bigapplesauce | don't get lost in heaven, they got locks on the gate [open to multiple]

Current Location: literally anywhere
Current Music: September 11th - 13th

Entry tags:

don't get lost in heaven, they got locks on the gate [open to multiple]

Existence without form or breath or shape is disorienting, the spread of atoms over a plane he doesn't recognize, with the repeated dissolutions and reshapings of an indistinct self. At one point there was pain, and the unspooling of himself into light and purpose, and for a long while there is only amorphous drifting. He hits barriers, dissonant and frequent, where once he should have crossed from one plane to another, one reality to the next, in an effortless slide of energy across the universal boundaries. It is difficult to define emotional state outside of the human context - he only knows that he is not human - but it is a state of affairs that generates confused distress.

Temporal sequencing becomes a problem.

Awareness, too, is difficult to achieve. Gradually he is able to pull together the various components that comprise himself and reshape them into something capable of perception, but doing so strikes him with a revelation disconsolate, and that is that there are no Others here - no Ancients, nothing, simply an empty plane of shifting light and bottomless dark. And he is alone.

He knows he did this, and it was for a reason. But he finds he cannot remember anything, not immediately, and when the memories trickle back with his concentrated effort they are unfiltered and unstructured and unordered until finally he can impose the alien concept of linear time upon the thing, and fully interpret what he is in comparison to what he was.

Daniel Jackson.

The name is the linchpin that generates the outward ripples, spreading from that singular point of origin. It triggers the flood of remembrance, the 'gate, Manhattan, the locked-away knowledge that was once sealed in his head but now coalesces seamlessly into the whole of him now. He cannot delineate his form by shape or size or mass, not any longer, but now he remembers, he remembers what it is he can do and how it is he can do it.

He starts small because he must, drifting as a pair of hydrogen atoms while he glimpses the city on a reduced scale. Then he builds to it, the recollection of his shape. Spectrally manifesting was never truly allowed before, but if there are no Others then he is not bound by their laws. He assembles a body that resembles the one that was human and familiar, and projects it. It takes two tries to succeed, three to sustain it for longer than a meaningless collection of seconds, and no matter what he tries he cannot force his shape to manifest with glasses. Apparently his inner self, or however he chooses to define it, does not need them.

He loses track of how many attempts he makes before he can maintain his form visibly for any significant length of time. But finally, in a ragged burst of energy, the bewildered shape of Daniel Jackson reappears in Manhattan, and there he stays.

[ooc: Daniel Ascended back during the Rift Shitfit of September 4th, and he's only just figured out how to Do Things in his new state of being. Right now he's completely intangible and frequently phasing in and out of visible existence. I've added to his handy-dandy reference post as to what he can and can't do in this state. He can also show up LITERALLY ANYWHERE so if you want in on Ascended funtimes just pick a date and a location, or Daniel can pick one, or whatever.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She's finally dragged herself back to her own apartment from Greta's - the hangover is still pressing at her temples but it's not as bad as it was when she woke up. The apartment feels stuffy, closed, lonely - she stares around at it for a few moments before trudging to her bedroom and stripping off yesterday's clothes. She draws herself a bath and sits in it for as long as she can stand, her dead arm hanging over the side.

Somewhat refreshed, she wraps herself in a towel and pads back out to the kitchen to make herself some coffee.

Thank god the apartment is empty when he materializes in it, because dropping in on people in the middle of their personal lives has been a distressingly regular pattern that Daniel really wishes he could pin some measure of control onto, but it's been difficult enough controlling the generally unstable process of manifesting at all, let alone where he does it and when. It doesn't help that he hasn't really figured out any kind of means for tracking time in a way that makes sense to him yet, so he just has to blindly hope that it's progressing - reasonably.

Whatever that means.

He's in a kitchen, he can say that much. It's not one he recognizes, so that's a good indication that he should dematerialize and probably leave the owner to it. Yep. That seems like a good plan.

Too bad he can't seem to be able to.

