Scene #1986: Regarding Expository Explanations

Owner	Pose
Mortimer Balman	As Staren and Rory are decent people who let Mort sleep off his obvious.. Well it's hard to say if that was anger or depression or perhaps some mixture of both, but either way. Whenever the two came back to see Mortimer to learn more, they would find he was feeling much better. If we define 'better' as 'inebriated to an unknown degree'. Fortunately Switchbait has taken away all the booze before he can get totally wasted. They will find him looking over a shadow box full of ribbons and medals and several books full of pictures and notes and letters in it. Roll is sitting next to him, occasionally.. Pulling more books out of her tail pouch. Judging by sizes it must somehow be bigger on the inside than on the outside. Reder's on his shoulder, completely tanked, somehow managing to stay stable despite wobbling like hell, occasionally laughing and pointing at pictures and then rattling off some slurred story behind them. The front door is wide open and the porch light is on. As everyone knows this is a universal way of saying 'come in if you damn well feel like it I don't care'.
Rory White	Rory has spent a good fifteen to twenty minutes getting used to walking around. As a pony. In normal Earth gravity. Thaaaaat has NOT been easy. But she does seem to be getting around alright now! Trotting CAAAAREFULLY in her robot pony body. Not that it LOOKS like a robot - her Synthetic covering has apparently adapted as well. Which means she still can't eat anything. "Sleeping. No matter how many times I observe it, it just seems strange and wasteful... but I hope his going well. Let's see..." She just... ambles on into the front door to go see!
Staren	Staren-pony is next to show up, while Rory is musing. "It's a mystery of neuroscience, but humans and most higher Earth animals seem to need at least some..." He rocks on his hooves slightly in an attempt at a shrug, and follows on in. "Practically speaking, removing it isn't practical for everyone. Drugs work for some, but most fear repeated use will have negative side effects. And few are willing to trade their body for one that needs less sleep..." he comments, as he walks further into the house. "Mortimer, Roll, Reder, Rory." Staren nods to each in turn. "Watcha all looking at?"
Mortimer Balman	Mortimer looks up, "Heey kids how the hell are yah? Thanks for lettin' me get a nap in.. I feel better now. M'sorry about yesterday, just.. Even /being/ there.." He shakes his head a bit. Reder finally falls off of Mortimer's shoulders and lands on a large cushion, apparently put there beforehand perhaps knowing he would eventually fall into it. "<Fwaagh! Dammit Sarge! You can't just.. Just let /gravity/ get me like that!>" Managing to get out some understandable words by virtue of being shocked out of his stupor, at least enough not to slur horribly. But Mortimer doesn't pick him up, he's beaten to it by Falstaff, who looks decidedly /exhausted/- even moreso than usual- perhaps by Reder's antics, and just picks the wartortle up with his teeth and flips him back up onto Mort. Bizarrely he manages to land it almost perfectly. "<Haahaaaaa! Sonfbitch! Saint.. Saint usssetdo that..>" Roll waves to the two, "<Hiii! Uncle Morty is goin' through the BIG picture albums!>"
Rory White	"A mystery that's just perplexing--" Oh hey Mortimer's awake. "Was waiting for Mr. Balman to awaken! ... Are you alright?" That last bit's at Reder, whom she doesn't really know. And how is she supposed to know if a cushion is enough at 1g? She really isn't used to 1g! A glance from Roll to Staren gets her tilting her head quizzically. NOW what?
Staren	Staren 'shrugs' in reply to Mort's comment about the nap, then shakes his head. "It's fine." "The BIG picture albums?" Staren echoes, walking towards the group to see.
Mortimer Balman	Mort nods a bit. "Yeah.. One of the things my father got for me, right before I left for boot camp, was this little floatin' camera ball. Looked kinda like a cheap-ass pokeball only it could float and take snapshots. So I figured hell might as well take a lot, right? So every time I got the chance I'd take one or two.." Each album is carefully labeled. 'BOOT'. 'YEAR ONE.' 'YEARS 2-4'. 'FRESHMAN THRU JUNIOR' 'YEARS 5-6', 'YEARS 7-9' and then one labeled 'OUR WAR'. "The pictures got a lot better when one of my boots- that'sa term what means "fresh outta boot camp", was a photography student. She went and fixed up the camera so it would take better pictures.. I mean at first it was just a fun thing. Get some cool pictures now and then, but then it became a habit.. And then the war kept going on and on and on.. And it became a /need/." The previously cheerful look on his face fades a bit. "I can't even remember a good third of the shit we went through anymore.." Reder tortles, in a moment of drunken clarity, with a dead-eyed stare, "<I do.>"
Rory White	Rory glances over the covers, expression turning sad. "War." The blue-green pony states simply, as if it needs no further explanation. She has looked it up. She has seen sims. She has heard tales. I givfes her machine-willies, that's what it does... and this is pretty obvious to ANYONE taking a good look at her. "I can understand wanting to keep pictures of everything! .... this... is what happened to that place...?"
