(Redux) Thread 45 Recap

Still in your mind-house(?), your younger self Lottie leads you to the fireplace, where a grotty, rusted version of The Sword awaits you. You take it, and are immediately confronted by "Leftenant Fawkins," your forgotten Wind Court self. She has both the intact Sword and one of the keys you need. You're not sure what to do, but Lottie goads you into "dueling" the Leftenant. Despite your inferior weapon, you're evenly matched, and with help from Lottie you manage to disarm the Leftenant and reclaim the intact Sword. You "knight" her with it, and she vanishes.

Lottie, excited by your victory, asks whether you're a heroine. You tell her you aren't, but she doesn't believe you. You head upstairs and check in on your mother, who's in bed. She has an uncanny knowledge of what you've been up to underwater, and begins griling you on all the deaths you've been responsible for-- including Margo's, which you deny, but your mother claims Richard did it. She asks whether you enjoy killing, and you deny that, too. She asks you why you killed your father then.

Truthfully, you don't know. There's no logical reason for it. You tell her you must've been delusional, or under the influence of something, but your mother doesn't take this well: she starts screaming at you, blaming you for his death and calling you "evil". You know this isn't actually your mother (who's safely abovewater), so you tell her you don't deserve that. Abruptly, she turns into Monty, who you've been feeling especially guilty about treating poorly. "Monty" continues to blame you, telling you to accept your guilt like he accepts his, but you don't buy it-- you tell him that he's a good person now, that he shouldn't need to beat himself up about his past, and maybe you don't need to either. Absolved, "Monty" vanishes, leaving a key behind.

You return out to the hallway to greet Lottie, who eavesdropped on most of the conversation. She asks you whether you killed your father, like your mother was ranting about, and you tell her you did. She refuses to blame you, though, and tells you must've been under a wicked curse of some kind. The two of you head up to the attic, the same place you originally found Richard, and you start looking for the box he was hiding in. You find it, but no snake-- only a key with a decorative metal snake wrapped around it. Lottie spooks you by shrieking, and you dash over to discover an intruder: Claudia, the teenager you inadvertantly extracted from Us! Claudia is snotty toward you (understandably so, given you did violently absorb her), but explains that she's been deep in your mind the whole time, kept sane by visits from "a lizard"-- evidently the Herald. She also tells you that the Herald filled her in about her circumstances-- the whole "died in the Flood 200 years ago" thing-- and that she has no interest in going back to Us. Fine with you. You can't promise her a real body, or even a goo body, but you tell her honestly that you'll look into it. Grateful, she gives you a key the Herald gave her.

Lottie informs you that it's the last key you need, and you invite Claudia along for the last leg of your journey. Though you intend to walk down through the secret passageways, Claudia points out that this is *your* mind, and you can probably just teleport. You use the tortoiseshell-handled knife to slash through the floor and fall down, landing right next to the door you were looking for.

While Lottie takes the keys and opens it, Claudia grabs her possessions from an embarrassingly girly bedroom-- apparently the Herald, in an attempt to make her comfortable, created a space just for her. Once regrouped, the three of you set downward through a series of dark, steep tunnels, following footsteps in the ground. When you hit a branching point, you turn left and run into "Queen Charlotte," the fake "future" you from Gil's mind. She attempts to goad you into murdering her and claiming her "power," claiming that she used it to bring your father back to life, but you insist that he's dead and will always be dead-- that nothing you or she can do will change that. Even now, you're only here to see it happen. Claudia objects, pointing out that the footsteps in the ground aren't your father's: they're yours, worn into the stone from years of subconscious rumination. You've been doing nothing but observing his death since it happened. Now, since you're finally aware of it, you have to do something-- you have to, like your father always encouraged you to, try your best.

