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Your name is Dave Strider and you have some explaining to do. You look at the glistening curve of the freshly minted dream bubble in paradox space, the first new one in a long, long time, freshly glubbed by the only gods older than yourself. You contemplate the memories you’ll find within as you glide inside. According to John, these guys have been through countless planes of existence. The most important place to them could be anything, the first church of fungston, the glistening planes of Twosun, the worn in living area of the Star Blaster… What you don’t expect to see is an ordinary train car.
You glance outside the window, and you can see planes of existence drifting by in the blank white of a paradox space too far from the first gods to have to contend with their whispers and all-consuming tentacle horror. It takes a minute, but they turn and notice you as much as you allow them to.
“Hey…” you start, not used to using your voice in this way. The Gift of Gab tints your words as you open your mouth to speak, “Um, I know you’re confused, and, uh, I can- I can explain some of what’s going on, but I need you all to be cool about this, okay? This is breaking virtually every protocol that we’ve got in place, but I think this qualifies as extenuating circumstances.” You adjust your shades and take a moment to observe the four beings before you.
There’s Taako, an incredibly powerful wizard. He exudes confidence in a way that would make Vriska jealous, but even you can tell it’s a front. Next to him is Merle, an older dwarf that managed to make John “I don’t pity like that” Egbert flash diamond eyes so hard and sharp that they managed to cut through the carbon steel of his eternal bullshit. You’ll have to thank him personally later.
Then there’s Magnus. Classes and aspects haven’t had as much influence after trillions of trillions of eons of the game’s evolution over existence, but if he wasn’t a fellow knight of time, you’d eat your fancy cape. Despite his limited magical training, this is someone who understood time well enough to make an artifact that manipulated it in the service of others. It’s him who speaks up first.
“God?”
You groan, “No, ugh, see this is exactly what I was afraid of. No, I’m-“
Merle interrupts, “Jesus?”
“No, not him either. Oh man, this- maybe this was a bad idea…” You run your fingers through your hair as you pace unseen in their pocket dimension.
“Go on-“ Merle reassures, “No no no, please.”
He’s very polite and you can see how John took a shine to him. “I can’t- I’m not God, I can’t- I... I can’t really tell you my name.” It sound so lame when you say it out loud, but everyone agreed that Names have power, and even if these people deserved a debriefing, you couldn’t give them that much.
“That’s exactly what God would say!” Magnus says, like it’s some grand realization.
Merle nods solemnly, “And his friend Jesus.”
“I can’t- I can’t tell you my name!” you finally say, “I don’t wanna- I don’t wanna run the risk of one of you, like, going back and starting a doomsday cult in my name or anything, but, um, I-“
You are saved from further floundering by Magnus making random guesses. “Jeff,” he tries.
“If that’s what you want to call me-“ before you can even say “go ahead,” Magnus throws out another name.
“Andrew.”
Merle and Magnus start talking over each other, Merle begins to tell him to “Just pick one” and Manus turns to you and says, “Just tell me when I get there.”
Merle gives the frankly stupid suggestion of, “Jeffandrew.” You would be more annoyed, but you would be lying if it wasn’t exactly what you would have expected from someone that is John’s type.
Magnus starts to open his mouth and you see brief flashes of timelines where he continues onward, throwing out names in alphabetical order and not even Aradia has time for that and she’s MAID of it. “Jeffandrew is- Let’s stick with that, I-“
Magnus nods and tries out the name and you go to continue. “I- I, Jeffandrew, um…” saying it oud loud, you realize how ridiculously this sets the tone for the rest of your meeting. “Y’all know that’s not my real name, right? I do have to be clear. But I don’t wanna, like, look in here, like-“
“Too late!” Taako says, and he makes a verbal note to update the fantasy Wikipedia scrolls upon his return.
You sigh, exasperated, and get down to why you brought them here in the first place. You spend a minute to think about how to articulate the nature of your own paradoxical existence as a member of the third pantheon who’s belief spawned into existence the first before settling on, “I, well, myself and a small team of other folks, we made your world.” You pause, and then correct, “Or I guess, your existence. Or actually to be more specific, still, we- we made the… The laws of physics and- and thermodynamics and arcane interactions and all that stuff that- that govern your world.”
