036 [Private + Anon Texts]

[soggypastry]

[Private Text to: Hope and Vanille; locked]

You two doing alright?

[Private Text to: Talim; PGC Filter]

I'll be in Mahogany tonight. Are you and Ironhide still in town?

[/private]

[Anonymous Text; unfiltered]

When you've been in this world long enough to see and do everything it has to offer, what's left? How do you spend the rest of your time here when there's nothing left to do?

Comments

anonymous text;

[doitrockapella]

If there's nothing left to do, then I'd say the problem lies with your imagination, not the world.

[perma-anon text]

[soggypastry]

And what makes you so sure of that?

[doitrockapella]

You're implicitly asking people to offer you suggestions of things that might still be left to do; if you really thought you'd seen and done everything, what would be the point? Anything they told you, you would've considered it already.

Maybe what you really mean is that there's nothing left for you to do that you immediately want to do, and that's fine. But that's also not the fault of the world — the breadth of possibility is the extent of your imagination, and no one ever said you're required to use the playground in the obvious ways it suggests you should.

[soggypastry]

Maybe, but no one said the playground was infinite, either. Eventually you will run out of possibilities, and you're left right back where you started.

What do you think happens then? More people will ask the same question I did, and probably get the same answer you're giving me now.

[doitrockapella]

Being left back where you started suggests you never changed along the way. I don't think that's particularly likely.

As for what happens then — I imagine the next logical step is to find the way out.

[soggypastry]

What, so you think there's actually a way to get out of this world by choice? You haven't been here very long, have you?

[doitrockapella]

That can go both ways, you know. Have you been here so long that you're willing to give up and resign yourself to the apparent inevitable?

[soggypastry]

Three years, and I'm the only one from my world who never went back. So yes. I have been here "so long". Some impossible things can't become possible.

[Or rather, she's just too tired to keep on trying when her reason is supposedly dead.]

[doitrockapella]

In a period of three years, Thomas Edison contemplated over three thousand different theories of how to create the light bulb. When he finally prevailed, he's said to have remarked, "I didn't fail a thousand times; it was an invention with a thousand steps."

Failure lies in writing something off as impossible, not in trying without succeeding.

[soggypastry]

Right. I'm guessing that this Edison guy wasn't dragged from his home and left to rot here. He had everything he needed, from the sounds of things. We don't.

I've already tried getting back. The badges are useless. None of the cities hold any clues on how to send off-worlders home. Whatever brought us here may as well have sent itself to our worlds, for all the luck anyone's had in finding it so far. And you think telling us how a person who's not here succeeded because he didn't give up is going to help somehow?

[doitrockapella]

It's certainly going to help more than giving up and accepting this place as an inevitability will. I can't imagine anything would ever get done if the going response to apparent futility was to lie down and accept it.

[soggypastry]

Right. If pretty words and inspiring lectures did any good, I'm pretty sure we'd have found a way back by now.

But who knows. If you really believe in what you're saying, maybe you'll be the one to find a way out of here. Think you'll get that lucky?

[doitrockapella]

If I find a way out of here, it'll have nothing to do with luck.

What is it that you're so desperate to get home to?

[soggypastry]

Right. Sure it won't.

And your answer's right there. My home. That's what I'm so desperate to get back to.

[The people she left behind...or the ones that have been sent back. Maybe this world gave her more friends and another family, but she wants to go home. As crazy as it is these days, it's home.]

[doitrockapella]

Are you expecting it to go somewhere while you're gone?

[soggypastry]

No. I just want to get back before anything can happen to it. I belong there, not here.

[doitrockapella]

And you're angry because this world seems to think otherwise.

[soggypastry]

If you've got that much figured out, why even bother asking?

[doitrockapella]

If you're going to be this hostile to everyone who tries to hold a conversation with you, why even bother asking?

[soggypastry]

Because I'm not after conversations about my private life. Just answers. Do you need a better reason?

[doitrockapella]

You're after answers that you don't believe exist. So either you're wrong about there being nothing left for you, or you're lying now.

Either way, it's not the most advantageous position to be occupying in a discussion.