[video] time and time again and time again and time again

[punful]

[Sans is sitting on the floor of his room, methodically tearing pages out of a plain-looking notebook. There's clearly writing on the pages, but he's propped his device on a table a few feet away, so it's impossible to tell what it is. He balls up each page and chucks them forward, and from the angle it looks like he's throwing them out into the hallway. There's a watery plap every time.]

anyone opened their door yet? some pretty crazy water physics happening. it just kinda stays there. my cat doesn't know what to do about it. he's kinda freaking out.

[Said cat goes running past the screen with a "mrrbbllggmmb" sound. Sans keeps chucking wads of paper, looking as calm and collected as he always does.]

so, second time trying to post this. we'll see if it takes this time, i guess. dunno if wonderland's just gonna erase it once it's posted or not, but whatever. i'm guessing people have noticed the, uh, weird time stuff going on by now, right?

[Maybe a stumble-jolt feeling, like missing the last step on a staircase? A sense of deja vu?]

yeah, that's my bad. looks like wonderland's giving us a twofer this time.

[Tear. Wad. Toss. Plap.]

listen, i'd just try to ignore it if you can. focus on surviving. might mess with your head a bit, but just try to roll with it. you're gonna get used to it after a day or so. no point in trying to remember what you've forgotten, cause trust me, it's gone. trying to make heads or tails of it's just gonna give you a headache, heh.

[It's not his fault, he keeps telling himself, but haha, it's real easy to just say that. Then it's your event messing everyone up and--well, anyway.]

also, if anyone needs help moving rooms or getting to the kitchen or whatever, hit me up. i'm good with shortcuts. you won't even have to get wet. [He sighs a bit.] can't help everyone, though. you can't make a shortcut to somewhere you've never been. so...

[So.]

and if this is your second or third time hearing this? sorry. sometimes you gotta repeat yourself to make it stick, heh.

Comments

VIDEO / PRIVATE.

[punful]

uh...i dunno. the animal?

[Do groundhogs have time-manipulating capabilities? Do they just...have days? He has no idea, actually. He didn't even know a groundhog was a thing till he came to Wonderland and saw one. You miss out on a whole lot of weird animals, living underground.]

[Responsible is one way to put it. Sans just calls it common decency. Either way, he appreciates that Barry made this private, since he didn't have the energy to do so himself. Considering how well it went the last time he told anyone this much detail, he'd rather have as few people as possible involved this time.]

i, uh. sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's a few days. doesn't really matter.

VIDEO / PRIVATE.

[accelerate]

It's a movie where this guy relived this one day over and over and over again. [ at least it shows he's familiar with the concept! barry lets himself process it, not quite needing anything more than a minute. ] I don't think I've ever heard it be on and off like that.

[ maybe it's not his place to jump to conclusions, but he's wondering if this is sans' big bad. much like time travel itself, it's metas who are a plague on barry's life. it's them who try to torment the city, and it's them who try and put him down. there's no way to stop them from popping out of the woodwork preemptively, but perhaps there's a way to shut this event down before it grows any bigger.

[ it could be something for the flash to do. a big and stupid idea begins to brew in barry's head. ]

Do you know if you can stop it? Back home — did it ever stop?

VIDEO / PRIVATE.

[punful]

[He actually...pauses.]

[Stops tearing out pages and actually looks up at his phone, at Barry.]

there's a movie like that?

[Fiction, of course, but still--people made a movie about a guy living the same day over and over?]

[Sans toys with the edge of the next page.]

did the character in the movie remember it was happening?

[How long did it go on for? Was there a kid involved? Did he wake up over and over to the same words, no matter how far he'd gotten, no matter what had happened?]

[Did it ever stop? Movies have endings. There'd have to be some kind of ending.]

[Sans tears out the page.]

no. it doesn't stop.

VIDEO / PRIVATE.

[accelerate]

He figures it out. "I Got You Babe" is a pretty good song to keep waking up to, but I can understand why Bill Murray got tired of it.

[ another thing to fly over sans' head? possibly. but barry's trying to lighten the mood the best way he knows how: humour. personally, he's trying to figure out what this new information means for sans. does it place more context to what he's so far learned of his most favourite skeleton? barry isn't sure, but he now knows he has more in common with sans than before. ]

I've travelled through time. A few times, actually ... Mostly by mistake, but I ... [ his hand goes to the back of his neck before he drops it. ] I don't think it gets any easier to be a part of a timeloop. But maybe it gets easier having to deal with it. I don't know; I'm still sort of learning how to handle it. [ he shrugs his shoulders. sighing, ] But what I'm trying to say is is that you don't have to do this alone.

VIDEO / PRIVATE.

[punful]

[Another reference he doesn't get, but that's okay. He's still focusing on the idea of the movie itself.]

does...he remember all of it? or just some of it?

[He needs to check out this movie. It's probably a terrible idea, will probably hit way, way too close to home, but--he needs to check out this movie.]

[He's still tearing pages, and he stops for just a moment when Barry says he's a time traveler. Haha, of course. Of course, everyone's time traveling these days. Everyone can just sorta--do it, and retain all their memories. People can do it oh a whim, like Frisk. People can do it reflexively, like Max. People can do it accidentally, like Barry.]

[And they all get some modicum of control over it, huh? How nice for them.]

[Barry's right, though, it does get easier. It can't not get easier, because it's not like you can do anything about it. You can say you've given up, you can actually give up, but then it jolts back to the beginning, and you have no choice but to continue. Even if you'd rather just sleep the day away, because it turns out that doesn't change anything, either.]

[Nothing ever, ever changes.]

[He gives a quiet, completely mirthless chuckle.]

i don't, huh? that's funny. you're right, it sounds like everyone's jumping through time these days. all the kids're doing it.

[That last part is only somewhat a joke, but he's gonna play it off as one.]

you too, huh? guess that makes sense. that thing you do, how fast you are--the whole lightshow? guessing you hafta have a real tight control over friction and vibration to move like that. particle vibrates at the right frequency, that's how you get yourself through all that pesky quantum foam. could probably teleport that way, move through space in an instant. anything that affects space that way should also theoretically affect time. they don't call it spacetime for nothin'.

[That sure is a lot of science from a sleepy, jokey skeleton. He's glad this is private.]

but if you can control the frequency of the vibration, or whatever other factors you use to move at--well, you definitely break the sound barrier, but not the light barrier i'm guessing? anyway. moving through time would be something you could control. might be the kind of thing that comes with practice.

[Hell, it took him a full year and a half of practicing every single day of his life to get his teleporting on lockdown. It was a goddamn miracle he never ended up inside a wall.]

[He's still tearing out pages.]

still. end of the day, it's something you can trigger, can control. it comes from you.

[He pauses, staring at the next page in his notebook. It seems to be covered in odd symbols.]

[Then he tears that one out too with a sigh.]

ain't like that for me.