00: Nothing Lasts Forever
This work of fiction is a combination of the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the tabletop roleplaying game Eclipse Phase. The Ponies are owned by Hasbro, and the setting of Eclipse Phase is distributed under the creative commons license by Posthuman Studios. You can find out more about Eclipse Phase here.
Eclipse Phase: Dreamcatcher
By Pyrite.
00 Prologue: Nothing Lasts Forever
For many, the natural light of Luna's moon above was the first sign of the end.
With a sound like shattering glass, that pale moonlight broke through and poured over the streets of Canterlot.
In a gentler age, the rose-red moonlight that had filtered through Shining Armor's shield above during the last week would have seemed to turn the city into a brilliant rose. Instead, the depressingly common metaphor was of a city painted blood-red.
Despite this, the sudden return to the natural order did not fail to throw the city into a panic.
For Twilight Sparkle, the change coming over the city went unnoticed. It didn't help that she had virtually walled herself in with floating books and display screens. Her tired eyes flitted between them as she casually held them all in her magical grip.
Her friends had gone to bed hours ago, each claiming their own little nook in Twilight's old sanctum in the palace tower. It would have been an uncomfortably crowded arrangement, had they not spent more than half a decade as the closest of friends.
Twilight was the only one still awake. She'd had to sneak out of bed an hour after everypony else had gone to bed to avoid Applejack making good on her threats to sit on her until she got some decent sleep. Of course, none of her friends understood. They all had faith that she would come up with a solution, like she had so many times before.
And besides, the new body only needed about four hours of sleep a night, which meant she'd barely missed sixteen since the incident in Manehatten, which wasn't nearly as bad as admitting she'd only slept one night in the last week. Or as bad as actually sleeping, and having to dream about what would happen if--
"Twilight?"
Twilight spooked as a hoof prodded her in the side, books and portable screens hurled into the walls. She whirled, horn pointed half in anger and half in fear, and took several breaths before she could even comprehend what was in front of her.
Pinkie Pie didn't flinch at all. Somehow she'd managed to stand in one of the few spots that wouldn't have left her straight in line to have a book thrown at her. She tried to force a smile for Twilight's benefit, but it didn't hold, and left her looking like she'd swallowed something unpleasant.
Twilight let her guard down, taking a few more deep breaths and taking a moment to retrieve her accidental projectiles, looking ruefully over one of the screens, which had broken clean in half on impact. "I should probably be in bed, shouldn't I?"
Pinkie shook her head, her ears pressing her curly mane back. "No, I'm pretty sure you need to be awake right now."
She swung a hoof toward the massive window that made up one wall of the library/observatory/bedroom where Twilight had spent much of her young life. The Canterlot skyline was brilliantly lit in silver and pale white.
"I think something really, really bad is happening."
Within minutes, the six Bearers of the Elements of Harmony were pushing their way through the sizable crowd that had taken shelter within the castle courtyard.
The herd milled about anxiously, uncertain what to expect. The royal guard were subtly making their presence known in an attempt to control the crowd before things got out of hoof. The only thing out of place was the occasional shouted order or report.
Twilight noticed this, and it gave her a moment's pause. Reflexively, she panned through the networks available, and winced at the noise of encryption fragments and error messages.
"Royalnet's in pieces," she whispered to her friends.
"Ain't that a surprise," quipped Applejack, rolling her eyes. Equestria had been on the losing side of the Information Warfare battlefield since the Alicorn Wars started.
Rumors and conversation moved through the herd in waves, originating from the ponies closes to Twilight and her friends. A cheer went up from the crowd as they realized who was pushing their way through. The castle had opened its gates to them when the hotels and shelters had filled, and many of them had been among the infected in Manehatten, who owed their lives and sanity to the use of the Elements.
The six did their best to keep straight and severe faces, though Fluttershy ducked down between Applejack and Rainbow Dash as much as she could, while Pinkie was everywhere, working the crowd and moving in to shake the hoof of everypony she could.
Equestria had been largely transformed by new technology. Just over the palace walls, towers of artificial marble and diamond rose into the clouds, rivaling the height of the mountain they stood on and dwarfing the aging spires of the palace. If the lane leading to Canterlot Castle was not the widest in the city, the balcony from which Princess Celestia raised the sun would not see its light until almost noon. In the suddenly-pure moonlight reflected off those pale edifices, the castle courtyard was nearly day-lit.
