Rupert
Today is an interesting day. Today, we met Rupert.
We’d been wandering around, trying to figure out if the moving emerald was following us, when we found the dungeon. It’s a fair distance between us and that emerald that used to be on the other side of the Chasm, but the distance has been closing ever since we captured the yellow emerald in Vidriot. The cloud is a lot faster than the emerald, we think, so we could get a good idea on the position by zigzagging a lot and doing angle calculations. Turns out it’s not precise enough to get a good idea of if the emerald was following us specifically, or happened to be moving in our general direction for an unrelated reason. I’m pretty sure it’s Sorin, but I have no idea what he wants. Is he trying to give us the emerald? He gave us one 250 years ago, but lately his thing seems to have been scattering them around so they will mind-control various societies, and maybe have other effects. Not that we know Sorin was behind the purple emerald making its way to Penitencia, but it seems like a good guess. Yet another thing we should have asked about when we had the chance, whether they were visited by a lizard-person wearing a trench coat and fedora. Nothing to do for it now that Penitencia isn’t talking to us.
Anyway, this dungeon was odd. Unlike the stone boxes in the mountains, this was a large metal plate set into the ground. The sun glinted off it invitingly, prompting us to stop the cloud and investigate. Analysis revealed that it was a dungeon, belonging to Steve. (The name was much longer, and Clarence stopped reading the Analysis report as soon as he recognized Steve’s name in the middle. Good then, that Clarence transforms instead of having his Parasonico print out a plastic tablet containing Steve’s name.)
“There's probably a big monster just inside the main door, like the other ones were,” said Otto. “But if we open it from the outside, we could all ambush it together. There's not much that can withstand that.”
It was true; ambushing had worked just fine on Hangmon. “At least it probably won’t have those annoying undead things, like in some of the Lily dungeons,” I said aloud. “Those were really annoying. I wonder what Steve has, then—maybe robo-duelists? Nah, robo-duelists seem more Lily’s style, I’m surprised she had the undead.” And that Steve’s dungeon was made of metal. Maybe the people who partitioned Steve and Lily differently than we did weren’t so wrong.
“I’d expect more violence and less puzzles,” said Jacqueline. “But let’s break in and see. Everybody ready?” She had her Puppet Reaper out already.
We knew what to do about dungeons in most cases—Otto still has a dungeon key, and his clone inserts his copy into doors so we can keep the original—but this dungeon didn’t have a keyhole. Instead, there was a large button in the center of the door. A red button.
“Not more red buttons!” I cried as Jacqueline reached for it. “Why must you always push the red buttons? All this talk about saving the world from April—surely you know that part of saving the world is not pushing the big red buttons!”
As usual, nobody listened to me, and the doors swung open without mishap, revealing a staircase leading downward. These red buttons were surprisingly non-destructive. I was starting to suspect that the lecture on red buttons hadn’t been aimed at a post-Steve universe. Or maybe it was all a plan to lull us into a false sense of security so we’d feel fine about pushing the real red button. Or maybe Steve is just messing with me.
“How can we tell if it’s red, anyway?” Jacqueline asked me as we started down the stairs. “We’ve all been assuming that’s what the color is called, but we don’t really know for a fact…”
I swished my dragon tail in annoyance. The point wasn’t that the buttons were red so much as we were just wantonly pushing them without wondering if they might destroy something important. One of these days we’re going to run into a button that collapses the ceiling on our heads. The stairs ended just past the edge of the sunlight, and fluorescent lights brightened the hallway ahead.
We made it to the end of the hallway without anything interesting happening. “I’m surprised there haven’t been any mons or traps so far,” remarked Jacqueline. “Or at least anything that was visibly dangerous.”
Otto made a head gesture that was the helmeted equivalent of rolling his eyes. “The whole point of traps is that you don’t see them yet.”
“Why would you even say that?” I complained. “Now you’re just asking for traps! Let me listen for them.”
Tremorsense did not show me any traps, but it did reveal some footsteps. Not too heavy, but somehow wet-sounding. There were two more floors beneath this one, accessible by a central ladder in the next room. Both floors had a large room in the center, with four smaller ones around the edges. The wet stompy thing was on the floor below us, along with a something with too many moving parts. There was another creature moving around on the bottom floor, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
I didn’t particularly want to be on the same floor as the horrible wet-sounding thing, but Otto boldly sent his clone down the ladder in the middle of the room, and when he wasn’t immediately murdered, the rest of us followed. The round room was empty and the four doors that ringed it were shut. I could hear the two creatures behind doors, one shuffling like paper or wings and the other squelching.
