franciscoramon | riverview ∆ ic inbox ∆ @ciscodelamancha

What's up, my dude, it's ya boy Taako with two super quick questions.

1) Could you rec me like, a movie for a chill date? Doesn't have to be a romance or whatever, just something fun.

[He doesn't know that Cisco knows about him and Eddie, so he doesn't expect any dots to be connected. Cisco just seems to know his stuff re: films.]

2) Do you know anything about alternate realities?

sure thing.

the princess bride is my go-to for dates: adventure, romance, humor, and it's got a happy ending. if you're feeling something a little more sci-fi or [ Is it Eddie? Can he ask if it's Eddie without it seeming weird? Eddie said they weren't an item but Cisco's not sure he buys that... ] whoever you're watching with doesn't feel like that, i'd say the fifth element or back to the future.

[ To tell the truth, he's pretty flattered that Taako would ask him for recommendations. ]

i know some of the scientific ideas behind multiverse theory, but this is the first time i've actually been in another universe.

i also know a little bit about alternate timelines, which is not quite the same thing, though sometimes there's some overlap.

how come? did something happen?

Edited 2017-05-12 23:22 (UTC)

[Clark showed him the Princess Bride at one point (Taako loved it) but he makes a note of the other two.]

Thanks, my dude, I'll check em out and see what looks good

[And then, well, this is the harder part:]

Turns out I'm actually from an organisation that created a ship to travel to different planes of reality to study them, and it worked? which was the real shock. I've been to about a hundred or so of those fuckers, but I've never seen anything like the portal and my science guy isssss a) a lich and b) not here. Figured it could not hurt to ask.

[He decides not to mention the Hunger just yet.]

if you want something a little scarier, aliens is a good option, too. lots of jumpscares to cuddle through.

[ Cisco is literally dying not asking who this date is with. He types out various sentence fragments asking who, then deletes them all again. If Eddie hadn't blurted what he did about sleeping with Taako while under the influence of that firefly, Cisco would've just asked straight-up by now. ]

so, like, an interdimensional ship? that's A W E S O M E!!! you said you helped make them? and you traveled on them to different realities? i wanna hear all about it.

what's a lich?

i can't make any promises, but i can try to be your new / standby science guy. i've been studying the portal on my own, too. wouldn't say no to a new perspective or some extra data.

Edited 2017-05-14 01:06 (UTC)

Is it spooky scary or gore scary?

[He could just google it, but Cisco is here and seems to continue to have decent movie opinions so he might as well get that input rather than trusting the internet.]

I mean, I was part of the crew not the engineering team, you know? Lup dragged me to the academy and we graduated like top of the class cause we're fucking great. The ship was... (wait for it)

Powered by friendship ;)

Pretty cheesy, right?

[It's easier to talk about it like this, to focus on the good things rather than everything that went just so horribly wrong.]

A lich is kinda like a fucked up ghost. It happens when someone uses pretty dark magic to keep their spirit alive. I dunno what happened to Barry but he's.. yeah. It kinda sucks.

[Barold why :(]

Oh! The portal used to be alive and now it's being supported by the moon? That's the latest scoop from Taako.

it's more gore than spook. might be a little much for a chill date, depending on your taste.

academy? i thought you were a chef, though? do you just have, like, 10 careers?

wait are you being sarcastic or was it actually somehow powered by friendship? i mean that's not possible, right? even with magic? don't get me wrong i know friendship can make a lot of things happen but as far as i'm aware it's not actually a viable power source to integrate into a mechanical system of any kind.

hey, i've got a friend back home named barry, too. he's not really one for the dark magic.

sorry to hear your friend's a ghost and also maybe missing or whatever, tho.

the portal used to be alive? how... do you know that?

Edited (sorry i edit my comments so much ._.) 2017-05-15 05:56 (UTC)

My dude, I have been eaten alive. I get enough gore in my everyday life.

[Why is his life like this???]

I'd forgotten about the whole academy thing when I started my cooking show, but yeah, Lup and I cooked on the ship. There were only seven of us, someone had to make sure those dipshits didn't starve.

