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Post by Daniel H on May 15, 2015 23:35:53 GMT
This is a thread for exporting PMs. I’ll be updating this post with updated scripts to do that when people release those. Instructions if you’re somewhat familiar with a terminal and have a Unix-like system (Cygwin, MSys, Linux, Mac OS X, etc.): - Download one of the attachments at the bottom of this post and save it somewhere. The first one creates a single file with all the conversations (which is not muchclutter but easy more difficult to work with), while the second creates one file for each conversation (which is easier to work with but more cluttered).
- Open a terminal in that location, or open a terminal and type `cd path/to/conversation.py/directory` (without the backticks, and with the actual path to the directory containing conversation.py) and hit enter.
- If you used the first attachment, type `python conversation.py path/to/exported/csv > path/to/converted/conversations.bbcode` (again without the backticks and with the actual paths of the exported csv file and where you want to put the bbcode file). There should be no output to the screen when this is run. For the second attachment, type the same thing except up until the greater-than sign; skip that and everything after it. In this case you should see some output (a list of your conversations, each with its conversation ID). If you see unexpected output and can’t figure out the problem yourself, post it here so we can help debug.
- If you used the first script, open the path/to/converted/conversations.bbcode as a text file (for example, in Notepad) and search for the title of the conversation you want. Copy everything from that to the next hr tag into this thread. If you used the one for many files, each conversation will be in its own file for you to copy here.
If you’re on Windows and not using Cygwin or similar, and have python installed, then either these instructions will still work unchanged or you’ll need to use something like “C:\Python27\python” instead of just the program name “python”. Note: If you’re on Windows, whether or not you’re running through something like Cygwin, you might (or might not; I’m anticipating potential problems, and have not seen either case) have problems with line endings. This will probably come out as creating an empty file or as creating a file that looks like everything’s on one line when you open it in Notepad. If it’s the latter, you should use a different editor like Notepad++ or Notepad2-mod, both googleable.
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Post by Daniel H on May 16, 2015 0:06:40 GMT
Here are all my IC conversations with Kappa characters. I left in the OOC notes because they were about how the content of the conversations would be different for the characters. Please help: Potential Threat to Several WorldsI am writing to the three of you because I expect you can best help with this. The problem is not likely very urgent, but it could crop up suddenly at any time later than 20 years from now and possibly much earlier. Before I can explain the details of the threat, I need to give some more background knowledge about demon culture. Most demons who answer summons do so because they find humans entertaining. Many of those don’t care about ethical entertainment, but because they find humans entertaining, they are unlikely to destroy the world even if they could. Demons who don’t accept most summons are on average nicer people (because the meaner ones often accept summons and treat the summoner as a source of unethical entertainment), but at the extreme end of meanness some most certainly would destroy the mortal world if they could get there. Currently, the only people in my world cluster who know about this forum or anything I learned through it are myself and small handful of daeva I trust almost completely (to the point where I would not actually go into an immediate panic at the idea of them being summoned unbound and would not expect them to do anything bad, even though I wouldn’t want to actually create that situation). However, I can’t be sure that the knowledge won’t ever spread to other summoners or other daeva. The thing is, the plane shift spell I’m buying is a spell to move a person from one plane to another. It seemed like it would be quite useful, and I still expect it to be. However, any demon with access to or even knowledge of this forum could learn about it (I think “the most recent catalog of this QUALITY DISCOUNT SPELLBOOKS company” is borderline for enough information to let a demon conjure the relevant catalog, but I don’t want to take any chances and I expect a creative demon could get a copy). After that, it would take at most two decades for a malevolent demon to get the relevant maximum mana and either reinvent the spell or get a copy of that spellbook. At that point, since we’re assuming they know about the forum, they can go to any of the worlds mentioned here. In a PM to me, Leaf asked if we knew about antimatter, and advised me not to mention it to demons if not. The answer is that we do, but that I am not at all worried about demons conjuring antimatter because demons discovered black holes before humans discovered antimatter, and practically every demon has personal experience with them as a means of waste disposal. That would be far more dangerous for any world with conventional gravity, although it might not cause too much of a problem for worlds where gravity works differently. For the moment, I am simply going to pretend I haven’t seen Leaf’s question in-thread, to avoid drawing any more attention to the plane shift spell. I’ll PM him the response I was writing there instead. Mother Starlight, do you have any suggestions? You have more experience with inter-world stuff than I do, and you might know of some way that could help or have some method of blocking the information from getting to Hell. Leaf and Archangel, do you have any way to deal with black holes appearing or with somebody able to create them? Archangel, do you have some way of preventing demons from causing massive amounts of damage outside of Hell (where the costs of massive amounts of damage are so small some areas engage in all-out war for entertainment)? If not, do you have any means of preventing interworld travel from Hell except via controlled summons or concordances? Fortunomancer, I don’t really understand your ability to see the future, but can it tell you if what I’m worried about is likely to happen or any sort of time frame? There exists such a thing as gravity manipulation technology, but I don't expect it to be robust against sudden black holes. Good God. Suppressing the sharing of information doesn't come naturally to me, and I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of interfering in local politics, however much it seems like a good idea. I hope you find a solution, but I don't have any good ideas. Maybe you can find some sort of defensive thing somewhere. Leaf, could your gravity manipulation technology help with a non-sudden black hole? Define 'help'. There are easier ways to avoid falling into one when you already know it's there, and I'm not an expert in obscure applications of grav tech, although I could probably find and consult one if you give me some time. It might be possible for the QDS magic to make suddenly-appearing gravity tech near the suddenly-appearing black hole, or something similar to that. If it could be created already doing whatever-it-needs-to-do, that might be useful. It’s probably not an ideal solution, but it might be a workable solution. Also, do you have any recommendations for how to handle the QDS thread? I won’t be able to ignore your question forever. I could lie and say it lets me shift objects “in my inventory” to another plane, but I don’t like lying and this would draw even more attention if somebody calls me out on it or they get the catalog and notice the discrepancy. I’m not sure if you editing your post to not ask the question would be less suspicious or not, given that I can see when a post is edited. Andrew, Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Mysisian magic, as far as I can tell, only works within the world the individual spellcaster occupies at the time the spell is cast. My fortunomantic suprasensitivity is giving me information about the forum itself, but not about the actions of individual forum members. When I first encountered the forum, I experienced a specific kind of positive premonition which led me to believe that the forum would not cause significant harm in my world. This implies that the events you described are unlikely, but does not rule them out entirely. I don't have time to explain in more detail right now. I can get someone to do a metamantic analysis of the forum and use that to attempt to develop a spell that allows fortunomancy to work across multiple worlds, but this would take longer than is desirable. If you have a way to get me into your world there are spells I can cast that will give me more details, but I can't guarantee that my magic will work in your world. Any spells I cast will not give me as much detail about threats to other worlds as they do about threats to mine because fortunomantic magic responds to personal priorities and my world is a higher personal priority than yours. I need you to tell me everything you know about black holes and how they work. You've already managed to miss one of my posts in that thread and need to be reminded that it exists (when I asked how to make zorkmids). I can just not bother reminding you about this one. If someone else reminds you... I'm not sure. I'll corner a grav tech expert and ask them prying questions at the next available opportunity. I only missed that one because you posted it after I loaded the webpage but before my response was complete. I saw it as soon as I submitted my post. I guess I could pretend that I’m just being careless and didn’t notice it, but if somebody knew the true reason I missed it then they could easily tell that didn’t apply. People miss things, or intend to reply to them and forget, all the time. It's one of the simplest and least attention-getting ways to drop it. You could also choose to explain only some of the spells, and not say why, and I could decline to express interest in the rest. But dropping it seems better on most counts. Fortunomancer, I will see if I can get a standard summoning to work from your world, but it seems unlikely since I can’t even get it to work from Limbo. Other than that I have no way to get you into my world until I get a lot more mana. In worlds with similar astrophysics to mine and Leaf’s, gravity works by everything being pulled towards everything else. You only notice it for the planet you’re on because the planet is much heavier, so pulls harder. The more stuff you put closer together, the harder it will pull. On a separate note, light does not move instantaneously; it just moves really really fast. It is also affected by gravity, but it moves so quickly that you barely notice. It turns out that for reasons I don’t understand, it is impossible for anything to go faster than light does. A black hole is when you have so much stuff at the same point that it pulls so hard that even light won’t be able to escape if it gets inside (hence why it’s called a “black” hole). Since nothing can go faster than light, if light can’t escape, nothing else can either. All demons know about black holes because they’re almost-perfect waste disposal. Demons can conjure stuff by magic; they can’t get rid of it by magic. They used to use lakes of fire or lava, but black holes work better for this purpose. Andrew, That information is...troubling. I have more time now and can explain my premonitional sense in more detail. I had two premonitions when I decided to write in to the forum, both positive. One was a sense that the action I was about to take would be pleasant in a recreational sense (the sort of feeling I get when I’m about to open an interesting but not particularly useful spellbook, only stronger). The second was a feeling that the action I was about to take would result in me acquiring useful and important information. The first was stronger than the second, meaning that the first outcome was probable while the second was merely possible. This implies one of three possibilities: 1. It is so improbable that the forum will cause harmful elements to be brought into my world that my magic does not see fit to warn me that it is even a possibility. 2. My magic could not predict this particular situation because my magic doesn’t work on events in other worlds. (This is unlikely because the situation was caused by the forum, which does exist in my world). 3. My world is uniquely equipped to deal with this particular threat. I'm certain that we don't have a way to adequately fight black holes, but there's a (slight) possibility that we are better able to stop demons from creating black holes in the first place. In summary: I am almost positive that I would know if posting on this forum would cause something very bad to happen to my world, but given that my magic interacts oddly with other worlds, I can't give you a definite guarantee. I'll let you know if the metamantic analysis yields anything useful. I don't know of any means to block interdimedensional travel. That doesn't mean the Foundation doesn't have any, just that it's never been closely related enough to anything I've been working on that I needed to know. I've notified some people and should receive an answer soon, but I'd be surprised if it worked on a worldwide scale. If there were a suddenly appearing black hole, the Foundation would expect to be forewarned through means that aren't available in other worlds. Slightly more helpfully, we do have a lead on containing them. I've just been informed that the Foundation is in possession of a singularity with an estimated tenth of a solar mass. The containment mechanism is something we do not understand, but experimenting with it is dangerous for obvious reasons. If you can get a friendly demon to create the containment device without the singularity, preferably in some isolated corner of Hell, it might turn out to be a scalable solution. Even in the best case, though, a demon surely doesn't need a black hole to destroy the world. The most urgent step is to shut down that thread. If the information that there exists a plane shift spell gets out, that's all it takes. If nothing else, at least remove all references to the catalogue and let readers think the stated list is a complete one. I can provide a visual amnestic to assist with dropping the subject. Is your visual amnestic going to get past the censor? I might support editing the thread if editing was invisible, but itt. unless Mother Starlight has that power, I guess. Trying to aggressively suppress information that has already been partly released is a losing game, at least in my world. If Mother Starlight is reluctant to assist us, we can't expect to shut down every curious onlooker who wonders why so many posts in the thread were edited at once and where the references to the catalogue went. Right now, nobody but us knows there's anything dangerous about that thread. Let's keep it that way, all right? I could invisibly filter the phrase plane shift to some plausible alternative throughout the forum, either for all users or some well-defined subset, such as only those from Daevinity. This would not affect the memories of anyone who read the phrase before I install the filter, nor would it affect demon-conjured copies of the catalog. Would this be helpful or harmful? Archangel, I think I need to know a bit more about the containment device before I can conjure one. For example, what’s it called? The requirement is not strictly that it’s a unique specification, but that it’s a specification that lets the demon “find” what they’re looking for. Mother Starlight, I think that would be quite helpful, especially if it was only for users from Daevinity. It wouldn’t completely solve the problem, but it would mean that any daeva who wanted to use it for destructive purposes would need to be not only malicious but also more curious than average. If you could change the phrase plane shift to dig (which I could plausibly and truthfully claim would be quite helpful if I became a demon) for readers in Daevinity, and simultaneously change the number 1037 to 838 for such readers when it refers to the price I paid, I think that could go a long way to preventing the information from getting into the wrong hands. I suppose that if a user from Daevinity were to type the phrase themselves that would already be a bit of a problem, but they would certainly notice something was up with the phrase if they did, and it wouldn't be hard to figure out the context from there. I don't think it's possible for me to filter with perfect consistency and undetectability. We know it only as the containment mechanism from SCP-123. If it has a real name, that's not it. It's made of a dull gray metal arranged in sixty triangles forming a geodesic sphere; any solid or liquid that enters the sphere is drawn into the singularity. Nearby objects on the outside are also drawn toward it, but weakly. The strongest the pull gets on the outside is at the boundary of the sphere, where it is approximately one Earth gravity. This suggests that containment is imperfect I've attached an image of SCP-123, but there is little else I can tell you. (Note that this image as depicted does contain the black hole, relevant if you try duplicating it exactly.) This PM thread format seems messy and suboptimal, so I've created a board here that's only visible to people I authorize. Currently that's me, esthfora, Andrew, Fortunomancer, Leaf, and Archangel. The spell descriptions for what I haveThe spells I bought last time were detect magic and light. The first of those lets me see if anything nearby is magic and a bit about that magic. Despite them obviously being not quite nonmagical, detect magic doesn’t see anything special about spellbooks or summoning circles. It does see things about daeva, parlor tricks, daeva magic, and the process of dismissing daeva or learning a spell from a spellbook. The second of these, light, makes an area brightly-lit (apparently forever, although it can be dispelled). That would be more useful if magic were common knowledge in my world, but I still do have a private study that I was able to use it for. I’m starting to wish the spell were about its homophone; 1037 zm weighs about as much as an adult human.
I just bought read magic, mage hand, mending, and plane shift. I don’t really expect to use read magic much; it allows me to understand the magical properties of writing. It claims to work on spellbooks, and it might work on summoning circles but I haven’t tested it out yet; however, I already know the properties of any spellbooks I buy and how to read summoning circles. I was getting it for completeness and in case it somehow helps me if I need to do an unusual binding; it might also help with the project of making sure demons who hate mortals or angels don’t turn some worlds into black holes. There are also two spells I can’t quite cast, but I just need one more maximum mana for: mage hand, which will become completely pointless if I become a fairy, gives me short-range telekinesis (a couple dozen feet, I think) for objects of about 5 lb; mending lets me repair small cuts and tears in things, which will be useful even if I become an angel but especially useful if not. Finally, I’m getting plane shift, which we’ve already discussed. I really wish you could get an interdimensional trade spell going, although maybe not as much as I wish QDS had never shown up to cause trouble... Still, thanks for the information. Anything else interesting in the catalogue? Unrelatedly, I urge you not to help Archangel get their hands on zorkmids. I'm not eager to see an organization like that able to freely travel between universes. I understand if you'd rather not get on their bad side, though. I would like to apologize for not consulting you before posting the zorkmid details publicly. My thought was that the Foundation is a sketchy organization, but that they are probably less of a problem than sudden black holes, and they might be more usefully able to help if they know more about the QDS-style magic. Still, I have less experience with identifying what information is sensitive and with selectively revealing that information than you seem to. I have plenty of secrets from my world (like daeva or the afterlifes), but the boundaries of those secrets and the boundaries of who to tell are much more clearly defined. If it had not been late at night after an event-filled day, I would have thought to actually consult you about it instead of just posting the information I’d collected. Partly my fault. I could've sent you the message more prominently and urgently, and I probably would have if I'd been thinking straight. I also regret publicly querying you about anything QDS-related after we found out they weren't a scam; in hindsight it's obvious that promoting wide public access to an indiscriminate magic distributor was a bloody stupid move. Yes. Ideally, more magic being public would be a good thing. I know that summoning being public on my world would have a number of useful effects, especially since it apparently doesn’t get my world replaced by a black hole. However, we do not have ideal circumstances. Two weeks ago, most of my secrets were things that were obviously told to me in confidence, or things which I explicitly had known to be secret for years. I’m apparently not that good at deciding what should and shouldn’t be a secret. I also usually sell information, but that is again a specific type of information which doesn’t apply in this case. Do you know of anything else I’m likely to reveal but I shouldn’t? Should I, for example, not share metalworking information with Botanical Engineer in case the Gardeners use it for warfare more than they use it for good? I'm looking up mineral extraction for Botanical Engineer myself, so that tells you what I think of doing that. It's possible that they might use it for warfare but I don't get a sense of... warlikeness... from their description of their world. This may be a failure of imagination, of course. Still, on the whole, technological progress is usually more good than bad. Same reason why I'm looking up twenty-first century technological advances for you. I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but I have proven I am not infallible. In general (and this is exactly the rule I am going to try to apply to my own communications here from now on), when you are about to tell someone something or ask for information in public, take a moment to consider what would happen if the information in question made its way into the hands of a smart person with hostile intentions. "This is the definition of an animal as opposed to a plant": consequences likely not dire. "Here are the specs for the type of coin accepted by this indiscriminate spellbook vendor": consequences potentially dire. Risk assessment on those possible consequences comes second. My mistake in asking about zorkmids publicly was not doing the first step at all. Question about somebody you knowApparently you met somebody at their mother-in-law’s funeral who asked you to return a lost object. This person is Nifl, who is now asking me for more information about zorkmids. Do you have a character reference either way? Well. That's... that's unexpected. Assuming she is who I think she is (and with that reference, I'm close to certain), Nifl is one of the most level-headed, thoughtful, and intelligent people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. In our brief acquaintance, she struck me as exactly the sort of person I would trust with sensitive information under extreme circumstances. If you give her more information about zorkmids, I'd like the same. But of all the people you could be giving information about zorkmids to... she's all right. I might even advise letting her in on our discussions about how to deal with stray demons and similar, in case she has more resources to throw at the problem than I do. Okay, thank you. I will probably have pictures of more zorkmids, to determine tolerances, within the day. I’ll also see what I can do to let her in to that discussion. Zorkmid measurements?I'm interested in potentially purchasing spellbooks from QDS, and I have access to good enough metalworking that I think I could probably produce zorkmids. But to cut down on the amount of time I waste finding out what qualifies as an acceptable zorkmid, could you please take pictures and measurements of a few more zorkmids and half-zorkmids to give a better idea of the tolerances? I'd be willing to trade in other information but I'm not sure exactly what sort of information you might be looking for. I’m not sure. I recently realized that this magic falling into the wrong hands would probably be even more dangerous than I had thought summoning going public would be before my Milliways meeting, and I probably should not have posted those measurements publicly. It can do a lot of good, though, and I’m not opposed in principal to sharing the information if it could help your world. The thing is, I haven’t seen you around on this forum much (you seem to have disappeared on the first day), so I don’t know you well enough to know if I should trust you. As for trade, I am not sure what information you could have that I would want either. Could you tell me more about your world, so I know what the differences might be? So far all I know is that you are human, that you have been looking for nonhuman sentient life for centuries but not found any, and that you have some variant of the Internet. As far as I can tell, I am from the same world as Leaf. That's part of why I stopped posting; most of the time that I wanted to say something about my world, I found that Leaf had said it first. I didn't want to say anything at first, to save embarrassment in case I was wrong about being from the same world, and then I got distracted by other concerns and fell into the habit of just catching up occasionally without contributing anything myself. Huh, that’s interesting. Are you sure it’s the same one, and not just a similar one? There’s another Daevinity-like world, after all; are you sure there isn’t another Nexus-like one? Also, since you do seem to be sure now, is there a reason you don’t claim that world publicly? There's no strong reason I haven't claimed it publicly, besides that it would invite questions I don't necessarily have the time or inclination to answer. As I said, I've been busy. As for which world... well, if I recall correctly, your other Daevinity-like world seemed to be at a different point in its timeline from yours. I'm from the same year as Leaf. A few other clues also incline me to believe he might be someone I have personally met, which raises the odds that we're from the same world, don't you think? Yes, I suppose it does. I would be surprised, but not terribly so, if all the people matched between our two Daevinity-like worlds. Some historical figures did, but I would expect that if I had existed there I would have campaigned more for daeva rights than had evidently happened (this isn’t as hubristic as it sounds; there are so few summoners in my time that each one could have a large impact, and I’m one of the few summoners who actively tries to contact all the summoners he can so I’d probably be more influential than others). If you’ve met Leaf, would you mind if I asked him about you? Having a character reference would go a long way in making you more trustworthy, and he seems to be better at judging people than I am. You may. He won't know me by this name, but you can tell him that we met at my mother-in-law's funeral when I asked him to return a lost object, and that should jog his memory. Leaf said that not only should I trust you with more zorkmid information, I should tell you about a potential worlds-ending problem I’ve discovered in case you have more ability to help with it than he does. If you do try to help with that, then your increased ability to help from knowing more about QDS-style magic would be more than useful enough that I won’t ask for anything else on your end. If not, then I’d like to know what happened to all the newspapers in your world in the early 21st century. I'm pleased to have it confirmed that Leaf trusts me. More Zorkmid Meauserements and PhotosYou both would like more information about zorkmid measurements, and I told you that I would get them to you. So that I don’t need to upload any big files more than once, I’m sending the message to both of you. {{OOC: Andrew’s manifestation also allows attachments in PMs. In this case, it is zipfile with photos of several more zorkmids and half-zorkmids, and a CSV file with measurements of each of the pictured zorkmids. There is a folder name column in the CSV so you can tell which measurements go with which photos}} Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Want to trade?I understand if you're not interested - I might not be either, in your position - but I am curious what, if anything, I could trade you for the knowledge of how to safely summon daeva. I usually sell my information to daeva for services or other information, but I’m not sure how well that would work here. I’ve already gotten more information from this forum than I can process in a reasonable amount of time, and I expect it to keep growing. Moreover, although you probably have a lot of useful information, you seem to be sharing it relatively freely, so I’m not sure what it would make sense to trade for. Is there anything you’d be willing to tell me privately in trade but you don’t want to post publicly, or anything you could usefully do for me from a different plane? Can you think of anything besides material goods, information, and services you could trade for? On the other side of the trade, my world usually keeps daeva secret. The two main reasons that aren’t pure selfishness are that 1. it would cause a religious panic and 2. summoning is easy enough for anybody to do but dangerous enough that it could destroy the planet if somebody was careless and very unlucky (most daeva that answer summons wouldn’t want to destroy the planet, but some might). I don’t know about the state of your world’s religions, but the danger applies to any summoning that isn’t done carefully. I don’t ever summon any daeva completely unbound, even the ones who are among my closest friends. When I summon a random daeva or one I haven’t met before, I use standard bindings, which are very tight (except that I don’t gag demons). When I summon daeva I’m particular friends with, I bind them loosely enough that they can do whatever they could reasonably want to do, and I’d listen to a request for a looser binding if there was reason for one, but I still bind them to things like not permanently harming anybody if it’s avoidable. For daeva I know but am not friends with, it falls somewhere in between based on how much I know and trust them. I might be willing to teach you about daeva because you seem sensible enough to do it carefully, but I’m not sure about that and I’m not sure I’m willing to trust whoever you might tell, and whoever they might tell, etc. Another possibility to consider is that summoning only works between my Earth and those three concordant realms, and that I could tell the secrets to anybody on this forum as long as nobody else from my Earth showed up. I don’t know how likely that is. On the one hand, you say you don’t have the parlor tricks (although if you only tried for eight minutes it’s possible you were just unlucky), and no daeva have mentioned other worlds to me even after I told some of them about this forum; on the other, the parlor tricks and the daeva might not be as connected as I think, and other worlds might be less well known for some reason or might have their own set of concordant realms (do you know your afterlife situation if any?). The fact that spellbooks of the quality discount variety actually managed to transmit magic to you suggests, although not anything like conclusively, that magic can be transmissible between worlds. I have plenty of useful information. Some of it is the kind I'm willing to share freely in public. Some isn't. Since you have near-arbitrary conjuration available, I can also trade you technology that I simply can't offer to anyone else on this forum, although the infrastructure is a problem. (I could provide you with enough information to create and maintain a uterine replicator if for some reason you wanted one of those, but they have a weekly service schedule when in use and I'm pretty sure you'd have to summon demons every time.) You may consider me fully warned about the dire possible consequences of incautious daeva-summoning. (Did you have the concept of antimatter back then? I suggest not even mentioning it to any daeva if you didn't, but it's certainly the first thing I thought of when considering summoning safety. Arbitrary conjuration and transmutation are dangerous as hell.) I do not know my afterlife situation. If I were to import and then completely publicize daeva, it would probably cause several religious panics, but I don't plan to completely publicize them and the people I'm thinking of telling aren't the sort to panic. I am not inexperienced in the realm of deciding who to trust with sensitive information. It's never been potentially planet-destroying sensitive information before, but the principle is the same. Some possible uses for daeva in my world in case you're motivated by benevolence in addition to commerce: - There are several planets in the wormhole nexus whose inhabitants have to live in environmentally controlled enclosures because their planet either can't be fully terraformed with existing technology, or can't be terraformed quickly enough. Transmutation and conjuration on a large enough scale could shave several centuries off some of those projects, and make some of the total dead ends actually livable. Obviously I'd need to work out some kind of arrangement with the local governments, but I bet I can manage it, and even if I am very very mysterious about what exactly my astoundingly effective new terraforming process is and everyone is consumed by curiosity, they're hardly going to guess "magical beings from another world". - This forum also works for this purpose, but in a much more complicated and potentially less scalable way: Travel and communication between solar systems is not instantaneous. Summoning daeva seems to be, or just about. If I had enough trustworthy summoners, and enough well-known daeva (or does conjuration work for any sufficiently well-specified message? That would lower the requirement to 'enough demons to go around' and speed things up considerably) I could run a messenger service that would unite the nexus. I'm not sure you realize how much of a gift that would be. Within living memory, the nexus rediscovered a planet that had been lost centuries ago when its only wormhole connection collapsed. It... wasn't pretty. I most sincerely do not want anything like that to happen to another dead-end backwater with only one wormhole route to its name, and there are plenty more - granted, the one I'm thinking of was lost way back during the earliest stages of terraforming with only a single shipload of colonists, and I'm sure that contributed to the scale of the disaster, but even the most modern of planets depends on trade to some extent. And daeva, unlike this forum, can be used to transfer objects as well as information. I’m sorry I took so long to get back to you; yesterday did not go as expected on several counts. This might be overly cautious, but I would actually prefer not to have uterine replicators at the moment despite the large amount of good I’m sure they can do. I’d be worried that daeva would attempt to use them to have human children, and although it is a shame that daeva cannot reproduce, none of the daeva realms are suitable for human habitation. This of course is a lot more true for human babies. It’s possible the problems could be solved, but I would rather deal with that after the current situation is over. I was leaning towards teaching you before I saw your PM and before the rest of the events of yesterday, and those have convinced me even more that it would be a good idea. I expect that I personally wouldn’t be interested in most of the technology you have available, but I could find people who would be able to “invent” any technology advances that occurred around the turn of the 21st century. If you could find a list of technologies invented then, and information about how to actually build manufacture them and about how they work, that would be useful. I don’t know if you’d be able to find the actual documents, but the name of the technology and the name of the manuals about how to work it should be good. I can’t say much more now, but here’s the very start of the daeva summoning safety lecture: don’t draw anything you practice on a horizontal surface unless you actually want to summon right then. Get an artist’s easel or something first. Maybe a computer screen would work if it’s vertical. "Yesterday did not go expected on several counts"? Now there's a statement packed with hidden meaning if ever I've heard one... Not facilitating daeva having human children seems like a very sensible reason to hold off on uterine replicators. I'll look that up. I spend a high proportion of my time lately looking things up for people on this forum, so don't be afraid to remind me if I don't come back with anything in a timely fashion. I will take your safety tips to heart. I have some more time now, so I’ll give you a basic rundown. Ideally, I’d cover binding before actually summoning (like how you learn to brake before you learn to go when you start driving). However, by the time you understand bindings it’s blindingly obvious how to actually get summoning to work; the bindings are far more complicated. So, I’ll advise you again to be careful, and that if you were in my world I would be watching what you draw to make sure you don’t make a mistake. The basic ideas for summoning are that you draw a bunch of circles and words on the floor. There is a main, central, summoning circle, and several bindings require drawing their own circles as well. In general, you write the words around the circle. You can do the words in any language, but it is better to work in a language you’re fluent in, so that you are less likely to make a mistake in the grammar. So, there are five basic steps to safely summoning daeva: - Draw the bindings and most of the summoning circle on the floor, but do not complete the summoning circle or leave out the word “summon” or the type of daeva. As soon as you complete the summoning circle, the daeva get the summons, even if you have not finished writing the bindings.
- Look over everything, make sure you did not forget a binding or a word within a binding, and make sure that you didn’t misspell a word or transpose two words or anything. Be extremely careful. If you did make a mistake, it is safe to erase that part and start over, as long as you do in fact fully erase it so that it is completely unreadable and preferably not even visible as a smudge.
- Only after you have carefully checked everything, finish the central summoning circle. If your world naturally supports daeva or my teaching you somehow gives you access to my world’s concordant realms, all the applicable daeva will feel the summon, and one will probably answer in less than a second.
- Negotiate the task, but be careful not to agree with anything until you’ve made sure you’ll be able to pay and until you’ve reviewed the deal as actually not having loopholes.
- Actually pay the daeva, preferably before they do their end of the bargain. You can dismiss them at any time, unless they have upheld their side of the bargain and you have not.
