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syncopator) wrote2015-12-14 12:00 am
syncopator) wrote2015-12-14 12:00 am
[ a p p l i c a t i o n ; r u b y c i t y ]
PLAYER
Name: Emily
Age: 25
Personal Journal:revolutionary
E-mail: lonelydecember @ gmail.com
AIM/MSN/etc: spark memories @ aim
CHARACTER
Name: Dave Strider
Canon: Homestuck
Age: 16
Timeline: While flying around after some miscreant dog-god-demon-things that were making off with the corpse of one of his buddies. Right here.
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: N/A. (They'll definitely have CR overlap, but handwaving should mostly solve it.)
Personality: So you were looking for a cool dude? Super fly, always on the hippest beats, so slick you'd trip and fall down all that radness?
Then you came to the wrong guy, because Dave Strider is not a single one of those things.
Sure, Dave presents a sort of cool, ironic surface. Or at least he tries. He pulls off a pretty effective deadpan expression as much of the time as he can physically manage, trying to keep all those coolkid feathers distinctly unruffled. After all, a cool guy doesn't let even the weirdest of assholes rustle his jimmies. A cool guy rolls with the punches, out-trolls a troll, and mixes beats so vicious that enemies fall before him in waves of grist. A cool, ironic guy draws and writes extremely shitty comics and comes up with rap lyrics based on dead presidents. And sometimes - just sometimes - Dave actually manages to fill out that persona, once in a while achieving that ultra-blasé dryness that might actually, according to certain and perhaps disreputable dictionaries, pass as genuine irony.
But when it comes down to it, Dave is just not that cool or even ironic a dude. He's a huge dork who talks to himself in a constant stream about total shit, mumbles unbelievably bad rap lyrics out loud, forces an irate troll to draw tons of purple dicks, makes an ass out of himself when he wants to talk and nobody's listening, and gets super fucking ruffled when a bunch of smut puppets fall on his face. Cool is not actually his forte at all. He's dorky and sorta awkward, trying to play off any uncool moments as if they were intentional, which really just takes the awkward and elevates it to a level of funny that he didn't actually intend. He's not nearly as big a goofball as his best friend, John Egbert, but there's a reason the two of them get along. Deep down, Dave is just as much of a doofus as John is. He just channels it differently, usually by saying inappropriate shit and rambling on and on in weird, elaborate, colorful, metaphors that are always total non sequiturs and only sometimes make sense. Dave's the kind of guy that can't really stand silence and will do everything he can to fill it, even if it makes him look like an idiot. He's only really, actually cool in the moments where he is most not trying to be cool. All of his coolness is of the unintentional kind, and as soon as he realizes it, shit gets awkward and goofy all over again.
Deep down - or maybe not so deep at all, really - Dave is a painfully sincere sort of person. He cares so much about his friends and would do pretty much anything for them, including sacrifice his own life and agency as a human being - which he actually does, in the offshoot timeline where he becomes Davesprite. He passes off all that sincerity by saying it with a dead straight face, as if that will make it ironic and thus absolve him of having to own his corny emotions. But he's blunt, and honest, and when he gets mad, he gets mad. When he wants attention, he will ask for it repeatedly like a puppy pawing at your leg. And when he wants to take care of you, he'll do that, and do it well, and offer you an ear or a shoulder if you need it later. He's a true friend and almost fatalistically loyal to the people who win him over. And by almost, I mean definitely. His tendency to surrender all to save a friend is even preyed upon in canon.
JADE: you can be stubborn all you want, but i will force you to comply with her wishes one way or another
JADE: it will be quite easy actually
JADE: all i have to do is target the people you care about most
For all that Dave tries to play off or disavow all his emotions, he's actually a pretty emotional guy. He's cried on screen, so to speak, more times than you'd expect of a dude who really was as stoic as he claims to be. And when he laughs, he actually laughs, and he's not incapable of smiles, or grins, or expressions of gross shock. He's not loud about these things; Dave doesn't go in for the belly laughs or the goofy emotes or the cartoonish expressions (well, maybe in extreme cases). As much as he'd like the popular opinion to be otherwise, however, he does indeed have feelings, and they pretty much rule his actions.
