[Plot] IHOP, Therefore I Am

[Will Stanton]

Summer Break Montage!

Girls in bikinis! Fun in the sun! Crippling personal revelations!

After discussing things with Miriam, and realizing that staying anywhere with potential distractions was probably going to be an issue, Will had gone to ASHLIE for help -- after all, no matter what he ended up discovering on his summer of giving in to himself, he'd need a place to stay, and he still didn't have a room after the whole Lippencott fiasco.

It took several attempts for him to explain what he needed and what he was attempting to do, but eventually, he got permission to set up shop in the lighthouse -- the room where, in an alternate universe, several billion years ago and a decade from now, he had set up his office. Patterns and forms, repeating endlessly and all that.



The first step was to clear it out, completely. It had mostly been used as a storage room at the moment, and all that shit had to go; Will spending a good two hours moving furniture and ripping out carpet, creating a pile of debris on the lawn outside. He spent another couple hours painting the room white from head to toe -- blank, blank, calm, neutral. Nothing as a distraction. Nothing that would overwhelm him. Nothing to gravitate to. The simple act of destruction gave him something to focus on, something to subsume himself into -- he either ignored or politely declined help from outsiders as he went about respacing the space. A simple task he could focus his mind on -- what he had been trying to achieve by going to the farm; and the sort of thing that had frustrated him in the recent past.



That had been two weeks ago. Although the door had remained unlocked and the lights on, Will hadn't...done much at all, other than sitting in the room. At first, he sat there in his default humanoid form, cross-legged, eyes-closed for most of the time, looking like he was meditating. That had lasted about two days, after which point, he had slowly oozed down into just a lump of clay, sitting there, alone in the light. An occasional bubble or pop was recorded by the security cameras, and noted appropriately on the clipboard hanging outside the door, but otherwise, it was a boring time.

That had lasted for the first week.


Starting on day eight, things had started appearing around the clay blob. At first, it was basic shapes in primary colors -- unlike Will on the MGH, it didn't immediately go to full-fledged, fully detailed copies of things. Over the next couple days, however, the objects started becoming more and more complex -- combinations of shapes, and then different materials and colors. By the end of the week, different pieces of furniture and accessories were appearing and being reabsorbed on an irregular schedule -- the flexing and release of the clay, exploring and testing and iterating.

But it wasn't until the end of the second week that a Will had appeared in the room again, wearing a labcoat and glasses, writing and crossing out information on a blackboard, standing back and scratching his chin. He wasn't...quite right, yet -- there was something of the uncanny valley about him; his hair ropey and thick, his skin strangely matte and lifeless. But it was, however, a start.

((open, with various montages possible))

[Will Stanton]

((Still open))

As the day(s) went along, the room was occupied by a number of different figures.

At one point, it was trashed, an angry, roided-up Will smashing the various furniture and punching the walls. This was later cleaned up by a Will in full, stereotypical French maid's outfit -- nothing but a sucker for the classics, that one.

A canine Will slept through a couple hours of the day. The scarecrow-patched-up Will from Faeland spent a few hours just hanging out, chilling.

As of yet, only one vaguely humanoid Will had been present at a time, as opposed to the Null split Miriam had engendered earlier in the year. For now, at least.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh, still around for now, approached Will's door and knocked. He wanted to start being a more active friend and the first step was to attempt to repair the damage he'd done mishandling the MGH situation. Until now he had been too much of a coward to try all that hard. That had to change.

[Will Stanton]

"Come in, come in, come in," Will called as Tosh entered.

Will was standing at an easel, a beret cocked on his head, squinting at the yet un-marked canvas.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Somehow I expected more green in here," he said by way of an awkward icebreaker.

[Will Stanton]

"Mmm. You may be confusing a brand for a compulsion, dear Toshiro," Will said. "The grass is not always greener, no?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Well no. Especially when you can be the grass. Though I guess that's more Shane's thing."

[Will Stanton]

"We're having a little trouble figuring out our thing at the moment," Will admitted. "It's all we can do to get some peace and quiet."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"If you don't know what your thing is after all this time, what hope do us younguns have?" he commented.

[Will Stanton]

"Is that what you look to us for? For guidance?" Will asked, turning around.

His face was melting just a little bit; his shape having a little struggle holding steady.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Gah! I mean, guidance? No, of course not."

His face is melting! Why is his face melting!
Eh, he's fine. It's fine. Be cool Bro.

"Your experiences don't always apply to the rest of us."

[Will Stanton]

Will opened his mouth as if he was about to respond to that, but collapsed in upon himself before he could reply, hitting the ground with a *splorch* as he reverted to clay.