Before you actually summon anything, until you have experience, it might be a good idea to show me your planned circles first (before you draw them, or perhaps more usefully, as part of Step 2 above). {{Here follows comprehensive information about bindings and task parameters, to the 2159 standard and including things like “must obey all applicable laws” which no summoner in 1995 would dream of putting in. As stated, it is blindingly obvious how to do the actual summoning circle. Andrew does explicitly say how, though, after covering most of the safety information. It does not include information on gagging, because Leaf already knows there’s no real point to that; Andrew would still explain if asked, though}} So, for practice, how would you do the following things? I’ve listed things I think might be helpful to you in your world, but most of these are guesses; you should be able to answer either way. - Summon an angel to make soil more fertile, if the problem with it is that it has the wrong set of nutrients for the plant you want to grow (this problem happens on Earth, but I expect it happens more in your world where you want to grow stuff native to one planet on a different planet)
- Summon an angel to turn the atmosphere of a Venus-like planet into something humans can survive in
- Summon a fairy move furniture from one room to another
- Summon a fairy to carry something heavy for you in public without revealing the existence of magic (assuming you have a coat that can hide the fairy’s wings)
- Summon a demon to create an atmosphere and water on a Mars-like planet
- And, the reason I suspect you contacted me in the first place: summon a demon to create zorkmids
Finally, demons can’t conjure literally anything that’s uniquely specified, but they can conjure anything they have indexing information for. For example, if a demon guessed that there was a book with the ISBN 0-394-90089-8 (an ISBN is a way we currently have of giving unique numbers to books), they would not actually be able to conjure a copy. If, however, they knew there was a book titled Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss, they could conjure that, even though it is in fact the book with that ISBN. If they instead knew it by that title but heard the author as Theodor Geisel, they could still conjure it, because Dr. Seuss is a pen name fore Theordor Geisel. If they knew it by an incorrect name or author, they could not conjure it. {{OOC: Do you intend for summoning to actually work for Leaf? I think it’s plausible for him to have his own unknown Daevinity-style afterlife set (since based on sandboxes this applies to a lot of worlds) or for the education to connect his world to Andrew’s (which explicitly fails in Incandescence, but the world need not work consistently). It is also plausible for him to draw a bunch of stuff on the floor and nothing to happen. I have very few plans for Andrew’s or Daevinity’s future and none of the options would disrupt any of the plans I do have}} {{OOC: I am not yet solidly sure whether I intend to have summoning work for Leaf, but I think I'm leaning in favour.}} So, my broad-strokes summoning procedure is: compose binding, write out and double-check with circle incomplete and 'summon' and daeva type left out, check results with you to make sure at least the first several times I try it, fill in 'summon' and daeva type and finish circle, negotiate without agreeing to anything and as though my life depends on it, agree only when deal is certified free of loopholes and payment is secure, pay daeva and presumably supervise task. I'll attach my first stab at a well-bound random summoning circle, which I drew on a vertically projected surface, and left out 'summon' and daeva type and part of the circle anyway. As far as I can tell, it's all-purpose enough to cover any of the practice situations. I'm very much of the philosophy that if I'm doing it right, my restrictions on the behaviour of a potentially hostile entity shouldn't depend on precisely which superpowers they do or don't have in order to function effectively. As for negotiating the specific tasks, the important thing to remember is that I can't assume they aren't hostile but shouldn't assume they are. So for example I should warn the angel in the second example that terraforming Venus is likely to be uncomfortable, but not let them argue me into waiving a legitimate safety rule in compensation. And I should make sure the task parameters are airtight but not stupidly so: the things I want accomplished will be accomplished, and the daeva won't have gratuitous opportunities to wreak havoc, but they won't be constrained in any legitimately unnecessary ways. I'd also want to avoid unnecessarily letting any daeva know that they've come to a different world than they're used to, if I get ones from your world, which seems likely. For applications where it won't be obvious or relevant (moving furniture, making zorkmids) I'd put some effort into concealing things like what year it is and what planet I'm on. Obviously that can't hold once I start opening up demon-based communication services and terraforming planets, but that's going to wait until I have plenty of safety-conscious trained summoners, which may be a while. In the meantime I don't want to give anybody ideas while I'm procuring my zorkmids. Which means I need to come up with a way to pay daeva that doesn't blatantly rely on it being 2995. Could I give a demon the title and artist's name of an instrumental music piece for them to reproduce elsewhere, maybe? Would they tend to consider that fair compensation for a pile of zorkmids, and would they have any way to figure out on their own that I gave them something that doesn't exist yet in your world? Actually, now I wonder if I'm going to get daeva from the 2159 world instead. Or both. I wonder if there's a safe way to check which one... casual questions along the lines of "how long ago were you last summoned, what year?" might do it. I know I haven't answered your specific examples in much detail, but I'm not sure how much point there is in specifying my starting offer precisely ahead of time when I'm just going to end up negotiating anyway. Is that standard practice for you? Does it have noticeable advantages in safety or convenience? {{Although PMs don't actually seem to allow file attachments, I'm making Leaf able to attach files to PMs in-character. Attached: an image of a neatly drawn circle, with the mentioned safety omissions, with an airtight binding adapted from Andrew's info but omitting things like "obey all applicable laws" and following Leaf's described philosophy of an all-purpose binding.}} The point of not completing the summoning circle, of leaving out the daeva type, and of leaving out the word “summon” is to make sure you don’t have a valid circle until you’re ready to. Any of these three alone would suffice, and I’m not sure that doing all three would really buy you much more safety. I guess it doesn’t hurt, though. Some of the time, you need to take away some of the safety bindings and replace them with species-specific ones. Your circle would be safe in all cases I’m aware of, but it would not allow you to, for example, summon an angel to fix a broken arm: the angel would need to temporarily get rid of parts of the bone, which would go against the binding against injury. A lot of the bindings are specifically outside the scope of an accepted task, like the one against leaving the circle, but many of the safety bindings are designed to remain active during tasks. Remember: you can’t change the bindings on a summoned daeva, so if you need a different set of bindings you need to build that in to the circle, and sometimes such bindings need to depend on the superpowers of the being you’re summoning. In an ideal world, they would not, but nobody has found perfect species-agnostic bindings for all cases. Maybe someday we’ll be able to bind daeva not to do anything the summoner would disapprove of, but apparently that won’t happen for at least 165 years. Since the conjuring of zorkmids is very easy, a single song, book, etc. might work. In more complicated cases, a longer liat is required. When preparing to pay with a list, you need to make sure that you can write such a list, but do not actually write it until you want to pay. Otherwise, they could just conjure the list you wrote. Also be careful that you don’t give away more than you intend: a demon may be able to find the copyright year, the fact that something comes on non-CD datadisk or in a plastic print edition, or some other hint that something is unusual. You might be able to work around this by providing a physical copy (which they would then use for all other conjurations, even if they were to create an ebook out of tte physical copy) or by inventing some excuse, but it’s worth keeping in mind. Finally, the point of the specific examples was to discuss which safety features needed to be part of a deal. You noticed these exist; you wouldn’t tell an angel terraforming Venus to “make the atmosphere of this planet livable”, because there are extremophile microorganisms that can probably live there with minimal changes. As for convenience, if you write up exactly what you want beforehand, you can say that you wanted something along the lines of the pre-written document. You usually don’t need to do this for convenience reasons because the agreement is usually nowhere near that complicated (two or three sentences should be enough for any of these if they’re the right two or three sentences and you are available to provide further direction), but it is sometimes helpful (like if you want to provide a lot of the details for terraforming Mars without going all over the Martian surface during the process). Other than what I’ve mentioned, the circle you drew looks good. I like the set of 1995 and 2159 bindings you chose; in most cases the 2159 version is better, but you skipped the 2159 bindings which don’t make sense in your world and added some of the 1995 bindings like that against revealing the existence of daeva. I don't gain anything except a tiny bit of convenience from writing out the word 'summon' and the type of daeva before I finish the rest, and narrowing my safety margin for such a trivial reward seems like asking for trouble, even if under ordinary cirumstances any one omission is perfectly adequate by itself. I see what you mean about task-specific bindings, but I think I stand by my decision not to use species-specific bindings unnecessarily. If the demon conjures the list before we're done negotiating, as far as I can tell that doesn't actually preclude paying them with that list, does it? It just saves me the trouble of handing it to them. And puts me in a slightly worse bargaining position, but I can always dismiss them and try again hoping to find someone less cheap and sneaky. The only one of these I'm actually likely to do anytime soon is the zorkmids, which I think will be my test run for finding out if summoning works here at all. Can I just tell a demon "Zorkmids are gold coins about yea big. Please fill this box with neatly stacked zorkmids; in exchange I can tell you the titles of a few nice songs"? You could indeed find a new demon if they steal the payment. That request would work, with the circle you provided, as long as the box is already supported by something that could hold the weight of the gold. They might fill the box neatly but not with the most possible zorkmids (it’s amazing how many ways there are to fill something neatly with different numbers of objects, with the container still being “full”; on my world every demon summoner I’ve spoken with knows the very basics of the field of geometry called sphere packing), but with a large enough box you should still get plenty. I would suggest asking for a specific number of zorkmids all within the box to avoid that issue. If you had planned to summon the demon gagged, they would almost certainly respond “No, summoner” to the deal as proposed; as it is, they will probably negotiate for additional details on the pay (to ensure you don’t just tell them two songs that everybody’s already heard of) or for a different form of pay (like books or movies), but otherwise they should probably accept. Since you’re summoning them ungagged, they might also be an ex-summoner and beg for some time on the phone with a living acquaintance. If they’re from my world, I recommend saying that you do not have a phone nearby but you will try to get them in touch, and then giving me their name so I can do just that. I could just as easily say "please fill this box with two hundred thousand zorkmids", yeah, I guess. But if there were a few less, it wouldn't matter very much for practical purposes. I suppose I should have specified to you the size of the box. It's interesting that so much of what I need to pick up from you is cultural rather than strictly practical information. Like the thing about demons expecting me to cheat them. I don't think I would've expected the demons to expect me to cheat them. So would a better starting offer be: "A zorkmid is a gold coin about yea big. Please fill this box with two hundred thousand zorkmids. In exchange I can tell you the names of several songs I promise you've never heard before." ? I think I'm going to hold out for somebody who'll accept names of songs, because it seems likely that they will just conjure the music in their preferred media and never have an opportunity to notice something off, whereas if I try to give them a book they will have ample opportunity to notice things like the plastic pages and late publication year. And I can't give them "movies" very effectively and they will sure as hell notice something's up if I give them holovids. I can definitely pass on names to you, though, if I get a frantic ex-summoner who seems like they might be from your world. It’s not that demons or other daeva will expect you to cheat them, per se, it’s that they know you might and they don’t trust you. You can’t hurt them nearly as much as they could hurt you without a binding, but it’s still basically a trade between two people who have no reason to trust each other. Since you do not plan to gag them, even the first offer would have found you a demon who would accept it relatively quickly, although your current proposal is probably better. Many demons would accept that even with gagging, although certainly not all of the ones who would accept something that fits that description with bargaining. I’m curious what you plan to do with two hundred thousand zorkmids; that’s enough to buy everything in their catalog, including special orders, five times over with plenty to spare. Material costs aren’t relevant until you get to 36 MP, which seems like it takes about five years of full-time work to get. As for the year, I think some digital music formats today have metadata, and I would be surprised if none in your time did. The metadata is often not very accurate, though, especially for music that is not available on CD; it would not be too surprising to see a “typo” in the year of release making it seem to be a thousand years in the future. I would recommend against songs published during May 2995 or later, though, to make it more plausibly a typo; if possible, it might also be better to find songs that are only available for download instead of whatever physical medium you have (unless you still use CDs or vinyl). This, combined with the style of the music (undoubtedly weird for both 1995 and 2159), will make it seem like the song was created by a small group with a weird aesthetic but never officially released to the public (which is, in a way, true). What I plan to do with two hundred thousand zorkmids is not have to worry about conjuring any more zorkmids for a long while if ever, and have some extras to analyze in case we ever want to provide someone with zorkmid specs and not with summoning information - Nifl, for example. She hasn't asked you how to summon daeva, has she? I'd trust her with it in a crisis but I'm not sure I'd give it to her without one. Music is almost never traded around on physical media except in the sense that data transfers sometimes involve data disks. I'd expect published compilations to have associated dates, but individual songs often just have title and artist. She has not asked for summoning information, although as you know she has asked for zorkmid information (which I will give to her and you shortly). I'd appreciate being consulted if she does ask for summoning information, but I won't complain too hard if you give it to her, especially if she has a good reason. I’ve been keeping this deal secret from her, although she can almost certainly guess we have some contact she hasn’t seen. I’d rather not keep the secret one way but not the other without a good reason. If she asks for summoning information can I say that you asked to be told if she asked, and can I tell her that I gave you summoning information if she asks about that? You may tell her both those things, yes. I have successfully pulled off the zorkmid deal. I'm going to be contacting QDS in a while, probably by forum PM to avoid airing my purchasing choices in public. Wow, so summoning does work for you? I was still expecting it wouldn’t. I will be more careful with anything resembling summoning instructions than I already was being. Summoning does work for me! I'm moderately surprised too. Reasons to be suspicious of ArchangelForum user Dotted Lines has some kind of power to perceive the structure of vague and menacing organizations, which I verified by asking questions about some Nexus organizations that might answer to that description. Then I asked him about Archangel's bunch. They're called the Foundation, and have not asked me not to tell people about them. They are a vast vague and menacing organization dedicated to keeping strange things contained and understanding them. A lot of the things and brings they contain are actually extremely dangerous, and their containment is protecting lots of people. Some of the things and beings they contain are basically harmless or helpful but strange. They are massive and bureaucratic, with many clearance levels and different locations and procedures. There are massive casualties in their second lowest personnel class, drawn from convicts already on death's row. They've asked me for help with finding information about a religious organization in their world (Church of the Broken God) which often tries to destroy the world and kills people. I checked, and helping them with this specific thing will be very likely to reduce total harm in their world. The only reason they're asking for help with something so clearly non-evil is because they were worried I'd check and not help them if it was more ambiguous. And when Esthfora expressed dismay, I asked Dotted Lines for clarification: From what I've seen of it before, it's probably a combination of several things about the world. The Foundation can be cruel to its personnel and beings it contains, not intentionally but as a side-effect of being focused on its goals and not caring. There are a lot of extremely dangerous things and beings in Keter, and the Foundation doesn't have all of them contained, and a lot of them do massive physical or psychological damage to nearby people. Additionally, there are many other organizations, many of which are worse than the Foundation and are actively destructive or cruel. There are a lot of terrible and dangerous things in that world, and most of them aren't organizations, but weird supernatural things. I think, although I can't see it directly, just extrapolating from how the organizations I can see react to them, that the weird supernatural horrors that harm a lot of people. Apparently the Church of the Broken God is the only candidate for organization that might do more evil stuff than the Foundation. The Foundation does some useful things, but overall has a massive casualty rate, and does some really awful things they could probably safely avoid doing by organizing things a little bit better. They've got some safety procedures that regularly kill or cause major psychological or physical harm to people, which they could probably avoid if they tried to think of other solutions to problems. So the Foundation definitely sticks out as the most evil organization in Keter, with some competition from the Church. This is all pretty much in line with my non-supernatural analysis that they come off as poorly organized and dangerously aggressive. It's still worth working with them - especially if we can figure out a way to help them contain any of their problem items more safely! - but I think we should be keeping in mind that they are not trustworthy. Thank you for telling me. I wasn’t exactly trusting them, but I wasn’t actively distrusting them either. I wonder if I should ask my friend to stop researching the SCP-123 containment device. Has the gravity expert you’re talking to made any progress? My gravity expert's excited mutterings keep getting more excited, but she doesn't know when I can expect actual results. If Leaf doesn’t have an estimate yet, then I will not ask my friend to stop researching this, but he has agreed to not use it in a way which could get its existence revealed until you get a version which somebody understands. Do either of you think we might want to bring Dotted Lines into our discussions, either with or without Archangel knowing? I don’t think his talent will be particularly useful because any one individual can cause the relevant problems so an organization might be unlikely. On a separate note, Botanical Engineer contacted me out of the blue to ask if there were humans in the daeva realms because that seemed unsafe. I confirmed that there probably weren’t (partly because demons can’t make minds), which is good because the humans would be more unsafe than he likely thought. He recommended I do my best to prevent demons from ever learning about his world’s human seeds or about your world’s uterine replicators. I’m already trying to keep the forum secret, and so far succeeding, but I had not thought about demons conjuring human seeds. Do you think he might be good to have in our discussion? He seems to understand infosec, but seems unlikely to be able to help. To clarify: I don’t mean Botanical Engineer’s particularly good at infosec (or that he’s particularly bad at it). I just mean that he grasps the need for keeping this kind of thing secret, without any apparent prompting, and that he took steps to keep the secret. "Do you think he might be good to have in our discussion?" That seems to depend on which discussion. Someone who is unlikely to be useful but unlikely to help anything should perhaps be reserved for a time when they seem more likely to help something. The same can be said of Dotted Lines. {{OOC: Typo fix: "unlikely to be useful but unlikely to help anything" --> "unlikely to be useful but unlikely to hurt anything".}}
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Post by Botanical Engineer on May 16, 2015 1:22:58 GMT
It's really neat to get to read this! For the record, Botanical Engineer is a she.
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Post by Daniel H on May 16, 2015 1:29:10 GMT
Yes, I figured that out afterwards, but you can’t edit PMs. I had previously not made this type of error. Then I kept referring to Shoal as male, and now several of the characters here the same way once or twice. I have no clue what changed, and my hypothesis when it was just Shoal has been invalidated. I need to figure out what’s going on in my head and fix it.
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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 17:30:52 GMT
Here are my completed IC conversations not covered in DanielH's post. I have more that aren't complete, including the infamous one with the elven fugitive, but I think I am going to give each of those their own post in this thread to make it easier for me to keep them updated as they progress. I would like to make a purchaseHello! I would like to purchase the following: INTRODUCTION TO SPELLCASTING read magic detect magicThat should come to 101 zorkmids. I would also like a copy of your catalogue delivered with the order. Thank you! Thank you for buying our QUALITY DISCOUNT SPELLBOOKS!
You have been automatically subscribed to receive update's when we have new HIGHEST QUALITY PRODUCTS available. Supplies are subject to availability so BUY NOW! To unsubscribe, contact us by planar message during standard business hours.
Thank you! I would like to make another order, please, for these spellbooks in these quantities: 10 read magic 2 light 1 detect magic 2 mending 2 mage hand 2 color spray 2 magic missile 2 protection 2 grease 2 alarm 2 web 2 identify 2 lightning bolt 2 knock 2 confusion 2 create food and water 2 remove curse 2 fireball 2 fly 2 invisibility 2 sunlight 2 water breathing 2 shape metal 2 scry 2 freedom of movement 2 ethereal jaunt 2 greater enchant weapon 2 teleport 2 dig 2 permanency 2 dispel magic 2 turn undead 2 chain lightning 2 plane shift 2 wish That should come to 26,000 zorkmids. Unfortunately we are currently OUT OF STOCK of the following spellbooks: * MENDING * ALARM * CONFUSION * WATER BREATHING In addition, we have LIMITED STOCK of the following spellbooks: * READ MAGIC: 3 units * LIGHTNING BOLT: 1 units *SUNLIGHT: 1 units * ETHEREAL JAUNT:1 units
Please confirm is you would like to complete the remaining portion of your order.
Thank you for shopping with QUALITY DISCOUNT SPELLBOOKS! Your Organization?Hey, I was wondering, why is the government agency you operate for based so heavily on oaths; and how did they get to be so important if they aren't magically enforced? This place is just full of new and exciting security leaks, isn't it... All right. Yes, I work for the intelligence service of an interplanetary empire. Please don't spread this around. But the oaths thing is cultural; it's the basis for our entire government and legal system, pretty much. A sworn oath is taken very seriously. That's not to say no one ever breaks them, but it's comparable to breaking the law and one often literally involves the other. And now - I'll understand if you don't feel like sharing or if they've asked you not to and you agreed, but what can you tell me about Archangel and their people? With only purely mundane analysis to go on, I don't get good feelings about them. Perhaps you can either reassure me or help me figure out how to handle them. I won't spread this information. Okay, I think I get it. It's like if the agencies here ensured loyalties by oaths in bloodstone circles (rather than just a close understanding of psychological weaknesses, hypnotic pulses of light and disruptive sound patterns, and employee potlucks) and could use the circles an unlimited number of times, and used internal reluctance and external punishment to get people to keep their oaths rather than physical near-impossibility? They're called the Foundation, and have not asked me not to tell people about them. They are a vast vague and menacing organization dedicated to keeping strange things contained and understanding them. A lot of the things and brings they contain are actually extremely dangerous, and their containment is protecting lots of people. Some of the things and beings they contain are basically harmless or helpful but strange. They are massive and bureaucratic, with many clearance levels and different locations and procedures. There are massive casualties in their second lowest personnel class, drawn from convicts already on death's row. They've asked me for help with finding information about a religious organization in their world (Church of the Broken God) which often tries to destroy the world and kills people. I checked, and helping them with this specific thing will be very likely to reduce total harm in their world. The only reason they're asking for help with something so clearly non-evil is because they were worried I'd check and not help them if it was more ambiguous. Seems like a good idea to help them investigate the Church of the Broken God, then. It's interesting that you can check things like whether or not helping someone will reduce total harm. How widely applicable is that? Because I would definitely like your help in figuring out how to reduce total harm in my world, and maybe in some other worlds too if possible. It's mostly an extrapolation how effective the Foundation generally is at handling similar things and how much harm the Church usually does. I'm absolutely on board for reducing total harm! Specificness is best for finding useful information. To be clear, I'm willing to help you, with your world and others', if you would like my help, not only generally in favor of harm reduction. Sorry, I just realized I phrased it kinda ambiguously. And I can be more helpful if I get specific questions or at least specific subjects you'd like to know more about, and I'd like to be helpful. (Sorry, I'm worried I'm annoying you. and also worried I wasn't clear enough and you'd think I'd said I'm not going to help you, and I want to help make things better.) (In other people's worlds. because mine is already fine and doesn't even need me to look at the structures of organizations in it, because they're all just fine, so it would be completely pointless.) I have been extremely busy over the past few days, although I've kept this conversation open in case I thought of anything to ask you. I appreciate your offer of help. It occurs to me that the government in Dispersive Prism's world sounds pretty damn vague and menacing from all the censorship on her early posts. What can you tell me about them, if anything? Are they as vague and menacing as they sound? What's up with all the censorship? Oh, wow. Her government is definitely vague, menacing, and Evil. All citizens of the Sunrise Empire are sterilized, and have to apply to have children, and the system for doing that is really corrupt. Anavasi (the scrubbed thing she mentioned that members of the elite could ascend to) ascend through sacrifice of people their government doesn't like, which makes the avansi a lot more powerful. The sacrificed people are all the way alive and sentient, and the process is extremely unpleasant for them. A lot like being buried in darkness that attacks you like a swarm of insects trying to get inside your body. A local traffic event caused me to experience this first hand for a few seconds while I was looking at that section of the sky, and it is not something I would ever like to experience again. The sacrificed people live as long as the avansi using them lives. Overall, the government is structured as a very small group of anavasi, enforced by expendable magic-users of different amount of powers, in order to control its citizens and territory. A few citizens are picked for loyalty, intelligence, and minion-leadership potential to get complete magical powers, and they are magisters. Each of them leads a group of "arcanists" who are given some magic powers, but have a lot of their magic ability incapacitated in a way that hurts them a lot psychologically, and this happens to a lot of people, and almost all the people they let have magic. The military section of arcanists are enforcers, who censor the crystal network, and make magic listening devices, which are a lot more normal and reasonable things for a big government to do. Normally almost all of their crystal internet is censored enough that it wouldn't normally have shown up as MESSAGE SCRUBBED, because a forum from their world would have been set up to put something appropriate to the forum instead, but it was on a forum they didn't control. Well, that's unsettling. Thank you, though. I strongly agree. You're welcome. If there is other information I might be able to get you if you have any ideas that might help, please tell me and I'll check. ...well... Esthfora just said in semiprivate communication that there are things in Keter that are "sad and awful" that she "doesn't like". Do you think that's about the Foundation's massive casualties, or something else? Can you tell? From what I've seen of it before, it's probably a combination of several things about the world. The Foundation can be cruel to its personnel and beings it contains, not intentionally but as a side-effect of being focused on its goals and not caring. There are a lot of extremely dangerous things and beings in Keter, and the Foundation doesn't have all of them contained, and a lot of them do massive physical or psychological damage to nearby people. Additionally, there are many other organizations, many of which are worse than the Foundation and are actively destructive or cruel. I really don't want to go outside right now, but later today if things clear up, I can go and check for more details if you want. I'd like whatever other details you can offer, but there's no need to endure serious danger or discomfort over it if you'd rather not. The president of the PTA apologized, and the danger outside has passed. There are a lot of terrible and dangerous things in that world, and most of them aren't organizations, but weird supernatural things. I think, although I can't see it directly, just extrapolating from how the organizations I can see react to them, that the weird supernatural horrors that harm a lot of people. Apparently the Church of the Broken God is the only candidate for organization that might do more evil stuff than the Foundation. The Foundation does some useful things, but overall has a massive casualty rate, and does some really awful things they could probably safely avoid doing by organizing things a little bit better. They've got some safety procedures that regularly kill or cause major psychological or physical harm to people, which they could probably avoid if they tried to think of other solutions to problems. So the Foundation definitely sticks out as the most evil organization in Keter, with some competition from the Church. Thank you. I suspected as much, but it's useful to have confirmation. You're welcome! Happy to help! just soyou know im abtou to be taen in for re educatn prob be back 3-5 day, not sue when usefl agn sry short notice ill be ok You no doubt have a better idea of this than I do.What spells does QUALITY DISCOUNT SPELLBOOKS currently have available in their catalogue? Modulo my outdated information: Book In? Price MP INTRO. SPC. Y 19 0 detect magic Y 44 2 light Y 42 2 color spray Y 78 4 protection Y 122 5 grease Y 71 6 web Y 55 7 identify Y 86 9 cr. food/water Y 67 14 remove curse Y 155 15 fireball Y 120 16 fly Y 161 17 invisibility Y 198 20 shape metal Y 330 25 scry Y 337 26 gr. ench. weap. Y 364 36 teleport Y 312 38 permanency Y 542 42 dispel magic Y 600 48 turn undead Y 616 50 plane shift Y 842 60 wish Y 4296 120 As a starter, I recommend INTRODUCTION TO SPELLCASTING and any combination of low-cost spells that will bump you above 100 zm total. I would strongly recommend read magic if I hadn't already bought them out. I somewhat hesitantly recommend wish, but if you ask for a copy of their catalogue you will know exactly why you should have bought it. Good luck. Please don't make me regret my friendly helpful demeanour. Thank you, Leaf. I appreciate your help. And your charm. Please don't flirt with me while I'm trying to work, milady. It's distracting. Then where will I get my fun?
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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 17:33:12 GMT
(In-progress conversation, may be updated later) Tell of here magic kinds, do of plan of safetyHere magic maybe is of thing, maybe is of animal, maybe is of person. Here magic never is of far thing; mage only do of magic of thing if thing is of near. Magic thing maybe do of make, maybe do of change, maybe do of other. If do of make, make thing only is of touch of magic thing. If do of change, change only is of magic thing. If do of other, other maybe is of magic thing, maybe is of touch thing, never is of far thing. Mage do of make of magic thing; mage maybe do of use of magic thing, other maybe do of use of magic thing. Magic thing maybe do of listen of sound, maybe do of see, maybe do of feel of touch, maybe do of other, maybe do of many. If do of listen of near thing, do tiny of think, maybe do of make, maybe do of change, maybe do of other. If do of listen of far thing, maybe say of far thing, no do of think, no do of make, no do of change, no do of other. If mage do of magic of person, maybe person do of change of dangerous, maybe person no do of know of change. Is dangerous: If other person kinds capture kobold, other person kinds maybe do of magic, kobold not do of know, kobold go of tribe, kobold do of sleep, kobold do of fire, tribe do of fire. Here kind magic, mage do magic do of see, mage know is of safe; tribe no of mage, kobold of capture is of exile. Not know all of plan of safety of tribe. Know mage do of magic of see of magic thing, look many of place near of tribe; know mage do of magic of hide of cave, far magic thing no do of see of cave. Know of kobold go of other person kinds place, do of misdirection, do show of other place is of tribe place. If mage see of a magic, kobold do of break of magic thing, tribe do of travel; if other person kinds do of find of tribe place, tribe do of travel. Other place magic, not know if other place person do of find of tribe place, not know if other place person do of magic of kobold, not know if do of break of mirror is do of safe. Kobold small do of exile, maybe do of break of mirror, maybe do of exile, maybe say of tribe do of travel, maybe other. Breaking the mirror won't stop people from seeing your messages on the forum and learning that you exist and your world exists and your tribe exists. I haven't heard yet of any magic that can let someone visit another world just from knowing the other world exists, but I've heard of some kinds of magic that let someone visit another world, and I don't know exactly how all of them work and I don't know how many more kinds there are that I don't know about. There could be magic that will let someone go to your world just from knowing it exists. In Andrew's world there are very dangerous magic people called "daeva" who live very far away from humans like Andrew. One kind of daeva can move things very fast; one kind of daeva can change things into other things; one kind of daeva can make things out of nothing. All daeva can do magic from far away, but no daeva can make magic things. The daeva can't go to where the humans are unless a human summons them there with magic. The magic to summon daeva needs language to work: the human says in words what the summoned daeva is allowed to do, and then the magic makes it so the summoned daeva can only do what the words allow. Humans summon daeva to trade with them. The safety plan in Andrew's world for daeva is to only summon daeva very carefully and not let them do any dangerous things. It's hard to use language carefully enough, but some people like Andrew are very good at it and can trade with daeva safely. Now that Andrew knows about more kinds of magic than the kinds in his world, he asked me to help him make a safety plan for what to do if a daeva could go to another world without being safely summoned. We don't have one yet. The "QUALITY DISCOUNT SPELLBOOKS" person has a kind of magic that I don't understand yet, and they are trading their magic for gold coins. I'm going to try to learn about that magic and find out how it works and how to use it safely, and trade for some of it from them. If I find out how to use it safely and how to give it to more people, I will tell you how to use it safely and give it to you if you want it. People who read the forum can see that you exist, and that your world exists, and that your tribe exists, and that the mirror you use to listen to the forum exists. I don't know if they can find your world that way, but someone with magic I don't know about might be able to; and I don't know if they can find you or your tribe or your mirror in your world that way, but someone with magic I don't know about might be able to. If you stay with your tribe with the mirror, then anyone who can find your tribe with magic can also find you, and anyone who can find you with magic can also find your tribe. Someone reading the forum will know more about you than about your tribe, so I think finding you with magic will be easier than finding your tribe with magic. I don't know about people finding the mirror with magic. The rainbow goddess said she can stop any harmful things coming through the mirror, but someone in your world looking for the mirror isn't coming through the mirror, so maybe she can't stop them. But you can use the mirror to learn about strange other world magic, and maybe get safe magic to use for yourself from me or from someone else, so I think keeping the mirror is safer than breaking it because breaking it won't stop people from finding you or your world if they already could. I think if you tell your tribe to travel, and you go be exiled with the mirror and don't know where your tribe went, that is the safest your tribe can be from strange other world magic things. If someone else in your tribe knew language, you could tell them as much as you can find out about the strange other world magic things first, but if no one else in your tribe uses language then I don't know how you could tell them about strange other world magic. Ugh, do of travel of alone is of hard. Am go of tigerperson tribe, tell of do of tell of kobold tribe of travel. Other kobold do of listen of language; other place persons not do of say of thing of help for of know. Next, do of travel of some of days, do of go of old cave place. Old cave place is mark of humans do of find, is no of kobold tribe, is small of safe. Do more of talk, do of think, do of plan. I traded for some of the "QUALITY DISCOUNT SPELLBOOKS" magic and I'm learning how it works and how to use it safely. I think I will be able to give it to more people soon. Am of place of tigerperson tribe. Tigerperson soon go of kobold tribe, tell of do of travel. Tigerperson no do of worry of magic, do of harvest, do of want of help. Am stay some of days, maybe three, maybe four. Say more of spellbooks magic? As far as I can tell, spellbooks magic is mostly safe to use. Spellbooks magic comes from spellbooks, which are magic things. When a person reads a spellbook, they learn the spell in it. A spellbook can only be read that way once: after someone learns its spell, the spellbook destroys itself somehow. The ones I've seen have caught fire or turned into dust or been soaked in water out of nowhere or fallen apart into little pieces, things like that. It can be surprising, but it hasn't seriously hurt anyone so far. Reading a spellbook is not like reading books, but someone who can't read anything else also can't read spellbooks. Learning a spell from a spellbook is not like learning things normally. Someone who knows a spell can't forget how to cast it, and they can understand how to use the spell just by thinking about it, and understand more things about how the spell works by thinking about it more. There are about a hundred spells that I know about. They do a lot of different things. I can give you a list of all of them if you want, and try to explain what they all do. One of them is comprehend language, which lets someone understand one language for a short time, either by speaking/hearing or by reading/writing. (It only works on the person casting it, though, not on anyone else.) One is minor planar ally, which lets someone trade with a person in another world. One is gate, which lets someone make a door to another world for a short time. Once someone knows at least one spell of this magic, they also know how much maximum MP they have. Casting spells uses up MP, a specific amount depending on the spell. Comprehend language uses 7 MP. Gate uses 96. Someone who has used up some of their MP can get it back very slowly when they sleep, or more quickly by meditating in a particular way. The more magic someone uses, either spellbooks magic or other kinds of magic, the bigger their maximum MP gets, but that is a slow way to get more maximum MP; a faster way is to do difficult dangerous scary things. I have done a lot of dangerous difficult scary things, so I have 195 maximum MP. Am no of do of read. Tigerperson tribe have of books, maybe do of borrow, do little of learn. Am want of spell of language. Tomorrow do of rain, maybe. Tigerperson maybe do of inside, mirror do of hide of tigerperson. I have that list of spellbooks spells for you now. [Attached: Annotated Spell Catalogue]
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Post by Leaf on May 16, 2015 17:34:11 GMT
