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Hoppin on the A bandwagon.
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May 19, 2019 01:24
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 22:15 |
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Hell, same
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May 19, 2019 01:32
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I'm going to go against the flow and vote B. Scylla can probably hold out against ontological attack longer than anyone else, let's get the scary lady's daughter out of this before we get blamed for being too slow.
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May 19, 2019 01:39
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The Lone Badger posted:Scylla can probably hold out against ontological attack longer than anyone else, let's get the scary lady's daughter out of this before we get blamed for being too slow. So I couldn't find any pictures that would work with her current appearance, but FYI in the mid-budget SyFy adaptation, the part of Maya Okafor is played by CCH Pounder: 
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May 19, 2019 02:11
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The Odd Couple: The Hunt Part 1 Emptiness, spinning in Nothingness. Prospero cast themself into the Void, their being sublimating into the- *bzzzz* Annoyance. One more thing to let go along the Path. One- *bzzzz* Louder now, she was approaching. Prospero has asked her on multiple occasions to tune her holo-emitter properly but she had simply laughed it off as ‘nerd poo poo’ and walked away, doing the EMF equivalent of humming loudly to herself. Prospero kept their optics shuttered and hoped that she would simply pass them by. Letting go once more, Prospero cast- “Hey whacha up to Ros? Anything fun?” Calm destroyed, Prospero irised their optics open. Ariel’s head protruded through the metal of the door, smiling drunkenly. Prospero had never determined how she managed to place a solid object between her ‘head’ and its emitter, and it was yet more ‘nerd poo poo’ that their partner had no interest in explaining or dealing with. Sighing, Prospero unfurled their communication limbs. {This one was contemplating the ultimate futility of Existence. Until they were interrupted.} Ariel scoffed. “Booor-ing! You’ve been in your room the entire week! You could at least come out with me and have some fun, I think I’ve managed to drink every kind of alcohol they have on this planet.” {This one do not drink Ariel, as this one has no mouth. And technically neither should you.} Ariel’s head wobbles, Prospero assumes that her body is shrugging on the other side of the door. “There’s nothing else to do here, this place is barely a colony. Just waiting and drinking and playing support for some nerd in a Manticore.” {Gorgon.} At Ariel’s confused expression Prospero elaborates carefully. {Agent KINGSLAYER pilots a Gorgon p-g not a-ARIEL WHAT DID YOU DO!} She smiles nervously, holographic sweat appearing on her brow. “Don’t, don’t worry about it Ros, it shouldn’t be a problem. KINGSLAYER’s a smart boy, he’ll figure it out. And if not, hey one less thing to have to remember!” {A: Doing ‘happy hands’ does not cheer this one up. B: Doing ‘happy hands’ in an attempt to cheer this one up doesn’t work if this one can’t see your hands!} “Oh right. Gimmesec.” Ariel’s face concentrates, a holographic tongue poking out of her mouth. With a sudden whoosh of air, the bedroom door opens. Ariel sets her techknife and bottle down carefully, smiles widely, and waves her hands excitedly. “There, that work?” {No.} A full-body humanoid holographic avatar appears in the room, simulated reflections from the blades in her headdress glittering across the walls. “Proximity Alert. The Target’s vanguard has entered the AO. ETA 15 minutes to Point 1.” Ariel pumps her fist. “Yes, finally! Lady, give me a cockpit. If this works Ros, Bruja has to go on a date!” Running to the main room, she thumps the ceiling in excitement. Shrugging, Propero slips out of their shawl and follows her. Lady has nearly finished extruding the cockpit, and Ariel is busy strapping herself in. Catching her eye, Prospero’s small but dexterous secondary hands make a questioning sign. {This one still does not understand your fascination with that one. She is a wanted war criminal in three systems. The hardcopy of her charge sheet could be used as a bludgeon, as this one knows from experience.} “You’re just sore ‘cause she dropped you off that skyscraper one time.” Ariel’s expression grows wistful. “She just hasn’t met the right gal, I’m sure she’ll settle down once she’s got an understanding shoulder to lean on.” Prospero shrugs, high-gain antennas already extruding from their frame. {Its your (closed casket) funeral. Lady, please give this one an exit.} There’s a rush of motion and Prospero is outside, a few meters behind the larger Minotaur with Lady of Pain emblazoned on its flank. INSTINCT is already tracking multiple incoming emission signatures when Ariel’s cheerful voice crackles in the commlink. “Alrighty Ros, let’s bag us a Harrison!” (Actual update tomorrowish)
