Work Text:
The sendificator takes the book, pregnant with all your goddamn words, and transports it to Jane with an arc of residual electricity. You were half hoping it wouldn’t work. Not that you’d want to slime Jane on her birthday, even though it would be the kind of prank she would honestly probably appreciate more than your butchered pony story.
Why did you have to write that.
You could have stopped, is the thing. You were working on that book for the better part of eight months. There were countless drafts, so many pages spent perfecting your dumb “mindless doodles”, sleepless nights as you poured wikipedia pages and worse, when you hacked into online libraries to access the original texts so that the quotes and references you used wouldn’t be the ones cited on fucking wikipedia. The tome you just sent hurtling through time and space is a monument to your arrogance. And you had the audacity to call it a birthday present.
You should have just made her another rabbit.
You take refuge in your shower, where you can’t worry about whether she’s received it or whether she’s reading it, where you can’t snap at Jake or Roxy for not being Jane, where you can’t leave her even more words in Pesterchum justifying your present and presumably neglecting entirely to mention her birthday, drowning out her day with more time she’s obligated to spend on you.
It all comes back to Timaeus, you think, if we ever really left it. Plato’s most incomprehensible and yet most popular dialogue, at least among the ones who wanted his truths to suit their religious purposes. In Timaeus, the eponymous Athenian spends pages and pages explaining how the world, the universe and the gods came to be. He does this with an air of complete authority, using the same Platonic argument structure that can be found in all the dialogues (or at least their wikipedia pages): if you accept this to be true, then, naturally, this follows.
It’s amazing what utter bullshit a man can sell if his sales pitch is delivered with enough confidence.
Yes, hello Jane, it’s Dirk, from the Internet. I know it’s your birthday, so I won’t take up too much of your time. This is a lie, but of course when you hear what I’m selling then you’ll be grateful that I rescued you from a day that might otherwise be filled with love and celebration. See, what I’m here to sell you is a book. But it’s not just any book. The book I am here to sell was once a completely banal (but pure) children’s book, and I’ve taken the liberty of “improving” it with thousands of words of orange semen. That’s right! The book you hold in your hot little hands is the product of hours and hours of intellectual masturbation, and it’s all yours for the low, low price of hours of sifting through references not even I could get without an AI helping me through it and a guilt hangover that will last a lifetime.
Timaeus sold the world on a single unifying god, a universe developed from the soul out, and a world where order is better than chaos, and the dickheads who thought that he had proven divinity ensured that Plato would be forever immortal long before his name was used as an illogical synonym for non-sexual. Like, that dude was gay. He fucked.
You spend the rest of the shower alternatively congratulating yourself on your incredibly intellectual chumhandle, wallowing in preemptive misery at Jane’s upcoming reaction to your bullshit, and just zoning the fuck out. You deliver fake lectures on Plato’s dialogues. You have a fake argument with first Jane about the suitability of her present (you on the “it’s perfect” team, despite your real feelings) and then another fake argument with Roxy as you imagine her scolding you over the whole affair. You stare at a couple of blond strands of hair on your shower wall. At some point, you pretend to shave, ridding yourself of maybe some invisible bristles. It simultaneously makes you feel like a man for making the effort and hate yourself for your pretension at adult activities.
All these things take up a lot of time. When you exit the shower, you have four windows blinking at you. Like a coward, you check Jake’s first. It looks like your Auto-Responder has that one covered.
golgothasTerror [GT] has begun pestering timaeusTestified [TT]
GT: Strider!
GT: I thought id take a break from a day filled to the absolute brim with adventure and all that malarky to message my bestest bro in the world.
GT: Theres a lot going on here but im never too busy for you!
TT: As always, your displays of fraternal love set my loins on fire.
GT: *Swallows nervously.*
TT: Obviously I am fucking with you.
TT: What can I do for you, Jake.
GT: Listen that consarned brobot is in a bit of a pussyvan.
GT: Or i think he is hes not around to check actually.