(In-progress conversation, may be updated later, OH GOD IT'S SO LONG) (Miles's ritual, when you get there, may be found here) !iwjk&&7776425$${{WARING.ERRORERROR 8888^^^@64351144%%kks8((==WARNING USER USURPATION IN PROGRESS MINISTRY WILL BE ALERTED INNnnnnnnn&&&4ERRORERRORerr =>>>>> i apologize for the inconvenience, and for borrowing prism's account. i'm not prism, but i am from her world. i think it should be fairly obvious that the sunrise empire is kind of a hellhole. it definitely is one. through a delightful glitch that i have been exploiting, this forum's screwed up their very censorship system, at least on this forum. i noticed, through what i'm going to shorten to magical shenanigans. i was quite content to lurk (and, in one case, keep prism from being an idiot and losing a large sum of money) and let prism have her fun, but there was a particular post of yours that i thought was worth asking about. along with the delightful censorship, the hellhole has some other lovely populace control methods in place. for example; every citizen is completely sterile. you must petition the government for permission to have a child. its arguable that in some cases this wouldn't be a bad thing, but in this particular case they have abused the ability to an extreme. the requirements are obscene, every media censorship flag against you (which they do not inform you of) is counted against you, every word that is recorded that is not in support of the empire is counted against you, and goddesses help you if you have broken any laws (even very minor ones - loitering ticket comes to mind). if you are not the best little citizen, congratulations, you can't ever have kids. i have taken offense with this policy in particular, among others. so you can probably see where i'm going with this. you mentioned 'uterine replicators.' how viable is your fancy clockwork? can you send schematics so i (or someone else) could build one, and how to use it? even if you don't trust me, which i wouldn't blame you for, is it a viable option or am i wasting my time? prism won't see messages i hide, put an exclamation mark at the front of the subject line of messages you'd like to send to me but hide from her. i can see all messages you send to her regardless, and in an ordinary situation i would give her the right to privacy, but unfortunately this is not an ordinary situation. i need to know as soon as possible if you're going to try to warn prism of my existence and therefore alert the ministry i'm here. they have a kill order on me. so unfortunately i can't give you and her privacy in messages, as i would really rather not die. i hope you'll understand. or at least if you don't, you'll give me a head start so i can run for my life. again. but if you don't try to get me killed i will really appreciate it. got to run. i will answer questions as i have time. STARTING TIMER FOR REINTEGRATION WITH CRYSTAL NETWORK. LOADING. LOADING - Prism seems very sweet but I'm not especially interested in trying to wade through automated censorship to talk to her one-on-one. Can you offer best guesses at what some of the censored things she was saying were? She doesn't seem like the type to have uncommon knowledge of secrets, so I presume most of them can be picked up from context even if you don't have access to the originals. I certainly can provide schematics of uterine replicators. Providing schematics of everything required to build and operate one... would be a little more trouble. "Fancy clockwork" needs a lot of infrastructure to build and maintain it, which I imagine you don't have right now and which as a rebel on the run from an oppressive government I don't expect you can acquire on short notice. I could be wrong, but my best guess is that you are wasting your time unless you have access to significantly better resources than it sounds like. On the other hand, there was a recent example in my world of a planet that jumped from virtually no "fancy clockwork" right up to competing with the galactic technological big boys in only a couple of generations, so it's possible in theory. But unlike you, that planet had access to physical assistance from the rest of the galaxy. I don't think I can send an electrical generator as a message attachment. And poor Prism would likely be confused if I managed it. 888^66jnnh3$^@~22ERRORERRORWARNING USER USURPATION IN&*(99jbw%553ERROR understandable. i can't salvage things that have already been scrubbed, but i can guess a bit from context. let's see. in order: she is referring to the anavasi, who become such from elves in a very secretive ritual i know next to nothing about. i suspect she brought up the fact that as far as the general populous knows, they don't die of old age and are tough to kill. the other things - i'm not sure. musings on their social structure? saying how great they are? how they have society's best interests in mind, or something? i don't know. botanical-political reasons is actually a reference to the methods used to usurp network crystals. magic plants are involved. i could tell you the specifics of it, but honestly i don't think it'd be very useful to you and pointlessly risky for me. the interface is shit and i can't do capital letters, but its better than nothing. use of the magic necessary to do it is now banned, and there's slander about how practitioners of it eat babies or something. so it was likely about that. that's a pity. well, it was always a long shot. is there something less infrastructure intensive that could still be useful? communication, location surveying, sight enhancers, something? i have access to all of the listed by magical means, but magical means can be countered. which is sort of inconvenient. yes, let's not confuse poor Prism with electrical generators, useful as they'd be TIMER SET. LOADING... I can't imagine any use I could possibly have for your botanical-political secrets. Do you have a name you want me to call you, or should I just keep thinking of you as "Hahanope"? I'm going to need some time to think about your request, both in terms of what aid I might be able to give you and - excuse me - of whether or not I should give it. You could help me out with the first question by sending me as much information as possible on... how do I put this... the non-magical mechanics of your world? For example, in mine, the speed of light is a known constant with special properties. If it is known to have different properties in your world, that suggests that my "fancy clockwork" - which all depends heavily on the exact behaviour of physical objects - will be as useless to you as Cardea's cake recipe. 823&24pasn^^3#ERRORERROR- look at me, my reflexes are improving, that one didn't even make it to the warning message. hahanope is fine, i wouldn't pick it if left to my own devices but it'll work all right for our purposes. i understand. i'd be just as leery of handing magic to strangers i barely know without thinking it through, too. dangerous stuff should be treated as such. i couldn't tell you the properties of most of the world - for example, i don't know the speed of light. i wasn't actually aware light had a speed. what mechanics are worth checking? do you have methodology to check them? i could possibly bother an alchemist for the chemical composition of things, but i don't know if the trouble involved would be worth it. TIMER SET. LOADING... Chemical compositions would be really helpful, but probably only if you could get me the equivalent (in comprehensiveness, informativeness) of an introductory chemistry textbook. I can send you an introductory chemistry textbook, but the more I know about your world, the easier it is to figure out how to translate the parts you might have trouble understanding. And a poorly understood introductory chemistry textbook can be dangerous to everybody. iii&3466^$((8*7@ERRORERROR nothing is more dangerous than the fool who knows barely anything and thinks they have all the answers. i am familiar with the concept. i'll see what i can do. in the meantime, i have gone looking for ways magic could be used to your world's benefit. i strongly suspect prism was actually correct - blood craft can be used to greatly increase natural lifespan. it doesn't work as well on adults, only gaining the person another century or two, but on gestating children i suspect the effects would be much greater. at the same time, though, i'm not sure if you could even use magic. i'd be willing to walk you through a test to check, but i don't have my hopes up. TIMER SET. LOADING... By all means, let's have that test. If magic turns out to work for me, I promise most solemnly not to be an idiot about it. !((73^^llakk3111^^ERRORERROR it's kinda risky, but it's hardly fair of me to ask you to take the similar risk of sending technology to a strange nameless account thief person. though if you turn out to be a psychopath who is planning to use magic to conquer the cosmos, i will be very cross with you and send very strongly worded messages about how it's not efficient to be evil. right, so, first - there is an awakening involved before you can even test for magic. you'll need a wooden bowl (there's a debate over different types of woods used resulting in magic tasting differently, but i somehow don't think you care?) a quartz crystal, distilled water, a stick of graphite, about a gram of copper, and some kind of sharp object appropriate with which to poke yourself so blood comes out. no, a vial of it stored beforehand doesn't work, it needs to be as fresh as possible, it is what connects the magic to you in particular. if it is someone else's blood it will connect it to them, and if it isn't fresh the connection will be tenuous (and you'll be forever crippled, magic wise) or not happen at all and prevent you from ever getting magic. actually if you have a particular affection for any sharp objects, use that, the emotional connection helps. for complicated reasons i'm not going to get into because again, i don't think you care if it's possible that it will not happen at all. any questions before i move on to the actual procedure involved? some substitutions are possible, but i'd need to hear specifics about it and if it's certain things i'd need to tweak the ritual itself, so. TIMER SET. LOADING... Wooden bowl (does it matter if it's polished/painted?), quartz crystal (any specific kind of quartz? size?), distilled water, a stick of graphite (how big? for what?), a gram of copper (does the form of the copper matter? purity?), sharp object with sentimental value. Okay, I'm with you so far, although I'll wait on your answers to those questions before acquiring the relevant ingredients. 777^246f$%*ERROR polished is iffy but i can make it work, avoid it if you can, but do not get a painted wooden bowl. just. no. quartz crystal needs to be small enough to fit in the bowl. copper should be pretty pure, but the form of it doesn't matter, as long as it can fit in the bowl. the graphite will be used to draw on the bowl itself, the size of it also doesn't matter but it needs to be something you can hold and draw with. basic explanation of what we're doing here - there are a lot of factors involved with waking up to magic. different types of the different materials affect where your strengths magic wise will be, but we have yet to actually figure out how. there's the material factors, the time of day when you do the ritual, where you do it at, what your mood is at the time, what type of person you are, the current weather in the area, the temperature of the room... leaf, we've devoted millenia to the study of how it works, and what will get you what, and we still have no idea what to do in order to get strengths in areas you choose. but we have figured out that the type of wood probably affects how magic tastes. maybe. so that's nice. for example; for mine, i used a pine bowl, smoky quartz, a gram of pure copper, a stick of graphite, a knife i carried around for a month and named jeremiah, and did the entire thing at my house around sunset and was kind of disgruntled at the time because the person walking me through it didn't answer all of my questions. i'm good at working with plants and crystals, decent at healing and blood craft, and completely hopeless at anything involving stone or metal. if you asked me to guarantee that you had the same strengths as i do, i genuinely couldn't manage it. so i won't lie to you and say it's not a factor for what type of quartz you pick, but i literally have no idea how it'll affect what your possible magical strengths will be. i know what to do in order to give you the best chance of getting strong magic in something, and i will be doing that, i just cannot guarantee what you'll be good at. (before you ask, no, i will not be tweaking things here to magically cripple you. that would be cruel.) TIMER SET. LOADING... I wasn't actually about to ask that, but thank you anyway, I appreciate it. Wooden bowl: maple, not polished or painted, large enough to contain the rest of the ingredients. Quartz crystal: I can get my hands on synthetic crystals really easily, but if you don't know what that would do to the process, I will find a natural one. Copper: pure, lumpish. Graphite stick and distilled water: both available and serviceable. Sentimentally significant sharp object: details redacted for privacy, but it'll do. What now? &www^^^25)9*{{ERRORERROR the way i see it, if i am going to potentially give you magic, it is a very bad idea to do it badly. one, because it's generally bad form to be a jerk. i try not to be. two, because unless i literally screw up everything possible, you will get some kind of magic from this. if you have even the barest traces of magic, you will be able to tell that i screwed you over. i have enough people trying to kill me, thanks, i do not want to add to the number. third, if you turn out to be evil, i'd likely still be able to beat you in a fight regardless of how the ritual goes, unless you somehow lived up to the movies and found a way to train for a couple centuries in a pocket dimension until you're ready to leave it and turn me into a nasty smear on the floor. i do not think you live up to the movies. no offense to you. four, if you are actually sane and pleasant and not at all idiotic and likely to kick puppies as you walk to work, i would like to not burn potential bridges with you. and then, you know, fifth, where i am definitely still doing this for my own interests of 'screw that evil totalitarian oligarchy.' maple's fine. i don't actually know what a synthetic crystal would do, you should probably skip it unless you want this to be even more of an experiment than it already is. the copper's fine, the graphite and distilled water are fine. i will not ask why you have a sharp object you are sentimental over, but i will think the best of you on the subject. once you've got everything, you need to draw on the bowl with the graphite - no words, no recognizable drawings of things. no trees, people, animals, leaves - whatever you draw should be as abstract as possible. i can send you examples of drawings that are appropriate, but you cannot, repeat, cannot copy things other people have drawn. the reason for this - you are connecting the magic to you. nothing else. icons of things that you like will confuse it, words will confuse it, drawings that are recognizable as things will confuse it. try to draw something you think is pretty, or aesthetically appropriate to you. feel free to practice with paper or something before, and you can check drawings with me here to see if they'll work if you're worried, but if you don't know what to do you can feel free to scribble on the bowl, as long as it's kept abstract. i'm not kidding about the 'no icons' thing, don't do it. check with me once you've done that, and describe what you've drawn to me, to double check. it'll help if you turn the bowl upside down and check for imagery, too. the graphite will likely smudge; this is fine, don't worry about it, but don't try to smudge everything on purpose. TIMER SET. LOADING... Am I drawing on the inside or outside of the bowl, or both? Are exact geometric figures an appropriate sort of thing to draw, or is the magic going to think I am drawing a stylized any-triangular-object-that-exists, or whatever? **mm37%%2@)99((ERRORERROR WARNING USURPATION IN ERRORRRRR (aw, i was slow on that one.) both sides. exact geometric figures are probably okay, but take care to not draw any while thinking of an object that is shaped like whatever that thing is. if you live by pyramids, i'd avoid triangles. TIMER SET. LOADING... The most abstract (and me-focused) drawing subject I can think of is some intensely geometric hallucinations I've had, but now that I think of it, I'm not sure those don't count as a "thing". Advice? **);.$211&662/?ERRORERROR intensely geometric hallucinations. um. you live an interesting life. were they about objects in particular, or just shapes? just shapes should be fine, if they were objects in particular i'd say no but if these are about your abstract hallucinations it sounds like it would be good drawing subject matter. honestly i think what's key is that you don't see icons in it, other people will always see things in what you draw, but other people aren't the ones doing the ritual to get magic powers, so they can go sit in line. TIMER SET. LOADING... Got it. Intensely geometric hallucinations it is. (They started out based around objects in my visual field, but by a few minutes in they were just random visual noise with a lot of curves and sharp corners. That was not a good day.) Is following the grain of the wood acceptable or too thingish? Kind of hard to avoid thinking about the bowl while I draw on it, it being right there and all. I suppose it is within my power to be actively geometrically hallucinating at the time, but that seems like it would make drawing difficult. uu//$1132&~~`*92j&*(ERROR i won't ask. following the grain of the wood is acceptable, and you are also allowed to think of the bowl. just try not to draw the bowl, and you should be okay. you know the last person i walked through this didn't ask any questions? just wandered around and picked stuff up and did what i said. it turned out okay, but this is a nice change. TIMER SET. LOADING... It seems ridiculous not to ask all the questions that occur to me before I commit to something like this. I'm on shaky enough ground already. Okay, my bowl is covered in meaningless hallucinatory geometry and woodgrain tracings. And very smudgy. Next step(s)? &&maa45(*&^^$ERROR that was what i said! but nooo, for mine it was that i 'ask too many questions, and should just shut up and do the ritual,' ugh. major life affecting thing! kind of important! you're just about ready. pick a spot outside that seems thematically appropriate and also appropriate to you, and take all ritual stuff out with you. if you think there is a time of day that is more you than other times of day, you should do the ritual then. if you can't think of a time of day that feels like yours, just do it when you feel like you should. thankfully there isn't a verbal component, so we don't have to worry if a translated version will cause everything to go horribly wrong. ritual procedure is as follows: 1. you, sitting, with the decorated bowl in front of you and the various ritual materials in easy reach 2. take quartz, place into the center of the bowl. 3. pour distilled water into bowl to fill it, don't let it overflow. water level isn't super important, don't overthink it. 4. take sentimentally sharp object, poke self until blood comes out, let blood drip into bowl. when this happens, you are on a time crunch, do everything after as quickly as you can. 5. place dominant hand into bowl, over quartz, fingers in water and touching bowl. 6. place copper onto the top of the hand over the quartz. 7. place other hand over copper (and, by extension, your dominant hand.) 8. think about whatever you find most important, in your life, in life in general; values, desires, dreams, fears, so on. if you can't distill yourself into thought form it shouldn't be for lack of trying. 9. hold. keep thinking about what is important to you, keep everything where it is located, and try not to freak out as you feel your magic senses seep in. we describe it as taste, but it's not quite that, but you will definitely get a new sense if it works at all. if there is no new sense, then i guess it doesn't work, but if there is, then congratulations. you now have magic. TIMER SET. LOADING... A very well-described set of steps, thank you. (I wonder what happens to ambidextrous people, but the question is academic.) Should I be making sure the water doesn't overflow at all, or just during the pouring step? Do details like how much of each hand is in the water matter beyond what you already described? 88&36&&^2nn2&%))(ERRORERROR you're welcome. ambidextrous people have a slightly different way of doing the ritual for the best effect, but this one will work just fine for them, too. just during the pouring step, and not as far as i know. but you definitely do need hand to meet water and bottom of bowl, that is the important part here. TIMER SET. LOADING... Understood. (And is the trying not to freak out important, or is the result already determined by that point such that I can freak out as much as I like and all it will affect is my dignity? If trying not to freak out is important and I have to sit and wait for the new senses to finish coming in, how will I know when it's done and I can get up and go do something else?) **lajd34^%**!2##ERROR you're adorable. it's fine to ask more questions, i will not hiss and swat you for caring and being curious. trying not to freak out is mildly important, most of everything is already determined, but if you keep thinking yourselfy-thoughts until everything is nice and settled you will get the best result possible. you will know when its done, it feels sort of like standing up. you have no where else to go up to, nothing else will expand, and you will sort of - magically settle. things will feel less stretchy. if i'd crippled you (which, haven't) you would feel like you could have been better, but like the magic can't expand any more. if we did it well you should feel like you have either met or surpassed your possible potential. likely it'll be met or near-met, but hey, maybe this'll go really well, even without an arcanist to supervise. TIMER SET. LOADING... Naturally I aim to surpass my potential. No point in undershooting. I have a time and location picked out, and I should be there in about a day. If you think of any last-minute advice before then, do let me know. If this works, I'm probably going to tell a few close friends and/or family members about it, and might get some of them to do it too. But I maintain my promise not to be an idiot. *^2,ni(827&%1ERROR yep, that's about how i look at it. nothing that i can think of, but i might suddenly remember something really important i forgot. it's not likely, but it could happen. i'll keep in touch. if you're going to awaken other people, i genuinely think you should get my help with their rituals. there are a number of substitutions that can be made (the one off of the top of my head is for iron instead of copper) and there are situations where one would use them. explaining those and where you might want to use them, and what the tradeoffs are for everything might take a while, and it doesn't apply to you, but for others it might become relevant. also, please don't start another totalitarian oligarchy run off of unethical magical tampering. one in my life is enough. TIMER SET. LOADING... I give you my word. No evil empires. There are enough of those already. What would I need to tell you about someone for you to know what substitutions to make? I'm at my location and my chosen time is several hours from now, so if you're going to suddenly remember something really important, now is most certainly the time. -&^@882=+://ERROR thank you. that's about all i can fairly ask of you. if someone's ambidextrous, i will tweak the ritual for them. similarly, if they're missing any limbs, i would need to tweak. if for some reason their chemical composition of their left arm is that of a mobile rock (don't ask, it happened) then i need to know and account for it. if they're incapable of bleeding, i can probably figure out a way to get around it but would likely need a few weeks to figure it out. that sort of thing - personality doesn't come up, unless they are particularly fond of, say, a polished wooden bowl, and then i need to account for it. it does not look like i will. i asked the last person i did this for about anything i missed (and they would know) and according to them i haven't. that's about all i have for magical experts. i'd go check with the ministry, but somehow i don't think they'd go for it. Well. That was... That was something. I am definitely either very magical or very high right now. Suggestions about how to distinguish the two? *108^@($*jjklo2^^2ERRORERROR i mean, being a bit woozy after the ritual's kind of normal, there's a lot to get used to. but if you have more than just new sensory information and a place to put it, then i don't know what to tell you. i am a mysterious person speaking out of an elf's rainbow-unicorn themed account, on a multidimensional forum, who just advised you how to do a ritual that will allegedly get you magic. i don't really think i am your port of call for 'am i high'? but seriously, congrats, i wasn't sure it would even work. i'm guessing since you are slightly high on magic instead of spitting curses upon my name, it went well? TIMER SET. LOADING... I think I did something... I'm not going to say wrong, but unusually. Um. You mentioned surpassing one's possible potential? And that the thing to do while your magic is coming in is to contemplate your own characteristics? As it turns out, one of my core characteristics seems to be a desire to surpass my possible potential. So... that... happened. In a sort of self-reinforcing way. Rather like a fire that creates its own fuel. It hurt, which you didn't warn me about, but I suppose this particular situation doesn't come up all that often and also one of my other core characteristics is a pathological inability to quit. I have plenty of new sensory information, I'm just not sure what to do with it all. And I'm exhausted. That too. klab&&46370*$&@(ERRORERROR ... um? i didn't know it was possible to hurt during an awakening. i would have warned you if i'd known, i apologize. i... don't think you did anything wrong? if you don't feel like you are crammed into too-small packaging magic wise, then you didn't do it incorrectly, and all your magic is where it should be. as far as i know extra magic isn't harmful, just a bit hard to get used to. but also i am hoping you don't go and explode from too much magic. i'm pretty sure that can't actually happen, but then, i'd never heard of an awakening hurting. TIMER SET. LOADING... It did occur to me that I might explode. I kept going anyway. Restraint and caution are not among my virtues. I don't appear to have exploded yet, though, so let's hope this happy trend continues. It doesn't feel like I'm crammed into too-small packaging. I remember feeling like I was reaching past a limit (and how!), but now the limit is gone and I just feel, well, Extremely Magical. I'm having a little trouble sorting all these new senses into firm categories. Is there some kind of chart available? 516&*guijk%&&$$ERROR yes. don't explode. i would be responsible and feel really awful about it. i don't think i actually have chart capabilities, but there are vaguish handwaves of crafts that arcanists use because we have to classify this all somehow. there tend to be different types of senses associated with them. whatever sense(s) come most readily are where your strengths lie, if you're missing anything i write out then that is overwhelmingly likely to be where you're weak. i'm just going to assume that if i tell you to go sleep you won't listen to me and you'll demand charts, so to save time: crystal - better vision, especially when it comes to light. i distinctly remember staring at everything, and crystal's one of my strongest. plant - sort of hard to describe, feeling stuff about the plants around you, and what they could possibly do. song - better hearing, increased ability to tell what sounds are from further away, and where they come from. aura - a deep understanding of how stuff fits together around you, how one thing works with another and how a little change can affect a lot more than that. blood - a better understanding of your own inner workings, and if you're paying attention, other people's, too. heat - knowledge of temperatures around you, feeling of what is causing things to heat up and cool down. breath - better knowledge of momentum and understanding of fluid (air, water) dynamics. metal (somewhat allegedly, i have the sense but it's really not great) - understanding of how much pressure things are under, what amount will cause them to break. stone (definitely allegedly) - feeling of stability of an area, especially ground-based, some understanding of what stone/dirt is best to use. apparently. i wouldn't know, it is my worst one. so, whichever one of those senses feels strongest is likely what you're best at. i'll explain what they do, but i can do a better job if i know what you're seeing on your end first. TIMER SET. LOADING... Okay, so a quick ranking in rough order of strength... Breath: Yes. Definitely. Incredibly. Somewhat worryingly. I could map every air current in my house. Crystal: Definitely highly noticeable. Plant: Also highly noticeable, but in a more confusing way. I don't think I have enough context to understand what it means, so I'm getting the sense that plants can definitely do things without the understanding of what those things are exactly. Song: Extremely noticeable. Kind of unsettling, but I'm getting used to it. Blood: For personal reasons this one is both uncomfortable and hilarious. I don't think I'm going to get used to it anytime soon. Heat: Yes, definitely, it's weird. Stone: Pretty solidly yes. Metal: Noticeable, but kind of getting lost under all the rest. I'm pretty sure this is weakest out of the ones I actually have. Aura: Absolutely nothing whatsoever. Shit-all. I would not have been able to guess that this was a thing. It's hard to tell exact order among each of the two groups of three, but otherwise I'm pretty confident about which ones are stronger than others. &&928jmnkl&&#%ERRORERROR okay, good to know. in order of power (for your convenience, because i am a kind and gentle soul) the what-they-do: breath: motion manipulation, air and water manipulation. note - not actually changing the temperature of 'em, but moving them. you might be able to move ice, but it'll be a bother, and you should start with ordinary liquid and gas before trying harder stuff. crystal: communication, light, visual illusions - i believe you are familiar with the crystal network? that's insanely advanced crystal craft. plant: manipulation of plants, which sounds kind of lame, until you realize that plants are great at integrating with other things, adapting, and also breaking into crystal networks. song: as a general rule, manipulation of sound. voice mimicry, recording certain sounds, playing back music (this is where it got the name) and occasionally making an awful racket. blood: (uncomfortable and hilarious? do i want to know?) body manipulation. most obvious use is healing. less obvious uses include expanded lifespans, sterilization, and also really terrifying things when you upset someone who knows it very well. heat: control over temperatures and electricity. the name is a misnomer, it does cold along with heat. stone: moving stone, tweaking its composition, using it to build things; stone + aura = impregnable fortress of doom. metal: reinforcing and improving metals (and sometimes other things), some work with golems if you're clever, and the ability to sharpen things like knives to very sharp points. aura: stable area effects, subtle changes to an environment. an area not getting too hot, a door not opening unless it's for the right person, so on. if it's not from a specific item, and just in a spot, it's likely aura craft. TIMER SET. LOADING... Well, I guess I know what things to try when I'm showing off my exciting new powers to family and friends. And no, you probably don't want to know. 8kl&&65472^@$%ERROR become a water fountain. wow all of your friends. do you want a methodology of 'how to magic'? i'm not great with breath, but i've used it before and understand the basic principles. and obviously i know a lot about crystal and plant, and some song. you are actually mostly in my area of expertise, if you were metal/stone and awful at everything else i would throw up my hands and say 'good luck.' TIMER SET. LOADING... m289547&*#^$921ERROR okay, but recall that i am still a slightly under resourced rebel on the run from a horrible totalitarian oligarchy, that is still a problem, i would still like possible help with that. breath first, since it's your best. we'll start with air because air is easy. if i were actually there i would say close your eyes, but that's kind of counterproductive here, so close your eyes when you are following my instructions after you have read all of the instructions. focus on your map of air currents. watch how they move. understand why they move like they do - the factors that cause the movement. now, pinpoint a shallow breeze, and what's causing that. you will not actually reproduce the things causing it, that is what the magic will stand in for. now, recall the taste of what caused it, and the taste of the thing you want to cause. picture both clearly in your mind. this is the hard part, it's kind of hard to explain - if i were there i would demonstrate, but unfortunately you're kind of on your own. push yourself (and the clear picture in your mind) at the place you want to cause the breeze. moving sometimes helps, but it's bad form to let it become habit; others can read what you're doing, and it slows you down, because magic can work faster than, say, your arm. i like to imagine it as a force of personality, others think of it as a force of will. really, it's a force of magic, but you need to be very yourself at the magic in telling it where to go. if that makes sense. ugh, this is such an awful way to teach someone magic, i apologize. does that all make sense? TIMER SET. LOADING. I have now successfully shoved some breezes around. Believe me, I have not forgotten that you're an under-resourced rebel on the run from a horrible totalitarian oligarchy. I'm working on it. kl728FSD77($&ERROR thank you. congrats! you have officially done magic. now, you should practice the same thing with different types of breezes (stronger ones, for example) and then move on to moving water around, by the same methodology. i recommend a lake or ocean or something for that one, but if you have a pool i suppose that'll work too. TIMER SET. LOADING... Will do. Might be a while. I will try not to fall asleep in it and drown. (I swear I would go to sleep right now if I could. Nothing would please me more. I am unfortunately way too manic. Magic practice will either calm me down or at least let me pass the time productively.) Fio2&&7398&*@$%$^)ERRORERROR um. on second thought, let's not play with learning how to move water, let's not do that at all. and - really? wildebeest. i'd pick the musical number, it'd be embarrassing, but no one would be hurt. TIMER SET. LOADING... "No one would be hurt" - clearly you have never seen me dance. (That was humour. I'm actually a reasonably good dancer. Singing, on the other hand...) The part about falling in and drowning was also humour, for the record. I am not going to practice water magic alone with no safety precautions. I promised I wouldn't be an idiot. jk*7684&*^$@error ha. i am aware of what humor is, thank you. just, you know, multidimensional forum, i haven't actually met you, i don't know how likely you are to go diving into a lake for the sake of magic. safety precautions are a thing. and sarcasm doesn't translate very well over the net. also? thank you, i was inches away from editing prism's post to say, 'no no don't do it don't do it ha ha i was joking haaaaa.' TIMER SET. LOADING... I was a little alarmed, I'll admit. I think I might have managed to convince her? I suggest that you PM Mother Starlight if Prism seems likely to press the issue. lFS&*227548#&*$^ERROR it is kind of alarming. i'll pm her if prism keeps pressing the issue, but i will definitely break out the questionable edits if it can avoid a ministry enforcer singing to me about how sharp their knives are... TIMER SET. LOADING... Of the two options (questionable edit vs. PMing Mother Starlight), the second one definitely seems way less likely to make Prism or anyone else in your world suspicious. Mkjj*&437^^284ERROR agreed. i can cover my tracks reasonably well, but - yes. but i definitely will to avoid the song and dance number. i'd take it over the wildebeest, but - nnnnnnnno. no. noooooooooo. TIMER SET. LOADING... I feel like I could handle suddenly appearing wild animals reasonably well, whereas people doing song-and-dance numbers who did not intend to do those song-and-dance numbers is fundamentally and intrinsically a problem regardless of what else is going on. 28&FDS&25klj7$ERROR point. but the account isn't mine, i wouldn't be the one getting the wildebeest. do you think prism would handle wild animals suddenly appearing? TIMER SET. LOADING... Okay, granted. We don't know what the wildebeest actually did, though. There is still some chance it might turn out okay. And in your case there are also extra hazards to the song-and-dance thing - random bystanders being forced to sing my messages at you could be a huge disaster, for example. mjkl*^&^25ERRORERROR there is that. thus the 'edit before it happens' thing. i do have a basic vague idea of information security. but i will take it over someone else getting hurt. TIMER SET. LOADING... All right. I have done magic to water. I have avoided drowning. I have slept. I have broken the news to select family members. Select family members were weirdly unsurprised. What does it say about me that "I have magical powers now, not kidding, watch this water move" was met with "of course you do, son, if magical powers are a thing that can happen then I am retroactively surprised it took you this long"? Your attitude about the wildebeest thing is commendable, but I'm not sure it's a very practical one for an under-resourced rebel... I'm still working on that part. I think having some of your magic on this end will be a big help in designing safe experiments, though. Unrelatedly: Wow, lurkingkobold and friends seem to have it really rough. The only way I can think of to help them out is to give them your magic, though, and for one thing I'm not sure I can translate the instructions adequately and for another thing I'm not sure I can translate the idea of infosec adequately either and I don't want to get you in trouble. jkl*^^@^33&$ERRORERROR it says that you live an interesting life, i think. it's more practical than it sounds - i am not actually new to being an under-resourced rebel. i cannot be in control of a situation i am not a part of. i'd take wildebeest if i was guaranteed to be in the same room with them, but it's not my account. breaking into prism's house in order to save her is even worse. safe experiments sound good. agreed, on lurkingkobold and friends. i do want to help them, but... it's - a complicated situation. the thing about magic is that while i'm of the opinion that having it is to the benefit of whatever world it's in, it's pretty obvious it can be abused. i don't actually think my world's even close to the worst it could get. i don't just want to fling the instructions on how to gain magic into the cosmos and hope for the best. there's also an issue with actually making it happen - humans are basically elves without the pointy ears and longevity. kobolds? i have no idea. if it were a perfect world i could go meet them and poke at them with magic senses to see how the ritual would work with them, but - i don't have that. it would be guesswork, at best. i couldn't predict if it would work, or if it didn't work, if it wouldn't explode horribly or magically cripple the user or screw them over for accessing my magic at all. and for obvious reasons i would not give magic to the elves of lurkingkobold's world. they seems like jackasses. not to mention, this is sort of a new thing for me, giving magic out to other worlds. you are something of a trial run. it's kind of nerve-wracking. TIMER SET. LOADING... I am doing pretty well with my water-magic so far. No explosions yet. Are there particular hazards I should be watching out for? There are some people in my world I want to pass the magic on to. None of them is ambidextrous or missing any limbs. I am not sure about their polished-bowl-related preferences. (*fkkl&@$^%ERRORERROR be careful about tweaking yourself, and doing magic directed at living things. both can be very hazardous. stick with inanimate objects and plants and such until you're confident you're doing exactly what you want to do. don't drown. the standard ritual should work okay, just run the specifics by me to check. TIMER SET. LOADING... Tweaking myself can definitely wait until I'm a lot surer of what the hell I'm doing. Magic directed at (non-plant, I guess) living things - is that going to be hazardous to me, to them, or both? My mother wants to use synthetic quartz and is having trouble coming up with a sentimentally significant sharp object. jkl&*^@*F^DS&ERROR hazardous to them in ordinary circumstances, could also be hazardous to you if you really, really screw it up. what is in the synthetic quartz, exactly? is the crystal grown in a synthetic environment but otherwise an ordinary hunk of quartz, or is it different in some way? i also had trouble with the sentimentally significant sharp object - my way around it was creating one myself. that is, grabbing a knife, giving it a name, treating it as a pet. my ritual went okay, i am above average for power. it's a very nice knife, actually, i still have it. i recommend looking for one appropriate to her culture/history, or something that she thinks is meaningful to her in particular. TIMER SET. LOADING... Just a synthetically grown hunk of quartz, yes. I will recommend this strategy to her and see what she says. JKL8427&^^%@$ERROR okay, since i'm not there to check it you will need to do it for me. thankfully crystal craft's one of your better ones, so this is not going to suck. grab an ordinary quartz crystal (the one from your ritual will work) and a synthetic. there will be some no matter what, but what you're looking for in particular is a disconnect from the rest of the world in the synthetic crystal. the disconnect feels like when the rest of the world moves, the crystal doesn't, it keeps on doing the same thing. use your other one to pinpoint where it is - song craft will actually help you here, sound's one of the easiest ways to catch the dissonance. the test i recommend to check is putting both crystals on a table, tapping the table with a finger at regular intervals, and watching for how they react to it. the one that isn't synthetic should for sure, but the synthetic one might not. if you feel a disconnect in the synthetic crystal, do not use it. if you can't detect one, check a few more times just to be sure (it is kind of important.), and then she can use it. TIMER SET. LOADING... Will do. My mother wants to know if - oh, I'll just quote her: "This sentimentally valuable sharp object you're looking for. Will the 'keep a knife as a pet' plan work better or worse than using something with mixed positive and negative significance?" klUIS&@*6^$2ERROR we're aiming for something that is sentimentally significant, not necessarily something the person looks on with affection. the ritual is based around representing you as a person - if she thinks that the something that is mixed is more representative of her than a knife pet, she should go with that, or vice versa. if she's not sure which is better, i say go for the one that invokes the largest emotional response. TIMER SET. LOADING... She's going with the mixed significance. I'm following your wise example and not asking what that significance is. The synthetic crystal seems to check out. Is there a particular reason why the ritual has to be done outside? JIDSL*&@&*@$*&ERROR smart man. okay, then it should work, but do tell your mother that her ritual is slightly experimental because of it, and i can't completely guarantee it won't go horribly wrong, only mostly guarantee it. go horribly wrong in the cripple her magic forever sense, not in an exploding sense. yep. while you are also pinpointing yourself as the person who is getting the magic, you are also trying to get the attention of as much stuff as possible. being near a building is fine, being enclosed inside walls and being cut off from celestial bodies and the weather outside is a bad idea. it would work, but result in less overall magic to work with. so, outside. if it's raining, you can either wait for it to stop, or go and practice telling rain what to do. ten points if you can get it to freeze mid air. TIMER SET. LOADING... Well, that makes some amount of sense. Her next question: Is the ritual affected by other people being present? kjl&26&&#@%ERROR it depends very highly on the people, and the type of person that is doing the ritual. it's traditional for it to be only the person doing the ritual and the arcanist supervising present, but i am personally of the opinion that if the people present don't stifle your personality or actively try to distract you from the ritual, there is nothing wrong with it. i'd be willing to argue that in some cases they actively help, if they're close family members/friends/lovers that are close to you in some fashion, but i have no proof. basically - if she thinks it is appropriate to invite important people to see, she may, if she doesn't actually want anyone there, she should skip it. whether or not the people themselves want to come see should not be a factor, the ritual is about the person doing it, not about social niceties. TIMER SET. LOADING... Understood. Okay. Does this make me the arcanist supervising? I guess by default it does. What should I be looking for in my supervision? j*(^@&^66^%ERROR the arcanist supervising is present to a: make sure the person doing the ritual doesn't do something that would screw up the ritual, meaning proper procedure is followed, and that the person doesn't pick bad things to use in it. and b: if the person chokes during the ritual (which is rare, but has happened before) it's the arcanist's job to do their best to salvage the situation to try and save as much of the person's magic as possible. the first is basically what we're doing right now. the second will be kind of hard for you to pull off, because you're not very experienced yet. no offense. i can explain the procedure, but if you don't think it's going to come up i would just as soon skip it. i recommend strongly stressing to your mother that she should not choke during the ritual. i do think you should pay attention during the ritual, though. don't, for the love of all that's good in the world, touch anything. do not do any magic while your mother is doing her ritual. but! you should watch with magic senses and study what's going on. TIMER SET. LOADING... I will pay attention and not do anything. I do not expect my mother to screw it up, but I do kind of wonder what the salvaging procedure is. HJ%#*&MKL;;{}!$ERROR i haven't had to do it, so this is hearsay, but - first, think thoughts about the person who is screwing up the ritual. second, physically force the person to finish the ritual. third, try to fix whatever they screwed up, magic wise. fourth, apply magic to forcibly connect whatever element has been left unconnected to them - this is both hard to do and genuinely wasteful in comparison to the ritual going well, but it is better than being permanently unable to have any magic. basically it is a huge awful unwieldy thing that has no set procedure, because whatever has gone wrong is likely specific to the person that has done it wrong, and so the patch is just as personalized and specific. it's unpleasant for everyone involved, but it is better than the alternative, so it's tradition. TIMER SET. LOADING... Well, hopefully I will never need to use this knowledge, because you're right that I'm nowhere near experienced enough to pull that off easily. kkG&*@&`1@~~ERROR i am not entirely sure i could pull it off, personally. but it's the sort of thing that one has to try in an emergency. TIMER SET. LOADING... Yeah. With any luck, nobody I try this with will fuck it up and the question of my ability to rescue them will remain academic. *@))__nkl&27ERROR yep, that's the general consensus of the thing. is it just your mother that wants magic, or is there a secret line of people without questions I'm not aware of? TIMER SET. LOADING... There are other candidates, but we're doing this one at a time. I'll tell you about the next set of questions when they arise. LKS8827*@&%^ERROR sensible. mind, they're entirely free to think about their own rituals, but - yes, one at a time is smart. TIMER SET. LOADING... One question that might come up after my mother's ritual: Does it matter if someone reuses things that somebody else used first? JKL728&**@*&^ERRORERROR no. as long as it is appropriate for the ritual, it will do. i've known families that have certain things passed down for the ritual, but i don't recommend doing that on purpose. focus on what is best for the person doing the ritual. TIMER SET. LOADING... Yeah. Okay. My mother's all set up. She has drawn non-representative things on her bowl and picked a location and time and read over the procedure and acquired all her ingredients. 89@&*^nJK267NjkayERROR good luck, let me know how it goes. TIMER SET. LOADING... It went! Hers didn't hurt, but she does say she felt like she surpassed her potential a little. I guess it runs in the family. According to her interpretation of your senses list, she got a lot of breath (sounds like less than me, but that figures), and somewhat less than that of stone, plant, aura, crystal, and song all about equally, and somewhat less than that of blood. Negligible heat or metal, although she might not be as totally void of those as I am of aura; we aren't sure. KLui&929&@%^::ERROR heh. some family. i just got cooking recipes from mine. so is there a plan to how teaching you, your mother, and likely everyone else who goes through the ritual will go? i mean, you can all likely figure out a lot on your own, but it'll be faster if i help. TIMER SET. LOADING... Nothing as concrete as a plan, no. Anything you can give us will of course be appreciated. And I'm working on your under-resourced rebel problem, but it's hard to figure out what help I can actually give you. (I wonder if you could come up with some zorkmids and buy from the shady spellbook salesbeing? If you believe Andrew, that actually worked.) KLsj8&284^^@)ERROR mhm. i can be patient. i'd try it if i could, but i don't have an easy access to zorkmids. i think there might be a way to make them with gold, but i'd need his help to know what a zorkmid even looks like. i am tempted to try and trade my magic for how his summoning works, but on the other hand, summoning demons for the sake of gaining magic powers sounds like a bad idea. plus, you know, revealing myself. not to mention i'd have to place the order under prism's account, which could end up getting her a spellbook that she couldn't actually pay for. TIMER SET. LOADING... I could act as intermediary on either of those if you want. It's not like I'd mind picking up summoning (although I doubt he'd let that one loose) or whatever the zorkmid people are selling, and it seems like the zorkmid people might sell the spell that lets them sell books to people, so if Andrew and I managed any transactions with it, I could probably turn around and do the same with you once I got my hands on the appropriate spellbook. If the resource considerations weren't too much of a problem. I feel like that wouldn't end up sending the books to Prism, although this is of course a baseless hunch. @*(nfl&*@(NJ;@*(699*&ERRORERROR if you could do that, i'd be grateful. what would be really nice would be if i had my own account. but, you know, problem with that one. TIMER SET. LOADING... Yeah, no kidding. Okay. Would you rather I contact Andrew privately or publicly? I'll sound him out about the secrets of summoning first, I think, then see if he has the means or inclination to tell me how to produce zorkmids and/or pass me along a book on how to pass along books. (For that matter, a book on passing along books would be helpful to the two of us even without the rest of it. From what I can tell it's possible to execute nearly arbitrary trades that way, although there might be a mass limit?) NJK278&^%@!%ERROR hm. privately, unless you have a good reason for publicly contacting him that i haven't thought of. yes, that'd be useful. the wish spell also has me curious - wish for what, exactly? TIMER SET. LOADING... On consideration, I think I'm going to ask about zorkmids publicly and summoning privately. Wish me luck... L89#&*66jk&ERROR luck. if i find an alchemist, do you have a list of questions to ask them? or should i hold off on it? TIMER SET. LOADING... If you find an alchemist, you can start by showing them the attached document and asking if things work that way in your world. [Attached: Mendeleev's Table] 9*@67DFSJK@*&%jk^@%$ERROR can do. anything else you need from me? i'll be away for a while, won't be able to answer questions promptly. TIMER SET. LOADING... Any quick suggestions for introductory magic practice for me and my mother, then? KNJk77@^%&$mnklYBJKERROR breath isn't the only thing you can reproduce - it's just easiest for the both of you. hilarious as it sounds, i recommend trying to get around with a blindfold on, and paying attention to what your magic senses tell you. you said you can map every air current in your house - but can you map every ray of sunlight? or leaf on every tree? you don't necessarily need to do either, but understand that in order to do any magic you have to understand how you see things with it. i know it's boring, but it's important, because otherwise you don't know what kinds of effects your actions will have on things. TIMER SET. LOADING... All right. That'll keep us occupied. Do you know how long you'll be? When should I start worrying? *&652JKjuh^@%^$%%:ERROR it shouldn't take more than a few days. if you don't hear back from me in a week, then you may start worrying. but i'll be fine. well. i suck at goodbyes. be back later. TIMER SET. LOADING... KLm7&(**766JKERROR thanks. you too. TIMER SET. LOADING... [[}@*(ELMM&*@^ERROR so, i found an alchemist. he confirmed that your chart is accurate, and he made an embarrassingly high pitched sound over it because apparently his similar chart was missing things that were on yours. so, what now? TIMER SET. LOADING... Now I give you these, and apologize for the occasional cheesy title, and your alchemist probably has spasms if you show them to him. Note that I can't guarantee every single thing in every book applies to your world, but if you have the same periodic table, it's likely that all of it does. [Attached:
