.... What sort of word would you use for it, then. You sound like you cannot make up your mind. Are you affiable with my brother or not.
They are more refined flavors. I am not a fan of anything overly sweet. Though you are missing parts of life if you have never tried carrot cake.
....
I dislike surprises. But I would like to think I have good problem solving abilities. Let me guess. You are planning something for my brother's birthday and felt the need to not leave me out, so to speak.
given that he's your brother i dunno if you want me to go into detail about how affable we are
and yeah i come from a pretty big desert with a lot of food scarcity, cake was either crazy expensive or not worth all the extra ingredients so it's gonna be an experience for everybody
[ and then this bitch ]
why ask me a question if you were gonna get the answer to it in one Uncle Stuffy it's your birthday too Vash would rather eat his good arm than leave somebody out of somethin nice
[ ............................. he doesn't like this conversation suddenly. This must be one of the people dante has been spending some nights with. he hates you suddenly. and he's not even sure why. it's probably not sensible. but. ]
Do not be crass, I was merely trying to ascertain if you were someone who is a friend or someone I should be wary of.
You lived somewhere like Egypt, then? Or are you ... one of those other-worlders. Experience things while you're here.
And who knows. I could have been wrong. I have been wrong before, I am not so infallible that I have not been incorrect on assumption before. I do not know who "Vash" is, but ... he need not go out of his way, if he does not wish to. ...
My name is Vergil Vittore, also. Not "Uncle Stuffy".
[ come on man there's a lot of dante to go around you don't have to be weird about it ]
i was trying to be polite about it but you wanted to put a fine point on it 'sides, Dante tells me all the time I could never hurt him like a massive idiot so who knows, i'm probably harmless
oh you know about the other world thing yeah i'm one of those no clue what an Egypt is, but my world is a massive world-wide desert with two suns. grass is neat. so is rain.
[ this guy makes his teeth itch so very much in the same way Dante does when he's being Overly Dante, too casual and cool for anything and everyone, breezy and in control and just a liiiittle frustrating for someone who's trying to manage a fraying tightrope of a frame of mind ]
to continue to fail at being polite, you don't sound like the kind of guy who opens his mouth unless you're 100% sure you're right about whatever's about to come out of you Vash wishes to go out of his way Vash will not be stopped from going out of his way we called him the Humanoid Typhoon back home
[ hes not weird about it what do you mean he's just a normal guy who gets irritated when people spend too much time with dante its normal ]
Probably harmless, hm. I suppose ai can trust that, Given I have had front row seats to him taking a blade through his heart and he merely walked it off.
And yes. I admit I have only met two others like yourself, so I am no great expert oe anything of the sort. Dante is here from a different world, after all, while I was born on this world. Things like rain and grass being novel... fascinating.[ and yet theyre twins isnt that fun ]
...And perhaps I am that sort of person, yes, but I won't linger on the point. If your... storm-born friend is bound and determined to do what he wants, I find it pointless to argue. I am not someone who has the combat skill to go up with a storm. Do as you both wish, then.
oh you too huh yeah i shot him with his own gun when he turned up all deviled out the one time it wasn't my proudest moment but he seemed happy with my aim
[ this is so fucking weird how did you two come from the same egg ]
when I say desert i mean desert i know you're thinking 'hey weird asshole in my inbox, surely you have some mountains or other biomes and weather patterns but you're probably just some bumpkin who can't travel far enough to find a nice savannah' but no, no, it is all desert and worms the future sucks
... storm-born. he'd probably like it being said like that it's more because he causes a fuckton of property damage and he'll cry all over you if it comes to that
[ vergil doesn't need to know that vash could juggle him like a Brawl character ]
He is very comfortable in devil form. It is something I do not quite understand but... Do not make a habit of it. His masochistic tendencies should not be fed.
[ the egg was big and roomy ]
All desert and Worms. You say that with a finality that makes me think you do not mean the little brown creatures that slither through soil here, on Earth. Another planet, and entirely desert. Fascinating.
