( ARCHIVED )

[shrinkage]

( the inbox has been relocated HERE! it's been a moving experience. )

Comments

audio.

[taer]

Hey, Ray. Got a minute?

[ it's not quite her showing up in his workshop, but she wants some input. ]

i'm sorry forever D:

[shrinkage]

No. [ WAIT FOR IT ] I have like a zillion of them.

[ #science :D ]

Are you OK? Settling in? Need a drink recommendation while you're in line at the coffee shop?

sdlfkj i love it

[taer]

Great. Reserve some of them for me.

[ nerd. ]

You've been here for a long time. I want to hear your thoughts on what to do with Rip now that he's here and evil.

[shrinkage]

[ oh no sara w h y ]

Should I start with our place as a team in Wonderland, a philosophical argument about evil, or the unreliable and chaotic nature of a dimension removed from the multiverse that runs on glitchy logic and uses magic to eliminate the identities of its prisoners?

[taer]

Why don't you skip all of that and jump straight to recommendations and options.

[shrinkage]

Because it doesn't work that way here?

[taer]

You haven't thought this situation through a million times and tried to come up with scenarios of what we can do?

[shrinkage]

[ he hums, not with full discontent, but against the instinct to become what he is at home, in the presence of the team and the mission. it's interesting-- everyone wants to go home, but ray keeps having home delivered to him. ]

Has anyone told you about Chronos? About what happened the last time someone from our world tried to solve a personal problem on their own?

[taer]

Chronos here, or Chronos in our world? [ because of course she knows about the latter, so she's assuming that's not what he's talking about. ]

[shrinkage]

Here. Go back in the network and look for a broadcast from Cisco Ramon. He did what he thought was right, to protect someone he loved.

[ there's no malice in his voice, but it's obviously something that marked ray in some way. of course it did; it affected everyone. ]

And we all paid for it.

[taer]

What happened, exactly? [ she's found the post, but without context, it's not that easy to make sense of it. ] Something with the mirrors, I got that much.

[shrinkage]

I tried not to pry into the details. [ hey look he's trying to grow! ] Chronos targeted the Legends first, but he didn't kill us. He got what he wanted. Rip doesn't exactly have a spear-shaped reason to come after us right now.

[taer]

Rip proposed a truce to me.

[shrinkage]

Same as what he made with Thawne, probably. We leave him be, he leaves us be?

[taer]

Pretty much, yeah.

[shrinkage]

I know this is hard to understand, but... I have a life here, Sara.

[ and it seems that he's not ashamed to plead to keep it intact. for better or worse. ]

Rip knows that retaliating against the team directly won't do as much as coming after the people we love from other worlds. People we don't get to return to back home.

[ he's desperate to keep his sarah safe. and while he and len have taken a year to become more than unwilling team mates, he'd have fought for this bonus time even a year ago. ]

Do you know about the five death rumor?

[taer]

[ it's not hard to understand, exactly, but -- it's something she hadn't really considered. she should have; she's already seen ray go native once before. he's good at that, at finding a way to fit where he is and making it somewhere he wants to be. ]

You come back from the dead here, that's what I've heard. Is the rumour that it's only five times?

[shrinkage]

The rumor is that something happens on the fifth.

[ maybe someday he'll stop putting his expectations on other people. and maybe pigs will discover space travel. ]

But honestly? I'm less worried about other people than I am him. If he hurts someone here and then goes home and comes back after you guys fix him...

[ ray's not sure he'll be able to forgive himself. #selfcentered much? ]

[taer]

Something? Like what?

[ but more importantly -- ] So we do fix him. How? [ if they can do the same thing here, maybe they'll spare themselves a lot of pain. maybe they'll spare rip a lot of pain, too. ]

[shrinkage]

I think I've heard that you can't go home anymore and that they take something from you.

[ ray sighs, and unseen, shakes his head. ]

I don't know. Whatever we do, it has to be something we'd never plan. Something that he wouldn't see coming, which, is probably everything at this point. Maybe magic?

[taer]

Magic. [ if she sounds skeptical, well. her experiences with magic haven't always been great. ] Got any ideas?

[ none of them know magic, unless ray's learned some new skills in his time here. which means they need someone they can trust. ]

[shrinkage]

Maybe go lurk around the magic studies room? I know there are some pretty powerful mages that live here, but I've never had reason to seek them out.

[taer]

All right. It's worth a shot.

[shrinkage]

Hey, before you go-- I wanted to apologize. I think I got kind of desensitized to people from home showing up. You deserved more than an infodump from one of the nerd twins.

[taer]

How long did you say you've been here again?

[ because sara's beginning to get the impression that there may be a bit of a dissonance between them at the moment. ]