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JCV: You just woke up here?
CORVID: Yes. Not long before you showed up.
JCV: Interesting. Is it the first place like this you’ve just wound up in?
CORVID: No.
JCV: Been to any other earths before?
CORVID: Not that I can think of.
JCV: Where else have you been?
CORVID: The sixth. And the gap, I believe.
JCV: The gap?
CORVID: A chasm between the two dominant realms.
JCV: The Tritone?
CORVID: Yes.
JCV: What’s that like?
CORVID: Dead. It’s the first place-
JCV: Besides your own realm that you can hop to?
CORVID: Yes. Are you also a hopper?
JCV: I was until I landed here. I’m more of a construct, now. I’ve been trying to outrun a fast-travel Non-Person Construct with a grudge against me. Hopped here, been safe since.
CORVID: And how did you?
JCV: Same thing, just woke up one day. I felt like I had been here forever, like I would be here forever. I’ve tried to find the strength to hop again, but nothing ever lined up. So, I take it the universe wants me here. I’m a construct now. It needs a soul to mind the crossroads, probably.
CORVID: I mean how do you hop from here?
JCV: harmony and state. the body has chemicals that are the right shape to be a key to the vorteX. you bring yourself to a state and you make some waveS. there’s thaT whole cobweb, grid, tunnel, spiral thing in youR mind's eye and you get pulled through it.
CORVID: Have you met many others?
JCV: I might have sent other hoppers off. You’re the first to come from inside.
CORVID: I see.
JCV: What’s the sixth like in person?
CORVID: Horrifying.
JCV: I mean so is Earth, if you think long enough.
CORVID: Maybe. In the 6th, life is born as bugs. Every bug has its own mind, its own thoughts. It achieves sentience by becoming a swarm. If you are to arrive there, you must understand that the swarm that swirls around you is all of the pieces of you. You must accept that your experience, your mind, is merely the negative space between the bugs. The swarm is loud, disgusting, and erratic. But you must accept the swarm, and breathe through them. Once you do that, the world around the swarm can be anything you want it to. It could look and behave identically to here. But I much prefer earth without the constant reminder of the bugs.
JCV: This is the same as Earth, isn’t it? Our atoms, the bugs, they stay more still, and its the energy that spins in around us. We also have a choice of where to put our attention. We can focus on the loud, disgusting, erratic hell given to us by our cells and our form, or we can accept it and focus on the energy that can spin and shape them. In three, on earth, that spinning fire can do way more to shape the bugs inside and the world outside. You’d be surprised how many people think and act like they’re in bug land. They see their swarm as outside themselves, not a part of them.
CORVID: Strange for creatures who live in such a paradise.
JCV: I mean, we could do better. The best timeline is the one with Anglia. Right in the center of 3:4. The Vandalic Mountains would have had better bodies for you to spawn into.
CORVID: I’ll aim better next time.
JCV: Maybe we can help each other aim for the fifth once I’m good to start hopping again.
CORVID: That’s where I’m trying to get back to.
JCV: I know. That’s where we’re all trying to go back to, doctor. It’s the Top Quark universe.
CORVID: How do you know all this?
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PAN