[ he doesn't like you but he likes hearing about this. so maybe he can be cordial. a little. ]
... If you and this storm-born man plan on coming to my house to throw some sort of party for my brother, he had best keep the property damage to zero, or I will take an issue.
look i don't make much of a habit of shooting my friends these days i didn't realize dante came in hellspawn format it's easy to forget he's not human all the weirdos have such nice normal faces it's a bit worrying
[ eva did not deserve to have the two of you WWE wrestling in her womb ]
uhh, nope would've been nice if they'd been just little fuckers but they could be as big as a street, able to swallow up a whole fuel station the small ones have stingers and wings and they communicate through a hivemind desert, two suns, five moons, and not much else No Man's Land sucks
[ wolfwood can't tell the difference it's fine ]
look vash mostly doesn't mean for shit to go sideways so it's not like we're gonna have some sort of 'party activity: smash the place up' moment we just wanna do something nice for dante and you by extension congrats on making it another year, guys
It is not as if a single gunshot will kill him anyhow, I suppose. He is built a little hardier than that.
[ listen fighting is the only way they communicate and their best method of bonding eva doesnt have to worry about it. ]
...God forbid any such creatures like that show up in this place, else I will very quickly look into moving somewhere far, far, far above ground. Small bugs I can handle.
[ the idea of a planet with that many suns and moons, though... fascinating. ]
How long were your days? Your nights? Surely you used a different sort of day-night clock than on earth. Did you have several days in a row before one nightfall? Did the moons affect the way the oceans worked? How did human beings sustain themselves, with days that long, surely no fruit or vegetation would be able to grow unless it was very hardy and built for intense heat and sun. Or did you mainly eat these bugs for sustenance? Were they even edible? Many insects are toxic, or do not have much in the way of sustaining people as a food source. A man cannot live on insects alone without something else to supplement your diets?
[ well, all thoughts of how much lead you can put inside of Dante go frittering out the window as Dante's kin comes crashing through Wolfwood's proverbial window like a wrecking ball. he'll take a minute to respond? ]
i i think we had incredibly long days, yeah the nights never felt like they lasted long enough since they were the only real relief you got from the heat, especially if you were on a part of the planet where the wind didn't kick up much i don't know what an ocean is, hang on
[ give him a minute to beat google into submission ]
okay yeah no, didn't have oceans and yeah fruits and vegetables and shit just growing were a huge no-go unless you were heinously rich or one of the uhh people living on the crashed SEEDs ships, apparently bugs are a sometimes food, the protein's good for you you can even eat 'em raw if you avoid the stingers, though they taste like shit the stingers had poison in'em that you could use to knock people out or you could smoke em, we used to smoke stingers at the orphanage or i used to there were also these big-ass birds called tomas, but you could kill a man with tomas-loaf if you really wanted to
all of our other foods come from plants Plants the capitalization is important i think they're these entities that live in tanks inside of big-ass generators and we used 'em to make stuff like power, water, food, clothing--anything you needed, but it ran a pretty penny because Plants burn out when they're used enough and you can get one last big pop of power out of a dying Plant, but once it's gone it's gone we can't really make more my friend used to cry all the time about how he could buy one .22 bullet, orr two slices of pizza toast, or a dozen doughnuts
[ listen, up until recently, he's been nothing more than a boorish antiques dealer with a fascination for relics of a bygone time. hearing about another planet? He can't help himself. Wolfwood has just become an unfortunate target for Vergil's thirst for knowledge. He's a little intense, just like Dante, turns out. Just in a different way. ]
For a planet to have two suns, I can only imagine how long your days were. Do you have any measurement of time? Hours? Your day lengths may have been shorter or longer than onrs on earth. So that also brings up the wonder of age, as well. time being relative and all.
...No oceans? Were your bodies of water very small? Or perhaps most of the water on the planet was underground. You mentioned these worms of insects of yours being large enough to swallow up petrol stations. Which means the oxygen on your planet must have been highly abundant as well. Insects cannot get that large here due to atmospheric pressure. They would literally implode on themselves.
Did the planet have greenery or vegetation at all? With sun that sharp and a lack of even oceanic bodies of water, I cannot imagine it was abundant. Which means the wind could likely be deadly were it to create a sandstorm big enough.
[ and then finally a pause as he processes this Plant thing. huh. huh... ....entities.... he can't even imagine. ...oh, dear. ]
You used the word Entities, yes. Purposefully? The word Plant brings to mind two things, after all. A power plant, a generator, something that pumps water from underground or produces substances for humans to use such as power or chemical components.
