The Endless River

[voidtreckermods]

On the morning of day twenty one of the month of Kazoo there is a message on the ICP screens around the train. Their SCA's will light up the colour of the Void and show the following information.

World #398050 is a void nexus known locally as Tshering. As a void nexus this world has strong links with the void and the connection through worlds. World #398050 is home to the Endless River. Legends speak of this river being powerful enough to send thoughts from one heart to another across any distance. All that is needed is for you to know who it is you wish to reach.

On-board

The dressing carriage is open, filled with clothing best suited to a pleasant spring day. Light, airy and in a rainbow of joyful colours and florals. One closet is entirely filled with wide-brimmed hats bedecked with ribbons, feathers and ornaments. A stack of picnic baskets and containers filled with an alarming variety of passenger-suitable foodstuffs and flasked drinks sits in one corner, next to rolls of thick, weatherproof blankets in the four team colours.

The large box marked Do Not Use Yet, filled with small, empty jute bags, is hopefully still sat in the Luggage carriage, ready for passengers to grab handfuls of its contents as directed by the announcement.

Upon landing (after an appropriate countdown), the train remains on the surface, its carriages partially curved to form a gathering site for the day. Welcome to Tshering, the eighth void nexus!



A Day for Picnics

Tshering, system #398050, is a strange place, only habitable by grace of the passengers' SCAs. The sky is shot through with colours, a cascade of sunsets, and through it, the void shimmering through it in seams like a child's painting of the milky way. Still, there's a beauty to the chaotic mash of colours that soaks through its landscape, and in the shelter of the forests of towering funghi that dot its surface, the Void can go unseen by its visitors.

The temperature seems mild, suitable for the provided clothing, and if there are weather patterns around the world they've taken the day off. The funghi are sturdy enough that what air flow there is doesn't disturb their stalks, and carved grooves and holds in some of the larger examples indicate that climbing them to sit atop their glowing crowns is eminently possible, and, in fact, encouraged.

the Endless River

The Endless River is a font of pure chaos, flowing from a multitude of small rivulets across the area to a central reservoir, from which it pours directly upwards, away from Tshering's surface and out of sight, beyond the world's atmosphere.

Anything bagged and placed within the Endless River will also flow upwards and soon be out of sight, passing, presumably, into the Void. Scattered across the surface of Tshering are small, glittering pebbles, as described in the announcement.

The stones are pleasantly cool to the touch, and all passengers need to do is feel. Messages can be in any form that the Voidtreckers wish. Perhaps words, perhaps feelings, perhaps an image from their mind into the stone. Perhaps a mixture. Once they begin their message the stone will glow slightly and continue to glow as they secure it in the bag and cast it into the river. They will feel, almost instinctively, that they need to focus as they do so, thinking of the person they wish to reach all the while.

There are plenty of bags and many more stones; passengers will not be limited in their sendings.

Comments

[sciencegirl]

"Oh, yeah. I took some rubbings of the glyphs from the city walls with me for future study. I'll probably consider going to a priest for it. I know one, I used to room with him before he moved in with his boyfriend."

A whole conversation is happening and Guri has barely managed a hello.

"How did you do? I didn't see much of the fighting but I bet you did great."

[marvelous_murderbot]

It's Entrapta. You insert necessary pebbles into the stream of conversation and, sometimes, it bends where it needs to go. But it happens, regardless, with the same inevitability of flowing water.

"That's good, I hope you learn something. And I performed well. There was too much of it, however."

She'd killed so many demons. And she hated every moment of it.

[sciencegirl]

It did seem like it was too much for a lot of people. So many came back run ragged from the experience, and while she's not always the most emotionally observant the obvious statement of there being too much of it is easy to catch onto.

"You're still showing great performance! Those were pretty impressive leaps up there. It looked like you were having a lot of fun. And it means I now know how much weight impact those mushroom caps can take."

She's taking samples back with her for, she doesn't, biological study.