Emboldened, you push the Queen away, then use your own "power" to ditch the spooky tunnels and find open air. You wind up on the beach from your dreams, the one with white sand, red water, and a gigantic yellow eye on the horizon. On the other side of the beach is a small chapel, and you sense that your father is inside it-- that it's your final destination. You part ways first with Claudia, who tells you she'll find her way back to your manse on her own, then with Lottie. You apologize to Lottie for being a bad role model, for squandering all her potential, and for merely pretending to be a heroine, but she rejects all of that. She tells you that you always tried your best, which makes you a heroine in her eyes, and gives you a hug. She then asks to hold The Sword-- something she's dreamed about her whole life-- and, after doing so, smiles and vanishes.

You enter the chapel to discover your father, plus yourself, mid-murder. Your attempt to heroically charge in and stop her fails when you're merged with the murderous Charlotte's body, which you discover is being controlled by an unseen force. Not just any unseen force. RICHARD was possessing you! Immediately, you regain control, then lunge at him, pinning him to the chapel's altar and attempting to bite his throat out. When this fails (his body is made of paper), you instead slash him to ribbons with The Sword, then set the ribbons on fire and stomp out the ashes. He's dead. You crouch on the floor, feeling empty, before somebody comes up behind you and knocks you out cold.

You awaken elsewhere, tied to a chair, with a strange man sitting at a small table across from you. He speaks, and you immediately realize that it's Richard, for some reason in a brand new body. New Richard apologizes for tying you up (he didn't want to get re-murdered), then explains the situation: yes, he killed your father, and the last time you found out, you refused to cooperate with him so hard the only solution was a "semi-cycle," or partial mind wipe, for both of you. This is why neither you nor him can remember the past 2.5 years underwater. In a concerted effort to ensure history doesn't repeat, he's obtained a special powder-- the same kind the Wind Court uses as a truth serum-- and intends to take it right in front of you. Then he'll answer any questions you have of him, in the hopes that by the end you'll have regained enough trust to work with him again. After all, if you don't, you won't get a third chance-- you'll probably get killed, and he'll probably have his mind wiped for good.

You inform him that you still want him to die, but nevertheless he snorts the powder, then opens the floor to questions. You ask many, many, many questions and learn the following things:

>Richard is neither human nor snake, but a third thing, which he calls an "agent." All of Richard's coworkers are also "agents." They are working on behalf of the Wyrm to complete the work of 200 years ago-- to fully resurrect the Wyrm, and to end the world.

>The Crown is genuinely a Fawkins family heirloom, but only because the Fawkins are a long line of Wyrm cultists, and the Crown was an artifact involved in the Flood (which was the original, only partially successful attempt to resurrect the Wyrm). Richard wants it so bad because it's a "conduit": if fully charged up, it can be used in a ritual to channel the Wyrm directly into the body of its wearer, enabling the Wyrm to regain its full world-ending power. Richard claims that therefore he didn't lie about the Crown's purpose: it does in fact make you into a god. In fact, it makes you into *the* God. You're not impressed.

>The Wyrm didn't provide direct instructions to do this, and in fact hasn't been in contact with the agents at all. They're doing all of this on their own prerogative.

>Horse Face isn't really trapped in a "time loop," but his consciousness is being shuffled back and forth between timelines, probably because a bored agent is experimenting on him.

>Richard killed your father as part of his master plan. As a Correspondent, he's tasked with coaxing a human into finding and charging up the Crown to summon the Wyrm with, but Richard believes the standard procedure for this is fatally flawed-- most clients wind up betraying their Correspondent, because they're power-hungry types who don't trust evil snakes. Instead, Richard thought that 1. he should target somebody naive and pure-hearted, like you, and 2. he should build a closer relationship with you, so you'd trust him implicitly. Because he's a raging asshole, he doubted his ability to do this naturally, so he killed your father (whom you were very close to) and stole his identity so you'd attribute your positive father feelings to him. This worked. This, um, outside-the-box thinking is also what makes him "indispensable".