...But using the word entity suggests they were living beings your people were "burning out" in order to survive. Terribly cruel, or terribly misfortunate, whichever way it was. On such a resource-barren planet, what choice would you have though, I suppose.
...That does bring to mind the matter of entropy, though. Could these beings make something out of nothing, or were they borrowing matter from one place and displacing it to another? Or was the material literally being created from their bodies? What an interesting existence.
there are so, so many words, there are too many words, Wolfwood stares at all these words and wonders how likely Dante is to be nice (and nice) to him if he tells Dante's brother to fuck off, and then he decides to err on the side of caution. they're just questions, after all. harmless enough, though it does occur to Wolfwood... ]
[ Wolfwood uses his newfound power of knowing what a private filter is! take that! ]
ok so uh, beginning at the beginning i guess we used days and hours and stuff, i know those terms the fact that you've asked me for exact numbers has made me forget ever number i've ever known so uh i think a day on No Man's Land would be arooound 18? of this world's hours to about 6 night time hours and even then the first hour or two of 'nighttime' is more 'one sun is down' as opposed to real darkness aging is fine for most people i think? just count days and boom, when you hit that day again on the calendar you're up a year i'm
[ an affront to the natural order ]
not the best at ages because i've got some unique personal circumstances but most people age normally unless they've got the tech to cryosleep or they're not wholly human
no oceans. no rivers, no ponds, no lakes, maybe a fountain or an irrigation-way if you were somewhere rich like Julai, but there was no just... loose water hangin' out. the water might've been deep underground but digging that deep always had to be weighed against pissing the hive worms off, so it wasn't really done unless you were desperate planet was a huge desert, basically. the only stretch of greenery like the stuff you'd see on this world that i ever saw was in the SEEDs ship
[ he should probably explain the SEEDs ship, fuck ]
the SEEDs ship came from so like okay i think my world is from the future compared to this one? humanity came from Earth but it was all fucked up and unlivable so they sent spaceships out to carry technology and colonizers to find a new planet to live on but something happened and the ships crashed on No Man's Land the survivors in the SEEDs ship have been there for a while trying to get the project to make the planet livable off the ground but it's slow going maybe impossible and uh going back to the wind, sandstorms could be killer yeah and sometimes the wind wouldn't blow for decades which is a problem when your power source is windmills
[ and the part that Wolfwood knows just enough about to be dangerous; Plants. ]
yeah. they're fuck, how do you describe somethin that's just human enough for you to know it's not so from what my... friend from home's told me about Plants, they were the humans of Earth found something that they pulled DNA out of and they made this race of they look like big white bulbs when they're closed up? but then they unfurl and thye kind of look like the angels from the bible stories, and they're long and kind of human lookin but not and they've got these petal lookin wing limbs and lines etched in their skin and generally they just... make stuff. do what you ask them to. they access this--other dimension? and they can create Stuff out of the matter or power or whatever the hell it is from there, and that's why humanity isn't completely dead, because we have enough information from old technology for them to be able to make food and water and power, but they're millions of doubledollars and limited so if yours gets sick or dies, your town is probably fucked they're alive so they're always slowly runnin down on power and eventually they stop being strong enough to pull material from the gates to the other place and then they burn up or get burned up i never thought about it much until i met Spikes apparently they can think they just don't talk in a way someone like me can hear
[ he doesn't mind so much that Wolfwood's put a privacy filter down. It makes sense? he's asking a lot of questions about stuff that wolfwood might not want blasted all over the place for anyone to see.
that doesn't mean he's gonna let up, though. Absorbing all the given info like a sponge. It's fascinating. The world sounds terrible; and yet humans persisted. What an amazingly hardy species they were. ]
Multiple cycles of daytime makes sense. It would be cooler during the times in which only one sun is 'up', then, yes? Fascinating that the day lengths are the same as well...
[ part of him wonders if that was just a fantastical, wild coincidence. Or... maybe... ]
'Cryosleep', 'Not entirely human.' I will not be so rude as to barge in on your personal circumstances unless you are willing to share, but I see--there are other species other than humans and Plants around, then. I never would have believed it before--but given things like Demons and Vampires exist here...