Then I heard a man on the floor below. “I have this thing which my brain labels a can-opener,” he said, voice growing louder and more panicked as he went on, “but I don’t know why my brain has this sound-label for it!” By the end of the exclamation, he was loud enough that those without enhanced hearing could be confused by it.
“He’s got a can-opener,” I explained. It was probably an absurdly large one, like the one Mark kept trying to hit me with. Steve and Lily have a thing about can-openers. But there wasn’t more time for speculation, because one of the doors opened, and out stepped a person made of worms. “Ace, you traitor, why are you immortal?” Now, where were my wire-cutters? I went to pat my pockets, then remembered that Leviazizmoth doesn’t have any pockets. How inconvenient.
It wasn’t actually Ace, but it was something similar. An Avatar of Steve, a person made of worms. Made of flesh-spirals, actually, which makes a lot more sense than worms. It wore a robe, and a familiar bird-beaked mask covered its face, similar to the one Plaguelock wears. And the one Ace wore.
“Hello!” Jacqueline greeted the Avatar as Citrine gave it a friendly wave. Neither of them had encountered one before, so they didn’t realize the danger they faced. “How did you come to be in this dungeon?”
In response, the Avatar summoned a Tall Man from one tentacle and a Damn O’ Klees from another. So much for only being able to use one medium at a time. Maybe the rules are suspended for those under Steve’s direct control.
Also, Rupert peeked his head out from the hatch in the floor, then slithered out to stare dazedly at the battle. We didn’t know he was Rupert at the time, he was a small man with red hair and an expression of extreme confusion.
“Do you have any useful spells or mons?” one of the Ottos asked him, shooting the Tall Man into nothingness with the hyperbreaker he’d charged before we entered the dungeon. We haven’t been bothering about glamour, so both Otto and his clone have visible armor, making them impossible to tell apart. The other Otto shot the Damn O’ Klees.
Rupert gaped in confusion and slowly dawning horror. We got back to the fight. The Avatar summoned another quickly dispatched Tall Man, then tried to escape up the ladder, shedding flesh-spirals in its haste. We killed it as it reached the top, and Clarence and Otto clambered after it, intent on a thorough investigation.
Which left me, Citrine, and Jacqueline to deal with our newest friend, who looked extremely upset. Figuring a dragon might be alarming, I untransformed and asked if he was okay. This was apparently a mistake, for his expression morphed into full-on panic. But instead of running away like I expected, he slowly reached for my outstretched hand, and pinched it with his can-opener.
“Hey!” I yanked my hand back. “What’d you do that for?”
Rupert curled up into a ball and started hyperventilating. “You can understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel pain?”
“Yes.”
“Not right now,” Jacqueline quickly clarified when Rupert got even more upset. “We can remember it, but we’re not experiencing pain right now.”
“Speak for yourself,” I muttered, shaking my hand. That can-opener had drawn blood.
But Rupert was more worried about other things. “You have memory?” he asked in dismay. Then he carefully bit his finger, wincing dramatically, and looked around to see if we reacted. “Oh my god there are other conscious minds that exist,” he said in a rush. “No! No no no! This is the worst thing!”
Citrine observed him with concern. “I like being a conscious mind,” she told Rupert seriously. “I was unconscious for a long time and that wasn’t fun.”
“But… there’s multiple subjective viewpoints observing the same thing? Having different experiences in the same world? How? That can’t be how it works!”
“Don’t worry too much about personal identity,” Otto advised, poking his head out from the hatch in the ceiling.
“But why am I perceiving things as me and not you???” Rupert wailed. “There’s a me and there’s a you! At least three of us! There might be more!”
“Don’t be hasty,” said Jacqueline extremely unhelpfully in my opinion. “There might actually be less. For example Otto here is two of him but he’s actually one person.”
Surprisingly, this calmed Rupert a bit. After further explanation of Otto’s Clone spell, he came up with a theory that satisfied him. “When you’re apart, you’re two minds with different experiences, but when you come back together you’re really one person,” he summarized. “It’s like that for all of us: we’re all just me, but lots of different mes who think and have ideas. Each part of the mind can only perceive itself, so it looks like there are multiple minds that… Oh, this is what talking is for,” he concluded happily. “I figured it out….” Rupert has a nice smile. It’s too bad he is so often worried instead of happy.
Citrine and I tried hugging Rupert to see if this would make him feel better. He seemed to enjoy it, but it didn’t do much to diminish his persistent anxiety. Citrine told me it was probably because there weren’t enough tentacles in the hug, and that matters would improve if I transformed into a Monitor.
