What I Want to Know Is, When I'm Asleep, Do I Really Remember How to Fly?

[adrastus]

When; February 26^th, 27^th, and 28^th
Rating; G to PG-13 (please make a note if your thread goes higher and needs a warning!)
Characters; All residents of the City who are not native-born to the City
Summary; The Animal Trinity and their entourage have opened ways out of the City. All those who are not native-born citizens will be asked to leave before March 1.

We would like to ask for your cooperation in this part of the endgame plot. Even if you think your character would refuse to leave, we are asking you to find an IC reason for your character to leave. No player characters will be left in the City. So please find a reason for your character to leave the City. If you can't think of a reason for your character to leave, the Animal Trinity or their entourage or the Deities or the Anonymous Movement may offer your character incentives to leave. (We're also not putting too many limits on what or how much characters can take with them. They can't take an entire building, brick by brick, but if you want your character to cart all their furniture and possessions out of the City with them, feel free!)

The choice is up to each person where he or she wishes to go after leaving the City. Remember the Happy Ending Clause that we set up.

One can go home, one can go to another world entirely, one can accompany someone else to his or her world, one can find a world not so unlike the City. Perhaps there are more and other doors elsewhere even after the City. But know that the ways into the City will be shut hereafter. The City will no longer draw in unwilling captives. Those whom it tries to draw in will be turned in their path by the new guardians of the City and sent elsewhere.

But choose a world--perhaps a place to start anew, perhaps a place to live the life that was shown by the City's own curse, perhaps home. The possibilities now are endless.

Please feel free to use this log as a place for final farewells and to play your character's exit from the City.

Log; The Doors out of the City have been opened. The Animal Trinity have been settled as the new guardians of the City. Their message was clear (more or less): they and the Deities and now the Anonymous Movement will guard the City and keep it as a world for all those who have known no other world.

The Clock will always tick, the Carousel will always turn, the City will stand forever.

And now it is time for all those who have known other worlds than this to go on to still more and other worlds. To their own world, to a chosen world, to a world by chance, to another world entirely.

They meet in Misery Square--such a name; it suited it once before, and perhaps it suits it still--to say their last farewells to the City and to each other and to make their choices in what path their futures will take.

As the citizens begin to depart, all the names in the City Cemetery and in the Hall of the Missing burn across the sky in fiery and glittering letters. These are others who have been here and who are gone.

There is a sense of sadness but also of joy among the native-born citizens, the Anonymous Movement, and the Deities. This is their City now, their World, and they will live in the relative peace that it affords. And they wish all those who are leaving it well--and they truly do. There is a sense of a ship leaving port, of a long journey just beginning.

This is only the beginning of the adventure. Anything might happen.

After the last person has departed from the City, the Carousel will play a sweet and haunting song, a remembrance of all who had been here...

Comments

[unflagging]

A handsome man wearing battered black boots and faded jeans and a denim jacket decorated with patches and pins stands before one of the doorways. A view of a desert, of endless drifts and dunes and a white-hot sun that seems to hunger after whatever beings might venture beneath it.

He wears a pack on his back, a secondhand Boy Scout pack bought at a thrift store in some other world. He has packed his gunna for this journey, a familiar journey, and folded up an empty duffle bag inside it--that had been intended for another use, but that use is perhaps past now. It may come again. The wheel turns. He grins at the view before him.

Clicky-clocky bootheels have led him to this time and place and doorway. Clicky clocky bootheels have led him through time and space and it is by chance or by fate or by what some might call ka that he stands here now. And here, at this doorway, he stands a while, pondering his journey across such a small gap, a doorway, and into another world.

A familiar thing, this desert. He has seen it before. He knows he has seen it before. And he knows that he is bound unto this track as are so many and there are times when the endlessness of this existence, this turning and turning, threaten to break even the kind of supernatural madness that rests within his brain. But that is another matter. For there are ways to break that track. And he has the ways and means.

A familiar thing too, to step through such a door, from world to world, as though they were only rooms. For so they are. If no place better proves the truth of the Tower for those who do not believe, it is the City. (And the room at the top?) The City may be a connection point of many universes, and its structure, the twelve buildings and the ring around which it all has settled, echoes Beam and Way and Tower alike. Such is the way of the universe.

The universe, of course, is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a non-living brain--although it may think it can--the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe--universes, indeed, but let it stand for both--is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in the world we know, more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind--no, nor woman's either--can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatic and the romantic.

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size defeats us.

He took a step forward, smiling, feeling the dry air filter through that doorway now.

A man seeks his own destiny and no other. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.

He stood before the door that opened on the desert, with its sands as numerous as stars but fewer than the universes that spun in their tracks and in their own realm, their own orbits about the Tower.

That same desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.

A hairless and foul-tempered cat is crouched on top of his pack. It yowls and whines and growls and flexes vicious claws into the pack and wears a harness and a leash and he speaks to it over his shoulder, grinning all the while.

"Well, Larry, let's head on. You're gonna love this place. And there's a guy I know that I think you'd like to meet. You might even get a chance to kick around a few more places after this. Whatcha think?"

The cat yowls, as is its wont. He laughs as is his--a laugh that rings brightly dark into the desert before them. He pulls the hood of his jacket over his head.

He settled his pack a little higher on his shoulders and set off.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed...

omg, the title; Open to all

[sitaronthewater]

There Demyx stands, ready to move on to another world aside from the City. He's been assured that he will not be dead there. This is a marked improvement on his own home world. He doesn't quite know where he's going, who else will be there, what it'll be like, or anything. But he's willing to try it. He's really going to miss all of the friends, yes, friends- he doesn't hesitate on that word anymore, not when he's sure he won't see most of them ever again- that he's made here.