Inside the walls of Canterlot Castle, things were much as they had been for the last century. Even the ever-escalating hostilities had only prompted the installation of weapon emplacements on the outer walls. The castle was a symbol of austerity, a statement that the values that bound equestrian society together still stood, despite how deeply the world had changed.
The gleaming hypercorporate strongholds that loomed over its walls somewhat ruined that message.
At the edge of the herd of refugees a line was held by a cordon of royal guards. Relief washed over their usually stony faces at the sight of the six approaching mares. They parted before them without a word, and closed ranks behind them to keep the civilians from following.
A young guard officer greeted them on the other side with a quick bow and a crisp salute. "Lady Sparkle, Captain Dash, I'm glad that you're here. As you can guess..." He gestured toward the naked moon with his horn. "We have a situation."
"That's obvious, lieutenant." Dash barked, suddenly a military mare again. "Report! What's the status of Princess Cadence and General Shining Armor?"
"Unknown, Ma'am," he answered, then flinched at her immediate glare and scrambled to explain himself. "We-uh... we suspected Nightmare incursion, and SOP is to contain and wait for specialist backup."
"You're telling me you've got nothing more than--"
"He's right." Twilight cut in, stepping between the two and facing Dash. "We still don't know everything the Nightmares are capable of. If we aren't careful, we could easily have another Manehatten on our hooves."
Rainbow Dash grumbled, prodding her element necklace uncertainly. "Then I guess we just hope they don't have a defense against these yet."
"We can't be certain of anything," Twilight said, turning and trotting down the lane. "That's why we need to proceed cautiously and rationally--"
Then Twilight looked up, and the part of her mind that allowed her to be cautious and rational suddenly stopped. She'd finally gotten close enough to see the tower that Shining Armor and Cadence had taken residence in after their retreat from the Chrystal Empire. The masonry on the fifth floor bulged outward slightly, and the reinforced glass from its windows littered the ground beneath it.
Her horn lit up, and with a popping sound she was on the fifth floor balcony, rushing inside.
The rest of her mind ground to a halt at what awaited her.
The room was shredded. The bed had been reduced to splinters. The dozens of little souvenirs and knick-knacks Cadence had gathered from her long life were scattered or obliterated. The young princess was lying belly-down on the stone floor, cradling what was left of Shining Armor in her forelegs.
Twilight's brother looked like he’d slammed into a train horn first, and most of his body was pulverized. She was only sure it was him by his neon-blue mane, which decades of service to Equestria had left streaked with a respectable gray. He was still bleeding all over his wife’s coat, darkening patches of it.
Cadence was relatively unharmed, but still looked battered and disheveled, like she’d flown through a hailstorm. She shook him gently, as if trying to awaken him from mere sleep.
“Shining, no..." She closed her eyes against her welling tears, and shook him harder. "It can’t happen like this. It doesn’t happen like this. That’s not how it works!”
“Cadence?” Twilight managed, breaking free of her mental paralysis. “Tell me what happened?”
Cadence twitched, suddenly noticing Twilight in the room with her. Her voice was unsteady, and she stammered, her eyes unable to focus. “He... when we tried to recast the shield spell, there was some kind of resonance in it already. Th-the others must have done something to it."
The Princess' breathing quickened, and her pupils almost disappeared in the whites of her eyes. "What was I thinking? Shining's shield couldn't protect us forever. No defense can last long enough, or protect anypony. Nothing lasts. Nothing.” She was shaking, hysteria taking over again, and she clutched her husband harder to her chest.
"No!" Twilight shouted. "There's still a chance." She pressed forward as far as she dared, blinded by her own tears. Her brother’s body may as well have been a solid wall to her. She didn’t dare cross it. “We might still be able to save him, but we need to get you two out of here.”
Cadence snapped an angry glare at her. “He’s gone. His brain is gone! His mind is gone! There’s nothing left for you to upload and bring back. Don’t you understand? Everything in him that I loved is gone!"
Shining Armor’s horn, now that she looked at it more carefully, had ruptured into a twisting fractal shape. she knew Cadence was right when she saw the way the horn had channeled the impact directly into his skull, and the ragged hole that had opened on the other side of it.
