fh_trips | Entries tagged with bde fall 2011: the nothing

That small purple orb had troubled the Nothing for too long.

It had worked at it patiently for two days, but finally it was gaining a foothold. Nothingness slid straight through it and wiped it away, gobbling it up--

--and then suddenly, it reappeared. Not only that, but the wall that held its entrance slowly cobbled back into being. Then the hallway. And then the rest of the school building. This wave of creation pushed back against the clouds, and soon they slid away; millions of miles away and many years back and forth in time, similar events happened.

They focused on one person, or a couple of people, or a building, and then fanned outward, touching the minds of newly recreated people and gaining strength from their memories. REMEMBER, said a thousand walls and papers and floors and signs and Portalocity offices.

With each memory, life restored itself.

It might take all night - it had taken months to get to this point. But come morning, the multiverse would be put to rights, only a little different than before.

[[ alumni, drops, current island dwellers: coming back? this is the place. ]]

fh-refugees.livejournal.com

Falcor was a speedy steed, and it didn't take him long to get here: to the tower atop the mountain that shone with its own light. The sun was setting on the horizon, though occasionally it was blotted out by strips of black that melted slower than they appeared.

He touched down on the platform above, catching the attention of the refugees holed up in a corner of the platform. He grinned lazily at them, and flopped to the floor, giving his charges time to climb off.

At the same time, the area kept shimmering. Little trembles within the fabric of Special Collections, which happened every time the library succesfully pulled someone from the campsite to this platform. One by one, it plucked the Fandomites from their tents and their hiding places and left them here.

[[ for everyone who's still alive right now. this is your final finale post. ocd up! ]]

fh-refugees.livejournal.com

Morning came with soft pink twilight filtering in past the toadstools, and a light drizzle of rain that might not be entirely well-received. The camp at the foot of the giant toadstools had been left undisturbed that night, reasonably warm and quiet, as if Special Collections was trying to make up for weeks of sleeplessness on the Fandomites' end.

That kind front only stuck to the camp, though. A little further off, towards the entrance they had taken to get there in the first place, more and more black cracks were materializing before they fizzled away again.

[[ ~~wait for the~~ ocd up! ]]

fh-refugees.livejournal.com

Special Collections had always been a peculiar place, and now that it was to be their home for the duration of... whenever... it chose not to change that. Those who had raced into it would find their world briefly a disorienting amount of purple light and flashes of lightning and books falling from an eternal above to a perpetual below--

--and then it spat them out in a cheery green field, surrounded by toadstools that reached far up above their heads and provided cover. Here and there were bags full of tent poles and tent fabric, just in case they wanted a roof above their heads, and bookcases stood randomly and haphazardly around the area.

There was even sign of a gingerbread house a mile or so off.

Still, Special Collections remained unpredictable, and behind any tree, toadstool or tent could lie a sudden plunge into unexpected adventure.

Just pay no heed to the occasional appearing, then disappearing black cracks in the walls.

[[ ocd up! have at! ]]

momslilassassin

It would be difficult for the people in Fandom to learn from their televisions tonight, being that they were showing all gremlin bites all the time, but the Nothing was edging ever closer.

The meteorologists on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and other cable shows blithely discussed the weather on their massive maps, oblivious to the fact that Asia, Australia, and Africa used to be much larger than what they were showing. Mile by mile, inch by inch, the Nothing was creeping up on Fandom, devouring all in its path.

If you were ever inclined to have a bad feeling about things, now would be the time.

fh_bde

The staff of Portalocity had had access to millions of dimensions over the past few millenia. They had explored planes few people knew existed, just for the sake of finding somewhere to open up a portal - money was in everything, after all.

And so it was that their final battle did not so much take place in the cramped confines of Portalocity HQ, but across several layers of time and space all at once. They fought valiantly for many hours. They suffered. They fought harder. They won some, and then they lost some more.

In the end, though, it wasn't so much an unlikely victory by the underdog as more of a total dramatic curbstomp.

There was only so much you could do when your enemy was a bunch of beings discorporate on the material plane, and a whimsical force of natural entropy.

Within the bowels of Portalocity HQ, and across fifty thousand other dimensions, one short Portalocity employee with thirty eyes and a carapace typed away at a console with his five front limbs.

The Portalocity staffer who had been promoted to PR the Klingon way just two days ago limped in, or rather crawled, as parts of his anatomy seemed to be missing. "ONE... more..." he managed, and then there was little left of him to manage.

