Three

You are making your way back to your house after an intense battle/manslaughter to tell your friends about it before you decide against it. Come to think of it, if there aren't any other monsters running around, it might just be pointlessly unpleasant for them to know about it.

> BBread: Ponder card game mechanics

It's pretty interesting to you the way that the Concept you used helped you in battle. You wonder what Oddity's cards can do.

> Oddity: Wonder what your cards can do

As much as you appreciate the correlation, you have no need to wonder. The Concept you have active now is perhaps your favorite in your collection: the Superposition card. This Concept allows you to literally be in multiple places at once. You still have to go there manually, but you can superposition yourself into three Channels, each with a third of your strength as according to the Caveat. It is a very powerful and unique Concept, and can be applied to many situations outside of battle.

To demonstrate this, you will act two different things you need to do at the same time.

> Oddity: Superposition

You activate the Concept card, and begin to walk towards both of your tasks; two Channels towards the closet, and one towards your computer. The Red Channel begins to respond to an Affiliate, while the Blue and Green now stand in front of your apartment's closet.

Green/Blue Oddity: Open

You do so. Immediately after doing so, you are buried under an egriegous mass of Plushies. You took most of your strength here because you knew this would happen and that you would probably need to clean this up later.

> Emerge and scream

Using the two thirds of your usual strength you have, you flourish from the depths of plushie rump and also yell. Red Oddity looks at you with brief concern, blinks, and then continues typing.

> Examine egregious plushies

You grab two plushies, then superposition a flipper and grab a third. One is a generic depiction of a Skitty. You think it's a bit odd that off-worlders find practically everyone here cute in some way, but you somehow chose to buy this nontheless.

Now this one you do actually remember getting, back in 20XX. The X's are Notlandish numerals, though, of which only X is used in modern times because it looks cool. Not that saying that clarifies a definite time since each planet moved around their original stars at different speeds so everyone thinks a year is different and a growing number of people have been trying to standardize time measurements so it won't matter soon anyway since that won't stop being high on society's priorities any time soon.

It's an abnormally long housecat.

The last one is whoops this isn't actually a plushie. It is instead an old Engineering Project you gave up on a while ago. Turns out simulating a tiny planet is a bit harder than making a rock float mid-air in a jar.

> Oddity: extravagant plushie juggling

You decide to take a minute to practice your Foolery act since nothing will happen anytime soon that would render such performances irrelavant. You inflate three small Bubble Balloons with your ridiculous, fleshy clown nose and place each item you are holding in them. This has no bearing on the bubbles' physical properties for secret reasons you will only think about later. In the mean time, you begin juggling the balloons with your two flipper fin things, the motion being more natural to a clown-aligned species such as yourself.

Though you start with just two fins juggling three objects, you soon Superposition another arm, and another shortly after, adding another bubble balloon each time. You see your own facepainted visage in the reflections passing by. After continuing enough for the audience to take that in, you throw all five bubbles behind you, and they burst in unison as you take a bow.

> Okay now think about secret reasons

Ah, the Inner Machinations of the Conflictedly Named Things has been a secret well kept universally and exclusivly among the pinnepedal Aquafae, and long kept as well. It has baffled biologists, doctors, aerodynamics specialists, and everyone else for generations, and many have simply chosen to focus efforts on literally anything else. Not everyone of your kind agrees with this, but not a single one has brought themselves to metaphorically pull the also metaphorical trigger.

This lie is perpetuated purely because nobody knowing how it works is really funny. It will be more hilarious when everyone finds out, but the ammount of hilariousness will constantly expand until then, when it slips and the laughter of thousands of pinnepedal fools shakes the earth. Or rather the four earths, as of over a decade ago. Such is the tale of the Vast Joke.

The secret reasons they so covet? Popplio and Brionne like and unlike yourself respectively possess a small fraction of the Fairy-type Acuity at the disposal of your / their final form, Primarina, which can be put to use in manipulating bubbles of nasal clown fluid. This won't quite be a scientific revolution to anyone; it will merely be tacked on to the list of features consistant across your Evolutionary Line. Nothing is lost by witholding this information, nothing is gained by letting it be known, and no-one will derive enjoyment from this but you.

What's this? Your Red Channel is standing next to you. He seems to be ready to Collapse Into a Definite State - which is really just merging into one physical entity again.

> Oddity: Collapse

You kinda just... step into each other and start moving in unison again. Less akwardly than the elipsis would imply, though, since you do this every time you have multiple things to do.

Because you are all literally the same person, you now know the contents of the chats you just had, but you leave them on screen for a bit just so the reader can see them. You are a natural performer, after all.

That was alarming.

Those weren't as long as you expected. What could've occupied Red you so much as to stay on the computer for so long?

Ah, it must've been this Writing Project he/you opened. It looks the same as a month ago. Maybe you should finally get around to posting that.

First, though, you have to send something to your CreepilyCarbonaceus friend. And to do that, you have to arm your transport device. Well, not you personally. You know very well not to try that again.

> Oddity: Contact local clowns to arm device still unseen

You open the Northern Aunova Aquafae Syndicate, which you use to communicate with at least vaguely nearby members of the Popplio Evolutionary Line. That group is rather exclusive, as most prefer tropical climates as opposed to landlocked cities. This is especially true during the summertime. Which it is not, obviously. It's winter.

> Go to door, greet the guest

You go to the door of your apartment, but there is no guest to be found. Not that you expected one here; the device can only reach the other planets on the roof.

> Oddity: Ascend to the highest point in the building

You exit your apartment and begin walking down the hall to the elevator. You suppose during this downtime you could...

> Be CreepilyCarbonaceus (sic)

A young

...

You reached the elevator before you switched grammatical person.

You suppose you could try again on your ride on the elevator.

> Oddity: do that

A young, perhaps adolescent

Nevermind, it happened again. You still need to reach the roof through the stairs at the end of the hall, though. Maybe, if you do away with the Hussnasty prose, you can really

> Be CC

Lil guy in a actual hole is expecting something to land on his roof sometime between five minutes to five days from now, and since the echo command needs to happen to get this going, what do you think will be written in the recipient box of this package?

> Echo name

Your name is Oddity because you were just too fast on those stairs, man. Now that you're on the roof, though, you can behold the ISPTD before you.

Oddity: Behold

It is a cold winter afternoon, a sharp breeze gliding across your face. Before you stands the mechanism you spoke of, the Collossal Catapult. It takes up the bulk of the space on the roof, with enough machinegirth alone to send something flying all the way across the Celestial Ring. It seems that AssailAffiliate user TitaniumArtisan has just finished arming it, and is already approaching CornutousGladiator's house at rapid pace.

> Oddity: Put something in the catapult

You open your Hyperjournal to list off its contents. The Harborcarts contain a Raspberry Heirphone, a few Candy Wrappers You Haven't Done Anything With Yet, and a Trihorn which you are Still Trying to Figure Out the Proper Usage Of since you Have No Fingers.

> Do the horn

You don't think the Trihorn would survive the fall without some overzealous packaging, plus you still intend to use it once you decipher how a pinneped is supposed to operate it. You'll need to find something that could survive the inter-/super-planetary trip on its own since you don't feel like wrapping that up.

But to do that, you'll need to go back downstairs. And then back up.

END THREE