cheryl blossom (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sweetwater) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
elnysa2017-10-05 09:48 pm
sweetwater) wrote in elnysa2017-10-05 09:48 pm
video | un: CherylBombshell
[ Cheryl is sick. despite that, she's done her hair and makeup and dressed herself in a red silk robe. a lot of effort went into her appearance, but it does little to hide the fact that she's unwell. she looks tired. at home she was a pro at snapchat, and she holds the camera out at arms length. all that's missing is the puppy filter! ]
By now you've all heard of the great tragedy that's befallen us. I was caught right in the middle of everything, an innocent bystander in someone's very cruel plan to shake us all to the core. I don't scare easily and I don't wilt, but I could use your help in this trying time.
First: obviously i am confined to bed until I recover. You can entertain me by chatting with me and telling me your stories. Make sure they aren't boring.
And secondly: If you're able-bodied, perhaps you can avenge me. [ she pauses. smiles. ] Us. It's the right thing to do.
[ and as she ends the video: ] Hashtag Olympia Strong. [ yes, that's right. hashtag. this is Cheryl Blossom, after all. ]
By now you've all heard of the great tragedy that's befallen us. I was caught right in the middle of everything, an innocent bystander in someone's very cruel plan to shake us all to the core. I don't scare easily and I don't wilt, but I could use your help in this trying time.
First: obviously i am confined to bed until I recover. You can entertain me by chatting with me and telling me your stories. Make sure they aren't boring.
And secondly: If you're able-bodied, perhaps you can avenge me. [ she pauses. smiles. ] Us. It's the right thing to do.
[ and as she ends the video: ] Hashtag Olympia Strong. [ yes, that's right. hashtag. this is Cheryl Blossom, after all. ]
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That makes things a bit more difficult.
Happy stories were in rather short supply where I came from.
We should have had a happy ending for you, with the way everything wrapped up, but then the whole Storm thing happened and wrecked it all.
Sorry to disappoint.
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You could tell your story and change the ending.
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It might be therapeutic, even.
Fine, then.
I recommend you make yourself comfortable.
I'll try to keep things relatively brief, but I'm admittedly more of a Dickens than a Hemmingway.
This may get long.
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1/2
There will be no "once upon a time" here, for time can be a nebulous thing in this story. Assigning order to the flow of events is something of a Herculean task to ask of a narrator. Still, all stories must begin somewhere, so we shall begin with this:
The world ended.
Lamenting that fact is pointless, for it was as inevitable as the sun rising each day up until the moment it didn't anymore. Nothing could have prevented this end - an end that came not by Storm, but by meteors and fire, the crumbling of the planet in the midst of the death of the universe. All universes have a natural lifespan dictated by some unknowable force, reality tidying up by cleaning out that which has run its course, and ours had simply reached the end of that lifespan.
But if you raze a forest to the ground, seeds will remain to take root in the fertile ash and soil. A system for propagation is intertwined with the system for destruction. The infinity mechanism of reality is a forest fire, and the pinecones that might release their seeds in its heat take the form of a game.
It's impossible to guess at just how many people attempted to play this game. A great many surely did, and it's almost certain that most failed to win. Perhaps there were one or two or even a handful of other groups that played and emerged victorious. Like the various species of animals that reproduce in large numbers, the ultimate point is that with such great numbers, at least a few might survive to pass on their genes. But those hypothetical other victors don't matter in this story.
The group we concern ourselves with here were always fated to play this game of universal death and rebirth. Paradoxically, the game itself was responsible for their existing at all, and their roles were prescribed for them from the very beginning: Heir of Breath, Seer of Light, Knight of Time, and Witch of Space.
Their obstacles in the beginning were many, but they stumbled their way through the mire of difficulties and succeeded in their first tasks to begin the game. Success to that extent would allow players to escape their dying world into the space in which the bulk of the game would take place, something of a minor universe in itself. The players would find themselves on new worlds tailored to them and their personal quests, all centered around a battlefield wherein the forces of light and darkness would wage war.
But it was in these first steps, during the escape from the universe's death, that the outcome of our heroes' game was decided for them. Simultaneously because of their mistakes and through no fault of their own, a villain was created that would prove impossible to defeat. The demon shattered the typical structure of the game. It spilled oceans of blood, tore the game apart, and would eventually escape that session of the game into another - one that had been played by a group from a different dying world altogether. The players of that session found their victory stolen from them by this unexpected foe right when they had won, and were forced to flee to the edges of their game's universe. There, they managed to establish contact with our heroes via messages unrestricted by the traditional flow of time, sometimes harrying and sometimes helping, and retroactively they contributed to the creation of the demon.
In contact with these foreign players, faced with an insurmountable enemy, and knowing in advance their inevitable failure, our heroes worked stubbornly against their fate. The Witch sacrificed her dreaming self to save her brother, the Heir, so that he might wake and dream as she had. The Knight learned to weaponize time and exploited every rule and loophole possible to give them some advantage. The Seer raged against the game itself, putting her faith in dark gods as she tore her world apart searching for answers. The Heir was equal parts tricked and guided to his death by one of the otherworldly players, ascending to godhood and gaining great power.
The demon, however, tore through them all the same. The Heir was killed before he could even make a stand against their foe. The Knight was gunned down. The Seer dueled the demon but was struck down despite all the dark magics fueling her. Fortunately, death in this game is not always so final as one might expect. The Heir rose again thanks to his godhood, his death deemed neither just nor heroic. The Knight and Seer were each revived with a kiss from a friend, a trick that could be used only once per player provided they still had a dreaming self left to act as their "extra life". Only the Witch had been left untouched, as a part of what had given the demon its overwhelming power also forced upon it a strange fondness that wouldn't let it harm her.
