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[lifetothefullest]

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[lifetothefullest]

[Lance glances up from finally cutting his own pancake, giving Ian a faintly amused look.]

Which part, that I haven't had pogs in like twenty years?

[But okay, for real--]

It was called the Door, and it was pretty much how I described it. It was a way to move between different dimensions, but it had its own sort of sentience and was alive in some sense. It was also broken for a long time, which didn't help how erratically it behaved.

[wittingly]

[ Lance earns an equivalently amused look, wry but patient. Hilarious, but seriously though. ]

So... just so that I'm on the same page--

[ Said with a hand out, palm toward the counter top.

He's pretty sure he is, but he wants the honor of saying it all out loud so it sounds maximum amounts of insane. ]

The last time you were transported from home, it was by a semi-sentient broken Eldritch multi-dimensional being called a door, which would occasionally rob your apartment and give you your stuff back.

[ Is that... is that it? ]

[lifetothefullest]

[Give him a moment to think about that and remember the times that items from home showed up in Hadriel, but--]

Yeah, pretty much. We hardly ever got anything from home, though; mostly it was people coming and going.

[wittingly]

[ Just, like, the most... tentative look of comprehension and understanding.

Like, he gets it, but... does he though? Does anyone? ]

What the fuck, man.

[ It's more a statement than a question. It's not really something Lance can answer, just. The multiverse is fucking weird and enormous, and his handful of times dropping acid didn't prepare him for it. ]

[lifetothefullest]

I haven't even gotten into the emotion-sucking aliens and their nemeses, the ultra-logical cyborgs.

[Said with enough humor that it's clear he very much gets how weird this is and how weird it sounds; it's been a few years and he's gotten used to this nonsense, but when he first arrived in Hadriel it had been quite an adjustment.]

[wittingly]

[ Sheer, unadulterated amusement barely filtered by casual-calm demeanor. The sad thing is it's fucking possible, it's completely possible. The universe is fucking insane. ]

Kyna almost had me convinced Einstein was a pixie where she's from, so I wouldn't laugh too hard just yet. You never know, you never know.

[lifetothefullest]

[Lance laughs a little at that, because--]

I wasn't joking. That was legitimately part of it.

[But that said, he has to ask about that other comment.]

She said Einstein was a pixie? I actually could have believed that too; her world's weird.

[wittingly]

[ He... there's a moment wherein it's obvious he's legitimately trying to discern whether or not Lance is kidding about not kidding, because that... fucking... That sentence was absurd. ]

Yeah, sure, her world is--

[ Wow get a little perspective man. ]

What you just said is the most insane shit I've ever heard. Like, I'm on the fence about whether or not you're really just one of those crazy ladies that wander down allies yelling at cats back home.

[lifetothefullest]

[Lance gives him the time to think about it, taking another bite of pancake, and is faintly amused by the disbelief. Sure, it's totally warranted, but what a way of putting it.]

I know it sounds totally ridiculous, but there are at least two other people here who were also in Hadriel with me, and who can corroborate. Either we're all cat ladies or none of us are.

[wittingly]

I hear they move in herds.

[ He proposes helpfully. Cat ladies, that is.

But on a more serious note; ]

Who else? Not Kyna right? I feel like that would've come up by now.

[lifetothefullest]

[Lance is expecting Ian to ask who, but not necessarily to guess and definitely not to guess Kyna. So he can't quite catch himself in time to prevent his eyes from flickering and his smile faltering, but it's only for a brief moment.

Hopefully, it'll just go unnoticed, especially as he answers quickly in an attempt to immediately deflect.]

Have you met Nate? He's one of them. Another is Drake--he's not related to Nate, Drake's his first name--and then there's Cecily too.

[wittingly]

[ He puffs out a soft laugh. ]

Yeah, I know him and Drake both.

[ Not so much Cecily, but him and First-Name-Drake are — is it still called eskimo brothers? ]

Jesus. I mean, I believed you — mostly — but it's nuts that you guys have like a club of people.

[lifetothefullest]

[Okay, maybe he got away with it; either way he'll just move on.]

