thesphererp | memory } didn't know how but i always had a feeling

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memory } didn't know how but i always had a feeling

"Hey, Tim, dare me to jump?"

You're up high, kneeling at the ledge of the roof of a tall, tall building, one of many in this sprawling metropolis. It's nearly sunset, the last of the day's rays sinking slowly behind towers constructed of stone and concrete and steel and glass. You look down over the edge to the buildings and streets below, and your heart rate ticks upward in recognition of the danger you've placed yourself in, but you're not afraid. Dizzying heights like this are comfortable and familiar to you; rooftops are practically your second home.

"Jumping's easy, Steph. I dare you to sit still." You don't look back over your shoulder at her, but you know she's sitting on the ledge, feet kicking out into the air.

"Aw, you're so cute when you brood."

"I'm not brooding," you protest, broodingly.

"You couldn't be broodier if you had a cowl on," she counters, then adds: "Though it makes your butt look cute."

You roll your eyes and finally sit down next to her, the blonde girl in the purple caped uniform holding her phone up to film you with her camera. Stephanie. Your girlfriend. You turn to face her, eyebrow quirked. "I'm just wondering why I let you talk me into eating something this bad for me," you say, producing a wrapped, warm burger from a paper bag.

"Because it's so gooood. Gimme mine." You obediently hand over the bag, then unwrap your burger to take a bite.

"Why is that?" you muse between bites. "The best stuff is the worst for us?"

"You're the genius college boy, Mr. Ivy University. You tell me."

"You shouldn't be filming us in costume," you answer, taking another bite as you eye her camera warily.

"Stop being a buzzkill, this is for my personal files. We wrote this encryption together."

"Encryption can be hacked," you say, pragmatic as ever.

It's her turn to roll her eyes as she pauses her filming, phone still in hand but no longer angled at you. Her bubbly grin doesn't fade. "And the sun could explode in the next minute, and this food could start a clog in our arteries that kills us forty years from now. Anything can happen. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have fun. You'd realize that if you weren't stuck thinking about how you're going to break the news to him." She takes a bite of her burger and chews while giving you a look that dares you to prove her wrong.

You look down at the burger in your gloved hands and tear a piece of the bun off between your fingers. "I'm sorry ... it's hard, Steph. What we're doing in the Belfry feels so right, like the logical step we should have taken years ago. Part of me does want to stay, to make it all run correctly." You look up, and toss the bite of bread up to a bird sailing overhead. "But if there's a chance that with more knowledge under my belt, I could come up with an even better way to help people ... I have to take it. Saving the world is a complex thought problem. I'm doing my best, but it feels like my best could be so much better."

"You told me that it was about helping one person at a time. I always liked that."

"Yeah, but that'll take forever." She placed her gloved hand over yours, pressed to the cement, still warm from the heat of the day.

"Nobody said saving the world was going to be easy, kid." She picks up her phone and resumes filming you. "So ... where exactly do I fit into this plan? Or is this one of those one-man crusades?" The levity is notably dropped from her tone, replaced with a hint of worry. You both know you have a tendency toward making your mission exactly what she says - a one-man crusade. You turn toward her, expression serious, and gently cup her face between your hands.

"Steph ... "

"That's not an answer ... "

You answer her by bringing her mouth to yours in a gentle kiss, stroking the side of her cheek with your thumb as you linger at her lips. You love her so much your heart sometimes feels like it may burst, overfull.

"The plan doesn't exist without you," you say, once the kiss finally breaks, staring deep into the blue of her eyes with your own. "I'm trying to get this world one tiny step closer to utopia. And I'm pretty good on my own, but you and me together?"

You wrap your arm around her shoulders and pull her in close as she slides her arm around your back and leans her head sideways into yours, both of you staring out into the skyline of the city you know and love as the sun disappears farther behind the buildings in front of you.

"We're unstoppable."