Not to say that Dave is impulsive. He's a Knight of Time. No one, barring another truly adept Time player like Aradia, understands the concept of actions = consequences like Dave does. In fact, the gravity of knowing how important his decisions are, of having continuous loops rest on his shoulders where the slightest mistake will spell doom and death, has made him careful and deliberate about the courses of action he'll choose. He states himself that time manipulation is a careful balance between knowledge of what will happen and simply rolling with his gut intuition - and this principle ends up applying to pretty much every other sphere of his life. It's a heavy burden to bear, one marred by constant second-guessing and painful self-reflection. In his normal, pre-sburb life, Dave was just a teenager, a guy not prone to deep consideration and the kind of knowing, pained rumination that came to people of statuses to which he did not belong. That sort of headache was reserved for royalty, not some goddamn kid from Texas. All this thinking, the weight, the desperation and pressure of timeline maintenance, eventually soured Dave entirely on the concept of time travel. Always knowing the critical importance of his actions, being forced to be excruciatingly self-aware, drove him away from ever truly wanting to engage his time powers again. So, no, he is not impulsive. He's far more careful than someone of his ironic, brash, occasionally crass demeanor would seem to be. He knows things, and he is rarely happy for the knowing.
That's the thing about Dave. Because he does take things seriously as death, because he cares so much, he ends up bearing burdens on his shoulders he wasn't really built to handle, and his frame shudders under the pressure. The way he conceives of himself is as a teenager. As a kid. He didn't want to be a hero, and even when he was shoehorned into the role, he always disavowed it, claiming others were the heroes, but not him. His perception of that idea seems to change over time, but his commitment to it does not. He talks about engaging in "reluctant hero bullshit," and how he can have his arm twisted into it eventually, but he very seriously wants to avoid it and goes deliberately out of his way to do so, arguing with an evil dogtier space witch ad nauseam about it. It's not that Dave hates responsibilities, exactly, or always wants to shirk them. It's more like he believes the level of responsibility thrust upon him is too much, more than he can handle or wants to handle, and he basically just wants to drop it and walk away.
Despite his fierce verbal commitment to this idea, the probability of his actually doing so, especially in the clutch, is extremely low. Dave might want to be just a kid, but the fact is that he isn't just a kid anymore, and he's aware of it. He might fight his destiny, such as it seems to be, but he'll still be the hero if called upon to do so in a way he cannot refuse. He makes like Atlas and carries the world. The instant shit gets real he shapes up and ships out, snapping into form as best as he remembers how. All he needs to hear is that Jane can return Jade from the dead, and he's off like a rocket, doing what needs to be done to save his friend. He'll always do whatever needs to be done to protect the people he cares for. Three years and many dream bubbles later, that hasn't stopped being true, and no amount of bitterness has been able to tamp out the fires of loyalty and dedication that still burn inside him. It's cheesy as hell, but Dave is cheesy as hell, and his own moral codes would never allow him to just bow out if it meant other people would get hurt for the decision.
In that sense, Dave's greatest strength and greatest weakness are one and the same: his allegiance to those he cares about. He is a knight through and through, a guard and a protector, one who serves, and he won't abandon anyone who should need him. The more they need him, the more he'll do to ensure their survival and happiness. He likes to be needed. Maybe needs to be needed, because what is a knight if no one needs him? If there is nothing to guard, nothing to save or protect, then what is his point? Dave needs a purpose, though he likely doesn't realize it, or think about it in that fashion. He just knows sometimes there's shit he needs to do and he's gonna do it.
Dave is a kid. He's a teenager who likes his old ironic selfies and still thinks dead shit is cool and wants to hang out with his friends and bug them about stupid bullshit and build a can town with a mayor. He just wants to do his own thing and he hates being summoned to duty. But by the same token, he needs to be summoned to that duty, because without it he is aimless and loses sight of where he belongs and what he ought to be doing. Maybe, sometimes, that's okay. Maybe being an asshole aimless teenager is what he really wants. But it might not be what he needs. Dave might disown being a hero, but it suits him better than he'll ever admit or truly believe.
Background: Ta daaaah.