She rounds the corner with her eyes downcast and just as the tall, broad intruder catches in her periphery she snaps to attention, adrenaline burning hot, gives a gasp she nearly chokes on, and staggers back against the wall, her one good hand clutching her towel. "What the FUCK," she demands shrilly, coming back down almost immediately as she sees - she recognizes-

"Daniel?" she takes a trembling step forward. "What the fuck?"

Oh god. When he'd curtly told Satan he'd consider consulting Iman, this, this - this is categorically not what he meant.

"Sorry," he blurts immediately, and it doesn't change much if his projection is looking away when the whole of his awareness is very much still present and there isn't much to be done about it, but maybe it gives the impression of maintaining her decency. "Oh god, I - this - that wasn't intentional."

This is off to a great start.

"Holy shit," she breathes, eyes going wide. "Just - just wait there a second. Just hold on!"

Like she gives a flying fuck about him catching her in this state because he's alive, Rush was right, he's back and he's alive, thank fuck. She dresses herself as fast as she can one-handed, not even bothering with the headscarf, and darts back into the kitchen.

"You're alive," she says, looking at him. "Holy shit, Daniel..." She reaches out and her hand immediately passes through his shoulder and she jerks it back, startled and oddly embarrassed.

Her alarm abruptly spikes into excitement and Daniel, bemused, stays exactly where he is while she tears off and is back before he can put any actual words to his confusion.

It only occurs to him after she's spoken that she even knew he died, and he sobers. Her hand simply ghosts through his shoulder as he watches it, watches her emotions torque and branch into their logical directions, his projection's expression a silent, sympathetic apology.

"Yeah," he says, the word trailing off in a slow pull. "I know. It's, um. It's kind of a lot."

Well he seems pretty well put together for being noncorporeal and evidently only in partial control of his manifestation. "So Rush was right," she says, studying him, though he looks pretty normal to the naked eye. "You ascended."

She looks up at his face and offers a weak smile. "You missed a real shitstorm."

"Nick?" he says absently. He hadn't strictly meant to come across the other man's head, but he'd been storm-tossed and utterly bereft and that mind had been the only one that rang the slightest bit familiar. He'd probably gleaned more than he should have, but he'd gotten the sense of recognition, and that had been enough of an anchor to trigger the resurgence of the memories of who Daniel was which had been, in the end, necessary.

Though now it's struck him that he might need to apologize for that, assuming he can and it won't further mangle their respective timelines. It had been instinctive and completely by accident, but it had still been an invasion of privacy of sorts.

"So I'm gathering," he says slowly. "I heard that Daine, uh. Broke the Rebel Base?" Assuming he understood her correctly?

"Nick?" she blurts with a bewildered laugh. Well, yeah, it's his name, but it sounds so weird and wrong. Like when he used her first name, only that had been kind of different. Don't think about that. She shakes her head to dislodge it. "Um, yeah. Well, Rush and I did it first, with ROMAC, that was actually right after you..." She waves her hand at him. "They went down, and then the Rebels pulled some kinda shit and Daine went after them. I don't know so much about that situation, I've been kinda... out of commission."

She glances at her arm, then looks up at him with a faint, brittle smile. "Rift didn't do me as bad as it did you but..." She shrugs, her left shoulder lifting and the arm hanging, swaying very slightly like the inanimate object it is.

ROMAC and the Rebels. That's - basically the entire rifty infrastructure, down in one fell swoop. That in and of itself is alarming, but what Iman presents to the table next is even more so, and all thoughts of dissolving factions suddenly seem pretty peripheral in comparison.

"Oh," he says, a soft realization as the tendrils of his awareness creep over the arm that he knows is lying too limp, too unnaturally still, to be the product of any ordinary injury. It's a prosthetic, and what's more is it's - completely inanimate. It's easier to understand, now that he can see it. The neurological link and the subsequent severing of.

