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[voice], within the first week of October
[You feel something reaching out and touching your mind... Poking it, actually, like a prodding finger. It withdraws and tries a softer, finer touch. That withdraws too, and there's a pause. Looks like Need can't get around her powerloss and covertly use peoples' senses/look into their minds just by using the pearl network. Unfortunate.
After a moment, Need allows her presence to bloom into the connection and make itself known. If you can gauge this kind of thing at all two things are immediately evident. One is that she's very old. Not tired, not fragile, but distant and distorted to the point where her mind doesn't really feel human. The other is that she's female. There's nothing stereotypically feminine there but it's very clear. She's something crushed into a tiny space a very long time ago and also: she/her.]
Someone always figures out how to make a teleson. [Telepathy via technology.] How far does this reach? Does it work between people who haven't met?
[Need is far more accustomed to speaking mind-to-mind than using anything else, so her "voice" has a particular quality to it that I'm gonna keep rendering as italics.]
Where I'm from it's possible to visit other realities, where things might be very different, and be fully embodied in them but one's actual body remains behind. The more difficult part is getting back to it. I wonder if that's happened here.
After a moment, Need allows her presence to bloom into the connection and make itself known. If you can gauge this kind of thing at all two things are immediately evident. One is that she's very old. Not tired, not fragile, but distant and distorted to the point where her mind doesn't really feel human. The other is that she's female. There's nothing stereotypically feminine there but it's very clear. She's something crushed into a tiny space a very long time ago and also: she/her.]
Someone always figures out how to make a teleson. [Telepathy via technology.] How far does this reach? Does it work between people who haven't met?
[Need is far more accustomed to speaking mind-to-mind than using anything else, so her "voice" has a particular quality to it that I'm gonna keep rendering as italics.]
Where I'm from it's possible to visit other realities, where things might be very different, and be fully embodied in them but one's actual body remains behind. The more difficult part is getting back to it. I wonder if that's happened here.
audio
One thing is quickly apparent: this one was never human. It's just a sense, the shape of the mind. It was human enough; it's clear the owner has thoughts and feelings instead of just being an instinct-driven animal.
But there's one startling difference-- a complete lack of a soul. Whether or not Need figures out the exact nature of it may depend on her experience with souls and magic. But there's a hollowness there, like a pumpkin with the innards carved out but the rind left intact. Where others might have 'love' or 'empathy', there's nothing--
And then the mental sense of Flowey slamming the door on that before Need can look any further. He hates the Grumpearl. This crap always happens when he dares to let his guard down even for a second.]
Lady-- [He doesn't know why he said that. This person seems like a woman? God, the Grumpearl is weird and he HAAATES it.] --if I ever find you, I'm going to teach you an important lesson about privacy. Ever heard of it?
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Once or twice, I think. I take it you're in favor.
[Dry resignation, but no guilt. ...In all honesty, of the beings like her in her canon Need is the most concerned with psychic ethics. It gets bad in there.]
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[Oh, just as a little treat, Flowey will attempt to project the feeling of dying a slow, agonizing death into Need's mind-- and it is from experience.]
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Sorry that happened to you, kid.
[It's not even extravagant pity. Genuinely it's a yeah, that sucks, doesn't it? Need's job has involved sharing in such moments for a very long time.]
Wanna see mine, or would you feel insulted by the comparison?
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Whatever. [The only thing that stops him from getting mad is that she doesn't show overwhelming pity. Yeah, it did suck. But that was a while ago. He's over it. Mostly.] Sure. What type of messed up thing happened to you?
cw bad death
[Need is way too casual about showing this to people. There is no malice in doing so, no expectation of sympathy; she can only think of it as a traumatic experience if she imagines it happening to someone else, and otherwise it's... just something of interest. The memory has a worn, weathered aspect, as if seen through transparent veils.
The blade of a sword heated until it glowed white, thrust into a lung. Delicate tissues boil up the trachea, into the throat and mouth. The body, however worn and battered it is, collapses and chokes, struggles as it has so many times before, not understanding the futility of it. Conscious thought and awareness evaporates, aside from, ah, determination. Pain that accelerates into something else entirely and hovers, twisting like smoke, and then the fading, and then the drop.
Something's torn away. What's left lodges and sees nothing, hears nothing, smells and tastes nothing, feels nothing, has nothing to move with, nothing to breathe with, settles and is nothing nothing nothing but waiting. Need closes it there.]
And that just went on for a while. Not recommended, but I've seen worse deaths.
cw bad death as well
You too, huh?
[The feeling he showed Need before was a scrap of the whole. Flowey offers the whole memory with the casualness of handing someone a business card:
Blades shoved through him, his fur burned off with torches, bullets piercing through his body. It's a death by mob violence, a death by a thousand cuts but all of them would have and should have killed a lesser being. Within his fingertips is the power to kill them all, and someone else in his mind begs him to do so, to defend himself, to not let them both die.
But instead, he turns around and walks away. His body should be broken a thousand times over. The only thing that keeps him moving is that power, that determination. He makes it back past the barrier, back home, and everything goes white.
He closes it there. But the hollowness Need may have seen earlier remains. He died, that's for certain-- and he's still here. But much of him didn't make it.]
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Flowey and her are not, to her reckoning, that similar, but that's because in Velgarth there are several ways people can end up remaining attached to the world after they die, changing in the process, and hers was pretty distinct. Part of the reason Need's so distant and strange is how long she's been active. Emotions not related to her purpose have worn down. She's unwilling to talk about her emotions but internally would say she doesn't feel real love because grief has become a fleeting melancholy.
With a rueful, self-deprecating sympathy and no passion to speak of:]
Wretched, isn't it? I couldn't take it when someone I knew used my name, so I had to keep telling people to forget it and call me Need. Now I've forgotten it myself, and doesn't that just sound like senility.
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[He hasn't forgotten his old name yet... but he doesn't think he could go back to using it any time soon, even if he had a small measure of reconciliation with it.]
'Flowey' for me. Sounded innocent, unassuming... [... and he's not good at names. And also, his old one was so steeped in meaning that he liked having a name that doesn't really mean anything at all.]
... you're REALLY old, aren't you? Some might say immortal, even.
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[not so much that as Need is also bad at names. She tends to refer to people with really uncreative nicknames instead. Including calling a catgirl "kitten". It has the additional effect of keeping them at a bit further of a remove.
Swords can't sigh, Need included, but there's a sense that she would have here.]
I hate that word. For one, I'm very much dead and for two, it's just so arrogant.
[Not that Need isn't arrogant herself. She's very sure and confident, it's just that the caution and her aversion to boasting make it less obvious.]
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['guardian spirit' and 'angel' are more specific but she's definitely not using those. Also also: normally she'd cheerfully admit that while she's hard to put down it absolutely is possible. That seems like pointless bravado considering the circumstances and how much less power she has here.]
Or spirit-sword works, if you feel the need for precision. Lykeblade. Kalyke, even, if you want to say the same thing in a different language.
[the connotations there are also something like 'dead-sword'.]
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