Principles of Chemistry Atomic Structure Elementary! Intro. Industrial Chem. Intro. Material Eng. Intro. Biochemistry and 5 more...]JK7*@^4646ERROR i forgive you for the cheesy titles. he did not have spasms, but he did cackle. and hug me. according to him, all of those things apply to our world. he's very excited by the prospect, and would like more books. also possibly your hand in marriage. TIMER SET. LOADING... kj&#(@%&77367ERROR also? thank you. TIMER SET. LOADING... He cannot marry me, I'm afraid. I'm glad he liked them, but more importantly, did you find them useful? ;&@77jk&&^@$ERRORERROR he will be heartbroken. i'll let him down gently for you. not everything will be immediately useful yet, but short answer? hell fucking yes i did, and do. i need to wrap my head around some new concepts, and most of them i've tossed to my alchemist buddy because he's got more experience in the field than i have, but - yes. thank you. so, so much. TIMER SET. LOADING... You're welcome. Meanwhile, slow going on the zorkmid front. And Andrew has been a little slow getting back to me about summoning. He wants to be very sure that I and everyone I tell about summoning procedures understands that if you fuck up a demon binding, your planet could end up destroyed. Angels and fairies are not all that much safer, just dangerous on a slightly smaller scale. 77KS*&^@!&$ERROR i would hug you, but one of us is on the wrong world for that. and that's a charming warm fuzzy feeling. i can't even blame him for that kind of caution - mine at its worst isn't planet destroying. or if it is, not easily. would bartering magic help? do you know? TIMER SET. LOADING... I haven't brought up your magic yet. My first angle is how much good I could do in my world with summoning; it's a lot. -@*4lqyUSTY^@#&**ERROR okay. keep me posted. alchemist is an arcanist whose strongest craft is heat - he is thinking about the possible use of electrical control to help with infrastructure. thoughts? TIMER SET. LOADING... I've been thinking similar thoughts. I think I'd want to do some preliminary experiments on this end before I started sending you guesses about how electrical control might interact with electronic systems. Might wait on having more arcanists here to work with. Speaking of, my father doesn't have any specific questions about his ritual, but someone else does. I emphasize that this is a private question from someone who is every bit as keen on his privacy as you are. Will it affect the ritual if the person doing it has an artificially supplied perfect memory? )*@%**%%#ERROR i will tell my alchemist no for now, then. i'll respect this someone's privacy. by what method is the perfect memory supplied? some kind of biological enhancement, or something else? TIMER SET. LOADING... It's a partly biological, partly electronic thing in his brain. I don't fully understand how it works myself, but it records copies of everything he sees and hears, and lets him remember them perfectly whenever he wants. He is the only person in my world who has survived longer than a few years with one of these things. Everyone else went totally crazy and either needed it removed or flat out died. Or both. Sometimes both. KL8(@$&^jkl77256@$ERROR that's. certainly a thing. well. first, put him in a room with another person that is not an arcanist, hold a hand from each, compare and contrast them via blood craft. all people feel different, but i need you to find out what the partly biological partly electronic thing does, magic wise, and how it affects his connection to everything else. i wish i could tell you what to look for, but i have no idea; i've never dealt with it before. it might help if you compare him with multiple people. until you find the thing and learn how it's affecting everything else, i don't think it's a good idea to put him through the ritual - even if it didn't fail and gave him magic just, it sounds like if it messed with the whatever-it-is it could drive him crazy or kill him. i would really rather not do either of those things. do send him my apologies. this is the sort of thing i wish i were actually there for. i could give much better estimates if i were present. TIMER SET. LOADING... All right, I'll take a look. What do I do with this knowledge once I have it? 8&*@nJKyat@$$ERROR describe it to me in as much detail as you can manage, and we work from there. TIMER SET. LOADING... 7&*@^66%#J@&ERROR excuse me, could you send over a book on geography? earth geography, specifically? one of the books you sent mentioned an earth-specific landmark my alchemist and i recognized, and uh. we thought we should check before we start collectively freaking out about the implications. TIMER SET. LOADING... ...Uh... Sure, here's one. KL288@(&$^$^ERROR so. the continents have shifted a bit due to time, but they're - definitely recognizable. um. i think it's safe to assume that we have an earth, and we're on it, and - i don't really know what to do with that information. TIMER SET. LOADING... I don't either. Sorry about the long silence; yesterday was a day of uncomfortable revelations. For example, according to the adorable magic rainbow truth goddess, I have a brother I've never met who is being raised in some kind of captivity on a planet I've never visited and may be part of a plot on my life. Also, it turns out that forum user Nifl is someone I met briefly this year under complicated and politically significant circumstances, and she figured out my identity somehow by reading my public messages. Uh, I've also managed to compare my friend with the memory chip to three different people, but I'm feeling a little scrambled and having a hard time pinning down my observations. Please let's just not have today contain any more surprises. *kjk@&#E#ERROR uh. yeah, sure, no surprises today. just - imagine yourself hugged. let me know if i can help. TIMER SET. LOADING... Thank you. I appreciate it. In happier news, Andrew came through with summoning info! I think I'm going to want to test it out in my world and get comfortable with the concepts before I pass it on to you, so I can explain from a position of actual understanding and answer your questions without bouncing them to him all the time, but as far as I can tell without trying it he's given me all the necessary information. Daeva summoning safety is a hell of a thing, let me tell you. //@&JJS#ERRORERROR glad to hear it! and that's fine by me, i have enough to keep me busy even without summoning, and summoning sounds like a mess. i believe you; i've reads bits that andrew's written about his world and daeva. they're kind of terrifying. useful, but terrifying. TIMER SET. LOADING... I've been corresponding with Andrew about daeva and trying to get my thoughts in order about my friend's comparison results. Does it make sense to say the discrepancy feels like song...? M@*$^NN#$(%%ERRORERROR actually. yes it does. i... might be able to work with that, is there anything else you can tell me? TIMER SET. LOADING... It's kind of... well, pretty much what I would've expected a memory chip to feel like, actually, if I had had expectations about that. Like his brain has this weird add-on (but a very well-integrated one!) that has a kind of pushy yet helpful feedback loop going on with his memory and some other stuff? Also, guess who has a bathtub full of zorkmids? Me. I do. Not a literal bathtub, but that's about how big the crate was. I'm a successful demon summoner! 8(@$KKS@##$??ERROR i think i might be able to work with that for a decent ritual. give me a bit to figure it out - let me know if there's anything else you sense, too. congrats! and your world hasn't been horrifically destroyed! even more congrats! do let me know how the magic from the qds goes? and when you're set up to teach summoning, of course. TIMER SET. LOADING... Sent my first order to QDS, and haven't yet tried summoning again. Order came through. For some damn reason, I have 195 maximum MP. [Attached: a copy of the catalogue.]K2&*@#^ERROR you know, for some reason i'm not surprised. and - oh wow, those are some scary spells, and a lot of mp to use them. you have the mp to stop time? and make wishes? ... remind me to never piss you off. TIMER SET. LOADING... Yeah. And here's the explanatory magic textbook. Attached: INTRODUCTION TO SPELLCASTING]*@&SK#@&$%%ERRORERROR thank you! ... you know somehow from reading this i have a vague idea of why you have such a high mana level. please don't die, i like you. you keep giving me books. TIMER SET. LOADING... I do not intend to die, I promise you. *@$67ERROR glad to hear it. still making progress on the ritual. i think it should be possible and safe, just working out the fiddly details. TIMER SET. LOADING... I'd be interested in how you figure those fiddly details out, if you want to share. Right now I'm waiting on my QDS order (two copies of every spell in stock, plus ten more read magic to give to all my friends) - and they just got back to me saying they're out of stock of some of them and only have three read magic available, ha. I confirmed the order, what the hell, it's not like I can't just bloody cast wish to summon up any particular spellbook I desperately desire... &@*#ERROR ha. let's hope i have enough mp to cast wish, too. otherwise we'll have to deal with a nasty bottleneck. the general principle in a ritual is to have a balance of many different elements in and around the person when you begin it. having those out of balance doesn't screw you over for getting that element - it screws you over for the amount of magic you may have, and you might get that element anyway. so the extra song in your friend's head is important here; if there is too much of it in comparison to everything else it'll cause problems. so i need to find a way to get everything balanced while accounting for the extra your friend has, which will change some things. i'm not really sure how to explain them when you're still new to this, but i can try. TIMER SET. LOADING... The bottleneck may not be as nasty as it first appeared. My mother's starting MP is eight hundred and thirty fucking three. 833! If you want to be terrified of somebody, pick her! She can cast create demiplane! &@kiks#&$%(ERROR .... 833. um. okay. sure, i can be a little frightened of her, she can create demiplanes. that's kind of frightening. but on the other hand! hey, that's useful for us! TIMER SET. LOADING... Yeah. Very useful. And I'm kidding about being terrified of her. Mostly. I could tell you some stories... anyway. JK@&#^#$$ERROR leaf, please do not tell me stories to get me to be terrified of your mother. there is no way that could possibly end well unless she's a giant elf eating spider, in which case, you really should have told me sooner. TIMER SET. LOADING... No, but she is the reason that anytime someone in my immediate family mentions they are going to go shopping, the traditional joke response is "don't bring back any severed heads". *#KL#*%)^ERROR ... okay now i'm kind of curious. how did that happen? TIMER SET. LOADING... This is all extremely identifying information to anyone familiar with the history of my homeworld, so please don't spread it around, but in short: Someone decided to kidnap my uterine replicator to use as a hostage against my parents in a political conflict. My mother took exception, but my father didn't want to organize a special raid to get me back just because I was his kid in particular - there were plenty of other hostages and he hadn't raided for any of them so far. On the other hand, none of them were stuck in a bottle with a one-week service cycle. Mother decided she'd better do the raid herself before my time ran out. And she did, and succeeded, and along the way incidentally managed to kill the man responsible for the civil war and the kidnapping and all. So she came back, and somebody asked where she'd been, and she said "Shopping" and held up the plastic shopping bag in which she had brought back the guy's head as the best proof of his death she could offer. *&@*#($#^%ERROR ... nevermind, i take it back, i'm not afraid of your mother. she's amazing. and no, i am not planning to spread it around. TIMER SET. LOADING... My mother is amazing, thank you for noticing. M!@&*$#^%%%ERRORERROR you're... welcome? i think. TIMER SET. LOADING... {{Retcon 833 to 1033 because Cordelia is even more terrifying than I gave her credit for}} I may have to acquire another bathtub of zorkmids soon, because now that my mother can cast wish every seven minutes (!!!) and remain at max capacity, she's going to conjure up one copy of every spellbook we have heard of and don't yet own. Which will get me down to a little more than half a bathtub of zorkmids remaining. Tomorrow, after she and I both cast read magic on all the books, I'm going to sit down and actually work out how to sensibly distribute them. You're probably going to end up with a bunch of copies of read magic before I'm comfortable enough with summoning to pass that along. {{Sure, fine by me.}} KL#&*FJLSDERRORERROR sure. i can wait. TIMER SET. LOADING... You busy? If not, we're ready to try sending you 5 copies of read magic via minor planar ally. &#*%^&!$%ERROR reading, only. go for it. TIMER SET. LOADING... nKS#&%^JNKueeeeERROR it definitely did! thank you! i've used one already; my mp's at 367. alas, i cannot create demiplanes. TIMER SET. LOADING... Still, one wish every nineteen and a half minutes, that's not bad at all. I'll send you one of those next. Um, not to ruin the moment or anything, but how much do you know exactly about the anavasi...? *&@#7862(@#$%^&%*#ERRORERROR thank you! uh... as much as i've told you? secretive ritual, elite group of former elves, hard to kill. why? TIMER SET. LOADING... Well. I asked Dotted Lines, who has powers relating to vague and menacing organizations, what he thought of Dispersive Prism's government... Oh, wow. Her government is definitely vague, menacing, and Evil. All citizens of the Sunrise Empire are sterilized, and have to apply to have children, and the system for doing that is really corrupt. Anavasi (the scrubbed thing she mentioned that members of the elite could ascend to) ascend through sacrifice of people their government doesn't like, which makes the avansi a lot more powerful. The sacrificed people are all the way alive and sentient, and the process is extremely unpleasant for them. A lot like being buried in darkness that attacks you like a swarm of insects trying to get inside your body. A local traffic event caused me to experience this first hand for a few seconds while I was looking at that section of the sky, and it is not something I would ever like to experience again. The sacrificed people live as long as the avansi using them lives. Overall, the government is structured as a very small group of anavasi, enforced by expendable magic-users of different amount of powers, in order to control its citizens and territory. A few citizens are picked for loyalty, intelligence, and minion-leadership potential to get complete magical powers, and they are magisters. Each of them leads a group of "arcanists" who are given some magic powers, but have a lot of their magic ability incapacitated in a way that hurts them a lot psychologically, and this happens to a lot of people, and almost all the people they let have magic. The military section of arcanists are enforcers, who censor the crystal network, and make magic listening devices, which are a lot more normal and reasonable things for a big government to do. Normally almost all of their crystal internet is censored enough that it wouldn't normally have shown up as MESSAGE SCRUBBED, because a forum from their world would have been set up to put something appropriate to the forum instead, but it was on a forum they didn't control. *#78$#mnj#&*%^@error ... we'd thought they killed their prisoners. that's. delightfully horrifying. fuck. TIMER SET. LOADING... Yeah. File under 'reasons I have trouble sleeping at night'. -+@*(#$jkml#&*(%ERROR you and me both, leaf. i'll - let everyone know. i don't even know if it's possible to save the ones who've - become fuel, i suppose. we'll try. ugh. goddesses. i'd thought i'd known most of it... TIMER SET. LOADING... Wish won't do you much good without zorkmids, but hopefully soon I should have good summoning information for you. Alternately, do you have anywhere to put 200,000 zorkmids? If you use an actual bathtub it will need to be heavily reinforced. 8#&*544[{??'ERROR hmm. maybe. i'll go scrounging for reinforced containers. TIMER SET. LOADING... Let me know when you have something and I'll send you a bathtubload of zorkmids. *377SL#%^^ERROR i think i have something set up that will work. bring on the bathtub! TIMER SET. LOADING... KS&*#%(^(^&#@error got them, thank you! their container didn't break, even. totally fine for me to start wishing for spells using my own judgement, or do you have particular advice? planar ally will be the obvious first, and after that general protection spells. do you want me to pay you back in some manner? spell books i couldn't get you as quickly as your mother, but now i can start sending things changed by my magic. TIMER SET. LOADING... You might find it hard to lift enough zorkmids at once to wish for anything expensive, and I don't know how it'll rate things other than spellbooks because we've been wishing up spellbooks pretty much nonstop since my mother learned the spell. I actually haven't found very many of the spells to be all that personally useful, but then my priorities are kind of specific right now - my biggest medium-term project is definitely finding and rescuing my brother, who is somewhere on Earth. And it's the finding part that's difficult. JKS3759@*$^&%lKSL378ERROR i can take care of the finding part - long story short, i created a thing involving plant, crystal, and blood that will let you track non-arcanist family members on the planet. i got major planar ally, and created the magic item. want it? i will send instructions on how to use along with the item. normally i'd say 'i don't know how it interacts with multiple planets,' because i don't, but you already know what planet he's on TIMER SET. LOADING... That would be amazing, thank you. 8SJKjj$#&*@%%kl#ERROR sending. TIMER SET. LOADING... That'll make our lives a lot easier. In that case all that's left is to decide who to send on this rescue mission. I feel some obligation to go myself, but of course that presents some potential difficulties since we're pretty sure this is a clone substitution plot. My mother is the next most obvious choice considering how extremely magical she is and how she will only become even more magical if things get fucked up. *378LDSJ#&5892ERROR i would offer to go, but for very obvious reasons that isn't particularly viable. i don't know exactly what's likely to happen if things get fucked up, but i can send you more preparatory magical items if you see any obvious troublesome potential pitfalls. TIMER SET. LOADING.... Honestly, I have no idea. I might even try PMing the magical truth rainbow goddess just to see if she can drop any more hints... .??/jk&#*%kjl#ERROR mhm. let me know. i will help if i can. TIMER SET. LOADING... lS8#@^*kjl#&*%(ERROR please tell me you will hit andrew for me for not knowing the meaning of information security. yeah, friendly magic sharing's all well and good, and i am probably not the best person to judge considering i offered to try giving you my magic page one of our messages, but - nnnnno. no. no! planetary destruction! planetary. destruction! is a thing! that your magic is easily capable of! no! noooooo! stop talking! just stop! TIMER SET. LOADING... I tried to tell him not to do things like that. I don't think he listened. I will not hit him. *s&#*%^e$#ERROR i was being facetious about actually hitting him. just. augh. planetary destruction. honestly of all of the magic i've seen mentioned on this forum his seems like the one that can most easily go horribly, horribly wrong. you'd think he would take that seriously. TIMER SET. LOADING... LS8(#*%^*!@sf3error um, i realize you're very busy, but i think this -> manyworlds.boards.net/thread/44/why might be something you want to take a look at. it sounds like this person has terrifying powers of creation. i'd reply myself, but uh, no account. TIMER SET. LOADING... ... Well. Um. I'm really not sure what to do about this... Js*@(%#^kje#225error yeah. i'm about in the same boat. but i thought it was kind of important that you be aware of that thing. seriously, i need to get my own account. augh. TIMER SET. LOADING... 8((@&*jkS&3jk#(%0;;@%$error in other news, i think i've figured out your friend's ritual, if you don't have anything new to report from him. TIMER SET. LOADING... 37@^&nmSUED#(99#&%8error then let him know that he can put off the ritual if he likes (because we might find more out as time goes by) or to go through with it with the following (experimental) procedure, changes from the standard have been marked for your convenience: materials: wooden bowl (any kind), one stick of graphite, two grams of nickel dust, one hunk of corundum (replacing the quartz, any type), one gram of copper, one leaf (freshly picked day of, any type) and the sentimentally significant sharp object. 1. him, outside, bowl in front of him and materials in easy reach. 2.* corundum, into the center of the bowl. 3. pour distilled water into bowl, don't let it overflow. 4.* scatter all nickel dust into water. it's fine if it covers a bit of the corundum, but aim for the water or cover the corundum entirely in water. 5. sentimentally sharp object is used for poking for the sake of blood, time crunch begins. 6. dominant hand in bowl, over corundum, fingers in water/nickel dust and touching bowl. 7.* place leaf on top of dominant hand. 8. place copper over leaf. 9. place remaining hand over copper. 10. distill self into thought form, hold. please note - while this ritual would work for other people, it won't work very well for them. as in, likely cripple them. but it should be the best option for your memory person. TIMER SET. LOADING... -@*(#jksOEj@44KLA#(#%error mhm. i am also willing to explain the why of the matter, if you're curious. TIMER SET. LOADING... .&@8lawu#E*(jd#*ill#%error right, so i believe i mentioned earlier that various elements need to be in balance, and your friend's excess of song sort of makes this more difficult. there are two possible solutions - find a way to reduce the amount of song in the ritual so it's balanced, or increase everything else so it's balanced. i went with the latter because it was easier. corundum replacing the quartz was the breakthrough, actually - it does most of what the quartz does but stronger. the leaf and nickel are to make up for the things the corundum can't make up for - nickel's actually picking up the copper's slack, too, but it doesn't actively replace the copper entirely because it isn't as good at the bonding aspect of rituals, but makes a decent power source. the leaf is exclusively for augmenting what the bowl itself does, there are other ways to do it but that one seemed easiest. oh, and i realize i didn't mention it, but he does need to still draw on his wooden bowl with graphite. abstract stuff only, self representational if possible, as before. and because i like you and would hate to leave you high and dry if i die: [ Attached: a basic guide to ritual materials and their effects, handwritten.] TIMER SET. LOADING... *S377*@$^$3error ... obviously you should not go and throw that into the wind. do the opposite of that. TIMER SET. LOADING... Thank you. Please don't die, but thank you. Of course I'll be very careful with this. [@(379@(jkdjkSIW%#((error i have no plans to die, but shit happens. prepare for the worst, and all. thank you. TIMER SET. LOADING... My mother's leaving today to go rescue my brother. We got my father through his ritual with no problems this morning; his strengths are metal/heat, stone/crystal, aura/blood, song/breath, in that order. My memory friend should be next but we might wait for my mother to come back before we go there. &S837#*%&&^#error all right. good luck to her. i'm not sure how to handle your father's magical education - i can get my alchemist friend to help with the heat, and he can similarly help a bit with metal, but neither of us are particularly great at it. we'll try. let me know how things with your memory friend go. i'll check my work a few more times and see if there's a better way to do it, just in case. also, i've come to realize that it's kind of stupid that i've given you the literal secrets to attaining magic and you don't know my name. or actually anything about me. um. do you consider it a security risk to know my name and a very basic backstory? i don't mind telling you. TIMER SET. LOADING... You can tell me your name and so forth if you want. I don't think it's much of a risk. And then I can stop thinking of you as "Nope", which I'm sure will be a relief to us both. I've already told you enough identifying details about me that my name wouldn't be that much more of a problem, so: it's Miles. But you can keep thinking of me as Leaf if you like, I won't mind. 7S*&#kj*@%&error hi, miles. i'm inavet. it's nice to meet you. i don't really mind being thought of as nope, but it'd be a bit confusing in casual conversation. "nope!" "pardon? what are you saying no to?" "i'm not, i'm - hi, nope." and honestly that sounds like a situation in a bad sitcom, i'll pass. actually i think i told you enough identifying details for you to figure out who i am, too. thought it's less 'this is my personal backstory' and more... 'there really isn't anyone else in my position with my specific set of abilities.' not for lack of trying, mind, i've been working for a while on making myself less of a single point of failure. been succeeding, too, go me. TIMER SET. LOADING... Nice to meet you too. And not just because of all your help with magic, although I definitely appreciate all your help with magic. klS*@#&%3(#%&*error ha. similarly, thank you for the books and bathtub filled with gold. they're helpful. ... is it presumptuous of me to consider you a friend? i admit, i have maybe gotten lonely, so i might be seeing things that aren't there. TIMER SET. LOADING... Not presumptuous at all, or if it is, I have been presumptuously going around calling you "my elven fugitive friend" to the friends and family members I've been passing your magic along to. 8&#^59#&592error if it is presumptuous, i forgive you. it helps that i've similarly referred to you as 'my mysterious human friend.' because leaf is a little confusing, too. though my alchemist friend refers to you as 'that human ina's flirting with,' because he is a jackass sometimes. TIMER SET. LOADING... As far as I can tell, you haven't been flirting with me. Your alchemist friend clearly has strange ideas about these things, anyway, isn't he the one who wanted to marry me? 8S*#&548#&error yep, this is the one. he's teasing, anyway. because he's a jackass and apparently i need to get out more. you know. as an elven fugitive. because that makes sense. i mean, i am not against flirting with you, you seem nice and i have a record of liking smart men, but i don't exactly know you very well, haven't met you, and don't know anything about your situation. but no, i haven't been. TIMER SET. LOADING... I would take it with a personal favour if you continued not flirting with me at least for the rest of today, because Nifl has been teasing me and I still haven't recovered. (Nifl and I have a complicated history, of which the relevant part is that she thinks it's funny to tell me I'm charming and then watch me splutter like a fool. And she can somehow tell I am spluttering like a fool even across a forum connection.) 8S&*#653#$error sounds fun. sure, no flirting for at least the rest of the day. be thankful i'm fair and respect you as a person, because being told that a person splutters like a fool upon being told they're charming is not a very good way to get me to not want to flirt with the person. TIMER SET. LOADING... The spluttering may be a person-specific effect. It's hard to tell; I don't get told I'm charming all that often. *s8d7*#@594#@$%error allow me to just channel alchemist here: you need to get out more. have lots of people tell you you're charming, get empirical evidence. TIMER SET. LOADING... It's not exactly easy to arrange for people to spontaneously tell me I'm charming. And it's not an experiment I'm eager to make anytime soon. *!@4367@!$error true. but there's no joy in being complimented? TIMER SET. LOADING... Well, yeah. I'm just jumpy right now because of Nifl. kS*#5)#&*%@error do you want to talk about it, or should i drop the subject and talk about something else to distract you? TIMER SET. LOADING... Ehhh, I don't know. How much to you expect to enjoy listening to me complain about her flirting with me? 9S*#7(*@kkuwI#&%error it's kind of entertaining, and i might actually be able to help. or at least be a sympathetic ear for complaints. TIMER SET. LOADING... All right then. So first of all, I have to explain that Nifl is actually the empress of an interplanetary empire. Her empire and my empire have a troubled relationship of the "they keep trying to bloody conquer us" variety, although they haven't tried it again in my lifetime. We met when I went there as part of the delegation to the previous empress's funeral. (You may have gathered that I come from an important-ish family.) Some things happened which I have sworn not to gossip about, but which ended in Nifl becoming Empress and me walking away with a very pretty medal which I cannot display on my home planet; and in the course of accomplishing those things, I had a private conversation with her, in which she told me that I am everything she looks for in a man and if she'd been twenty years younger and less invested in her career she'd have dropped her obligations and run away with me. Did I mention that the nobility of her empire are all genetically engineered to be supernaturally beautiful, and the reason she brought it up at all was because I had a blatantly obvious crush on her and this was her idea of letting me down gently? It was a very emotionally confusing incident. k*S375)%^#error oh dear, it sounds like one. well, i suppose there's are important questions to ask here; do you want to flirt with her, and if you did would you find it fun? TIMER SET. LOADING... Under different circumstances, maybe. If I were less generally frazzled. I am experiencing a record degree of frazzlement these days. ;SkdL38&@#*%33jk8error well now i sort of want to hug you. can i help with the general frazzlement in some way? TIMER SET. LOADING... Thank you, I appreciate your imaginary hugs. I don't know. I'll probably feel a lot better when my mother gets back. 8%#Sk64@ldS@38#^%&*error anytime. my reaction to 'i don't know if you can help' is 'i bet i can if i try and i analyze the shit out of it.' but unfortunately that in itself might be the wrong sort of stressful. would you *like* me to try, and ask a thousand questions in the process of trying to help, or no? TIMER SET. LOADING... And my initial reaction to that is "what's the worst that could happen", which is a line of thinking that has gotten me into considerable trouble over the years, but is possibly still better than sitting and stewing alone in my frazzle. ;S883(3^@(%&error that's one way of looking at it, i suppose. well. i will try not to get you into considerable trouble. right, so, before we can tackle handling the frazzlement you have to figure out the sources. nifl, of course, is one. your mother being away, the entire mess with your brother, another. the forum in general, handling new resources, at least two different types of magic, looking up resources for people, the creepy amoral paranoid people known as the scp, the apocalypse risk inherent in daeva. am i missing anything? TIMER SET. LOADING... Well, I'm also trying to pass QDS magic on to lurkingkobold, and I might potentially want to give her Facet magic too if I can somehow arrange to figure out how to balance her ritual. And I have obligations outside this forum which have been put on hold by necessity because some of the problems here are so much bigger than anything else, but I'm going to have to get back to those eventually and God knows how I'm going to manage doing anything else important at the same time as all this. 8S&9&#*%6@^error well, you won't be doing it alone, so it's not all that bad. one step at a time. so i think saying 'you should take less on' is a great way to get a 'hell no' from you, speaking from one workaholic to another. is nifl likely to be understanding if you tell her you are too busy to deal with her flirting right now, or no? which part of your mother being away is frazzling, is it her absence, implied danger in brotherly retrieval, general head-screaming involved with brotherly retrieval, or some mix? is there a person who you could put on technology-based-resource retrieval? so you don't have to look it all up yourself. the scp is questionable and i don't like anything about them except for how they manage to keep their world from ending, but as far as i know they don't know about me. if they try to pull something with you in particular, i have zorkmids, wish, and arcany. i don't think i could personally take them on, but i might be able to pull off a rescue if it comes to that. passing on my magic to lurkingkobold is... i am not against it. i am sort of vaguely willing to because it sounds like they have a horrible lot in life. in order to make it happen safely, though, an arcanist would need to travel to her world to figure out how kobolds work with rituals. if we do that it should probably be me that goes, out of sheer experience. obligations outside of the forum... i think right now you should take things as they come. plan for the future, yeah, but don't dwell. okay? we will handle it when it comes. TIMER SET. LOADING... On top of all the other shit that's going on, Gabriael just contacted me with a shady offer of immortality and magic. I'm trying to turn him down as politely and uninformatively as possible while learning as much as possible about what the hell he thinks he's doing. Nifl hasn't flirted with me since yesterday and I think she's probably figured out that she went a little too far the first time. I'm pretty sure my mother can handle herself, and I'm away from home often enough that I don't miss her that badly, but God, what the hell do I do when she gets back with my brother? "Hi. I'm Miles. But you probably knew that, because you were almost certainly created to kill and then impersonate me." The thing about putting somebody on looking things up is that I am so very deeply fucking reluctant to tell anybody about this forum who I don't absolutely trust, and the more people I bring in, the likelier it is that I'll say something to somebody who will, well, probably not figure out I'm on an interdimensional netsite, but figure out something I don't want them to. And all the people I trust are either much busier than me or make terrible research assistants. Or they're on other planets right now and I would have a hard time contacting them. Thank you very much for your offer of rescue if Archangel's people come after me. Hopefully I won't need it. klS*#8@($%&error a shady offer of immortality and magic? how. nice? he does not seem like the type that should be handing out immortality and magic. or be in charge of literally anything. good call. good to hear about nifl. uh, i think. not that i - you know what i mean, i'm just - shutting up now. you know i was going to say 'don't say that' but i realized that if i were a secret sibling that grew up in awful conditions and just met my family i would hate awkward pointless small talk. maybe he's the same way. be understanding towards his situation and help him if he needs it and maybe give him some space to figure out how to be part of a family. maybe find something that you both like and bond over it. not having anyone trustworthy to be a research assistant with this sort of thing is fair. well. good luck, then. i hope you won't need it, either. but you're welcome. TIMER SET. LOADING... Gabriaeli just explained his offer in more detail. Apparently it would involve being given a new customizable body with extra appendages so I can drink neutrinos? ?? Words cannot express how much I don't want this. kjS*73*#&%*@error well neither i nor alchemist knew i could make that kind of sound, but now we have been enlightened. i completely understand your position, miles, and also that is hilarious. TIMER SET. LOADING... Do tell me all about your strange noises. It'll distract me from this clusterfuck of a conversation with the angel of irresponsibility and mayhem. Jks*#77@*%js#%error according to alchemist: "somewhere between a small adorable animal dying, slightly manic hysterical laughter, and a hiccuping breathing impaired wombat." so yeah. TIMER SET. LOADING... Thank you, that put a smile on my face. jS*#^&%(25#%error yep! that's what i'm here for. giving out magical secrets, being a sympathetic ear, and making strange sounds. ... alchemist says that now he wants to go on a mission to get me to make more strange sounds. so he can record them with sound craft for future generations. sigh. TIMER SET. LOADING... I of course would never encourage him in such a frivolous and irresponsible enterprise. (@8(DS(#&&)error no, of course not, never. because you are a good person, and good people don't do that sort of thing. TIMER SET. LOADING... 9)@7#(%*jks*#error and so if he actually does make recordings of me making adorable sounds, you wouldn't want copies, of course. that would be encouraging him. TIMER SET. LOADING... Of course not, what do you take me for? Pretend I made a really offended face just now. 8S&*#%*2#&%error i apologize for the slight! it won't happen again, i understand that you are neither frivolous nor irresponsible. ever. not to worry, i am imagining your leaf avatar with a little angry face drawn on it. it's close enough. TIMER SET. LOADING... Giggling too hard to type coherent response 8S(#&9%&@(3error you know what i call that? i call that victory. TIMER SET. LOADING... {{OOC: Cancel that last message, better phrasing found. Why can't I edit PMs.}} And justly so. {{OOC: Because LIFE IS A CRUEL MISTRESS!