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Post by Grigori on May 16, 2015 5:49:37 GMT
Even watching is one of the things that is guarded against, but the Gauntlet is a better defence against large violations than small ones. Looking through a tiny pinhole at a tiny part of the world can work; that's how the Forum is able to get through. Looking on the scale of the entire world at once will hit the Gauntlet, and will provoke a Response. Bandwidth is the limiting factor; things as complicated as minds will not be allowed to pass without some opposition.
The beings that will Respond to a major breach are likely to respond by attempting to smite whatever is provoking the Response. If the being in question declines to be smote, they will respond as they will to the stuff their rivals do... re: extremes of malice and pettiness. This includes attempting to destroy things in the universe controlled by the interloper, and attempting to instantiate destructive things in said universe.
I judge that the Keeper is probably more omnipotent than the nasty things that claim the World of Darkness, but not by enough to completely ignore them while doing her thing. They are powerful enough to persistently be extremely annoying to her, and will do so in response to provocations, unless she puts up barriers of a sort that will also impede her own ability to interact with things in the World of Darkness, or actively seizes full control over the World of Darkness as a domain from its current holders.
Think of the archetypal mythology of a god of creation that can make any amount of arbitrary things immediately, and a god of destruction that can instantly unmake them just as quickly as they are made. These are beings on a similar order as the Keeper; they're just not as smart, and have the same supply of power in a number of hands instead of invested in one figure.
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Post by Kit on May 16, 2015 7:38:06 GMT
(The keeper can connect to Nest just fine.)
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Post by lurkingkobold on May 16, 2015 8:26:06 GMT
It occurs to me that it might come up as relevant that Carp has ghosts and zombies. A pretty small minority of sentients become ghosts - only ones who aren't properly laid to rest or memorialized - and zombies can be made out of any animal (including sentients) and most animal parts and aren't the plague type, they're either created by necromancers or occur 'naturally' when things die in some places.
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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 14:37:02 GMT
In her natural state, the keeper has absolute control over her own domain and no ability to directly affect anything else. If someone came in to try to mess with her she could shut them down completely, but without externally-sourced interdimensional shenanigans she has no way to leave her domain and no power over things outside it.
If I were writing a world that had some kind of informational fence controlling what outsiders could learn about it, the keeper would circumvent the fence completely and have just the same access to that world as any other, although if she noticed the fence she might hold off on ever doing anything with the information she gathered because having powerful entities trying to mess with her sounds like a huge bother which she would rather avoid.
Would the nature of the Gauntlet business be affected at all if she only ever acquired information about past states of the universe? In theory this is actually true of her, but usually it doesn't come up because "the state of the universe an instant ago" and "the state of the universe at this exact moment" are rarely that different and this exact moment will become an instant ago soon enough.
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Post by Grigori on May 16, 2015 15:21:27 GMT
The fence is not particularly hard to notice, from the outside, if you're looking at universes in general. If you're just poking around with low-medium bandwidth searches (as opposed to high-bandwidth 'I want the exact state of the entire universe' searches), hitting the Gauntlet returns horrific nightmarish visions, to the extent of 'That thing you were trying to do; do not do that thing. Or else [insert horrors].'
Also, it is weird to talk about past states of the World of Darkness, given local temporal metaphysics. Everything that can happen has happened, and then it unhappened, and now things are happening again differently, and there is not a necessary stable progression between past to future. Temporal progression is more tightly bound to 'the actions of people who are metaphysically significant' than it is to something like 'physics'.
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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 15:32:03 GMT
I don't want to give the impression that receiving information about universes is an action she takes. The information just sort of constantly streams into her awareness/memory, and at her current level of skill, she's not particularly good at sorting through it to examine particular universes. Right now she mostly ignores the whole several infinities of it unless she wants something specific, and then it's a matter of peeking at random points in the stream until she recognizes what she's looking for.
If that's how the timeline works, then I wonder if she might tend to get information only about things that have "unhappened" - since presumably those versions of the fence are no longer active, if the current state of the world is that they never existed.
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Post by Grigori on May 16, 2015 17:28:02 GMT
In that case, I'd be inclined to say that she does not receive information passively from the World of Darkness. There is a barrier, it's there to stop that kind of thing.
It's like the difference between passively seeing starlight, and trying to actively look for a rogue planetoid; the latter isn't emitting radiation or exerting meaningful gravitational influence on anything that is, so its existence isn't apparent to passive searches.
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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 17:36:46 GMT
And the only-receives-unhappened-things idea doesn't hold?
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Post by Grigori on May 16, 2015 18:08:54 GMT
I'm going to say no.
High-density information streams, even about doomed timelines that can now no longer occur, will not be able to pass through the Gauntlet absent something doing something to the Gauntlet, or its creators.
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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 18:17:05 GMT
All right then. If the keeper ever notices this, plot might occur, but she can go an arbitrarily long time without noticing because there are a lot of universes pouring data into her domain and she is only just barely learning how to sort through them.
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Post by Archangel on May 17, 2015 3:09:40 GMT
I don't have any Watsonian reason to deny the keeper access. You can find it any time you like. If she pays attention there should be more effects than I know to predict, but as long as none of them are world-destroying they can be handwaved as Archangel not being in those loops. Or as their effect not reaching between universes; 096 would be one of those. There might be something that could affect the keeper, though. 370 seems closer to the evil deity end of the scale than the face-melting end, and isn't limited to its current universe. But it's nothing that can't be sealed away on its/their thrones in the name of the devil. She can probably take it. But if not then everyone dies.
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Post by Daniel H on May 17, 2015 3:31:21 GMT
Well, if the keeper becomes infected and is not a 370-c case, I’ll be surprised.
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Post by Leaf on May 17, 2015 3:32:20 GMT
You may have things like "096 starts freaking out inconsolably" (even if 096 in particular wouldn't cross universes) start happening whenever you feel it would be amusing.
370 as described would not overwhelm the keeper. She might find it irritating to handle. She might find it irritating enough to write Archangel with a complaint. Would that be amusing? Although I think Archangel would have to mention identifying details of the world in public on the forum in order for her to connect the dots.
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Post by Daniel H on May 17, 2015 3:49:22 GMT
So the keeper can handle 370. Can Jarvis? Are there plans for the keeper to figure out how to let Jarvis help sort?
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Post by Leaf on May 17, 2015 3:54:17 GMT
Jarvis-related plans stalled on lack of any idea how to feed him the data. The Gray Librarian offered to help the keeper sort her things if she instantiated a library to facilitate communication with the Library, and she's probably going to take at least a few decades to decide where to instantiate the library and precisely what form it should take. If, in that time, she discovers information-based hazards among her unsorted material, she's going to conclude that she should probably not dump the job on anybody else.
I am becoming increasingly enamoured with the idea of the keeper complaining about 370 - if not directly to Archangel, then in vague-but-recognizable terms in public.
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