The last Portalocity staffer did not pay attention to him. He/she/it kept typing, as the shadows drew closer. "^{WE HAVE MANAGED AN ACCURACY OF 98.7% IN COMPARISON TO OUR PROJECTED RESULT,}" he/she/it intoned. "^{WE WILL NOT LET ANYTHING KEEP US FROM ACHIEVING 100% ACCURACY.}"

Thirty seconds later, there was no more floor.

"^{WE ARE AT AN ACCURACY OF 99.5% AND COUNTING,}" it intoned.

And the ceiling.

"^{ACCURACY OF 99.8% AND} _COUNTING."

And its prehensile legs.

"^{ACCURACY OF 99.9%--}"

And most of his torso.

"^{ACCURACY OF 100%. OBJECTIVE ACHIEVED. THIS IS A LEGENDARY OCCURANCE IN PORTALOCITY HIST--}"

The clock struck seven, except there was no more clock left to strike. Nor was there a Portalocity HQ to strike at, and Brigadoon had just gone and lost its ability to tell time too, and Milliways Bar had just lost most of its parking lot.

The Nothing did not care.

It thundered on towards Fandom in one impossible wave, devouring everything in its wake as it finally breached Fandom's universe threshold, several light years away from the planet known as Earth.

On Fandom, the magic of the Causeway fizzled and died within seconds, like someone had pulled out a plug.

And across all inter-dimensional channels, there was suddenly and irrevocably... silence.

fh_bde

Portalocity had put out a lot of press releases in their time. About outages, about deals, about splendiferous feats done by members of Portalocity staff to get into the Guinness Book of Multiversal Records.

None of them had been anything like this.

( To anyone who is still capable of reading this. )

The Portalocity representative who had been elected to do PR in the wake of the disappearance of the entire PR staff... sighed, and clicked send. Then he reached into his pocket and produced his camera phone, which he put up on a ledge.

He made a picture.

He pressed a few buttons, and( sent it off to twitpic. )

And then ran screaming into the breach.

fh_bde

It was getting worse. Tech support was no longer answering their phones and entire swaths of the multiverse had blinked out without a trace, almost like they'd never existed at all. And while the Portalocity gnome, personally, would not miss any version of the Dark Ages (there wasn't much travel in and out of there anyway), he knew enough about history to know that universes unraveling was Bad.

He waddled down to public relations. "We're going to need another statement."

( Because they are so good at them! )

The v-gift, the gnome knew from experience, would slow their servers to a crawl, but it might also slow down the bookings of holiday passages and thus the dreaded next step for a crisis of this magnitude: offering refunds.

Shudder.

"Send it," he commanded. "And get tech support some more antacid."

fh_bde

The gnome in charge of Portalocity stared at the latest printouts from the various universes the company had lost contact with in the last month and a half. Some would not be missed: places without shrimp, places only with shrimp, places populated by plankton, places with a Hellmouth, places with wars…but there was a not insignificant pile of places with a lot of people who would want to travel back and forth, especially with the holiday season approaching. Tech support had babbled about "unstable vortexes" and "elastic realities" and "timey-wimey" something before becoming truly incomprehensible, and had not offered anything in the way of a timeline for this issue getting fixed.

“Bugger,” the gnome muttered to himself in a nebulously Scottish accent, “what a disaster.” He waddled off toward public relations, which was waiting with its own not insignificant pile of annoyed letters, emails, tweets, and messenger birds from various eras. A few hours later, they’d put together an email:

( Cut for email text )

The gnome looked over the email copy and nodded. “Let’s see if anyone buys it.”

Current Mood: annoyed

endsthegame

The Nothing gnawed and gnawed and gnawed like a dog on a chicken bone. It bit and it tore and it vanished worlds clean away with nothing but a thunderclap and a sea of clouds. It got in between the worlds, it snuck in the little creases and the little folds, and it ate.

All it could.

[[ this is your very last drop post! Have at! ]]

endsthegame

When the Nothing was released, some of its nature was altered. To do the job it was released to do, it would need to have a broader... concept of the universe, in as much as it had anything at all. And so for weeks it had spun around, gobbling up the forgotten, clearing away the unnecessary.

And then suddenly, the eye of its storm had changed. So many creatures from so many places in so many times, some from the same places but in different lives, some from the same places but in different times. And some-- some came from realms that had just gone wrong. What was remembered? What was forgotten?

