your heart pounds. Once you get a half mile out, it hits you like a sledge hammer. You've left. It's not a dream anymore, a plan you've yet to put into action. For the first time in your life you're actually free.
You've spent over a year on Derse, watching the populous and reading shitty newspapers and magazines and always, always steering clear of the capital building. It'd been research, but it strikes you in this exact moment as you jet through dead space toward the light of Skaia, that you'd been as trapped there as you are in your apartment on Earth. The Condesce is there on the throne, too dangerous a threat to tango with. You've had to stay quiet, pretend you were something you weren't no matter how much you wanted to wade into the thick of the marketplace at noon and talk with some of the people you've been watching for months. They were right there like a carrot before you, and the instant you broke and bit the Empress spotlight would turn directly on you, would pin you like an insect in her dusty, desiccated collection of hollow carapaces and powdered flesh. A new pawn to bend to her will.
Now you're free. No one to watch you. No sword dangling over your head ready to crash down. On Earth your heart races. In the space between Derse and Prospit, you allow yourself the first smile of your dreaming life.
You hover at the edge of Prospit orbit, struggling to grasp the enormity of it all. For the first time you're balancing on the brink of something you haven't researched to its core. You know snatches of gossip about Prospit, and after a year of reading the Condesce's propaganda, you're excellent at sifting the shit from the real information. Prosperity. Peace. A race of carapace people not subjugated by a terrible alien queen. You linger between the letters that orbit just beyond Prospitian atmosphere, entranced by the sparkle of a city made of gold. Skaia beyond is all blues and whites like your apartment back home, but your eyes stick on the twin minarets of shining gold sweeping through the clouds. Jake and Jane. For a moment you can't breathe.
You've never even met Roxy on Derse. You've seen her in the distance but never chased her and never gotten close enough to see the familiarity in the shape of her face or the crook of her smile. The threat of some gonzo journalist noticing, of the gossip rags spinning sudden tales of a prince awake and chasing his princess, were too dangerous to chance. But, god, you'd wanted to. The only other human you'd ever seen, a smudge of purple fluttering fabric and a giggle left in her wake. The few times you'd caught those snatches of her had twisted your heart up with the ache, your research abandoned as you hovered there shell-shocked for a moment, imagining what would happen if you could chase her and catch her, look at her, hold her hand.
This is different. Now you're floating less than a mile from two of your best friends in the entire world and there's no dictator in the way to stop you. You race for them and don't look back.
There's no way to tell which tower is which, and honestly you don't care. The first window you duck into is all pink on the inside, bright and cheery and friendly in a way the deep deep red of your dream room has never been. You've seen four grainy webcam photos of the girl asleep in the bed, three of them with a different fake mustache every time. Jane Crocker. She's prettier than you imagined. You float an inch off the carpet, watching her, your hands knotted together as you breathe—and the thing that strikes you first is that she looks happy. She smiles in her sleep, subtly and natural like she's never yet had a reason to spend long lonely years worrying incessantly about the future. She looks like what movies have taught you a kid should look—innocent in all the right ways and sheltered from the struggle and the heartache that real life beats into you with every breath. Part of you is jealous for that. Another part of you is endlessly glad, because you trust Jane and you respect Jane and she is one of the three friends you would do anything for. You would lay down your life for her in a second, no hesitation. You want her to be safe and sound. You reach out with shaky fingertips and smooth the hair out of her face. It's the first time you've touched another human being in your life.
You step into Jake's room expecting the same peace as Jane's. Instead you float just inside the window, transfixed by the messy green scrawl etched into the blue patterned wallpaper. Four letters repeating at random, a foreboding BRAKAKRABARKARABAKA that takes up the length and breadth of two entire walls. You don't know what to make of it. A dream mural in Jake's own hand, undoubtedly the key to some snarl in his psyche. But when you rip your eyes from the wallpaper and look at Jake instead, there's no hint on his face of the gravity that you feel in your gut when you look at those letters. He looks nearly as at peace as Jane had, calm and quiet and with that damn daring hint of the ruggedly manly you'd hoped was a trick of your webcam and not actual fact. You touch his hand, gentle and tentative and nothing more. You spend a long moment floating there watching and thinking, unpacking your life and the reality that you know these people, that your heart aches to finally—finally—be so close to them. But even if you're here in the room with them, while they sleep you are nothing more than a figment to their imaginations.
It hurts.
You don't stay as long as you intended. That's enough for a first visit; a first meeting. You fly back out to the letters in orbit around Prospit and fold yourself into the curve of the S. Hidden from sight, you concentrate on your Earth self, determined to comb every inch of the internet for some clue to unlocking the message scribbled into Jake's walls.
You visit back and forth for a month, and in that time Jane never shows any sign that she's changed. She doesn't sit up and start scrawling messages on her walls like Jake has. She still uses the new chat client, never once heeding your artfully casual warnings. It's brand loyalty, she says. She doesn't mind the ads, she says. You offer to send her the original bootleg copy of Trollian the troll girl sent you when she first contacted you, but Jane's happy with BettyBother. She hasn't fallen to Guy Fieri's shitty propaganda yet, so you hesitantly let it go for now. Her expression in her dreams never changes. You're terrified for the day that it does, but the troll girl assures you she will be fine. After two months of no change you try to convince yourself that you can trust her not to simply lie for your benefit.
Jake is the same as he always is, and no underhanded mention of the letters on his walls brings up any change in his demeanor. Your research turns up nothing, and neither troll you ask has anything useful to say about writing on the walls of a dreamer's room. So you let that go too, as much as you'd rather not. Instead you send Jake all four volumes of an indie carapace comic about a spider alien that won't be published until three hundred years in his future. He eats it up like candy.