>Richard couldn't keep being nice to you, like he was before you drowned, because that wasn't really *him*-- that was the snake programmed to be nice. He ended this programming because he found it painful to be forced to act so uncharacteristically 24/7 (because, again, he's naturally a raging asshole).

>If it wasn't obvious from context, "recycling" is confirmed to be a memory wipe, administered to underperforming agents so they can be shuffled off to a different department. Richard greatly fears this because he's attached to his "Richard" identity and a recycling would destroy it for good. In fact, said Richard identity is only three years old-- he was recycled immediately before becoming "Correspondent #314," and you are his first-ever client.

>Richard, and all the other agents, are located in a large alternate dimension adjacent to your own (so, an AUX space). Richard calls this dimension "Satellite." The agents are unable to leave Satellite, Richard included-- his physical body is still there. Apparently they were exiled by the Eight, way back when. They want to resurrect the Wyrm because they hope that, once unleashed, It'll free them back into the real world where you currently live. After all, agents are the Wyrm's children, created "perfect," so It likes them much better than It likes humanity.

>Your memory of finding Richard in a box in your attic is false. Actually, you found a key with a decorative snake on it-- but snakes reproduce through nearby snake-like objects, and that key was in fact a snake's "pupa" (or egg? Richard isn't sure about the right term). Richard, inside Satellite, was able to use this pupa to identify and link your mind with his "chassis," or snake-body, made from a surgically altered snake. Richard is able to upload his consciousness into this chassis, which is projected into your mind, to bypass his inability to physically enter your world. However, years of doing this has left him metaphysically linked with the chassis, which in turn (having hatched from one) is metaphysically linked with keys. Meaning Richard is, loosely, part key. That's why he's so good at opening doors.

>Richard continues to deny that any of his strange abilities are "magyck." He can manipulate strings because he's an agent and has a lot of practice, can do weird things to you because he has "advanced machinery" inside Satellite that hooks to your brain, and can wipe your memory because of both of the above... and also because he was influenced by being a snake, and snakes eat memories. He tells you that your memories of your father were eaten and are now irretrievable-- but that by eating them, he might also have been influenced by them (so he was pressured to be your father from both the inside and outside)

>Conversely, Management (which Richard re-confirms as another team of agents, possibly from the R&D department) wiped your memory through direct manipulation of your strings, which is supposed to be strictly regulated (which is why Richard does it via the snake instead)

>Management's end goal was almost certainly the same as Richard's: to free the agents from their captivity. Instead of resurrecting the Wyrm directly, though, they planned to use an enormous store of Law (harvested from the trapped locitis victims) and the goo snake (intended to be created by Namway) to create a powerful Wyrm-facsimile, which, unlike the actual Wyrm, could be controlled by the BrainWyrm II. By interfacing with the BrainWyrm II, which identified you as a viable "chassis" instead of the goo snake, you inadvertently stumbled into the middle of this.

>Richard doesn't have much deep knowledge of the workings of the BrainWyrm, or many other things, because he's installed with knowledge post-recycling on a strictly need-to-know basis. (He uses a microstick, the USB thingy you used to re-implant your own memories.) He also doesn't have any spare time to look into it, since he spends 80% of his waking hours directly plugged into you. Due to all of this, Richard is neither the mental age of his physical body (at minimum, hundreds of years old, but likely thousands), nor "three years old"-- he estimates his actual mental age at around 35 in human terms, which is also about how old his new body looks.

>The agents have been working on escaping Satellite ever since they got there, which Richard estimates was 10,000 years ago, the same time the Eight rose up, buried the Wyrm, and created humanity. They've only been working on the "Crown" plan in earnest since the Flood, though, so around 200 years. When you ask what's taking them so long, Richard blames the recycling scheme-- with everybody constantly losing their memories, it's hard to make lasting progress. Apparently, the reasoning behind recycling is that agents are all "perfect," so they're also all interchangeable, so it makes no difference which one does what job. Richard strongly disagrees with this.