And I'm not fucking with you, I know that sounds like a thing I'd do, but with the Light (super long story) the scientists and arcanists discovered that everything in the universe was connected by bonds. It covers shit like magnetic energy, gravity, all that science stuff, but it also includes the bonds between any two people. They made an engine out of it.

My Barold wasn't really into dark magic either. Things got pretty screwed up.

[Yes his name is Barold is that not normal???]

Magic! A spell called legend lore, let's me learn forgotten lore about an object, I cast it on the portal.

.......................wtf

[ You can't just say you've been eaten alive in casual conversation, Taako, who DOES that??? ]

wait how old are you anyway?

[ Probably not the politest way to ask, but he IS an elf and it's just occurred to Cisco that maybe even though Taako didn't look that much older than him, maybe he's 700 years old and changing careers a few times is really to be expected. Or maybe the long-lived thing is a horrible elf stereotype and Taako is going to be offended at him. Each seems likely. ]

that's pretty much the coolest thing i've ever heard.

[ Barold... is not the best name, it's true, but Cisco isn't about to disrespect the dead by saying that. Besides it's still better than Bartholomew. ]

that's a pretty handy spell if you ask me.

does it work on people? just wondering.

Edited 2017-05-17 15:37 (UTC)

We got eaten by bugs, it was pretty quick, way less painful than uh. Well I've died a few times? Getting eaten alive in like five seconds is way less shitty than bleeding out!

[Welcome to 'flippancy about horrible circumstances', a novel by Taako.]

I've got a few centuries under my belt, enough that putting an exact year on it isn't easy.

[Plus the whole century on the Starblaster, but that's... complicated.]

It was pretty neat, I will admit. We saw a lotta cool shit, like talking animals and robot people.

[He can talk Mongoose it's great.]

It works on people who are famous enough to have legends about them? It's not pulling shit outta thin air, it's tapping into what's already known. There's probably some bullshit about the mythology of people and how stories shape their existence but I don't really care it's just a handy spell.

um... not to be nosy but how is that possible?

[ Cisco skips the incredulous part, though he is still plenty surprised. He's not used to meeting people who have died, much less "a few times". He figures it is probably necromancy, healing magic, something like that. Still... he'd like to know. ]

holy shit. yeah, i guess once you pass 200 or so precision starts to matter a little less.

i'm not gonna lie: that's gonna take some time to wrap my head around, man.

[ Cisco can't help thinking that people like him and Eddie must seem ridiculously young to Taako. Even if he's only 260 years old, that's still ten times Cisco's age. Ten times... ]

talking animals? sentient robots? that sounds like pretty much every awesome daydream i ever had as a kid.

[ There are times Cisco can't really believe he's living the life he is, meeting the people he does. It's all so much more colorful and exciting and wonderful than he could have ever anticipated. ]

i see, so it's not exactly reading the object itself so much as like... running a search algorithm on all the stories about the object that are floating around in the world, but, like, with your brain.

It was Groundhog day, like the movie? for the bugs, all magic time travel shit. The other times are cause we're sorta like... coded into our ship? Whenever we left the plan we'd "reset" to the body we'd been when we first took off, even if we'd died.

Oh, yeah, I guess that'd be weird for you. [Humans in his world are used to having shorter lives] If it helps I'm like, the elf equivalent of 30! We don't hit proper adulthood until a century.

[Elves, man.]

The robots used to be people, their souls got put in a robot body? They were rad.

[They're all super dead!!!]

You know what, that's a pretty tidy way to put it. Less my brain and more just magic, but yeah, close enough. If you were super famous I could do you, but if you're just some dude it's not gonna turn anything up, you know?

So, when I was talking about improving roombas? I wanted to talk about how we had AIs to help us with basically everything on my planet.

From medical care to household chores. Fact: Kelex cooked better than my father did.

( A beat. )

I know Star trek has Data, but I'm wondering if your Earth has anything remotely like what I knew growing up. Or if we could build it.

That'd be a fun challenge!

( And he doesn't need her to do it; she well knows what he's capable of. But it'd be nice to contribute anyway. )

oh, right, a time loop, got it.
that's... a pretty handy piece of coding. makes you basically immortal, huh?
(you think you'd reset if you died here? there's like no non-creepy way to ask that but i promise i'm not a serial killer or anything)

wait does that mean you had to deal with being basically a teenager for, like, decades? because if so... i'm so sorry.