[marvelous_murderbot]

"You may be surprised - I'm not that much heavier than a human female of my size. My strength is achieved by materials, not heavy design. I was, after all, designed as a human mimic, not a combat unit."

Though what that says about her if she had been...

"And I was, though it has become a bit too easy since I began."

[sciencegirl]

"What's your exact weight?"

This is not a fair thing to ask someone, but Entrapta is nothing if not completely unfair in her lines of questioning. As long as it leads to some sort of discovery.

"Could you do some again? I can move to a higher vantage point." Before Guri can even answer her properly, Entrapta runs for a mushroom and starts climbing in that Octopus fashion of hers. She may not be a fighter, but she's still agile as can be.

[marvelous_murderbot]

"Eighty-nine point four five kilograms," she responded promptly. "Slightly more if I have consumed food or liquid. Clothing also extra, though frankly negligible. Four more for my blaster pistols and gunbelt, when I wear it."

She has no objection to precise answers.

"Oh, very well," she said, moving to follow Entrapta up. After observing that movement for a moment. It takes some getting used to.

[sciencegirl]

She's up on a mid-tall mushroom when she finally stops to overlook the landscape.

"Wow. This is how butterflies and spiders must feel."

Somehow it feels more like that from up here and down there. She still wants to do the thing, but she has to take a moment to look. This is a rare opportunity (which is a thing that can be said for 99% of her train experiences).

[marvelous_murderbot]

She pulls herself up behind Entrapta, wondering not at the statement so much but at the specific choices. Though, when she stops to think about them.

"I suppose it must be so," she replies, thoughtfully.

[sciencegirl]

Her ideas are generally an example of something that flies and something that crawls and hops. There are both types on this train, butterflies and spiders. Entrapta is maybe a spider, but rarely at high places. She's one for dark corners.

"I miss Etheria but I wouldn't miss the chance to discover all this. Maybe if I ever go home, I can fix our ship up and take a longer trip into space!" A really long one. As much as she loved Dryl, she'd much rather have the stars. It's not like she has a Runestone to protect.

[marvelous_murderbot]

"Oh," she said, surprised, "you don't have regular space travel. It's quite worth it. It's a matter of routine where I'm from."

"I've seen..." she pauses, knowing Entrapta, and edits the sentence she'd been about to speak. "I've been on the surface of 148 different worlds, since my self-emancipation."

[sciencegirl]

"That's incredible!" She can only imagine the data she could collect.

"We were trapped in a pocket dimension called Despondos. Our planet sustained itself off cosmic radiation and the light of our moons. There were no stars. I saw evidence of 'constellations' having existed in Etherian First Ones' writing, but I never imagined what it would be like to actually experience them."

She looks up at the sky.

"Hordak was the first person who told me about other worlds. Someone made him to fight, too. He started self-emancipating and didn't even realize he was doing it." She looks back at the river, then, shining in the distance. She needs to make sure he's alright.

[marvelous_murderbot]

She just is quiet at that, for a long moment.

"I like the sound of him," she says, finally. "We would have much to discuss. And when you return, you will have so much to experience. There is endless variety. Had you a hundred lifetimes, you could not begin to catalogue it all."

And, because she knows how Entrapta's brain will chew on it.

"The previous government, known as the Empire, had 1.5 million member worlds. Which in turn, between them, represented eighty million planets, colonies, space stations, client-states and other entities. And that was only, perhaps, the three quarters of the galaxy we knew, of course."

[sciencegirl]

"Yeah, he's really creative! I kind of hope he shows up here one day so I'll know he's alright."

What? She can be selfish and want someone around just to keep an eye on them. "He gets into a lot of trouble sometimes when he's left alone." Y'know, like, starting totalitarian kingdoms.

That sounds so amazing, though.

"I bet there is so much incredible shared scientific data between worlds!" She feels like one of those people born in a small town who was never able to get out. "That's also a ridiculously large area to maintain." Suspiciously large.

[marvelous_murderbot]

She nods, making a few assumptions in her reply.

"You care for him, I see. Let us hope, then, that he arrives."