>Apparently, Satellite is a ginormous hollow sphere filled with floors and floors of rooms, with a second hollow space in the middle where the BrainWyrm lives. Satellite may or may not be rotating around the world proper. You wonder if Richard's talking about the moon, meaning that agents all live in the moon, but he isn't really sure. He tells you that he can't take you there, though-- *maybe* mentally, but certainly not physically.

>For the most part, agents don't hate humanity, but they don't care much about it, either-- almost all agents have never seen a human, let alone spoken to one. They're aware that resurrecting the Wyrm might wipe out humanity in the process, but they consider this an acceptable sacrifice if it means they get the world back for themselves. Richard, who *has* spent a lot of time with humanity and seeing the world, doesn't necessarily agree with this.

>The agents didn't directly kill the Eight or cause the Flood, but Richard thinks that they were likely in contact (as "divine messengers") with the Wyrm cultists who did, and may have provided information or motivation to do so.

>The Pillars are probably hyperextended spines of the Wyrm, raised during the Flood to rescue the loyal cultists who did it. It's unclear whether the Wyrm was cool with this or not.

>The agent in charge of the rest of them is the Director. Richard has never seen or spoken to the Director, and neither has anybody he knows-- agent society is very hierarchical, and Richard just isn't high enough up the ladder. He suspects, though, that the Director isn't an all-powerful dictator, and is bound in just as much red tape as everybody else, given the current rate of change in things (zero).

>Everything Richard told you about #301 and Jean Ramsey is true, to the best of his knowledge. Richard really, really hates #301 and wants to spit in his face as much as possible, so he's all for you finding the Crown and kicking Jean Ramsey's ass.

>This is counter to Nice Richard's "do whatever you want" attitude. Richard is definitely no longer Nice Richard, though he does remember everything from being Nice Richard. He admits that it was like a "pleasant dream" to him, where he wasn't himself-- but he claims that he wasn't your father, either, who was more complicated and prickly than you're able to remember. Rather, Nice Richard was your *idealized* vision of your father, whose sole goal was to make you happy. However pleasant this was, Richard denies wanting to go back-- he'd rather be himself, no matter what, even if he's much unhappier. He values having an identity that strongly.

>You were a total bitch pre-memory loss mostly because of Richard. Not only was Richard busy taking all his frustrations about his sucky job out on you, but he was also deliberately manipulating you into being as bitchy as possible, in the hopes that you'd drive off everybody else and only depend on him. This also worked... until you forgot you did anything wrong and reverted to the whole "heroism" thing from your childhood.

>Like Richard has told you before, it's psychologically excruciating for him to be inside the snake; it squeezes every ounce of personality or emotion out, leaving only room for the ultimate mission and how to most "efficiently" accomplish it. This partially explains why Richard was so horrible to you-- if he was inside the snake, he didn't have much choice. Richard thinks that chassis are made this way on purpose to keep Correspondents on a strict leash, and that you projecting your father onto him overrode that.

>Snakes are "perfect": they're made of only one self-defining Law, [SNAKE]. Agents are also allegedly perfect, but the fact that they're sapient and clearly have different personalities suggests that this might not be true. If it's not true, though, it becomes much less likely the Wyrm would want to bring them back (since they'd be just as "flawed" as humanity)... and doubt and denial are also signs of imperfection, so everybody sticks to the party line. Richard is aware of all of this, but there's not much he can do about it.

>Richard can time travel... kind of. The same machinery that can transport his chassis into your mind can also transport it to different points along your timeline, provided that Richard wasn't already present during them (so he can't be in two places at once). He also can't go to the future, and he can't really mess with the past, lest it screw up a bunch of other things. All he does with this is occasionally go back and fill in for himself if he has to leave his post. That being said, Correspondents use this technology to interface with clients in many timelines at once-- only one of them needs to find the Crown, because once the Wyrm's back it'll collapse all the timelines into one regardless. That's why you haven't heard about anybody else with snakes in their head (Jean Ramsey excluded). You can't go to a different timeline yourself, because you'd just be overriden by the Charlotte native to that timeline, effectively dying.