"The Rift did this?" His shape's expression darkens, momentarily, a flicker of outrage betraying the swelling frustration and anger with the thing that did this to them in the first place. It raveled them in, deposited them into its own personal self-contained playground - and is now toying with them. He's now of the capacity to understand it, if only partially, for the twisted thing it's always been, but seeing evidence like this - it just makes it worse.

Iman raises an eyebrow, studying him. Though it's nothing overt, it almost seems like he knows the full extent of 'this', his reaction more one of righteous anger than the confused concern she expected.

"I was trying to feel out the barrier," she says, "and it pulled me in. This thing is tied into my brain, shorted, would have killed me. Rush got me out, and I told him to sever it."

There. Spoken straight and even like it's no big deal. Not the slightest waver of her voice.

"Just how much can you... see, like this?" she asks, peering at him curiously.

"I can tell there was a link there, once," he says, narrowing his focus over the arm's entirety. "Neurological, right? The components, I can see, ah, inorganic, but - tied, directly to you. And now it's, well."

He tries and fails to suppress a vicious spike of frustration over how, despite being what he is, he's completely unable to access the capabilities that would allow him to help with this.

"I'm sorry." He raises his form's eyes to meet hers, subdued and regretful. "If I could remember how to help I would. I should." But like most everything he should be able to, those parts of himself remain infuriatingly cut off, beyond what he can retrieve. "I should be able to, like this. But everything's - it's harder, here."

"Nah," she murmurs. "It's okay. I've... made my peace with whatever."

Bullshit. And he can probably tell, would probably be able to tell even if he weren't somewhat omnipotent right now. She doesn't want an easy fix, is what. She doesn't want some powerful godlike being to just wave a hand and fix her back up, fix something with no effort that she made herself, that nearly cost her everything. She will not accept that. She can't. It's stupid, but she can't.

"So how does this work, exactly?" she asks briskly, eager to move on. "I mean, is this gonna get easier for you? Are you gonna be able to recover your corporeal being? Is there anything I can do to help?"

Possibly an absurd thing to offer after that thought process she just had but whatever. She's not gonna not offer.

It's pretty much code, and they both know it. It's an awfully immediate thing for one to 'make their peace' over so quickly, but it goes beyond avoidance; it's not talking about it in a way Daniel recognizes.

She shifts the subject, and he lets her.

"I'm hoping that's the case," he says, though there's no masking his note of uncertainty. "The last time this happened I was able to descend again but, uh, right now the Rift's making pretty much everything - way more difficult. It took me a while just to figure out how to manage this." He opens a hand to indicate the form he's currently walking around in. "There aren't any Others here. I don't have the kind of guidance I did before."

"Others," she repeats curiously. "This is triggered by something, then? These 'Others'? How many times has this happened to you?"

Fuckin morbid, and also fucking fascinating. It's hard not to treat it like one of the most interesting discoveries ever. This is Daniel's life they're talking about.

"This'd be the third time," he admits a little ruefully. Ascension isn't really a thing here and he has to remember that, even if he has his suspicions that the Rift more or less facilitated the whole thing, whether on his behalf or for the sake of its own observation. He'd been more selective about who he discussed it with before but, well, there's hardly any point to secrecy now that the cat's very much out of the extraplanar bag.

"Back home I, uh, I kinda had this habit of - dying, really. Kinda frequently." His projection shrugs, resigned. "It's how I knew how to Ascend even though humans haven't advanced that far. Some of that leftover knowledge from the last two times, it was still there, subconsciously. I just had to access it and, well." The rest went right ahead and happened.

"No shit," she says without a trace of sarcasm, lifting her eyebrows. "How come? Is archeology that dangerous a pasttime in your space future?" She steps around him, finally getting around to that coffee. "I mean, I guess it's good that you have the wherewithal to..." Her one hand occupied, she tilts her head back to sort of nod at him.

"When your galaxy's linked by a network of unstable wormholes, it is," he offers with the semblance of a shrug. "Beings on higher planes, it was a thing. Now I guess I'm one of them. Er - again."

