Quoted By:
In the end there is nothing left but dying, dried-up red stuff and a puddle of goo. You are empty of one thing and full of another. At this mass, you can bear it, but you are still dimly glad when the sun rises and scours your guts dry and painful and boils the water-weight from you in giant white gasps. Soon you can't see from all the steam, and soon it is so white and bright there wouldn't be anything to see. Only the feel of your body, newborn and squirming, and the binary star of your minds, and the sudden and insistent vertigo, as you—
—
[SUNSTROKE]:
>[-2 ID: 6/14]
>[SV: 1/???]
"Claudia?"
"Uhnn," you emit. Where— who— Us. And he just said. You are Claudia Fawkins.
...But you're not, are you? You might be Claudia right now, but your name is Charlotte Fawkins. You're right here. Right behind her.
>[GAINED: Claudia. The mind of Claudia Fawkins, a distant and long-dead ancestor, has been subsumed into your own. You may access her (fragmented) memories, thought processes, or overall persona at any time, without risk of losing your own.]
"Er," says Dream Gil, "are you doing okay? You just kind of... spaced out."
"Get your eyes checked," you say, and flip your hair back. "I'm totally fine. Are we gonna go?"
"Go where? ...Do you still want to mess with those booths? Because, I just said, the inspectors already—"
"No, stupid! We're going to the pageant. Don't you think we better inspect it?"
"...Why?"
"Because I guarantee those out-of-town ones aren't doing their jobs right. Didn't you say they breezed right through? You really think none of those booths have safety violations? What if somebody <span class="mu-i">dies,</span> huh?"
"...Um, yeah, but I don't really see how it's our—"
"Come <span class="mu-i">on!</span>"
>[A1] Okie-dokie. Go check out the pageant set-up. Claudia is, um, pretty? Right? Maybe? You can't really tell under the makeup. Whatever. You'll make them give you a spot in the pageant if they don't want to let you.
>[A2] You have zero doubt that Horse Face, lucid or otherwise, would be 100% willing to "report on" / sneak into this pageant. If Gil can pull his friend card and you can use the press pass, that makes everything way easier. Downside: Horse Face.
>[A3] In for a penny, in for a pound. If Us is going to be mad at you for this, and probably Gil and Nice Richard, you better get something valuable out of it. Just *find Pat.* [-1 SV]
>[A4] Write-in.
(The s are optional.)
>[B1] Try to peek in and see if you can tell what actually happened to Claudia. You mean, you know what happened. Kind of. Ish. But what happened to- to *Claudia.*
>[B2] Access Claudia's mind and/or memories. She's dead and made of goo, so they're bound to be incomplete, but maybe there's something of use. (What do you look for? Write-in.)
>[C] Write-in.
If anybody would like my rationale for why exactly this spending of SV resulted in what it did, feel free to ask. (It does exist.) If it's self-explanatory, we're all good.