Then she saw the pink and black smoky aura curling up from the edges of the horn. Twilight leapt back, screaming “Cadence! Get away from him, quick!”
The princess didn’t even acknowledge her, lost to the world, and Twilight felt her insides sink like she’d swallowed stones as she realized that Cadence had likely been breathing the multicolored smoke for minutes. Shining Armor’s blood crept through her coat, staining her a uniform deep red. When she looked up at Twilight, her eyes had gone wild. “Nothing lasts... if nothing lasts... then love is just a lie we tell foals to make them feel better.” She let out a dark, bitter laugh. “It all makes sense now.”
The echo of wing-beats reverberated through the tower, and then the clatter of hooves, as Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy landed ungently on the stone floor on either side of Twilight. Neither pegasus looked quite prepared for what they saw.
Cadence dropped Shining Armor’s body with a wet thud, standing to face the three ponies as hard hoofbeats began to echo up the tower’s spiral staircase. She gave the entrance a suspicious glance, then turned back to Twilight. “Your friends are coming up to surround me, aren’t they?” she asked in a hollow voice.
Trembling, Fluttershy pulled her eyes away from what was left of Twilight's brother, and focused on the Alicorn in front of her. With a few hard breaths she took a step forward, her eyes wide pools of sympathy, approaching Cadence as she would a wounded animal. “Please, Princess... We've seen this before. You’ve been infected with the Discord Virus. Please let us help you.”
Cadence pointed an accusing hoof at each of the necklaces that the pegasi wore, and then at Twilight’s tiara. “With those?” she asked.
Rainbow Dash stepped into line beside Twilight. Where Fluttershy projected kind forgiveness, Dash was doing her best to be as cold and hard as steel, though a slight creak of her voice betrayed a hint of fear. “It worked for Luna, didn’t it? Come on Cadence, we'll get through this together."
“No. We won’t.”
The transformation had been subtle, but was now complete. Her pupils were now ruby slits, and her mane had gone bloodred to match her coat, hanging limp off of her back. It seemed to flow around itself and into her tail like a thick liquid.
Cadence’s hollow eyes locked on Twilight, who shrank back under the weight of her gaze. “I can see past it all now, Twilight. All these poor, mortal foals, even you can’t keep them all safe. Not forever.”
The heavy wooden door slammed against it’s frame, drawing everypony’s attention for a moment. Suddenly the time for banter was over, and the Nightmare that had been Cadence stepped easily over the body of Twilight’s brother, stopping within a few feet of the trio of ponies. Fluttershy quailed in her presence, barely able to hold her ground, but Rainbow Dash stepped around to the side, flanking her.
“Did you know that Celestia built barriers in my mind? I can only use my magic by lying to myself. You like to call me a sister, Twilight. You said you love me. If that love is real, then help set me free.”
Twilight shook her head, trying to keep control in the face of what was happening. “Cadence... You’re not thinking clearly...”
“You’re wrong. I can’t stop thinking clearly. I can’t stop thinking of all the ponies who are going to die." She tapped Shining Armor's body dismissively with the tip of a hoof. "If I had realized this sooner, I could have saved him.”
She tossed her head dramatically. “If you’re not going to set me free, then maybe the others will.”
Rainbow Dash saw it coming and started to move, but she couldn’t escape Cadence’s wingspan before she snapped her powerful wings open, sending the mere pegasus tumbling across the room. Just as the door slammed open with a resounding crack, Cadence tackled the speechless Twilight, wrestling the Element of Magic from atop her head. Before anypony could react, she had rolled over Twilight’s back and was galloping for the balcony.
Rarity and Pinkie Pie rushed into the room, followed closely by a gray-maned Applejack. Cadence cast one last look back at the six friends, cradling the tiara in one leg, and took wing.
Twilight was enveloped by Rarity’s magic, pulling her to her hooves and straightening her coat and mane. “What happened in here?”
Applejack rushed to the balcony, her long rifle strapped by a harness to her back. She propped herself up on the balcony ledge, a sight sliding down from the side of the rifle to rest over her right eye. “She’s got your Element, Twi. Ah’ve got a shot on her. Do ah take it?”
Twilight started to answer, but couldn’t. Over the last ten minutes, she’d lost all that was left of her family. It was too much.
