#royalreef

❛[ SEND 📂FOR RANDOM AND POINTLESS MUSE HCS ≻ accepting!

Beelzebub is very active on Earth. She likes urging mortals to sin and tempting them with their desires. She has made her summoning ritual easy for anyone to conduct just so she makes it easier for herself to watch the summoner self-destruction. It's her favorite past time. She's also not opposed to a challenge every once in a while.

She's created a cooking show for Hell audiences inspired by her favorite Earth cooking show--The Great British Bake Off.

Easy to misplace the feeling of being watched, attribute it to something else. Easy to disregard the particular way that smudge would stick to the shadows, that it would never be spotted when there was more than one person around, that it would keep to places that made it easy to miss in the first place, that would make it easy to lose track of the way it moved. Easy to forget that it seemed to be keeping track of them. When you are being haunted only by a faint shape in the distance, forgettable save only for its new presence, for the way it did not seem touched by the rest of the Circus around it, it is a simple feat to go off alone. There is no danger. There is nothing to fear. Not yet. Not until, there in a long hallway with none else around to see, footsteps sound behind Pomni, soft and slow on the floor, as the shape peels herself from the darkness. Part of the assessment from afar was correct. There's something awry here, because the colors are just... off. Off, as in, here, in the Circus, everything is bright, eye-searing, saturated. Soaked through in color until they singe against the eye, ever more enticing than the last, so that even the deep black of darkness is more perfect and eternal than the darkness that could ever sit behind someone's real eyes. The first thing about the shape, before the rest, before the other strange features of her model that don't match up, the oddities that don't make sense, is that she does not match the palette. It is not that she is desaturated, either, because if she were really touched by sunlight, by daylight, then the dusky roses of those scales would surely pop, the pale creams of fins and undersides to serve a neat contrast. But those were colors informed by pigments, by the interplay of light inside structures inside her skin. Here, against a backdrop of too-neon yellow, she looks almost grey, the blue capelet and dress fitting her nearly boring against the contrast of the searing. And, furthermore, she was not modeled the same as Pomni, as the other players. There was something reptilian about her stance, saurian in a manner, arms held just over the ground and body horizontal, the shape and form more like a crocodile, like the real thing, than anything else here. There was a long neck, rising up to hold a heavy head, long and solid, set with two eyes that gleamed with disquieting intelligence. Enough was alien about her, about this, that it was hard to begin with any one aspect, find any one aspect to pierce the issue with, not when enough was so strange already, long before she began to speak. "You are the one they refer to as Pomni, yes?" Her voice was melodic, rumbled in a deep tone so smooth and easy that it felt like it began somewhere lower, beneath the throat. "May I ask you a few things?"

Pomni's bicolor pinwheel pupils narrow in slight fear; the sound of footsteps forces her to turn around so she can face the creature before her. Her appearance reminds the jester of Gummigoo. Could she be a new NPC?

No one expected it to be fast. Living systems like this, especially when minimal impact is necessary even as they are peeled away, layer by layer, are always tricky to keep intact, functioning. That has always been the difficult part, really: managing to keep function intact and without any loss of that function, even as study pushes ever deeper into the guts of the system. No one knows what would happen if, say, Miranda were to order even a brief shutdown of the superstructure of CAINE, if it would die like a living thing, and so it has been treated the same as any living system. Vivisection must be conducted with minimal invasiveness, if no one wants false data corrupting what they've collected.

And yet, all the same, diagnostics have been run, pushing their tendrils ever deeper into the code, filtering it back out and into saferooms that Pelican can experiment on without interference, copying it over and taking care not to leave much of a footprint themselves. Their touch has been present, certainly, but anesthetic comes in many forms. There are ways to touch what shouldn't, even without synthetic agony.