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Squarewave needs repairs. You patch up breaks in the concrete roofing. The light in the bathroom goes out and you spend three days tearing out the walls to find the short in the circuitry, plaster dust in your hair and spackle smudged into the whorls of your fingerprints. On one sparkling clear afternoon, you pick your way down the space-age steel struts your apartment perches on like a wading bird, and you sit on one of the cross beams, the water lapping just below your dangling bare toes. You fish because you can, because you can't live only on four hundred year old Doritos and apple juice and jars of Cheez Whiz and the pumpkins Roxy sends you sometimes. You pull up your nets and cast out your line, and when you hook something bigger than you'd ever imagined catching, you spend the entire long long day pulling in a tuna the size of Cal, balancing on the bare steel struts until ever muscle in your body aches from the battle and the cramping—six hours on your feet and concentrating so hard you lose track of what you're watching in your dreams. Later that night you flop into bed exhausted, sunburnt from head to toe and baking with the unnatural heat just beneath your skin. You can barely keep your eyes open. For the first time in ages, you fall in to a deep natural sleep instead of the half-awake drowsing you're used to.
Suddenly your dreams are crystal clear in a way they haven't been in over a year. No distractions, no feeling of half-reality. You can't even hear the waves lapping against the metal struts of your apartment. Everything is here and now and brash in-your-face in a way you'd forgotten existed. It's more unnerving than you ever thought it would be. The trickle-down whisper of the horrorterrors' aria of broken eternity rings like a distant bell in your dream room—this tower that you live in and sleep in, the whole structure held up to the heavens like a sacrifice from Derse to the Dark Gods. Seated on your purple bedspread, you can barely stand the sound of it. It crawls inside of you, unnerves you deep down in some secret place you'd forgotten you have. An imagined hollow just behind your eyes aches like a void waiting to be filled by some watchful monster. Twenty minutes of it and you're gagging, hunched over in your dream bed with your head cradled between your palms as you itch and itch with an animal instinct to flee.
It takes all your concentration to do it, but you slip away carefully, as quietly as you can. Prospit has become your escape. The place you go when you can't stand the political pressure of Derse any longer. You fly the black of space between the two moons with the dischord aria fading on your heels, cloying like reaching tentacles, and it's only when the blue of Skaia is bright in front of you that the corkscrew agony in your head finally expires. Jake's room is soft blue and familiar haphazard green scrawling, and you want nothing more than to flop onto the floor next to his bed and listen to the ringing of the mail bells for a few minutes—strike the echo of the horrorterrors from your mind entirely.
Except that when you coast in the window, you find a golden letter folded and marked with the Prospitian Seal resting on the table next to Jake's bed. With your name on it.
You nearly run for the Veil to never come back. For the first time in over a year, you wish you could wake up. You wish you didn't have to be here, that you could open your eyes back on Earth and pop out of existence, a ghost of a memory in Prospitian lore. But you can't. You're awake for better or for worse, and your stomach tries its best to sink through your soles. You float just in the window with your heart hammering as hard as it was when you left Derse atmosphere. You're frozen halfway in, halfway out, fingers clutching the molding as you flip through options, your head an old fashioned film reel running to overdrive.
The Prospitians know you're here. They've found you out, which is something you should have expected but you thought you'd covered your trail and played the sleeper routine to the nines. You thought you'd been careful every time you swooped into the atmosphere, every time you sat perched in Jane's windows squinting up at her prophetic clouds, trying for all you were worth to see the future the troll girl insisted was gilded in their silver linings. You'd been careful. They hadn't seen you acting awake. (Because the moment they saw you, it was inevitable that the information would make it back to Derse. Inevitable that the Empress would hear, and then one night you would find her in your dream room with a predator's smile and a weapon in her hands, ready to play the long spy-breaking pain game until she cracked your head open and stitched her living strings in place of your agency.)
Now there's proof on Jake's end table that they know you're already here. You've never had someone notice you in your life. You don't know what to make of this brand new hurdle in your path, the panic fluttering in your chest until you tamp it down and step inside, trembling fingers lifting the note gently to tear open the beautiful wax seal:
You read it three times. Your mouth is dry. The script is beautiful. There's nothing foreboding about it. And the thing is that it's the absolute opposite of what you'd been expecting. White moves first, never black. You're invading out of turn and you know it. You'd expected declarations of war and threats of bodily harm. You'd expected pawns with pikes to burst in on you and haul you to the dungeons. You hadn't expected a summons from the Queen—your Queen, as she claims you, redeemed out of the tragedy of Derse.
(You're not sure you want to be redeemed. What is that bullshit?) But part of you aches deep inside, because she wants to meet you. She will keep your presence secret, and for a moment you get caught up in memories of the troll girl's stories, in the sweetness and honest trust of that alternate reality queen. Awake and alive, she wants to see the cast of your eyes and she wants to acknowledge you. You've never met another person on Earth. You've never had someone offer you that equal ground in your dreams. What if this one is the same? What if—for the first time in your life—someone looks at you and sees you, sees you as a whole person and not simply a mascot trapped in a dream.
It's hard. You spend twenty minutes rooted to the spot, tearing your heart to shreds to see the way your desires fall. Jake rolls over in bed. Your eyes dart to him as you stand there, your hands trembling, your throat thick with the indecision. In the silence you go over memories of your brother; snatches of extra features hidden in the broken pixels of his shitty DVDs. Video, the cut of his suit and the shape of his jaw, meeting deadlines, telling stories that seemed like nothing but would mirror the end of the world. He stepped up and countered the overthrow of his government with the exact kind of subliminal messaging and careful persuasion that the Condesce was using. He didn't stay down. He didn't run and hide. He took up his sword and faced her head on, determined to tear down her regime and bring about revolution or to die trying.
It's a legacy that casts one hell of a fucking shadow. One you're standing smack in the middle of.
(And this isn't the same situation at all, but that's what you can't stop thinking about. That's the ideal that keeps your feet on the carpet. Because for once in your life you have the offer of something that's worth political power. Something you can use the way your bro used his chosen media of rebellion. The White Queen has claimed you as her own, and with all her goodness and all her kind teachings, there's a chance you could finally learn a thing or two about the rules of this game of the century. And with that knowledge plot the absolute downfall of the Condesce.)
"How should I play this, Jake?" you whisper. You can't remember the last time you spoke in your dreams.
He's not awake. He doesn't answer. But you know what he would say if he could hear your question, if he could grasp the magnitude of it. Life's a friggin' adventure. Choose a path and see where it bloody well leads.
