employeelounge | PREGAME

[sei sticks her tongue out at shinnosuke. a paragon of maturity, she is not.

nico says a lot of familiar names, and flayn's brow furrows as she listens. yin yu makes the connection first. she nods. sora, too, mentioning both taako and lup being in the realm...

hmm.]

Chef Taako never spoke of being in the Realm. Rather, he said... he had come from a boat. Or... no, he insisted he did not come from the boat, but in such a way that it was fairly obvious even to me that he had. [...] Magnus never spoke of the castle, though... I believed he had come from somewhere else. Stephanie, Sanji, Yasusada, and the others from the castle did not seem to recognize him...

[she's... thinking about it.]

There are many possibilities, I suppose. In any event, being from the same world as someone does not mean that everything will... line up. Dimitri and I were both from Fódlan, but our memories were... different.

[shinnosuke is making a similar expression to gu yun because i can't remember how much xion talked about her backstory but anyway y'all are weird. otherwise, he looks disinterested in this conversation as he instead fiddles with his headphone.

anyway, shess doesn't really get the details of what sora's saying, but.]

Well... you might as well know, then, that he was one of the "hosts" in mine. If you're from the same world as him, then there were also several others.

[...]

Different timelines, perhaps.

[not exactly shess's area of expertise—he never really dealt with any of the people associated with "time" in his world. but he's not wholly unfamiliar with the concept. watch canon joss me but shess's not going to show up for another 2938427492 chapters so i'm safe.]

[wow. okay. god. this is a lot? this is so much and for a moment he kind of looks like he wishes he could expire and exhausted all at once. for a moment, he glances at yin yu and then at flayn with a brief nod.]

...Xie Lian was with me. Hua Cheng, too. They were together. I don't know anything about Taako and a boat, but maybe...he really was in a couple of places? I don't know.

Taako and Lup's memories were a little different than each other's, so you could be right. Maybe it's just things people forgot, or they haven't lived yet. More timetravel?

[wow. anyway. he finally...has to address shess though and it means big frowny. very big frowny.]

...great. Was he okay? Who were the others? Riku? Kairi? [he shakes his head.] It makes you wonder what it means for the timelines of people who'll be coming here next.

[nico, meanwhile, seems to think about this before there's a tentative nod.]

The war between Tiger and Dragon, yes. We were at the castle for a few months until we were able to get our numbers right for the ink necessary to end the war and leave. [but there's a double-frown.] The three of them were at your camp, too? Who else? Do you know?

[this is so tiring he hates this actually.]

[as sora talks shinnosuke glances at sei but wow suddenly really occupied with twirling his knife]

[gently,]

I'll preface this with saying that everyone was fine in the end and returned home, so ultimately, all obstacles were resolved.

[everything gets kind of bad from here, though.]

The others were Axel—or Lea, whichever name you might know him as—Xion, and Namine. [no idea if those names mean anything to sora, though.] You'll probably hear about it sooner or later, if anyone from there shows up here, but all but one of us had to die. Namine had already died by that point, as she'd been possessed, but Axel, Xion, and Roxas consented to their deaths and made their own arrangements.

[in the background, shinnosuke continues to be really invested in not participating in this as he frowns. wowee.]

[sei looks like she wants to say something, then catches shinnosuke looking at her and twirling his knife. her brow furrows, and she stares at him with a frown. really? really, you're not going to say anything, dude?

flayn does not notice this, because she's a little distracted by hearing - ]

Xie Lian and Hua Cheng? Well... at least they were together...

[that's probably a good thing? mostly. it might have been a bad thing for whoever or whatever was responsible for their murdergame, but frankly, flayn is of the opinion that entities like pandora and the nightman deserve whatever they get, and she's assuming something like that was involved in their foray to the realm.]

Ah, there was... Belph and Hikage, I believe they were also from the castle? Did you know them? And Damien and Jason-- ah. No, forgive me, they were from a different group, but they knew Stephanie from their world before they ended up in these situations... [she sighs.] ...in our case, there was no requirement that we all had to die. Just that... at least one person had to die each week, or else we and everyone else from the places we came from would be wiped out.

[ HUA CHENG WAS HERE???

this makes yin yu choke on his drink, and he reaches up to blot at his mouth with his sleeve gently after a moment. it's. not surprising. of course... where one goes, the other will follow..... ]

.... I hope that Chengzhu was not too... [ a pause. ] ...Well. They both must have made it out alright.

[ otherwise hua cheng would have definitely tpk'd that entire game ]

There have been far too many situations where people were required to murder each other.

[ is what gu yun decides after listening to all of this, taking a long swig of his wine. ]

I suppose Sora does make a point, though. If, for example, Lup arrives here, who is to say what she might remember? Would she know of both? What a mess.

...Hikage tried to get me convicted for murder, and Stephanie and I were friends. I didn't know Belph that well, but he was close to both of them from what I could tell. Our entire war was about balance, and I know the only reason I stayed alive back there was because my partner was an alignment we needed. And I wouldn't have wanted to leave her anyway. Some people handled it a little worse than others. Yasusada lost his temper and got voted for even if he didn't do anything. Same with Dazai.

All of these games are about culling numbers, but the different methods are strange. [why is there no consistency???]

[sora, meanwhile, frowns mightily upon hearing that all of his friends fucking died? hello??? but regardless....they're all fine now. that's what matters.]

I helped him cover for a murder. [he just. says this. it's his way of saying that he was friends with the dude.] Hua Cheng and I were on the same team, and Xie Lian and I both had roles to play in the game. We survived and we brought our dead back. We were lucky that we were able to talk to our dead pretty early and got the message about two members from each team needing to kill. Otherwise we could have really screwed things up for them and for us.

[but gu yun brings up a good point, too.]

...in the Realm, we forgot a lot of things, but then we sometimes remembered later. What if it's something like that? Like if they're here, they might remember some of their other lifetimes or whatever? Is that possible? What do we even do about that?

PREGAME | jenga!

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digs this back up six months later bc i truly never got a notif but plz ignore 1/2

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1/2 throws tag order out at this point

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