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[After yesterday, Alex knows better than a lot of people how much having your intimate thoughts and moments being broadcast over the network sucks. However, she also knows that she herself wasn't aware of them until someone else informed her of them. So, she's just going to decide to tell him; just in case.]

I'm sorry, I know you're new but I just wanted to warn you that you're broadcasting to the network.

[Right, the network ... that implant behind his ear. It likely speaks to Tim's disoriented frame of mind that he's only made a cursory investigation of the network so far. He takes a moment to access and find this broadcast he's unwittingly sent out, and it's - it's a good memory, but painful, too. He was very happy with Steph, discussing their future together, a whole world in front of him ...

No sense in brooding about his future being cut short. Steph isn't even around to appreciate how cute it makes his butt look.]

Sorry ... I didn't realize I was doing that. [He chuckles apologetically.] I don't suppose there's any way to delete it, so I'm not bothering everyone?

It's okay, when things like this happen no one seems to unless someone tells them. It's not fair not to tell them, so I wanted to make sure you knew.

Unfortunately we've not discovered a way to delete anything from the network, which sucks honestly.

[There are a lot of personal details from everyone on the network it seems like right now.]

But there's nothing to apologize for, it doesn't give us the option not to do it.

Also welcome. I'm Alex.

Thanks - I appreciate the heads up, even if there isn’t anything I can really do about it.

[No way to delete from the network? Challenge accepted, Sphere.]

I’m Tim. It’s nice to speak with you, Alex. Have you been here long?

Of course. I mean, I'd hate to have it be on the network and have someone comment on it or something without me knowing.

[Which had happened actually. Her boyfriend is an asshole.]

Nice to meet you, Tim. I've been here about two months now, but this month is the first time that something like this has happened.

[Hmm ... ]

Do you know if there are any records of this place from previous inhabitants?

Only what’s on the network. There’s what we think are older files in the library but no ones been able to decipher them.

They're not in a language like anything we've ever seen, and my partner deals with dead languages on a regular basis.

[Well ... that's extremely interesting, if a little frustrating.]

This might sound weird ... but do you know if anyone here has any experience working with any alien languages?

Rhys might, he's from a different world than most of us from Earth. Different universe too, I mean.

But other than that, no I don't think so.

Thanks, I’ll try to track him down. You’re also from Earth, I take it? A version of Earth, anyway.

Yeah. I think about 75% of us are. Maybe 80%. Some people are less forthcoming than others.

[Until this very moment, things like this were reserved for comic books: caped crusaders talking about saving the world. But here, in this moment, it's normal, it's needed even, and...Aaron doesn't really know what to do about that.

That and he's pretty sure he hasn't met anyone in a cape recently.]

Hello, I-I'm sorry. Are you new?

I guess I must be.

[He laughs quietly, mostly to himself. You'll have to forgive him, since he expected to be dead instead of spirited away to a weird facility at the bottom of the ocean.]

Sorry, I didn't mean to put anything out on the network. I must've triggered the implant on accident.

[Yeah. Totally going with that, and totally not addressing the whole capes and saving the world thing.]

No, it's...not your fault. It's been happening a lot lately.

[And his tone is reassuring next.]

It's okay. I'm Aaron, by the way.

Really? [Tim is 100% gonna shake off this fugue state and go network diving as soon as possible. Maybe it’s a little invasive, but knowledge is armor, and this is a weird situation. Better to be prepared for who he’ll be dealing with.] Well, as weird as it sounds, I’m glad it’s not just me glitching here. I was thinking I’d have to disassemble myself to troubleshoot.

[Another quiet laugh, because humor is a coping technique.]

It’s nice to speak with you, Aaron. I’m Tim. Have you been here long?

Disassemble...? You're...not a robot, are you?

[He chuckles nervously. Look. It's been a weird month, man.]

You too, Tim. And...a little over a month, yeah.

[Tim chuckles under his breath again.] No, I’m not a robot. Just an ordinary human.