Not the full truth, but not inaccurate either. As dumb a name as Jeffandrew is, you are glad you hadn’t caved and given them your real one. The woman in the back, Lucrecia, is looking contemplatively in your direction in a way that reminds you of Dirk on his more self-depreciating kicks. You continue, “This- this place that you’re in is um- well, it’s nowhere. It’s- it’s a kind of safety net. The- the laws of this world dictate that everything’s somewhere, and that no two things can be in the same somewhere at the same time, and…” Jade would be so much better at explaining this- space was never really your deal. “The Hunger, as you called it, it- it broke that law, flagrantly, using the Light of Creation, it was just this big jumble of places all occupying the same somewhere, just this big mass all tied together with the bonds that it stole.”
You don’t think any of you will ever forgive yourselves for letting shit happened the way it did. You all had bullshit powers, but nothing like John’s OP retcon nonsense. If any of you had taken one minute to stop and think of the toll it was taking on him, maybe none of this would have happened. You continue, surprised at the lack of interruption, “And when you cut those bonds, the laws caught back up to the Hunger, and all those places couldn’t be in the same place anymore, and so they ended up here. And, fortunately, now that they’re here, we can start putting em’ back in place. Who did that by the way? Who cast that spell? That- I didn’t think anything like that was possible.”
“That was, uh, her,” Magnus tells you as he gestures to Lucrecia.
She makes eye contact with you in a way the others don’t, like a Strider who’s spent all their lives looking through tinted glass. Her hair and skin are the same as yours, and if you didn’t literally talk to your sister just before coming here you would have sworn she was the second coming of Rose Lalonde. She kinda waves all around in a way that, to you, further proves she knows exactly where you’re at. “Hi? That was me?” she says.
You look at her over your shades, red eyes piercing into her very soul. Her unflinching return of your gaze wouldn’t surprise you as much if you weren’t so sure she could see it fully. “You’re…” you begin, “the most powerful person I think I’ve ever met, and I- I owe you an enormous debt of gratitude.” Flowery language wasn’t really your thing, but you needed to make sure she Understood. She saved your best bro and you could think of nothing that would repay her.
Taako chooses this moment to speak up, “I did cast the Whirlwind thing-“
You mentally scratch everything you said about aspects not manifesting in the newer universes because that is the most breath bullshit you’ve ever heard.
“I mean, I didn’t want- I thought you were talking about me, honestly, hi, Taako from TV, Did- am I dead? I should’ve asked earlier.”
He’s confident in the way that only fully realized witches are and you are momentarily glad Damara and Rufio’s relationship never worked out long term because this kind of self-assured arrogance can only come from their influence and you dread the consequences if there was more of that kind of energy in the world.
“No, you’re not dead, you, uh-,“ You feel a little out of your depth, talking to new people who aren’t the ghosts of your doomed friends for the first time in eons.
“Nice!” Taako articulates his exclamation with a little fist pump as Magnus asks, “Is this purgatory?”
“No, it’s not that either,” and before you can open your mouth to explain more, Taako turns to his friends.
“That’s what he would say, though!”
“Yeah!” Magnus adds while Merle says, “It’s nowhere!”
Magnus turns to you and asks, “Have we been in purgatory this whole time?”
It takes every ounce of self-control to not rub your temples and groan. You feel a headache coming on. “I don’t actually know why you’re on a-“ you stop yourself when you realize something. When living people enter the dream bubbles, it’s much easier for them to manifest on a physical object. That’s why so many of your own afterlife adventures started from the meteor when you were a kid. It was much easier to drift into the mishmash of memories when they were grounded in a tangible item. “Oh, oh oh!” You grin, realizing why this space is a train, rather than some other site of significance to the four, “When- when you made this train, uh, uh,” you flounder, trying to remember the terms this plane uses for disappearify and transportalize, “disappear and then the teleportation magic didn’t hold, it ended up being nowhere, so I guess that’s why you’re… Here too. Gosh we got some… We got some stuff to work out. I guess I owe all of you a debt!”
