Saiyuki! meme!

[elsane]

OMG MINEKURA holy shipbait.

(You had better be making these two explicit in the end game because if you go this far, HOLY SDKFJ.)

Also, it's wonderful to see Kougaiji again, and he's still being an absolute noble idiot, no surprise there. I'm very curious to see how this will develop.

About meme: I am frazzled enough to play, and the results have so far been deeply amusing, so:

via shati: I've got a list of characters from various fandoms numbered 1-15, give me scenarios/questions with combinations of characters (e.g. 1 and 5 walk into a bar, and get into a fight with 7. who wins?), hilarity ensues.

Comments

[genarti]

Oh my god, these are glorious.

5 and 8 are on a plot-necessitated road trip to acquire a MacGuffin from 10. Is 10 willing to give it to them, or do there need to be bonus hijinks? What happens when 4 decides to help them whether they like it or not, when they stop by 6's roadside inn along the way, and why is 14 so determined to interfere with their mission?

[elsane]

So: Combeferre and Kim Yoon Hee (Sungkyunkwan Scandal) are trying to collect a plot ticket from Mordecai Roberts, aka Tacroy (Chrestomanci), with dubious assistance from Isumi (Hikaru no Go), pitstops at Simon Illyan's roadside inn, and interference from Ukoku (Saiyuki).

hmm.

This is clearly more of a fantastical scenario, with dark underpinnings.

Ukoku (whom you probably don't know, but he is awesome in the most nihilistic and horrifying of villainous ways) has discovered how to walk between the worlds and is starting to unravel it all. Key to this is Tacroy's soul: Tacroy had the misfortune to encounter Ukoku, in a moonlit and crow-filled wood, while Tacroy was soul-wandering, and Ukoku smiled, and snarled Tacroy's soul in his fingers. This is possible only because Tacroy still belongs to the Dright at this point, and his soul is not his own, and Ukoku has his way in through this crack. With Tacroy's soul in his hands, Ukoku can start unraveling the worlds Tacroy has touched, and the worlds he's lived in, working his way back toward Series 11, whose existence he senses and with whose sealed self-centeredness he is especially fascinated; he wants to know, who is it, who cares this much about an experiment on the experience of a person's soul? Who else is taking detached and scientific notes on what it means to be human, and alive? Tacroy is fighting hard, but every battle is a rearguard action, and he is prone to despair.

The threads of unraveling run through every universe where Tacroy has walked, so attuned philosophical types like Combeferre and Kim Yoon Hee start sensing a deep wrongness underlying and exacerbating the political/economic injustice of their day, trying to seep its way along the sociological faultlines and break society open in destructive, rather than productive ways. Combeferre dreams one evening of meeting a young scholar, half the world and half a century apart, and they talk over a drink which is wine to him and makgeolli to her, and agree that whatever is going on is real and strange and dangerous, and they walk out of the bar together and onto a hazy mountainside which somehow surprises neither of them, and they follow the threads of unrest one world over, and then another, and then another, as they learn how to track the trail.

Isumi is a little tricky, let's suppose he sees this wrongness in his Go board, in the stones (it's a little mystic, but hey). He wakes up one foggy morning at three am, and walks out of his apartment with his go board under his arm; Combeferre and Yoon Hee are arguing on a street corner about which way to go next, and Isumi plays Yoon Hee at baduk (=go) for the right and the route to passage. He wins, white against black, virtue against audacity, and takes an odd number of black stones prisoner. He arranges the white stones in neat lines, counting his territory, as is customary, but the lines of his arrangement all lead to the west. "Go", he says: "your path lies to the west, to the sunset; and he will not win, if you can count ahead far enough to sacrifice the ko." He gives Yoon Hee a single black stone, and goes back to his apartment, and wakes up with a headache, and a missing stone in his best Go set.

Yoon Hee and Combeferre step west at the next crossing, and come to Simon Illyan's inn. Ukoku has half unraveled Barrayar; Simon remembers himself, and he remembers his memory chip breaking down, and he's no longer sure what is real. He remembers managing an inn (an old undercover operation, going metastatic in his memory), where travelers come, and he writes their stories down in his ledger along with his memories of something different. "I don't remember you," he says to Yoon Hee and Combeferre, and they trade a rueful smile. "Try not to remember us," Yoon Hee says, and Combeferre agrees: "We've come to set things right." Yoon Hee pays their fare with a single coin, a piece of silver, black with tarnish.

Tacroy is drinking in the back room, his soul spilling out of his wine glass. Yoon Hee and Combeferre look at each other, and Yoon Hee has a brief momentary thought of her friends, variously winning and losing at gambling.

"They're playing poker," Combeferre murmurs. "Help me count?"

"Tell me the rules," says Yoon Hee, and a moment later, "good," and the two of them sit down to play the crow in the darkness for Tacroy's soul, and the worlds along them.