Abilities:
First Person:
look
ok
you know what
this is not cool
you cant just jack a dude from doing his ultra important civic duty of rescuing an innocent corpse from a couple of anthro doggy demons and dump him on a train in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and make with the spooky plot foreshadowing fog like shits gonna go straight silent hill and next thing i know some hellbeast is going to try and gnaw my face off or whatever happens in silent hill
seriously thats just all hells of rude
but for real
what the hell is going on here
i get that universe hopping is not an impossible feat having done it myself
but at least the first time i was aware of what was going on
this is just
i dont even know what this is
magic??
its fucking shenanigans is what it is
like it cant have been jade for obvious reasons and unless theres another teleporting dog eared spacey broad zapping people to and fro across paradox space around here i am fresh out of logical explanations for this bullshit
i have extremely important reluctant hero duties to be performing and you cant really just hit pause on that
not like the universe has a rewind button
like fuck what am i gonna say to the intergalactic blockbuster employee when he gives me the stink eye for handing him a tape thats all the way at the end of the movie so now he has to do that shit manually so the mother of five whose kids are breaking shit all over the store doesnt call corporate on him and get his ass fired
though i guess in this metaphor hed actually just get his ass dead or paradoxically deleted or something
whatever
the point is
sup
how do i get out of here
and if the answer is i cant
then where is the nearest pizza joint because if im going to be stranded in existential purgatory for some unfathomable reason that probably has something to do with more weird cosmic fuckery i cant wrap my head around
i might as well get some pizza out of it
actually while im here why not lets do a roll call
raise your hands in order children
i will only accept responses of "yo" and "sup dawg"
"here" is not a valid response and youll be marked as absent if you try to get smart with me
and "present" will get you sent straight to the slammer
if youve spoken to or seen the individuals named john egbert rose lalonde karkat vantas kanaya maryam terezi pyrope or any of their associates
please tell them to report to the principals office immediately for Serious Business
ok thanks
later
Third Person: Dave was having a pretty weird goddamn day. Getting interrupted in the middle of chasing around a couple of demon dog creatures who had carted off the dead body of one of your best friends only to wake up on a train in the middle of nowhere was pretty jarring, to put it mildly and understate the matter entirely. Especially when you couldn't abscond the train to find out what was going on and you had to cool your heels like the lamest of convicts until the ride stopped and let you off.
He did, at least, put the welsh piece of shit away. Who knew, maybe this new world or universe or dimension or wherever the fuck this was required a license to open carry ancient and powerful swords of legend. Besides, might be best not to terrify the new locals right off the bat, whoever or whatever they'd turn out to be.
So the sum total of the train ride and a lot of grousing was a be-caped teenager hanging out at the train station. Quite literally hanging, about a foot in the air, with an attitude of vague disgruntlement.
"The fuck," he muttered, running a hand over his hair. "I mean, seriously."
There was no one around to speak to. That didn't seem to bother or stop him any.
Eventually, after hovering around doing nothing for a few long and useless moments, he slowly drifted higher, apparently trying to get a better aerial view of his new digs. The obelisk became visible once he cleared a couple of rooftops, and having nowhere else to head, he began meandering over in that direction. It wasn't purposeful flying. More like floating-with-intent. He figured he might as well head for the big red beacon in the center of town that basically screamed "come here for further plot developments." He'd been embedded in game constructs for long enough to know the next destination marker when he saw it.
Arriving didn't actually trigger the next cut scene, though, and he was left simply hovering next to the structure, muttering aimlessly to himself about gem-toned historical structures of ambiguously threatening cultural value. Whatever developments were actually going to occur, they were going to have to come to him if they wanted to get the party started. Dave was annoyed and confused and sort of tired and basically cranky as fuck, and for now, at least, he wasn't going anywhere.
Name: Emily
Age: 25
Personal Journal:
revolutionaryE-mail: lonelydecember @ gmail.com
AIM/MSN/etc: spark memories @ aim
CHARACTER
Name: Dave Strider
Canon: Homestuck
Age: 16
Timeline: While flying around after some miscreant dog-god-demon-things that were making off with the corpse of one of his buddies. Right here.
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: N/A. (They'll definitely have CR overlap, but handwaving should mostly solve it.)
Personality: So you were looking for a cool dude? Super fly, always on the hippest beats, so slick you'd trip and fall down all that radness?
Then you came to the wrong guy, because Dave Strider is not a single one of those things.
Sure, Dave presents a sort of cool, ironic surface. Or at least he tries. He pulls off a pretty effective deadpan expression as much of the time as he can physically manage, trying to keep all those coolkid feathers distinctly unruffled. After all, a cool guy doesn't let even the weirdest of assholes rustle his jimmies. A cool guy rolls with the punches, out-trolls a troll, and mixes beats so vicious that enemies fall before him in waves of grist. A cool, ironic guy draws and writes extremely shitty comics and comes up with rap lyrics based on dead presidents. And sometimes - just sometimes - Dave actually manages to fill out that persona, once in a while achieving that ultra-blasé dryness that might actually, according to certain and perhaps disreputable dictionaries, pass as genuine irony.
