lieutenantantichrist | [11] Video/Action for Route 39

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[11] Video/Action for Route 39 - "4 THE MARE"

[Carter doesn't know he's gotten used to it until he wakes up alone.]

[What's supposed to happen is they get up, bitch about the cold, make some coffee and breakfast, bitch about the cold some more, pack up, and hit the road.]

[Today there's just the sound of birds.]

[When Carter sits up, the other sleeping bag is flat. There's a fat, fuzzy teddy bear thing sitting on top of it, and a crab perched on the pillow, where a head full of messy blond hair should be.]

[Both of the animals look at Blake expectantly.]

[He fumbles for his phone and hits the key that dials Dirk. He sits very, very still while it connects.]

[The prerecorded voice tells him what he already knows.]

[He drops the phone and leaves it to chirp out its message to nobody. He pulls on the nearest clothes to hand and crawls out of the tent. The bright light makes him squint. He walks toward the edge of the clearing. They'd found a good place this time. Level ground, no tall grass, surrounded by pine trees. You couldn't even see it from the road. Honestly, Carter doesn't know how Dirk knew it was there.]

[Blake rests his head against a tree and breathes in deep. The bark is cool and rough on his forehead. The air smells like pine needles.]

[Dirk had a good eye for these things.]

[He slams his fist into the trunk as hard as he can.]

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

[Over and over, and when he finally stops his knuckles are stinging and it's all silence except for his panting.]

[He turns and goes back to the tent.]

[Inside, the fuzzy thing is trying to open up his backpack. Its claws are giving it much luck with the ties. Blake unties it and dumps everything out on the floor. Soap, pokeballs, clothespins, socks. Some oranges roll away, and the thing goes right after them and starts gnawing. Doesn't even take the peel off.]

[There's something thin and white in the pile. A piece of paper. Blake picks it up and reads it.]

[He reads it again.]

[He sits there for a while as the teddy bear thing munches, and there's a low thrum and a shadow through the tent's wall as one of those ladybugs passes by.]

[He digs the little sewing kit out of the pile. He turns his backpack inside-out and opens up the seam at the bottom. He tucks the note in and sews it closed again.]

[By the time he's done, it occurs to him he's pretty hungry. Usually they'd be having breakfast by now. The fuzzy thing's gone through a lot of what he has already. Carter doesn't really feel like fighting it. For the crab's part, it's just watching with wide, unblinking eyes. It has a pair of mushrooms stuck to its back.]

[Carter remembers hearing those are edible.]

[VIDEO]

[Blake is sitting on a stump. He looks contemplative, and somewhat withdrawn. His beard hasn't been trimmed yet this morning. His pupils are a little too wide.]

Hey. You out there.

After a while here you figure things come and go. There's no point in bitching. You just gotta keep moving forward and keep your hooves on the ground.

I figure I might as well ask. I kept putting it off, thinking maybe I'd get home. But that's not happening anytime soon, and it has to be past by now. So if anybody here is from 2013 or so, maybe a little later, I got a question for you.

And all of you. Talk to me. [He thinks, then nods, and taps on the phone's screen.] Tell me something you'd want to know about what's going on at home. Wherever you're from. If you could find out one thing that's happened while you've been gone, what'd you ask?

[He looks out at the trees, his eyes a little glassy. He seems to forget the Gear is on. A moment later, he abruptly cuts the feed.]

[ACTION]

[If you venture down Route 39 today, you might come upon Blake staring out at the horizon, contemplatively chewing on some hay.]

((ooc: Blake's in a bit of an odd place right now...He'll be mostly coherent, but anyone who talks to him may get hallucinated into something unique. The Paras has one mushroom left, so you could also come join him on a spirit journey.))

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What happened, somebody drop a nuke?

For all I know, the same thing's happened to the real world.

[The guy on the screen has long hair, pale skin, and a lot of black clothes. It takes Blake a second to place him.]

Yeah. S'gotta all be real zedda for a Dracula.

[Well. Pale for a Japanese guy, except where it's black enough it looks like he's got tattoos.]

...No. Reaper. Ex-Reaper. Sort-of.

[The black hand (as opposed to what looks like tattooed whiskers) waves around a bit] Less killing people here. ...So far no killing people here. As time increases without killing, differences between here and home →∞.

[This is a man who speaks in mathematical symbols. Still, the concept of "approaches infinity" makes itself as clear as anything Sho talks about.]

[Yep, that's a Dracula all right, unless Blake's eyes deceive him ~~as they totally do~~. Got black fancy gloves and everything.]

No killing anybody, asshole. [Blake jabs his hoof at him unsteadily.] I don't care how many bats you got. The law's the law.

[He settles back on his haunches and thinks a little.]

But you got a point about one thing. I haven't heard about a single person dying since I been here. Back home, hardly a day went by without a new case. It's...weird.

[Glove. Singular. He pushes his hat back on his head a bit, looking at Carter with yellow eyes that have rather more coherency than is usual.]

If I need to kill to survive, I will. I prefer not, but I will not let myself be Erased without a fight. I do not have bats. Mostly cat-type Pokemon.