The note flutters in the wind as you leave the room, the pretty golden paper clutched in your fingers. You fly out over the city, a gaudy smudge of purple against the blue of Skaia. The palace isn't somewhere you're familiar with. The eerie similarity to Derse's city planning is mapped all over Prospit like the opposite side of a coin. You've stayed in the slums and the marketplaces on Derse, anywhere full of people and far from the bishops and the knights who were sure to come prying. Far from the Condesce, who you've never trusted not to come investigate on her own if you just gave her the convenience.
On Prospit, you hover in silence above the architecture, white faces turning to watch you as you veer off the paths you've stuck to since you first started visiting. Time to break the pattern. Time to take a chance and step outside the mold. Roll the dice for revolution. You to float down to the beautiful golden tiled mosaics of the plaza just outside the palace and finally let your soles touch, let the clip of your shoes ring against the smooth tile as you stride forward with the first real agency you've shown in your dreams, maybe in your life. The note is in your hand to back you up. (Inside you're trembling, but this is a power play, and even if you're terrified there's no turning back. Time to own it.)
"I'm here to meet with the Queen," you tell the guards at the door, eleven years old and your voice all squeaky and so young. Your hands shake as you show them the letter, the Queen's personal seal, this beautiful thing that grants you access whereas if you'd tried this yesterday without it, they would have battered you down to the pavement and only scraped you off again when your cell was prepared.
The guards nod you through. A whirlwind of gold architecture and white faces, a pawn leading you through the corridors with fast tapping steps. She'd set this up. She'd had people waiting for you to bring you through all the right doors. And then the pawn stops and motions you in through two magnificent doors, a massive guard on each side. Prospitians looking at you, staring at you, seeing the blink of your eyes behind your shades—you're awake and everyone in this room knows it. Power play or not, you've never been so scared.
"Prince?"
The carpet is lush and gold. Your footsteps are muted. The Queen sits on her beautiful throne five yards away, and you're frozen in the doorway, staring at the knights and their weapons, the grandeur and the prestige that's inlaid in every shining surface like nothing you've ever seen before. You don't belong here. You're a kid asleep back in his apartment on Earth with all the stucco cracked and chipping off, with the dirty threadbare carpets and the tired, worn look of all of it, four hundred years past its grave and still standing only because of you. For a second you can't move, hands balled into fists, a knot in your throat. You'd be greeted exactly the same on Derse, swept in the big double doors, ushered into the throne room and up to the queen; the Empress replacement with her predator's smile and her evil shark eyes and the knots of her hair all twisted up in a psychic power with absolutely no rival. She'd welcome you into her throne room, the last little human she ever did see, and then she'd pry your mind apart and warp your very flesh with her biotech and turn you into a terrible, perfect weapon at her beck and call.
This Queen is nothing like that. You look at her and there's patience on her face with a hint of worry, her hands folded calmly in her lap. She's waiting for you. Her guards aren't hovering, prepped to haul you to the dungeon and string you up by your wrists until she condescends to grace you with her presence and let the brainwashing begin. The White Queen will let you come forward at your own pace—and everything about that is bullshit because you don't need to be coddled. You've been taking care of yourself for eleven straight years and it's long past the time you desired a parental figure to step into your life. You don't need her. You don't need someone to redeem you, nor do you need a mentor to take you under her wing. You've already got three people under your own. You're self sufficient. For a moment you consider turning on your heel and leaving just to punctuate that fact.
(But you know she's not coddling you, even if your pride is blowing everything out of proportion. She's giving you the opening to make the choice you will make—not that she expects you to make or that destiny demands you should make. You are on the threshold of the rest of your life, and she refolds her hands, patient to let you choose which door you will step through here.)
You turn and you walk those remaining five yards. The carpet swallows your footsteps. You don't do the whole full-body stoop kneel-down bow you've seen in a hundred movies. You dip your head respectfully, and then you speak:
"It's an honor to meet you, your Highness, and I'm sure you have a whole script you're planning to go through for this. But let me cut to the chase. Derse is fucked. The whole session is fucked. I've been doing recon as well as I can on Derse, but fact of the matter is, she's slowly turning the moon into a weapon she can use against you and your people, and probably even the eventual big bad boss at the end of this game. She's out for blood. She's trying to derail my session, and she's going to come through you to do it." Your mouth is dry. Everyone is looking at you. You don't think your heart has ever beaten so fast before. "I never knew my Queen, but I am still the prince of Derse, and I sure as hell am mad about what that bitch of an alien Empress did to my moon. I want her empire in tatters, and I want to be the one at the helm, guiding it all. So take this as a formal request from the last uncompromised remnant of Derse. I don't have the power to take her down, but you do. Would you be willing to collaborate?"
There's not a sound in the room. The silence rings. And then the White Queen smiles the kind of mean smile you'd never imagined a Prospitian could make, and she says, "I was very much hoping you would make that request. Yes, Prince of Heart. I accept."
Characters: Dirk, (Roxy, Jane, Jake, UU)
Wordcount: 7445
Summary: Living alone in the middle of the ocean is hard. Waking to the political turmoil of Derse is an island of a different flavour. It takes him a while to learn how to navigate.
You never get to know your Queen. The Condesce has long since usurped her by the time you wake up, ten years old and fresh as a baby. Ten years alone in the middle of the ocean is a long time, and when you wake up that dark first morning, you stand at the window of your dream room and stare down at the hustle and bustle of the city for hours, this whole new world folded out before you that you've never known before and that's been hiding from you this whole time. It's just like the troll girl said, but with the colors inverted. Black carapace people scurry to-and-fro like beetles stretched out and warped at all the wrong angles. They're people. They've got bodies proportional to yours, faces with eyes and mouths and language like yours, but they aren't like you. They're alien. They're weird. And you've seen video of carapaces through Roxy's webcam before, but that still doesn't make seeing them in real life—in real live motion—anything like familiar. Below you stretches out a throng of people all going somewhere, doing something, intent and purpose and society written all over the sparkling purple city like an ancient language you've seen glimpses of in movies but never thought you'd need to actually learn.
For the first time in your life, there are people other than you and Cal. Ten years alone in an apartment with nothing but his imaginary laughter in your ears as conversation, and suddenly all you can hear is errant conversation and radio chatter—and as you learn to identify in the next few days, the endless clanking rustle of presses printing shitty tabloid newspapers, a never-ending flood of bullshit propaganda selling Her Imperious Condescension as the new Almighty Dersite Queen.