But I digress. A huge desert. What a cruel landscape for supporting human life--that feels impossible. I appreciate you pre-emptively giving me a run-down on how humans got on such a forsaken planet in the first place, terrible that such an accident happened to have them crash down somewhere so damnably unsuitable--however, I do have to wonder if it was an accident. A planet with a matching 24-hour period, I almost wonder if they were considering it before the accident happened because of the similarities to their own cycle that they're used to...
Ah, to be a fly on the wall for what went down.
[ because it's normal to want to unravel the mystery. ]
...Plants sound fascinating. And dangerous, not to mention such a moral dilemma wrapped up in simply using them. Draining another life in order to survive--making such decisions can really create an uncomfortable moral quandry many times in one life.
Or, ah, should I even assume that humans treated these creatures like anything close to equal. That may have been presumptuous of me.
So you're in this world now. I would assume you're happy to stay here. Or do you miss desert life?
[ Wolfwood still lives under the deeply held belief that nobody cares what he has to say in the sea of voices and lived experiences that go on within this application, but Vash gets all sad and wilty and tense when Wolfwood puts too much of his shit on blast, so if only to spare himself the biggest pair of puppy eyes later, he'll do a privacy filter. ]
A little cooler, but not by much. hot was hot was hot, you know? it doesn't matter if you're only a little on fire, you're still on fire it might've been that the SEEDs people were mostly checking out planets like Earth with compatible time systems and shit i'm not a scientist or particularly smart but that seems like shit smart people would care about
[ and then Vergil pivots, and Wolfwood's almost dizzy at how much this guy wants to know and think about at any given moment, rubbing his face as he weighs out what to say and what to keep close to his chest.
... it doesn't matter all that much, does it? ]
i mean if you wanna get philosophical about it, which it sounds like you do, i guess the question you should be asking is 'when does a human stop being a human and what do you call whatever comes next' we didn't have vampires and demons but we did have scientists who tried to make a new species of humanity, one that wouldn't waste Plant-made resources and could survive on No Man's Land, and that's where you get 'people' like me, though I'm a pretty mild case of what can happen to a person when you get inside their guts and starts mixing things up and then they scrapped that project and took Plant genetics and started to try and make a true superior hybrid, but she was a bitch so morally I feel superior i don't know what happened when the ships first crashed the SEEDs people didn't really want to talk about it and a guy i knew who was there doesn't like to talk about it either but you seem like you're into more than just facts and shit the preachers say that God dropped humanity on No Man's Land for all the wicked, terrible shit they'd done to each other and to the Plants, and that they'd have to suffer and try to atone for their sins until the promised day when a pair of twins angels would come down and wipe the slate clean, bringing Paradise and signaling the start of a new era of humanity's service to God with the death of the old one
[ chew on that if you like a mystery, not-Dante especially since you're just gonna look Wolfwood in the textual eye and give him all sorts of morality issues ]
... of course they weren't treated as equals. do you treat the animals you eat as equals? or the batteries you use? they i'm not saying it was right but we don't have another option didn't have i don't know every alternative possibility i'd ever heard of was either a hundred years out from working or wanted to start fresh with a good round of genocide maybe we deserve it in the future
... i feel like i'm cheating with how nice it is here and now. i don't deserve this. nobody here deserves how easy it is here. i don't want to go back.
One needs not be a scholar to speak strongly and with conviction of experiences. While I do enjoy speaking with scientists and other scholars life myself, we quite often fund ourselves speaking at odds, stubborn in our own studies. Speaking with people who have had their own experiences can tend to be more informative.
[ and that's why he finds himself not minding that wolfwood's answers arent exactly clean or notated, or anything scholarly or with fact. he has never been to another planet, so. hearing of this sort of thing first hand? it's worth more than wolfwood thinks. ]
I do enjoy being philosophical. I personally think a being stops being 'human' and starts wandering into the realm of being 'other' when they start to drift dangerously into the territory where they lose all sense of empathy. The ability to take what they want from others merely by killing them, or treating everyone they meet as ... meat. The inability to treat things like children, family members, friends as people deserving some measure of kindness or respect. That's when someone becomes a 'monster.' Something 'other'.
