by Narrator » Thu Feb 24, 2022 4:05 pm
"All I can do is what you can do." is the last coherent sentence that forms before Will's hand passes the plane of the portal. Will's shifted processing power is the only thing parsing things into an easily understandable framework. Sending his 'data' out of that environment robs him of the trick that let him walk and talk in a reasonable space.
Telepaths are capable of bringing that kind of parsing of the abstract into metaphor with them. Will is not a telepath. Will is. He can feel 'Bouba' around him but without a physical presence they can't shift. Without a physical presence they can't really do much of anything. It's beyond frustrating to simply be, with infinite potential and to lack any way of using it. This isn't like being a tool patiently waiting to be used, this is not even getting to be the tool. It's stupid and dumb and exhilarating when someone finally needs you to be something. And though it feels like this state of floating, unused and unwanted, last forever, soon he can feel himself/Bouba be pulled this way and that. Be a mirror over here. Form an impossible mass. Adjust density over there. For all the eternity of nothing, there is an equal eternity of work to be done. All around him, tugging every which way, he lends his power to himself. Places are hard to recognize. Sometimes they're familiar, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they call for known shapes, sometimes they require new and exciting experiments. Sometimes all they want is one boring static shape, sometimes they want to never remain the same for too long.
Their surroundings, their thoughts and ideas, their understanding of the world around them is all he has to shape them. Fragments of songs, stories, misunderstood mechanics, known truths and trusted lies. Sometimes it doesn't work out, doesn't mesh with the rest of the world. It's difficult to get everything right. There's so much to manage. Tiny little quarks dancing to Will's/Bouba's tune and spinning themselves into shape to make clay. To make muscles. To make plastic. To make metal. To make liquid, to move what shouldn't have muscles, to always be helping and shaping and being in that moment with them forever and ever and ever.
And then he's suddenly spit back out of the portal and both the computer and the Clockwork-Portal nearby tell him that barely a second has passed. Bouba's portal still shows the familiar blubby shape, though past it Will can see otherworldy branches twisting in endless fractals and perched on them a Raven. Or a whole flock of them. or the same Raven over and over. It's like a magic-eye picture that constantly swims in and out of focus.
"Look, we found the roost!" Bouba chirps.