Raumme Schenn: Background

Backstory: Your name is Raumme Schenn, and you've never been good with people, but you've always wanted to fly.

It all started with Space Privaterrorizer Amanda. SPA, as fans refer to it, was a space opera anime mainly focusing on the relationship between the titular Space Privaterrorizer Amanda Cosmos and Ohmsvo Tagell, her highly advanced fighter's power supply. It followed their adventures as they grew close amidst the bitter conflict between the Empress' Armada and an alliance of lower aliens who had banded together to resist the troll conquerors. It was a fantastic show, with a lot of heart and great animation for its time. You swoon every time you watch the usually cool and aloof Ohmsvo convince Amanda to fly with him for one last battle: "@m@nd@... do you remember the first time we flew? I took your h@nd and you showed me wh@t it w@s like to be @lone with someone in the wide open sky. Come there with me, just one more time. Let's be @lone together." Ah... It might have been propaganda--Amanda and Ohmsvo joined the Empress' Armada and brutally crushed the aliens--but it was also the early sweeps of your grubhood, and all you ever wanted was an Ohmsvo to your Amanda.

Armed with the Space Gal's bracelets, your unsated desires, and the youthful naivete necessary to not really consider the obstacles, you set out to make your dream come true: to find a telekinetic lowblood with whom you could fly. It... didn't exactly go well. You found one: a spunky yellowblood who shared your dream of flight, but her dream wasn't quite the same as yours. At the time, you didn't understand it, but what she wanted was to fly with someone, as more than the battery she would be relegated to once she was older. How could you have known that? All you wanted was your Ohmsvo. Even as the two of you worked together to build a makeshift ship to fly in, the long nights you spent together under the stars you both wished so desperately to touch, you never realized what her dream meant. And so, when the night finally came, when the ship was completed, and you both put on the bracelets and took your places, you didn't think to expect the inevitable.

There were a few moments, just a handful, when it was better than either of you could have hoped. You weren't just happy; you were flying. You were flying and it was pure joy, but more than that, it was pure joy bouncing between the two of you. As the world raced by underneath and the sky glimmered closer than it ever had in the highest building, your joy bounced off of hers and together you felt something more. And then you were flying, just you, alone in the sky. And then you were angry. Betrayed. Hurt. You were evil and dumb and you couldn't believe you'd fallen for your own lies. You should have known better. You couldn't be trusted. You were just like them. After the crash landing, the last thing you saw of her before you passed out was her back, stumbling away.

And that was that. You woke up alone, next to your destroyed ship, both metaphorically and literally the smoking rubble of your hopes and dreams. How do you just get up and move on from that? Well, you didn't. You didn't get back up, you crawled. Back to your hive, back to SPA, back to a place where the stars were unreachable fantasies, and that didn't help because you'd gotten so close just to screw it all up! Everything you saw just reminded you of the life you weren't living! You shut the episode off midway through and looked for something else to do. That was when you decided to try an old gamegrub you'd gotten sweeps ago, Space Privaterrorizer 36, for the grubtendo 36. It was a ridiculously hard game, or maybe you were just incredibly bad at it, but either way, you'd never made it past the second level. Still, you wanted something, anything, to take your mind off of the crash, so you hooked the game grub up and started playing.

For whatever reason, your anguish at how things had gone mixed with the rage the game's difficulty induced in you, turning into a general sense of rage towards everything in the universe. You harnessed that into a vindictive crusade against the game, force-marching yourself through each and every one of its stupid levels until finally, after a wipe of playing, you conquered it. For a second, you were thrilled. You'd beaten the hardest game, you'd piloted your virtual ship through every obstacle, defeated every boss. You'd done it. But you couldn't help yourself, you wanted to tell her about it, and then you remembered what had happened all over again, and realized you would never get to tell her about this, or anything else ever again. Your victory turned to ashes in your mouth. Then you discovered there were multiple routes through the game and in a fit of escapism, threw yourself into trying to beat those as well. You didn't need her, you didn't need anyone, you were going to become the best pilot ever in this game and that would be enough.

That would never have been enough, but it occupied your thoughts enough that there wasn't space to be sad, so you clung to it. Even after you beat all of the game's routes and unlocked the true secret final ending, you kept playing, because you couldn't give it up. You would play the game over and over, trying to get better at it, to beat it doing random challenges you would make up for yourself. You were obsessing over it. Then, while you were looking up new strategies for it, you saw a grubtube video, "SP36 Beaten in 1:30:00 New Record!" That was impossible, it had to be, but you clicked it anyways, and watched as someone completely destroyed the game in ways you didn't even know were possible.

The video was your first introduction to speedrunning, but it wouldn't be your last. You quickly began studying how to do the crazy tricks the person in the video had done. Glitching through walls, skipping levels, breaking weapons so they did more damage than the game intended, all of those things were possible now, if you could just learn how, and you were excited. You were so excited, you were able to completely shove her out of your mind as you dove headfirst into speedrunning.

The community welcomed you with open arms. They were more than happy to teach you their tricks, and tell you what they knew about how the game worked. They were also your first contact with people besides your lusus in almost a sweep, so you were very appreciative of them being so understanding about your complete inability to not be awkward. (They told you that was normal for lots of new speedrunners.) Soon enough you were brought up to speed and were working your way up the leaderboards. Every day was an opportunity to improve your time and climb a little higher, it gave you a sense of purpose you had been lacking, and a community to talk to, even if it was just over messages. You weren't flying, but this was something.

As you got better and better, eventually you started to contend for the record, and other members in the community started asking you to stream your attempts. Sure, you weren't going to break it any time soon, but you were a top 10 player, and they wanted to watch in case you got close. You weren't sure about it, and kept trying to explain to them about your stutter and how you don't speak very well, or quickly, but they insisted that would be fine. Eventually, you relented, and set up a spasm.tv stream for them to watch.

A few wipes later, you got on The Run. With almost supernatural luck and execution, you were hitting gold split after gold split, everything was lining up, every trick was working on the first try. If you kept this up, you would break the record. You watched your sleepy channel's viewership grow from 5, to 20, to 50, to hundreds of people watching as your miracle run sped towards its conclusion, but you weren't scared. You weren't uncomfortable to be performing in front of all of them, you were nervous about the game of course, but the incredible sense of hype and community pouring out of the chat feed was radiating onto you. You felt better than you had in a long time. Better than you had felt since... since...

You missed the last trick. Completely whiffed it. Died horribly and got a time loss so bad it set you back behind the record. It would still be a PB for you, but it wasn't the record. People filtered out of the chat after you finished, offering semi-consoling memes, while you just stared at the screen sadly. You still wanted to fly. This was never going to have been good enough for you. But, despite that, you were in love with it, and you wanted to be on The Run again. So you keep running, but during the day your dreams are of the sky.