[ Human souls in a robot body might have creeped Cisco out at a certain point, but he has seen some weird things and also had some friends die somewhat recently, so he thinks the option of having them around still as a robot sounds pretty enviable. ]

i'm definitely just some dude.
i was thinking before the spell sounded more like psychometry, which is what they call it where i'm from when someone can touch an object and just know stuff about it and sometimes the person who owned it, no matter who they are or what it is. which is totally not actually real! but we've still got the idea of it, you know in movies and such.

[ No, Cisco absolutely does not know that term because he'd been googling around for an explanation of just what the hell his occasional visions are, gosh. ]

Pretty much immortal, yup.
Uh, if I died here my soul would have to get back to the world the ship is in? I think? Memories are part of your soul, not your body, so like, we remembered all the shit from the years we went through.

[Well, when the voidfish isn't taken into consideration, but that's a whole... other... thing]

Kiiind of, there's a whole coming of age thing and new names blahblahblah. We weren't really into elf culture, we're too cool for that shit.

[And Lup had already picked a new name, but that's not the kind of shit to share with strangers.]

Oh! I got a spell called Identify that does that with any magic items, tells me what spell made/is on them and how to use them. Psychometry sounds pretty fucking useful, though.

first of all, your planet sounded awesome.

[ Normally he'd be a-bubble with questions, but Cisco is a touch more circumspect, knowing as he does that Krypton met a tragic fate. He's still curious as hell, but he can go about it with a little bit of tact. ]

we haven't got androids, and we definitely don't have functioning ai. the earth will, in the future. barry invents one, apparently. which we know because we found it in this creepy time vault and it said so.

hell yeah it would be. to be honest i wouldn't even know where to start. i mean... i've got some ideas....

Thank you, Cisco. It means a lot to hear. See? Read. You know what I mean. Earth is pretty great, too.

( Both versions I've been seen. She appreciates it, though it's not hard to admit that both planets had and have their share of pros and cons. )

Really?! Wow! That's amazing, since somehow I thought Barry was more into biology and chemistry than engineering. Is the AI itself a creepazoid?

Like what? The DEO found a program stowed in the pod that brought me to Earth. It held an AI of my mother. Not her, but her thoughts and knowledge; living memory.

well, mazel tov on the immortality i guess.

[ Boy howdy Cisco is glad they're having this conversation by text because now he's thinking about memories being part of souls and not bodies, and how he remembers the timeline Barry had changed, and does that mean that whatever metahuman stuff he has going on that he doesn't want to think about, it means the particle accelerator did something to alter his soul, and what does that even mean - and it's a lot of deep terrifying existential stuff that he knows he'd do a bad job covering up. ]

so do elves even celebrate birthdays? i mean i figure it's gotta get kind of repetitive after 150 or so.

[ But then, Cisco can't help thinking (though he wouldn't say it to Taako since it's probably rude) that everything would start to get repetitive in one's second century. Cisco had read enough fantasy novels and thought about elves and vampires and all of that to decide that eternal life would probably end up sucking eventually. Extended life and immunity from violence? Great. But endless life? Naw. ]

yeah, i guess so.

[ If a person knows how to control it. And wants to know how to control it. ]

Edited 2017-05-22 17:27 (UTC)

he is. something must change in the future cuz the barry i know isn't really equipped or inclined to invent an AI.

it was pretty creepy. helpful but creepy. no way around that when dr. wells had been using it to spy on us for years.

[ Cisco knows that that isn't Gideon's fault, that she's a program who obeys the commands given to her, but even so... hard not to hold the tiniest bit of a grudge. ]

wait, have you got that with you?
taking a look at it could help jump start things.
i wouldn't want to risk damaging it, obviously, but i could probably determine some things about the programming by asking a few questions.

That's the same Barry I know, too. Maybe he'll speed read the texts for an engineering major sometime? Idk.

Wait, that's new. How was it spying on you guys?

( And Dr. Wells—as in the H.R. Wells she'd met during the invasion? Kara has trouble seeing that man capable of that. That man's too... bubbly? Is that the right word?

