rippedtheskyapart | (no subject)

(no subject)

The front door of Milliways opens and a naked man walks through it.

His hair is swept back tidily, his skin fresh and clean and smooth except for a number of scars—varyingly old and varyingly interesting. Almost before he's cleared the threshold, he stops, looking around in a brief, brief moment of total confusion.

Halfway through spinning back around toward the (now closed) Door, he silently explodes into a cloud of fine grey dust.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

. . . that was fairly unusual, even for Milliways.

He stays where he is, eyes on the space in front of the Door, and waits to see what will happen next.

Nothing, for a few long seconds.

(He expands to take in the building, and—stops, dizzily. There's more of it than there should be, folded into less space. Past the back door is a lake. Past the window is vacuum; he knows what that feels like and has never yet been bored enough to try crossing it. Past the door he came in is... precisely nothing; his awareness stops about halfway through the wood. Can't even get past through the cracks.)

A salt-shaker on a nearby table explodes, flinging salt and glass shards in all directions. The scattered grains on the surface of the table spell out the word:

WHAT

Good thing the persona Jim was wearing until about ten seconds ago favors long sleeves; as it is, a few of the shards of glass manage to embed themselves into the fabric. He brushes at them irritably.

"The end of the universe," he says, as though it could not possibly be more obvious. Which, as far as he's concerned, it couldn't.

A corner of the message rearranges itself into an inch-high fuck you; at the same time, the glass detaches itself from Jim's sleeve; while it hovers in the air a moment as though debating an attack, the bulk of the large angry word squirms into a new, more detailed alignment. Somewhat more sedate, too. He even includes punctuation.

Tell me something I don't know.

As an afterthought, fuck you brushes itself off the table and the glass drops to the floor.

Temper, temper. He mouths the words without quite giving them voice.

Then, pleasantly:

"Where did you want me to start?"

He wants to try incarnating again just so he can pick this little bastard up and shake him, but he's not steady enough to stay solid right now—barely made it the first time, and look how that ended—and he knows exactly how well it wouldn't work in any case. The salt skitters indecisively across the table, forming patterns that don't quite become words, before finally settling on:

How?

"No one seems to be sure," Jim has to admit. "It's either extraordinary technology or magic, and yes, there is a distinct difference between the two here."

Lectures about sufficiently advanced technology are not wanted, thank you.

That temper Jim warned him about wipes all the salt off the table with a violent motion.

Oh, fuck it, he'll try again.

His body coaelsces in the air over the course of several seconds, from the bones out, standing with his arms crossed. Still no clothes, a fact which seems to bother him not at all.

"And how did you come to happen? You're not exactly me, but you're damn close."

He lacks, for example, the scar under his jawline; he has a rather more significant collection of cigarette burns, although this Jim is not without a few of his own, currently on prominent display to anyone who may be looking.

Oh, and he isn't dead. That is one major distinction.

Jim watches the process with open fascination.

(His double, he decides, can learn about Milliways's stance on nudity for himself. It would be entertaining to see how they'd get him to the cells.)

"Multiple universes," he says, looking his double over and likewise noticing differences in scars and markings. "Infinite, most likely, but only a sampling here."

"Hnh," he says.

Vocal sounds are a luxury he truly appreciates these days. Despite repeated experiments, he can't get himself to sound right speaking out of thin air. Sound intelligible—sometimes, barely. Sound right, no.

"I'd ask if there's anything you want to know about your future, but I'm not sure it would apply." He fiddles with his left forearm, peeling away flesh from the bone with a touch of his fingers and smoothing it back down again, much the same way someone else might pick at a loose thread on their sleeve. It parts along the line of the old scar there, whose counterpart he can't see now under the shirt the other Jim is wearing. But a minute ago, looking him over, he felt very clearly that it was two inches too high.

"I'm given to understand it involves blowing my brains out," he says, sounding hopelessly bored. His tone clashes decidedly with the way he watches his counterpart toy with his arm.

The question of Jim's future is boring; the mechanics of this double's existence are not.

"Oh yes," he says, with a smile of fond remembrance. "Then comes the fun part. I'd kill you now if I knew how to duplicate the effect."

His hand lifts away from his arm—detaches entirely, suspended at the end of a smooth linkage of blood flowing through the air between the cleanly severed ends of veins and arteries. He wiggles his fingers in a cheery wave. The appendage snaps back into place.

"I can do tricks," he chirps.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only