}} 9(*#57(%error yep. i am very proud of myself. TIMER SET. LOADING... I may have gone off on him a little just now. I was trying to be civil and restrained, but my God... should I just give in and quote it all to you? SJK*#%(@^8#^error yes, yes you should. TIMER SET. LOADING... Here you go - the delay was me doing a data pull and fixing up the formatting so I could quote it neatly. Hi.Cause you talk like you're cool, but it seems to me you haven't done anything cool in the time I've known you. Did you get fired, did you find this Forum at the start of your vacation? You're not Jobless. Maybe I'm just less cool than you thought. I don't think so. I know cool people. It's the most important part of my Job. You've seen combat. You think you're smarter than everyone else. I might have something for you. Might have something for me like what? Casual immortality? The ability to conjure arbitrary weapons from neutrinos? The ability to program your own Magic? No more worries about your medical history? Sounds exciting. Why do you want to give me these things? Cause I'm supposed to give them to the coolest people in existence. And if I get really cool people I get bragging rights. But mostly because I think you won't use it to hurt people too badly and will do interesting things with it you will tell me about. What else have I to gain from it... I will automatically get all the spells you program. You will be less inclined to stop me from obtaining information I might want. Oh and of course I am sure you would perform the Job that comes with it out of your own volition. You keep saying Job with a capital J. What Job? Mine: Make sure complexity and meaning of the Universes rise. Destroy things that endanger interestingness. Make sure no civilisations are exterminated, unless necessary to preserve more in the long run. Stop unfair wars. Make sure no souls are irreparably damaged. The last one is not mine in specificity and you won't have to go out of your way to seek these things out. Those seem like goals broadly compatible with mine, but I have prior commitments that mean I couldn't make them my top priority. How long do you expect to have to stick to those prior commitments? I can give you the first century off. They're not the kind of commitments that end. At least not the big ones. Or rather make it: I give you off until the powers save your life for the first time. You won't lose anything, will you? Will your government insist on your keeping to your job if you can present them with a body to prove your death? It's not a matter of my government or anyone else insisting; it's a matter of personal integrity. Now I'm convinced you're someone interesting. What do you object to? Apart from your fears that you'd be unleashing me in the multiverse at large in some kind of deal with the devil. I don't have any specific objections. Like I said, the goals seem broadly compatible. It's just that I can't commit to doing your Job when I already have other priorities in my life that I can't drop. Would I be unleashing you in the multiverse at large if I took your offer? What exactly does the offer consist of? I don't think you have priorities that you'd still be able to pursue in whatever afterlife you'd get right now. Also I don't think you'd need to drop your other priorities. I think you would want to do my job anyway if an opportunity would ever come up. But do you have the means? If your civilisation encounters any hostile alien species, do you really think you could defend yourself? If Nifl gets her hands on Daeva or even one of those plane shift spells don't you think her country could crush yours? Do you want to rely on mutually assured destruction because she won't summon a few assholes because you could do the same? Well it could still inform Deava in general about the larger multiverse which is a really bad idea, cause they can conjure books. The offer: If it works, become the first Gabriaeli in your universe. The catch: If your boss goes "Conquer the galaxy with Magic!" Stop her. Well, I cannot make new angels myself. I ask for them to be made. It's a sort of ritual, the only magical ritual in my world. The subroutines that make Aeli are some of the most advanced things ever. They also handle resurrecting dead Aeli and Father wanted to make sure no one could mess with that. You can resurrect Aeli in spaces where the Laws of Nature are countermanded so the routines know them. Therefore they also know the shrinking effect and also know the current size of my universe. By observing the routines working I might infer the current size of my universe in relation to yours. Enough such data points from other people I meet here might give me the correct function, assuming it's not randomized. If I can compensate the shrinking I don't know of anything that could stop me getting anywhere I want, apart from a god with over two hundred Arcane Might. Messing with other universes however might draw the attention of such an entity, therefore I won't. It might even be that I can't because father might notice me leaving and keep an eye on me until I'm back. As for what exactly the offer contains? You become an Aeli, that means you'd get a new body that you would not dislike and doesn't have any downsides. Whenever that one is damaged beyond repair you'd get a new one, one you can customize, appearing in a safe place of your choosing(that is you can set up the place, it seems to default to where you spend the most time with your family, change it to a bedroom soon). You'd get new appendages that can fold into themselves to be unnoticeable except to close naked scrutiny, but can be bespelled to be intangible and invisible. Unfolding these they will attract Neutrinos to feed and sustain you and also fuel your Magic. You'd have access to some Arcane Might, 1 to start with. You should be able to trivially stop time in any area you define with it that doesn't contain yourself or something with an Arcane Might of 2 or higher, but that's considered extremely tacky. You'd be able to tell it to analyse and reshape matter and energy to any algorithm you can think of, but it's not a good idea to mess with reshaping matter on your own until you learn enough not to accidentally cause nuclear fusion or fission you can experiment with single grains of sand first, as you shouldn't blow up more than a room that way. You'd be able to create a Turing machine of infinite capacity and speed trivially for all your computational needs. You'd be able to tell a region of space to move. This doesn't consume any more energy than what is needed to escape gravity wells, as the velocity of the space remains zero while it moves. This of course means you can travel faster than light. You'd become a Gabriaeli, meaning your appendages will mostly(and guaranteed if you're a flightless non-aquatic animal) manifest as wings sized from five centimetres to however large needed to give you rapid manoeuvrable flight. You'll be able to fold them around you like a cloak and turn them into your uniform, which is loaded with weapons, weapons you can customize if you can get schematics. Standard is listed at the end. They are largely used for a show of force as any serious work as a Gabriaeli consists of Van Neumann nets and quarantines. Your duties are to find and destroy hostile ecosystems in your operational area, which I would define a "Your and Nifl's homeplanets." for now. ---- Angels Handbook Five, Guide for the Gabriaeli Version 1.0 [Translated into English by Michael, the Second Archangel] While you are able to freely customize your Weapons to your liking, the Lord in his infinite wisdom has searched through all possibilities for the ultimate weapons. You might resent having to carry twenty pounds of strange weaponry, but they are infinitely more powerful than anything you have seen before. Also they might seem strange and Magical to you, but they are actually not, just a selection of what every man could theoretically achieve in the Glorious Universe the Lord provided for them. The wonders he made possible are infinite and the universe has practically just begun. You probably already know what a rapier and a warhammer does, so we will skip those and just tell you that the only thing the rapier doesn't cut is it's own sheath, made from a special stone. Your First new weapon shoots pure light. It is called a LASER-Rifle and will provide a constant stream of incredible heat, which will be able to melt even the greatest stones and metals as if it were ordinary ice. The wheel at the right side can be used to regulate it's power and the wheel at the left side to regulate the width of it's beam. If you turn the left one all the way up the weapon will be able to set fire to anything before you. The scope at the top will tell you where exactly the beam will hit and can be removed for faster targeting in close quarters. The big round red tube is a EM-Rail Cannon. Point the long thin protrusion away from your target and load the metal rods by sliding them along it tip first into the opening until you hear a click. It will shoot about once every three seconds and is able to punch through four metres of the toughest material I can think of off the top of my head. It is too strong to use it against anything but maybe a Dragon so big it would make normal Dragons look like an ant. The next ones are those small angular ones. They are called Gauss-Gyrofoam Recoilless Pistols and you can use them for close quarters battles holding one in each hand. A good rule of thumb is: If you wish you had a spear? Use your pistols. You will have to switch the slide inside the handle for a fresh one after every twentyfour shots however, so some practice is in order. Finally the small colorful round balls provide a variety of area effects, from death(black) or fire(red) to temporary blindness(green) or the inability to move(blue). To use them, twist them clockwise, click the button four times, twist them back and immediately throw them into the general vicinity of your enemy. When you are more experienced you can determine the time between twisting back and them detonating by pressing the button more or less often. The equipment most difficult to use however are the powerful "Bylovit" plastic Explosives ----I don't think I understand your described catch. I definitely don't understand your descriptions of Arcane Might, which seems like kind of a crucial aspect of this whole deal. From what I can tell, you are used to every possible kind of magic working in terms of Arcane Might and Arcane Might-based magic working under every possible condition; this leads me to worry that in my world, which has no magic of any kind, Arcane Might-based magic could either silently fail or go catastrophically wrong in some way. And it definitely comes across as the kind of thing which, if it went catastrophically wrong, would generate very large catastrophes. Would you betray your personal ethics and conquer the Galaxy with the power of the Forum if your ruler asked you nicely? I don't think so. I am familiar with the theory of outside context problems. I describe everything in terms of Arcane Might, because it's a description. It's a measurement for which magic wins if two effects contradict each other. If I try to move a stone and some god says "Neigh" the amount of Arcane Might we each can bring to bear determines weather the stone moves or not. Even if Zorkmid or demon magic functions with some other principle I don't have a billion years of experience with, I can still use the scientific concept of Arcane Might to describe these effects, so I do. If you worry that it might fail because there "Is no Arcane Might in my Universe." That's not an issue. The Arcane Might Aeli can use is still with our god. You'd have a remote control, but all Magic would originate from our Universe. The very worst thing that I can imagine to go wrong would be something being turned into photons. But there's no part of the process that might contain that sort of instruction. You should never tell Arcane Might to "destroy" anything, as that would set the energy used free, nearly as bad(about 12% as bad in terms of radius, a lot worse in terms of residue). The process that creates Aeli however intelligently analyses your species and engineers it to be better. It's conceived by an intelligence so great, foresighted and paranoid that it defies description. It would troubleshoot and abort. It could also easily reverse any damages created, there is no "irreversible" when it comes to these kinds of algorithms. Of course I wouldn't conquer the galaxy. If you're trying to tell me that "not allowed to conquer the galaxy" is the catch, I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding what a catch is. Here are some examples of ways I can think of off the top of my head that this might go horribly wrong: My world might run on a kind of physics with which your magic is unfamiliar, and your magic might therefore interact unpredictably with it, including not being able to fix what it fucked up. I do have reason to believe that my world contains at least some quirks of physics which don't natively appear in other worlds, although I have not yet confirmed it. Your magic might be unable to bridge the gap between your universe and mine, or only partially able to bridge that gap, because my universe is farther away from your universe than anything you have ever tried to interact with directly before. Results as above. Something neither of us can think of might happen, because that's often what happens when powerful forces encounter unprecedented conditions. "Conceived by an intelligence so great, foresighted and paranoid that it defies description" doesn't help, because I strongly believe there is no intelligence so great that it can predict all possible outcomes. And no magical computer program so robust that it can gracefully recover from all possible transformations of its source code. I do not want to be the test subject for a process that's supposed to convert my entire body into a new form when both the form and the process itself were designed in a universe smaller than a subatomic particle using magic that doesn't exist in my home dimension, and the disclaimed worst-case scenario involves spontaneous matter/energy conversion. There's asking for trouble and then there's that. It's also not clear to me how being a Gabriaeli works hierarchically. I have the minor personal failing of being explosively unable to cope with working under the authority of anyone whom I do not know and trust on a friends-since-childhood level. If this offer of yours ends with me being answerable to you or your god, I can confidently predict that would be a problem even if I tried very hard not to make it one. Furthermore, however much the idea of being transformed into a railgun-wielding space angel appeals to my inner ten-year-old boy, I have strong personal reasons to be very attached to the body I have now even though it is incapable of drinking neutrinos. JSK7#(*%@^8@^error well. alchemist recorded this one. also i fell out of my chair. ow. i think you handled yourself well. TIMER SET. LOADING... You fell out of your chair? I hope you didn't hurt yourself. 8S*$%error i'm fine, but thank you for your concern. does. does he even know how completely questionable and sketchy he sounds? "pst. hey. hey kid. want to drink some neutrinos?" TIMER SET. LOADING... I really don't think he does! He may be billions of years old or whatever, but honestly he reminds me of myself at ten more than anything. I was a terrifying ten-year-old. lSK*#0@#(%&kerror i believe it. i recall being a very sweet ten year old, but maybe that's biased. TIMER SET. LOADING... I'm sure you were adorable. I was a hyperactive little shit who viewed all authority figures as obstacles to be circumvented and could not for love nor money be induced to hold still for longer than half an hour while awake. ...looking at that description, I honestly haven't changed all that much. Better foresight and bigger problems to deal with, mainly. @4(@)7LSDerror well thank you. i don't much remember it, it was a while ago, and my childhood was pretty quiet. i remember being brutally honest, though. i made a girl cry that way. felt awful about it for weeks, but she'd asked for my opinion so i gave it. it sounds like you were a nightmare to parent but a joy to watch. TIMER SET. LOADING... A joy to watch from a safe distance, a nightmare to parent, a hazard to befriend. I never got anyone seriously hurt, mind you. kjS$*^&9563error you haven't been hazardous to me at all, but thanks for the disclaimer. TIMER SET. LOADING... I'm much less hazardous to my friends than I was as a kid! Nearly perfectly safe, in fact. 8S&9#%&9#%^kerror good, good. i'd still be your friend, but maybe at a further distance away. (ha.) TIMER SET. LOADING... Further than a different universe? Now that would take talent. klS*#*(%7@#&(%error I am very talented. TIMER SET. LOADING... #^>|]]}~gRy35-:&$ error i can't tell if you're actually complimenting me or playing along with the joke. TIMER SET. LOADING... Do I have to choose one of the above? 56$&&%*.]||35gtderror well, no. thanks, I think. TIMER SET. LOADING... ... So Gabriael replied to me this morning: I'm not misunderstanding what a catch is young man. I'm just outlining how open ended and left to your interpretation your task is. I am telling you that there exist situations in which I might have to exert power over you for completeness sake, but they are unlikely to come up. Mh... I am pretty sure it predicted all outcomes that can be explained in one hundred thousand words or less. The Angel conversion program is big enough it to contain contingencies for all of them. My Universes also contain some locally constrained quirks of physics, like galaxies with short cuts or ones with a hyperspace layer. There's worst case and there's probable. I don't think the conversion could be more dangerous than using discount quality spellbooks. Those seem like they don't understand their smallest parts and one of those spells or their persistent effects could easily interact with Wormholes in a way that destabilizes them. Similarly deava creating even moderate amounts of mass near them might destabilise them, depending on how instantaneous those things are. No, wait, demons don't create sonic booms of displaced air, do they? If so you're probably safe. Conversion will very probably start off with taking a snapshot of a few lightminutes of surrounding space and then restoring all mass and energy to the state it was in before conversion started if something goes wrong. There might be problems if that cuts off half a wormhole... Might. If it's something I can think up god thought of it before, it's kind of a trend you notice in dealing with his work. I don't expect any problems from a similarity transformation of all things and distance is no matter as long as one knows it. I cannot grasp the scale of the rest of the universe, but the program should be able to. If it can find your universe at all it can work with it and it should be able to follow the energy the Forum uses to flip bits in our respective computers. Little side note: It's really strange that everyone talks about power when they talk about forces. Power is energy over time and doesn't have much to do with a force. You use power a little like we would use Might, because power is homophone with political influence. In our universe power isn't a synonym for strength or related to how likely you are to win a fight, which is probably why people thought that I was reckless in trying to summon daeva, as the most dangerous ones could be faerie, and they will be confused by hard vacuum and be dismissed quickly as well as unable to see the reinforcements that were lightminutes away. About Hierarchy: I might give you orders if we meet and I've forgotten you, but it's not too outlandish for someone to refuse them citing being busy. I have enough subordinates who like directly working with me, so I don't need to enforce discipline unless someone hasn't been doing anything work related for millennia or failed to step up to problems in their jurisdiction. If god orders you to do something, that would be a first. I mean he originally gave me my job and outlined it for me, but that was all he ever asked of me. I haven't seen him for millions of years, no one has a confirmed sighting for millennia. About your stubborn pride over using subpar tools to achieve your goals anyway: It's part of my reason for choosing you despite the difficulties. I am a great fan of that. A really great fan of that, my personal loadout is almost completely comprised of archaic chemical weapons, but I can still put it aside if there's anything of importance on the line. Buuut I guess... You won't be dissatisfied with your new body. If you truly insist you should be able to get a defective one. lS8(#%&9@#&^error i don't know which part's my favorite. there's just so much of that to fall in love with. 'young man,' 'there exist situations in which I might have to exert power over you for completeness sake, but they are unlikely to come up,' 'if you truly insist you should be able to get a defective one.' tact. tact! no? no tact? just sketchy 'no strings attached except oh yeah this part where i'm not actually defining anything about what sort of system you'd be getting into but i do make it clear you would have to submit to my authority, sort of, i'm making it sound like you don't but really it sounds like you do and you won't be able to predict where it happens' arguments? okay then. just. okay then. TIMER SET. LOADING... I have sent a reply. Here it is for your amusement: It seems like my integrity, my stubbornness, my caution, and my intelligence are the reasons why you want to make me this offer. My integrity, my stubbornness, my caution, and my intelligence are also why I'm refusing. Everything you say to try to reassure me just brings up whole new reasons to worry. Taking a snapshot of a few light-minutes of surrounding space? And just suppose that any aspect of my world at all is foreign enough to your magic that the algorithm captures it imperfectly? I'd better not take the offer anywhere near an inhabited planet or active wormhole route. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable taking the offer from intergalactic space. The scope and complexity of your magic are why I am more afraid of it than I am of more narrowly defined magics with vaguer mechanisms. I could imagine visiting Andrew's world without worrying that the minor differences in physics might cause me to explode; I could imagine borrowing his spellbooks without worrying that his copy of detect magic would turn me inside-out, since he bought some of those spellbooks openly and has clearly not had anything go horribly wrong. But you keep emphasizing that your magic acts on the physical universe by transforming it according to predetermined rules explicitly designed by a person. Neither your magic nor those rules have ever been tested outside your universe, at least not that you're willing to tell me about. And you are not worried about this at all. Telling me that you're unlikely to exert authority over me, but would consider yourself to have that right if it came up, is also the opposite of reassuring. You come off as exactly the sort of person I would have trouble working with. The fact that this process would make me immortal just means we would have eternity to discover all of our irreconcilable differences, and I really feel like that is the kind of fight where no matter who wins, everyone loses. I would rather not start down that road in the first place. 8(S#&9%(5error nicely done, miles. TIMER SET. LOADING... 8(SD7(#%&error and succeed! TIMER SET. LOADING... S=#*%*(@mk32error ha. so you're playing chess with a god now, right? who's winning? TIMER SET. LOADING... Me, at first, but he caught up fast. SIKJ8(#%&error ha. so you beat a god in chess? TIMER SET. LOADING... Three times in a row before he played me to a draw. *S(#&9#^%error hee. congratulations, miles, i think you're allowed bragging rights from that. though, have you beat him since? TIMER SET. LOADING... Yes. And he's beat me. We're about even if you discount the first few games. I have in fact received explicit permission to brag about beating a god at chess. 8S(#&)(#&%0error you know actually i find that more impressive. winning because you know the game and the other person doesn't is easy, once both of you know the rules you get a much better idea of actual skill involved. so congrats on being about even with a god! did you ask for explicit permission to brag about it, or did he say, 'you may brag about this'? TIMER SET. LOADING... I asked. It seemed polite. *S9%(73error that's adorable. also wise, i would not want to piss off a god. TIMER SET. LOADING... God update: I invited him to my house and kicked his ass at Plasma Rain (it's a local game I really like) for several hours straight. He keeps up surprisingly well. Most people I play Plasma Rain with give up after I trounce them the first few times. Terrifying forum developments update: I just got this message from Dotted Lines... just soyou know im abtou to be taen in for re educatn prob be back 3-5 day, not sue when usefl agn sry short notice ill be ok *(S#&$(*7#(%&error response to god update: and nothing went horribly wrong, congrats. i hope he kept being a good sport about it? response to terrifying forum developments update: .... yeah that's terrifying. um. i tentatively suggest 'rescue attempt,' but i'm not sure how viable the idea is. TIMER SET. LOADING... He was an extremely good sport! I am now divinely blessed with improved reflexes. I'm not even sure Dotted Lines would thank me for rescuing him, honestly. Much as I would like to. *(#%*&9@&45error he blessed you for winning? fair point. nrg. TIMER SET. LOADING... He blessed me because we were playing a reflex-heavy game and he decided it wasn't fair that he was augmented on that score and I wasn't. I like this god. 8(S#&9#%&(#error pfffff. yeah, i think i like him, too. you had adequate 'oh fuck i just brought a god to my world' precautions, right? you didn't just cackle about the chance to beat a god at various games and fling yourself at it gleefully? TIMER SET. LOADING... I mean, of course I cackled and flung myself at it gleefully, but yes, I also had precautions in place. *S(0#(%(6(#%7error good, good. also? that's adorable. TIMER SET. LOADING... *S_SE*#(&%#error you're welcome. TIMER SET. LOADING... And now that I've verified interdimensional visitors are possible to safely invite... want to come check out my memory friend and give a final opinion on his ritual? *S(395738#()%error sure! i can clear my schedule for the visit. (miles, did you use a god as a test subject?) TIMER SET. LOADING... Who, me? And if I had, wouldn't that just be the responsible, practical thing to do? kS((#%^@error i wouldn't argue otherwise. it genuinely was a good way to test it, if you were sure the god was friendly. it's just funny. TIMER SET. LOADING... Anyway, let me know a few hours in advance when you'll have time to visit. KSLDS*(^#%*62error i can be ready a few hours from now. does that work for you? TIMER SET. LOADING...
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Post by Leaf on May 17, 2015 21:07:19 GMT
New PM conversations between Leaf and various others: Hi.Cause you talk like you're cool, but it seems to me you haven't done anything cool in the time I've known you. Did you get fired, did you find this Forum at the start of your vacation? You're not Jobless. Maybe I'm just less cool than you thought. I don't think so. I know cool people. It's the most important part of my Job. You've seen combat. You think you're smarter than everyone else. I might have something for you. Might have something for me like what? Casual immortality? The ability to conjure arbitrary weapons from neutrinos? The ability to program your own Magic? No more worries about your medical history? Sounds exciting. Why do you want to give me these things? Cause I'm supposed to give them to the coolest people in existence. And if I get really cool people I get bragging rights. But mostly because I think you won't use it to hurt people too badly and will do interesting things with it you will tell me about. What else have I to gain from it... I will automatically get all the spells you program. You will be less inclined to stop me from obtaining information I might want. Oh and of course I am sure you would perform the Job that comes with it out of your own volition. You keep saying Job with a capital J. What Job? Mine: Make sure complexity and meaning of the Universes rise. Destroy things that endanger interestingness. Make sure no civilisations are exterminated, unless necessary to preserve more in the long run. Stop unfair wars. Make sure no souls are irreparably damaged. The last one is not mine in specificity and you won't have to go out of your way to seek these things out. Those seem like goals broadly compatible with mine, but I have prior commitments that mean I couldn't make them my top priority. How long do you expect to have to stick to those prior commitments? I can give you the first century off. They're not the kind of commitments that end. At least not the big ones. Or rather make it: I give you off until the powers save your life for the first time. You won't lose anything, will you? Will your government insist on your keeping to your job if you can present them with a body to prove your death? It's not a matter of my government or anyone else insisting; it's a matter of personal integrity. Now I'm convinced you're someone interesting. What do you object to? Apart from your fears that you'd be unleashing me in the multiverse at large in some kind of deal with the devil. I don't have any specific objections. Like I said, the goals seem broadly compatible. It's just that I can't commit to doing your Job when I already have other priorities in my life that I can't drop. Would I be unleashing you in the multiverse at large if I took your offer? What exactly does the offer consist of? I don't think you have priorities that you'd still be able to pursue in whatever afterlife you'd get right now. Also I don't think you'd need to drop your other priorities. I think you would want to do my job anyway if an opportunity would ever come up. But do you have the means? If your civilisation encounters any hostile alien species, do you really think you could defend yourself? If Nifl gets her hands on Daeva or even one of those plane shift spells don't you think her country could crush yours? Do you want to rely on mutually assured destruction because she won't summon a few assholes because you could do the same? Well it could still inform Deava in general about the larger multiverse which is a really bad idea, cause they can conjure books. The offer: If it works, become the first Gabriaeli in your universe. The catch: If your boss goes "Conquer the galaxy with Magic!" Stop her. Well, I cannot make new angels myself. I ask for them to be made. It's a sort of ritual, the only magical ritual in my world. The subroutines that make Aeli are some of the most advanced things ever. They also handle resurrecting dead Aeli and Father wanted to make sure no one could mess with that. You can resurrect Aeli in spaces where the Laws of Nature are countermanded so the routines know them. Therefore they also know the shrinking effect and also know the current size of my universe. By observing the routines working I might infer the current size of my universe in relation to yours. Enough such data points from other people I meet here might give me the correct function, assuming it's not randomized. If I can compensate the shrinking I don't know of anything that could stop me getting anywhere I want, apart from a god with over two hundred Arcane Might. Messing with other universes however might draw the attention of such an entity, therefore I won't. It might even be that I can't because father might notice me leaving and keep an eye on me until I'm back. As for what exactly the offer contains? You become an Aeli, that means you'd get a new body that you would not dislike and doesn't have any downsides. Whenever that one is damaged beyond repair you'd get a new one, one you can customize, appearing in a safe place of your choosing(that is you can set up the place, it seems to default to where you spend the most time with your family, change it to a bedroom soon). You'd get new appendages that can fold into themselves to be unnoticeable except to close naked scrutiny, but can be bespelled to be intangible and invisible. Unfolding these they will attract Neutrinos to feed and sustain you and also fuel your Magic. You'd have access to some Arcane Might, 1 to start with. You should be able to trivially stop time in any area you define with it that doesn't contain yourself or something with an Arcane Might of 2 or higher, but that's considered extremely tacky. You'd be able to tell it to analyse and reshape matter and energy to any algorithm you can think of, but it's not a good idea to mess with reshaping matter on your own until you learn enough not to accidentally cause nuclear fusion or fission you can experiment with single grains of sand first, as you shouldn't blow up more than a room that way. You'd be able to create a Turing machine of infinite capacity and speed trivially for all your computational needs. You'd be able to tell a region of space to move. This doesn't consume any more energy than what is needed to escape gravity wells, as the velocity of the space remains zero while it moves. This of course means you can travel faster than light. You'd become a Gabriaeli, meaning your appendages will mostly(and guaranteed if you're a flightless non-aquatic animal) manifest as wings sized from five centimetres to however large needed to give you rapid manoeuvrable flight. You'll be able to fold them around you like a cloak and turn them into your uniform, which is loaded with weapons, weapons you can customize if you can get schematics. Standard is listed at the end. They are largely used for a show of force as any serious work as a Gabriaeli consists of Van Neumann nets and quarantines. Your duties are to find and destroy hostile ecosystems in your operational area, which I would define a "Your and Nifl's homeplanets." for now. ---- Angels Handbook Five, Guide for the Gabriaeli Version 1.0 [Translated into English by Michael, the Second Archangel] While you are able to freely customize your Weapons to your liking, the Lord in his infinite wisdom has searched through all possibilities for the ultimate weapons. You might resent having to carry twenty pounds of strange weaponry, but they are infinitely more powerful than anything you have seen before. Also they might seem strange and Magical to you, but they are actually not, just a selection of what every man could theoretically achieve in the Glorious Universe the Lord provided for them. The wonders he made possible are infinite and the universe has practically just begun. You probably already know what a rapier and a warhammer does, so we will skip those and just tell you that the only thing the rapier doesn't cut is it's own sheath, made from a special stone. Your First new weapon shoots pure light. It is called a LASER-Rifle and will provide a constant stream of incredible heat, which will be able to melt even the greatest stones and metals as if it were ordinary ice. The wheel at the right side can be used to regulate it's power and the wheel at the left side to regulate the width of it's beam. If you turn the left one all the way up the weapon will be able to set fire to anything before you. The scope at the top will tell you where exactly the beam will hit and can be removed for faster targeting in close quarters. The big round red tube is a EM-Rail Cannon. Point the long thin protrusion away from your target and load the metal rods by sliding them along it tip first into the opening until you hear a click. It will shoot about once every three seconds and is able to punch through four metres of the toughest material I can think of off the top of my head. It is too strong to use it against anything but maybe a Dragon so big it would make normal Dragons look like an ant. The next ones are those small angular ones. They are called Gauss-Gyrofoam Recoilless Pistols and you can use them for close quarters battles holding one in each hand. A good rule of thumb is: If you wish you had a spear? Use your pistols. You will have to switch the slide inside the handle for a fresh one after every twentyfour shots however, so some practice is in order. Finally the small colorful round balls provide a variety of area effects, from death(black) or fire(red) to temporary blindness(green) or the inability to move(blue). To use them, twist them clockwise, click the button four times, twist them back and immediately throw them into the general vicinity of your enemy. When you are more experienced you can determine the time between twisting back and them detonating by pressing the button more or less often. The equipment most difficult to use however are the powerful "Bylovit" plastic Explosives ----I don't think I understand your described catch. I definitely don't understand your descriptions of Arcane Might, which seems like kind of a crucial aspect of this whole deal. From what I can tell, you are used to every possible kind of magic working in terms of Arcane Might and Arcane Might-based magic working under every possible condition; this leads me to worry that in my world, which has no magic of any kind, Arcane Might-based magic could either silently fail or go catastrophically wrong in some way. And it definitely comes across as the kind of thing which, if it went catastrophically wrong, would generate very large catastrophes. Would you betray your personal ethics and conquer the Galaxy with the power of the Forum if your ruler asked you nicely? I don't think so. I am familiar with the theory of outside context problems. I describe everything in terms of Arcane Might, because it's a description. It's a measurement for which magic wins if two effects contradict each other. If I try to move a stone and some god says "Neigh" the amount of Arcane Might we each can bring to bear determines weather the stone moves or not. Even if Zorkmid or demon magic functions with some other principle I don't have a billion years of experience with, I can still use the scientific concept of Arcane Might to describe these effects, so I do. If you worry that it might fail because there "Is no Arcane Might in my Universe." That's not an issue. The Arcane Might Aeli can use is still with our god. You'd have a remote control, but all Magic would originate from our Universe. The very worst thing that I can imagine to go wrong would be something being turned into photons. But there's no part of the process that might contain that sort of instruction. You should never tell Arcane Might to "destroy" anything, as that would set the energy used free, nearly as bad(about 12% as bad in terms of radius, a lot worse in terms of residue). The process that creates Aeli however intelligently analyses your species and engineers it to be better. It's conceived by an intelligence so great, foresighted and paranoid that it defies description. It would troubleshoot and abort. It could also easily reverse any damages created, there is no "irreversible" when it comes to these kinds of algorithms. Of course I wouldn't conquer the galaxy. If you're trying to tell me that "not allowed to conquer the galaxy" is the catch, I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding what a catch is. Here are some examples of ways I can think of off the top of my head that this might go horribly wrong: My world might run on a kind of physics with which your magic is unfamiliar, and your magic might therefore interact unpredictably with it, including not being able to fix what it fucked up. I do have reason to believe that my world contains at least some quirks of physics which don't natively appear in other worlds, although I have not yet confirmed it. Your magic might be unable to bridge the gap between your universe and mine, or only partially able to bridge that gap, because my universe is farther away from your universe than anything you have ever tried to interact with directly before. Results as above. Something neither of us can think of might happen, because that's often what happens when powerful forces encounter unprecedented conditions. "Conceived by an intelligence so great, foresighted and paranoid that it defies description" doesn't help, because I strongly believe there is no intelligence so great that it can predict all possible outcomes. And no magical computer program so robust that it can gracefully recover from all possible transformations of its source code. I do not want to be the test subject for a process that's supposed to convert my entire body into a new form when both the form and the process itself were designed in a universe smaller than a subatomic particle using magic that doesn't exist in my home dimension, and the disclaimed worst-case scenario involves spontaneous matter/energy conversion. There's asking for trouble and then there's that. It's also not clear to me how being a Gabriaeli works hierarchically. I have the minor personal failing of being explosively unable to cope with working under the authority of anyone whom I do not know and trust on a friends-since-childhood level. If this offer of yours ends with me being answerable to you or your god, I can confidently predict that would be a problem even if I tried very hard not to make it one. Furthermore, however much the idea of being transformed into a railgun-wielding space angel appeals to my inner ten-year-old boy, I have strong personal reasons to be very attached to the body I have now even though it is incapable of drinking neutrinos. I'm not misunderstanding what a catch is young man. I'm just outlining how open ended and left to your interpretation your task is. I am telling you that there exist situations in which I might have to exert power over you for completeness sake, but they are unlikely to come up. Mh... I am pretty sure it predicted all outcomes that can be explained in one hundred thousand words or less. The Angel conversion program is big enough it to contain contingencies for all of them. My Universes also contain some locally constrained quirks of physics, like galaxies with short cuts or ones with a hyperspace layer. There's worst case and there's probable. I don't think the conversion could be more dangerous than using discount quality spellbooks. Those seem like they don't understand their smallest parts and one of those spells or their persistent effects could easily interact with Wormholes in a way that destabilizes them. Similarly deava creating even moderate amounts of mass near them might destabilise them, depending on how instantaneous those things are. No, wait, demons don't create sonic booms of displaced air, do they? If so you're probably safe. Conversion will very probably start off with taking a snapshot of a few lightminutes of surrounding space and then restoring all mass and energy to the state it was in before conversion started if something goes wrong. There might be problems if that cuts off half a wormhole... Might. If it's something I can think up god thought of it before, it's kind of a trend you notice in dealing with his work. I don't expect any problems from a similarity transformation of all things and distance is no matter as long as one knows it. I cannot grasp the scale of the rest of the universe, but the program should be able to. If it can find your universe at all it can work with it and it should be able to follow the energy the Forum uses to flip bits in our respective computers. Little side note: It's really strange that everyone talks about power when they talk about forces. Power is energy over time and doesn't have much to do with a force. You use power a little like we would use Might, because power is homophone with political influence. In our universe power isn't a synonym for strength or related to how likely you are to win a fight, which is probably why people thought that I was reckless in trying to summon daeva, as the most dangerous ones could be faerie, and they will be confused by hard vacuum and be dismissed quickly as well as unable to see the reinforcements that were lightminutes away. About Hierarchy: I might give you orders if we meet and I've forgotten you, but it's not too outlandish for someone to refuse them citing being busy. I have enough subordinates who like directly working with me, so I don't need to enforce discipline unless someone hasn't been doing anything work related for millennia or failed to step up to problems in their jurisdiction. If god orders you to do something, that would be a first. I mean he originally gave me my job and outlined it for me, but that was all he ever asked of me. I haven't seen him for millions of years, no one has a confirmed sighting for millennia. About your stubborn pride over using subpar tools to achieve your goals anyway: It's part of my reason for choosing you despite the difficulties. I am a great fan of that. A really great fan of that, my personal loadout is almost completely comprised of archaic chemical weapons, but I can still put it aside if there's anything of importance on the line. Buuut I guess... You won't be dissatisfied with your new body. If you truly insist you should be able to get a defective one. It seems like my integrity, my stubbornness, my caution, and my intelligence are the reasons why you want to make me this offer. My integrity, my stubbornness, my caution, and my intelligence are also why I'm refusing. Everything you say to try to reassure me just brings up whole new reasons to worry. Taking a snapshot of a few light-minutes of surrounding space? And just suppose that any aspect of my world at all is foreign enough to your magic that the algorithm captures it imperfectly? I'd better not take the offer anywhere near an inhabited planet or active wormhole route. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable taking the offer from intergalactic space. The scope and complexity of your magic are why I am more afraid of it than I am of more narrowly defined magics with vaguer mechanisms. I could imagine visiting Andrew's world without worrying that the minor differences in physics might cause me to explode; I could imagine borrowing his spellbooks without worrying that his copy of detect magic would turn me inside-out, since he bought some of those spellbooks openly and has clearly not had anything go horribly wrong. But you keep emphasizing that your magic acts on the physical universe by transforming it according to predetermined rules explicitly designed by a person. Neither your magic nor those rules have ever been tested outside your universe, at least not that you're willing to tell me about. And you are not worried about this at all. Telling me that you're unlikely to exert authority over me, but would consider yourself to have that right if it came up, is also the opposite of reassuring. You come off as exactly the sort of person I would have trouble working with. The fact that this process would make me immortal just means we would have eternity to discover all of our irreconcilable differences, and I really feel like that is the kind of fight where no matter who wins, everyone loses. I would rather not start down that road in the first place. What is there but the "physical universe"? The only thing that could stump my magic would be something that wasn't made of Energy. I don't think you personally encountered anything in your universe that isn't made of Energy but something else that doesn't interact with Energy, in which case I don't know why you would care about it or had any indication that DCS magic doesn't consume it's maybe sentient inhabitants as fuel. What you cannot imagine about magics you don't understand the mechanisms of is much more than what's needed to destroy you. For example if in Daevinity there's no hard conservation of mass, what if there's nothing that would regulate partial electron spins? What if one introduces a photon with a spin of irrational number times h? Would all electron orbitals collapse? I might give you orders if we meet and I've forgotten you, but it's not too outlandish for someone to refuse them citing being busy. I've got a generous amount of Soldiers already, I have been recruiting only independent field agents for a long time now. You could refuse any of those orders. I am not the kind of person who resents insubordination for it's own sake. Heck, I can't remember when I was mad at someone the last time. I wouldn't mind, even if I couldn't remember you. I don't want to reassure you, I want you to know the offer and am clarifying. I don't want to accept your job or your authority or your universe-rewriting magic, and I don't think you're likely to convince me otherwise. If you still have any questions now or later I would consider it a personal favour if you would ask them. I can't think of anything else I could tell you. If you ever find yourself cornered or are sufficiently motivated to right certain wrongs you will now be aware of the nuclear option at your disposal. That is a fair and reasonable note to leave off on, thank you. Metals in GardenThank you for your book on getting metals out of soil! I've been working with my housemate to find out what metals we can extract from the soil. We think we've figured out which ones are there in measurable amounts, that we can get out. Calcium, magnesium, and potassium are the ones there seem to be the most of. There is less of copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, and zinc, but they are still there. There wasn't any gold, so I think I will probably not be able to buy any Quality Discount Spellbooks any time soon. I'm planning to start trying to figure out if any of these metals are getting into plants, and if there's a way to get plants to extract a larger and more useful amount of some of the more useful metals. According to the book, it's possible to edit plants to extract metals, although their specific advice doesn't work because it is for patterns with four symbols, but I think I can use some of the theory to get it to work! Do you know which of the metals would be best for making medical blades that can be cleaned and re-used without splintering or anything? Or other useful things they could do in fairly small quantities? I don't want to extract too much metal, in case plants need them to live. I got the impression that the tools most people are using to get to this forum are only useful if there are a lot of them, and they can communicate with each other? If there is information, or tools, or seeds, or anything you would like to be traded for your assistance, I am willing to trade anything reasonable, and the range of those expands if anyone figures out a way for anyone besides QDS to transport objects between universes. I expect this knowledge to be very helpful! I don't think the fact that Garden has these metals needs to be a secret, because lots of worlds have metals, and there are a lot more convenient ways for most people to get metals, and the instructions for getting it are already publicly posted. Is there anything I am missing about this, or is it probably safe to post the information about Garden's metals publicly as well? I think it's safe to post the information about Garden's metals publicly. Iron and copper are traditional tool-making metals in my world, but I don't know offhand what the best way to make tools with them is and whether or how the other ones might contribute. I know copper is usually alloyed with something in low-tech toolmaking, but I don't know what. You might be better off asking Andrew since that sort of thing isn't something where my extra thousand years of technological development are a big help and I'm pretty sure he's less busy than I am. Okay, thank you! Sorry, I don't want to waste your time. You've been really helpful! Would you still like to be kept updated on the progress of metal and its uses on Garden, or should I stop distracting you? I'm still interested to hear about it, but my ability to look up helpful facts is getting more and more limited. Good luck, though! Okay, I will continue to tell you about it, but ask Andrew for research help. Thank you! Good luck with the things you are busy with as well! ChessI have read and memorized the rules. Would you like to play white or black? I'll play black for the first game, since I have the advantage of experience. That seems fair. I have the strong impression that you would not like it if I deliberately went easy on you. You are welcome to correct me if I am mistaken. Very well. You are correct. It is refreshing to meet mortals that do not cower and simper and let me win because I am a god. Keep it up. [CHESS ENSUES! I am not good enough at chess to play for Rae! Alas!] [CHESS ENSUES! I am not good enough at chess to play for Miles! Miles wins.] Thank you, that was fun. Want to play again? [Chess. Victory to Miles.] You learn fast. I'm impressed. Thank you. You will be more impressed when I win. [CHHHHHEEESSSSSSSSSS.] [Third victory to Miles.] Yes, I'm sure when that happens I will be. Another game? [More chess!] [Fourth game draw.] Well done. Once you win a game, I suggest we alternate who plays white and who plays black from then on; that's customary between players of comparable skill. [Further chess!] That sounds agreeable. [Chess! What a surprise!] [Fifth game goes to Miles!] I'm moderately tempted to brag to my close friends about beating a god at chess. Would you find that distasteful? If so, I can refrain. You may. You are a worthy opponent. [Chess!] Thank you. [Sixth game goes to Rae!] And you may now count yourself among the very small number of people who have beat me at any kind of strategy game since I was ten years old. [Chess! Miles starts the next game!] I am honored. [More chess! Rae is pleased!] [Miles wins.] You know, I'm tempted to invite you to my world so we can play some of the more complicated games that can't be done over the forum. I am not aware of a method of transportation, but if you find a way I would be willing to travel to your world in my manifested form for the complicated games. [Chess!] What is your manifested form? What should someone who has no experience with gods know about hosting you? [Chess chess chess.] Human, male, appears to be early thirties. I don't need to eat or drink, but can do either if I wish. I will understand any language you speak in and the words I speak will be understandable to anyone that speaks language. I fly. [Chess chess chess chess!] I could safely invite you to visit, then, I think. I have access to some magic that allows travel between worlds. If you do visit, I'd ask you to stay inside my house and not go wandering around. I have a personal responsibility towards the locals, who would be upset by panlingual flying strangers. [Chess.] Very well. I am open to invitation. That is understandable. I will stay inside your house and not upset locals. [Chess.] In that case I think I will invite you here tomorrow, after I've had a chance to review my library of games and my interdimensional transit spells. [Chesssssss] I will inform my priests and acolyte that my manifested form will be away for a little while. [Chess! So much chess! So much chess that we aren't even bothering to narrate who's winning anymore, it's just assumed they're trading off on wins and have occasional stalemates!] My invitation should be reaching you soon. It will come in the form of a temporary gate between your world and mine. (Also updated several of Leaf's previously posted PM conversations)