He doesn't bring anything much, all the index cards that he's written while here, not only written with instructions, or notes on how people interact, but with the names of people he remembers, and what he remembers about them. He's been busy with those the last few days, since he heard they'd be forced to leave. But, he's okay with it. Really. Probably.

He's concerned that he will feel, really feel the way that he has been here; so different than when he first arrived. But then again, so much about him is different now.

And in another world, that will only get better.

He hopes.

[thewildone]

Curt has a guitar strapped to his back and a bag with pretty much just snacks and books, although somehow he's managed to remember to pack a toothbrush. It seems like something his mom would approve of. The books include Narcissus and Goldmund, Alice in Wonderland, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the Kama Sutra. He has on his special silver pants, a comfy t-shirt, and a black leather jacket with a large green pin--the one he usually keeps pinned to the inside of his clothes--displayed prominently on the collar.

He taps it a couple times for good luck, closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and heads for a door. It seems like he must have chosen the right one because there's glittery drifting out from it. On the other side of the door, several androgynous human figures look up from what they were doing, whether fiddling with instrument panels or simply lounging around on futuristic sparkly couches. They are all dressed in colorful and glamorous jumpsuits and one may look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton. Moonage Daydream is playing in the background. They look startled, then not surprised at all, and begin whisper to each other.

Curt himself looks very surprised to find this scene on the other side of the door, but he shrugs and walks through. He wouldn't be Curt Wild if he didn't just throw himself into everything wholeheartedly. As he begins to pass the threshold into the belly of the flying saucer--because of course that's what it is--a small white and brown blur streaks past. It's the Beast, Curt's prodigal and not entirely tame cat returning at last. The glam aliens do not seem terribly pleased, but Curt grins. This should work out just fine.

[water_wine_wizard]

Laruna is standing by one of the doors with her arms crossed in a sullen or angry manner, it's hard to tell. The cause of her ire is her brother who's also there some how looking like he's apologetic for everything that ever happened ever in all the existences.

"But I can't do that! It's against the rules!" he protests.

Jabbing him in the chest she says, "Rules? What damn rules? You never follow the rules if you don't want to."

"That's not true! There's just some rules I can't break no matter what I want," Alec says, holding up his hands.

"This isn't about what you want. This is about what I want. You've got all these fancy flash powers, so for once you're going to do what I want. I know people here. I don't want to not see them again. And unlike you I can't go jumping around like a demented frog into other realities. You owe me."

She jabs him in the chest again, hard enough to make him step backwards.

"Why do I owe you?"

"I've never pried. I've never asked what's happened to you in these other realities no matter how many times you've come home off kilter. I just want a way to visit. You can do that, can't you? I'm not asking for it to be an all the time thing."

He shakes his head rapidly. "There's too much of a difference between the worlds. It'd be shaky, at best. And I'd get in trouble with them."

"Then make it unshaky. I know you can do it. You're just fucking around." There's a deep breath and a pleading look. "Please, Alec. I don't want to lose them."

This time she grabs his hands and squeezes them tightly. He ducks his head and looks away from her. "I..."

"Please?"

Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes, he says, "Fine. Second Tuesday of the month. One way only. He can't come to our world. You can go to his... but no powers. I'll find a good place to put the door."

Delighted, Laruna threw her arms around Alec and gave him a hug. "That's fine. Thank you. Just ... let me tell him and I'll be right back." She gives her brother a hug and runs off leaving him standing there with a bemused expression on his face.

Somehow he manages to lean on the doorway watching people leave, saying their goodbyes. When his sister returns she looks sad but pleased. Alec has enough sense to not notice it. Instead he gives her a soft smile, which she ignores as she goes home.

He sighs. "Can we go home now?"

"Just... let me tell him and we can go."

Open;

[mortemscintilla]

[ With his few essentials (mostly weapons) slung in a shoulder bag, Hei drifts through the square, a ghost in the scenery, affecting cover for no reason. The traffic thrums and quivers like a leaping pulse. Pedestrians filter out toward the gates, empty-handed or hauling luggage, smiling or sad-eyed, hugging or murmuring to each other, music skirling in an eerie rise and fall in the background. He doesn't stop to analyze -- why waste time? -- but as he pushes through the crowd, senses assaulted by stimuli, he has to acknowledge a dull surprise at the fact that life is carrying on. Before him, his breath fogs in the dark chilly air. ]

[ A week ago, he would have decoded the City with each glance. A haze of maps and grids and data burning behind his eyes -- Shortcut through the street there; nice noodle stand at the left; that two-story house has been empty for five weeks; that woman there, very strange family history. But there's no need for that. Not anymore. The City is just a blurred multicolor wall topped by limitless dark sky. ]

[ Exhaling, Hei lifts his chin and cuts through the crowds, unseen. ]

[ He has a door to get to. ]

open;

[othersdie]

Justin waits until late on the twenty-eighth to leave. He doesn't have much with him, considering how long he has been in the City: a worn notebook, half a dozen or so books, miscellaneous cards and photos, tiny mementos from various curses. His glock is safely tucked away among the books and Electra, his tabby cat, is hunched in her pet carrier, nervous and quiet.

The door in front of him is dark. He doesn't know where he's going. The City's been more of a home than anywhere else, however many times he has come and gone, and he's finding it hard to leave.

Wherever he goes from here, it won't be home.