[Right ... a completely ordinary human. Not a stupidly well-trained teen crime-fighting vigilante who may or may not have died saving his city. Sure, we’ll go with that.]

So what would you say this place is like? I haven’t even left my pod yet. Has anything else weird or interesting happened in the last month?

It wouldn't be a big deal, even if you weren't.

[He's met some...interesting people here. He's not going to judge.]

It's...surprisingly domestic. This is the weirdest thing that's happened...except when we first arrived here, it snowed. Yeah, I know how that sounds.

It snowed inside the domes?

...yeah. It's unbelievable, I know, but...I was there. It was cold, either, at least not as cold as now should be.

Was it a technical malfunction? There has to be some kind of climate control system here, right? I mean, we're underwater, who knows how deep. Something's keeping us breathing and unfrozen.

I have no idea. Someone suggested magic, but I don't know how much I believe that for...obvious reasons.

What sort of obvious reasons do you mean?

...why? Do you think there's magic involved here?

Until it can be definitively ruled out, I wouldn’t discount it.

[Stranger things have happened, in Tim’s experience.]

You know, until I showed up here, disproving magic wasn't something I ever had to worry about.

[All right, Rhys is totally skipping over the cute mush and the fact that this is a new face to zero in on one sentence. He'll appear in the video from the waist up, wearing his black dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There's no missing that chrome right arm and gold-tinted left eye.]

You're right about that, encryption can be hacked. What did you study at university?

[Rhys’ appearance is definitely interesting - more subtle than Cyborg, but hey, Tim knows how this multiverse stuff works. It’s unlikely they’re from the same place, and different places have different technological advancements.]

I, um. Didn’t actually make it to university yet. I was supposed to start next semester.

[But then he had to go do a Heroic Sacrifice instead and ended up - dead? Here? Maybe both.]

I’ve been doing computer programming and encryption for a while, though. Outside of school.

[Just for fun. Really.]

Sounds like you do too?

Ah, yeah, I do. I started on it as a hobby in high school and made it into a career.

[He followed after his hero.]

Now I'm running things--or...I will be once I get back home. Can't really do much from here. No way to communicate.

Of course not. That would make things much too easy for us.

[Not that he’s bitter or anything! He knows how these kidnapping situations work.]

So what do you do back home, as far as the things you run?

Nothing can ever be easy...But yeah, back home, I'm the CEO of a weapons and tech company. Big stuff, you know.

[Hmm ... weapons manufacturing usually spells trouble. Better approach cautiously.]

Can I ask what kind of tech, or is that proprietary information?

Robotics. But that's all I'm willing to give up. I know none of my friends made it here, but that doesn't mean a competitor didn't make it.

[He's not exactly worried about Tim stealing his work, but he doesn't want to give details over a public network.]

Totally fair. I know how cutthroat the business world can be. But robotics is a pretty fascinating field. Some of my programming work has occasionally overlapped in that area.

Oh, has it? [Having an assistant might be good.]

You know, the council is letting me set up a robotics shop. I'll be teaching those who want to learn about anything and everything technological. Any chance you'd want to help out with that?

Why were you in costume?

[The question comes from a teen around Tim's own age. He's got a Northern European accent of vague origins and completely blue eyes. That's right, not just the icy blue irises, but the sclera are a faint shade as well.]

[Hoo boy. Tim was wondering when that question would turn up.]

It’s something people do for fun where I’m from - it’s called cosplay.

Cosplay? I've never heard of it before. Is it like Halloween?

[That one he knows about.]

Yeah, sort of - you just don’t need a specific day for it. You can dress up whenever you want.

[Good redirection, Timothy.]

Do you have a favorite Halloween costume?

We don't celebrate Halloween where I am from, but I did get a chance to experience it in the city I was in last year. I went as a skeleton knight.

[His own personal joke, for Ivar was the one usually killing the knights, and a knight in death seemed like a good costume idea.]

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memory } didn't know how but i always had a feeling

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