[ so, sorry buddy, you don't count because you couldn't hurt a child and you have people you care about. you're discounted as monsterkin. ]
Religion makes things difficult. I personally do not believe in higher powers that can control the flow of fate for great groups of people, but I can understand why people in peril, such as those on your planet, can turn to some great force that can't be seen to 'save' them.
...And Somehow, I saw this response coming. I will offer an apology if I offered you a moral quandry you didn't wish to respond to. On top of telling me of... such traumatizing things from your past. I will not judge you based on it.
I would not consider being here 'cheating', Mr. Wolfwood.
Perhaps, if there truly is a higher power--which I still do not believe there is,--but if there was, perhaps it thought you deserved a break.
no subject
What sort of word would you use for it, then. You sound like you cannot make up your mind. Are you affiable with my brother or not.
They are more refined flavors. I am not a fan of anything overly sweet. Though you are missing parts of life if you have never tried carrot cake.
....
I dislike surprises.
But I would like to think I have good problem solving abilities.
Let me guess.
You are planning something for my brother's birthday and felt the need to not leave me out, so to speak.
no subject
and yeah i come from a pretty big desert with a lot of food scarcity, cake was either crazy expensive or not worth all the extra ingredients so it's gonna be an experience for everybody
[ and then this bitch ]
why ask me a question if you were gonna get the answer to it in one Uncle Stuffy
it's your birthday too
Vash would rather eat his good arm than leave somebody out of somethin nice
no subject
Do not be crass, I was merely trying to ascertain if you were someone who is a friend or someone I should be wary of.
You lived somewhere like Egypt, then? Or are you ... one of those other-worlders.
Experience things while you're here.
And who knows.
I could have been wrong.
I have been wrong before, I am not so infallible that I have
not been incorrect on assumption before.
I do not know who "Vash" is, but ... he need not go out of his way, if he does not wish to.
...
My name is Vergil Vittore, also. Not "Uncle Stuffy".
no subject
i was trying to be polite about it but you wanted to put a fine point on it
'sides, Dante tells me all the time I could never hurt him like a massive idiot so who knows, i'm probably harmless
oh you know about the other world thing
yeah i'm one of those
no clue what an Egypt is, but my world is a massive world-wide desert with two suns. grass is neat. so is rain.
[ this guy makes his teeth itch so very much
in the same way Dante does when he's being Overly Dante, too casual and cool for anything and everyone, breezy and in control and just a liiiittle frustrating for someone who's trying to manage a fraying tightrope of a frame of mind ]
to continue to fail at being polite, you don't sound like the kind of guy who opens his mouth unless you're 100% sure you're right about whatever's about to come out of you
Vash wishes to go out of his way
Vash will not be stopped from going out of his way
we called him the Humanoid Typhoon back home
no subject
Probably harmless, hm. I suppose ai can trust that, Given I have had front row seats to him taking a blade through his heart and he merely walked it off.
And yes. I admit I have only met two others like yourself, so I am no great expert oe anything of the sort.
Dante is here from a different world, after all, while I was born on this world.
Things like rain and grass being novel... fascinating.[ and yet theyre twins isnt that fun ]
...And perhaps I am that sort of person, yes, but I won't linger on the point.
If your... storm-born friend is bound and determined to do what he wants, I find it pointless to argue. I am not someone who has the combat skill to go up with a storm.
Do as you both wish, then.
no subject
yeah i shot him with his own gun when he turned up all deviled out the one time
it wasn't my proudest moment but he seemed happy with my aim
[ this is so fucking weird how did you two come from the same egg ]
when I say desert i mean desert
i know you're thinking 'hey weird asshole in my inbox, surely you have some mountains or other biomes and weather patterns but you're probably just some bumpkin who can't travel far enough to find a nice savannah' but no, no, it is all desert and worms
the future sucks
... storm-born. he'd probably like it being said like that
it's more because he causes a fuckton of property damage and he'll cry all over you if it comes to that
[ vergil doesn't need to know that vash could juggle him like a Brawl character ]
you got it, chief
no subject
Do not make a habit of it. His masochistic tendencies should not be fed.
[ the egg was big and roomy ]
All desert and Worms.