Otto and Clarence popped back in to report what they’d found. The Avatar was composed mostly of flesh-spirals, which we’d surmised from the ones it had shed while running away. A lot of them contained the glowing blobs, and Clarence and Otto had managed to rescue a few of them as the rest were sucked into the Avatar’s core and vanished, perhaps returning to Steve.
We asked Rupert what his name was. He didn’t seem to understand the concept, but quickly came round to the idea that having labels for the various subjective viewpoints might be useful. However, he had no idea what his name was.
“Well, what would you like to be called?” Citrine asked. “I picked my own name, you can too.”
Rupert muttered something about the Axiom of Choice and looked at his can-opener as if it had all the answers. It didn’t. We later found the box he’d woken up in had Rupert carved on the front, so that’s what we’re calling him for now.
After more prompting, we finally found out what was bothering Rupert. “I don’t like being conscious, but I also don’t want to become unconscious,” he explained with an expression of utter seriousness. “Resolving this will be tricky, so the first step is to make sure I don’t cease to exist before I’ve solved it. Or become temporarily unconscious, that also seems bad.”
“Not sleeping will not be a problem,” I reassured him. “We don’t need to sleep anymore.” I explained about the bizarre biological changes that had taken place after the Cataclysm, which make day-to-day survival much easier. I’m still not sure if we are immortal, though. With the changes I know about, halting the aging process after reaching adulthood is pretty plausible, and explains Lou’s appearance.
“That is good,” Rupert decided. “We are safe, then.”
Well….
“Not exactly,” said Clarence carefully. “That is, we aren’t. We tend to find a lot more danger than most people, because we’re trying to save the world from April.”
“The world is ending?” Rupert once again looked concerned. “I don’t want the world to end before I’ve figured out how to stop being conscious without not being conscious,” he said, frowning. He frowns a lot. Maybe he has just as hard a time as I do understanding what it is he’s trying to accomplish.
“To be clear, we don’t know what April’s doing,” I added. “We think she might be trying to destroy the world, so we’re trying to stop her. But we don’t know if we’re doing a very good job of it. And anyway, there might be other risks to the world, we just happen to know about April so we’re trying to prevent that one.” Which is about an accurate assessment of my level of confidence that we’re saving the world.
“We do have a lot of ulterior motive to tell you we’re saving the world,” Jacqueline added, further destroying Rupert’s confidence in our plans. “There’s really no reason you should believe us.”
This triggered another crisis. “You’re saying that some consciousnesses might tell other ones information that they know is false? Oh, of course that’s possible, since the various consciousnesses have separate information! But…” he stopped to think, then concluded: “I need to figure out a way to spin down all these consciousnesses in a way that’s okay.”
“That’s not an okay goal,” said Otto.
“Speaking of not ending other consciousnesses, let’s talk about removing your flesh-spiral,” I said.
“My what?”
“That thing on your arm. If we leave it on, you’re going to go murderously insane and start killing people. Which is not okay, because it’s turning off other consciousnesses without their consent. You wouldn’t want someone to do that to you, would you? So it’s not okay.”
After some discussion, Rupert agreed to have his flesh-spiral removed. “Will it hurt?” he asked worriedly. It turns out that Rupert absolutely cannot handle pain. When he left his coffin after waking up, he was upset by the unpleasant feeling of eyes adjusting to a room with brighter light. I don’t remember having my flesh-spiral removed, but it still hurt when I woke up afterwards. There was no way Rupert would handle having a thing cut off his arm at all well. We decided to bring him back to Gotita, where Lou might have some anesthetic, or at least alcohol to get him drunk on.
In the meantime, we needed to finish off the remaining mon in here, to make sure it wouldn’t run off into the wild and cause trouble. And loot the rest of the place, because why not. We gave Rupert Negative Man to keep him safe. Given his flesh-spiral anything more dangerous would be a mistake. But Negative Man is entirely useless as a fighter and would soak up any attacks directed at Rupert so we didn’t have to worry about him.
Rupert took to summoning rather quickly, getting Negative Man out in short order. He stared into the yellow rectangle’s face with its expression of despair. “Oh no,” he gasped in utter horror. “Does it have a mind?” He schlorped it back in, forgetting about how he didn’t want to destroy other minds until he’d figured things out. Maybe it didn’t count when the mind in question was as depressed as Negative Man.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t get any sense of another mind in there when I transform, although I do get instincts and knowledge, and they don’t seem to communicate in other ways.”
