Evening of November 1st, About A Day After The New Travelers Showed Up

[thornsofmalkav]

Uh, hey. I've got a few things I need to talk to people about, that I've mostly been waiting on until we got a new shift of liminal space so I could share them with all the newbies and returning Travelers too. Uh, I'm Thorne, by the way, if you haven't met me before. Sorry if this gets to be long

Anyway, some of the shit I want to talk about is kinda heavy, so we'll start this out with a rage comic I made with an app on my phone to balance that.

[The voice switches to the viewpoint of someone looking down at a phone screen, in which the follow rage comic has been constructed on:]



[About ten seconds later, the sensory livestreaming switches off and everyone's back to voice.]

Okay. Now the heavy stuff. A lot of you guys know already that the woman I was Infiltrating as during the last Jaunt, Chouko, was killed the fourth week by an inexplicably insectile cyborg known as the Mantis. I came back as an Investigator and ended up 'haunting' my murderer.

What most of you don't know is that Chouko left a corpse behind, which Herr Doktor Blitzkopf found. He replaced her heart with a clockwork one, then used the lightning of the storms to reanimate her body, ala Frankenstein and his monster.

I didn't go back to being Chouko at this time, although she certainly did come back to life. I know, I met her when she came home to the embassy, where I was taking care of her brother, Min.

The people we Infiltrate as, our overlays... they have lives outside of us. Unless there's a Blitzkopf around, when we die as them, they stay dead.

[There's a short silence as Thorne lets that sink in for everyone.]

Uh, next thing! So, there's a secret I've been keeping from everyone, but my spirit animal, Selene, has been going around all doppelgangered and telling people anyway and I figured that if I made this announcement I could control how people found out.

So. Uh. I'm a vampire.

What this basically means is that I'm a talking, thinking, animate dead person. Well, undead person. Technically double-dead person. I got killed again after I got turned into a vampire.

I have to drink blood to survive, but you guys don't have to worry about that because I've already made arrangements with some people already to be regular blood donors and there's enough of them that nobody's should have to do it so often that it make them anemic or anything.

There's a lot of details about my condition, which I don't want to bore people with, but basically it's annoying but manageable. And so far as I know, I'm the only one of my kind here. [If you consider her kind to be Malkavians and now wodpires in general.] I guess you could say I'm a monster, but I'm honestly trying not to act like one.

And, uh, I just wanted to say to any other dead people here, if you need someone to talk to privately about it, I'm here.

Which brings me to the last thing I wanted to tell you guys about! As far as I can tell by the calendars people can agree on, it's gonna be November 2nd tomorrow. I'm gonna hold a Day of the Dead thing at Leo's and, like, build an altar in his yard and stuff and have food. People are welcome to come, living as well as dead.

Uh. That's all, I guess.

Comments

[comebewe]

Shouldn't someone look angry in a rage comic? And why are there ducks?

[he should, probably, be asking about something more important. But honestly he's not sure how to process that deluge of information yet. Also, they really want to know about the ducks]

[thornsofmalkav]

It's called a rage comic due to the art style? The original rage comics had a lot more angry people in it.

And the ducks are there to represent the Trumps. I picked them for that purpose because we needed something and, well...

Okay, so there's this famous reality show guy named Donald Trump in my world? And there's also a famous cartoon duck named Donald Duck. And the rage comic builder had these Dolan and Friends images. Dolan's like a parody of Donald Duck. So it felt appropriate to personify the Trumps as Dolan.

[HER MIND WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS.]

[comebewe]

[Matthew decides to tactfully not remark that the art style of rage comics appears to be 'really badly drawn']

That's...really complicated.

[Also they're kinda disappointed. They were hoping the explanation would be much more interesting, like maybe the ducks were actually feathery personifications of rage and vengeance]

But okay, the Ducks are the Trumps. Got it. Now...who are they?

[thornsofmalkav]

[Ducks are already feathery personifications of rage and vengeance, Matthew.]

They're the guys who brought us to liminal space and who send us to the other worlds to solve problems for them.

