goneawaycomms | Brand Saint John

We haven't had anything that could be called an 'apocalypse' by the most generous definition, so we've still got time. Or if we did, it was back in the sixties when the rest of the planet found out magic was real, and that was before my time.

[Brand shrugs.] I'd have tried to weaponize it too, but I guess that's why I don't get to fucking mess around with the component parts of reality. Wouldn't shock me if the people behind that shit show are the ones running Jorgmund now either. But unless that means they fucking know how to get us all back home, does it matter?

Edited 2021-01-31 06:35 (UTC)

It might. You never know what'll pop back up again when you least expect - an' knowin' how people fit into a problem is half of solvin' it, in my experience at least.

But I don't think they do. I don't think they even know what really made the bombs work in the first place, or if they did once, they don't remember. Whatever the fuck is wrong here goes deep, is all. To the fundamentals. Somethin' we outsiders should keep in mind. My two cents, anyhow.

[She wouldn't be surprised, at this point, if they were Stuff themselves - ghosts of a world endlessly repeating its last mistakes. It's the sort of thing she runs into]

When was the sixties for you? I'm from 2070, or thereabouts. We got magic back in about 2000.

Fair enough. But unless you've got some information sources outside Jorgmund -- "Jorgmund", fuck, that sure was a fucking choice they made -- we don't have enough information to speculate on who's responsible for what yet.

[Brand hates working from limited information sources.]

They broke their world badly enough that we ended up here, I'd say that tells us plenty about how phenomenally they fucked everything up.

[He frowns and does some quick mental math.]

It was the 1960s, so we're coming up on sixty years now. The magic was always there, humanity as a whole just didn't know about it. Shat a brick when they found out everything they'd dismissed as imaginary was real. Sounds like it went differently for you.

There's a post went up way back when we first arrived, I can send you the link. Someone got to talk to a sympathetic party among the leash-holders, an' learned some things. Been drawing mostly from that.

[She nods understandingly at "shat a brick"]

I mean, reaction was about the same. Didn't happen all at once for us - we're on like a cycle? Periods of more or less magic. Not a short one, they're like thousands of years at a go. When the magic started leaking back in this time, it'd been so long everyone had forgotten, except for the people who had reasons not tell anyone, apparently.

[Not over it! Never getting over it! Brand can see this clearly in her expression.]

The dragons woke up first, which was alarming. Then people started turning into trolls and orcs and elves overnight. That was pretty weird, too. Spirits started getting chatty about the same time, an' Awakened - people who use magic, shamans an' mages an' adepts, like me - starting showing up in the general population. An' a bunch of other shit on top of that - plague, war, genocide, capitalism - the millenium woke up in a tearing goddamned hurry an' it hasn't slowed down, according my pops.

Sure, I'll take whatever information you've got to share.

[Her description earns raised eyebrows, which is more than her ears got.]

Nobody turned into anything for us. No cycles, just secrets. Rune could tell you more about it, the whys and hows of Atlantis staying hidden are more his fucking area than mine. But as soon as humans found out about magic and monsters, they kicked off a fucking world war. Calmed down after a few years and a few places are still fucking uninhabitable due to plague or magic backlash, but the political landscape settled out by the time we were born.

[this link lands in his secure inbox]

Oh, hey, we had an Atlantis too. 'Cept it called itself Thera, an' it disappeared when the magic levels dropped below sustainable. Turns it it shoved itself into an astral bubble that went fucky an' its just been doing its last three thousand years or so on repeat... ask how I know. I'll tell you, it's 'cause I got fucking stuck there.

[She makes a broad, exhausted gesture]

Things are basically sort of stably unstable, I'd say. No major wars just now, or any interesting new plagues. It turns out you can get used to anything, 'cept maybe Rig cooking.

[Brand opens the link and skims through the contents as Saturday talks. He'll go over it more thoroughly with Rune later.]

Our Atlantis got fucked by plague during the war. It's still uninhabitable; Rune and I grew up in New Atlantis. Don't ask him about it unless you've got a burning interest in historical architecture, he'll take any opportunity to ramble on about that shit.

[Nerd. Why'd he have to go and pick "old buildings" as a special fucking interest instead of "how to not get dead in a fight"? Good thing he's got Brand or he'd be fucked.]

I hear tell that the kitchen staff will let us scavenge after hours if we're nice and clean up after ourselves. I'm not nice and I can't cook, but I've got a background in nutrition and I know how to wash dishes.

Oh yeah, they're pretty chill. Some of us have higher-then-normal caloric needs an' we tend to hang around after hours feeding ourselves - I'd lost a couple pounds before I found out about the night crew.

[Brand sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose.]

Fuck, these people are morons. I'll bet they calculated caloric intake needs using the fucking desk-job pencil-pushing adults as the standard, too.

Right in one. This place... I'm still not convinced it's mostly incompetence. Some of it just makes too much sense as malice.

At a certain point, the distinction between malice and incompetence is fucking academic.

[He taps his chest where they'd implanted him with a shock collar.]

They're not short on malice either.

It's not academic if it helps predict their moves. What they intend, what they value, what they want, how good they are at getting it... we're deeply on the back foot. Knowing what's what could matter.

Fair enough. I'll do my own research and we can see where we line up and where we disagree.

[It's not that he doesn't trust Saturday's assessment, it's that he doesn't know her well enough to know whether or not he can trust her assessment. So far, she seems to be competent enough, which is a good fucking start.]

Anything else you think I should know?

Let's see. Don't underestimate the other New Hires, an' you can basically trust 'em to be sensible and community-oriented. Cameras are busted, the gardener dude doesn't mind you picking fruit unless you get greedy - oh, an' the Stuff makes people, sometimes. Like, real people. That are totally new and made of Stuff but still people. We've all basically agreed not to go in guns blazing. You can disagree, but don't get caught if y'do.

How frequently does somebody verify that the cameras are still busted? Because if they're more malicious than stupid, that's a trick worth checking.

[Everything else he mentally files away to confirm with Rune later.]

I think our friend who made the private network keeps an eye on it, but you're right, I should find out.

Have you seen any thin, dark, opaque materials that could be cut up and placed behind the lenses of the cameras? Electrical tape or something like that?

Not recently. I can add it to my scavenging list.

I'd appreciate it. I don't like cameras unless I'm the one on the other end.

Brand Saint John

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