tabularasa_rp | (no subject)

Who: Espio + anyone
What: One very belated intro
Where: Here and There
When: "November", if November exists
Content Warnings: Likely references to him being from a sex-or-die CRAU in the tags.

1. The Sky

[Why, you might ask, is there a short man with a lizard tail standing on a rock, arms spread wide as he laughs almost maniacally at the sky? There must surely be a reason, right?

Before he can be interrupted, he notices whoever approaches him and his laughter trails off as he turns to face them.]

Look at that! Five years, and they give me this - it's like going home! How long's that been like that?

[He jabs a thumb towards the sky behind him, where shapes are twisting and coiling just like in the weird part of the Special Zone. It has been so long since he's seen a sky as colourful as the one he was once used to that the little taste of home actually makes him feel slightly ill... still, seeing it, all he can do is laugh, even if it's not a happy laugh.]

2. How to Be Social

[Still convinced this is only an illusion, just like the countless illusions he's experienced in the past several months, Espio has not been particularly inclined to socialise. The problem with that is that while he does not want to go through meeting and greeting new people who might not even be real, being alone is... well, it's lonely! So while he has mostly been steering away from more obvious social hubs and has instead wandered what feels like the entire habitable area for he doesn't know how long, eventually he gives in and shows his face somewhere with people. What few people there are in this place, anyway...

The Heavenly Blanc is as good a bet as any, but he can also be found somewhere in the Underground Academy. Either way, his idea of a greeting is questionable:]

Still haven't seen anyone I know. How 'bout you?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[He can never seem to quite explain Between's nature without very deliberately keeping his voice flat and level, focusing more on how it's said than the reality of it and how ridiculous it sounds.]

Aside from it being a dead, dusty and broken wasteland? Whether or not things were allowed to exist depended entirely on how much sex people had. ...in a dead and broken wasteland with no food or water, which is obviously the perfect environment for it.

Not fully convinced I'm not still there, either, which is great.

...

[She just stared at him with the most oblique, confused, non-plussed sort of face that she could manage. In what sort of dumbass world would you depend on that for survival or make random strangers do that sort of thing? She was actually aware of the fact that 'other worlds' did exist, but the inanity of that defied explanation. Hell, this might not even be another 'world.' It might just be his world's idea of a joke.

Was he bullshitting her? She grunted.]

You are either punking me, which I do not recommend, or I can settle your confusion real fast.

Not gonna fuck you. So we're clearly not there.

[Blunt as hell.]

I prefer men.

[Just to make that clear.]

...reason I'm not convinced is because of several short-lived illusions that felt perfectly real, only they weren't. This feels a lot like one of the bad ones, so I'm gonna keep doubting 'til proven wrong.

Hah. Good one. Fair 'nuff. Well, you're going to be waiting on that proof. Just so you now.

You're in a world that's coming into existence. So, it's on the barren side. And random crap keeps coming into existence. The world's still figuring out how to BE a world. My clock only started working right a little while ago, and the hourglass still doesn't work unless I dunk it in the river.

Well, as long I'm not fading out of existence yet!

[Hmmm... so the world doesn't 'know' how things work, yet? Maybe that's why none of his abilities seem to work? It's made climbing a lot harder, he can't turn invisible, and he can't seem to change colour...]

At least the world's alive. Trees, plants and naked chickens are an improvement over dirt as far as the eye can see.

People don't just fade from existence around here, but they do disappear sometimes. Nobody's seen it happen yet, but it happens. Everyone around here isn't from this world originally.

[She laughed and shook her head.]

Glad you can call those things chickens. But yeah, this place is alive at least. It's definitely that.

Everyone? Not even one local?

[Now, that's a little surprising. He would have expected the world to have some kind of native people - perhaps whoever had brought them here?]

...so what you just said, about the world just beginning... is that a theory, or...?

Not a one.

So, it's kind of story time. Since new people've been showing up, I guess the first ones have stuff to tell. When we showed up, everything was just this white nothing. That void out there. The stuff that feels like paper with substance, but it's all the same.

It was like... twenty... thirty of us. Showed up around the nothing, and then things from our worlds started appearing and dropping out of the sky, and the Void stopped being a Void and became something. There weren't even animals before. It just sort of all appeared.