EEVEE! EEEEE! Eevee vee eeeevee!
VEE! Vee eeee EEVEE! EEVEE EEVEE EEVEE!

[The two objecting Pokemon start simultaneously bitching Sho out for calling them cat-type, making him wince and cover his ears.]

Mostly! I said mostly!

[The Eevees subside, grumpily, one of them bracing his feet on Sho's leg so he can look into the Pokegear. The ex-Reaper pets Nor between his ears and muses.]

People do age, though. I wonder if people just forget about people who have died?

[Sure, next you'll be telling him he doesn't have fangs or a cape.]

Self-defense, that's something else, even for blood-suckers.

[Blake winces too.] Christ, those are some loud-ass rodents you got.

[Blake waves his hoof at the one who looks in the screen.]

[His expression turns chilled. That is a cold thought.]

Jesus. What if that's it? Just forgotten so everybody can go on and never realize you were ever there. God, that's a hell of a lot worse.

[Cape, no. That would be tacky. Fangs? We-ell. They're very small fangs. Not big enough to get hit by this place's humanizing-effect. Also fixed rather than retractable, which book Dracula did not have.]

I don't suck blood. I used to eat souls, [more or less. He's breaking it down for simplicity's sake because sometimes he simplifies the wrong things.] but I don't have to do that here.

[Nor waves back, cheerfully, despite having been called a rodent. For all he knows, Blake has been dealing with Eevees like Taboo, and even Nor wants to call Taboo a rodent.]

Might be optimum for dealing with a world like this, though. Would allow the natives to continue on their remarkably innocent lives. Of course, that also has the potential to keep the populace in a sedated state if it was an artificial state of affairs; possibly by way of the incessant noise. [mathematical genius really hates the so-called music. It hasn't any artistry.]

Many possible reasons for that being a viable hypothesis; steady source of organs for transplant, test subjects, or food spring to mind. [Vampire, no. Sociopath, yes.] There are not nearly as many people as there should be, especially taking into account the number of aliens that appear to be here. Where are all the elders? Why are there so many children? Why are children sent out with virtually nothing besides a lunch and a Pokemon? Where are all the fathers? Even acknowledging the transport of severely wounded people to PokeCentres, wouldn't you expect there to be some deaths-by-accident out in the wild? Why are the only people ever reported missing those from other worlds?

[You didn't plan on sleeping, did you Blake? Like - ever again?]

The maths just don't add up.

[Blake nods along sagely.] Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Souls, huh. Must be tough to grab. All slippery. Sounds like a lot of work for breakfast.

[His expression grows grave as the Dracula goes on.]

Hey.

Wait.

I've heard people talk about dead grandmas and stuff, though.

I'm pretty sure nothing's Soylent, too.

It's still all pretty fucked up, though. All the kids out alone dealing with monsters, you'd think you'd have dead kids all over the place. It'd be hard to hide, though. People notice this shit.

[he thinks it over, and shrugs.]

Never was real good at math. Leave that shit to the desk jockeys.

Not really. It's all very metaphysical.

[Sho's eyes blink back to rather more present in the current moment than they were. Maths take him to a whole other realm, really.]

Good to know. Still not enough people to account for the infrastructure.

[Then he looks betrayed. They were having such a good conversation, and Blake had to go say that about maths.] Maths are important, beautiful, and fun.

Oy, metaphysics. That's way beyond an old workhorse like me. All I know is the simple things. Sunshine, apples, beating the shit out of bastards who have it coming. The good things in life.

[He spreads his hooves.]

Somebody had to build it and keep it running. There's gotta be plumbers and stuff around somewhere. Maybe they're shy.

[Blake scoffs] Math, fun? You gotta be crazy. Nobody does that shit unless they have to.

[He gives it a little more consideration.]

You might be the first vampire accountant I've ever met. I don't know for sure. There's a lot of people I never asked.

I'm not a vampire! ...I am also not an accountant. That's not maths, that's just logic and basic sums. Maths are more than just sums. Phi is the basis of beauty, even if you do not understand the maths behind it, the human eye loves things that fit into it.

Pi holds universes within it; hidden in it's digits are every word you will ever think, every sight you will ever see, the sequence of your DNA - unlocking all the secrets of pi would unlock every secret that any universe would, or could, ever hold.

Music is maths made auditory; rhythm and structure of a piece of music is entirely made up of maths. Even the simplicity of tuning an instrument requires you to be able to match the appropriate frequencies in your head; identifying where they lay and adjusting to it.

Knowledge of how to best beat someone down requires at least a working understanding of physics - how hard do you need to punch? What angle is best for breaking a nose with or without driving it up into the brain? What force is optimum for breaking an arm versus merely ripping it out of it's socket?

[Don't mind Sho. He's just going to start mildly frothing at the mouth.]

You mean math, there's just the one...

[The guy goes right over him, and soon Blake shuts up.]

[His eyes get wider and wider. His pupils take up most of them. Soon the guy's words are making sparks and fireworks burst in fractal patterns around him. His words keep coming like machine gun fire, ripping up the world and showing the colors on the other side.]