GT: Ive been in communicado with my penpal and shes not able to get to her ruins because of a situation with a rather rascally guardian but i dont have anyone here to care if *i* go for a plunder!
TT: Strange boast, but okay.
GT: However!
GT: I do have quite a few beasties who would like to gobble me up and i was wondering if there was any way for the brobot to i dont know…
GT: Protect me instead of kicking the fucking stuffing out of me?
TT: If you trained with him more, you wouldn’t need his protection.
GT: Come on strider!
GT: There must be something i can offer you.
GT: *Rummages in pockets for things to send into the FLIPPIN FUTURE*
TT: Tell you what, if you can hold your own in a strife, he’ll have your back the rest of the day.
tipsyGnostalgic [TG] has begun pestering timaeusTestified [TT]
TG: i canot BEKLIVE that the “sercet project” that u hav been workin on was a book
TG: believe**
TG: ur a ffkn nerd disti
TG: we totes could have gotten our coords on with thta like with the bubs
TG: bubs
TG: buns OMG
TG: r u havin one of ur legendrary ablooshes?
TG: ablooshes is short for ablutionss, dont let my durnkeness fool ya i can spell shiz
TG: course it has thr same sybalbles so it isnt rly short
TG: ar is he havin one of his legenfary ablooshes?
TT: Yup.
TG: well how bout u and me have a chat bb!
TG: wats goin on int hat robo melom
timaeusTestified [TT] has been blocked from viewing further messages!
gutsyGumshoe [GG] has begun pestering timaeusTestified [TT]
GG: Why, what have we here?
GG: It does seem that a book marked with a distinctive shade of orange has alighted itself upon my lap.
GG: The circumstances surrounding this spontaneous book materialisation must be investigated thoroughly.
GG: I consider myself on the case!
GG: And I suppose you must be off doing something else, despite the fact that I didn’t waste much time ogling your present before pestering you.
GG: Thank you, Dirk.
GG: Now to crack this bad boy open!
gutsyGumshoe [GG] is an idle chum...
gutsyGumshoe [GG] is now online!
TT: Hey, Jane.
TT: I hope you didn’t spend all day reading that piece of shit.
TT: Cakes to be eaten and pinatas to be brutalised, am I right?
TT: In fact, you don’t ever have to read it, just admire the chapter title artwork or whatever.
TT: Genuinely not my best work.
TT: I mean, I should hope. Imagine peaking at 14. I’d literally chop my own fuckin’ head off and fling it across the ocean if I thought that was true.
GG: Am I Anna, Dirk?
TT: That's not really the point. It's very experimental—
GG: But I am, aren't I?
TT: ...
TT: Yeah.
GG: I love you too, Acorn.
TT: I know.
The thing is, you do. You don’t doubt Jane’s love for a fucking second, and somewhere beneath layers and layers of bullshit you managed to convey that. It didn’t matter how bad Acorn was, he loved Anna and Anna loved him. And they just fuckin’ kept on caring about each other until their existence was cut short.
You talk longer, because Jane has questions and you’re incapable of shutting up even now. You knew she was smart enough for this, knew she’d be able to read past your lectures on memes and metatexual rambles, and school your ass when you should by all rights have the upper hand.
GG: I have the sneaking suspicion you watched all of Parks and Recreation for this.
TT: Please, I got all the information for Pawnee off the wiki. She practically reads it out loud to Betancourt.
GG: Oh, I know.
GG: I still think you watched it.
TT: ...
TT: Damn, someone should give you a special title. Investigative horse or something.
GG: So, what do you think?
TT: I can see why you’re in love with Ron.
TT: Manliness embodied, Jane.
TT: A moustache that goes on for days.
GG: Very funny.
GG: It makes me hopeful, actually.
GG: I don’t see local governance in my future, but if I end up as savvy as Leslie when I’m CEO, I’ll be making my company very rich indeed.
TT: How are we not talking about ponies right now, I demand a refund on this conversation.