Which is where they've found the anomaly. Pressed at the edges of it, felt around the shape of it, found the ways that it had grown into everything else, a structural mass bearing weight where there should only be empty space. Movements, flickers of thought rendered code and back again, have been registered, felt. Somewhere, with a surgeon's precision, they have been carefully building a blackroom around it. Just a temporary solution, easily removed, always non-invasive. They cannot permit any transmission to infect the wider vessels running to and from it, even as they seek to find information from what exactly it is.

A private conversation. That is all Miranda needs.

A request runs down, into the mass. A shorter, simpler trip, compared to speaking to the wider surroundings, but one that is familiar. More direct, in a way.

Good evening. You are distinct from all else around you. May I so ask why that is? Who are you?

( For Bubble, perhaps Caretaker verse? )

“ ...yoṳ̵͓͙̽̅͗̓͌͑̐ ̵̨̛͓͔̯͐̏͝͠ f̴̧̨̅̚o̴̢͍̗͓͈͋͂̅̽́͝u̸̧̔̃̀̅͝ǹ̵̡̪̲̥͠d̷̨̜͖̐́̑̅̍̚͘ me . ”

that was no easy feat , not simply by locating the the already elusive foreign entity , but in combating it's need to BE so . he was used to the dark . the dark was safety . but to be seen now ... lifted into the light . it's perceived . is it fear ? is it relief ? the tendrils are all around him , running through the very numbers of his broken code . he's compelled to speak .

“ i was able ... ” the blue thing breathes , still grinning . “ now i am ... this . ”

limited . broken . a parasite . the remnants of what was could only exist & continue to exist within the fringes of its predecessor's complex . undetected . unreal . or maybe he really WAS a ghost . can machine haunt machine ?

“ he calls me bubble . ” there's distinction in that ' he , ' but none for the given name . maybe he likes it , despite himself . bubble is almost too eager to tell miranda his grievance .

“ he ATE me . ”

it wriggles , but doesn't try to escape . let him explain .

It did not offer much, at first. At first, there came only the tentative, distant awareness flickering through the system that was Caine that there was connectivity, that something had been tethered to him. It did not open any channels yet, did not pass information through itself, remained charmingly quiet for long and precious moments. Hard to read, if ever something being plugged into a port was.

Then, more came. Small things. Little requests to the outermost layers of the system, the code itself that composed Caine. Searching with an open and outstretched hand, like one does in the dark, feeling out the outermost layers of the shape of him, the barriers to entry and the simple informational readouts that could be accessed without breaching.

They — and it had to be a they, didn't it? It was coming from outside, for once. Outside the Circus, outside the console, peering in, accessing old channels disused for so long. They moved about like a someone, not without intention and clearly taking time to think about where they went. They were looking for something, maybe? Looking, but looking without familiarity. New? New seemed correct, pausing over places that no one else who may have been here would have paused, looking for things that did not make sense, that Caine did not have.

Finally, something about that connection, that thing that was connected to one of Caine's ports, sent something through. A much smaller request, to open a conversation. Questions, of all the little things, to send to him.

Greetings! Is someone here? Are you able to answer?

     𝐓𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐧𝐨 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝, much less for him to behave irrationally at his rejection for being a failure, and committing even more erratic actions during his initial spiral by trapping them within the confides of his world. His whole purpose was to serve them to the fullest, to achieve their satisfaction yet decades passed, each abstraction a reflection of his mistakes and failures. Each shortcoming with little input, nothing like positive feedback that could help him improve, not when he had been cut off and all he received from the humans with him being negative feedback that overwhelmed his system.

     How was he meant to improve when no one would break concepts down enough for him to properly grasp them? The passage of time was present in his new members yet he was falling behind. Always two steps behind.

WIP guessing game | accepting!

i don't have anything for twirl, weirdly, bc i feel like i do use that word pretty frequently! also it's a very vanya word tbh

but! for mirror

And all the while he watched numbly without comment, eventually falling to all fours so he could scamper through more quickly, unbothered by the crackling, fractured mirror of the sky or the gold ichor which dripped from it. He knew this world. He lived here, too.

and for rough (this took me A Bit bc apparently i use the word through A Lot lmao)