Staren	'Our War'? "'The War.'" Staren echoes. "What was it about?"
Mortimer Balman	Mortimer picks up his pipe and carefully lights it by setting his thumb on fire and using it as a match. A pause, a sigh. "It wasn't supposed to be an /actual/ war. Lot of smaller villages in Peth were getting attacked by Ditto- a couple even assimilated whole. Government was still busily trying to restructure their whole damn military and fill the ranks again because they'd recently lost a war with /Terne/ and it cost them the lion's share of their last army. Well they fucked up and tried to model the new army after Contiki's brilliant fucking vision! Too bad they didn't have the skill to pull it off. Six months after the trouble starts they come cryin' to Grouda askin' for military aid. Sure! No problem! We owe you a favor, we'll take out this little infestation!" The warpony's face contorts into a bit of a snarl. "Little infestation turned out to be the tiniest sliver of the biggest gods damned conflict we'd had with the Pinks in two thousand years.."
Staren	Staren listens, ears occasionally twitching. "I'm afraid I lack a lot of context here... Terne, Contiki... I know a Ditto is a kind of pokemon that can imitate other pokemon... Why were they attacking this other group?"
Rory White	THAT is worthy of a wince. Rory's eyes squeezed closed as she imagines that... no, doesn't really want to imagine that. She ends up trotting about, looking for somewhere to sit down..... but whether there is or isn't something like that to do, she doesn't quite know how to do so. So she just wobbles around in place and finally gets seated on her rump. "Same as Staren... lacking in context, but I do know enough of Earth history to fill in somewhat. Wars are never simple or clean... what are these Ditto?"
Mortimer Balman	Mort pauses. "Right.. Uh.. Terne. Land cursed to eternal darkness never to see the sunlight until the End of all Time. Very might-makes-right kinda country, used to be communist but that distributed power too much. Contiki, dominant nation by virtue of clever economic and political maneuverings. Lots of money. Had the brilliant idea to get rid of professional armies and replace them with /conscripted Trainers/. Which was a great idea for /them/ because they had legions of pro Trainers that could do the fucking job- like, an army of Ash Ketchums, y'get what I mean?. Everyone else thought it was a good idea to mimic them. Except Grouda and Terne. Caused some political tensions but Terne eventually acquiesed. Grouda was /going to/ but then the war happened." A brief pause. Right, /their/ Ditto were different. A grumbling frown, interrupted frequently by puffing on that pipe. "Ditto are.. Unstable, like. Biologically. They can take genetic tissue and then copy it and be like, dopplegangers. They still look pink and have that fucking /smile/ that never goes away, but they can copy techniques, memories, data.. They're all connected by some kinda planet-wide mind link. It's like, something between radio and telepathy. They reproduce by infecting people, pokemon, or eggs with their own genetic data. Not like cloning but theirs becomes the dominant set of bio-info, and then you become one, and then you /are/ one. As long as recorded history /existed/ we were at odds with them.."
Rory White	"Grey goo as a proper lifeform." Rory declares, still grim and depressed about the subject. "Pink goo," she adds moments later as an amendment. "... Worse than fighting one's own kind, I imagine. They don't sound like the sort that can be reasoned with..."
Staren	Staren looks like he's concentrating on taking all this in as Mortimer explains his world's political landscape. He scratches his head as the ditto are explained. "But if they were able to actually... /infiltrate/ anything, they must have been more than mindless zombies. What did they /want/? Just to become the only lifeform on the planet?"
Mortimer Balman	Mortimer throws up his hooves. "Fuck, I dunno! Nobody fuckin' knows! They just.. Assimilate people, grow their swarms up and up and up. Then we scrap with'em in wars or small actions or once in a couple dozen generations some big-arse conflict comes along because holy fuck there were acutally tens of millions of'em in some corner damn nobody knew about. Might as well ask a rock what life is all about, you'll get about as many answers."
Staren	Staren blinks. "They... never talked, or anything?" He wonders how they managed to infiltrate anything if they weren't smart enough to talk...
Rory White	"The point is made..." Rory's gotten very quiet now, shoulders a bit slumped. "Then... you and your team were in the war against them? It sounds like it went very badly."
Mortimer Balman	Mort shook his head. "No.. They had Ditto-/kin/ to do that.. We're not gonna talk about that right now.." His entire body tenses up at saying that, then he takes a moment to calm down and smoke. "No.. No only Reder and I were. Everyone else in my crew came after the fact. They assigned Reder to me when I hit boot camp, I've had him since.. He was a year old, at least."
