“. . .”
“What if oyaji did break it? …Never any word he found it, but never anything saying he didn’t either… But he didn’t have all this mess of crossing over dimensions either. …I don’t know how, or why it ended up spread so far… But… I take it that stone doesn’t tell anything about how it came to be broken, does it?”
And he doesn’t plan on asking it himself. Ever.
“…… Mmm, so you’re now saying, in some really weird way, that if one of us dies then things just sorta keep going and nobody realizes that a Kaito sorta… vanished? Dropped dead? Bit the dust, all that? And that ‘cause I found my Pandora, I made all of us harder to kill?
“I don’t follow that last bit. I’m the only one who has immortality. Aaaaand even then it isn’t absolute. I have at least one death condition that I’m aware of. It’s not like I’m sharing my lifeforce or whatever with all the other Kaitos.
“Also, I don’t know why I did what I did. It just sort of happened. I didn’t mean it.”
“… Not really. People would notice if, say one of us died in front of them. And if no other Kaito is sharing the universe at the time, then it’d still be noticed in world as a whole. Just the crossing over makes it more likely for there to be more than one in the same dimension.
And you attaching Pandora to yourself didn’t change anything about the rest of us. When I say ‘collective Kaitos’, I mean if we think in terms of all Kaitos as a whole. Umm… a being made up of smaller versions of itself, if you will. Killing one of its parts would make it smaller, until you completely get rid of it.
The individual versions are us without dimension crossing. The larger being is all of us together with the crossing, in terms of existence. With us together, we’re harder to be destroyed.
You using Pandora strengthened a part of the being. Not all of it, just one unit. If we all did that, the being would be impossible to kill. Never said it’d be impossible to kill the ones who use Pandora, just makes it a lot harder. It’d still be best if none of us died normally, though, immortality stone or not…
The last part… If Pandora was gone from all the worlds, there wouldn’t be any dimension crossing. Period. And no chance for ‘immortality’. You choose not to destroy it, so people still can even if all the others might be destroyed. If we all do what we set out to, you’re the one that’d still be letting people talk to alternate selves, because Pandora would still exist. It’s not entirely a good or bad thing…”
“Woah, that’s a big wall of text!”
Pandora-Kid might have lost interest there.
“Maybe breathe once in awhile so you don’t pass out in front of me. Handler wants to ask if you can break up those walls so she can follow better! Her brain has trouble reading biiiig paragraphs.”
(Hush, you.)
“So… you’re saying there’s more than one Pandora, and it’s ripping up the universes?”
“Ah… sorry.” Tends to get out of hand with rambling when a train of though catches hold.
“That’s basically it, yeah. Though, not ripping in any ‘end of the world’ type of way, just enough for some interactions to keep the chain of potential immortals going.
Think of it like how you have infinite lives in some video games, but where you have to reset to a certain point because of it. Except, instead of one person having all those lives, it’s spread infinitely though the universes. Doesn’t do much for them separately, but if they can interact with each other, the collective ‘Kaitos’ could, say, have two or three ‘lives’ in one universe.
It wouldn’t care about the individuals though, so it’d be the death of one, but if there’s more than one Kaito in the universe that happened in, then to the world, he never died. One is dead, but there’s still an existence.
Finding and using Pandora increases the resistance to death for each individual Kaito, making it even harder to get rid of all of them, and thus, granting a sort of ‘immortality’ to us.
…But that might also mean that if we all destroyed the Pandoras, then the holes would close and we wouldn’t be able to see our other selves again. …So while what you did might not have been the best of plans, situations like that might at least let us continue talking like this. It just also makes it harder to entirely get rid of the problem of people looking for it.”
flyawaythief replied to your post: “…” “…” “Don’t see him around right now~” “So,…
Pandora-Kid blinks. “But I already found it. Is there just one?”
Aahh… The magician had been half-hoping this version of himself wouldn’t speak up… Does make it harder to defend his theory. But this is fine, he’ll keep building as needed.
“…No, or else the story around it wouldn’t be known in all of the universes. If were only kept in one, it’d be unfair and would give no benefit to disrupting the universe. Why have all the ones looking for it able to cross to meet other selves when what we’re looking for wouldn’t exist in other worlds? Then everyone would converge on one and royally screw up any reality that does exist as is.