"Ah, that is where you are wrong, young Narumi," a voice came from behind Tosh. A Will, who Tosh was sure hadn't been there when he entered the room, stood behind him, wearing the robe of an Eastern monk, his head neatly shaven, and carrying a long staff. "We may learn from all experiences that happen to us, as well as those that happen to others."

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh spun around and, to his credit, didn't jump out of his skin. He was adapting!

"Well, alright, they are sure to be useful when stranded in other dimensions. Which has already happened to me once," he said, only sounding slightly unnerved. Again, adapting!

[Will Stanton]

Tosh's answer brought with it a light but firm rap on the head with the staff.

"One need not know the shape of every leaf to rest under the tree."

[Toshiro Narumi]

He couldn't help but smirk at that. "I'm pretty sure you're just stating the obvious."

"Also, as a science major, resting while there are things to classify isn't really advice I'm programmed to follow."

[Will Stanton]

"But is not rebelling against one's programming the sign of a truly independent individual?" Will said, staring off into space. "The healthy river overflows its banks."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"And a river that does not flow is no river at all."

[Will Stanton]

"And that is why we are here," Will nodded, his face beginning to get a little droopy and saggy again as they talked. "To find which way to best flow from here."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Yeah, I get that. There are just too many paths to choose from. But I guess that is a pretty first-world problem."

[Will Stanton]

"And this is not my first world," Will nodded.

He missed a step and shot his staff out to catch himself, as he continued to deteriorate.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"I wasn't going to ask, but... what's with the melting? You okay?"

[Will Stanton]

"No, we believe we are not OK," Will said, attempting (and failing) to steady himself.

"We are rather...disfocused, at the moment. Too little butter spread over too little bread."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"You've felt this way a while, haven't you? Long before the MGH thing."

[Will Stanton]

Will nodded, the 'old wizened man' look making him look all the more tired.

"The growth hormone opened new doors, but they were doors we had been looking for before that."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"What sort of doors do you mean? Like, to your true self or something like that?"

[Will Stanton]

"It's...difficult to put into words..." he said, furrowing his brow, and continue to lose form and shape.

"Doors to...new possibilities. New applications. Things we could not do before...surpassing and destroying our limits..."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Sounds a bit like when I discovered I was able to do more than turn into Bruce. Saying that I opened a door isn't a bad analogy," he said with a nod, "Though perhaps not at the same scale."

[Will Stanton]

"We don't...fully understand it, ourselves. We're missing a piece to the puzzle."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Knowing you, that could be quite literal. Maybe try turning into a jigsaw puzzle or something."

[Will Stanton]

"We don't think that's quite..." he began, before he crumbled apart, splattering across the floor in an explosion of jigsaw pieces going every which way.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh sighed, "Putting a Will-puzzle together myself isn't exactly what I had in mind."

"But I have nowhere to be for a while, so why not?" he added before hunting down the pieces and starting to put Will back together, beginning with the edges.

[Will Stanton]

"Oh, zut alors, Toshiro. You have made un pequite mess, haven't you?"

Behind Tosh, yet another Will had appeared (from where? From how?), this one wearing a rather scantily-cut maid's dress. And speaking a mish-mash of foreign languages, perhaps to make up for the fact that Will did not normally speak French. Or perhaps she had just been spending too much time with Collette.

[Toshiro Narumi]

That time he did startle, dropping a puzzle piece when he jerked to look at her.

"Seriously dude, you've got to stop just appearing on me."

[Will Stanton]

"Oh, like we are oh-so-hidden around. You have us in your hands there, do you not? Ze puzzle, on ze table...and ze floor, for zat matter."


Will's energy levels seemed to have perked up -- they had slowly dragged down as Tosh had talked to him as the monk, but were now back above the feisty level they were at when he had hit Tosh over the head with his staff.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"So you're experimenting with dividing yourself? Without splitting your psyche too. That's good progress."

[Will Stanton]

"How do you handle it, Tosh? Ze voices in ze head?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

"They don't really bother me that much, to be honest. They don't whisper bad thoughts or anything like that and I've made it so they rarely talk to each other. That's not to say having other mes chatting in my head didn't take a whole lot of getting used to. Thought I was going nuts until it was explained to me that it was normal for animalistic shifters to have a kind of benign multiple personality condition to cope."

"Of course, it helps that their primary concern is mitigating my confidence issues."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, how did you make it so zhey never talk to one anovver? Ze voices, zhey never seem to stop talking to us..." Will asked, leaning closer in to Tosh.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"How? I dunno, I just... asked, I guess. But then they aren't vying for control."

[Will Stanton]

"Mmm," Will said, tight-lipped. "Well, zhat is of leetle use to us, we are afraid. The voices, zhey are incessant."