But when it comes down to it, Dave is just not that cool or even ironic a dude. He's a huge dork who talks to himself in a constant stream about total shit, mumbles unbelievably bad rap lyrics out loud, forces an irate troll to draw tons of purple dicks, makes an ass out of himself when he wants to talk and nobody's listening, and gets super fucking ruffled when a bunch of smut puppets fall on his face. Cool is not actually his forte at all. He's dorky and sorta awkward, trying to play off any uncool moments as if they were intentional, which really just takes the awkward and elevates it to a level of funny that he didn't actually intend. He's not nearly as big a goofball as his best friend, John Egbert, but there's a reason the two of them get along. Deep down, Dave is just as much of a doofus as John is. He just channels it differently, usually by saying inappropriate shit and rambling on and on in weird, elaborate, colorful, metaphors that are always total non sequiturs and only sometimes make sense. Dave's the kind of guy that can't really stand silence and will do everything he can to fill it, even if it makes him look like an idiot. He's only really, actually cool in the moments where he is most not trying to be cool. All of his coolness is of the unintentional kind, and as soon as he realizes it, shit gets awkward and goofy all over again.
Deep down - or maybe not so deep at all, really - Dave is a painfully sincere sort of person. He cares so much about his friends and would do pretty much anything for them, including sacrifice his own life and agency as a human being - which he actually does, in the offshoot timeline where he becomes Davesprite. He passes off all that sincerity by saying it with a dead straight face, as if that will make it ironic and thus absolve him of having to own his corny emotions. But he's blunt, and honest, and when he gets mad, he gets mad. When he wants attention, he will ask for it repeatedly like a puppy pawing at your leg. And when he wants to take care of you, he'll do that, and do it well, and offer you an ear or a shoulder if you need it later. He's a true friend and almost fatalistically loyal to the people who win him over. And by almost, I mean definitely. His tendency to surrender all to save a friend is even preyed upon in canon.
JADE: you can be stubborn all you want, but i will force you to comply with her wishes one way or another
JADE: it will be quite easy actually
JADE: all i have to do is target the people you care about most
For all that Dave tries to play off or disavow all his emotions, he's actually a pretty emotional guy. He's cried on screen, so to speak, more times than you'd expect of a dude who really was as stoic as he claims to be. And when he laughs, he actually laughs, and he's not incapable of smiles, or grins, or expressions of gross shock. He's not loud about these things; Dave doesn't go in for the belly laughs or the goofy emotes or the cartoonish expressions (well, maybe in extreme cases). As much as he'd like the popular opinion to be otherwise, however, he does indeed have feelings, and they pretty much rule his actions.
Not to say that Dave is impulsive. He's a Knight of Time. No one, barring another truly adept Time player like Aradia, understands the concept of actions = consequences like Dave does. In fact, the gravity of knowing how important his decisions are, of having continuous loops rest on his shoulders where the slightest mistake will spell doom and death, has made him careful and deliberate about the courses of action he'll choose. He states himself that time manipulation is a careful balance between knowledge of what will happen and simply rolling with his gut intuition - and this principle ends up applying to pretty much every other sphere of his life. It's a heavy burden to bear, one marred by constant second-guessing and painful self-reflection. In his normal, pre-sburb life, Dave was just a teenager, a guy not prone to deep consideration and the kind of knowing, pained rumination that came to people of statuses to which he did not belong. That sort of headache was reserved for royalty, not some goddamn kid from Texas. All this thinking, the weight, the desperation and pressure of timeline maintenance, eventually soured Dave entirely on the concept of time travel. Always knowing the critical importance of his actions, being forced to be excruciatingly self-aware, drove him away from ever truly wanting to engage his time powers again. So, no, he is not impulsive. He's far more careful than someone of his ironic, brash, occasionally crass demeanor would seem to be. He knows things, and he is rarely happy for the knowing.
That's the thing about Dave. Because he does take things seriously as death, because he cares so much, he ends up bearing burdens on his shoulders he wasn't really built to handle, and his frame shudders under the pressure. The way he conceives of himself is as a teenager. As a kid. He didn't want to be a hero, and even when he was shoehorned into the role, he always disavowed it, claiming others were the heroes, but not him. His perception of that idea seems to change over time, but his commitment to it does not. He talks about engaging in "reluctant hero bullshit," and how he can have his arm twisted into it eventually, but he very seriously wants to avoid it and goes deliberately out of his way to do so, arguing with an evil dogtier space witch ad nauseam about it. It's not that Dave hates responsibilities, exactly, or always wants to shirk them. It's more like he believes the level of responsibility thrust upon him is too much, more than he can handle or wants to handle, and he basically just wants to drop it and walk away.