Applejack jerked back to stare at her. “Twi!” When she didn’t respond, the farmpony kicked the stone of the balcony and turned back to the sky. “Aw hay,” she swore as she refocused.
The something that had been sinking inside Twilight suddenly felt like it hit the bottom. The feeling was awful, but suddenly she was beyond grief and fear. She turned to Applejack, still shaking. “We can’t let the other Nightmares get the Element.” She swallowed, barely able to find her voice again. “Take the shot.”
“It’s too late, Twi. She’s past the castle wall, an’ flyin’ low. We lost her.” She turned the barrel hard to the left, where Twilight could see dark shapes emerging over the walls in the distance. "And it looks like we've got other problems coming."
That was when the shooting started.
The night sky leaked in through the edges of the enormous domed window, stars and planets glistening in the distance. Twilight gazed listlessly through it, her eyes tracing over the scene below, and she shook her head in regret.
“What seems to be troubling you, my most faithful student?” a voice asked from deeper within the compact little chamber
Twilight turned to her mentor, who stood self-assuredly in the center of the room, between the space devoted to Twilight’s bed and the slightly larger space occupied by her overflowing and disorganized bookshelf. She knew books were outmoded, but she still felt comforted by the feeling of real paper between her hooves and against her nose as she turned the pages. Sometimes it was the only way she could calm herself down enough to sleep. They were definitely worth the matter she’d fabricated them from.
And there was Celestia, the wisest and kindest of all ponies, and the source of all the answers Twilight had ever needed. The unicorn did her best to smile, just a little, even though she didn’t really feel it. “The same thing that always troubles me when I look through this window, Princess,” she answered wryly, her smile slipping as she felt her eyes drawn back to it.
“The Fall,” she continued. She was staring down at the earth, at the ruin of Equestria.
The towering skyscrapers of bustling Manehatten had vanished into a massive crater. Canterlot Castle had fallen to rubble down the mountainside. The desert canyons where the buffalo once roamed and where the Appleoosans had made their home was now a landscape of black glass. And even if Ponyville, Twilight's second home, had been visible from space, the swarm of nanosprites gathering above it like a weather system would have blotted it out. Everywhere she had ever called home had been destroyed, and quite possibly she would never be able to return.
“How?” she asked, staring down through the research station’s porthole window. The scene through it slidslowly to the side, a result of the habitat spinning to simulate gravity.
“How did we let it go so wrong? I know the history, the politics, all the excuses. I was there! It doesn’t make sense, how could we not see this coming?” She struck the transparent alumina window with a hoof in frustration.
She felt the gentlest of nuzzles on the back of her mane and sighed, turning back to Celestia. The Princess smiled her most encouraging smile; an expression that always managed to soften the tightness in Twilight’s chest. “We never believe that the worst can happen to us until it does."
Twilight nodded in weary agreement. “It was all coming together so fast back then. We didn’t really consider what we had to lose, so much as what we could accomplish by pushing things just a little further.” She swallowed. “Discord and Chrysalis made us feel powerless. Especially after...” She shied away from Celestia’s gaze as the sentence trailed off.
“Especially after what each of them was able to do to me?” The princess finished.
Twilight gave a slight nod, refusing to pull her eyes away from her hooves. “We thought if we had more ponies who could accomplish even half what you and Luna could, we could make the world safe.” She shuddered, sinking lower into the hard tile floor. “Instead we managed to create the biggest threat we’ve ever faced.”
A silence fell between them, as Celestia leaned forward over Twilight’s back, gazing down on her ruined country. Just as the silence was about to become unbearable, she spoke again. “We could have foreseen the war. After all, the only two full Alicorns anypony knew went to war once.” She shook her head with a pained look at that. “We should have foreseen that the creations of ponies would behave in at least a similar manner, though it happened far more quickly than with Luna and I. And we did not know that their war would be enough to reawaken an aspect of Discord, after less than a century.”
“Perhaps I could have stopped them from being made in the first place,” she continued, regret creeping into her regal tone. “Perhaps if I’d taken a stronger stance, if I’d been willing to accept ruling from a position of power rather than one of respect, I could have prevented this.”
She heaved a sigh, shaking her head. “Perhaps I was hopeful that the project would succeed, to protect my little ponies better than I have been able to. And...” she shifted uncomfortably. “And perhaps I have been growing lonely over the years.”