You say that with a finality that makes me think you do not mean the little brown creatures that slither through soil here, on Earth.
Another planet, and entirely desert. Fascinating.
[ he doesn't like you but he likes hearing about this. so maybe he can be cordial. a little. ]
...
If you and this storm-born man plan on coming to my house to throw some sort of party for my brother, he had best keep the property damage to zero, or I will take an issue.
no subject
it's easy to forget he's not human
all the weirdos have such nice normal faces it's a bit worrying
[ eva did not deserve to have the two of you WWE wrestling in her womb ]
uhh, nope
would've been nice if they'd been just little fuckers but they could be as big as a street, able to swallow up a whole fuel station
the small ones have stingers and wings and they communicate through a hivemind
desert, two suns, five moons, and not much else
No Man's Land sucks
[ wolfwood can't tell the difference it's fine ]
look vash mostly doesn't mean for shit to go sideways so it's not like we're gonna have some sort of 'party activity: smash the place up' moment
we just wanna do something nice for dante and you by extension
congrats on making it another year, guys
no subject
[ listen fighting is the only way they communicate and their best method of bonding eva doesnt have to worry about it. ]
...God forbid any such creatures like that show up in this place, else I will very quickly look into moving somewhere far, far, far above ground.
Small bugs I can handle.
[ the idea of a planet with that many suns and moons, though... fascinating. ]
How long were your days? Your nights? Surely you used a different sort of day-night clock than on earth. Did you have several days in a row before one nightfall? Did the moons affect the way the oceans worked? How did human beings sustain themselves, with days that long, surely no fruit or vegetation would be able to grow unless it was very hardy and built for intense heat and sun. Or did you mainly eat these bugs for sustenance? Were they even edible? Many insects are toxic, or do not have much in the way of sustaining people as a food source. A man cannot live on insects alone without something else to supplement your diets?
[ the questions
just
keep coming
fuck the birthday shit
he desires Knowledge ]
1/2
2/3
i
i think we had incredibly long days, yeah
the nights never felt like they lasted long enough since they were the only real relief you got from the heat, especially if you were on a part of the planet where the wind didn't kick up much
i don't know what an ocean is, hang on
[ give him a minute to beat google into submission ]
3/3
and yeah fruits and vegetables and shit just growing were a huge no-go unless you were heinously rich or one of the uhh
people living on the crashed SEEDs ships, apparently
bugs are a sometimes food, the protein's good for you
you can even eat 'em raw if you avoid the stingers, though they taste like shit
the stingers had poison in'em that you could use to knock people out
or you could smoke em, we used to smoke stingers at the orphanage
or i used to
there were also these big-ass birds called tomas, but you could kill a man with tomas-loaf if you really wanted to
all of our other foods come from plants
Plants
the capitalization is important i think
they're these entities that live in tanks inside of big-ass generators and we used 'em to make stuff like power, water, food, clothing--anything you needed, but it ran a pretty penny because Plants burn out when they're used enough
and you can get one last big pop of power out of a dying Plant, but once it's gone it's gone
we can't really make more
my friend used to cry all the time about how he could buy one .22 bullet, orr two slices of pizza toast, or a dozen doughnuts
no subject
For a planet to have two suns, I can only imagine how long your days were. Do you have any measurement of time? Hours? Your day lengths may have been shorter or longer than onrs on earth. So that also brings up the wonder of age, as well. time being relative and all.
...No oceans? Were your bodies of water very small? Or perhaps most of the water on the planet was underground. You mentioned these worms of insects of yours being large enough to swallow up petrol stations. Which means the oxygen on your planet must have been highly abundant as well. Insects cannot get that large here due to atmospheric pressure.
They would literally implode on themselves.
Did the planet have greenery or vegetation at all? With sun that sharp and a lack of even oceanic bodies of water, I cannot imagine it was abundant. Which means the wind could likely be deadly were it to create a sandstorm big enough.
[ and then finally a pause as he processes this Plant thing. huh. huh... ....entities.... he can't even imagine. ...oh, dear. ]
You used the word Entities, yes. Purposefully? The word Plant brings to mind two things, after all. A power plant, a generator, something that pumps water from underground or produces substances for humans to use such as power or chemical components.