Despite his fierce verbal commitment to this idea, the probability of his actually doing so, especially in the clutch, is extremely low. Dave might want to be just a kid, but the fact is that he isn't just a kid anymore, and he's aware of it. He might fight his destiny, such as it seems to be, but he'll still be the hero if called upon to do so in a way he cannot refuse. He makes like Atlas and carries the world. The instant shit gets real he shapes up and ships out, snapping into form as best as he remembers how. All he needs to hear is that Jane can return Jade from the dead, and he's off like a rocket, doing what needs to be done to save his friend. He'll always do whatever needs to be done to protect the people he cares for. Three years and many dream bubbles later, that hasn't stopped being true, and no amount of bitterness has been able to tamp out the fires of loyalty and dedication that still burn inside him. It's cheesy as hell, but Dave is cheesy as hell, and his own moral codes would never allow him to just bow out if it meant other people would get hurt for the decision.
In that sense, Dave's greatest strength and greatest weakness are one and the same: his allegiance to those he cares about. He is a knight through and through, a guard and a protector, one who serves, and he won't abandon anyone who should need him. The more they need him, the more he'll do to ensure their survival and happiness. He likes to be needed. Maybe needs to be needed, because what is a knight if no one needs him? If there is nothing to guard, nothing to save or protect, then what is his point? Dave needs a purpose, though he likely doesn't realize it, or think about it in that fashion. He just knows sometimes there's shit he needs to do and he's gonna do it.
Dave is a kid. He's a teenager who likes his old ironic selfies and still thinks dead shit is cool and wants to hang out with his friends and bug them about stupid bullshit and build a can town with a mayor. He just wants to do his own thing and he hates being summoned to duty. But by the same token, he needs to be summoned to that duty, because without it he is aimless and loses sight of where he belongs and what he ought to be doing. Maybe, sometimes, that's okay. Maybe being an asshole aimless teenager is what he really wants. But it might not be what he needs. Dave might disown being a hero, but it suits him better than he'll ever admit or truly believe.
Background: Ta daaaah.
Abilities:
- Strider: Dave was raised a ninja by a ninja for future ninja'ing purposes. Because of this, he's got whip-quick reflexes and is easily the fastest player of his session, and maybe one of the fastest players overall barring other Striders. He also has the inherited Strider ability to flash step. It's like low-level teleportation, granting him the ability to instantaneously cross or close a distance of a couple feet, or at most a handful of yards. Finally, he actually knows his way around a sword, having had shitty katanas all over his apartment growing up.
- Sburb player: Being a player in a game that physically dominates and restructures the universe around you grants you some weird abilities. He is in possession of a sylladex, which uses a fetch modus, and a strife specibus. What this essentially means is that he has a hammerspace inventory he can fetch by being a tool and applying various sort methods to it. He can store and take stuff out of his sylladex pretty much from thin air. It's convenient, having your own weirdo pocket dimension/inventory that comes with you everywhere. His strife specibus details how he's able to fight and with what weapons, and he uses 1/2 bladekind, which means he basically exclusively uses broken swords. He was once in possession of plain old bladekind and can in fact wield a full sword. He's just more prone to the broken ones.
- Knight of Time: This is the big one. Dave's sburb game title is Knight of Time. This heroic title is broken into two pieces: class and aspect. His class of "knight" basically just means that he can weaponize his aspect and use it offensively or for the benefit of others. Knight is a pretty straightforward class, as you might imagine from the name. It makes him a protector and defender, and that describes perfectly the way he tends to use his powers.
His aspect is, of course, time, and that means he is a time traveler. His method of time travel is to set up a bunch of stable loops, that were already always supposed to happen, while still protecting the sanctity of the alpha timeline. What this means is that his leaps around in time are always predestined and were always already going to happen, and are all in service of preserving the main timeline in which he exists. He has no power to actually change that timeline in a meaningful fashion. If he does, the only result is an off-shoot timeline that goes nowhere and leaves anyone within it temporally stranded, worse than dead.