You know better than to swallow her schoolfeeding without question. You've been a historian for as long as you can remember, piecing the past together through carapace gossip sites and ancient untampered Wikipedia articles and the life-support depths of Project Gutenberg in your endless, endless spare time. At ten, you can quote the underground, uncensored history of her artful takeover of the entirety of Earth government (courtesy of one Rose Lalonde). The Condesce was a Bad Guy back then and she still is now, and you know her face like a wanted poster. The High Troll Empress. You never thought you'd meet her. And now she's here occupying your dream moon the same as she's occupying your homeworld back on Earth.
So you do the only logical thing. You hide.
The troll girl always urged you to float free from your sparkling purple minaret when you finally woke up for the first time; explore, get to know everyone. Instead you duck down, stay safe and quiet in the lofty heights of your ivory tower, pretending you're asleep instead of caving to that split-second child's desire you'd felt the moment you'd first laid eyes on this city—to cast yourself into the exotic new experience of culture and people and social order with out a glance backward. They sit there tempting like the first taste of freedom you've ever had, real people, real society, something you've watched in movies but never known yourself, and there are times when you ache to experience it. But you know better than to try.
You're a historian. You know exactly what the Condesce has done to your species. It goes so far past simple subjugation, spiraling off into forced cultural extermination and biological experiments and reproductive reprogramming and so much more. Humans weren't people to her, they were playthings, and you know for a fact that if she ever gets wind that you're awake, one of the last little humans in all the world, she will instantly direct her attention from the pretty bug people under her heel to the twin purple towers that rise up above them. The mascots of Derse. If she folds those into her deck the city will fall for her instantly, and it's written all over the history books that she is definitely not above using humans as puppets to bring a nation to its knees, the whole time twisting their minds up to think it was their own idea.
Puppets you understand. You were raised by one, and you have no intention of ever being used by the woman who destroyed your entire civilization and mutilated your species for her own sick plans. You'll never be her puppet. You decide at ten years old to make sure no one else ever is either.
So you do what you're good at—you watch and learn and you bide your time as you try to piece together a plan you can use to your advantage.
Derse is fucked. It takes you less than a year to realize that. She has her tentacles of politics twisted up in everything; the queen gone, the archagent assassins at her beck and call, the people tools for her bidding. For a while you just watch it all in your dreams, studying everything like a live action model—an experiment of real observable society to compare to the control group of movies you've watched all your life. (Sitting on the edge of your seat, knees tucked to your chest and your lips barely parted, breathing so quiet and shallow with your heart pounding fast as you watched the entire crowd of people thronged around the float in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Earth used to look like that and you couldn't help but marvel, a deep jealousy burning you up slowly. All you've got is water for miles and one lone apartment on space-age steel struts: Sealand, Houston, Texas. You've never seen another person in the flesh and you never will, and sometimes the things you watch on your TV screen, throwback gifts your bro left for you, twist your heart up with the absolute empty loneliness.)
You watch Derse for months from on high, tucked away safe in your tower with your wide awake eyes always hidden behind your shades, and then—suddenly—you don't sleep anymore.
It's a gradual thing at first, confusing and unsettling as something in your consciousness unsticks itself in spacetime. You start to get these moments of lucid wakefulness right at the edge between dreaming and the real world, moments where you can open your eyes and see purple paisley wallpaper and the pony posters taped to your apartment walls at the same time. Layered over each other, but not. Twin consciousnesses operating in tandem. One week you sleep sound, a solid dividing line between Derse and Sealand; the next week you're splintered in half constantly, that other self half-awake and listening to the noise of Derse as you chat with Jake about the Three Stooges movies and how Curly Joe was never ever an acceptable substitute for Shemp.
That's not how dreaming is supposed to work. The troll girl tells you as much when you try to explain it to her, and even though she says she'll get back to you about it after she does more research, she never turns up with anything interesting. Apparently you're a special case. You don't need to sleep to dream. And even though your real self does still need sleep to function, your dreamself never gets tired.
Suddenly you have twice the time you used to have. No matter what you do on Earth, you're always awake on Derse, always in the middle of that treacherous mimicry of a society you've never known but always wanted to, the susurrus of the Condesce's propaganda and the idle carapace chatter always in your ears. You've heard all there is to hear about the princess of Derse and her tendency to sleepwalk right out of the upper atmosphere and into the Veil for days on end. They've seen you shambling around your room before, pretending to be asleep whenever they were watching. So you decide to take a gamble.
One quiet morning you slip off the sill of your window and float down slowly into the streets of the city below. Down to the level of the very people you've been watching through magnification for months on end. Your feet never quite touch the pavement. You float an inch above the pretty purple cobblestones like a ghostly phantom. The Dersites part before you, peeling back in the middle of their errands and their conversations and the endless complication of their lives to stare at the prince now in their midst. (You have entered the equation; observation changes behavior every time, and even if they don't know you're watching them, the fact that they all want to watch you and bask in the cool wonder of their mascot among them changes everything for a good long while.)
You amble through the winding streets and the artful gothic architecture, lingering at the corners of the markets and the wide open plazas you'd marked out in the city planning months ago. People stop and stare, whispering that turns to gossip that will make its way into at least one of the hundred pulp magazines Derse pumps out every afternoon like clockwork. Soon everyone will know the prince of Derse has joined the sleepwalking world. Children point and scuttle through the crowd to touch the hems of your clothes, spinning away and giggling like they've stolen a spark of your fame. You watch it all through a straight face and the concealment of your shades, never letting them know that you're capturing every shade.
The moon doesn't know what to make of it at first. Of you, finally out of your tower. Roxy tends to ricochet off the buildings and giggle in her sleep, collapsing over inopportune pieces of infrastructure and generally behaving like a faerie trickster, eager to swipe shiny things and hide them a block away or to tug people's hoods down over their eyes. They're used to her making an idiot of herself. You're a different story, with the silent act, floating an inch off the cobblestone pavement and never once touching anything, just watching the milling of the marketplace for hours like a marble sentry in the background. For a few weeks people flock to see you—a living tourist attraction as you float from market to market trying to lose the crowds. You expected this but it's not what you want. You want to watch them after they forget about you, when the normal hubbub of the city returns to what it was when you were watching from on high. When observation becomes so commonplace that it ceases entirely. It takes a month or so, but slowly Derse gets bored of you. The plazas that had filled up with gawkers clear out again, turn back into quiet markets where Dersites sell vegetables and paper and colorful clothes, sitting in shops and sending their children off to school every morning like nothing special is happening at all.
