milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

Sometimes 'looking like you need more sleep' and 'looking like you're in a good mood' are not nearly as incompatible as you'd think.

Ray has sugar cereal, a T-shirt from the 53rd Precinct in the Bronx (they were really grateful when the Ghostbusters got the walls to stop bleeding), and his Incredible Hulk slippers. Yeah, he looks tired and his morning reading involves advanced avionics repair textbooks with 'USED' on the spine, but other than that all would appear to be right with his world.

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"I really hope you're right."

Guppy puts his head in his hands on the bar.
Jim, Fin, Simon, Jack, Patrick, Andrew, Tom, Ewart, Anna, Kelly...
They're dead. They're all dead.
The chap who used to be in charge of paramedics before Josh is dead. Nicky has a paralysed arm, Charlie has been shot and had a pulmonary embolism...
Thirteen deaths in nineteen years.
The gladiator steps into the ring. And let there be lions.

"Given that I've been to a reality where everything looked like it was part of a cartoon, and where that movie there was based on the story of our first major adventure, and it still looked exactly like the world I come from, I tend to think that yeah, it's the radiation of inspiration thing."

He blinks. "Are you all right?"

Boring characters get killed off. There's nobody more boring than you in the department.
And it's quiet... oh so quiet...

Guppy blinks and comes back down to reality.

"Um... I'm... not really sure."

Ray sighs. He's seen this before. "I think you need to talk to Peter," he says quietly. "He's been where you are now. I think he can help you."

Guppy is in total shock. So much so that he makes a mental note never to label any event as the weirdest thing he has ever experienced again. Because there cannot be anything weirder than this.

"It's..."
It's oh so quiet. It's oh so still...
There are no words.

"Thanks. I might do that." he says quietly.

Ray watches him for a while.

"There's one thing you need to know, first," he says at last.

Guppy looks up.

"What's that?"

"Whatever happens. Whatever it turns out is the case. Whether you're on TV or in a movie or in a comic book or a novel or- or anything-"

Ray leans over and thumps Guppy squarely in the middle of the forehead with a forefinger.

"You're real here. You make your choices. You. Not some writer, not here." Another forehead thump. "This is where you're real. None of the rest matters, unless you let it, and then it's no one's fault but your own."

"I'm real here." Guppy repeats, sort of dazed.

He blinks. "But I have to be real. I exist, I move, I feel, I think. How could I not exist?"
Brain in a vat
"This is horrible. They're killing people... and I can't do anything about it. I almost wish it was a curse."

Ray grimaces and swats Guppy across the top of the head with one hand. "No! No, they're not! Don't you understand? There's no conspiracy of writers. There's no circle of murderers plotting to ruin your life, or the lives of the people around you. It's just you, and the other people, and the rest of the world. You can't think like that, Guppy, it's abdicating responsibility for your own existence!"

"There's no circle of murderers." Guppy repeats. He still seems a bit dazed by the whole thing.
"They're just watching us? Somehow from somewhere? Or not even watching, sort of feeling our existance."
To be honest, he doesn't understand.
"Then how are people being killed off?"

[ooc: Mun has to go to dinner. Back in about three and a half hours]

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