vatheon | (no subject)

Who: Dirk and Open
When: the afternoon
Where: Near the Library
Style: Starting prose, but I'll follow.
Status: Open

Today has been a day of training for Dirk.

Not his usual style of training, with a sword or even the puppets he occasionally uses to fight. Nor has he gone somewhere like the forest or the island which have plenty of open spaces appropriate for sparring. Instead, he's spent the day sitting by the front steps of the library. He isn't wearing the shirt emblazoned with an orange hat that is his usual choice, either. Instead, he's wearing a maroon shirt with a pink heart emblazoned on it.

He's also got a stack of books beside him that he appears to be making his way through. By the afternoon, he's been working all day to no effect, so he sets the most recent tome aside and leans back against the steps to get the crick out of his neck. "How the fuck do you even define a soul, anyway." He apparently isn't paying attention to where he is, because the comment is more than loud enough to be heard by anyone passing by.

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"Davesprite mentioned it, but didn't really explain it. He also mentioned something about you being the prince of heart. That got anything to do with the shirt you're wearing?" Leo tapped the heart on Dirk's shirt, as though he needed to explain what he was talking about.

It's a good thing that Dirk has come to view Leo as a close friend, and that he's been desensitized to close contact from good friends by living with Roxy for so long. What that means for Leo is that he doesn't even flinch when Leo moved into his space to tap the symbol on his shirt. He just glances down at it and nods. "This symbol is representative of the Heart aspect. There are plenty of different aspects- Hope, void, life, light, wind, space, time, the list goes on. I'll fully admit to knowing jack shit about a lot of them. There were only four players in our session."

"Without going too deep into the mindfuck that is SBURB, God Tier is a power level you can achieve in the game. If you die in the game- and trust me, dying is a goddamn likely thing- on your quest bed, you're granted conditional immortality and cool powers based on your class and your aspect."

It was easy enough to jump to the conclusion that if Dirk was talking about God Tier after his asking about the shirt that it was because he'd made it there. The fact that he had to die in order to get there kind of sucked, but at least he was alive now.

"So if someone randomly tried to kill you right now it wouldn't work?" That was kind of an interesting thought. "And what kind of powers did you get?"

"It'd work. I'd just come back to life, depending on the way I died." Not quite as awesome as it seemed. Certainly not like the kind of immunity being dipped in the River Styx would provide. "I had someone describe the role of a Prince of Heart to me as a destroyer of souls. What that means I can do, I have no fucking idea."

"Oh. Well, that's a little less cool than I was thinking. But it's good that you'd probably come back to life." Definitely nowhere near as good of immunity as that.

"Destroyer of souls?" Leo blinked. That sounded like the opposite of what being the Prince of Heart should entail. "Sounds grim."

"Far as I remember, the revival works as long as the death isn't heroic or just. Which means if I get my ass killed in a really fucking stupid fashion, the game gives me a second chance so I don't go down in history as the lamest God Tier to ever exist."

He nods. "Most of the shit in this game does, when you get past the what the fuck factor. Hell, it destroys worlds."

"So, unlimited 1-ups so long as you keep being a screw-up?"

Leo thought on that for a minute. "Man, I don't know if that's better or worse than back home for me. If we don't succeed in our quest then we've doomed the world to destruction."

"Yours is better, trust me. It's not guaranteed that your world will be fucked up beyond repair." He's not really bitter about it. In his session, there were no meteors to destroy the planet, just an evil space alien and a long, slow decline.

"So even if you manage to win in your game, it's still gonna be messed up?" None of the pieces of what he knows about this game so far really makes a lot of sense. But he's not entirely sure knowing everything would make a ton of sense either.

"If we even win it. Our game's fucked up in general, we can't do shit without a bunch of other people coming in and taking a crack at things." It's a long story, but if Leo asks more, he'll tell the whole thing.

"What's the point of even playing it then? I mean, it sounds kind of like the outcome is gonna suck anyway. So why bother trying?" Leo doesn't think Dirk and them should give up. He's just trying to figure out why they haven't.

"Because you can't avoid it. That's just how it works." Dirk adjusts his sunglasses, then continues talking. "For me and Roxy, it was just about the only way we'd do shit in the world, thanks to hostile alien bitch takeover. We did it despite Roxy's doubts about it because there was nothing else to do. It was the batterwitch's trap, but we couldn't accomplish anything by not walking into it. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I know what you mean," Leo says with a solemn nod. So much of the big quest that was to do with the prophecy of seven fit into the category of walking into unavoidable traps. It was annoying as hell, but that just seemed to be how quests worked.

"Anyway, who's the batterwitch?"

“You’ve met plenty of trolls already. I’m guessing you’ve learned a bit about how shit works for them, but I’ll give the summary anyway because they’re condescending as hell about it.” Dirk traces out a pyramid in the air. “You know about caste systems, right? A whole pyramid where the most power goes to the few people on top. Anyway, trolls have an especially bullshit one based around their blood color. It’s muddled as shit on most of the levels, but there’s always one person at the top. The Empress.”

The way he says the word is sharp as daggers. “She’s the batterwitch. In my universe, she fucked up and lost her empire of trolls. So she decided to come to Earth and make humanity her bitches instead. Only she killed off all the humans, too.”

"Yeah. I've heard a bit about troll things here and there." He listens to the rest of what Dirk says with interest. He totally gets caste systems. They're everywhere if you look close enough. There's definitely one going on with the gods, demigods and monsters. And even in normal day to day life, he's aware of class structures. It was hard not to be when you spent 7 years in the system and trying to get out of it.

"Wow, what a bitch. Anyway, how'd she go from being called The Empress to being called the batterwitch? I mean, that's a pretty big change in titles."

"Because of Betty Crocker." Whatever Leo was expecting, it probably wasn't this. "First few decades she was on our planet, she worked under the guise of a baking company, of all things. But there were rumors about her, and she was called the batterwitch. Or the batterbitch, if you especially hated her."

Yeah, he definitely wasn't expecting Betty Crocker. He hoped that the Betty Crocker in his world wasn't evil.

"So the Betty Crocker in your world was always an evil troll?"

"Just about. What makes it awkward is having a friend who's an heir to the company." He leans forward, laces his fingers together. "It took a while for me and Roxy to convince her we knew our shit, but we got through to her eventually."