The answer was simple:

All things could be forgotten.

The Nothing clouds spread thinner, further, spinning out of control, no longer set on limited parameters but on everything, to make everything... nothing.

The unbeings that had released it were pleased: things were finally getting back on schedule.

[[ welcome to phase 2! ETA: And have at with your drops! Next week's your last shot to get them in! ]]

endsthegame

The being that had released the Nothing could be happy with its progress: many universes had already fallen to its steady approach, many creatures that should not have been now never had. But that alone was just a drop in a bucket, and as some universes fell, others lost more of their tethers to memory and grew unstable, attracting the Nothingness where previously they had been overlooked.

In one universe, a once-beloved and then-forgotten janitor rounded a corner, and then simply never was. An accountant never filed his paperwork, and then never had filed any at all. A garden blinked and became wilderness in an eyeblink as its caretaker was ripped from the fabric of time and space.

All of them, nothing.

[[ for the dropped. ]]

endsthegame

The Nothing did not care for vacations-- though it had rolled over a Newfoundland on an Earth, but where and which one it was less easy to determine. It didn't matter, for very little mattered once it touched the Nothing: it simply ceased to be, in all times and all minds, though perhaps not in all worlds.

It nibbled further. Not just whole universes now, but at the edges of ones that were harder to consume. A person there, a plant here, small things. Forgotten things.

Things that no one would miss.

[[ as of now, minor, forgotten NPCs are starting to disappear. but: post is still open for drops to ping in! ]]

endsthegame

For two full Fandom weeks, the Nothing had been spreading. Holes were starting to appear in the tapestry of the multiverse, near the fringes, the backwards places that the web spiraling out from Fandom barely even touched any more. But it was not satisfied: there were more, forgotten and abandoned, useless and discarded.

Waiting for it.

The clouds rolled on, dragging behind it a thousand leagues of absence.

[[ for those dropped who are disappearing, take three. ]]

endsthegame

The Nothing had raged for a week now, nibbling at the edges, wiping universes. All those people who had been forgotten - so many minds, so many places, so many ideas. The clouds rolled over them, and left nothing in their wake.

But it was far from done.

It slid soundlessly into the next world, and covered it. Swallowed it whole, and then spread out to the next. And after that, another.

[[ this is your second dropped characters post! second verse, same as the first. have at! ]]

endsthegame

The time the Auditors' efforts lasted could have been minutes, or could have been years. Seconds and centuries didn't count when you were outside of all things, and they were doubly ridiculous within the vast space of the multiverse.

None of that was important.

The important thing was that there was a place, somewhere in that mad hodgepodge of time and space, that had been Something.

And now it was Nothing.

It had been a long time since the Nothing had woken, though the Nothing thought not and knew not of such things - it was Nothing. It was Nothing, and it did what Nothings did: it spread, like a tiny inkblot, rolling ever-gently over Somethings that had been ignored, Somethings that were only Somethings in their own eyes.

Like a thick blanket of clouds it swept over the edges, and in its wake was Nothing.

[[ this is your very first dropped-mark-I post! feel free to establish your dropped character's demise in this post if you so please - there will be more opportunities over the next few weeks. ]]

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And let me find no true abode

But forever let me roam

Entries tagged with bde fall 2011: the nothing

Everywhere, Starting At the Remains of Fandom, Sunday Night

The Ivory Tower, Sunday Evening

Special Collections, Sunday Morning and Afternoon

Special Collections, Saturday Afternoon and Night

Fandom's dimension [Late evening]

Across The Multiverse, On 57 Consecutive Planes, At Exactly 6:55 Through 7:00 PM, Every Time

The Internet, Five Seconds To Midnight, Friday Fandomtime

Portalocity Headquarters [Always Dinner When They Call You, Monday Fandom Time]

Portalocity Headquarters [Everytime & sometime, and 15 minutes late, but Tuesday, Nov 8 in Fandom]

Nothing And Nowhere, Everything and Everywhere, Monday

Everywhere And Nowhere, Including In Your Back Yard, Monday

The Universes Across Space, This Second Right Here, Monday

Everywhere Else and At No Particular Point in Time, Monday

Across Universes, The Second After Last and the Millenium Before Next and All Things In-Between

Across the Multiverse, Every Time and No Time At All

Some Hidden Corner of Everywhere and Nowhere at All, All Times & No Places, Right This Moment

Fandom High RPG

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