#you get: incomprehensible void time with your alternate selves

[tekras-iszovh]

// hey guys new writing or whatever. enjoy this mess. i took 30 minutes to do this. if there are writing errors / it feels like a ramble, you're right there are. i'm not fixing it. this is gonna be sooo disjointed because it's more about saying it and less about it being good

CLUSTERFUCK. - 1609 words. The tables turn when it comes to doomed selves. Esoteric and incomprehensible abilities come into the fray.

You weren't ever sure why your fourth self was the one you decided was so special that you were to stick with it and develop it, among hundreds of others. Maybe it's because it was the first time you truly left the trollian form behind, many sweeps ago, from your perspective, or maybe it's because it's the first time you had that kind of control. Is self-control a big deal to you, or do you simply like being able to take more risks with it? Being limited to one body, you always thought, was a recipe for ultimate destruction. Capacity for disaster.

Either way, is there symbolism to four? Is it still your fourth body if you've replaced every part of it tens of times over? Ship of Theseus, meet Body of Tekras. Internally, you keep denominators. It's probably TK-04-33a or something by now. No, it definitely is, but you don't include those later numbers in your externally-showing tech. It takes from the look of 'having your shit together' that you oh so desire. You never believed in open betas. Or tester builds. At least, you never integrate something into your wider network of selves until you're sure it works. How many split-off selves, doomed selves, have you created just to use a body you know doesn't work? Isn't finished? You've lost count.

At least you know they aren't… They aren't dead. They're erased, there's a difference. You would never let a self die, no. It's too open-ended. Dead trolls, even if they're literal purposeless clones, they show up in places. You remember dreaming among them, once. Bubbles, or something, right? It's hazy, it's been so long. Even then, you promised yourself you'd stay vigilant. You saw what happened when you let yourself - your dead selves - split up and grow powerful. There's a lot of Doom to sap from when the self is from a doomed timeline. It makes them so, so powerful, and the only way to stop them is to prevent them in the first place.

Time travel is nasty stuff, really. You never could work your head around it, but it's usefulness is understated, massively. Stopped a lot of shit.

Yes, stopped. Not moved, not transferred to an irrelevant timeline - stopped. As you wished. You can't let yourself go like that.

The next time you visit the dreambubbles, you scan, and you're glad to find that not a copy exists. You send a few bots out to do extra double-checks, triple-checks - nothing. Good.

You get back in your ship, your extra bodies get back in their transport pod, you move on. From the outside, your ship is a haze of green, and your body is a dark, hazy mess. Some kind of villain, no doubt? Maybe. Scanning for something… it's intimidating.

You never felt it, but you'd figure that maybe using Doom abilities to scan and obliterate alternate selves' canonicity would get a little intimidating… but you've no reason to use it on others. No, no way. Of course not. It's not your business, you know? You LIKE other people, which is much more than can be said about the guys you prevent.

You pass by some terrors, creatures of the void in the area between the furthest ring, dreambubbles, a wide array of incipispheres from games from various universes, and then pass through a barrier between universes itself. Space goes all hazy. With a jolt of force, you send yourself into hypervelocity, firing yourself back into reality, your own.

After a few minutes, you get the thing slowed down and approach a planet - a city - a tall building - a landing zone. A surprisingly quick process, and you're already getting out - the most tedious part of the whole process is the airlock, which takes five minutes of doing nothing.

You get out, take a brisk walk up some metallic stairs, enter a door, say hello to the people in the office building you pass through, and enter an empty head-office room. You throw yourself onto the desk, laying flat, documents and paper-weights and a very advanced-looking trollian computer flying off the desk. A crack is visible in the table.

You'll get that replaced in an hour or so. It's not the first time. In fact, every day you seem to destroy something a little more when you get here.

Every day you make this journey. Something compels you. Is it the power? The urge to progress? Is this what that act of self-sacrifice, self-destruction many sweeps back gets you - the immense power to destroy? You don't know why you keel to it.

But you continue to.

You grip the table, and it burns under your hand with a hiss, and a fizzle, then cracks as you firm your grip. It doesn't turn to ash, but seems to slowly degrade - shrink, crumble, melt? As if things are happening in a vastly sped up fast-forward of time. A life cycle. The smoke burns a deep green, and you smirk to yourself a little. Ha. You're lucky you never put fire alarms in this place, you could do this all day. Maybe you will.

You grip your hand, to try the same thing. It doesn't destroy yourself, but the smoke generates. You hold yourself firm. It doesn't do anything, but the haze grows.

It's funny how fast a room can fill up with fumes, and all it does is cloud your vision of the moons of this planet moving outside. The table has crumbled by now, the walls are deeply stained and cracked, the door is off it's hinges, the windows deeply dusty and stained, cracked but never seeming to break - the air in the room is nothing more than a deep green swirl, and your eyes barely light a foot, hell, a couple inches ahead of you, and you take some breaths.

It's a nasty scent. Receptors disabled. It doesn't smell of much, but it incites just a little something. Stand up, pace around. You glow a little. The smoke swirls around you, as if it was magnetic. Ferrofluid? Almost.

You head outside, and it follows you. Up to your ship, in the open air, and it stays attached, though seems to leave a trail of deeply aged material around it, as if leaving everything it touches to it's ultimate fate. Walls rendered mossy, or crumbled, as if they were fated some day to be perpetually in that state. Ceilings fell behind you, ground crumbled after you walked on it. The metal walkway collapsed thousands of meters into the clouds below, after your smoky footsteps touch them… but, when it touches you, it does nothing. Contact, but the ship stays intact, as if nothing, too. The colors inside the ship change in rapid succession, the naming of it seems to shift among lettering only vaguely recognisable. The computer system of the ship remains unchanged, as you intended.