...But using the word entity suggests they were living beings your people were "burning out" in order to survive.
Terribly cruel, or terribly misfortunate, whichever way it was.
On such a resource-barren planet, what choice would you have though, I suppose.
...That does bring to mind the matter of entropy, though. Could these beings make something out of nothing, or were they borrowing matter from one place and displacing it to another? Or was the material literally being created from their bodies?
What an interesting existence.
1/2
there are so, so many words, there are too many words, Wolfwood stares at all these words and wonders how likely Dante is to be nice (and nice) to him if he tells Dante's brother to fuck off, and then he decides to err on the side of caution. they're just questions, after all. harmless enough, though it does occur to Wolfwood... ]
hang on lemme do a thing
→ private. 2/2
ok so uh, beginning at the beginning i guess
we used days and hours and stuff, i know those terms
the fact that you've asked me for exact numbers has made me forget ever number i've ever known so uh
i think a day on No Man's Land would be arooound 18? of this world's hours to about 6 night time hours and even then the first hour or two of 'nighttime' is more 'one sun is down' as opposed to real darkness
aging is fine for most people i think? just count days and boom, when you hit that day again on the calendar you're up a year
i'm
[ an affront to the natural order ]
not the best at ages because i've got some unique personal circumstances but most people age normally unless they've got the tech to cryosleep or they're not wholly human
no oceans. no rivers, no ponds, no lakes, maybe a fountain or an irrigation-way if you were somewhere rich like Julai, but there was no just... loose water hangin' out. the water might've been deep underground but digging that deep always had to be weighed against pissing the hive worms off, so it wasn't really done unless you were desperate
planet was a huge desert, basically. the only stretch of greenery like the stuff you'd see on this world that i ever saw was in the SEEDs ship
[ he should probably explain the SEEDs ship, fuck ]
the SEEDs ship came from
so like
okay
i think my world is from the future compared to this one?
humanity came from Earth but it was all fucked up and unlivable so they sent spaceships out to carry technology and colonizers to find a new planet to live on
but something happened and the ships crashed on No Man's Land
the survivors in the SEEDs ship have been there for a while trying to get the project to make the planet livable off the ground but it's slow going
maybe impossible
and uh going back to the wind, sandstorms could be killer yeah
and sometimes the wind wouldn't blow for decades which is a problem when your power source is windmills
[ and the part that Wolfwood knows just enough about to be dangerous; Plants. ]
yeah.
they're
fuck, how do you describe somethin that's just human enough for you to know it's not
so from what my... friend from home's told me about Plants, they were
the humans of Earth found something that they pulled DNA out of and they made this race of
they look like big white bulbs when they're closed up? but then they unfurl and thye kind of look like the angels from the bible stories, and they're long and kind of human lookin but not and they've got these petal lookin wing limbs and lines etched in their skin
and generally they just... make stuff. do what you ask them to.
they access this--other dimension? and they can create Stuff out of the matter or power or whatever the hell it is from there, and that's why humanity isn't completely dead, because we have enough information from old technology for them to be able to make food and water and power, but they're millions of doubledollars and limited so if yours gets sick or dies, your town is probably fucked
they're alive so they're always slowly runnin down on power and eventually they stop being strong enough to pull material from the gates to the other place and then they burn up
or get burned up
i never thought about it much until i met Spikes
apparently they can think they just don't talk in a way someone like me can hear
private 4ev
that doesn't mean he's gonna let up, though. Absorbing all the given info like a sponge. It's fascinating. The world sounds terrible; and yet humans persisted. What an amazingly hardy species they were. ]
Multiple cycles of daytime makes sense. It would be cooler during the times in which only one sun is 'up', then, yes? Fascinating that the day lengths are the same as well...
[ part of him wonders if that was just a fantastical, wild coincidence. Or... maybe... ]
'Cryosleep', 'Not entirely human.' I will not be so rude as to barge in on your personal circumstances unless you are willing to share, but I see--there are other species other than humans and Plants around, then. I never would have believed it before--but given things like Demons and Vampires exist here...