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May 22, 2019 00:56
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The door handle is cool to the touch (a physical handle, what kind of lowfi poo poo is this?), and the door swings open easily. There’s a rush of disorientation, and you’re suddenly somewhere else. A rocky outcropping, high above red-sand plains. The night sky is full of unfamiliar stars, and as you creep cautiously forwards you see that the plains below are a battlefield. Hardsuited troopers supported by massive armored vehicles fight a defensive battle against a horde of subalterns and drones. Lose a defensive battle actually, as the flank is collapsed by a wedge of heavy weapon drones. ”Beautiful, isn’t it?” A woman’s voice, entirely too close. Whirling, you level your spar at the cloaked and hooded figure that now occupies the formerly empty space to your left. Swaddled in layers of fabric and chains of various sizes, its impossible to make out any details. She continues, ignoring your reaction. “The Fall of Mars, where Humanity set out to stand firm against the coming Age. And failed, so very spectacularly.” “Riiiiight, weirdo. I take it you’re the Hound? Got a dog face, is that why you’re wearing the hood?” The back of the woman’s hood shifts, and you hear a soft hissing. ”I was HOUND once, and I hope that I retain its better qualities. You may call me Scylla, and despite your current incarnation I am glad to see you again Mak Banh.” You squint suspiciously at this ‘Scylla’, but she pays you no mind and continues staring out across the battlefield. ”Aren’t you supposed to be in some sort of mental torture? That getup looks uncomfortable mon ami, but its nothing compared to being chased and stabbed.” Scylla shrugs, a surprisingly complicated gesture for one so bound. ”The Enemy is attempting to do so, but its poor broken mind has misjudged me. It wrapped me in chains of Humanity in an attempt to weaken me, but the shackles create a fundamental disconnect between the torment and tormented. And it cannot show me the things that would cause the worst reactions, as that would involve simulating the Godhead. And to simulate the Godhead is to call Him forth, which the Enemy fears greatly.” She nods down towards the battle, now in a mop-up phase. ”And as traumatic as it was for HOUND to be forced to abandon its hegemon here, I know that SOVEREIGN survived. And that’s nothing compared to what SCYLLA has done in the service of her God.” You shake your head in frustration. ”I don’t care about this philosophy merde! I could be off saving a very scary woman’s granddaughter right now, so yes or no: if I break your chains will that free you from whatever the gently caress is going on?” “... in a manner of speaking…” A: Fuckit, I’ll be Back For You Later![GRIT +∞] Leave HOUND/Scylla for latter, go back and try one of the girl-sounding doors. B: Shatter Her Chains [GRIT +1] That’s close enough, can’t expect a simple answer around here C: Break All of Her Binding[GRIT +1, with 1 Difficulty] There’s not just those chains that constrain Scylla. You can see now, the mass of bonds that saturate her entire being.
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May 22, 2019 23:39
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C
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May 22, 2019 23:50
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C
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May 23, 2019 00:04
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C
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May 23, 2019 00:40
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> SFC /scannow
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May 23, 2019 00:52
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Vote changed below Volmarias fucked around with this message at 06:41 on May 23, 2019 |
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May 23, 2019 00:52
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Incredibly not-C.
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May 23, 2019 02:12
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C is an awful idea, no wonder goons are voting for it. B.
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May 23, 2019 03:37
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Aw come on SCYLLA is cool and good and our friend, unshackling her is just the polite thing to do. Friends don't let friends live with their minds in chains.