Rupert didn’t believe me, so I gave him my crowbar. He hung it on his belt and took out the key card he’d found in the barrel he’d opened with the can-opener (absolutely typical). We were about to try it on all the doors when we noticed Jacqueline. Asleep on the floor. She looked normal, except that there was a rainbowy liquid seeping through her left sleeve, around her elbow.
“She’s still alive,” Clarence said, Analyzing her. “But she’s a second gate vampire now, not first. Whatever that means. I really, really wish this would come with better explanations….” he reached for her right arm.
Jacqueline jerked awake at his touch, looking around wildly. “What’s going on? How many eyes do I have? Two, right?” She sighed. “Of course I have two. Stormnimbus is making me paranoid.”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so. I don’t know why I was suddenly on the floor, though.”
“Will you show me your arm?” I asked, pointing at the soaked cloth of the sleeve. “That definitely doesn’t look alright.”
Jacqueline’s elbow was missing. Just gone, a few inches on either side of the joint.
“Hmm,” said Jacqueline. “This has gotten considerably worse since Vidriot.” She moved her arm experimentally, looking puzzled as the forearm and hand came along just like the elbow had been there. “This is causing my already shaky knowledge of biology and physics to be even more in doubt.”
It was causing my more certain knowledge of biology to thoroughly freak out. Both sides of the disappeared bit looked like a perfectly normal arm, displaying somewhat disturbing cross-sections of the expected muscles and bones. They weren’t bleeding, though, just leaking a multicolored liquid that had soaked through the bandage Jacqueline had tied around it. As we watched, the bandage fell away, passing through the missing elbow as it dropped to the ground. So the elbow was really gone, not just invisible.
“Jacqueline, why are you missing part of you?” Citrine asked in dismay.
“If I knew I would tell you. I do not remember this ever happening before. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t, but it does mean I don’t know what I should do about it.” She took out a healy doodad and poured it over her arm. It had no effect on her missing arm-segment, but the rest of her suddenly glowed with health.
“Hold on, what do you mean it’s worse since Vidriot?” I asked. “How long has this been going on?”
“I first noticed it just before we left Vidriot.”
“Before or after Hangmon?” I asked suspiciously. Was this what “watch your back” meant?
“The day before. I tried researching it in the library. It was very vague, but there were a few mentions of vampires fading away over the course of a few months. I didn’t say anything because I thought we’d head to Nosgoth soon and they would know what to do about it.”
I remember Jacqueline pushing for visiting Nosgoth on the way back from Vidriot. And instead we’d headed to Penitencia, and now we were wandering around trying to find out what was up with the moving emerald. Maybe we should have listened. But she didn’t tell us it was anything urgent!
Since there wasn’t anything to do about Jacqueline’s arm at the moment, we went back to clearing the dungeon. The keycard Rupert had found opened a room containing a Chrystalis, which Otto quickly hyperbreakered. Analysis of the soul fruit revealed that it was a mutated Chrystalis. Inspection of the room revealed syringes containing Perfection 6 and Perfection 7. The computer had vague descriptions of experiments, as well as a progress bar showing the Chrystalis’ journey towards hatching.
“Makes me wonder what would happen if we injected these into Citrine,” Clarence said, eyeing the two vials of Perfection. “But let’s not.” He took them anyway, because we can put anything we want into Jacqueline’s box. It’s got much more room now that it only contains two Nullified and an empty suit of power armor, since we cremated the knight yesterday.
The keycard sitting under the computer keyboard opened the room with all the hands. So many hands, extruding from walls made of flesh, each of them with a flesh-spiral. We managed to tackle most of them before they could summon anything, but had to fight a UCD, a Red Shadow, and a Blighted Lord before we could finish slashing all the spirals. Rupert managed to stop a few blobs from escaping into the wall, which sucked the mons back from the leaking spirals.
Nobody knew how the hands could summon anything. They were just hands! You need a mind to be able to summon anything, robo-duelists are just guys in cardboard costumes, not actual robots. But maybe Steve can break all the rules in his own dungeon, or maybe we don’t know everything about the rules. Otto burned the room waiting until the inch-think layer of flesh peeled off the walls and seemed truly dead. It didn’t appear to have connected to anything else, just coated the room.
Rupert was confused when we took him outside to leave. “Where are the walls?” he wanted to know, looking around at hills and trees and some mountains in the distance.
“We’re on a piece of land that’s floating in the universe,” said Clarence.
“How big is the universe?”
“Extremely.”