[comebewe]

[that's swans, not ducks]

Wha...why?! That doesn't...why the hell would something powerful enough to pull all of us here in the first place even need us?

[thornsofmalkav]

We don't know. There's a lot we don't know about them. We're trying to find out? Someone of us are, anyway.

[comebewe]

What do you know about them so far?

[thornsofmalkav]

Oh man, you should really be talking to Naoto about this, not me. She's the big Trump expert. Uh, they're named after Tarot cards. Some of them are dead? Four of them. One of the dead one's the Star, I remember that. Sometimes they claim you and you end up with a wicked cool tattoo in some place or another on your body. We don't know what they're claiming people for. They don't usually interact with us directly, I don't think. Usually it's with some proxy or another.

[comebewe]

Who's Naoto?

And um. I'm sure the wicked tattoos look nice and awesome and all, but in my experience getting marked by mysterious mystical powers usually means that you are now doomed to a life people trying to kill you. Is there any way to not get any ominous tattoos?

[thornsofmalkav]

Naoto Shirogane. She's a friend of mine. And a private detective in her old life.

You should probably just make sure you never talk or interact with anyone you can't identify as a Traveler on Jaunts, then. Trumps don't mark people without at least some interaction through their proxies.

[comebewe]

A detective, awesome. [And he will totally be hunting her down and asking her more about these Trumps]

So...all I have to do is never talk to anyone, ever. Wonderful.

[thornsofmalkav]

Yeah, sorry. They lurk everywhere. Usually there's about, hm, around fifty of us Travelers at any given Jaunt, give or take whatever, so there's some people you can talk to, but it does restrict your social circle a little.

[comebewe]

Okay, so...what exactly are these Jaunts? And you said something about 'Infiltrating' earlier.

[thornsofmalkav]

Jaunts are what we call it when the Trumps send us to another world to fix things. And, uh, Infiltrating is a thing that happens to about half of us. We merge with people already there in the world.

The other half us just get dumped in as ourselves. That's called Investigating.

[comebewe]

Merge with people? But we...

[they stop, not actually wanting to say that they have already merged with him, and they're not sure that merging with someone else again wouldn't go horribly wrong]

How...how exactly does that work?

[thornsofmalkav]

I don't know the mechanics. I just know it happens. It's happened to me twice.

[comebewe]

Yes, but if it's happened to you then you know, well, what does happen, as a personal experience, even if you don't know why.

[thornsofmalkav]

You're just-- well, you're them. You remember their lives. You feel what they feel. Sometimes you come back from being them and you've got skills or possessions or even forms that they had. Like, I've never been a fighter in my life. But the first time I Infiltrated I was a girl named Charoite who'd been training at knives for a couple years and now I can fight like she did.

Usually the people you Infiltrate as are people suited to you in some way. Like, you've got something in common with them? I keep getting literary types. Like Charoite, my first Infiltration, she wanted to be a writer. And Chouko, my second, she was really into poetry and had originally planned to be a sort of lady poet, before... well, a lot of shit happened to her.

[comebewe]

Do you...do you still know that you're really you, though? Or do you think you're really them?

[thornsofmalkav]

No. You think you're them. Unless something odd happens, like with that Daneel guy last time.

[comebewe]

What happened with that Daneel guy?

[thornsofmalkav]

Uh, I was still infiltrating when it happened, but it was in the psychic archives--one of the things you can learn to do when you get better at stuff is do a sort of archive dive to listen to old conversations--and I think he was Infiltrating and Investigating at the same time. You should ask him if you can find him. He's the robot dude.

[comebewe]

...He's a robot dude? Really?

Are we talking like, a sentient roomba? Or you know, something with arms and legs and all that stuff?

[thornsofmalkav]

I think he has arms and legs? I don't know if I've ever met him face to face, just listened to him on the psychic network.

[comebewe]

Right, the psychic network. We're not very fond of it. Do you realise how freaky it is to have this thing pop up in your head all of a sudden?