ROUTE 2: INTERMISSION 1 PART 2: VAPORIN AND THE CONTAINED CITY

Time was not a word that Vaporin cared much for. At best it could be viewed as a constraint, a device once created to give an orderly impression of a world that was no longer relevant.

It was an antiquated and cowardly concept that had been made meaningless a long time ago.

His own bond with Arma showed as much, where perception could be altered so that time appeared to stand still, and yet time was still mostly viewed as natural law, even by those who could bend it to their will.

Vaporin favored the word sequence much more. While time moved in a straight line the only thing straight about sequence was the pure fatality of one thing leading to another.

Counting the ticks and turns of change, forcefully applying them to a straight narrative, essentially making them equal to the rules of a ruler used for measurement, seemed almost perverse in a universe where the only constant was the lack of consistency.

Sequence, on the other hand, could not be avoided. Conceptual reality be damned, there would still always be sequence. Even when events were made undone by the whims of the wind, there was still sequence. At one point, at this moment, something happened. At some point something was undone… but it still happened, it was still there.

Reality wasn't kind enough to let its inhabitants truly forget its mistakes.

A lifetime lived in a single moment, one single moment accounting for an entire lifetime.

He himself had lived for far too long, once you knew, once you understood, age was nothing of importance, just another aspect of personhood to be managed.

And yet, as he solemnly gazed upon the glass orb placed on the pedestal before him, he felt old.

(Vaporin: I still can't believe that used to be me. Such a petty little man, punishing everyone around him equally, whatever crimes they had truly committed.)

It was something akin to the snow globes of old times, an image captured inside a spherical glass surface, a reminder of how things used to be.

Inside of the orb there was a city made out of lights and darkness. Deep shadows cast from fluorescent neon and high-rise skyscrapers. The old and ancient, the modern world before profanation had tainted everything.

It was the hubris of old men, the hubris he had equally partaken in.

(Vaporin: Nevertheless… you came along to free me from my misunderstandings.)

The burning red apparition could not help but to smile at the glass surface, speaking to it as if it contained people able to respond.

(Vaporin: I still remember when this lighthouse was a prison, how could I forget? An eternity in captivity, time losing its meaning, as it always does.)

A multitude of lights shone from the contained city, a pocket-universe of sort, even though it was frozen in time. Or lacking further sequence.

(Vaporin: And here you are replaying your life in some trinket, my very own prisoner. Although I wonder if you would have felt that way if you knew? Without this globe you would have seized to be long ago, as dissolved as that angel Thyone was as the tides of change turn.)

But that was not true, was it? He was the sequence, the consequence, the results of those actions taken long ago.

(Vaporin: I have never forgotten you, even though you would never accept that I felt this way... and you are a part of my greatest creation.)

It had been a self-indulgence, the imaginings of a man starved for power and influence, but even such a narcissistic phantasm could be overthrown, deservedly so, just as the gods deserved to die.

(Vaporin: You won… but what does it amount to? Nothing as long as these constraints remain for all of us. Don't you worry… What you gave to me won't be wasted.)

~ ~ ~