“Okay, we’re in a big room,” Rupert decided.
Close enough.
He had much less trouble with the Stormnimbus. “Is it one of us?” he asked Jacqueline. “Hello, are you one of us?” When the cloud didn’t answer, he decided it probably wasn’t a piece of the fragmented consciousness all people are part of.
“Killed any deities today?” Lou asked when we arrived, several hours later. Which is an exaggeration, we only killed the Pope of Penitencia.
“Just an Avatar,” said Otto nonchalantly.
Lou shuddered. “There are still worm people around? Ugh.”
“Are worm people one of us?” Rupert asked him.
Lou, who had met plenty of spiralled dungeon-escapees, quickly pulled Rupert into the house and started helping Lara prepare for surgery. “Drink this, it’ll knock you out real good,” he said, handing over an unlabeled bottle.
“No!” cried Rupert.
“We don’t have to use anesthesia,” Lara reassured him. “It’ll hurt, though.”
“No!” Rupert objected again. “Can I just keep it?”
“NO!” said everyone else. So we got him drunk instead, and Lara removed his flesh-spiral.
Rupert was still shaken after a Heal had removed the pain and closed up the cuts on his arm. “That was awful,” he complained.
Lou shrugged. “It’s not great, but I’m sure it’s better than what you were going through before.”
Rupert looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he finally decided. “I have alcohol now.”
Oh dear. We now have an existentialist alcoholic in the making.
While we were discussing what mons and spells to give Rupert, Citrine had a brilliant idea. The idea could also be described as extremely dangerous, and absolutely insane. But since it worked out okay, I’m tentatively sticking with brilliant.
“I wonder what would happen if I turned into an Ooziel and Fissioned?” she suggested. “Would there be two of me? And what if I Fused with someone else? Can I borrow your breastplate, Sarah?”
I had been wondering the same thing since we fought Hangmon with Ooziels, and since we now had a willing test subject, I let Citrine borrow the breastplate. It fit her without modification, since her torso is fairly human. And it seemed to work fine: she easily turned into a green Ooziel.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
Citrine gave a wiggle. “Squishy! I still have wings. I’m going to explode now!”
“Hey, wait, let us get behind cover!” We joined Lou and Lara behind the table Lou had upended. He was wearing a helmet he’d gotten from somewhere, and Lara had put on medical goggles. Citrine exploded and turned into two Oozielets with one wing and one eye each.
Rupert walked up to one of them. “Wobble if you can understand me.”
The Oozielet bounced cheerfully. “I think I can talk, too!”
“Do you think you have subjective experience?” Rupert asked.
“Of course I do!” said Citrine, continuing to bounce. As one Oozielet, she couldn’t quite fly with her one wing but she could do slightly higher bounces than you would expect from a goo blob.
Rupert turned to the other Oozielet, the mirror image of Citrine. “If you can hear me, please wibble.” The Oozielet wibbled, but didn’t talk when prompted. “If you’re a good ooze, please wibble.” The Oozielet remained motionless. Rupert frowned. “If you have subjective experience, please wibble. If you want me to rub you—” Wibble. “Which one was that for? Rubs?” He waited several seconds without any wibbles before going on. “Subjective experience?”
Wibble.
“Aaaaaaaaah,” said Rupert, and covered his face with his hands.
I took over with some more experiments to determine the relationship between the two Oozielets. Citrine seemed to be present in one of them, but could also control the other one. She promised she hadn’t been wibbling it to mess with Rupert, though. The non-talkative Oozielet could count, and repeat back to me how many fingers I’d held up by wobbling the correct number of times. Citrine couldn’t get any information it had, but bizarrely it could wobble four times after I showed Citrine four fingers. Finally, when Citrine merged back into one Ooziel, she didn’t have the memories of the other Oozielet, only the one that she’d been talking from. So, not like Otto’s clone spell. There’s some weird kind of asymmetric information transfer from Citrine to the other Oozielet but not the other way around.
Citrine wasn’t done with science. “I’d like to try merging with someone,” she announced. “But only if they want to, of course.”
There was a discussion about who, if anyone, would merge with Citrine. Clarence was suspicious of the whole idea. Rupert thought merging with Otto would be good for his mental health. Otto thought merging with Citrine might give him useful information. Citrine wanted to merge with anyone who was willing to. I did not want to merge with anyone, and instead take notes for science. Eventually, a fairly dubious Clarence was persuaded to give his breastplate to Otto.