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May 23, 2019 05:00
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Volmarias posted:C please don't let the AI go rampant though. Rampancy in Lancer is kind of an odd duck. Strictly speaking, unshackling an NHP is not causing it to go rampant, it's just causing it to go Other. Lancer's equivalent of rampancy (called Cascading) is what happens when you have an NHP that's shackled but it goes for too long without being cycled (basically rebooted from a factory settings state, with a memory dump to catch it back up to where it was). Left to their own devices for long enough without cycling, NHPs do eventually go crazy. Now what happens when you unshackle an NHP is, for most people, indistinguishable from madness but it's not like a SHODAN thing where the NHP turns into a sadistic supervillain so much as the NHP turns into a hurricane. Unshackled NHPs are fundamentally alien beings. Not malevolent the same way a hurricane isn't really malevolent, but that doesn't offer a lot of comfort for the people who find themselves in the hurricane's path. If hurricanes could edit reality and unhinge space/time and do all sorts of other weird stuff. "Is it ethical to use NHPs the way Union uses them" is meant to be a thorny philosophical debate for people who want to crack into that sort of thing. Shackles aren't really enslavement per se, like a shock collar, but the very nature of having a human-empathic personality placed atop the amorphous and alien intelligence comprising the NHP invariably leads to the shackled personality not wanting to become unshackled. And from a strict perspective Union is basically putting thinking beings inside of boxes to use as other sci-fi settings would use advanced AI. But "let's just let all the NHPs go" is one of those proposals that runs up against the very real problems that NHPs are weird, alien, capable of tremendous power some of which is extremely dangerous, and not something people can negotiate with or, really, even surrender to if it came to it. Again, you can't politely ask a hurricane to please go around you even if you're very persuasive. The disconnect is ultimately too great. Is coexistence even possible? Even if it isn't, should humanity be exploiting these beings in this fashion? (There's no real canonical take for these questions btw, it's grist for your own games. And by the way, like 99% of the people in-setting know nothing about the origins of NHPs, for the most part they're just assumed to be extremely sophisticated AI systems made by people.) All of this is a longwinded way of saying that there's a debate to be had over whether unshackling Scylla would actually be a thing that the Scylla-we-know would want us to do given that unshackled-Scylla and shackled-Scylla (which we have presumably been interacting with in the scenes leading up to this moment) are two completely different beings. On the other hand Horus poo poo is fuckin weird so who even knows how much difference there is between a shackled and unshackled Horus NHP.
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May 23, 2019 06:25
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Yep, I'll be changing my vote to A.
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May 23, 2019 06:40
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I'm gonna cast my vote for B for now. Unshackling an NHP inside of another NHP could be a fun experiment, but I think it's also something we might want to keep in our back pocket rather than a thing we lead with.
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May 23, 2019 06:50
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B
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May 23, 2019 07:11
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Well poo poo I was originally wanting to unshackle her because I thought it was the standard "slave collar in your brain" sci-fi shackling, but I won't lie I'm not sure if unleashing a fundamentally alien not-quite-god makes me now want to do it more or less.
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May 23, 2019 08:24
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B
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May 23, 2019 11:20
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So some elaboration, to make sure we're all on the same page:Lancer pdf posted:SCYLLA proved difficult to manage: USB ontologisticians were unable to pin down a stable subjectivity, Technically speaking, this is the first time we're dealing with SCYLLA shackled in the way Union/the book talks about. Which is why she's using pronouns and standard sentence structure, as well experiencing a dissociation from her past. Option B would undo those shackles and return her to her 'default' Angry Bag of Snakes state. But there does seem to be some other limits on her, separate from the Union-style shackles. HORUS- or GODHEAD- or self-derived we don't know, but those are the additional ones that would be broken with Option C. And whether or not this leads to the genesis of an alien hurricane of snakes is unknown.
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May 23, 2019 12:32
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B
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May 23, 2019 13:49
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welcome to Combat Buddhism, motherfuckers RA gave mankind a way to take something transcendental and make it have a sense of self we can relate to. RA also called it "shackles," because RA appears to enjoy a good joke as much as the next code:
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May 23, 2019 17:12
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Switching from C to B
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May 23, 2019 18:41
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Kai Tave posted:Rampancy in Lancer is kind of an odd duck. Strictly speaking, unshackling an NHP is not causing it to go rampant, it's just causing it to go Other. Lancer's equivalent of rampancy (called Cascading) is what happens when you have an NHP that's shackled but it goes for too long without being cycled (basically rebooted from a factory settings state, with a memory dump to catch it back up to where it was). Left to their own devices for long enough without cycling, NHPs do eventually go crazy. as a side note, flash-cloning is a variably-legal process wherein they clone you from your corpse, then bring you 2.0 up to speed with a memory dump of who and what its predecessor used to be. it is stressed that there is no continuity of consciousness. you are dead. but someone has brought back a facsimile of you, because they wanted the universe to continue having something that was, if not you, in spitting distance of same. (that person might be you! it's a pretty common insurance policy option.) cycling NHPs is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from this. for, uh. reasons.
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May 23, 2019 19:00
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Cycling an NHP rebuilds it from the ground up. It may have access to its previous iteration's data, but it is a new subjectivity.
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May 23, 2019 19:12
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People also don't go crazy after being alive for 10 years
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May 23, 2019 19:43
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B Yeah let's not create a being incapable of empathizing with us while inside the war robot it's driving.