But you never get bored of Derse. Your research slides up a notch.
Back on Earth you scribble notes down in the notebook on your desk, endless jaunty pencil scrawl on college ruled paper. The salty warm breeze flutters in the window and ruffles the pages, and you're split in half, watching the purple backdrop of Dersite society with ultra-sharp eyes. Teaching yourself how people behave, how people talk to each other and trade items and how they walk and move in group patterns without ever seeming hesitant to be in the presence of hundreds of people at once. You've been at this for months already but now you're in the thick of their society, incognito and free to explore. You write faster and faster. You learn shorthand. This isn't scripted humanity like the movies you've watched all your life, and you know it's not actually humanity at all, but it makes sense to you in a way movie logic doesn't. This is reality. These are real people. You find yourself getting invested in their lives as you study them. (And sometimes you flip back through your notes when your dreamself is tucked safely in bed, and you ache that you are trapped here in your apartment so far from your friends; trapped in your tower on Derse by the queen who would paint a neon bullseye on your back the moment you cast off your sleep-act and try to integrate yourself into the people you watch so often you know some of them by name—shopkeepers and bakers and school teachers, regular people she is slowly bending to her will while you just watch and do nothing.)
You've been quieter than you usually are on Pesterchum. It's finally Roxy who calls you out on it and asks what you've been so wrapped up in. It's not the first time. She's known you to spend days on end threading copper wire through the steel framework of a robot's nervous system and only coming up for air when your hands start shaking too much from raw hunger to complete the job. This is bigger than robots set to kill mode, though. A lot bigger. So you tell her.
You tell about the purple planet wrapped in a city, populated by thousands of the same carapace people she lives in the middle of. Of the invading troll queen that rules them and is slowly bringing them fully under her power. You're dreaming a mimicry of what went down four hundred years ago, living it and studying it and somehow staying apart from it at once.
It's funny how it looks once it's all down in text, orange words and descriptions and heated condemnation spilling all over your chat window, and for a moment you think to yourself that it all sounds like a fairy tale. It sounds like you've becomes so obsessed with the past that you're detached from reality—Sealand; Houston, Texas—and inventing something better but just as bleak in your dreams. It doesn't surprise you when she doesn't believe you, even though it stings. You sit for hours at your computer trying to convince her otherwise, using all your logical constructs and argumentative prowess to sway her closer to your side. You're good at getting her to go along with your plans to keep Jake and Jane in the dark about their sad future for the time being. Before Roxy leaves for the night she says she'll try to wake up and meet you in crazy purple dream land, high five you in your digital sleep. (You don't tell her how much that image hurts. It leaves you frozen for a minute, reliving that instant when you'd seen her fly by fast as a jetcruiser over a marketplace, mere yards from you but so so far for the physics. The only human on Derse, and you can never break your cover to catch her by the pretty striped ankles and say hello.)
The troll girl from another universe backs you up. She chats with Roxy for a while and when she finally gets back to you, Roxy asks you things about Derse. Casual questions, interest at the tip of her tongue, testing you to see if you're for real all the while. You answer and she seems satisfied with that. With truth. But she's not as interested in your dream land as you'd thought she'd be. She has a whole slum to provide for. She doesn't have time to chase a purple fantasy in her dreams. (You have nothing but.)
The troll girl is the opposite. As long as you've known her, she talks about Prospit like it's the most perfect thing in her world. She's awake on another planet just like yours, but one that doesn't orbit out in the cold lonely black of the Veil—a glorious golden city filled with people who have always welcomed her and loved her and treated her with boundless kindness, and a Queen who has invited her to her side. You feel this sting of jealousy when she tells you about it sometimes, the smiles on the people's faces and how she's been invited into the banquet hall time and again to have dinner with the King and the Queen. How she's sat with the White Queen for hours, perched on a pillow next to the throne and listening as the Queen taught her stores and truths and anything else she could ever want to know about anything in the world.
Your queen is dead, her reputation dragged through the mud and her throne occupied by the very alien that destroyed your world. You have no choice but to hide. You have to fight to fish your information out of the censored depths of the internet, and then verify it three different ways before you believe it's real. And you're not bitter, but sometimes you lay in bed at night listening to the noise of Derse, and you wonder what it would have been like if you'd been awake before the Condesce usurped the government. Maybe then you could have had a say in the matter, sword in hand and revolution on your side. Maybe then you could have slipped into your brother's shoes and taken up the mantle he left grafittied across history for you to find.
Life goes on. In 2007, your bro's second movie comes out, and for days Jake raves at you over and over about how great it is. Jane sees it too. You watch your copy of the DVD over again, and then bask in a dumb proud glow as they pick the nuances and hidden messages apart with you through Pesterchum. Your hands calmly reel in mutated mackerel off the side of your apartment as you chat through your shades.
And then, a month later, the troll girl says something you never would have thought of yourself. It's a passing thing, her constant vague head games somehow softened by the British slang—you're talking about Jane and her new bullshit Betty Crocker chat client, and then she suggests you visit Jane on Prospit of you're really so very worried.
Leave Derse atmosphere, not for the black of the Veil that attracts Roxy like a moth to flame, but for Skaia? You sit back in your chair on Earth and blink at the walls, reeling at the reality that you'd never thought of that before. You can leave. The inception of escape is striking in its clarity.
On Derse, you're perched on the slick tiles at the very apex of a roof, overlooking the marketplace that folds out before you. In that moment your fingertips grip the roof tiles, every other inch of you still as sleeping, and you tilt your head back and stare up into the deep black sky, imagining the sheer beautiful rush of zipping up and away into the stratosphere like you've seen Roxy do three or four times.