Twilight turned, making eye contact with Celestia again. “Is that why you made Cadence?”
This time, Celestia was the one who turned away, suddenly very interested in the contents of Twilight’s bookshelf. It took her a moment to answer.
“A thousand years is a very long time, Twilight, and even before that it was just the two of us.”
She shook her head sadly. “I took steps to limit the expansion of her power, and to help her develop empathy for the ponies around her.” She turned and gave Twilight a weak smile. “It did work out wonderfully, for what it’s worth.”
Then the smile died on her muzzle. “As long as it lasted. If only other ponies had followed my example more closely... we might still have her with us."
Twilight's eyes burned, and she shrank away again. But before she could disappear into her mind again she was locked in an equine hug, Princess Celestia leaning in to wrap her neck around her student’s. “At least you saved everypony you could.”
Twilight trembled in the embrace, but regained her senses and pulled away from it, wiping her eyes. “And for what? So that their minds and souls could have the time to wait in storage on the moon? We didn’t think of how to get everypony new bodies when we cast that spell. We’re lucky the moon colonists even found morphs for Applejack and I. There are still millions of ponies waiting there, and I don’t know how many of them will ever wake up again.”
She walked over to the bookshelf, nervously rearranging the volumes in it with her magic. “Now everypony is obsessed with the idea of living forever, without stopping to think about how easily everything could slip through our hooves. There were twenty-seven possible vectors of extinction last year, each of which could have wiped out every pony in the system within months. This year I’m expecting at least thirty. We barely made it off planet during the fall. Now we don’t even have the Elements anymore. Not with the Element of Magic lost somewhere in the Discord Gate network. At some point we’re going to mess up and there won’t be any second chances.”
“Isn’t that the purpose of Dreamcatcher?” Celestia asked, following behind Twilight, her voice infused with serene sensibility. “‘A secret network of individuals ready to do whatever is necessary to preserve Transequinity from the Nightmares and other extinction-level-threats’ was the mission statement, wasn't it?”
Transequinity. The state of transition between a natural state of pony body and mind and a body and mind augmented and enhanced by technology to the point where prior frames of reference became nearly irrelevant. It still scared Twilight to think about, even though she’d done so much to personally usher in this new era she found herself in. A hundred little steps that taken individually were mostly unobtrusive and undeniably beneficial, but when combined and made available to everypony it occasionally made her wonder if she was really the same mare who had lived in a tree in quaint little Ponyville once upon a time.
One of the books went flying across the room and hit the wall. “A secret organization was necessary because they still don’t want to admit how bad things have gotten, how bad things could still get. They don’t understand what measures are necessary. And the ones that do care are more interested in power than survival.” She looked away in frustration, a glance that unfortunately took her gaze back to the window. “I find more sentinels every month, and we lose them almost as quickly. I’m drawing out of a diminishing pool of ponies that can handle this, and I can’t seem to stop losing them. My resources aren’t infinite, but I’m starting to think that the folly of ponies is.” She shook her head in resignation. “What am I going to do if it’s not enough?”
“I’m sure you and your friends will be able to manage, just as you always have,” Celestia answered serenely.
Twilight gave the princess a long, sad look. With a sense of resignation, she stood, bowing her head for a moment. “Thanks, Princess,” she said, as she began walking to the door. “I think at least some of that helped.”
“Pluto?” she asked.
A white filly emerged from the corner of her vision, blinking up at her. She was Twilight’s muse, a specially made AI companion that most ponies kept with them, whether in peripheral devices, or like in Twilight’s case, in the cybernetic inserts implanted in her head, which allowed her to see a reality augmented by digital images and enhancements. She'd modeled the little pony after a character she'd made up in her foalhood, a little pony she had drawn wings and a horn on before she understood what that meant.
[Yes, Twilight?] Pluto asked in a soft, childlike voice, concern written over her features. She fluttered her tiny wings nervously.
“End Augmented Reality Therapy Simulation PC41.” Twilight ordered in a dead voice.
The filly nodded solemnly, her wings drooping a little. [Alright.]
Twilight looked away from the image of Princess Celestia, an image that only she could see, which only existed in the space between her optic nerves and her brain. When she looked back, the phantom she’d composed from memories and recordings of her mentor, was gone. She sighed, a long deep sigh that seemed like it might end with her collapsing.