And aside from that, it’s not as though you’re entirely immortal in all senses of the word. More likely the jewel containing Pandora is different for each of the universes, and possibly the effects as well, but all of them make it harder to be killed. So the more of us that find the gem in out universes, and if we chose to use it like you did, wouldn’t it be that much harder to get rid of us entirely? Basically, it adds another level of longevity to all of us as a person collectively if we find it ourselves. On our own in universes, even with parallel selves, it could be easy to kill us, but with both the interacting between universes and the possible added benefit of magical help in surviving from the gem itself, whoever searches and successfully manages to use Pandora for each of their selves really would be nigh unkillable.”
“…”
“…”
“Don’t see him around right now~”
“So, about this new parallel dimension theory. What if it’s related to Pandora? Like, because all of us Kaitos are working towards the same goal, for the most part, in finding it, it’s caused a big enough disturbance between the worlds to allow people to visit other selves. It already supposedly grants immortality, so I don’t think anything we try to come up with is too far fetched… And I know it’s silly to base things off of books, but has anyone heard of the Chrestomanci series? They have a character – or a title carrier, more like – that is known for being a skilled magic user who can appear in parallel worlds and has nine lives. Not quite immortality, but a scary coincidence nonetheless. They also tend to be the types who want to help solve problems of the magical kind.
I’m not saying what goes on between all of our dimensions is the same, since each of us individually has one life, and whatever allows us to meet ourselves doesn’t just apply to us Kaitos. But what if the ‘immortality’ someone might get is to have all those lives between universes connected similar to this, in that there’s more than one of them, endlessly rotating through the universes, so no one could really ‘die’? Would be hard to test, especially with some of the differences between some of the worlds throwing things off already… But either way, a gem that already bends the laws of nature might have a hand in putting easy-to-pass-through holes in the universe.”
“…I don’t think you get how confusing this would be… I interact with tantei-kun in my universe, and other mes in between universes. If one of my alternate selves swaps with tantei-kun, would that mean he wouldn’t have any of the interactions with me? Or is it treated like a web, tantei-kun can have somehow interactions and memories with multiple Kaitos and remember them, even if he’s been separated from the universe he was in with me? Most interactions between the same characters are separate, but if they’re swapped within their personal universe… You really don’t get how much of a headache I can cause going through all of this…”
“Wait, how does that work? Is tantei-kun swapped with just that specific Kaito, or is it does any Kaito that wants to talk with him has to be using his body? …As one who deals with alternate universe selves, I think this is an important question. Am I him, or do I treat him as me?”
“I guess the most logical answer to that would be we somehow have different phone numbers and our telephone providers are secretly dark cults of magic, but…”
…. Well.
Ignore him, he’s just going to go look for some books on quantum theory and dimension travel. Hey, you know, maybe there was just a huge linked network of all Kaitos that were just hard wired into their phones by magical/technological/muse-mun world-encompassing accident?! Yeah!
Calling all Kaitos!
Aw man, that would be awesome.
Well, if there was an accident that connected all Kaito’s together, this one must be near the center of that accident, as much as he poked around with other selves. Possibly how they connected the lines? Meet them in person via magic gem and they’re connected to the inter-dimensional network, and maybe the phones connect though just thinking about which version they wanted to talk to?
Eh, this magician was still trying to avoid the headache from thinking to hard. Thinking about stuff at random was one thing, but it was hard to focus for too long outside of general train of thought… Though…
“Nah. Most logical would be we’re all one person who’s gone so far off the deep end that they think there’s multiple versions of themselves in different parallel universes so of course they’d all have the ability to contact each other’s phones… But that wouldn’t be as fun. I like your theory better.”
blackorgkaito replied to your post: “Wait… I do have my other self’s number… If I were…
…Holy shit, guy has a point. “Best not to think too much on it, don’t we chase magical immortality granting rocks, anyway?”
"That’s different. Magic magic and dimension magic aren’t the same. ‘Sides, don’t know if Pandora would work… Just have ta get it so the other guys can’t and they’re beaten and stuff. And even crossing between dimensions is different, because then you’re there… But how would the phones work? Because I would seriously think there’d have to be a line for that, but I don’t remember putting anything in particular… If you call the number in one dimension, it gets that one’s house, if you call in another, it gets that other dimension’s house, so…” He’s going to give himself a headache. Maybe he should stop thinking about it. Yes. Sounded better. So much.
“Wait… I do have my other self’s number… If I were to call it, would it just call my house? Is there some sort of dimension crossing extension line I have to do? I mean, I visit enough anyway, so it’s not like I need to use it, but… Can’t help but wonder…”
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