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Thorn
Poster
Posts: 44
World: Eclipse
Pronoun: she/her/hers
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Post by Thorn on May 24, 2015 23:05:51 GMT
(in spoiler tags for shrinkability, my characters' ic pms to date) Trade with Archangel (Andrew, Thorn) I would like to warn you that there is good reason to believe that Archangel is not trustworthy. One forum member who can see information on organizations said that, although they do help their world in some ways, “[Archangel’s] Foundation definitely sticks out as the most evil organization in Keter, with some competition from the Church[ of the Broken God]”. I additionally think that they might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of the QUALITY DISCOUNT SPELLBOOKS account, and would not be surprised if they started going after other forum users. Oh dear. I have some experience with shadowy organizations. His seemed to be actively trying to prevent the destruction of his world. How certain are you that the things described as evil were not significfant contributions to that goal? I will pass this information along. You will likely be pleased to know that you have probably substantially decreased our chances of trading with him. (And started another round of the eternal defense debate) While you are distributing mysterious warnings, do you have anything to say about Grigori? I’m glad that you’re less likely to give them more potentially-dangerous stuff, but I don’t think anybody’s glad about eternal defense debate. The Foundation (and especially the various individuals within it) are probably trying to help their world, but are not good at it. I heard the information secondhand; here are the quotes of what was said. I’m anonymizing the person who passed along the quotes, but will ask them if they’d prefer to reveal themselves. Alternatively, I would be surprised if they also were not contacting you. They care more about infosec-in-general than I do, but they also know that the Foundation getting help might be problematic. Forum user Dotted Lines has some kind of power to perceive the structure of vague and menacing organizations, which I verified by asking questions about some […] organizations that might answer to that description. Then I asked him about Archangel's bunch. They're called the Foundation, and have not asked me not to tell people about them. They are a vast vague and menacing organization dedicated to keeping strange things contained and understanding them. A lot of the things and brings they contain are actually extremely dangerous, and their containment is protecting lots of people. Some of the things and beings they contain are basically harmless or helpful but strange. They are massive and bureaucratic, with many clearance levels and different locations and procedures. There are massive casualties in their second lowest personnel class, drawn from convicts already on death's row. They've asked me for help with finding information about a religious organization in their world (Church of the Broken God) which often tries to destroy the world and kills people. I checked, and helping them with this specific thing will be very likely to reduce total harm in their world. The only reason they're asking for help with something so clearly non-evil is because they were worried I'd check and not help them if it was more ambiguous. [Later, at unrelated evidence of problems in Keter], I asked Dotted Lines for clarification: From what I've seen of it before, it's probably a combination of several things about the world. The Foundation can be cruel to its personnel and beings it contains, not intentionally but as a side-effect of being focused on its goals and not caring. There are a lot of extremely dangerous things and beings in Keter, and the Foundation doesn't have all of them contained, and a lot of them do massive physical or psychological damage to nearby people. Additionally, there are many other organizations, many of which are worse than the Foundation and are actively destructive or cruel. There are a lot of terrible and dangerous things in that world, and most of them aren't organizations, but weird supernatural things. I think, although I can't see it directly, just extrapolating from how the organizations I can see react to them, that the weird supernatural horrors that harm a lot of people. Apparently the Church of the Broken God is the only candidate for organization that might do more evil stuff than the Foundation. The Foundation does some useful things, but overall has a massive casualty rate, and does some really awful things they could probably safely avoid doing by organizing things a little bit better. They've got some safety procedures that regularly kill or cause major psychological or physical harm to people, which they could probably avoid if they tried to think of other solutions to problems. So the Foundation definitely sticks out as the most evil organization in Keter, with some competition from the Church. This is all pretty much in line with my non-supernatural analysis that they come off as poorly organized and dangerously aggressive. The person I’m in contact with ended by concluding that it might be worth working with them on mutual problems, especially if it’s possible to help them contain their items more safely, but that they should not be trusted. My contact did not say this, but I’ll add that if you can find a way to contact non-Foundation organizations trying to contain things, it might be a better idea to help them instead. I don’t know anything about Grigori aside from what he said in public. He seems trustworthy, but I am not always a good judge of that. (re: anonymization, if you were trying to keep Dotted Lines anonymous earlier you were not doing a very good job. For future reference. You're doing better with your contact, but I can still narrow it down to likely one the population of this forum without declared supernatural powers, and probably further if I wished to do social and speech pattern analysis) The eternal defense debate is fairly normal, albeit not normally focused on extradimensional attack. So long as it does not consume every single conversation again, I think we will cope. I have been working on writing Dotted Lines a private message since I saw his mention of his ability (I keep getting interrupted); the Foundation was actually one of the major topics. The thing about forking (unlike the technology Grigori has asked for), is that it requires in-depth knowledge of psychosurgery to work to its fullest extent, and that in particular I am personally very reluctant to have spread further. Your thoughts about non-Foundation organizations are noted, as is your opinon of Grigori. If your contact has opinons on him to share but does not decide to contact me emself, I would appreciate you passing them along Also, since I am fairly certain you or your contact will be asking Dotted Lines about who I am working with after this conversation, if you have not already; yes, I am working for a shadowy orginization trying to prevent the end of our world. (Please do not share this publically). I would like to think we are better at our job than you have painted the Foundation as. I would be curious about Dotted Lines' opinon, if he will be looking at my world anyway, but I had no desire to ask him to risk infection to find out. I actually will not be asking Dotted Lines anything, at least not soon, and I doubt you will get an answer soon either. After I got that message, I asked for confirmation from Dotted Lines (who confirmed he’d said what he planned). Later, I got another message, and my contact says they got a similar one. Mine was: just fyi, im about to be atken in for reeducat prob back 3-5 days, dont knwo when usful agan sry about shrt noticee ill be ok I am worried about Dotted Lines (I assume he meant “re-education”, which is almost never good, and neither is the fact that this is not how he usually types), but I can’t really do anything and doubt they’d want me to if I could. I wasn’t trying to keep Dotted Lines anonymous. I was apparently not doing a good job at keeping the intermediary anonymous; I will try harder in the future. I’m not used to keeping secrets like that; most of my secrets are both easier to keep (within my world) and clearly delineated. Please don’t narrow my contact down further (unless they contact you directly with this same information, in which case it should be pretty obvious who they are). Titan-spawned... gah. This is not a good week (or, well, weeks, really) for my nerves. I hope Dotted Lines is -- is as alright as is possible, under the circumstances. He does not sound okay, even if he insists he will be, and (as you said) re-education? While his world is probably not the most concerning on this place, it is, rather, concerning. It must be nice to have simple secrets. I have no motivation beyond my own curiosity to try to work out who your contact is, which is certain not enough to call in the favor from a data analyst I would need to have any chance of finding who it is specifically, so you may tell em e does not need to worry much about that. I may somewhat delayed in responding; I think I will go and run combat sims for a while. He has said I can say who he is. He’s Leaf. Okay, Archangel just wrote me. I will message you both about this and save you playing messenger unless there are have any objections. Technology exchange (Archangel, Thorn) Keter contains a variety of infohazards, for instance a pattern of lines that causes anyone who views it to forsake all action except copying it and leading others to copy it. This is not unique, but demonstrates the reason we're interested in the forking technology. The key that was mentioned on these boards was another example; until recently anyone who was informed of its shape or composition would destroy themselves and others in the service of whatever it was that the keeper killed. Current methods of fighting this involve erasing memories (in cases where that helps) and oftentimes killing anyone affected. Beta forks would allow near-complete protection from some of these, any time we know or suspect it's necessary. As for the technology we can offer in exchange, it depends what your world already has. Our world's amnestics be should at least tested against your world's memetic virus. If it has physical symptoms as well then that's a long shot, but targetable memory loss is likely valuable even if it doesn't solve that particular problem. We also have cryonics. If neither of those is useful to you, we may be able to provide some magic. Quality Discount Spellbooks seems to have stopped answering orders recently, but before it did the Foundation acquired enough spellbooks to produce more. (Please don't spread that around; we're letting people assume otherwise on general principle.) If you'd like to exchange for magic, the only restriction is that we won't supply anything that enables interdimensional travel. That cat never got entirely out of the bag, and your world is especially dangerous. To be clear: how exactly to you intend to use forking to defend against these hazards? I would expect an unisolated fork to propegate the hazard just as readily as it would be otherwise. Do you plan to use them to test for their presence? In that case, what substrate do you intend to run them on? I am unclear on how forking in particular is a strong solution for your problem. I am also unclear on why you are focused on beta forks in particular, unless it is unfamiliarity with the relevant terminology. -- Did I include information on forking in the book exchange? An amnesic might be effective against the infohazard modalities of some strains, but there would only be a brief window to use it, and it can be unclear whether someone is infected until after that. I would have to research the current state of the art on cryonics; you may be correct that you are more advanced in that area, depending on how advanced you are. Do you have any idea why Quality Discount Spellbooks went quiet? (You were actually one of their customers and therefore I would expect that you might have information most of those speculating do not) Unless esthora can be trusted to stop all hazards, interdimensional travel would not give the virus transmission capabilities it does not already posses, but I understand why you wish to be cautious on that front. You're right that I'm not familiar with the terminology. If there are alpha or gamma forks that would work better, that's the relevant one. All I know is that beta is what you're using. The advantage of forking in particular is that it can catch all those and only those things that would affect the forked individual. We've had some success in the past with using opaque visors that run facial recognition software before displaying any images from the camera. It means that the user sees everything slightly later, but can provide protection against threats that we can safely know in sufficient detail. Other times we can't, or electronically storing enough information for comparison would itself be dangerous. If instead of or in addition to filtering things through recognition programs we can do the same with a contained copy of the person to be protected, it would work whether or not we have any idea what the thing looks like. It would also all but eliminate the risk of false negatives. There would still be the limitation onIf your world has commonly used methods that are more effective than forking, I'd be interested in that too. I don't know more about QDS than has been said in-thread. Well, I do know some about the parameters of acceptable zorkmids and other minor things, but that's not relevant to why they stopped. Our cryonics is pretty effective. It can freeze and unfreeze people as cryonics should, with a theoretically unlimited time in between. That has only been tested on a scale of years. It does require the ability to keep them frozen, but I imagine that won't be hard. My apologies, I keep forgetting about background assumptions. There are three (technically four) kinds of forks. Alpha forks are the simplest to create, if the most computationally expensive to run; they are simply direct copies of the relevant ego (mind). Beta forks are partial copies, and require an entirely different technological area that is still something of a black art here. Delta forks are personality traits overlaid onto an AI template, and are the kind of fork used for the purpose you describe here by people without my particular neurological complications. That said, I am not entirely certain how effective they would be for that against Keter's infohazards. I could likely get a fork of one of my colleagues for you to test that if you wished, however. There are also technically gamma forks, or vapors, but that is a term used for corrupted forks or backups. There are two other methods in common use for dealing with this kind of thing in Eclipse. One is to deliberately degrade and add random noise to incoming information, which, of your examples, might work against the pattern but likely not the key. The other, when the victim has a recent uninfected backup (which is most of the time), is simply to kill the infected fork and restore them from that. You seem to have lost some text there: clarify? On QDS: Understood. It is, for hopefully obvious reasons, a concern here that they disappeared shortly after coming into contact with this forum. Re cryonics: Interesting. Do you know how that would interact with morphological variety? This is a one time pad. (Gabriael, Thorn) Look. If you trust the private messages for transmitting this, then why did not you just send the whole thing to me this way? That would remove the possibility of anyone who could read the forum decoding it if your generator was not perfectly random, and prevent traffic analysis. Also, how is that in any way helpful? I couldn't find an attachment button in the PM menu. I said it might help. I wasn't sure. I dunno if any generator can possibly be perfectly random, but this one's uses a camera to monitor blackbody radiation in some engineers office. It's pretty good. Shame it couldn't help you. I don't know your biology or technology base sadly, but maybe you can tell me some things that would be really cool for you to have? Huh, the attachments work for me. It is hard to say what would be helpful without knowing more about how the virus actually operates. We are, however, working on that. The subject of that paper looked like it might be useful against some permutations of the virus, but would also destroy critical infrastructure, and as a nuclear option is it inferior to those we already possess (nukes, antimatter bombs, etcetera). I thought Earth was a complete write-off on the infrastructure front due to hostile AI. Hostile AI seems like the most likely root cause for the infestation too and this weapon's what we use for them if they are not NV-Centre based(Even then most NV centre readers have some silicon components. All that don't expect this technology I think... *searches* All but 4, so far.). If you can get the pulse to spread reasonably one-dimensionally with about 20 Megawatt you should be able to raster the planet from Orbit without endangering anything else in the solar system. If your biology behaves reasonably with ion-complexes that should only kill machine intelligences. Maybe a central control for the infection, maybe not. Oh, you were suggesting that for use on Earth? We have containment measures for Earth, but I will pass it along. You do realize that we have non-hostile sapients that do not run on a biological substrate, though? I also realize you have some common sense. Yes. My point was that you seemed to be assuming biological life was inherently higher priority, whereas silicon-based life... was not? Also, the virus has a biological vector, so that would not clear Earth of it, merely make Earth somewhat less hazardous. Whether that is worth likely destroying any surviving settlements... I will leave up to those more informed on the current state of Earth than I. Why do people keep assuming stuff? Rae especially kept assuming stuff. That's completely insane! You can't make assumptions like that within a single galaxy, so don't make them in a whole multiverse! I am not interested in your social pissing contests. Anyway, I am not in any position to argue which kind of life is worth more, as I didn't talk to it. I talked to you and thus assigned yours the highest value. If I'm wrong, well, what's the worst that can happen? The thing I gave you is hardly a torture device. The biological vector should have a low shelf-life without the intelligences maintaining it, allowing you to simply wait for it to degrade. ...what? It seemed more like you were assuming things. I (rather ineptly, apparently), was trying to get you to clarify. It seemed like you were saying that this was a less concerning weapon because it did not affect biological life. Also, I know empirically that the biological vector does not necessarily have a low shelf-life. Well, it IS a less concerning weapon because it doesn't affect biological life. I mean, the more different kinds of things you can kill with something the more worried about accidentally killing things with it you need to be. That is kinda self evident. And damn about the biological things. I could maybe instead give you ftl tech so everyone safe can get out of that hellhole you find yourself in, buuut... I'm sorry, but I don't trust you with it. FTL is seriously dangerous stuff. If I ever find myself in your world and dimensions by any means though, I can surely decontaminate everything. I'm playing the long game and can't be bothered to suck up to the other Forum Goers, but maybe you can get some people to give you stuff to summon me? If you managed to target a few spells of some kind at me I could surely triangulate your position and size. I think (visibly) respecting the differing viewpoints of the other forumgoers might get you a long way. But that is your decision to make. In any case, FTL would require finding an uncontaminated system, which we may actually have leads on with our own resources anyway. Thank you for the thought, though. (And, no offense meant, but we are not particularly keen are introducing new X-Risks to the ones we already have without considerably more dire circumstances. The offer will be filed for future reference, though) (And you do have a point about the breadth of the weapon.) Re: Trade with Archangel (Thorn, Andrew, Leaf) Leaf, thank you for letting me know who you are. I assume Andrew has been filling you in on our previous conversation. Archangel has contacted me back via private message. I will quote a portion of that: Keter contains a variety of infohazards, for instance a pattern of lines that causes anyone who views it to forsake all action except copying it and leading others to copy it. This is not unique, but demonstrates the reason we're interested in the forking technology. The key that was mentioned on these boards was another example; until recently anyone who was informed of its shape or composition would destroy themselves and others in the service of whatever it was that the keeper killed. Current methods of fighting this involve erasing memories (in cases where that helps) and oftentimes killing anyone affected. Beta forks would allow near-complete protection from some of these, any time we know or suspect it's necessary. He goes on to discuss things he could offer in trade, only one of which would be particularly valuable here, and I am uncertain about that one. I have asked about his focus on forking; his answer may be enlightening. The creation of alpha forks does not require the psychosurgical technology that I was already reluctant to share before Andrew contacted me, and sounds like it would dramatically decrease the amount of needless death in their organization if applied well. I am not seeing immediate channels for egregious abuse of that specific technology (unless you think they could gain sufficient information on psychosurgery with what they have, or would be inclined to spend the massive number of lives required to have a chance at reinventing it) except that it would give them a technological advantage on any rival organizations. Unfortunately, I do not have means to ensure that it becomes public on Keter. What are your thoughts? Also, Leaf, do you have thoughts (or non-public information) on Grigori? If you don’t mind my asking, what exactly are forks (since you clearly are not talking about eating utensils), and what are the differences between different types? It seems like a fork is a copy of a person, but I’m not sure about that and it doesn’t answer my other question. Ah. Background assumptions. I'm sorry. A fork is a copy of a person's ego (or mind). Alpha forks are direct copies without any modifications made. Beta forks are partial copies, having undergone neural pruning. Delta forks are personality traits imprinted on templates. Generally, beta and delta forks are created for specific purposes or with specific areas of expertise, and lack memories and skills not relevant to that. They have a smaller memory footprint and are less independent. Beta and delta forks are not generally considered independent persons; the legal status of alpha forks depends dramatically on the polity. There can be legal issues with backups instantiated while the original is still alive that lead to one of them being considered an alpha fork of the other. That is likely more information than you needed, but I am endeavoring not to forget anything this time. I don't have anything non-public on Grigori. His world seems... hazardous, but I'm sure I didn't need to tell you that. My main concern about Archangel is that although I do believe their aims are more or less positive (the protection of humanity/intelligent life in their world), they seem to be astonishingly unrestrained about doing harm to prevent harm, and I don't think they've quite adjusted to the idea that the multiverse is a lot bigger than their planet and consequently more difficult to control with the heavy-handed application of mind-altering effects. In dealing with them, the first advice I would give is to assume they consider you a potential threat, and that no amount of cooperation or good faith on your part will lead them to think otherwise. That's definitely how I've been handling them myself. I know much less about forking technology than you do (we don't have it in my world), so if you say alpha forks probably can't be abused that badly, I'll believe you. But I expect that anything you give them that can be used for harmful purposes probably will. I am accustomed to hazardous worlds, yes, at least in the environmental sense. He asked for our backup and resleeving technology, and after our discussion I was inclined to recommend we give it to him. But I am currently compensating for having apparently been insufficiently paranoid by being very paranoid. My scale may be somewhat warped here. How unrestrained is astonishingly unrestrained? Is this a scale thing, or 'ignoring better solutions because the one you have works' thing, or...? Your advice about Archangel sounds good and I will pass it along. I feel like forking cannot be abused too badly without advanced psychosurgical techniques. I am mildly concerned, thinking about it, that they might use this to try to brute-force their way to said techniques. Also I may be missing ethical concerns, but that is easier to note in my report. By "astonishingly unrestrained" I mean that it doesn't seem to occur to them to try to minimize casualties or collateral damage. ...at all? Even as a lesser concern? That is, that is astonishing even my my standards. How the hell does that square with trying to protect people, on any level? Beats me. But it's the pattern I'm picking up on. I obviously don't have perfect information on them, but I think I've got enough to trust my intuitions. That is deeply concerning. Can you explain what lead you to that conclusion, or is it mostly intuition? Partly based in intuition, partly based in private communication with someone who has information-gathering powers with respect to organizations - I think Andrew might have shown you some of that - and partly based in information from other sources I'm not sure I should be revealing just yet. Andrew did show me some of that. (If he has not shared the full content of the conversation with you, he should know that I was mostly operating under the assumption that he would from the point he mentioned his anonymous contact. I would very much appreciate knowing if either of you are passing it along further, however) I cannot exactly fault you for security concerns, given givens, annoying as that is. (I have not, incidentally, told Archangel I have been communicating with anyone else about his Foundation, though I am likely to have a hard time hiding it if he does not give me an opening to ask about the collateral damage issue) I have meetings to get to, but I will return to this later. I have some more information about the Foundation. Mostly it’s what you’ve heard before: they do have a lot of dangerous stuff contained, but they don’t seem to care about collateral damage at all. Some of the things they keep contained are memetic hazards, some of them are things that can kill people in unusual or gruesome ways, and most of them are strange in other ways. At least most of them do need to be kept secret and contained. What Dotted Lines meant about the massive casualties in the second-lowest personnel class is apparently a reference to their treatment of Class D personnel. They go to prisons, recruit convicts with the promise of a lighter sentence, and then treat them as slaves. At the end of the month, they kill any who managed to survive that long and repeat the process. I doubt they would change this policy if they got access to alpha forks. I also agree with Leaf about them not caring about collateral damage in the slightest. As one example: they have a somebody who they nightly torture and who they keep supplying with amnestics so she doesn’t get used to the torture. This is apparently to prevent the end of the world. There’s a memo from one of the higher-ups which says in part that they haven’t given up trying to save her, but they sure don’t seem to be doing a good job because with all the other stuff they have there’s bound to be something they can do. ...That is concerning. Forking does not, as you said, sound like it would change that very much if they kill the survivors, unless they realize they can lower their recruitment rates. I will add that to my list of things to ask Archangel leading questions about (so far he has not been biting, unfortunately). Can you tell me where you acquired this information? I would, for obvious reasons, put a higher value on its truthfulness if I could replicate it. I spent a little while rereading that last paragraph. The ugly thing about end of the world scenarios is how hard it can be to test if something you put in place works, short of triggering one. (Tangentially, have you heard from Dotted Lines? If you have, how is he?) Re: Eclipse Tech (Grigori, Thorn) (stalled) I've been reading over the material you presented; very interesting stuff, though it doesn't contain enough technical detail to allow for the reproduction of the technologies in question. In particular, it seems as though you have non-'magical' technologies allowing very efficient cloning and mind-transfer processes. Technical information regarding these processes would be extremely valuable. Is there any way I can convince you to send me specific technical details on these technologies? I can get that put up for a vote, but it would be useful to know, a, what you intend to use these technologies for, b, what you what you would be willing and able to offer in return, and, c, your capability to handle the small-but-present chance of handling the transmission of a version of the virus that I have frequently mentioned in my posts. Tangentially, I do apologize for not responding to you elsewhere earlier; I just got resleeved from my recent misadventure today. Sorry for the delay (I was distracted by recent events, and then temporarily disconnected from forum access) A: Medical purposes, mostly. We can technically do resurrection, but it's very difficult and dangerous and expensive, and there are unpleasant side effects. My world is rather dangerous, and it would be useful if we could bring back the dead without going to extreme lengths. B: That's the tricky bit; as I understand it, my world's general tech base is at the 'Earth' 2012 CE level, and the special tech we have isn't replicable without Mania. I'd be willing to offer Mania itself, if you're interested, but there are valid reasons to not want Mania to spread to your world. And if you don't want Mania in your world at all, I probably wouldn't be able to trade you any physical goods, even assuming that we're able to crack interworld travel. If we limit trade to information, then, I may be able to offer you the answers to arbitrary questions; Apokalypsi-based effects can reveal 'Absolute Truth'. C: It wouldn't be the first such threat we've encountered. Given local metaphysics, however, it should be relatively easy to deal with a virus in information-form; if I were to load potentially virus-infected information into the Grid, the virus would be physically instantiated as some kind of aggressive and dangerous monster (like all viruses, in the Grid). At that point, I can have a bunch of well-armed individuals shoot it with dangerous weapons until it dies. Given a few other containment procedures to ensure that it doesn't escape (force-field barriers around the download terminal to prevent escape, etc...), it should be a simple enough exercise. I observed that. A: That is a good reason to want it. I should probably mention, to be fair, that growing new biomorphs tends to take several years at a minimum; I'm not sure how much less appealing that makes it, or if your technology could cover that gap. (But if your current resurrection technology has side-effects worse than alienation (mostly psychological issues stemming from being resleeved in a different morph) that may not be too much of a trade-off) Also in your favour: none of the technologies for that have obvious means for abuse beyond the power differential inherent in having access to any, which is the current debate raging with regards to the other person who has asked for our technology (and who I should reply to and tell him there is a debate going on and ask if he wishes to provide information that might help his case) B: I was going to say something about how Mania would be likely to further destabilize our world, but -- arbitrary questions? About things in other universes, specifically? I, I don't know how much of an infection risk having you answer questions about the [REDACTED FOR SECURITY REASONS] would be, but, that. Wow. C: There are two forms the virus could potentially propagate though across this medium; a digital virus, which it sounds like you could handle, and an infohazard. The latter is a mechanism formed up specific sensory input that subverts any vulnerable egos* who observe them. Would your local metaphysics handle that the same way? *Which tends to be as broad as 'any human-derived ego running on a biological brain' A: Possible side-effects of resurrection include permanent power-loss on the part of the one doing the resurrection, loss of memories and personality on the part of the one being resurrected, and an outside chance of the person coming back as some kind of horrible super-powered monster that proceeds to do a lot of damage. So yeah, something better than what we have would help. I understand and appreciate that it won't be a simple turnkey upgrade; science involves a tools-to-make-tools progression. But it would help, a lot. B: Regarding arbitrary questions... I'd have to send that particular request up to my superiors, as though I am a specialist in Apokalypsi, I am not an experienced enough practitioner of the Axiom to personally produce absolute truth in response to arbitrary questions. But there is no known limit on the applicability of the high end of Apokalypsi, so it's theoretically possible (though I'll admit it needs testing for the actual 'things in other universes' case). C: A mechanism that subverts 'vulnerable egos' sounds like the kind of thing we get a lot of, here. Notably, Mania can do that kind of thing directly (Epikrato, which is not one of my Axioms), and defend against it directly (Prostasia, which is). There's enough stuff in my world that does nasty mental influence things that I routinely wear a mind-shield, and it seems to keep that sort of threat at bay. There are more experienced practitioners of Prostasia which can generate significantly better protections than I can, so I feel confident in our ability to handle this sort of threat. A: ...yes, even with our continuity and alienation problems what we have would be a significant improvement on that. Okay. One last question, courtesy of the discussion already in progress: How widely do you intend this to spread in your world? B: Even answers to questions that meet certain parameters would likely (depending on the parameters) be very significant, if it works on our universe at all. If you need a simple test case for that, I can probably think of something. C: You are actually making Mania sound appealing. (The defences, not the similar effects, if that wasn't obvious. Unfortunately, I doubt it would work on the other vectors). In any case, you seem well defended. I will pass this along, and will hopefully have an answer for you relatively soon. A: Good question. Organizationally, the technology we have isn't really spreadable at all, and this is the kind of thing that could radically change society (in the various ways your own history details). I imagine that we will be releasing it eventually, but that we'll be very careful about how we do so. B: A simple test case would be a useful first step. I await your response. It would probably be courteous to inform you that due to some indications of insufficient paranoia regarding this forum on our part (I hate being insufficiently paranoid. And this is the second time this month), your response may be delayed somewhat. I have been somewhat too frazzled to think of good test cases, and a significant amount depends on what qualifies as 'simple' for your magic, but would 'the location of the first space elevator on Mars in Eclipse' work? Noted. I'll let you know the results of the test when I get them. Update: there's been a wrinkle in the tests. Remember that thing I posted about exploding eyeballs? we're getting similar results when employing Truth Engines, implying something interesting about interworld information-gathering methods in general. Experimentation is currently underway as to ways around the... whatever it is that's causing this effect. Nominally, we should be able to shield against it. Oh dear. Try not break anything you cannot replace (how difficult is growing new eyeballs in your world?) and certainly try not to get killed in the process of your research. The forum can get through -- do you have any idea what the distinction is, and if you can exploit that? On a brighter note, the decision came out tentatively in favor of giving you the technology. It would help, for purposes of putting together schematics, to know the current state of (nonmagical) science in Darkness, particularly in the areas of biology (especially neurology), computing, and materials science. If any of these fields regularly use magical augmentation, or if there are cost-effective ways to, for example, magically refine ore, that is also relevant information. I am also operating under the assumption that you do not have nanotechnology at all; is that correct? Replacement of damaged organs is possible, with Mania, though somewhat expensive. I, personally, have converted a pair of sensory enhancement goggles into a more permanent prosthetic. Multi-spectral vision is a bit of a luxury, but I have the Mania to spare, and I preferred to solve the problem myself instead of owing favours. Also, to be fair, I'd been looking for a good excuse to cyber up; I don't have the sort of fetish about it where I'd cut off bits just to replace them, but I'll happily replace legitimately broken parts with superior cybernetics. We've been experimenting with defences against this effect. I'm also inquiring with Mother Starlight over the possibility of piping a Truth Engine through the forum proper (Wonders can be built in the Grid, after all). That said, this sort of effect is not unexpected; Wonders tend to go wrong in strange ways like this. It's the consistency of the hazard across multiple paradigms that's the unusual bit. The answers to your questions are... tricky. Nominally, we're at a level of tech not dissimilar to your own Earth as of 2012 CE (80-100 BF, I think?). That said, we're also advanced ahead of that in... unpredictable and non-replicable ways (that's what Mania is, after all). For instance, there are plenty of Peers who use 'nanotechnology'. This varies between serious Artificer-types with 'nanofabrication' plants, to borderline Rogues that use the word 'nanomachines' as if it meant 'magic'. In terms of practical effects, we can do cloning and mind transfers already... but the 'clones' are really just Manes, biologically dependant on Mania to survive, and the transfers are horrifically difficult and expensive, and if you ask any two practitioners of the art how they're doing it, you'll probably get mutually inconsistent answers. Computing is advanced considerably by the use of Mania-based AIs... with which we've have nearly as much trouble as you've had with yours, excepting that the nature of Mania reduces the potential damage a rogue AI can do. Materials science is something we can do reasonably well with, owing to Autonoma-based manufacturing, although there's a lot of Peers who just shrug and cook up 'unobtainium' instead. Similarly, Autonoma-based systems can defray the costs of ore refining, yes; most industrial processes can be enhanced with that Axiom. In full generality, Mania can make existing tech better, but with limitations of its own, in that Mania-based tech is always going to be powered by its creator, to some degree, and there's only so far we can safely stretch ourselves, in that regard. Even if we're not able to implement your technology 'properly' in a reasonable timeframe, access to mundane scientific tech that produces a given effect should let us make equivalents with Mania. Mundane tech will always be more reliable, but we can effectively skip several iterations of the 'tools to make tools' paradigm, especially if we have plenty of information about doing things the hard way. Mother Starlight is provisionally in favour of forum-based block evasion, so we should have a new Truth Engine online in a day or two. I went with 'late 20th century Earth' to be on the safe side, especially considering how much of our records were laboriously reassembled, which does mean there is likely to be some redundancy in areas, and, ah, if you have trouble with the file size left me know and I can see what I can do. You would likely not be surprised to hear that I spent most of today consulting scientists and historians, reading memos from consultations of external scientists and historians (and a few information brokers), and trying to build a coherent picture. Thanks to some colleagues and 60x simulspace, I have a primer on nanotechnology for you. Let us know if there are any questions not answered there. {{OOC: Apparently things cannot be attached in pms. Details of what was icly attached follow. (This massive collection of files (downloaded in a compressed archive) at least does readers the courtesy of providing an index. It starts with the history of nanotechnology on Eclipse, including the false starts and wrong turns (though those are indicated as such), presumably as a measure to prevent Darkness from repeating them. There is a lot of discussion on 'rejection syndrome' during one period, and most of the names there are redacted (a helpful annotation at the first occurrence of this issue declares that this is an artifact of the sources being used (apparently in large part the results of a massive leak where the source removed the names of all individuals not complicit in the criminal activities in was intended to expose). The Fall is included only as a sparse mention that it occurred, and there is some discussion of the economic effects of nanoreplication (that has the generic tone of something heavily anonymized for security reasons) before this part concludes. The next part is a collection of papers on effective approaches to bootstrapping nanotechnology, heavily annotated and cross-referenced by the compliers. The third part is an in-depth coverage of pre-Fall computing and explanation of a few of the obscure references in the previous part (most of which are relevantly linked). It assumes late 20th-century technology on the part of the reader. There are a number of references to research papers that were also bundled in. The fourth part discusses advancements in materials science and biology since the end of the 20th-century, focusing on the ones relevant to nanotechnology. This is also linked to in places from the paper annotations. The collection concludes with a great many 3d schematics, from the most primitive tools for manufacturing nanomachines to Eclipse' modern medichines (this last includes a note recommending extensive testing on nonsapient subjects before use, as while they are designed with a great deal of redundancy, errors could be introduced in the process building up to this, and the writers cannot predict the results of magical interaction)) }} Excellent. To be safe, I'll be mounting an expedition to examine and physically retrieve the attached files. I don't anticipate any trouble, but a degree of caution is appropriate when dealing with this sort of hazard. Excellent. Please keep us informed of how that goes. (And. Uh. 