Well, that puts a mark in column "someone is behind this" over "something," don't it?
Maybe someone with something very specific in mind.
[He's wondering the same thing that they're all thinking, that maybe their hosts are behind this. Like many of the others, he doesn't put words to the suspicion. It's a bit of a toxic rumor to spread around if they really are trying to help them and there's a high chance they're telling the truth. After all, they're doing what he'd have done in their situation and he knows plenty of other heroes that would be handling this the same way they are. There is a chance they're legit.]
[But in case they're not, he'll save discussing his suspicions with others for doing it somewhere a little more...discreet. There has to be somewhere on the ship he can lure people to, with minimal surveillance, to talk it over. In the meantime, he can talk about the other contenders. He wouldn't put all this past some kind of all-powerful cosmic something fucking with them all.]
Back home in my universe there are very powerful beings called Abstracts. They're...they're almost concepts, they're so powerful. Like Death. As in the Death.
[He taps his head.]
And the way they think is... [He shakes his head.] One of them died near me once. We were going against the Many-Angled Ones, against this -- this death engine made out of the body of a cosmic being, and the Abstract exploded. It got corrupted and exploded into this mess of --
[He's just going to cut that thought off. No little bitty teenage turtle should have what that looked like described to him. Explosions of tentacles and too-many-eyeballs, and too-many-mouths, and... there's even a little twitch on his face as he briefly closes his eyes.]
Anyway, I got caught in the psychic backlash. Nearly destroyed my mind. It left me a warning, because it'd sensed something and I used that bit of cosmic awareness to figure out what to do next in the war we were fighting. But that second of consciousness, that moment...
It was so utterly alien that -- I can't even put it into words.
[He's always terrible at describing this stuff.]
My point is that it might not make sense to us, not on our level. If something sentient did all this to us, had the power to bring us here, to change us, they might be operating on an entirely different scale. And that means we may have to focus on that scale, on the whole game, rather than the odd details that stick out. Because it could all come down to nonsensical, weird, dumb choices cosmic beings made while playing their little games with our lives.
A lot of these things are situations where you can't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The forest is always what it comes down to. That's my experience, anyway.
no subject
Maybe someone with something very specific in mind.
[He's wondering the same thing that they're all thinking, that maybe their hosts are behind this. Like many of the others, he doesn't put words to the suspicion. It's a bit of a toxic rumor to spread around if they really are trying to help them and there's a high chance they're telling the truth. After all, they're doing what he'd have done in their situation and he knows plenty of other heroes that would be handling this the same way they are. There is a chance they're legit.]
[But in case they're not, he'll save discussing his suspicions with others for doing it somewhere a little more...discreet. There has to be somewhere on the ship he can lure people to, with minimal surveillance, to talk it over. In the meantime, he can talk about the other contenders. He wouldn't put all this past some kind of all-powerful cosmic something fucking with them all.]
Back home in my universe there are very powerful beings called Abstracts. They're...they're almost concepts, they're so powerful. Like Death. As in the Death.
[He taps his head.]
And the way they think is... [He shakes his head.] One of them died near me once. We were going against the Many-Angled Ones, against this -- this death engine made out of the body of a cosmic being, and the Abstract exploded. It got corrupted and exploded into this mess of --
[He's just going to cut that thought off. No little bitty teenage turtle should have what that looked like described to him. Explosions of tentacles and too-many-eyeballs, and too-many-mouths, and... there's even a little twitch on his face as he briefly closes his eyes.]
Anyway, I got caught in the psychic backlash. Nearly destroyed my mind. It left me a warning, because it'd sensed something and I used that bit of cosmic awareness to figure out what to do next in the war we were fighting. But that second of consciousness, that moment...
It was so utterly alien that -- I can't even put it into words.
[He's always terrible at describing this stuff.]
My point is that it might not make sense to us, not on our level. If something sentient did all this to us, had the power to bring us here, to change us, they might be operating on an entirely different scale. And that means we may have to focus on that scale, on the whole game, rather than the odd details that stick out. Because it could all come down to nonsensical, weird, dumb choices cosmic beings made while playing their little games with our lives.
A lot of these things are situations where you can't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The forest is always what it comes down to. That's my experience, anyway.