But I digress. A huge desert. What a cruel landscape for supporting human life--that feels impossible. I appreciate you pre-emptively giving me a run-down on how humans got on such a forsaken planet in the first place, terrible that such an accident happened to have them crash down somewhere so damnably unsuitable--however, I do have to wonder if it was an accident. A planet with a matching 24-hour period, I almost wonder if they were considering it before the accident happened because of the similarities to their own cycle that they're used to...
Ah, to be a fly on the wall for what went down.
[ because it's normal to want to unravel the mystery. ]
...Plants sound fascinating. And dangerous, not to mention such a moral dilemma wrapped up in simply using them. Draining another life in order to survive--making such decisions can really create an uncomfortable moral quandry many times in one life.
Or, ah, should I even assume that humans treated these creatures like anything close to equal. That may have been presumptuous of me.
So you're in this world now. I would assume you're happy to stay here. Or do you miss desert life?
→ private. cw: human experimentation mentions
A little cooler, but not by much. hot was hot was hot, you know? it doesn't matter if you're only a little on fire, you're still on fire
it might've been that the SEEDs people were mostly checking out planets like Earth with compatible time systems and shit
i'm not a scientist or particularly smart but that seems like shit smart people would care about
[ and then Vergil pivots, and Wolfwood's almost dizzy at how much this guy wants to know and think about at any given moment, rubbing his face as he weighs out what to say and what to keep close to his chest.
... it doesn't matter all that much, does it? ]
i mean if you wanna get philosophical about it, which it sounds like you do, i guess the question you should be asking is 'when does a human stop being a human and what do you call whatever comes next'
we didn't have vampires and demons but we did have scientists who tried to make a new species of humanity, one that wouldn't waste Plant-made resources and could survive on No Man's Land, and that's where you get 'people' like me, though I'm a pretty mild case of what can happen to a person when you get inside their guts and starts mixing things up
and then they scrapped that project and took Plant genetics and started to try and make a true superior hybrid, but she was a bitch so morally I feel superior
i don't know what happened when the ships first crashed
the SEEDs people didn't really want to talk about it
and a guy i knew who was there doesn't like to talk about it either
but you seem like you're into more than just facts and shit
the preachers say that God dropped humanity on No Man's Land for all the wicked, terrible shit they'd done to each other and to the Plants, and that they'd have to suffer and try to atone for their sins until the promised day when a pair of twins angels would come down and wipe the slate clean, bringing Paradise and signaling the start of a new era of humanity's service to God with the death of the old one
[ chew on that if you like a mystery, not-Dante
especially since you're just gonna look Wolfwood in the textual eye and give him all sorts of morality issues ]
... of course they weren't treated as equals. do you treat the animals you eat as equals? or the batteries you use? they
i'm not saying it was right
but we don't have another option
didn't have
i don't know
every alternative possibility i'd ever heard of was either a hundred years out from working or wanted to start fresh with a good round of genocide
maybe we deserve it in the future
... i feel like i'm cheating with how nice it is here and now. i don't deserve this. nobody here deserves how easy it is here. i don't want to go back.
no subject
[ and that's why he finds himself not minding that wolfwood's answers arent exactly clean or notated, or anything scholarly or with fact. he has never been to another planet, so. hearing of this sort of thing first hand? it's worth more than wolfwood thinks. ]
I do enjoy being philosophical. I personally think a being stops being 'human' and starts wandering into the realm of being 'other' when they start to drift dangerously into the territory where they lose all sense of empathy. The ability to take what they want from others merely by killing them, or treating everyone they meet as ... meat. The inability to treat things like children, family members, friends as people deserving some measure of kindness or respect. That's when someone becomes a 'monster.' Something 'other'.
[ so, sorry buddy, you don't count because you couldn't hurt a child and you have people you care about. you're discounted as monsterkin. ]
Religion makes things difficult. I personally do not believe in higher powers that can control the flow of fate for great groups of people, but I can understand why people in peril, such as those on your planet, can turn to some great force that can't be seen to 'save' them.
...And Somehow, I saw this response coming. I will offer an apology if I offered you a moral quandry you didn't wish to respond to. On top of telling me of... such traumatizing things from your past. I will not judge you based on it.
I would not consider being here 'cheating', Mr. Wolfwood.
Perhaps, if there truly is a higher power--which I still do not believe there is,--but if there was, perhaps it thought you deserved a break.
A place where you can rest your weary bones.