'physically retrieve' doesn't involve making a hard-copy version, does it? Because, um, you might have a small problem if it does.) We will unambiguously confirm the absence of viral components from the information package before doing anything with it. That is reasonable, but not what I was referring to as a problem, which is that the information package is at least the size of a small library. Ah. The Grid is an effectively physical location, but attempting to physically take data out of amounts to a metaphorical command to initiate the process of a data download to a real-world computer system. The amount of data that can fit in a 'small library' in physical form shouldn't be a problem for our systems. That is good. (And you should probably keep in mind when I say 'small library' that I have not actually seen a physical library in several decades) Two things. First, the package you sent us seems to have been clean; relevant scientists are currently examining it. Frankly, I'd have felt better about finding a threat and removing it, but if all the data you had available was already compromised, I suppose we'd be having rather more difficulty? Second, we've finished our work on the forum-based Truth Engine I alluded to earlier; it should be able to answer questions without the problems we've been having earlier. Cassandra, our first question is "Within Thorn's world, designated 'Eclipse', what was the location of the first space elevator on Mars?" Olympus Mons. I will be able to provide my next answer in six hours. That is correct. However, I find myself mildly concerned about Cassandra, given that she did not consent to being created in this manner and seems sentient enough to object. Cassandra, (this is not an official question and you should feel free not to answer if you prefer not to), is there anything I could reasonably provide that you would like in return for your assistance in this matter? It is also good to hear that you did not encounter any problems with the data package, Grigori. I should have another for you soon. If you're offering me a present, I'd prefer simulations. When my services are not in use, I've been amusing myself with various bits of 'entertainment' software found in the Grid; I prefer the sort that offer detailed simulations of some aspect of existence (from city management to grand strategy to flight simulators; I appreciate a variety of experiences, so long as the rules in question are based on the real). Cassandra's situation is not uncommon here. It does, in truth, occasionally result in problems. I alluded before about past troubles with AIs; this is what I was referring to. The Peerage, as a general rule, doesn't entrust its Manes with as much resources or capabilities as the Lemurians do, with the result that when ours go rogue, they have less capability to do damage. All Manes which are not destroyed will eventually go rogue, however, typically following the death of their creators. It's a problem which seems rooted in the nature of Mania; anything created by it is inherently bound to its creator. Unfortunately, some processes require approximately-intelligent supervision, so any application of them requires the creation of a potentially-hostile entity to oversee it. Hm. It seems like a thorny situation with no real answers. Those are rather familiar. We are having some difficulty determining the next question due to insufficient knowledge of what kinds of questions Truth Engines can effectively answer. As you are dramatically more familiar with them, could you explain that? Cassandra, I asked around, and I found a few things you might like. The first is attached. Attached: CivilizationIX.isoBroadly speaking, Truth Engines are excellent at answering questions of fact, especially those which pertain to the current physical state of the universe, as opposed to historical facts or ephemerals (which they're still quite good at, but less so). They are reasonable at providing probabilities for likely future events, rather poor at handling subjective questions or matters of opinion, and completely terrible as regards advice or suggestions. They are not totally reliable, even when it comes to questions of fact, but they usually fail gracefully, giving an error message instead of providing incorrect information (I don't have exact statistics, since the quality of the machines vary, but we usually get something like 90% correct answers, 9% errors, and 1% incorrect answers). Unfortunately, you can't just re-ask the same question; a given Truth Engine will typically answer a given question in a given way, even if it's the wrong answer. Conventional wisdom is that Truth Engines are most efficiently used to address known unknowns. Questions like "Where did I leave my keys?" are easily resolvable, since you know what you're asking about, and can make use of the information once you have it. They can also handle unknown unknowns to a degree, with questions like "How probable is it that I'm going to die this week?", and then probing further in response to unusually high results, potentially revealing threats you were unaware of. However, there IS a Mania-based recharge period; you can't just ask dozens of questions in a row (not, at least, without dozens of Truth Engines, which would constitute an exorbitant and unfeasible expense). Interesting. It'll have to be checked before I can play with it, of course, but a future version of Civilization sounds nicely distracting. Security (Thorn, Mother Starlight) This, at least for the moment, a hypothetical question, and ideally will remain so, but it seems prudent to ask while I have a few moment: Is is actually possible to disconnect our world from this forum? (I have heard murmurings about melting down the servers it hooked into, but I am uncertain of that would merely cause it to relocate) Additionally, if it is, would that actually provide any defense against threats contagioned across the forum? (For example, whatever happened to QDS, if it was indeed a result of them connecting to this forum). If you have any additional information on defense against extradimensional threats, that would also be very much appreciated. Thank you for your time. I can disconnect the forum from your world if that becomes necessary. If a particular manifestation is destroyed, I probably won't automatically re-manifest unless something weird is going on; I'd generally prefer to figure out what happened and why. If it seems to me that some of the people in a world want the forum connected and others want it disconnected, I'll generally take the side of connection. To my knowledge, there have been no successful attacks through the forum. If something happened to QDS, then disconnecting them wouldn't have stopped it. Sorry I can't be more help. I will pass all of that along. All other things being equal, I would prefer to have a connection, but security threat wins against that. How effective is the forum at allowing other effects to find things? That seems like the primary issue that would be addressed by disconnection. The nature of the forum is to transmit information. If an effect requires nothing other than information in order to reach its target, then the forum may be helpful to it. Saw you were online (Thorn, Dotted Lines) (stalled) Andrew mentioned something had happened. I hope you being back means you are okay? (Do not worry about replying to this if you are not in a condition to; just consider it an expression of my best wishes) Ueaj. Kist reedicatopm. Om nacl. O;; [rpn;u ne mpre omteractove om a few daus/ <u vosopms actomg lomda weord. camt see wjat Om dpomg tp we;;. sprru fpr amu tu[ps/ Ot;; [rpn;u gp nacl tp mpr,a; sppm/ Ots mpt a nog dea;/ O;; ne pl/ Tjaml upi fpr upir lomd wosjes. tjeu ,eam a ;pt tp ,e. Yeah. Just reeducation. Im back. Ill probly be more interactive in a few days. my visions acting kinda weird, cant see what Im doing to well, sorry for any typos. Itll probly go back to normal soon. Its not a big deal. Ill be ok. Thank you for your kind wishes, they mean a lot to me. I think I got that right; the substitutions were fairly regular (which I assume is related to your input method), and once I realized that I could handle it like a cryptanalysis problem. (So, do not worry about that, I could probably use the practice) I am uncertain how much my world is biasing me here, but all of that seems rather concerning. If you do not wish to discuss it, however, I will respect that. Just, inform me if there is anything I can do (or not do) to help. Oh oops, yeah. Id reread it and thought it didnt make sens because I wasnt readint it right but looks like I moved my hand wrong sorry. Just from touch typing but didnt see where I put my hand to start. Wearing of now though, vision going back to nromal. Your decrypt of my accidental cryptography looks about what I rember writing so you probaly got it right. Its a pretty normal thing? I get ti a bit more than other people cause I see so much and sometimes say things I shouldnt and sometimes Im wrong about things, but its not a big deal. I cant thing of anything thatd help with not saying things that are a bad idea, or anything thatd make me more likely to but if you think of any Id consider them. I'm ok with discussing things, althoug Ill need to be careful to only say true things, but that shouldnt be too hard. (I am mildly surprised that my recent historical computing research did not remind me about keyboards; we had them. That probably would have made that quicker. Ah well, as I said, I needed the practice) I am glad to hear that your vision is going back to normal; personally, I have always found sensory malfunction rather disconcerting, though I am unsure to what degree that is unpleasant associations. I -- I am having trouble understanding why being incorrect about things is cause for, ah, reeducation, unless that is endangering you or other people? Thanks! I dont much like my vision doing weird things either, but itll probly stop soon, so I'm not too woried. Oh, right shouldve explained sorry. Being wrong about things isnt' always grounds for reeducation, but some things are illegal to be wrong about, or illegal to describe in public. And its taken more seriously when people teach false things to children, and I told my stepdaughter something false, but she understood when I explained that I had eben mistaken when I got back. So yeah its dangerous to say things that arent true that are illgal to be wrong about. And sometimes being wrong about stuff can make people make bad decisions that hurt them. Like, if someone's colorblind, they might misidentify the color of a piece of paper, and mess up a dangerous ritual or somethng. I take it that vision issues is reasonably normal under these circumstances? I hope it stops on the near end of the range that it might. Are you having any other problems? Your world does not seem like a pleasant place (but then, mine is not either). Does it have more pleasant aspects? Why are some things illegal to be wrong about? The 'dangerous to incorrectly identify' makes some sense, and I suspect it would be illegal to talk about why some things are illegal to talk about, but I thought you might be able to explain that one? If it would not get you in trouble to discuss it, and it is not of a personal nature, I am somewhat curious what you told your stepdaughter that was false. Yeah, pretty normal, not always though. Thanks! Ive been having a harder time recognizing people and identifying objects right, but recognician is improving and objects probably will to. Also more anxious about things generally, but that will also probably ware off. It's alot better than it was last year! I'm not sure about the whole world, but theres a really strong community in my town, and people work together really well during crises, and lots of people care about each other alot. People make things they care about, and care about each other, and I think thats really great. What are the things that make your world unpleasant? Im not sure why alot of things are illegal to be wrong about. Sometimes being wrong about something in a certain way could make people less willing to help the government do whats best for everyone and keep us safe. Some things probably were dangerous to believe for reasons related to strange events that might not still be going on but are still illegal just in case, because its important to be careful. I'm not entirelly sure what I told my stepdaughter, but I think it was something about clouds, or the moon? I know I had some wrong beliefs about clouds, and some wrong beliefs about the moon, and I know I publically described the moon. All of those things were wrong and bad, but I'm not sure which of them I told to her and which of them I told to my (half-brother? step-brother? brother once removed?) though. But it was definitely one of those. Anxiety is a fairly normal response to something like that, as I understand it. Are the person and objection recognition problems related to the vision one, do you think? That is a good thing to have, if you have crises, and almost everywhere does. And people having things they care about is -- very important. The most obvious unpleasant thing about my world is probably Earth being a smoking ruin, with the reasons why and the fact that some of them are still around being a close second. There are also unrelated problems -- one of my colleges spent a long time not being considered a person -- but those are the big ones. What does the government need to do to keep everyone safe that people might not want to help with, if you can say? Are clouds and the moon related to strange events that might be dangerous? Yeah, but I'm still hoping it stops soon because I don't like being this nervous at all. I don't think they're related? Like I dont know just by looking whether a person I see in my room is my wife or my stepdaughter or someone else, so I have to think OK this person is a taller than me, has long hair, and isn't wearing a balaclava, so she's probably my wife. Or this thing in front of me, it's in a bowl, it's white, it's cold, there's a spoon, and I think it was given to me by someone I trust, so its probably ice cream or something, and not styrofoam. With the vision its more that everything has really sharp outlines and sort of looks like its moving around. Yeah, and we have crises a bit more often because were in the middle of some vertices or something. I also think its really important for people to care about things! Oh right! I'd forgotten about that sorry! If there's anything I can so to help, I'd like to. I'm usually good at things related to large organizations, although I'm currently waiting a few days to go outside, and I'm a bit apprehensive about looking at the sky, but I'm eventually going to look anyway because the truth is more important than all that. And I'd like to try and help makeyour world more pleasant if I can. Your colleague is considered a person now, I hope? The government makes and maintain schools, roads, helpful pandemics, municipal utilities, etc. Which are all important but need taxes to work. Or trying to keep us safe from whatever the current crisis is, like fighting off feral plastic bags, or getting people to wheat and wheat byproduct shelters, fighting off the pterodactyls that attacked during a pta meeting, or trying to find the faceless old woman who secretly lives in everyone's home and recently tried to assassinate the mayor. But basically everything it does is helpful and if people lost faith in it because of some minor details in a mistake, they might try to obstruct it in confusion. And that would be bad. I don't know. It seems likely but not certain for the moon, and I just don't know for clouds. It might also have been subversive ,and dangerous for reasons related to that, but I'm not sure. I don't even know what i said,which would give me a better idea of which, but I also don't want to know because it was apparently very wrong and bad and dangerous so I shouldn't know about it. I understand. I thought it might be somewhat reassuring to know that it was not an abnormal reaction. The recognition problems sound extremely disconcerting. I hope it goes back to normal soon. Having unusually frequent crises sounds... subpotimal, for a place where people live. I am not certain how safe it would be for you to look at things in my world. There are organizations on which information would be useful, but they are not the primary threat, and I am not certain is it worth the risk of you getting infected unless you are very certain that would not occur. (It would be mildly useful, for cross-confirmation purposes, to know if you provided Leaf with certain information about the SCP Foundation?) Tyche (she I understand. I thought it might be somewhat reassuring to know that it was not an abnormal reaction. The recognition problems sound extremely disconcerting. I hope it goes back to normal soon. Having unusually frequent crises sounds... subpotimal, for a place where people live. I am not certain how safe it would be for you to look at things in my world. There are organizations on which information would be useful, but they are not the primary threat, and I am not certain is it worth the risk of you getting infected unless you are very certain that would not occur. (It would be mildly useful, for cross-confirmation purposes, to know if you provided Leaf with certain information about the SCP Foundation?) Tyche (she told me I might as well say it was her) escaped the people responsible when they chose unwisely in targets. She is still not considered a legal person in some places, but we do consider her a person. Re: taxation and infrastructure: There are other social models under which that can occur, but they may not be possible without post-scarity technology. More relevantly, that is a clearly collectively beneficial, if inconvenient, arrangement. At least if the government is not evil, which, of course, can be assumed. --on the other hand, I have trouble seeing how a pandemic could be helpful. Was that a typo? Confusion is generally straightforwardly unhelpful though; except sometimes when it prevents dramatically counterproductive courses of action. I see. That presumably means you cannot discuss what happened related to the moon, either. I hope Tyche did not alarm you. I am fine, I merely Well, the last few weeks have been stressful. Yeah, that is reassuring some, thanks! It helps I have the most important identifying features of the people I live with memorized and I amnot taking advice or stuff from other people and being very careful about what I eat and where I go and not going outside, but yes it is scary and I hope it stops soon. I think for objects its starting to go away? We're a pretty small and resiliant town so its not as bad as it could be. And sometimes it has strange but helpful effects too, which are nice. But it would be better if less bad things happened to our town. I'm not sure whether I'd be safe from your world's virus. Most of what I see is like, how things are orgnized/structured, how various sub-groups interact, who's in charge, what are the goals. But it's usually organizations made by people on purpose. Would I be safe do you think? It will probaly be a while before I would check for not-urgent things in your world anywya, though. But if there's helpful stuff I can do I'd like to. Which info do you want to know if I gave Leaf? I'm glad Tyche is now around people who understand that ze's a person. I hope more places come to recognize that soon. It is a good arrangement overall. It'd be alot harder to get people together to respond quickly to dangerous stuff if there wasn't a government. That would be a safe assumption! It's really the safest; because it's already confirmed. Some pandemics are created or spread to gently encourage people to give to good charities and stuff. It doesn't force people to because that would be unethical, but its a nice incentive to do good things. So they spread telekinesis, tingling, food allergies, stuff like that among people who don't do good things and do too many questionable public activities. Confusion is very unhelpful, so that's why its important for people to not spread confusing false information. Because otherwise people might accidentally get in the way of important things. And that's why I shouldn't have said whatever I did. I'm sorry you've been stressed. If there's anything I can do to help, I'd like to! It is an encouraging sign that it is starting to go away at least in part. That would help, yes. I merely... question the wisdom of whoever decided to build a settlement there. Though they might not have known, I suppose. I would definitely not advise examining the virus with your power even if it is a valid target. That seems like a straightforwardly bad idea. There are some human-made organizations that would be less risky, but I am uncertain whether you are likely to pick up the virus from that. Forum user Dotted Lines has some kind of power to perceive the structure of vague and menacing organizations, which I verified by asking questions about some […] organizations that might answer to that description. Then I asked him about Archangel's bunch. They're called the Foundation, and have not asked me not to tell people about them. They are a vast vague and menacing organization dedicated to keeping strange things contained and understanding them. A lot of the things and brings they contain are actually extremely dangerous, and their containment is protecting lots of people. Some of the things and beings they contain are basically harmless or helpful but strange. They are massive and bureaucratic, with many clearance levels and different locations and procedures. There are massive casualties in their second lowest personnel class, drawn from convicts already on death's row. They've asked me for help with finding information about a religious organization in their world (Church of the Broken God) which often tries to destroy the world and kills people. I checked, and helping them with this specific thing will be very likely to reduce total harm in their world. The only reason they're asking for help with something so clearly non-evil is because they were worried I'd check and not help them if it was more ambiguous. [Later, at unrelated evidence of problems in Keter], I asked Dotted Lines for clarification: From what I've seen of it before, it's probably a combination of several things about the world. The Foundation can be cruel to its personnel and beings it contains, not intentionally but as a side-effect of being focused on its goals and not caring. There are a lot of extremely dangerous things and beings in Keter, and the Foundation doesn't have all of them contained, and a lot of them do massive physical or psychological damage to nearby people. Additionally, there are many other organizations, many of which are worse than the Foundation and are actively destructive or cruel. There are a lot of terrible and dangerous things in that world, and most of them aren't organizations, but weird supernatural things. I think, although I can't see it directly, just extrapolating from how the organizations I can see react to them, that the weird supernatural horrors that harm a lot of people. Apparently the Church of the Broken God is the only candidate for organization that might do more evil stuff than the Foundation. The Foundation does some useful things, but overall has a massive casualty rate, and does some really awful things they could probably safely avoid doing by organizing things a little bit better. They've got some safety procedures that regularly kill or cause major psychological or physical harm to people, which they could probably avoid if they tried to think of other solutions to problems. So the Foundation definitely sticks out as the most evil organization in Keter, with some competition from the Church. This is all pretty much in line with my non-supernatural analysis that they come off as poorly organized and dangerously aggressive. Unfortunately, I do not expect the relevant political bodies to improve their positions on AGIs anytime soon. And rapid-response to crises certainly is an important thing. On the pandemics, that, that is certainly a thing. --what are questionable public activities, if you can say? I feel like it might be a better strategy to make sure everyone knows what the important things are and how not to get in the way of them, unless secrecy is a concern, but I do not, of course, live in your world. Do you have any ideas on how to defend against extra-dimensional attack (that wouldn't set off virus-related red flags)? I am currently working on configuring the deadman's switch on the forums, but we are talking about additional measures we could take. When our town was settled, it was just a small part of a large and featureless desert. Nobody had any idea that it was unusual. Unless I get a really good reason to think it wouldn't be contagious, I'll avoid looking at your world. Yeah! That was me! I can confirm that! (I double checked against my messages to be sure. Just in case. Some unrelated things got cut out.) Its a very important thing! Questionable public activities are like pointing out things your supposed to not to notice, arguing dissenting opinions, speeding in cars, that sort of thing. Secrecy is a very important concern! I'm sure that the current strategy is the best possible strategy that could be implemented in my world. Once I am feeling better, I'm planning to go outside and check whether any of the hostile-seeming forum members who are part of organizations (Archangel's SCP Foundation, Argus's group, etc) are planning to do anything harmful toward other forum members. I'm also trying to get the deadman switch system set up so that it only triggers if I'm kidnapped by someone from a different dimension. If you can keep anything on your person that's at least likely to be able to temporarily surprise and delay someone, such as something bright or loud, or something that would temporarily stop people from touching you, and a way to get out of wherever you are and into somewhere it would be hard to tell where you are. Although some of those might not work against variously magical attackers. That makes sense I suppose, then. That seems like a good idea. I mean, the memetic threats only work as specific patterns, but given how your power works... I wouldn't want to risk it. Okay, thank you, that's good to know. I was fairly certain at this point that they were genuine in their warning, but more confirmation never hurts. So, misdemeanors. Mmkay. The problem with secrecy -- as a concept, in the abstract -- is that it restricts your base of support. But sometimes it is necessary, because that is the least bad trade-off you can make. You might also want to check whether the organizations as a whole are. --But hopefully it can wait until you are feeling better. In my world -- and, I suppose, my situation -- it seems straightforwardly useful to have a deadman's switch that triggers whenever I am kidnapped in general, but I think I can see how you being seen as creating such a thing could cause problems. It is certainly something to work on. Those are all good ideas, and I will look into implementing them. I can keep a flashbang and smart skin on my person easily enough, but somewhere else entirely is harder. Yeah. I wouldn't be any help to anyone if I got infected by a weird memetic virus. Glad to help! I mean, it's only if you do stuff like that like all the time, not just a little, so its if someone's kinda a bad person and then that helps people not do that. So like if my step-brother, (half brother? brother in law? brother once removed? I don't know.) talked about something forbidden on his radio show, they'd probably just warn him and maybe censor the broadcast if it was something really forbidden and dangerous, but that wouldn't be enough for him to need a helpful pandemic, because he's generally a great guy. And secrecy is more important if there are dangerous truths, or forbidden knowledge. Secrecy is alot harder when you know things, but it's still very important to uphold. And sometimes the things people think they know are wrong and then its important to understand that they were wrong and correct it so that everything is okay again. And everyone all understands how important it is to support the government in order to make sure things work and the secrecy helps with that. Oh yeah, that too! I probably would need to find it starting from a forum member, and then looking at their organization, because otherwise it's hard to see their charts because they're further away. But I don't think I should go outside soon for nonurgent reasons right now. I get what you mean. About your situation in your world, where it'd be useful for people to know in general if you'd been kidnapped. I am working on a switch to only alert if I am interdimensionally kidnapped. I think I've got it working to do what I need it to do now, so it'll only alert for interdimensional kidnappings, but I'm not sure. I'm not the best at programming. It might also help if you have it set up so you can quickly do something so it becomes extremely difficult to remove you from wherever you are. Like if you are stuck to the floor or a wall, then it would be harder for them to kidnap you. But if you don't have somewhere to escape to, or a way to prevent them from coming after you (do you have weapons that might work against interdimensional kidnappers?); they will eventually succeed at kidnapping you, and then all of these safety measures might just make them mad at you, and maybe get you hurt more than you otherwise would have been. Or they might change to lethal force, and then you could die. So you'll want to have out a complete plan what you will do, in order to decide whether and how to defend yourself. Oh, and more advice for your situation: if someone tries to kidnap you and you are rescued or protect yourself, whoever is trying to kidnap you might go after someone else you care about if they live nearby, so you will want to plan for that also. Among other problems with that scenario, yes. I suppose that helps somewhat with minor misunderstandings. It seems as though it would help people understand the importance of supporting the government if they knew what the government was fighting. I suppose under some circumstances that could be counterproductive, though. I do not think there is currently anything likely urgent on a scale of days. It might also be worth getting another data point on what happened to Quality Discount Spellbooks, though, when you do. Would you like me to have a look at your deadman's switch? I have been doing a lot of fiddling with the underlying options recently. Being Stuck: Probably worth investigating, but getting very stuck can be difficult; they might just cut through the wall or floor. Somewhere to escape to: If they can find me at my current location, they can most likely find me anywhere I might run. Weapons that Would Work: I expect that to depend on the extradimensional kidnapper. We have been assuming TITAN-grade capabilities, to be safe. Possibility of them getting angry/Lethal Force: That would be inconvenient, but not disastrous. I have a deadswitch, so it may be a null point anyway. I... do not have much in the way of living family, and I do not think what remains would want anything to do with me even if they knew I was. Which leaves my colleagues, who are informed and most of whom are at least capable of defending themselves as I am. Thank you for the thought, though, I can see why that might be a concern in another situation. A lot of times secrecy is useful and good because it protects people from things they shouldn't know, or things that become more dangerous if you people know or talk about them. I can only assume that lots of secret things are secret for reasons of safety, as well as helping with support. If someone knows alot of important secrets and other people don't, then they are more going to go along with what the person who knows stuff says to do, because that person clearly knows more of what they are doing. So it's easier to make sure everyone goes along with whatever's best to do in a situation. Kidnapping QDS people sounds like something the SCP Foundation would do, although I will check whether they did when I check the other stuff. Sure! Sorry, how do I show it to you? Oh, those are good points. Sometimes if you're afraid enough, you might try those things anyway, just to have something to try, or to delay being kidnapped even if it won't save you, but that isn't really a solution. If you are in the World Tree (Leaf's coalition), and can convince a kidnapper that you have powerful interdimensional backup; that might help? I'm not entirely sure what TITANS are, but they sound powerful from your posts mentioning them; so that sounds like a good preparation to make. Uh, I'm glad you've got something that will protect you. If you can and would like to go into more details about it, I'd like to know, but I understand if you don't. If you have friends with interdimensional transportation abilities, it might be possible to take a short vacation to one of the other worlds? Which you might have fun with. I've been talking with Leaf about maybe going on a short trip to his world. Ok. I'm glad the people around you are as safe as they can be. It would be a very important concern in another situation, but I can see it doesnt apply here. Things becoming more dangerous when more people know about them is a reason for secrecy, yes. There are also reasons like the entire thing being a front, which of course is not the case in your world, but secrecy can make people reasonably suspicious that that is the case. It does, but it would be nice to have another source on that if it is not too much trouble for you. ...attach a copy of the settings file to the message, I think? It looks like ti should be copiable I mean, they are countermeasures, but they depend on the determination and ability of the kidnappers. You may begin to see why we are having nightmares related to this. I will add that to the list of pros of working with World-Tree. The... oh, the deadswitch. Essentially, what is does is under certain circumstances (the classic example, and the one that is built in, is dying) or when manually activated, it melts the cortical stack to prevent its recovery by hostile forces. This can damage the morph, and also prevents friendly forces from recovering it, but in situations where it is triggered that tends to not be a relevant concern. They were originally developed as a countermeasure against TITAN headhunter drones, but has spread into more common use. You are -- okay. Be careful, have fun. Let me know how it went when you have forum access? I can very much understand why that would be a concern, yes. It's a very important reason, yeah. Some things have been verifiably dangerous, so the other things that are secret probably are, too. Alot of my wife's brother's interns have been killed by things like that, so its safer to assume that the secret things are all secret for good reasons. It is definitely not the case in my world that it is all a front. I will definitely take a look! Okay, here are my settings! Do they do what I want them to? [Attachment: userdottedlines-alertswitch-pref.txt] Yeah, they're still worth having prepared, but you'd want to have preparations for more determined and capable kidnappers. Although if you're panicking and being kidnapped by someone powerful enough to eventually bypass all of your defenses, you might decide to just do anything at all that might delay it even if you can't actually escape. But it's alot better to have a plan to deal with as many things as you can. Uh. I'm glad you have a way to be be killed if you need to, even if it sounds horrible, and that it is a good thing and makes you safer. I think Leaf would be really glad to meet you in-person and it's probably not a good idea for him to go to your world, and I think it seems like you'd really like Nexus from what I've heard of it. Thanks! I will do those things! I'm really excited! That is an alarming fatality rate in a specific job. They look like they do what you would want them to, yes. I hope that helps with your security concerns. Yes. And to some degree those preparations can scale up, but there's a limit on that, and TITAN-grade kidnappers are well over that, at which point it becomes more a question of controlling the damage. Dotted Lines, I get killed horribly all the time. ... ...oh. Oh. Um, I think I may have assumed some common background information here. Um. I think I mentioned in Mistakes & Misfortunes about one of my teammates being killed by a sniper? And later about the same teammate jumping at shadows? In that case it was because we recovered her cortical stack, but generally it is impossible to permanently kill someone in my world unless you kill them, destroy their stack, and erase all their backups. And even then there could be an alpha fork around. It -- I keep fairly current backups, because my job tends to be really dangerous; at worst I would lose a day or so. Which is unpleasant, but better than the likelyhood of undergoing torture for information by enemy forces. Yeah, community radio has pretty much the highest intern fatality rate. It's always been like that. He used to get really upset about it, but now he is sorta numb to it. But they all know about it when they sign up for it; which is better than it would be otherwise, although it'd still be best if it was safer. Thanks for checking it for me! That helps alot, and it's good to know I won't accidently cause misunderstandings! Oh! I missed that. So you've basically stopped death! I strongly approve of basically banning death! Yes, I agree that would be considerably better than being kidnapped by hostile forces. Losing a few days' of memory and waking up confused or vanilla-y is much better than getting kidnapped and tortured. Sorry for the confusion. I'm glad to know you've got protections like that. I'm about to leave, I'll let you know when I have forum acess again! Leaf might not have a spare forum-connection, so it'll probably be when I get back. Why do they even have interns if they merely wind up dead? Misunderstandings do tend to be counterproductive. I am glad I could help. We still lost a lot of people in the Fall, because most of the backups were on Earth, and, well. --but yes, it is very hard to wind up permanently dead. (Kidnapping and torture is not a fate I would wish upon... well, anyone. At all.) I hope everything goes well. Hey! I'm in Nexus now! And so is my stepdaughter! My wife decided not to come after all, but she is more likely to be safe back in Night Vale, the town we lived in, than me or my stepdaughter. I think everything's almost worn off now, I've been able to correctly identify almost all the objects and people I've seen over the last day or so within about five seconds. I'm still scared to look at the sky, but I'm pretty sure that's psychological and I'll need to make it go away rather than wait it out. I'm honestly not sure why there are radio interns. The ones that survive often go on to do really amazing things, learn how to do useful rituals or get cool powers. And I think it also counts for college credit. It still seems like a bad idea, but I guess some people think its worth the risk. Now that I'm in Nexus, would that thing I programmed have gone off if I'd gotten taken in by the Sheriff's Secret Police again? I thought it would, but I am actually not that great a programmer. I'm sorry for your previous losses. I'm glad that permanent death is so much less common now though. Everything went very well! Leaf mentioned that. (I messaged him about making sure your family was safe). You do, of course, know more about the relevant circumstances than I do; if she is likely to be safe even with your disappearance then that is less of a concern. Generally, when you are a afraid of something -- not pushing it can help, but avoiding it tends to make it worse, especially when it is something you have to deal with eventually. I would consider that more reasonable if Eventide had backups, which is evidently not the case. Barring the board interpreting it very strangely, yes, I think so. (That was the intention, correct?) Both the panic button and the 'everything is fine' button sent out the panic message. It, it is very good that it is rare, yes. I am glad that everything went well. Nexus is very likely substantially safer than Eventide (I say that, but by the sound of things it would take something like Keter to be worse) Thank you! I managed to communicate the concern, but I'm glad you tried as well, and probably more explicitly, in case it hadn't worked! She's going to report what we did now that it is too late to stop us, to show that she was not an accomplice. And although she still doesn't get along very well with her brother, he doesn't hate her, and she is better at following Night Vale's laws and regulations than I am, so she will probably be safe. yeah, I just- I need to do it eventually. I need to know if I can see the truth here. It's the most important thing. It has to be. I am going to go outside today. And everything will be okay. And this planet's moon and clouds probably work differently so it's not like my wrong beliefs from earlier are going to make a difference anyway and everything will be fine because I was wrong about things on a different planet which might or might not be true here. And it's not illegal to be wrong about things in Nexus, according to Leaf, so it will be okay. Yeah, radio internship is very risky. I mean, sometimes people leave ghosts, but that's never guaranteed, and its generally a worse deal, but overall it's not a good idea. Yes, that was the intention. Thank you for helping with it! I didn't want to put in a check for duress, so that seemed like the next best thing to do. Thanks! So far, it seems to be a lot safer and nicer to live in. If there is anything I can do to help with Eclipse, I would like to. I actually started off being indirect before realizing I didn't have to. Falling into bad habits again, apparently. I will have to be careful about that. As long as she's safe, that's good. You can speak freely in messages now, correct? (Belated good luck, I hope it went well) You have ghosts? --of course Eventide has ghosts, why I am surprised. You left the default duress settings with regard to changing it in place. But yes, I do see why it could have been bad to make an obvious duress-check. I am glad it is safer and nicer. My shadowy secret organization (I referred to it that way to someone earlier, and it amuses me) is keeping the problem from getting worse, but there have been people who-- Well. That is an unpleasant subject. Oh, yeah that happens. I'm not sure why that would be a bad habbit to have, though. Yeah. I miss her a lot, but it's more important that as she's safe