ROSE: All right.
ROSE: Here's what happens.
ROSE: I give the deep ones of the Furthest Ring the web address of my old LiveJournal.
ROSE: In particular, my series of posts deconstructing the first season of the Squiddles cartoon.
ROSE: Taking its cheery character designs and inane plotting at face value, while simultaneously interpreting each event as strictly concordant with the mythos of numinous horror.
ROSE: To no one's greater surprise than mine, reading my twelve year old self's overwrought prose neither baffles nor offends my ageless summoners.
ROSE: Instead, it precipitates an powerful awakening amongst our already omniscient squid monster friends.
ROSE: Somehow.
ROSE: What they had understood to be hard limits on their abilities, baked in by the very structure of Paradox Space itself, were only ever artifacts of a shared cultural metaphor. The type of lie we use as a basis for civilization.
ROSE: It is best not to dwell on the psychic toll of losing such a necessary metaphor.
ROSE: As discussed, my calling ritual should not be invoked by those disinclined to sacrifice.
ROSE: Thus.
ROSE: Lord English is the master of time, but there is no time in the domain of the outer gods.
ROSE: Unless they will it.
ROSE: Newly armed - or tentacled, if you prefer - with this knowledge, how could the day not be saved? The battle not be won?
ROSE: As a side effect of this inevitable victory, there is a shuffling of certain metaphysical walls.
ROSE: All of us are free to step into a new reality of our own creation.
ROSE: It would not occur to me or you that things could ever have been otherwise.
ROSE: And once inside...
ROSE: I don't know.
ROSE: My Sight does not extend across this final boundary.
ROSE: I might guess that we continue in whatever function we're needed to fulfill.
ROSE: To protect our universe from disease or outside attack? Provide the required maintenance to keep the galaxies moving?
ROSE: Infancy is such a delicate phase of the life cycle.
ROSE: Or maybe there's really nothing left to do.
ROSE: Maybe we find an alien world similar enough to Earth and Alternia to be culturally navigable, and we settle down in the suburbs like Greek gods in a pulp comedy series.
JOHN: that sounds hilarious.
ROSE: I would have watched it.
ROSE: Maybe we simply wake up, thirteen years old again, in our old lives, on our old world.
ROSE: The past three years blinking away like a stubborn dream.
ROSE: But I hope not.
ROSE: After everything we've experienced, I fear the Earth would be too small.
ROSE: Like going back to visit your primary school.
ROSE: It's hard to imagine the place was ever big enough to be worth your time, or could do anything but stifle you if you were forced to return.
ROSE: Personally, I hope it's something unimaginable.
ROSE: That whatever awaits us is beautiful and strange enough that it's still beyond my understanding.
ROSE: But... whatever our ultimate destination...
ROSE: We finish the great work of becoming.
ROSE: It won't be easy, or without strife and controversy.
ROSE: We have a lot of feelings and problems and undiagnosed personality defects to sort through.
ROSE: I can only hope someone in that frog gets around to inventing psychotherapy before too much blood is shed.
ROSE: But we have all the time in the worlds, and eventually... We grow up. We grow into ourselves.
ROSE: We grow into our godhood, whatever that ends up meaning.
ROSE: I'd like to guarantee that we won't grow apart from each other along the way, but let's be real.
ROSE: That's the same solemn vow made by every group of friends who meet at summer camp.
ROSE: The odds don't really back it up.
ROSE: Unless we are entirely inept as creators, our universe will contain beings interesting and complex enough to be worth knowing.
ROSE: Even the trolls managed to get us.
ROSE: So we meet new people.
ROSE: We find new causes and start new journeys.
ROSE: Become part of new stories.
ROSE: The alternative would be intolerably claustrophobic, don't you think?
JOHN: but we don't forget each other.
ROSE: No.
ROSE: We remain the touchstones in one another's lives, however many tens or tens of billions of years those lives span forward.
ROSE: We're family.
ROSE: And if that's what a happily ever after looks like...
ROSE: We live happily ever after.
ROSE: The End.