"As for the data, yes to some extent - the civil war did much to interrupt that, however. And, of course, the warring over and subsequent collapse of Imperial power ensured both that sharing was more problematic and also that much of the available scientific effort was routed to military purposes."

"You're quite correct, too, that it's 'ridiculously large', but I would counter that such governance in our universe is old, and established. It reasserts itself after crisis, at least in part. In one form or another, the Old Republic that the Empire suborned and emerged from had lasted for 25,000 years in one form or another."

[sciencegirl]

"Wow, we could barely dig up history on the First Ones and that wasn't even 2,000 years. 25,000 is incredible."

It sounds incredibly fascinating.

She adds a quick. "Yeah! He's pretty great. He takes some getting used to, though." But this is also a girl who is friends with the AI Formerly Known as Handsome Jack. To his credit, though, Hordak is a little better.

"What happened during the civil war?" she comes back around to ask, momentarily forgetting the mushroom hopping to sit and hear war stories.

[marvelous_murderbot]

"The Empire sought to maintain power through fear," she responded, "and the Emperor and his chief enforcer, Darth Vader, concentrated the Empire's free resources into massive space stations, known as Death Stars."

She pauses, pulling up technical data.

"Planet-destroying superweapons. The first was 120 kilometers in diameter, the second larger still. The size of a small moon."

"The Rebel Alliance, which had very little in the way of available military force, was able to exploit a weakness in the first design, then fly into the reactor core of the second. To summarize several years of history, in the climactic battle a Jedi Knight named Luke Skywalker was able to redeem Darth Vader - really his father - and the Emperor was defeated. And with the Death Stars went vast amounts of Imperial resources - and their most talented officers. It is currently in the process of splintering."

[sciencegirl]

That reminds her of someone she knows. In fact, it reminds her of what Etheria was almost used for.

She also looks pensive over the idea of Death Stars. She can't help, on one hand, to admire the depth of creativity and dedication to construction. On the bigger, much more important prominent hand, genocide and planetary destruction generally are bad.

Luckily she's gotten better at keeping her inside voice inside.

"The Emperor sounds a lot like Hordak's creator. At least in his desire for destruction, though I can't be sure of the Emperor's reasons. Horde Prime wanted perfection."

[marvelous_murderbot]

"There have been many theories, the most common of which is to inflict absolute rule upon the universe as it was known.

"That perfection, I assume, being the exclusion of every being not in his own chosen image?"

[sciencegirl]

"Yeah, it was a lot like that." She says distantly. Like she's thinking back to it.

"He created these clones that could be so wonderfully independent when they had even a single breath of their own life. So ambitious and intelligent, but they always hated how imperfect they are.

"But whenever I made robots, each one never turned out perfect. They'd be a little asymmetrical or I'd have to change out parts for easier access or I'd build them for different purposes. But I would always think they were wonderful for all their little quirks and flaws. And I've never been able to understand why Horde Prime never felt the same.

"But I also don't want to be the type of person that understands him all that well so I guess that's okay, too."

[marvelous_murderbot]

She hopes this one filters through to Planet Entrapta, because it's important.

"Do you know much about gemstones? They are highly prized in my universe, but counter-intuitively, it is the flaws that give them the greatest value. An imperfection in the structure, but it imbues a unique character, a unique worth. So in the end, it isn't really a flaw anymore."

"Those differences are the true spark of things, and I'm so glad you built your robots - your friends, I expect - like that."

[sciencegirl]

The point lands, but Entrapta can't help but smile a little bit in a sort of mischievous way.

"Oh I know a whole lot about gemstones."

But she does understand that's not the point, she just needs that little moment of goofiness. Before she smiles more earnestly. It means a lot coming from Guri. That another artificially constructed being could appreciate the approach she's taken to hers.

"The clones are still alive, after we defeated their creator. I'm hoping they find places on our world. I think they would like it, once they got used to it and people got used to them. They deserve the chance to do more than shoot at people."

[marvelous_murderbot]

"One can hope," she replied, simply enough. It's what she would want, if given a choice.