>The red stuff you got from murdering Richard is, effectively, the Wyrm's blood-- and, like any blood, it carries the Wyrm's Law in it. The Wyrm, like snakes, is perfect, so it only has one law: [WYRM]. Anything carrying this law is, thus, loosely and metaphysically, an extension of the Wyrm. That means you. Richard would've needed to do this regardless to get you ready to have the Wyrm summoned into you, so he's happy you beat him to the punch.

>The Herald of the Bright Epoch is a mythic figure in agent culture, supposed to appear right before their escape and the Wyrm's revival, and who may or may not initiate said escape. The "Bright Epoch" is the infinite period of time after the agents are freed into their new world. Richard is skeptical of this-- if the Herald is anybody, he thinks that it's the chassis the Wyrm will be resurrected into, or in other words... you. He thinks that the Herald is in fact you from the future, and that its appearance in your dreams is an indication that the plan will succeed, and that *you* will and indeed must reclaim the Crown, become the Wyrm, and free the agents. You're appalled by this, especially the idea that you might have to turn into a lizard, but Richard convinces you that the "lizard" part of the Herald is probably optional.

>As evidence of all of this, Richard points out your inexplicable magyckal powers. They're not genetic, and they didn't actually start appearing until a few weeks ago. Why? Well, back in Thread 14, you were exposed to a rift in time caused by the dead god Quick Sea. Richard speculates that, through this rift, you were exposed to the *future*-- the future where you were the Wyrm-- and this formed a temporal loop (or "closed spiral") where you inevitably must see this future through. What's more, because the Wyrm exists outside of time, on some level the exposure made you *already* the Wyrm. Your powers, then, are Godly ones, growing in intensity and scope as you approach full Wyrmhood.

>You're shaken, but still not on board. Richard knows you wouldn't be, and pulls out all the stops to convince you. He tells you that becoming the Wyrm is the only possible way to save the world: if you don't do it, Jean Ramsey or a different client will, and their psyches will inevitably be disintegrated. The Wyrm will use their bodies to do whatever It wants, and what It wants is to murder all of humanity, full stop. You, Charlotte Fawkins, are stubborn enough that you might be able to resist this -- in fact, you might be able to wrestle the Wyrm to its (metaphorical) knees, using its ultimate power for whatever *you* want... like bringing your father back to life, or making Gil human again, or helping anybody else you want to help. (Also, maybe you could free the agents without nuking humanity first. You know, if you want.)

>Richard wants this because he respects humanity for its individuality, and because he's worried that the "new world" that will replace the current one will be sterile, lifeless, and "perfect." Also, he loves you. No, really. It started off as influence from the whole father-identity thing, but now it's deep in him-- he actually, genuinely, wants to protect you and do what's best for you. He has mixed feelings about this, as do you, but the upshot is that he doesn't want you Wyrm-nuked any more than you do.
As a result, he's prepared to work with you to get you as ready as possible for this, if only you agree with it.

>You have no other choice. And you want to save the whole entire world. You agree, shaking Richard's hand.

Mid-handshake, you start sneezing, and eventually expel a swarm of beetles-- Gil! Gil is baffled by the sight of you talking with a stranger. You tell him that the stranger is Richard, that you're fine, and that you're going to become God. Is there a reason he's here? Yes, Gil explains-- after you fainted at Game Night, Lucky and a ton of Courtiers showed up and started sniffing around. Gil saw Lucky talking to an angry-looking Monty, and the two of them going into your tent to look at your unconscious body. He's concerned that Lucky might be here to do something to you, and he wants you to wake up so you won't be kidnapped (or whatever). Richard sees you off, and you and Gil wake up.