You take another deep breath, and feel a burn down your fake esophagus, through your fake GI tract, in your robotic joints, and through every seam you built into this thing. Crackle. Your body's surface shimmers in place, as if everything is new, and then old. New once more. Different, and the same. Constant change. You feel yourself almost get pulled apart, and you feel yourself feel more whole than you have in sweeps. You get down on a knee, then onto all fours, then you lay flat. After an hour of hissing, sizzling, you lay wide-spread on the ground, almost exhausted - if a robot can be - looking altogether the same as you did before, and the smoke that once stuck to you seeming to have expended itself. Burnt itself out, but on what? You struggle to understand. It was… advancing fate… to it's end.

You guess, maybe it never found one? For yourself. It explored all it could. Possibilities you don't even know of yet - and passed so quickly that you can't even identify.

Your diagnostics are going crazy. All kinds of warnings. You'd think you were dying out here.

But you aren't, and it all seems to resolve. Every error checks out - every damage warning mysteriously reverted… or, well. Fixed itself, as fate intended.

Then you look to your left, and a small green hiss is emerging from your shoulder, and the seams of the craft around you, and then your chest. You furrow your brows, and then they stop.

You see a white flash, and the next thing you know, you wake up in your room at your compound.

TK-04 CHASSIS - TK-04-35c: awake.tk +recoveryprotocol

The first thing you see is a video recording of your body exploding, as well as the ship, and the building next to it crumbling. Recorded by… your ship, and then outside cameras from other buildings... and one other. You can't tell where it came from...

You check through other footage - no foul play - but… you don't remember doing this to yourself. But there is a figure in the background of a few of these shots, something deep and hazy. Glowing green. Seams in places… Same horns? It looks like… it almost looks like you - but you know that you're the only one of yourself you allow to persist. Wait. Is that where the camera came from? Did he plant this footage?

Fuck, fuck, you know. You figured you'd be your own biggest enemy. You're not the hunter anymore.

Is this how it feels to be on the wrong side of the coin? Tick, tock.

Of course the fucker would give you a taste of the ultimate power of fate before he killed you. That's EXACTLY something you'd do. Of course you would.

[britishassistant]

Hey isn't today Villain AU Yuu's b'day? I read it somewhere, but if so. They are Pisces!!! Just like meh.

Thank you for the ask, dear anon!

And yes, it is! It’s taken from my Villainous Paranoiac Yuu’s birthday and also applies to Reporter/The Prefect Yuu as well! (I figured it’d be cool to have it be the day after the official TWST launch date)

So yes, they’re all Pisces! Just like you!

“So you’re fish.” Grim says from your lap.

You don’t really like the weird gleam he’s getting in his eye. From the way the more put-together-looking older you catches your eye, neither do they.

The nervous-wreck version of you just keeps trying to merge with the chair they’re in.

You don’t suppose you can blame them. You’re running ragged after barely two years under the stupid birdbrain of a headmaster. You can barely imagine growing up under him.

Part of you wonders whether it’d be worse than your birth father already is. The rest of you decides it won’t be worth it to find out.

The reporter-you sighs. “Well, I mean. Technically, yes? But it’s not a real fish, Grim, it’s just a star sign that historically people have thought looks like one. It’s not tuna.”

“Well, what are ya then? Mackerel? Salmon?” Aaand he’s drooling now. Great. Wonderful! Your cat’s going to try to eat your face while you sleep.

“I-I thought I was, or-or we were shrimp.” The supervillain-you pipes up.

At your uncomprehending look they hunch in on themselves. “I-it’s what F-floyd says, after all…”

Reporter-you doesn’t face-palm, but one of their hands stops fiddling with the ratty old fedora they’ve got and twitches up like they want to.

Instead they reach out and gently pat supervillain-you’s shoulder. “He does that to you too, huh?”

They actually sit up a bit straighter at that, nodding so rapidly their top hat seems in danger of falling off. “Y-yeah! He’s, he’s got seafood nicknames for all my minions too…”

Grim is licking his lips.

You reach out and poke his side. “Oi. You try anything, and I’ll have your belly for a fur-rug.”

“Fgnah! How dare you?! Betrayal, by my own minion!” He screeches, outraged.

“You’re the one plotting to eat me.” You deadpan. “It’s not illegal if it’s self-defense.”

“I-I’m pretty sure that’s not what legal self-defense is…” Supervillain-you pipes up.

You shoot them another Look. “Doesn’t your job involve you breaking literally every law you can?”

“Exactly, so they’d know better than you about this.” Reporter-you quips back. “You are just a high schooler after all.”

Your jaw clenches. They smile sweetly at you.

“H-hey, hey!” Supervillain-you actually puts their hands up between the two of you, like there was some kind of physical confrontation going on. “Let’s not fight. That won’t solve anything here.”

“That’s right, fgnah!” Grim puffs up, as proud as any general. “We gotta figure out where the heck we are so my minion and I can get home and finally have some dinner!”

You all look around. Apart from the three chairs and two weird versions of adult you, the scenery here is…hard to track. You know it should be there, that it should be something, but it keeps…shifting. Slowly but surely changing, almost fluid somehow, details and landmarks you felt sure were there before slipping through your mind like water in a way that’s making your head start to ache.

“That might be easier said than done.” You mutter to yourselves in unison.