(The Dersites hate watching her leave. They watch her pretty speck of purple disappear into the black beyond, and the whole moon exhales in one voice, going about their days but waiting for their princess to return. You have to be smarter than that; deduce an escape they can't witness. That's not hard now that you finally have a goal.) On the roof, the plaza of the marketplace scattered in front of you like a tapestry of multicolored tents, you hatch a plan. You refine it overnight as your real self drowses in the only half-sleep you can accomplish anymore, and then the next morning you set off early before all of Derse is awake. You slip from your dream room and fly through the streets, keeping low and unseen until you climb up the chain that connects the two orbiting bodies and slip away into the dark of free space.
Your heart pounds. Once you get a half mile out, it hits you like a sledge hammer. You've left. It's not a dream anymore, a plan you've yet to put into action. For the first time in your life you're actually free.
You've spent over a year on Derse, watching the populous and reading shitty newspapers and magazines and always, always steering clear of the capital building. It'd been research, but it strikes you in this exact moment as you jet through dead space toward the light of Skaia, that you'd been as trapped there as you are in your apartment on Earth. The Condesce is there on the throne, too dangerous a threat to tango with. You've had to stay quiet, pretend you were something you weren't no matter how much you wanted to wade into the thick of the marketplace at noon and talk with some of the people you've been watching for months. They were right there like a carrot before you, and the instant you broke and bit the Empress spotlight would turn directly on you, would pin you like an insect in her dusty, desiccated collection of hollow carapaces and powdered flesh. A new pawn to bend to her will.
Now you're free. No one to watch you. No sword dangling over your head ready to crash down. On Earth your heart races. In the space between Derse and Prospit, you allow yourself the first smile of your dreaming life.
You hover at the edge of Prospit orbit, struggling to grasp the enormity of it all. For the first time you're balancing on the brink of something you haven't researched to its core. You know snatches of gossip about Prospit, and after a year of reading the Condesce's propaganda, you're excellent at sifting the shit from the real information. Prosperity. Peace. A race of carapace people not subjugated by a terrible alien queen. You linger between the letters that orbit just beyond Prospitian atmosphere, entranced by the sparkle of a city made of gold. Skaia beyond is all blues and whites like your apartment back home, but your eyes stick on the twin minarets of shining gold sweeping through the clouds. Jake and Jane. For a moment you can't breathe.
You've never even met Roxy on Derse. You've seen her in the distance but never chased her and never gotten close enough to see the familiarity in the shape of her face or the crook of her smile. The threat of some gonzo journalist noticing, of the gossip rags spinning sudden tales of a prince awake and chasing his princess, were too dangerous to chance. But, god, you'd wanted to. The only other human you'd ever seen, a smudge of purple fluttering fabric and a giggle left in her wake. The few times you'd caught those snatches of her had twisted your heart up with the ache, your research abandoned as you hovered there shell-shocked for a moment, imagining what would happen if you could chase her and catch her, look at her, hold her hand.
This is different. Now you're floating less than a mile from two of your best friends in the entire world and there's no dictator in the way to stop you. You race for them and don't look back.
There's no way to tell which tower is which, and honestly you don't care. The first window you duck into is all pink on the inside, bright and cheery and friendly in a way the deep deep red of your dream room has never been. You've seen four grainy webcam photos of the girl asleep in the bed, three of them with a different fake mustache every time. Jane Crocker. She's prettier than you imagined. You float an inch off the carpet, watching her, your hands knotted together as you breathe—and the thing that strikes you first is that she looks happy. She smiles in her sleep, subtly and natural like she's never yet had a reason to spend long lonely years worrying incessantly about the future. She looks like what movies have taught you a kid should look—innocent in all the right ways and sheltered from the struggle and the heartache that real life beats into you with every breath. Part of you is jealous for that. Another part of you is endlessly glad, because you trust Jane and you respect Jane and she is one of the three friends you would do anything for. You would lay down your life for her in a second, no hesitation. You want her to be safe and sound. You reach out with shaky fingertips and smooth the hair out of her face. It's the first time you've touched another human being in your life.
You step into Jake's room expecting the same peace as Jane's. Instead you float just inside the window, transfixed by the messy green scrawl etched into the blue patterned wallpaper. Four letters repeating at random, a foreboding BRAKAKRABARKARABAKA that takes up the length and breadth of two entire walls. You don't know what to make of it. A dream mural in Jake's own hand, undoubtedly the key to some snarl in his psyche. But when you rip your eyes from the wallpaper and look at Jake instead, there's no hint on his face of the gravity that you feel in your gut when you look at those letters. He looks nearly as at peace as Jane had, calm and quiet and with that damn daring hint of the ruggedly manly you'd hoped was a trick of your webcam and not actual fact. You touch his hand, gentle and tentative and nothing more. You spend a long moment floating there watching and thinking, unpacking your life and the reality that you know these people, that your heart aches to finally—finally—be so close to them. But even if you're here in the room with them, while they sleep you are nothing more than a figment to their imaginations.
It hurts.
You don't stay as long as you intended. That's enough for a first visit; a first meeting. You fly back out to the letters in orbit around Prospit and fold yourself into the curve of the S. Hidden from sight, you concentrate on your Earth self, determined to comb every inch of the internet for some clue to unlocking the message scribbled into Jake's walls.
You visit back and forth for a month, and in that time Jane never shows any sign that she's changed. She doesn't sit up and start scrawling messages on her walls like Jake has. She still uses the new chat client, never once heeding your artfully casual warnings. It's brand loyalty, she says. She doesn't mind the ads, she says. You offer to send her the original bootleg copy of Trollian the troll girl sent you when she first contacted you, but Jane's happy with BettyBother. She hasn't fallen to Guy Fieri's shitty propaganda yet, so you hesitantly let it go for now. Her expression in her dreams never changes. You're terrified for the day that it does, but the troll girl assures you she will be fine. After two months of no change you try to convince yourself that you can trust her not to simply lie for your benefit.
Jake is the same as he always is, and no underhanded mention of the letters on his walls brings up any change in his demeanor. Your research turns up nothing, and neither troll you ask has anything useful to say about writing on the walls of a dreamer's room. So you let that go too, as much as you'd rather not. Instead you send Jake all four volumes of an indie carapace comic about a spider alien that won't be published until three hundred years in his future. He eats it up like candy.