Who knows. )

No, but my cousin has his. Yeah—there's two of us, and he said I could tell you. He said he got his through the portal, so that might happen for me, too.

I'd like that! If I'm lucky enough to get it back, you can spend all the time with her you like. Uh, I mean... whoops.

I still call it 'mom.' I don't know if that's weird. Makes me feel less alone.

It's pretty shit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but thanks

[Don't get him wrong, he's super glad they're not dead after all the... dying, but after 100 cycles of it, they were all just really tired, enough to risk breaking the light apart just so that they could stop running.]

Me and Lup would do shit on our birthday sometimes but yeah, you get pretty over it. Half the time we'd just compete to see who could make the sickest cake. When we were little it was always who could steal the coolest shit. I always won.

[Because he had way less morals than her.]

That was the least committal response ever, just saying.

must be.

[ Boy, he sure shouldn't have mentioned the spying, there's no way for this to be anything other than an overshare. ]

well... dr. wells put cameras all around star labs and at ccpd and iris' work and in joe's house and in all our apartments so he could basically monitor us 24/7 like he was trying to win some kind of award for overachieving stalkers.

as far as i could tell gideon was just organizing the footage for him and maybe scanning for certain things

oh, awesome. so your cousin like... from home, not an adopted one?

i don't think it's weird to call it that, or think about it that way. you said it's programmed with her personality or memories or whatever, right? makes sense if you ask me.

so you're a wizard, an explorer, a chef, AND a skilled thief? there anything you can't do?

[ Sure, Taako had been talking about when he was a kid, but even so. ]

i guess i was thinking that kind of ability is probably only as useful as someone's ability to control it.

like say if someone could touch an object but not really control what part of its history they saw.

or if the person couldn't control when they read an object and when they didn't, and it just sort of happened randomly without any pattern to it.

[ Just two totally random examples that Cisco thought of randomly and in complete abstraction from himself or his life, naturally. ]

Edited (sorry dreamwidth is fucking with the formatting) 2017-05-25 04:21 (UTC)

Thief might be overselling it, my dude. [Partly because it's like, part of a class in d&d and Taako is definitely not a rogue.] The trick is having a good distraction.

[Casually talking about crime like it's nbd]

I'll pay that, that would be shit.

[Which has never been a concern for him; sure there are spells that can backfire, but it's always been about learning and practising to get more power, never having something raw that needed to be controlled.]

This is thing with metahumans, huh? Learning to get a hold of that shit?

So this weirdo just made 1984 into a reality?? Uhhhh he's somewhere far away, right? From you, Barry, CCPD, Star Labs... all of you? Because that's setting off alarm bells and also makes me want to hit him really hard.

Gideon was probably altered. That happened with Kelex, the robot who typically helps out at the Fortress. Henshaw reprogrammed him to attack me on sight, and I had to, uh. Fry him. It was him or me, and it wasn't gonna be me.

Yeah, from home. His pod arrived on schedule, so he was adopted by a great family and raised among humans. I was thirteen. My pod was knocked off-course and I got stuck in the Phantom Zone, for about 24 years. he was already out there saving the day while i was in middle school. Awkward!

Memories and knowledge, yeah. Apparently not emotions. I asked her for a hug the first time I saw her and I got "I'm not programmed to do that." Thanks, that makes me feel a bit better. If that program ever comes through the portal, you can take as long as you need to figure out how she works.

okay maybe that was a little too far.
still, the only time i ever tried to steal something you better believe my ass got caught.
lucky for me it was only a TA who actually kinda liked me and i explained i needed it for a robot i was building and she let me borrow it.

a good distraction is totally how magicians do it where i'm from. since it's just sleight of hand and not, like, actual magic.

[ It's probably sad that it never even occurs to Cisco he could tell Taako he's just talking about himself - that he has no reason to be prejudiced against metas and no concept of the fraught history of how he got and learned about his powers in the first place. ]

for the most part, yeah.
i mean some metas have a really easy time getting a handle on their powers, but for others it can be pretty complicated
they don't come with a guidebook or anything. not like most of them have anyone to talk to about it, either. they just kind of have to figure that shit out on their own.

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