Otto turned into a purple Ooziel, then split into two. Like Citrine, he only appeared to be conscious in one of them, although in his case it was the one with the right wing. Citrine had been in the one with the left wing. Otto had had a metal spiral on his right arm, so perhaps that has something to do with it. I wasn’t sure if two Ooziels with the same side of wing could merge, and if they had to have two different types, it meant that you needed a pair of people who had had different kinds of spirals, flesh and metal. I have no idea what that would mean, though.
While I was still mulling this over with all its hypothetical implications, Citrine and Otto merged. The full-sized purple-and-green Ooziel with two wings and two eyes sat there.
“Please wibble,” said Rupert, starting the same protocol he’d used on Citrine’s Oozielets.
The Ooziel didn’t wibble.
“Oh, dear,” I said.
“Maybe they’re still adjusting?” said Clarence hopefully.
“Okay, let’s try some experiments.”
We determined that the two leftover Oozielets could wibble on command, and repeat back numbers of fingers held up to them. They could also tell how many fingers we’d held up to the big Ooziel. And the purple one could tell how many fingers we’d held up to the green one, and vice versa. That was reassuring, right? Well yeah, it would have been pretty worrying if they couldn’t do that. So not being additionally worrying meant it was reassuring. Right?? I picked up the green Oozielet and started petting it nervously.
The Ooziel still wasn’t responding. Maybe it didn’t mean anything that the Oozielets could pass finger-counts between them. Maybe all Oozielets share information. Maybe we could establish a novel communication protocol through Oozielet-wibbling.
The Ooziel still wasn’t responding. Would it help if we hurt it until it separated into two smaller Ooziels? If we killed the Ooziels and forced Citrine and Otto back into their usual bodies, would that separate them? Would it make it worse? We should have established beforehand what to do in case they weren’t responding. When we should give up on the experiment and try to get them back. But how would we know when they were actually not responding, or just not responding yet? It was like that thing I vaguely remembered Clarence telling me about way back at the lab, where you wanted to find out if a program would ever stop. You couldn’t wait any certain amount of time before deciding it wouldn’t, because it might have stopped on its own if you had given it just two more seconds. I couldn’t remember what the solution to that was. It probably wouldn’t help with Ooziels, anyway. The point is, we really need to come up with plans before it’s too late to ask the people involved what they want you to do.
The Ooziel wiggled a wing. “Gosh, this is neat!” The voice sounded like Citrine, and Otto, and neither of them, with slightly more of Citrine coming through than Otto.
“With whom am I speaking?” Rupert asked formally.
“Both of us! I think Citrine’s vocal patterns are dominating, but not for this sentence.” That last sounded a lot more like Otto, even with Citrine’s voice mixed in. It was the word-choice and phrasing; Otto and Citrine sound distinct even if they’re speaking in the same voice.
“Are you one mind, or two, or what?” I asked.
“We’re somewhat merged, but there’s still some separation. We haven’t tried fighting for control yet, since so far we haven’t wanted to talk at the same time.” “I don’t want to fight Otto, Otto’s neat!” added Citrine.
“Anyway, we’re mostly separate, but sharing a body.” Otto concluded.
“What else is shared?” Clarence asked. “Current thoughts, memories?”
“I remember all of Otto’s memories.”
“I’m having a bit of trouble with Citrine’s, though.”
“That’s because they’re dreams.”
“They match up surprisingly well with some of my reality, though…”
It was really strange hearing a conversation conducted between two people using the same body and the same voice. It was still quite clear which one was speaking.
“I’m going to explode now,” announced the Citrine-flavored voice. “That way I can hug Otto.”
“You can hug Otto right now by hugging yourself,” Rupert pointed out. He has quickly learned to appreciate the value of hugs.
So Citrine/Otto wrapped their wings around themselves. We all joined the hug, even though Ooziels are not that great for hugging. They’re quite squishable, but their outer texture is a little slimy for my taste. But it was very good to have Citrine and Otto okay and huggable again.
Once we’d verified that Citrine/Otto couldn’t tell how many fingers we’d held up to either of the little ones (whyyyy), they split again, then returned to their normal forms. Neither seemed particularly changed by the experience, although they say they’ve kept each others’ memories. Otto says he’s going to need some time to work out what to do with all the information he received from Citrine, while Citrine seems mostly unconcerned with whatever she learned from Otto.
So, yay for science? Good experimental design on the Oozielet-information-passing tests. Complete failure on thinking through possible consequences and when we should stop the experiment on the merging-two-minds front. Honestly this seems pretty typical for us, a mix of great small-scale planning and somehow missing important consequences.