"You're fictional and a figment of my imagination. Or if you're real you live in a universe that's had superheroes since the wild west. Statistically speaking, your chances of getting splashed with mutagenic chemical waste, getting bitten by a radioactive spider, or, at the very least, needing to be saved from falling debris in a superhero fight are ridiculously high. Everyone in your world has latent potential for metahuman powers because cosmic beings experimented on humanity back when humanity was young. Your entire world - and even species of human - was engineered for weirdness, even if you're real and it wasn't engineered that way as just fiction."
Abed's hands were still over his eyes as if he was hoping that if he spent enough time not looking at everything that it would go away.
"I'm just a guy from Colorado and in my world, there are no superheroes and no magic, getting bitten by a radioactive spider just gives you a necrotic skin infection, and getting splashed with chemical waste just gives you cancer. Bad premises happen but they're car accidents, war injuries, strokes, cancer, terrorist attacks. Nobody gets great power and great responsibility. No one has to save the world."
And he'd wanted to. He'd always wanted to. He'd wanted all that to be real - and he still did - but this was too tempting. Even after escaping the illusions of earlier, he didn't trust this. This felt like the dream that the other dream had been in, in a dream within a dream.
The fact he wanted it to be real so badly was the reason it was a bad idea to accept that it was.
"I want this to be real - even if it's a stupid premise. I've always wanted things like this to be real. Fiction always made more sense than reality. It has structure, it has rules. It was usually better than things really were. That's why I can't trust this."
It wasn't even that he didn't understand what was going on. He did. He already did even if he didn't know the specific macguffin that had to be dropped into a volcano, or the specific villain that had to be fought with his new superpowers.
He knew how these stories worked.
He was just pretty much terrified that it was all just in his head.
no subject
Abed's hands were still over his eyes as if he was hoping that if he spent enough time not looking at everything that it would go away.
"I'm just a guy from Colorado and in my world, there are no superheroes and no magic, getting bitten by a radioactive spider just gives you a necrotic skin infection, and getting splashed with chemical waste just gives you cancer. Bad premises happen but they're car accidents, war injuries, strokes, cancer, terrorist attacks. Nobody gets great power and great responsibility. No one has to save the world."
And he'd wanted to. He'd always wanted to. He'd wanted all that to be real - and he still did - but this was too tempting. Even after escaping the illusions of earlier, he didn't trust this. This felt like the dream that the other dream had been in, in a dream within a dream.
The fact he wanted it to be real so badly was the reason it was a bad idea to accept that it was.
"I want this to be real - even if it's a stupid premise. I've always wanted things like this to be real. Fiction always made more sense than reality. It has structure, it has rules. It was usually better than things really were. That's why I can't trust this."
It wasn't even that he didn't understand what was going on. He did. He already did even if he didn't know the specific macguffin that had to be dropped into a volcano, or the specific villain that had to be fought with his new superpowers.
He knew how these stories worked.
He was just pretty much terrified that it was all just in his head.