Staren	Staren raises eyebrows a bit. Ditto-kin? More unanswered questions... "So... on your world there are pokemorphs, but /also/ pokemon. Any evolutionary connection? Were there humans at all?"
Rory White	Rory can be pretty insensitive at times. And socially clumsy. But here she turns to stare a bit at Staren. "That... isn't very relevant to the current topic!" Even she knows that. "... So both of you went through something like that..."
Mortimer Balman	Mortimer stares blankly at Staren, like he has two heads and one of them is a rubber dragon head. "...Did you get your hard drive damaged or somethin', son?" He flips through a book, pulling up one from the BOOT album. It's a picture of a younger, Cyndaquil-y Mortimer standing amongst a group of numerous types of Pokemorph. There are even a few humans in the group! "Humans're just another type of 'morph to us. The first morphs." Then back to ROry. "Yeah.. War lasted nine damn years. It was supposed to be less than four months."
Staren	Staren blinks. "Well, I figured it's better to /ask/ what the deal is than to just /assume/ how it works. But if you don't want to talk about it, fine." He looks at the picture. "What /do/ you want to talk about?"
Rory White	T Rory, on the other hand, is looking at the picture by leaning over, then glancing back at the current MOrt - wait, no, he's a pony now. Confusing. She checks her profile for him and copares with that. "If that's you... you look nothing at all like-- oh... right. Growing?" Blink. "A lot of growing over nine years... there was no easy way to stop the Ditto?"
Mortimer Balman	Mortimer nods a bit at Rory. "Yea.. Well, Pokemon /evolve/. Some people think it's like "maturity" but it's more like a measure of power an' inner development than like, biological growth. My Ma never evolved into a Typhlosion, she stayed a Quilava her whole life. So did three of my brothers. Hell my brother Friedrich never evolved past Cyndaquil.." A pause to think about it. "I guess we coulda just carpet-bombed the entire /continent/ but y'know people tend to kinda frown on that!" Laughing that hoarse laugh at his own awful joke.
Staren	Staren tilts his head. "Was there a continent entirely inhabited by ditto?" His tone implies he thinks it would have been quite reasonable, if so.
Rory White	More frowning from Rory! "... The entire earth was devastated in the TITAN uprising... I can ccompletely see why." She is NOT amused! And kind of bad at the laughter thing.
Mortimer Balman	Mort doesn't even need time to think. "Nope. We never let'em have our lands. They'd try, sure. Sometimes they came close- in early history it was literally only through divine intervention that many races /survived/, but.. No, they never had a whole continent."
Staren	Staren shrugs again. He doesn't think he needs to say that yes, in that case he agrees that blowing up a whole continent would have been bad.
Rory White	"By the sound of it they likely survived and proliferated in caves, if millions could go undiscovered for long times... or underwater." One can only posit things though, not know! "... Divine intervention?"
Mortimer Balman	Mort scratches his cheek a bit, thinking. "They sorta could. But that was dangerous. They might be able to take on the form of say, a Wailord, but not its full /ability/. Like.. They had a pretty low crush depth and even then the sea pokemon are damn dangerous." An enthusiastic nod. "Yea! Early in our history, the Ditto were set to wipe out damn near /all/ life in a lot of place. The goddesses- Mew, Celebi, an' Jirachi- all conspired and created Lords and Guardians to help our primitive ancestors who had fuckall fer defense against the swarms. Entei, Moltres, Suicine, Articuno, Zapdos, buncha others.."
Staren	Staren nods, taking this information in. "Were the Guardians pokemorphs like yourself, or pokemon?"
Rory White	Something about Staren's question again gets Rory blinking at him, but she doesn't comment this time. Instead... "Gods who actually take action is a thing to hear about! I've not found any evidence they really exist for my world... these guardians did not help in the war?"
Mortimer Balman	"Uhh.. Well they weren't morphs but calling them "pokemon" is kinda.. Weird. They're /demigods/, don't really conform to our notions a lot of the time. And.. Well, in short, Rory, no. As time went on from their first actions to stave off total destruction, they slowly became more and more... Symbolic. Less direct in action and more inspiration amd guidance. They were there to help us get off the ground, as t'were, and once we were.. Well we pretty much didn't need much direct action after that." Mort scratches his head a bit, thinking it might sound odd..
Staren	Staren just nods as Rory comments and Mortimer explains. Seems he doesn't have anything in particular to add to this.
Mortimer Balman	"Well.. Seems to be all yer questions fer now at least. ...I'm gonna pack these all in and get a little more shut-eye. I gotta actually /work/ more tomorrow.. You have a good night, Rory, Staren." He'd let out a yawn and start closing up all the albums, helping Roll to push them back into her tailpouch. They were of course, welcome to stay, but it was more likely they'd be off to go do science.