Yeah, it's really weird. I think we all came from the same point in time in Hadriel too, so that's also strange.

[wittingly]

I feel like if I were, like, forty percent smarter I could stare into the matrix and see what the pattern is.

[ Because there has to be one. Too many people are coming in clusters for it to be entirely sporadic — on top of that, the vast majority of the people here seem to be from within the same hundred year span, if they're from earth.

But as it stands, his peak intellectual level doesn't even allow him to recreate Sunny D. ]

[lifetothefullest]

A lot of people tried, in Hadriel. We never did figure it out, although I remember one of the gods saying something about the Door liking chaos? Something like that.

[It was one of those things he's pretty sure he heard second or third hand, but it fit. The Door liked to pull in people who were either prone to causing chaos, or were in a chaotic moment in their lives at the point they arrived from.]

[wittingly]

[ He puffs out a dry laugh. ]

Yeah, I guess that tracks. My world was absolute fucking bonkers chaos.

[ If they're operating under the assumption that the motivation here is the same, that is. Who the fuck knows? ]

[lifetothefullest]

In what way?

[He has to ask with a comment like that, and presumes that by Ian bringing it up he's okay to talk about it; if not, Lance will just let him dodge the question however he chooses to.]

[wittingly]

Alien apocalypse.

[ Announced brightly

Because that's, you know, what ya do. ]

[lifetothefullest]

[Okay, seems alright talking about it indeed, though Lance considers that a moment before--]

And the Eldritch abomination alternate reality portal came as a surprise.

[If your home world is invaded by aliens, it seems like that sort of thing would be less shocking. But that's a totally rhetorical question, since he's way more interested in--]

What happened?

[wittingly]

If it takes more than two words to say I think I'm justified in staying surprised.

[ Thank you very much.

Alien Apocalypse
Eldridge abomination reality portal.

Slightly different shades. ]

But anyway, they landed and decided we were a piece of shit species that didn't deserve the earth. And you know what, you can't really fault their logic. They pretty much set up shop, subjugated humanity, and started stripping out anything useful for their fleet.

[lifetothefullest]

I could hyphenate the first and last two pairs of words, if that helps.

[But as for the rest of that--]

They judged that humanity wasn't deserving of Earth in what respect?

[Because he can guess, but he wants to be sure before he says what he's thinking.]

[wittingly]

They didn't really elaborate much, it wasn't a conversation. More like an announcement.

[ Not for lack of attempted dialogue by more than one entity around the globe. ]

Based on what we figured out about their culture later on, I think it's because we were wasteful. That whole entire island made out of trash in the pacific probably didn't help our case. That's just our best guess — my best guess, whatever that's worth.

[lifetothefullest]

[That's along the lines of what Lance was expecting considering Ian's comment about not being able to fault their logic. But faulting logic is what Lance does, and so he has to say--]

Declaring they don't approve of how humanity was using the planet's resources in order to provide some justification to use them themselves seems like pretty brazen hypocrisy.

[wittingly]

[ He shrugs a shoulder, kind of at a loss. ]

I didn't think to point that out to them.

[ But something Ian's thought about is how he's never seen them once waste anything. Never heard any stories of it. Every scrap of rubble, everything they pulled from the ground, they never left anything behind.

They don't even bury or burn the bodies of the people they declared unfit to live, nobody knows what happens to those people they put down.

He's got theories.

You gotta feed the herd something. ]

Unfortunately there wasn't much of a cultural exchange. People have tried. Wanted to know what deciding factors were, whether or not they've ever found any planet worthy, what they're gonna do with what's left of the earth when they're finished. They're not interested in talking. Doesn't matter who you are, anyone who got caught wound up in the same position as everyone else.

[ Overcrowded, under-resourced prison camps. ]

[lifetothefullest]

[Lance is quiet at all of that, listening both to the words and to how Ian says them, noting the change in tone and scaling back the flippancy in response. Instead he gives a quiet sigh at the implications of all of that, offering sincerely--]

I'm sorry. That's an awful situation, and that you can't even get any answers just makes it worse.