Squarewave needs repairs. You patch up breaks in the concrete roofing. The light in the bathroom goes out and you spend three days tearing out the walls to find the short in the circuitry, plaster dust in your hair and spackle smudged into the whorls of your fingerprints. On one sparkling clear afternoon, you pick your way down the space-age steel struts your apartment perches on like a wading bird, and you sit on one of the cross beams, the water lapping just below your dangling bare toes. You fish because you can, because you can't live only on four hundred year old Doritos and apple juice and jars of Cheez Whiz and the pumpkins Roxy sends you sometimes. You pull up your nets and cast out your line, and when you hook something bigger than you'd ever imagined catching, you spend the entire long long day pulling in a tuna the size of Cal, balancing on the bare steel struts until ever muscle in your body aches from the battle and the cramping—six hours on your feet and concentrating so hard you lose track of what you're watching in your dreams. Later that night you flop into bed exhausted, sunburnt from head to toe and baking with the unnatural heat just beneath your skin. You can barely keep your eyes open. For the first time in ages, you fall in to a deep natural sleep instead of the half-awake drowsing you're used to.
Suddenly your dreams are crystal clear in a way they haven't been in over a year. No distractions, no feeling of half-reality. You can't even hear the waves lapping against the metal struts of your apartment. Everything is here and now and brash in-your-face in a way you'd forgotten existed. It's more unnerving than you ever thought it would be. The trickle-down whisper of the horrorterrors' aria of broken eternity rings like a distant bell in your dream room—this tower that you live in and sleep in, the whole structure held up to the heavens like a sacrifice from Derse to the Dark Gods. Seated on your purple bedspread, you can barely stand the sound of it. It crawls inside of you, unnerves you deep down in some secret place you'd forgotten you have. An imagined hollow just behind your eyes aches like a void waiting to be filled by some watchful monster. Twenty minutes of it and you're gagging, hunched over in your dream bed with your head cradled between your palms as you itch and itch with an animal instinct to flee.
It takes all your concentration to do it, but you slip away carefully, as quietly as you can. Prospit has become your escape. The place you go when you can't stand the political pressure of Derse any longer. You fly the black of space between the two moons with the dischord aria fading on your heels, cloying like reaching tentacles, and it's only when the blue of Skaia is bright in front of you that the corkscrew agony in your head finally expires. Jake's room is soft blue and familiar haphazard green scrawling, and you want nothing more than to flop onto the floor next to his bed and listen to the ringing of the mail bells for a few minutes—strike the echo of the horrorterrors from your mind entirely.
Except that when you coast in the window, you find a golden letter folded and marked with the Prospitian Seal resting on the table next to Jake's bed. With your name on it.
You nearly run for the Veil to never come back. For the first time in over a year, you wish you could wake up. You wish you didn't have to be here, that you could open your eyes back on Earth and pop out of existence, a ghost of a memory in Prospitian lore. But you can't. You're awake for better or for worse, and your stomach tries its best to sink through your soles. You float just in the window with your heart hammering as hard as it was when you left Derse atmosphere. You're frozen halfway in, halfway out, fingers clutching the molding as you flip through options, your head an old fashioned film reel running to overdrive.
The Prospitians know you're here. They've found you out, which is something you should have expected but you thought you'd covered your trail and played the sleeper routine to the nines. You thought you'd been careful every time you swooped into the atmosphere, every time you sat perched in Jane's windows squinting up at her prophetic clouds, trying for all you were worth to see the future the troll girl insisted was gilded in their silver linings. You'd been careful. They hadn't seen you acting awake. (Because the moment they saw you, it was inevitable that the information would make it back to Derse. Inevitable that the Empress would hear, and then one night you would find her in your dream room with a predator's smile and a weapon in her hands, ready to play the long spy-breaking pain game until she cracked your head open and stitched her living strings in place of your agency.)
Now there's proof on Jake's end table that they know you're already here. You've never had someone notice you in your life. You don't know what to make of this brand new hurdle in your path, the panic fluttering in your chest until you tamp it down and step inside, trembling fingers lifting the note gently to tear open the beautiful wax seal:
Welcome to Prospit, Prince of Heart. Skaia hints that you have enjoyed your visits so far, and for this I am glad. It has long been a hope of my kingdom for our native dreamers to awaken and walk the streets freely, and to meet with their Queen. Alas, that has yet to happen, and often when I look to Skaia, the things I am shown are bleak. A great political uprising has happened to Derse. Our terrible sister city has seen its Queen usurped and its government overhauled. There is no one for you to meet safely there.
It would be an honor to both our moons if you would come to audience in the Prospitian throne room. I would like to finally meet one of my dreamers, for it seems with the disappearance of my sister Queen I have inherited four dreamers instead of two. Please come. Your presence will be secreted as it has since you first began your visits. There is nothing to fear. I look forward to it.
It would be an honor to both our moons if you would come to audience in the Prospitian throne room. I would like to finally meet one of my dreamers, for it seems with the disappearance of my sister Queen I have inherited four dreamers instead of two. Please come. Your presence will be secreted as it has since you first began your visits. There is nothing to fear. I look forward to it.
You read it three times. Your mouth is dry. The script is beautiful. There's nothing foreboding about it. And the thing is that it's the absolute opposite of what you'd been expecting. White moves first, never black. You're invading out of turn and you know it. You'd expected declarations of war and threats of bodily harm. You'd expected pawns with pikes to burst in on you and haul you to the dungeons. You hadn't expected a summons from the Queen—your Queen, as she claims you, redeemed out of the tragedy of Derse.
(You're not sure you want to be redeemed. What is that bullshit?) But part of you aches deep inside, because she wants to meet you. She will keep your presence secret, and for a moment you get caught up in memories of the troll girl's stories, in the sweetness and honest trust of that alternate reality queen. Awake and alive, she wants to see the cast of your eyes and she wants to acknowledge you. You've never met another person on Earth. You've never had someone offer you that equal ground in your dreams. What if this one is the same? What if—for the first time in your life—someone looks at you and sees you, sees you as a whole person and not simply a mascot trapped in a dream.