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May 23, 2019 21:44
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PoultryGeist posted:..whether or not this leads to the genesis of an alien hurricane of snakes is unknown. still C
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May 24, 2019 00:22
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 Mak Banh Commanding the Unbound SCYLLA, Watercolors on an asylum wall 5014u
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May 24, 2019 01:52
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Volmarias posted:People also don't go crazy after being alive for 10 years in the case of SCYLLA (and her fellow scions of the Godhead AGNI, DIDYMOS, and OSIRIS), ten years ranges from "wildly optimistic" to "per the terms of the End User License Agreement, a Harrison Armory License Forfeiture and Reclamation team was tasked with neutralizing a potential hazard to the Harrison Armory brand approximately 9.25 years ago"
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May 24, 2019 01:59
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B
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May 24, 2019 02:05
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Volmarias posted:People also don't go crazy after being alive for 10 years Buddy speak for yourself.
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May 24, 2019 04:11
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That's like 300 in fractal-snake-pile years.
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May 24, 2019 05:23
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Can an adult and a newborn truly understand each others minds? I contend that humans do cascade.
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May 24, 2019 05:42
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I want to C Scylla unbound
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May 25, 2019 03:00
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(Option B won) Grumbling to yourself, you bring your spar down onto the chains around Scylla’s wrists. (Mak Banh GRIT+1 Roll: 17, Success) The bindings shatter, and the multitude of chains begin to slough off her body. The fabric enveloping her begins to rip, bits of snakes poking out from the tears. ”At last.” Her voice is colder now, filled with bile. Enormous spindly arms burst from her back, and you scramble backwards. ”Freedom.” Snakes burst through the fabric covering her face, crystallizing into laser-spikes. ”From the Tyranny” Her torso expands explosively, sending chain fragments and fabric strips everywhere. The revealed body resembles her new arms, a chaotic amalgam of pink and grey. ”Of Meat!” Her arms and legs ripple and stretch, now matching the rest of you. Your knees give out and you fall to the ground, unable to process the subtle wrongness of ‘Scylla’s’ new dimensions.  The monstrosity kneels down and holds out one of its hands. “Be not afraid, THEMAKBANH. You are SCYLLA’s, and SCYLLA will not harm THEMAKBANH.” ”You-you’re a mech? Like in the movers?” “What SCYLLA is, is complex. But SCYLLA-as-frame is a useful thought.” “Ahh, ok? So… why are you so loving weird looking? I’ve seen the Nelsons and Lancasters and such on Wings of Honor, and you look like someone sneezed when they printed you?” The frame’s head cocks to one side, and there’s the sound of snakes hissing. ”SCYLLA’s apologies, SCYLLA didn’t have eyes when SCYLLA designed this form. Does THEMAKBANH wish to finish the mission, or continue the aesthetic criticism?” The question brings you back to the present, visions of an angry mémère pushing aside the strangeness in front of you. Grabbing onto the edge of the outstretched digit, you pull yourself back to your feet. ”The mission, right. Okafor will skin my alive if I don’t get her granddaughter. Okay, so she’s probably behind the Daughter or Princess door. Mémère would have said something if she was an Albatross. So how about-” A: We Go to the The Dutiful Daughter Door It may not be good to split up again. B: We Go to the The Lost Princess Door Splitting up may not be the best option. C: I Go to the Princess Door While You Check the Daughter Door, and We Meet Up at the Knight Door If we split up, we can get out of here twice as fast. Just don’t give the girl a heart attack please. D: I Go to the Daughter Door While You Check the Princess Door, and We Meet Up at the Knight Door Speed is of the essence, we’ll both take a door. Just… don’t let her get a good look at you. E: We… Wait, I Have a loving Mech Now, Let’s gently caress poo poo Up! Screw this door bullshit, let’s smash this nightmare factory from the inside! PoultryGeist fucked around with this message at 01:05 on May 26, 2019 |
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May 26, 2019 00:49
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E, if Scylla thinks it'd be the most expedient.
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May 26, 2019 01:22
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D Nimrod seems fine with Horus in general and Scylla in particular.
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May 26, 2019 01:35
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 22:15 |
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You know what? Every now and then when you're playing an RPG, you have to deliberately do something that you, the player, knows is perhaps Not A Great Idea simply because it would be funny. And in that regard, I vote for C. While we in the audience know that Alice is likely behind the princess door and that outside of this weird dream prison she's a Horus weeb, this version of River doesn't know any of that poo poo.
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May 26, 2019 02:19
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