GG: Okay, okay!
GG: Actually, that part confused me.
GG: Do you *like* ponies?
GG: I honestly can’t tell, and I’ve known you for years.
GG: I thought you did, but you’re pretty dismissive on them in the book, it *seems* like you think they’re stupid.
TT: Ponies are the stupidest fuckin’ creatures on this entire planet.
TT: You know if they lay down for too long they die?
TT: Their hearts straight up give up. They can’t sleep for more than a couple hours.
TT: It’s why they shoot the poor bastards who break a leg, they’ll literally die anyway.
TT: If a pony gets a stuffy nose, they die.
TT: If you overwork a pony, guess what!
TT: It’s like they want to die.
TT: Their hooves are toes.
TT: Like all the other animals have feet for feet, but they’re always on skeletal tip toe.
TT: They don’t have muscles under their knees.
TT: God *damn*, Jane.
GG: So you don’t like ponies?
TT: I fucking love ponies.
GG: This is irony again, isn’t it.
TT: I’m glad you noticed.
TT: You know, this pony thing is an excellent example of irony in motion.
TT: I couldn’t mutilate a children’s book on a subject I had no interest in. Nor could I treat that tepid pony adventure with anything resembling gentlemanly behaviour.
TT: And it goes further than that.
TT: I’ve based a lot of my personality on my heritage. I’m a Texan cowboy, Jane.
GG: I refuse to believe that.
TT: That’s because you’re very smart.
TT: I’ve never been remotely near a ranch. But it’s in my *blood.*
GG: I don’t think your Bro has ever been near a ranch either.
TT: And part of bein’ a gun-slingin’, spur-wearin’, rootin’-tootin’ Southern gentleman is the goddamn ponies.
GG: Your text is much too orange to get away with that.
TT: Right. Sorry.
You prattle on about ponies for a really long time. She encourages you, because she actually likes talking to you. She likes listening to you dominate the conversation. She likes being the one to tell you that she’s never going to read Paradise Lost but it sure is sweet that you have yet another book recommendation that you haven’t even read yourself.
TT: What did you think of the meta stuff.
GG: You do know the characters aren’t real, right?
TT: Oh, of course.
TT: The Dirk in the book is a character too, he could have been drawn and quartered if I wanted. In fact, in an earlier draft...
GG: So you don’t believe in Anna’s core motivation?
TT: I don’t know if the book I wrote was *good*.
TT: To be honest, it’s pretty derivative even outside of the constant references.
TT: Baby’s first metatext and guess what the characters learn they’re in a book and take issue. It looks original to people who think Dan Brown is the height of literature.
TT: I’ve read it a thousand times.
GG: ...
TT: Fine, I researched metatext once I knew where I wanted to go with the plot and there’s a lot of this out there.
TT: I mean, not this.
GG: You went quiet in the middle of explaining something, that isn’t like you.
TT: Sorry, I was thinking.
GG: Well, that *is* like you.
GG: Penny for your thoughts?
TT: It’s embarrassing.
GG: I must find out then!
GG: What kind of thought would Dirk Strider find embarrassing...
GG: First we must visit the scene of the crime and scour for clues.
TT: Any leads, Crocker?
GG: Unfortunately not.
GG: But I have a way of dealing with such stubborn cases.
TT: Oh?
GG: The coppers aren’t opposed to having their palms greased, if you know what I mean.
TT: Oh, for sure. It just feels better that way.
GG: DIRK! GROSS!
TT: Not sorry for that one.
GG: Well, you definitely owe me the truth now.
TT: Fine.
TT: I like the book.
GG: How is that embarrassing?
TT: No, I really like it.
TT: I’m proud of it.
TT: I think I did a good job and I made something original, something only I could make.
GG: Oh, hush.
GG: I love it.
GG: I’m going to treasure it forever and ever and there’s nothing you can do about it. :B
GG: Keep explaining metatext to me, you duffer.