Til Death: Reanimated
The Easy Days (SHIP) / room-9 / Mich's Dream
You're lying on the floor. Well. You're reasonably sure you didn't fall asleep there, but maybe Penny kicked you off the bed or something.You push yourself to your feet... Huh. That doesn't look like the ship's floor.You straighten up and examine your surroundings. You're in some sort of shadowed, endless expanse, with a featureless grey floor. When you look up, you can barely see what look like bright teal neurons, all interconnected and pulsing slowly. They're far away, and almost not visible through the shadow.That's ominous. What should you do?
You attempt to focus and become some totally theoretical younger sister.
...The closest you can get is turning into Penny. You change back almost immediately, because being in someone else's body feels weird.You look around for something besides grey floor, and notice something off in the distance. You tilt your head and step over.There's a very large loom on an elevated platform, seemingly completely empty except for one thread. The rest of the loom stretches off beyond the bounds of the small lit area you can access. You squint, and almost like a trick of the light, you think you just barely see... two more threads trailing off up into nowhere, past the neurons. You try to see where they're attached to, but you can't see either end.
Not yet, at least.That's, oddly confusing.Scratching your head, you decide to step up and inspect the single thread you can access. It, doesn't seem very special. Just an ordinary, red thread. You tap it. It's strung taut. Your head abruptly gets a little fuzzy, and you step back a few paces....On a whim, you decide to pluck the thread. It oscillates back and forth a few times, the fuzziness getting intense enough that you clutch your head and almost fall over.The thread vibrates at just the right frequency to appear doubled... and suddenly it is, the loom now holding two threads. The fuzziness abruptly ceases. You blink and look up... and see yourself on the other side of the loom.The other Mich (hereafter referred to as Mich 2) gestures at the loom.You step back over to the loom again, and this time you attempt to pinch the strings together. They stick lightly on contact, and both your outlines start to blur together. You run your pinched fingers over the threads, smoothing them together, and suddenly you're one again. You reel back a little, hit with the sudden memories of both sides of the conversation.After shaking off the disorientation, you experiment for a while. There seems to be a hard limit of three "threads" of yourself at once. If you try and make another after that, each one just gets a headache. The whole process is actually pretty simple, and with practice you quickly figure out how to multithread yourself without even messing around with the loom abstraction. After that the loom itself fades, although the trailing threads in the distance stay, still unreachable.After collapsing into one Mich for simplicity's sake, you start walking and attempting to look for anything else in your mindscape. You don't find anything, however, your footsteps just echoing aimlessly....Thinking about it, what even is this floor made of? It sounds and feels like tile, but there's an odd quality to it that doesn't feel right....What would happen if you tried digging?Oh, fuck it. You summon a pickaxe from the aether, and swing it down. To your surprise, the floor is not a featureless platonic solid, and instead cracks splinter from where it impacts. It's rather shallow, though, and it seems like it'll take more than that to get anywhere. You multithread some more Miches with more pickaxes, and get to digging.After around half a mental hour, one of your pickaxes pokes a hole through to, something underneath. You perk up, and start working on widening the hole. In short order you have it wide enough for a person to squeeze through. You collapse down to one, throw away the pickaxe, and hop down a layer.You fall for only a short while, landing on... carpet? You look around. It's, an office. A bog-standard office, with cubicles and the like. There's nobody in them, however. You wander around for a bit, before coming across a door. You can hear... muttering, from the other side?This does not bode well.You knock on the door. The muttering pauses, and you can hear footsteps. The door is thrown open. What stands on the other side appears to be you, albeit in complete shadow with glowing teal shades and mouth. It seems dumbfounded.
It groans, before waving you inside.You blink, equally dumbfounded, but just step inside cautiously. The room is a standard executive office suite... if you can ignore the corkboards and string almost completely covering the walls, that is. The floor-to-ceiling window is almost completely covered in sticky notes, but past them you can see a bird's-eye view of those teal neurons.It takes a seat in an office chair and swivels to face you with a deadpan expression.You blink.It sighs and pinches the bridge of it's nose.You gesture to the conspiracy-level boards and string around the room.It spins in the chair and spreads its arms.It snorts.It points to itself again.It stands up.It walks over to one of the corkboards and slams a finger onto some sort of spreadsheet.It follows a string to another set of papers.You just blink.It lets out a vaguely broken-sounding laugh.It follows the strings again to an entirely different board.It taps another paper.It continues on like that for another half hour, listing all sorts of missing connections, and things without any seeming purpose.You just stand and watch, stunned into silence.You blink, only just processing that last part.
A ticker-tape machine in a corner activates and spits something out. It raises an eyebrow, but walks over and reads the tape. It snorts.It just throws its hands up.It places a hand on its forehead and sighs.It shrugs and turns around.It waves a hand.You find yourself back where you were in the grey expanse, no sign of the hole you dug.Well. What should you do now?Seems as good a thing to investigate as any. You scan the horizon for where the threads in the sky are coming from, and start to walk that way.After a while of walking, you find the base of the threads; two odd statues, right next to eachother. The one on the right looks kinda like Flint, and the one on the left looks kinda like Maud....On a whim, you pat the one that looks like Maud on the head.After nothing seems to happen, you shrug and poke the Flint-shaped statue in the forehead.After nothing happens, you shrug again and just lean on the Maud-shaped statue, looking up at the thread trailing off.You tug on it lightly out of curiosity.Independent of the tug, it suddenly goes taut for a moment, before slackening once again. Huh.You tug on the one connected to the Flint statue this time.Well, you're bored. You guess you'll, try and wake up now?You slap yourself in the face and vanish.DREAM END