In the looser sense of the term, maybe. It's sort of hard to tell what he is, seeing as a fully Ascended being wouldn't be having issues with anything as trivial as opening an avenue of communication. Or just plain traveling anywhere on any plane without getting incredibly disoriented.

"What are these beings like?" she asks curiously, turning to look at him while the coffee heats. "I mean, do they take a physical form like us, or - more of a noncorporeal energy sort of thing?" Back home she had a few colleagues - and more than a few acquaintances she tended to keep at arm's length - who would be overjoyed to have any evidence of noncorporeal and/or extradimensional entities. It was growing into a bit of a fad there, one she'd have been much happier to see the back of, but this is another story. This is hard evidence, a living witness. She feels a little pang of guilt, thinking of him that way, but - he's her friend, too. It's not like friends have ever received special treatment from her. It's a hard habit to break.

"Mostly they kept to themselves on the higher plane. Called the 'Ancients', and a lot of them Ascended a - really a long time ago." And the note of bitterness that enters his tone is, in his mind, completely justified. The Ancients were never any great secret back home, and Iman's as deserving of the context as anyone. "Strict non-interference policy kept us from so much as talking to any of the, uh. 'Lowers'."

A mocking set of quote fingers closes the word before he lets the projection's hands drop to its side in disgust.

"We disagreed, let's just say."

"So they started out like you," she guesses, tilting her head to consider this. "So they set it off the first time, yeah? And after that you did it yourself? Why'd they want you?"

He's being very open, which is agreeable to her, as long as it's okay for him to talk about it. She wishes she could take notes, but that would probably send the wrong signals.

"The Ancients - physiologically they were similar enough to humans, yeah. More advanced, which is why I always needed another one's help." One corner of his mouth ticks faintly upward, rueful and self-deprecating. "Went the same way both times. I was dying, so one of them helped me Ascend."

His projection appears to study the ground for a moment, dark crease notching into the brow that doesn't really exist. He doesn't have a shadow. He can't remember how to form the semblance of one.

"I don't know what it was - cosmic happenstance or chance or whatever else." He hadn't seen what there was about him that was worthy, hadn't been able to look back at his life and see anything aside from a string of failures. He'd learned, gradually, to not dictate himself by that, and he's still not sure if that was really the right choice on his part. He's not ever sure if Ascension is the right choice. It's not for humans most of the time, and that's for good reason.

He might have just cheated his way out of what was meant to be his time, again. By way of a celestial escape hatch that was never meant to be abused. Again.

The manifestation looks up again, his frown deeper.

"I guess some of them thought I was 'worthy' to join them, until I wasn't." The smile slides from the face that isn't real. "I wouldn't stop interfering."

This is some fascinating stuff, and Iman can't help smiling even as he frowns to himself. "Worthy and then worthy again," she says. "I mean, humans are all about interference, aren't we? Isn't that sort of the main draw?" In pop sci-fi anyway. "They should have seen it coming."

She takes a mug out of the cupboard and pours herself some coffee, adding sugar, forgoing milk - too much of a pain with one arm - and nearly forgets she can't automatically cool it down before taking a sip. She holds it awkwardly instead.

"What did they want you to do?"

"It wasn't something that was done frequently, and there were always risks. Ascending me wasn't even really a popular move." He moves over to the counter, as if he can lean against it. As if that part of him is really here.

"Ascended beings - well, you know." He spreads an incorporeal hand wide, his tone derisive and brittle. "Meant to study the universe. See everything, understand it. We're not meant to care what happens on a lower plane. Meant to be above it."

"Huh." She studies him for a moment. "So how much can you see now?"

It's not so much a question of paranoia as it is one of interest. In this state he might have immense capabilities, if he can only seize onto them, relearn how to do things. She isn't about to ask him to probe the Rift, especially when it's probably the Rift that started this, but - well, she's never prepared to let an opportunity go to waste. Even when that opportunity comes in the form of an undead friend.

don't get lost in heaven, they got locks on the gate [open to multiple]

September 13 / Iman's apartment

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)