2/2
I'll leave you with that first half to read while I take a quick break and work on the rest.
You'll have to forgive me if it's all unreadable garbage; I'm not doing much editing and I'm admittedly sick myself.
Still, it's a decent writing exercise, if nothing else.
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1/3
I do try.
Anyway...
2/3
Meanwhile, the Seer had learned of the source of their enemy's powers. With the aid of her brother, the Knight, a course was plotted to find and destroy it. But this mission was certain to result in the death of whoever carried it out. Both of them without any second chances left, the Knight claimed the mission for himself so his sister could theoretically escape their failed game and the resetting of the universe with the others. But the Seer knocked him out and stole away with their ship to enact this suicidal plot herself, convinced her life was better thrown away than his.
In his dreams, the Knight saw his sister in peril, apprehended by an assassin from the dark kingdom who'd stolen away on the ship, and he woke and gave chase to come to her aid. He managed to catch up to the ship and rescue her, cleaving the assassin's head from his shoulders. But once together again, neither the Seer or Knight would turn back and allow the other to complete the mission alone. They'd argued and debated, but neither wanted to let the other die in their stead. So they went together.
On her own world, the Witch worked to prepare the seed for a new universe. Her life was tragically cut short, however, by another agent of the dark kingdom. Seeing her dead and still cursed with love for her, the demon lashed out in a rage at the murderer before carrying her body away to the stone slab of her Quest Bed, where one had to die in order to ascend to godhood as the Heir had. The demon laid her out on the slab so that she too might live again as a goddess, before turning its sights back on the destruction of everything.
And the Witch did indeed ascend and live once more. Revived and suddenly more powerful than could be imagined, she quickly turned to manipulating space itself to aid the group. The Witch shrank the very planets the game had created for them to carry with her, seized an abandoned ship of the light kingdom, and teleported her brother the Heir to her side aboard it. From there, she opened a window for them in the universe itself and launched their ship through it to escape the game session as it fell apart around them.
Elsewhere, beyond the edges of time and space where their foe's power was supposed to lie, the Knight and Seer traveled deep into the core of their ship to deploy a bomb, its countdown linked to the death of both their own universe and that of their friends' from another world. There, they found their own Quest Beds waiting for them. The pair stood atop their slabs and watched the timer count down to the end of everything, and were engulfed in the explosion that followed.
But they had been tricked, and the explosion only served to create the very power source they had come to destroy. There, beyond time and space, the Green Sun came into being, and thus it had always existed.
From within it, however, the Knight and Seer emerged, ascended themselves to godhood. And the creation of the Green Sun also served as a guiding light by which their friends from another world were able to find them, in that void beyond space and time where even the gap between separate universes could be crossed. Their foreign friends were a ragtag group now; their party had all survived their session of the game, but in their hiding place at the edge of the universe they had fallen apart and now perhaps half their original number remained. Another two of them stayed behind there at the Green Sun. The Knight and Seer joined with the rest of them on the meteor that had served as their ship, and the two that stayed used psychic abilities to launch their makeshift ship through the void on a course that would eventually let them meet back up with the Heir and Witch.
That journey would take three years.
3/3 lmao i am so sorry
One more part, I think.
[why is her life such a long and convoluted clusterfuck...]
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[ Cheryl thought she'd been through Some Shit but wooooooow ]
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1/2
Now then, the hopefully much anticipated final part...
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Meanwhile, the equivalent trip for the rest of our heroes on their golden ship was struck by tragedy early on. A mysterious accident resulted in the Heir's death, and the Witch was left to complete the three year journey alone.
The point of reuniting would be a new session of the game, one played by individuals both familiar and not. The Heir had succeeded in activating the Scratch before their escape, so the universe had successfully been reset. It's end still came, of course, but this time a different set of players fled its destruction into the game: younger versions of our original heroes' guardians from an alternate timeline. Their session was rendered dead and void before they could even begin due to outside interference, but the Witch brought with her the elements of their game that might still make it fruitful.
All the mismatched players came together in the dead session: the Knight, Seer and Witch, their friends from another world, their guardians from the reset universe. And joining them as well was the Heir once more, jumping in from a doomed alternate timeline after having meddled with the current one to ensure it didn't meet the same fate. All together, their only remaining obstacle was a host of various villains that had accumulated: their original demon, as well as multiple alternate versions of the same individual from the various different universes; the tyrant empress of their alien friends' destroyed homeworld; a time-traveling cosmic monster and his assortment of minions.
The battles that ensued were chaotic and not without casualties, but when the dust settled all foes had been defeated. The players regrouped to facilitate the final steps after having finally beaten the game: the seed of a new universe was planted and blossomed, and a dead world our heroes' guardians had escaped from was terraformed via all the godly powers of space and time at their disposal into an inhabitable new planet. Unbeatable enemies defeated and impossible odds overcome, the players opened the final door and stepped through it into their new world where they could leave peacefully as god-rulers.
And of course, no interdimensional storm rolled in to immediately destroy everything that had just been created and leave the vast majority of our characters sleeing in magic bullshit comas, because that would be fucking stupid.
[She is maybe a little bitter. Just a teensy bit.]
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So which one are you?
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Guess.
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What gave me away?
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These titles don't always mean what one would expect, but in this particular case you're mostly correct.
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In my case, I do happen to see the future.
Specifically good futures.
But it works differently depending on one's aspect.
One of our alien friends was a Seer of Mind, and as far as I could tell she seemed to be able to see what different outcomes could result from different choices.
Or something like that.
Whether or not she would have made a good storyteller is up for debate, but if her DMing is anything to judge by, she would have thrown about a dozen dragons into the story for flavor.
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