“I’m sure you could help me if you were still alive, Princess,” she said to the shadows in the dormitory behind her.
[Twilight?] Pluto asked politely for her attention. [We've just received a message on the QE comm.]
Twilight stared across the empty space for a moment, then galloped out of the room.
The airlock opened, shallow light filtering into it from the surface of the asteroid. The shadow of a gangly stallion stretched across the floor, and halfway up the metal door that opened into the habitat. His figure was made more angular from the hard vacuum-barding he wore. The pony stepped in, and the door slid closed behind him.
The tiny room hissed as air from the habitat filled it, and the pony reached up and released his helmet, the section beneath his muzzle snapping open at the brush of a hoof. He lifted the helmet off and took a long breath of the fresher air of the habitat.
The window on the far door flashed silver, then lit up with an image of another stallion, his bushy mustache making him seem larger than he was. He looked sternly down at the pony in the Vacuum-barding. “Brother! I assume by your return that you were successful?” he asked with slightly-false joviality.
Flim set the helmet down and shook out his bright red-and-white mane. He had an ambitious gleam in his eye, and a hint of malice in his voice as he spoke. “It’s done, Flam. That fountain she insisted on installing in their main atrium will spread the gift throughout the hab quite nicely.”
Flam smiled slowly. “Wonderful work, Flim. I can hardly wait to see it start to take effect within their community.”
Flim glanced over his shoulder back to the outer door, then turned back to give his brother a searching look. “I guess I still don’t see the big picture, though. Why would we give it to them? I mean, it showed us all the opportunities we’d missed out on all those years, everything it really took to finally make it ahead in the game. Why give that edge to our competitors?”
Flam shook his head. “ I thought that way once, brother, and almost ruined us. I’ve been pondering the nature of it for the last few days, and I realized something.” His smile brightened, and his eyes gleamed. “I realized that one pony with our gift will rise above the masses, will naturally gather ponies under him and lead them into prosperity, but if more than one has it, they will inevitably tear each other apart, and bring everything down around them. Set it loose in a Habitat, let the unwashed herd have the keys to ambition, and it becomes a weapon.”
“But wait… Flam, we’re not one pony, we’re two ponies.”
“Indeed...” Flam answered, shaking his head slowly. “What a pity.”
There was a sound behind Flim, which gave him just enough time to spin to face the outer door and grab for his helmet before the airlock opened. The helmet was torn from his hooves by the sudden wind before he could bring it up again, and he followed quickly after, the push of the atmosphere enough force to catapult him out of the weak gravitational pull of the asteroid.
The door slid closed behind him. The stallion in the viewscreen gave a small sigh. “Goodbye, Brother.”
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I feel for Twilight as she clearly feels the burden from her part in Equestria's downfall (still not clear what that is). I'm struggling to understand the Alicorn War but makes a bit of sense when turning to the G.Seed universe.
Good read....waiting for MOAR!!
1181684
The inspiration is Eclipse Phase. It's a slightly obscure tabletop roleplaying game that came out a few years ago, and basically is the theme of Call of Cthulhu with Transhuman and singularity issues.
More is forthcoming, and soon.
Ooh, this is a thing!
Cautiously optimistic as fuck. I love Eclipse Phase, and I wonder where you'll take this.
Also, Flim and Flam that ARE NOT Extropians? Come on.
Eclipse Phase and ponies...very interseting
1181919
OH I see. Never got to play those (or many other table tops since my youthful days of playing AD&D and Battletech. At any rate Gundam Seed has a similarity in the plot but became more of a war between people natural to Earth and those that live on the moon and surrounding space colonies. Basically conflict arises from huge technological advances and human augmentation.
As I said though...I look forward to more of this.
1181919
not as obscure as you might think. it's a wonderfuly dystopian scifi game. my gaming group plays it fairly regularly and we have YET to not have atleast one party wipe/resleeving. to see it crossed with ponies, is just awesome.
So. Does the fact that you've taken this live mean you've made some progress along that story arc?
1199907
I've kindof come to an understanding about how to do the tone of this thing, really. Most of what you pre-read is going to stand, but much more will be added and a lot of the details will change to make it better and more interesting. I think I've got a pretty solid grasp of the next ten chapters or so, and beyond that I'm still figuring some aspects out.