It figures Paradox Space would collect the materials jettisoned from dying worlds. Everyone’s gonna kill John when they realize just how much cleaning up you all have to do.
You grin at the four, and it is easy to see why they would have been players of a session before evolution rendered them as obsolete as vestigial legs in whales. “We- we-,” you take a moment to collect your thoughts, “We don’t have the tools to interfere with a world once it’s made, so when the Light of Creation,” and boy was that a pretentious name for the game to take on, “slipped out of our domain and into yours, we had no way of recovering it, we thought that was- we thought that was it for this word. But the four of you, and your friends, you saved everything.”
You steel yourself, and channel your inner Dad Crockerbert and continue, “And… I know this doesn’t make much sense and it won’t mean anything to you, but I’m- I’m so proud of how you turned out.”
And you are, truly, Proud of them. You don’t make a habit of thinking of other universes as Lesser, but there’s a little bit of bias that is easy to go unchecked when you’re a god from a time when the number of universes could be counted on one human hand. When you lost John, you thought that everything was done for, but it turns out you needn’t have worried so much.
“Thank you, Jeffandrew,” Merle says with a sincerity you wouldn’t have thought him capable of.
“Uhhhhh,” Magnus starts, “So you- you said you made it. You made all this stuff, you made our world. And if you’re so great….” He pauses and you can see where this is going, it’s why you stopped interacting with planar systems ever since they evolved from frogs, “Why’d you make bad things happen? Hmmm?”
“We- I- uh- whuh- We’re not-“ You sputter, no matter how many times you’re asked that never stops being the stupidest question in all of paradox space. “Like I said, I’m not God. We, I guess, made the gods, or I guess the laws that made the gods come into being. We don’t really… Control the worlds that we make, that’s not really our- our style. We just- we just make em’.”
Taako and Magnus hum skeptically before Taako says, “I have a question, Jeffandrew. Are they ever gonna bring back Josta?”
You groan. This is stupid. “If I could, I would-“ you say, “I would reach my finger in and- and make Josta happen again, but… That’s just not- that’s not really how it works.”
Magnus asks you, very serious, “Jeffandrew, could you make a Josta so big that even you couldn’t drink it?”
Merle laughs and Taako adds, “Lemme at it, they couldn’t do that for me!”
Before you have a chance to shut down this line of conversation, Merle asks, “Could you pass a bottle of Josta through the eye of a needle?”
“I- I-“ you start trying to at least get a word in edgewise, “We don’t have Josta in our world, it’s a very-“
Magnus interjects with an “Oh God! I’m sorry.”
You continue, “I mean, that’s the thing though, like. We made your world and Josta was in it, and it’s delicious, and good, and…” at least, you think it is. You genuinely don’t know if your Earth had Josta in it but navigating this conversation is difficult enough for you as it is. “By any measure, Merle, you won.”
Sometimes Karkat talks about Serendipity. Of that magical destiny that leads to perfect quadrants. Of moirallegiances written in the stars, of kismesissitude fated to burn bright and potent. You think that if ever there was anything truly before you in a way that only paradox space can allow, the pity shared between Merle and John was written in the stars. That the whole concept of moirallegiance as a pacifying, peace giving force was based retroactively on the relationship they built.
You take a deep breath. “This… We thought this world was lost, we thought it was done. And… You all kept that from happening. And… Listen, I- I- the- the migraine isn’t surprising, it’s really not safe for you to stay here much longer. And to be fair, we’ve got a few centuries of work to do putting these planes back in their right place that we need to get started on, but I want you all to know something. When- whenever we make a world, we’re… guessing.”
You take another pause, and think of Jake. “Mostly. We’re- we’re- we’re putting some English on a ball that will roll and roll for eons, and… We HOPE that it lands somewhere good. And we’ve been observing your world for some time now, and… I- I’ve been in the minority of those who think that this world was worth saving- that it could be saved at all.”
You give them a little push. The dream bubbles aren’t really meant to manifest this far from those that created them, and this one wouldn’t hold up for much longer. As they start to fade, you express your gratitude.
“Thank you for… Thank you for proving me right.”