So, essentially: Dave is a defender and protector of time, guarding the alpha timeline and ensuring events are proceeding as they should, while employing the stable time loops necessary to do that and also to, say, win fights and game certain stock markets. As a time user/traveler, he can also defend and protect his friends by creating time loops around them, perhaps saving their lives. (See again: Davesprite, offshoot timelines, dumbasses named John Egbert, etc.) - God Tier: This is the final tier of his powers. Dave is not just a Knight of Time, but a god tier Knight of Time, which means his powers are raised to a truly ridiculous level. We haven't actually seen much demonstration of what literal godhood has done to change his powers, however, as he hasn't used them much since he was raised up to the tier. It is shown that he can independently sense the alpha timeline and is able to tell when something might be wrong. Beyond that, though, it's not clear what god tiering has done to increase his powers since he's refused to keep using them.
As a lovely little side bonus, though, god tier grants the ability to fly, so he can do that and zip around with his sweet cape.
First Person:
look
ok
you know what
this is not cool
you cant just jack a dude from doing his ultra important civic duty of rescuing an innocent corpse from a couple of anthro doggy demons and dump him on a train in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and make with the spooky plot foreshadowing fog like shits gonna go straight silent hill and next thing i know some hellbeast is going to try and gnaw my face off or whatever happens in silent hill
seriously thats just all hells of rude
but for real
what the hell is going on here
i get that universe hopping is not an impossible feat having done it myself
but at least the first time i was aware of what was going on
this is just
i dont even know what this is
magic??
its fucking shenanigans is what it is
like it cant have been jade for obvious reasons and unless theres another teleporting dog eared spacey broad zapping people to and fro across paradox space around here i am fresh out of logical explanations for this bullshit
i have extremely important reluctant hero duties to be performing and you cant really just hit pause on that
not like the universe has a rewind button
like fuck what am i gonna say to the intergalactic blockbuster employee when he gives me the stink eye for handing him a tape thats all the way at the end of the movie so now he has to do that shit manually so the mother of five whose kids are breaking shit all over the store doesnt call corporate on him and get his ass fired
though i guess in this metaphor hed actually just get his ass dead or paradoxically deleted or something
whatever
the point is
sup
how do i get out of here
and if the answer is i cant
then where is the nearest pizza joint because if im going to be stranded in existential purgatory for some unfathomable reason that probably has something to do with more weird cosmic fuckery i cant wrap my head around
i might as well get some pizza out of it
actually while im here why not lets do a roll call
raise your hands in order children
i will only accept responses of "yo" and "sup dawg"
"here" is not a valid response and youll be marked as absent if you try to get smart with me
and "present" will get you sent straight to the slammer
if youve spoken to or seen the individuals named john egbert rose lalonde karkat vantas kanaya maryam terezi pyrope or any of their associates
please tell them to report to the principals office immediately for Serious Business
ok thanks
later
Third Person: Dave was having a pretty weird goddamn day. Getting interrupted in the middle of chasing around a couple of demon dog creatures who had carted off the dead body of one of your best friends only to wake up on a train in the middle of nowhere was pretty jarring, to put it mildly and understate the matter entirely. Especially when you couldn't abscond the train to find out what was going on and you had to cool your heels like the lamest of convicts until the ride stopped and let you off.
He did, at least, put the welsh piece of shit away. Who knew, maybe this new world or universe or dimension or wherever the fuck this was required a license to open carry ancient and powerful swords of legend. Besides, might be best not to terrify the new locals right off the bat, whoever or whatever they'd turn out to be.
So the sum total of the train ride and a lot of grousing was a be-caped teenager hanging out at the train station. Quite literally hanging, about a foot in the air, with an attitude of vague disgruntlement.
"The fuck," he muttered, running a hand over his hair. "I mean, seriously."
There was no one around to speak to. That didn't seem to bother or stop him any.
Eventually, after hovering around doing nothing for a few long and useless moments, he slowly drifted higher, apparently trying to get a better aerial view of his new digs. The obelisk became visible once he cleared a couple of rooftops, and having nowhere else to head, he began meandering over in that direction. It wasn't purposeful flying. More like floating-with-intent. He figured he might as well head for the big red beacon in the center of town that basically screamed "come here for further plot developments." He'd been embedded in game constructs for long enough to know the next destination marker when he saw it.
Arriving didn't actually trigger the next cut scene, though, and he was left simply hovering next to the structure, muttering aimlessly to himself about gem-toned historical structures of ambiguously threatening cultural value. Whatever developments were actually going to occur, they were going to have to come to him if they wanted to get the party started. Dave was annoyed and confused and sort of tired and basically cranky as fuck, and for now, at least, he wasn't going anywhere.