[Blake's mouth falls open.]

[His mind is fucking blown.]

Woah.

No there aren't. There are as many kinds of maths as there are of art.

[Sho parallel processes far better than anyone expects of him. Some of his problems are due trying to express too many lines of thought at the same time.]

[He then goes straight into answering all the questions he'd asked regarding beating someone up via a combination of pantomime, equations, and general spazzing. One take-away from this is: don't get into a fight with him. He may be a painfully skinny nineteen year old but he knows exactly how to fight and if he's half as rabid when it counts as he is talking about it(he is) he's not afraid to bite either.]

[Again, he breathes the only thing that can express the plethora of feelings flashing across his mental landscape]

Woah.

[And now you're headed right into Blake's favorite territory: beating the shit out of people.]

[His nose is practically touching the screen. His voice is fascinated.]

I never knew that was all numbers.

Everything is.

[Sho's smile is wide and happy; maths are his favourite subject.]

Most people are just so used to the maths that they do not consciously know what they are doing. The more you learn, the more you see it everywhere. I cannot stop seeing the maths.

[He's just going to...detour into a long sequence of equations that describe the topological map of Belphe's face. So symmetrical! So beautiful!]

[Blake's eyes widen further.] Everything?

What about little stuff, like bugs? There's no room for numbers to fit. And they;d be all heavy. Make it tough to fly.

[But it isn't long before Blake is entranced by the Dracula's chant. There's numbers swirling around him and drifting through clouds of color, shifting and dancing. His eyes get wider and wider.]

[Blake breathes] Wow. Two.

[Time for "Follow The Logic" with our host: Minamimoto Sho! Bug to insect to butterfly to...]

The governing equation of the incompressible flow is the Navier–Stokes equation:
∂u∂t+(u⋅∇)u=−∇pρair+ν∇2u+fIB,
(1a)
∇⋅u=0,
(1b)
where u is the velocity of the flow, and p is the pressure. The interactions between the flow and the butterfly are calculated by the immersed boundary method. The interactions are introduced as the boundary force fIB . The values of the air properties are adopted from those at 25 °C: the density ρ air = 1.184 kg/m 3 and the kinematic viscosity ν air = 1.54 × 10 −5 m 2/s.

The direction of the main stream is taken as the positive x direction, the vertically upward direction as the positive y direction, and the horizontal direction as the z direction. The directions are expressed by the Cartesian unit vectors ex , ey , and ez. The boundary conditions of the flows are as follows: The velocity is constant on the inflow boundary plane: u=u0ex . The Sommerfeld condition is employed as the outflow condition. The boundary condition of the pressure is the Neumann boundary condition ∂ p/∂ x = 0 on both inflow and outflow plane. The streamwise length of the computational domain is L x = 5 × 10 −1 m, which is approximately 18 times as long as the mean wing-chord length. The periodic boundary condition is employed for the transverse boundaries. The transverse length of the computational domain is L y = L z = 2.5 × 10 −1 m, which is approximately 5 times as long as the wing-tip length. The results are not affected by the values of L x , L y , and L z.

[To pretty much anyone but a mathematician or a physicist it probably mostly comes across as BLAH BLAH NUMBER BLAH NUMBER NUMBER SPAZ FLAIL BLERG.]

[[This be ripped straight outta this article. All things correct are because of the people who wrote the article, anything messed up is because I am sooooo not a mathematician.]]

[Blake listens, open-mouthed, letting the numbers and symbols flow over him. They break into thousands of butterflies with fractal wings.]

Wow. That's what bugs were all along? Shit, I never knew. I thought they were just made of bug.

[They swirl around him, shining. His tail flicks at the ones behind him.]

Hey. You're smart. You should write a book or something.

I'm a genius.

[Sho corrects, sniffing]

I could write a book. Hmmm.

[God help the editor.]

Gotta be, if you know all those numbers. And...plusses, and shit. Never made any sense to me. Used to spend math class getting smacked with a ruler. They really used to do that.

[He leans back on his hooves.] Yeah. Like that wheelchair guy with the robot voice.

Why are so many damn people so damn horrified by maths?

[He just. He just didn't get it. At all.]

Cause it's all...complicated. All those numbers. Everybody hates shit they don't understand. Makes you feel stupid.

[Blake gets it.]

Most people are stupid.

[It's not meant to be an insult, it's just. Sho. He's both a genius and an idiot (you'd be amazed how often those go together).]

Doesn't mean that they should give up.

They are, aren't they. They never get things no matter how many times you tell them, so you gotta smack it into them. It's not that you want to. It's that that's how you get things done.

[Then he gets distracted by combing his fingers through the grass. It feels so green and bendy.]

[Huh. This guy is...really out of it, isn't he? Yeah, most people would have noticed that earlier, but Sho was in the grips of his own ego.]

Maybe you should...sleep. Where is your team? They should take care of you.

[Blake waves his hoof] I'll sleep when I'm dead. And when there aren't all these numbers whizzing around. [Look, a four!]

They're around. [A Munna floats over and starts to gnaw on the back of his head. Tangy!] Heheh. See?

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