It's hard. You spend twenty minutes rooted to the spot, tearing your heart to shreds to see the way your desires fall. Jake rolls over in bed. Your eyes dart to him as you stand there, your hands trembling, your throat thick with the indecision. In the silence you go over memories of your brother; snatches of extra features hidden in the broken pixels of his shitty DVDs. Video, the cut of his suit and the shape of his jaw, meeting deadlines, telling stories that seemed like nothing but would mirror the end of the world. He stepped up and countered the overthrow of his government with the exact kind of subliminal messaging and careful persuasion that the Condesce was using. He didn't stay down. He didn't run and hide. He took up his sword and faced her head on, determined to tear down her regime and bring about revolution or to die trying.
It's a legacy that casts one hell of a fucking shadow. One you're standing smack in the middle of.
(And this isn't the same situation at all, but that's what you can't stop thinking about. That's the ideal that keeps your feet on the carpet. Because for once in your life you have the offer of something that's worth political power. Something you can use the way your bro used his chosen media of rebellion. The White Queen has claimed you as her own, and with all her goodness and all her kind teachings, there's a chance you could finally learn a thing or two about the rules of this game of the century. And with that knowledge plot the absolute downfall of the Condesce.)
"How should I play this, Jake?" you whisper. You can't remember the last time you spoke in your dreams.
He's not awake. He doesn't answer. But you know what he would say if he could hear your question, if he could grasp the magnitude of it. Life's a friggin' adventure. Choose a path and see where it bloody well leads.
The note flutters in the wind as you leave the room, the pretty golden paper clutched in your fingers. You fly out over the city, a gaudy smudge of purple against the blue of Skaia. The palace isn't somewhere you're familiar with. The eerie similarity to Derse's city planning is mapped all over Prospit like the opposite side of a coin. You've stayed in the slums and the marketplaces on Derse, anywhere full of people and far from the bishops and the knights who were sure to come prying. Far from the Condesce, who you've never trusted not to come investigate on her own if you just gave her the convenience.
On Prospit, you hover in silence above the architecture, white faces turning to watch you as you veer off the paths you've stuck to since you first started visiting. Time to break the pattern. Time to take a chance and step outside the mold. Roll the dice for revolution. You to float down to the beautiful golden tiled mosaics of the plaza just outside the palace and finally let your soles touch, let the clip of your shoes ring against the smooth tile as you stride forward with the first real agency you've shown in your dreams, maybe in your life. The note is in your hand to back you up. (Inside you're trembling, but this is a power play, and even if you're terrified there's no turning back. Time to own it.)
"I'm here to meet with the Queen," you tell the guards at the door, eleven years old and your voice all squeaky and so young. Your hands shake as you show them the letter, the Queen's personal seal, this beautiful thing that grants you access whereas if you'd tried this yesterday without it, they would have battered you down to the pavement and only scraped you off again when your cell was prepared.
The guards nod you through. A whirlwind of gold architecture and white faces, a pawn leading you through the corridors with fast tapping steps. She'd set this up. She'd had people waiting for you to bring you through all the right doors. And then the pawn stops and motions you in through two magnificent doors, a massive guard on each side. Prospitians looking at you, staring at you, seeing the blink of your eyes behind your shades—you're awake and everyone in this room knows it. Power play or not, you've never been so scared.
"Prince?"
The carpet is lush and gold. Your footsteps are muted. The Queen sits on her beautiful throne five yards away, and you're frozen in the doorway, staring at the knights and their weapons, the grandeur and the prestige that's inlaid in every shining surface like nothing you've ever seen before. You don't belong here. You're a kid asleep back in his apartment on Earth with all the stucco cracked and chipping off, with the dirty threadbare carpets and the tired, worn look of all of it, four hundred years past its grave and still standing only because of you. For a second you can't move, hands balled into fists, a knot in your throat. You'd be greeted exactly the same on Derse, swept in the big double doors, ushered into the throne room and up to the queen; the Empress replacement with her predator's smile and her evil shark eyes and the knots of her hair all twisted up in a psychic power with absolutely no rival. She'd welcome you into her throne room, the last little human she ever did see, and then she'd pry your mind apart and warp your very flesh with her biotech and turn you into a terrible, perfect weapon at her beck and call.
This Queen is nothing like that. You look at her and there's patience on her face with a hint of worry, her hands folded calmly in her lap. She's waiting for you. Her guards aren't hovering, prepped to haul you to the dungeon and string you up by your wrists until she condescends to grace you with her presence and let the brainwashing begin. The White Queen will let you come forward at your own pace—and everything about that is bullshit because you don't need to be coddled. You've been taking care of yourself for eleven straight years and it's long past the time you desired a parental figure to step into your life. You don't need her. You don't need someone to redeem you, nor do you need a mentor to take you under her wing. You've already got three people under your own. You're self sufficient. For a moment you consider turning on your heel and leaving just to punctuate that fact.
(But you know she's not coddling you, even if your pride is blowing everything out of proportion. She's giving you the opening to make the choice you will make—not that she expects you to make or that destiny demands you should make. You are on the threshold of the rest of your life, and she refolds her hands, patient to let you choose which door you will step through here.)
You turn and you walk those remaining five yards. The carpet swallows your footsteps. You don't do the whole full-body stoop kneel-down bow you've seen in a hundred movies. You dip your head respectfully, and then you speak:
"It's an honor to meet you, your Highness, and I'm sure you have a whole script you're planning to go through for this. But let me cut to the chase. Derse is fucked. The whole session is fucked. I've been doing recon as well as I can on Derse, but fact of the matter is, she's slowly turning the moon into a weapon she can use against you and your people, and probably even the eventual big bad boss at the end of this game. She's out for blood. She's trying to derail my session, and she's going to come through you to do it." Your mouth is dry. Everyone is looking at you. You don't think your heart has ever beaten so fast before. "I never knew my Queen, but I am still the prince of Derse, and I sure as hell am mad about what that bitch of an alien Empress did to my moon. I want her empire in tatters, and I want to be the one at the helm, guiding it all. So take this as a formal request from the last uncompromised remnant of Derse. I don't have the power to take her down, but you do. Would you be willing to collaborate?"
There's not a sound in the room. The silence rings. And then the White Queen smiles the kind of mean smile you'd never imagined a Prospitian could make, and she says, "I was very much hoping you would make that request. Yes, Prince of Heart. I accept."