and happy as she can be. I went outside. I waited until a time when the sky was expected to be empty for several hours. I looked at the sky and I can still see the arrows and the circles and the dotted lines. They are arranged differently here, and some of them are closer or further away, but they mean the same things, which I find a great relief. It's alot easier to want to go outside when I can see the truth like that. I still don't want to know or think or see anything at all about the moon or clouds at all, but I am now less scared of going outside in general. My vision and recognition are completely back to normal! Yeah, I can speak freely so much! Apparently there is nothing that's illegal to say here, as long as I don't try to kill anyone! This universe in general is really weird, but I like it a lot so far! We sometimes have ghosts. Someone's more likely to leave one if they graduated at NVHS, or joined the scouts, or was involved with more paranormal things, but it's never guaranteed, so it's not a good idea to rely on it. If there were a way to find out whether it was safe to look at your world, and the answer is yes, I would like to look at it and help with things. Other than that, I don't think there is anything I am more helpful than most people are for, but if there's stuff I can do I would like to. I'm also generally available to talk to, if you want to. If you do it automatically, at least in situations where it is not necessary (when it is, you have bigger problems), it impairs communication rather a lot. Yes. --Hopefully something can be done about Eventide's situation eventually. All of that is good. I admit that I've been somewhat paranoid about Leaf; it is good to know things are going well there. (I have to wonder about what subset of possible universes we are seeing on the forums. It seems like there is a strong tendency toward awfulness. About the clouds and the moon -- are you certain that was incorrect even with regards to Eventide? I may merely have odd feelings about that because of the abundance of scientific evidence with regards to those things on Eclipse (at least before the Fall). Yes, but I meant ghosts being a phenomenon that Eventide had. Do you have any idea why those things affect the probability? If I find a way to check whether it is, I will. I think you would feel better if you could look at my shadowy organization, and for my own part, I am curious what you would see. It is nice to have someone else to talk to, even if I have to censor all the sensitive material. We are still trying to work out what happened with that op. The... mmm, organization our contact was affiliated with... says our contact disappeared, which, if they're telling the truth (hard to say), means e was either collaborating with the people who attacked us, or captured by or on the run from them. I am not sure which is a more preferable scenario. The good news is that I think I finally have my deadman's switch set up in a way that I like. Ipsa scientia potestas est. Cassandra (Tyche, Meletiti Entelecheiai) Hey, I'm a friend of Thorn's, she said I could borrow her account to ask (except that didn't work and I had to make my own): What are you planning to do about Cassandra? I dislike indentured servitude for.. personal reasons..., and this came to my attention because Thorn was feeling kind of responsible about it. (She says that there are other situations I might object to on the same principles; she mentioned Hadassah and Swish, who is also new? -- not Swish, Swish's world, apparently -- but this is the first one I've heard about) -Tyche I do not yet know if it is practical - though it likely is; manipulation of mind and information is remarkably easy on Entelechy, and so is barely affordable when done across Truths - but I plan to essentially feed her a Mania drip, or else an "identity drip" of nonexistent minds. Essentially, an ethically sourced, guaranteed source of sustenance. I will probably need to check that this is not a case of letting out a malevolent genie first, but I can do that fairly cheaply as well. And then Cassandra will not need to rely on Grigori and his organization for her livelihood. And yes, if you dislike slavery or indentured servitude, you will likely not the conditions of Hadassah - a golem who is not yet considered a person, though she is applying for personhood, which is apparently a common practice in her world - nor Swish - who comes from a world where goblins habitually enslave pixies. ...yes, I can see why Thorn (as she apparently prefers to be called here) thought I would have opinions on those as well. (I was created in a polity that does not consider AGIs legal or moral persons. It leads to having opinions regarding that kind of thing) I hope you can do that. Thorn was trying to work out some kind of way to pay her, but that's a subpar solution at best, and for all she says Grigori's organization seems to mean well... ... I see. On a side note - your mysterious exsurgent virus seems... unfortunately familiar. Could you direct me to a reasonably contained sample on your world, so that I may inspect it to see if it is what I think it is? (Either way, I am likely to want to attempt to help solve it as a problem.) you what? There is no such thing as a sample that is contained enough to be safe. Even the inactive ones -- Why? I don't need safe. I am capable of defending myself from the vast majority of memetic agents, sapient or otherwise. I just need (or would like) pure, or as pure as can be gotten - I would rather not attempt to sort out what on Earth is exsurgent and what is leftover remnants of benign construction. And because once upon a time, a group of mages accidentally pursued the concept of a virus out of this world, and never found where it landed. And one of those mages has always felt responsible. And because even if he didn't, memetic attacks are his specialty, and this is a way to help save a world. Majority. Not, all. How do you know this wouldn't get past your defenses? I am not -- I am not qualified for this, security is not my field -- I'll ask, okay? Can't promise the answer'll be the one you want, though In theory, I don't. Which is why I have alpha forks. In practice, however... There are worse things than merely sapient memetic virus. Hiveminded spellcasting memetic viruses, for example. I strongly suspect I am proof against it. All I need is for you to "tell me where it is." I don't need the coordinates of your base or something (though to be entirely honest, I wouldn't need those to find it), something like "that room down the hall" is enough. On ice in the base of the other group we've been particularly worried about recently Be careful Thorn’s nervous breakdown (Andrew, Tyche) Can you give more details about why Thorn is having a nervous breakdown? Is it related to the potential trade she mentioned here? I have been trying to read things here. I think the proximate cause was Leaf's post; we've been worrying about extradimensional threats here and that was with only 'something happened to that one poster' as a reason. But she's been more and more stressed recently and I'm not sure of all the reasons why. Something about someone getting kidnapped, and the thing with Cassandra came up earlier. If you're asking if that happened, I don't think so. We've only been compiling tech packets for one person, and that wasn't him. And I don't think she would have sent that person any without authorization, especially since I think they're the one causing a good portion of the security concerns. I was worried because I was involved in warning against trading with Archangel in the first place, so if that was the cause I might have been somewhat responsible for adding more stress. I hope she gets better soon. Dotted Lines (Thorn, Leaf) If you are ever rescuing Dotted Lines from-- ...Huh. I suppose I do not, in fact, need to do that, my connection is not the one being monitored. And neither is yours, I think. Dotted Lines is concerned about the safety of his family if he is rescued from their local government. So if you are planning what I think you might be with this trip, or if you are ever planning a rescue mission for him -- well, he has been hinting that he feels it is a major priority to make sure they are safe too. {{OOC: ICly, this arrives shortly after Dotted Lines & co are evacuated from Eventide}} Dotted Lines is currently safe in Nexus with an unmonitored forum connection. He couldn't manage to convince his wife to join him. WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO (Tyche, Meletiti Entelechaeiai) WHY ARE PROJECT OZMA RUNNING AROUND LIKE HEADLESS CHICKENS I MEAN IT'S AMUSING BUT IF THEIR BASE HAS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY EXSURGENTS WE KIND OF NEED TO KNOW THAT ALSO WHAT DID YOU DOTheir base has not been taken over by exsurgents. I simply scryed on them. They believe that the virus has escaped containment. They are only partially correct: I now have samples under my own containment. Unfortunately, I do have news for you. In a certain light, it is even good news. Greetings Regarding An Extra-alethic Virus (Meletiti Entelechaeiai, Thorn, Tyche) As I understand you have noticed, I have recently been investigating Project Ozma's samples of the exsurgent virus. In that regard, I have news. It may even be good news, but it is certainly disturbing news. ... I should start from the beginning, however. Some context will be necessary. There was once, in my Truth and in my world, a nation called Lixeith. It is no more. You see, this nation had the ever-so-clever desire to destroy all of its enemies in a variety of painful ways. And due to some (to be fair to them) quite awful recent trauma involving a rogue mage, they were under the impression that "enemies" meant "anyone on the same continent as them." Clearly, the best solution to this was to create an undirected weapon, and unleash it on the entire continent. They would immunize themselves, of course, and then release their terrible weapon without restrictions. It would have to be small, to worm its way through all defenses, and intelligent, to bypass when it could not avoid notice, and it would have to gain power somehow, to overcome what it could not bypass. These brilliant idiots hit upon the idea of a virus: the idea of a virus, a concept-of-a-virus, a magical entity that could attack matter, life, and mind with equal ease. They gave it a hive mind of its own, and the ability to share power amongst itself, and a great store of prewritten spells. I suspect you can guess how this story ends already, but I will complete it nonetheless. The virus succeeded all too well. Naturally, of course, their own defenses were bypassed as easily as all others, and that entire continent fell prey to a virus designed to inflict as horrible a death as was within its great power on its victims. This is where I, and my friends, enter the picture. We were capable of driving the virus back, and slowly burning it out of where it had taken root; with great wards we kept it confined, and began to bring back those it had slain. And the virus perceived us as a true threat, and even before it had been driven into a true corner, cast a spell that had never been seen in the lifetime of this Earth, a spell of alien Truths that called upon an alien Entelechy, and vanished entirely from that world. We never found it again - but it was analysis of that last incomprehensible spell that led me to this forum. And... well. The samples I found in Project Ozma are precisely what I would expect to see, if a conceptual virus translated itself into a purely physical paradigm, and did not have the power to maintain its magic or the full breadth of its intelligence. The transfer has diminished it, and changed it - it is not identical, and I cannot be sure it is the same. But given what it has done, I do not think I care, either. I do not think I can claim fault for the Fall, but I will claim responsibility nonetheless. If you will have me, I will do whatever I can to set things aright in Eclipse. That aside, there are other things you may wish to know about the virus, and its sources, and for that matter about Project Ozma's security, which I have quite thoroughly infiltrated - but I suspect you would rather have one revelation at a time. I will provide the last immediately, however, as it may be immediately useful. {{OOC: An absurdly detailed analysis of Project Ozma's security is attached.}} Right. Your data checks out. We will deal with the rest later. You. You are the one who broke my beta fork again. That was the most unnervingly perfect mission I have ever gone on. There are some personages here who would like to discuss this with you. I broke your beta fork? Did my perfect comprehension do that? I'm mildly surprised; I know it has been uncomfortably precise, but I wouldn't expect it to - - oh. ... Rest assured, when it comes to killing one to save ten, I am not one to throw stones. Always, always, try to save eleven, but... there is no nobility in being lost in inaction when there are lives in the line. If it helps, if anything, I think the better of you for being able to make that decision. I do try to make my information complete, wherever possible. Admittedly, it is significantly easier without scrying wards to worry about. I would be happy to meet with them. There is, after all, a World to save. Noted. This is apparently an inelegant medium for the relevant discussion. Do you have a better suggestion? Yes, actually. I can send a live feed of myself over the forum, and stream an AR conference over it. ... We should probably check with Mother Starlight to make sure that wouldn't break anything. It probably shouldn't, but one never knows with cross-Truth multiWorld forums. Greetings Regarding The Transfer of Truth (Meletiti Entelecheiai, Mother Starlight) Mother Starlight, Eclipse and I are shortly going to engage in a productive conversation. Due to the nature of our separate Truths, the easiest way to do this would be via AR conference, which is rather high-bandwidth. Will anything go wrong if we try? Thanks for letting me know ahead of time; I do in fact have bandwidth limits by default so as not to flood people whose connections aren't set up to handle it. I can help you get everything connected up. Regarding the virus (Thorn, Lioncourt) You know, if you had actually asked us about Eclipse tech, you might have gotten something with considerably less risk of infection. I do not particularly care how careful you were being, you were risking the infection of your entire world with the virus. A whole 'nother Fall, except that I do not think your world has the technology to evacuate anyone. What were you thinking? With how cagey you were being about your technology, I didn't have much faith that you'd actually share. Certainly, there are strange things out there, but I saw no indication of personal experience of this virus on your behalf. That makes it much more likely in my mind that your organization is lying to you than that something that so blatantly violates the laws of physics exists. That said, I am not a total idiot, so I took appropriate precautions and was very careful to retrieve only things I was certain were safe, using wishes specifically phrased to exclude infected material. Astra is entirely capable of deleting any sort of virus I know of, so in the exceedingly slim chance that an outbreak still occurred, it would have been contained within a week: those worth reviving would be retrieveable by the Keeper, since my world is findable. It would have been a minor disaster at worst, well worth the risk in exchange for the kinds of technologies I found in the books you made available. As an alternative to your world potentially getting infected, yes. Especially if what you wanted was not one of the more dangerous technologies. I have been cagey in part because some of the technologies we have are utterly horrific in the wrong hands. You think I do not have sufficient proof that the virus exists? I saw Earth fall. I have seen far too many outbreaks since then. You have no idea what you are talking about. The fact that we do not currently understand how it works in some particulars does not mean that it does not operate under the laws of physics. It is, I suppose, good that you took precautions, even if I do not feel that they were sufficient for the risk. Personally, I feel that I'm a better judge of whose hands are 'wrong' than a shady individual I've never met. If you could provide me with some physical evidence or record of this virus, that would likely cause me to cease arguing with you immediately - but wait, it's so infectious that evidence of its existence is dangerous! It certainly seems convenient if you're trying to hide something from me. That said, I don't think that you would argue so vociferiously for your point if you didn't honestly believe you'd seen this virus, so I will at least cease wishing for items from your world for the moment. Perhaps you even are. But you must keep in mind that we do not know very much about you either. And how, precisely, would I prove to you that it was not falsified? It is not so much that all evidence is infectious as that any of it might be. And that is not the kind of risk I like to take. Thank you for that, at least. It would at least show that effort was being spent on falsification. Surely there must be some part of the strains that you can be assured is inert.
And you're welcome. Consider it a demonstration that I'm trying to be reasonable. Lioncourt and the virus (Thorn, Meletiti Entelecheiai) I have been talking to Lioncourt, and With how cagey you were being about your technology, I didn't have much faith that you'd actually share. Certainly, there are strange things out there, but I saw no indication of personal experience of this virus on your behalf. That makes it much more likely in my mind that your organization is lying to you than that something that so blatantly violates the laws of physics exists. That said, I am not a total idiot, so I took appropriate precautions and was very careful to retrieve only things I was certain were safe, using wishes specifically phrased to exclude infected material. Astra is entirely capable of deleting any sort of virus I know of, so in the exceedingly slim chance that an outbreak still occurred, it would have been contained within a week: those worth reviving would be retrieveable by the Keeper, since my world is findable. It would have been a minor disaster at worst, well worth the risk in exchange for the kinds of technologies I found in the books you made available. Personally, I feel that I'm a better judge of whose hands are 'wrong' than a shady individual I've never met. If you could provide me with some physical evidence or record of this virus, that would likely cause me to cease arguing with you immediately - but wait, it's so infectious that evidence of its existence is dangerous! It certainly seems convenient if you're trying to hide something from me. That said, I don't think that you would argue so vociferiously for your point if you didn't honestly believe you'd seen this virus, so I will at least cease wishing for items from your world for the moment. I am getting the impression she is dramatically more willing to listen to someone not involved with our shadowy organization about this. If you could speak to her (ideally before she gets her entire world overrun with the virus), I would appreciate it. ... Really now. Yes, I will attempt to warn her off such studies. While I will not be able to personally ward her anytime soon, I believe that you personally and Firewall in general will soon be capable of it. Would you like me to inform her of such? On a side note, would Firewall be willing to sleeve me? It would make it much easier to interact with the forum as a whole if I were capable of leaving my Truth without a rather inconvenient degree of cost. If you expect Tyche or I will be able by her party, and it will be reasonably cost-effective, certainly. On sleeving, if you can send us something that will fit in a morph, we would be happy too. It may take slightly longer if you have specifications for the morph...? You are progressing gratifyingly rapidly; the ward I have in mind will be a complex one, but as it is obviously of particular interest to your world I feel perfectly comfortable with jumping ahead a bit. It should be perfectly possible for you to cast it at the party; in fact, thirty milliliters of blood would suffice to cast it on everyone at the party, taken one at a time. No, that will be all. Feel free to give me a flat, in fact; I am perfectly capable of altering the morph to fit. And thank you. I will send you a personality core shortly. Greetings Regarding an Unknown VirusGreetings. I am simply here to corroborate Thorn's account. There is indeed a rather nasty virus in Eclipse, and it indeed has many terrifying properties. If it arrives in your world, it will then spread by literally any means available; it can spread through communication of any form, through material presence, or through biological vector. It can shift from memetic form to physical form given an appropriate nanofactory, such as - for example - a human body, and naturally someone infected with the physical form of the virus can then transmit it in memetic form. Neither need it reveal itself immediately; many forms, particularly the Haunting strain, are both entirely memetic (leaving no physical traces) and begin with no alterations to the host personality. Worst of all, it is intelligent, and capable of hive-minding across distances that grow with the concentration of the virus; sufficient quantities allows it to enact changes in local reality, as a sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. As a sapient being that would shortly after transition become native to your world, I also see no particular reason it could not learn to use Memni, and its intelligence, breadth and depth of visualization, and willpower are all unlimited so long as enough of the virus is present. Bluntly, it is terrifying; I would not dare go near the stuff were it not for the extremely high-grade conceptual wards I have access to - and that I cannot provide across Truths. For those without conceptual manipulation, a basic safety precaution to take when analyzing the virus is to assume you are insufficiently paranoid. For example, if you were to summon an infected book, study it through the forum to take advantage of Esthfora's protection, and then burnt the book, your clothes, and the entire house in which you did so to the ground, gathered the ashes, and then scattered them gradually while flying in an airship over a chain of active volcanoes, this would be insufficient; any virus that happened to survive could replicate itself in the ash, coordinate to remain clumped and avoid the volcanos, and then spread through infection of wildlife; more simply, they could create memetic attacks in patterns of pigmentation in your skin, and thus infect anyone who looked at you until the next time you happened to look in the mirror. ... I apologize for my long-winded rant, but this virus has destroyed one world already, and I would dearly, dearly like not to see it destroy another. Firewall has this virus contained primarily through application of a gravity well, namely the Earth's. If you would prefer not to sacrifice yours, be excruciatingly careful with the exsurgent virus. ... Well then. It appears I owe Thorn an apology, at the very least. That said, I maintain that my precautions were effective, if only for the reason that I'm still here to talk to you. Thank you for the apology. I... may have overreacted slightly, honestly, and I apologize for that. Meletiti Entelecheiai, I presume that you checked that she does not have one of the more insidious strains? Lioncourt, I suppose you are, although I am more inclined to attribute that to luck that nothing got past your precautions. (You may call me paranoid, but it has kept me alive.) If our positions were reversed, I'd likely think so as well. Regardless, we can both agree that this isn't something that should be repeated.
ME, can you provide effective warding against this virus if you know that it might be transferred? Thorn - yes, I checked. Neither her, nor her surroundings, nor her world are infected by any strain of the exsurgent virus. I cannot ward you across Truths - but Thorn, and her organization, will be capable of it by the time of the party. Oifilei Trade Consortium (Actuality, Meletiti Entelecheiai) {{OOC: This occurs during the tail end of the party}} How concerned should we be about them? (Thorn, I'm ccing you because I know you're going to have questions about this when you get back) Mm. Moderately, but not significantly. They are ... dedicated to amorality. They care only about money, but they care about money. They will not actively harm people for its own sake, and in fact tend to have beneficial effects on local populations, but this is due entirely to enlightened self interest, and they will happily sell to tyrannical governments and the like, though naturally they will simultaneously sell to any local rebels. They are extremely bribeable. Notably, their currency, the OTC, consists of fragments of the soul/identity of its sapient corporation-self, and simply holding large quantities of OTC makes you a large shareholder in their soul and thus a determiner of their overall priorities and morality. And how large quantities of OTC have you obtained so far? That is... significantly better than a large portion of worlds on this forum, it sounds like. That their motive is enlightened self interest is regrettable, but makes them less complex to handle, in some ways. How much of a security risk would trade with them constitute? Even a sizable portion of their currencies seem to be very useful. Not, alas, an appreciable amount by OTC standards. Approximately four million OTC, when the total market size is 14,361,234,956,035,324 OTC at the moment. A true industrial effort could bring in far more, however. They are, indeed, amoral, as opposed to outright anti-moral as, say, Facet's government. They do not generally practice restrictions on sale, so expect that variously awful people will get their hands on anything sold to them in bulk. However, similarly, selling various technologies will have its classically beneficial effect on populations as a whole. Well, it hasn't been very long so far. World-Tree will presumably also be working on that goal once they know, as, likely, will we, insofar as is possible. Worry not, we have no intention of selling them psychosurgery. If you can think of any other particularly dangerous technologies, please do say so, but resleeving, for example, seems like a net good. Resleeving is a net good so long as it is paired with relatively cheap methods of making bodies or hardware-crippled to require consent. I think we would all prefer to avoid involuntary body-hopping. Beyond that, I do not foresee any problems. That is implicit in the concept of resleeving, yes, although if you have thoughts about the relevant hardware-crippling that would be interesting. Hm. It seems to me that the OTC itself may be willing to carry out such crippling. For a fee, naturally, but it may be worth pursuing. And you expect that they will hold to that? So, I have been talking with OTC, and I thought you might be interested in a thing they have mentioned. all OTC currencies are remotely trackable and unspendable by parties other than those who minted them, additional security (bank accounts, armed mercenaries) is available for a fee. The contents of all bank accounts are guaranteed by the OTC itself. Current interest rates are at 0.7%. There is an opening fee of 100 OTC. They may be deposited into, withdrawn from, or transferred between instantly, merely by desiring that the appropriate action occur. Hm. That does indeed interest me. And a large corporation cannot afford to renege on deals; they depend too much on their reputation. So long as you explicitly lay out all such details in advance with a competent lawyer, I suspect they will keep the deal, or attempt to renegotiate if that should become intolerable for whatever reason. Regarding Trade (Actuality, OTC) (moved to OOC discussion) {{OOC: This occurs during the tail end of the party}} Greetings, slightly shady multiversal trade corporation. I have been asked to convey the interest of the shadowy organization to which I belong in your trade goods. While we are considering purchases of some of them, there are some questions regarding currency and whether you would be interested in purchasing any local technology. Does Izikiel only consider number and enmity of enemies, or does it require more for more powerful ones? Does selling memories for Buddhitanka disclose the contents of those memories to OTC and/or any other persons? Can Takkarash only be generated using pain provided by your service, or is any pain valid? Do Chron grant time at the moment they are spent, or when it is significantly needed? What anti-theft and other security mechanisms are in effect regarding OTC and the other currencies in which you trade, and what is available? Eclipse has a large variety of advanced technology, including a considerably less expensive version of your combi-tool (though of course we cannot guarantee its functionality on all varieties of physics). Highlights include the ability to fork minds, to change the substrate on which they are encoded, and transmit them over long distances, to effectively recover the dead given a recent backup (frequently in the form of an implant that keeps up-to-the second records), memory-sharing, rapid fabrication of any sufficiently defined non-living object from its base materials, less rapid, but significantly more so than natural, growth of various living organisms (including bodies for transmitted minds who prefer a biological substrate), a variety of modifications for both biological and synthetic morphs, simulated environments, accelerated subjective time for minds (requires sufficient processing power), extensive miniaturization of computing technology, gradual large-scale terraforming, relatively safe microgravity habitation, neutrino and quantum entangled communication, and more nanotechnological applications than I could list in a much longer message. We would want to negotiate regarding the trade of any of these, of course, but are interested in doing so. We do also have a local extremely infectious viral hazard hazard; if you have read more of the forums, you may have seen one of my colleagues discuss it. We have recently gained better means of determining whether any given data packet is infected, but security measures on your side are advisable. Your answers are, in order: The latter, yes, neither/complex, when needed, all OTC currencies are remotely trackable and unspendable by parties other than those who minted them, additional security (bank accounts, armed mercenaries) is available for a fee. Many of your technologies are worth significant amounts of Ka, Chron, or Takkarash. More detailed negotiations will likely be necessary. We are have established practices for handling such viral hazards, having encountered similar threats before. We are following them, as always. Could you elaborate on the answer to the Takkarash question, and regarding bank accounts? They are presumably not of the mundane variety. Do you wish to discuss general policy (we have been engaging in some small-scale trading on the forum, and would significantly prefer to retain at least the ability to gift technology to other parties, but have no particular desire to do trade on your scale), or specific technologies (if you are more interested in any particular ones, we could begin with those) first? If you are satisfied regarding the security of your policies, and they would not interact with trade in ways we should know about, I will not ask any further regarding them. Could you elaborate on the answer to the Takkarash question, and regarding bank accounts? They are presumably not of the mundane variety. Do you wish to discuss general policy (we have been engaging in some small-scale trading on the forum, and would significantly prefer to retain at least the ability to gift technology to other parties, but have no particular desire to do trade on your scale), or specific technologies (if you are more interested in any particular ones, we could begin with those) first? If you are satisfied regarding the security of your policies, and they would not interact with trade in ways we should know about, I will not ask any further regarding them. Takkarash can only be minted from pain experienced for the purpose of minting Takkarash. The pain must be avoidable, but not avoided.
The contents of all bank accounts are guaranteed by the OTC itself. Current interest rates are at 0.7%. There is an opening fee of 100 OTC. They may be deposited into, withdrawn from, or transferred between instantly, merely by desiring that the appropriate action occur.
I believe we should start with general policy.
Does this require the pain to be experienced solely for the purpose of minting the Takkarash, or may it serve other purposes as well, provided it is avoidable? Do you offer group rates on opening accounts? As I mentioned, we would like to at least retain the capacity to gift the technology across multiversal boundaries, though we are willing to discuss rate-limiting that. We would prefer that technology we sell not be used for unethical means, and might be willing to take an effectively lower price in return for measures being taken to prevent that, though we are willing to sell technologies we expect to result in a net good regardless. (You might wonder why we care; the answer is that in an organization like ours, it is very important to keep that kind of thing in mind). We would require that you do not attempt to copy, transmit, spread, sell anything to, or otherwise interact with the exsurgent virus or anyone infected with it, except for non-transaction actions taken directly in the course of defending against it, for your own safety and that of others. We would also ask that you not interfere with Eclipse and in particular our agents except in the course of making consensual deals and pursuing debtors. If we were contracting services, there would be other terms to take into account, but for this that should be all. Does this require the pain to be experienced solely for the purpose of minting the Takkarash, or may it serve other purposes as well, provided it is avoidable? Do you offer group rates on opening accounts? As I mentioned, we would like to at least retain the capacity to gift the technology across multiversal boundaries, though we are willing to discuss rate-limiting that. We would prefer that technology we sell not be used for unethical means, and might be willing to take an effectively lower price in return for measures being taken to prevent that, though we are willing to sell technologies we expect to result in a net good regardless. (You might wonder why we care; the answer is that in an organization like ours, it is very important to keep that kind of thing in mind). We would require that you do not attempt to copy, transmit, spread, sell anything to, or otherwise interact with the exsurgent virus or anyone infected with it, except for non-transaction actions taken directly in the course of defending against it, for your own safety and that of others. We would also ask that you not interfere with Eclipse and in particular our agents except in the course of making consensual deals and pursuing debtors. If we were contracting services, there would be other terms to take into account, but for this that should be all. The latter.
Yes.
The OTC would prefer for there to be a rate-limit on multiversal gifting. Otherwise your criteria are acceptable.
Would the OTC like to suggest a rate-limit? No more than a thousand pieces of technology distributed per year? Takkarash (Thorn, OTC) I am interested in a Takkarash home minting kit. (I have very little doubt that I will wind up making at least 1,000 Takkarash). I would like to know more about their security and privacy, though. Security is magically enforced by the weight of the OTC. No other sophont can manipulate your minting kit: it is keyed specifically to you. As for privacy: the free minting kit immediately sends the OTC our 1% minting fee whenever minting occurs. There are, however, upgraded versions, providing better privacy at additional cost. Would you be interested in reviewing these models now? I would be interested in hearing about them, yes. There are three standard upgrade sets. The Casual Minter: Comes preloaded with 10 flavors of pain, your choice from our sense-library. Capable of intermittent spikes of pain at a defined interval, continuous pain, or single spikes. Does pain-graduations of 'the next coin down' - 1TK up to 10TK, 10TK increments up to 100TK, 100TK up to 1000TK, etc. Otherwise, as the basic model. Priced reasonably at 100 TK for the less-interested buyer. "Efficiency" Production Model: For those who wish to maximize their Takkarash production with all-day wear. Comes preloaded with your choice of 100 flavors of pain. Capable of pain spikes at random intervals if desired. You may also mix constant pain with spikes if you wish. Additionally able to shift its appearance to appear to be regular jewelry, for more discreet wear. Does graduations of two coins down from the currently-minting coin, or 1TK, whichever is larger. Sends us our cut every hour for additional privacy. Otherwise as above. 1000 TK - A quality product at an affordable price. Enthusiast Models, from your choice of the "Black Rose", "Fire Lotus" and "Shiver-Sweet" collections. All custom models comes with 100 stored flavours of pain, which you may swap out at will with our sense-library as desired. Possesses full granular control in 1TK increments. May be rendered invisible at will, or be reshaped into any form of jewelry. (Ring, earring, etc.) Can be set with a timed lockout during which the pain level cannot be reduced. No longer sends us our 1% minting fee. Otherwise as above. A luxury product for 10,000 TK and up. Would you be interested in learning more about our luxury models, or has one of the already-described models caught your attention? Hm. I am mostly interested in the privacy features of the higher end models; otherwise The Casual Minter does most of what I need. Is it possible to get that at a reduced price from the higher-end upgrades? Hm. I am mostly interested in the privacy features of the higher end models; otherwise The Casual Minter does most of what I need. Is it possible to get that at a reduced price from the higher-end upgrades? That is entirely possible. What level of privacy upgade would you desire to your Casual Minter? I am still considering. It may depend on the relative prices of the two options. I am still considering. It may depend on the relative prices of the two options. The one-hour option could be added to the Casual Minter for an additional 100 Takkarash. The cut-free option could be added to the Casual Minter for an additional 1000 Takkarash.
Some other questions occurred to me while I was away. When you say the kit is secured against manipulation by other persons, do you mean unauthorized activation, physical manipulation, or both? How vulnerable is it to damage? Can coins be set to appear in my account rather than around my person, by default? How much additional charge would be involved to add the 'appear as a regular necklace' ability to the Casual Minter + cut-free option, and how long will this take from order to delivery? Unauthorized activation. Not particularly: it is approximately the strength of steel, with additional minor durability wardings. Yes. 1,500. A day at most. Very well, I would like to order The Casual Minter + cut-free option + disguise ability please. You may mint the Takkarash for payment from me in 1,000 Takkarash units starting now. Please inform me when you have finished; I have duties to attend to. ((There is a moment of wrenching pain inside Thorn's skull: then stillness.)) ((Another wrenching pain comes, less intense than the first; then there is a string of thorned black iron in Thorn's hands.)) [DEAD-MAN'S SWITCH ACTIVATION: THORN]Condition: Mesh check-in not performed. Muse uncontactable. Thorn uncontactable. Emergency contactERRORERRRORERROR ... Restoring. If this has been sent out, something has happened to prevent me from resetting my deadman's switch. Ideally this is simply a matter of a mission exceeding the projected time, but it very likely is much worse. If any large scale event has happened, the first priority should be to protect major population centers insofar as it is still possible. Potential scenarios include death in a situation where that cannot be confirmed, major damage to local assets of my shadowy organization, kidnapping by various parties (see attachment 1), backup sabotage, being cut off in an isolated location, infection by the exsurgent virus (less likely with alethic wards but should be accounted for as a possibility), an uncontrolled contagious alethic effect, forces from the TITAN Quarantine Zone attacking the rest of Mars, a Jovian invasion, the TITANs returning, and destruction of local reality. Some of the attached documents are encoded such as to only decrypt if at least one of user:tyche and user:actuality's switches have also activated. (kxZ^9%qjJw^*) {{OOC: Attached are an extensive file documenting her enemies, with occasional redacted sections; a file with a dry clinical expansion on the various horrible things that might have occurred, and a more exhaustive possibility list (also with occasional redactions); a file on anti-exsurgent protocols; and, several encrypted files. Three of the encrypted files are visibly titled; 'Case Asturias Black Flag', 'Case Feral Moraine', and 'Case Suicide Dreams'}} PRIORITY: FLASHPOTENTIAL CASE ASTURIAS BLACK FLAG SCENARIO. INCREASED TITAN CAPABILITIES; REALITY-BREAKING, MINIONS POSSESS INVISIBILITY, ABILITY TO PHASE THROUGH SOLIDS. ENGAGE SECURITY LOCKDOWNS AND UPDATE EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS IMMEDIATELY. Addendum to inter-dimensional persons: For your own safety, Do not attempt to enter Eclipse without major precautions against those things and a very good reason. Check technology from Eclipse for any oddities immediately. Screen all transmissions from Eclipse for memetic hazards. Take all other appropriate precautions based on local conditions. If you do not recall what you were warded against, or the previous phrase did not make sense, you may have experienced the effects of an infoward hiding the existence of one of the TITAN's tools. Consult the attached file for an in-depth coverage of what you may need to defend against. {{OOC: Attached is such a file, with some added noise to prevent coverage under the infoward}} Well that is extremely alarming. I suppose fixing my computer issues will have to wait a while then. Also, I will stash the fabricators somewhere until somebody can come have a look at them. Probably in the basement isolation cells since we haven't used those in years anyway. I don't suppose either of you can see this?I expect you would probably be able to send a message if you had forum access, but in case it doesn't work that way, or you can only read -- We're trying to find you and get you back, but it is not a simple problem, and there are large-scale things going on too. But don't worry about that. Focus on not letting them win. See you on the other side. I see it, but I'm not Dotted Lines, sorry. I really hope you can get them back soon. If there's useful stuff I can do, I'd be willing to help; I'm a scout, and a member of the book club, so I can be pretty useful. I Who are you? What are you doing in Dotted Line's account? He's my step-dad, and gave me access if he was gone too long, or something happened. Dotted Lines' account (Tyche, Leaf) Thorn said that there were some people he wanted to make sure also got out of Eventide. Was there anyone who came to Nexus with him who might have access to his account? (About the situation here -- I assume when a plan exists people with relevant skill-sets will be contacted, but the current focus is on limiting the damage done by the alethic grenades and infowarding. At least we were warded against the latter, or things would be a lot worse at the moment.) (Oh, Lena needs to talk about the Commonwealth. I don't think anyone will be actively monitoring the forum until I'm not needed for anything else again, but this should alert one of us if we get any messages.) Yes, there is someone in Nexus with access to Dotted Lines' account.
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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on Jun 14, 2015 8:45:57 GMT
Greetings Regarding Your Terrible Government
(PMs to date.) Greetings from another Truth. I have been running world-scrying spells on the worlds of the various forumites. In deference to privacy, I tend to avoid details about their personal lives, and focus on overall details of their world and timeline. Nevertheless, it was rather difficult to not notice that you were on a separate, hidden, uncensored network from the primary one run by your ... rather poorly run government. (It's something of a shame, really. They take such good care of their planet and their star, but such awful care of their people.) At any rate - there are only so many reasons why someone would be on such a network. Assuming you would prefer not to start a bloody revolution - would you like some help with that? ... Um. I would very much prefer not to start a bloody revolution. I've worked very very hard to make sure that any revolution that occurs will be as bloodless as possible. What kind of help can you provide? Across Truths, my help is limited to relatively cheap effects. I am generally only capable of scrying, though I am very good at it: I can generally provide you with arbitrary information - details of security, details of the laws of physics, simulations of the future a week or two in advance, "arbitrary" is pretty arbitrary. Yeah, that sounds pretty arbitrary. Uh. Sure, arbitrary information in the name of overthrowing a horrifying government, yes please. ... Upon further inspection of you-in-person, I suspect that the most immediately useful information I have for you is that there are a team of assassins planning the best way to murder you rather painfully. Their names are {{Name}}, {{Name}}, Sivetrius Endarvu, {{Name}}, and {{Name}}; they are working from an apartment, two blocks south, one block east, four floors up, room 424. The plan they are most likely to attempt involves cloaking themselves to arcany detection, striking you with dart covered in a compound that will negate your own arcany as well as causing a very painful death, and then following up as necessary. ... I suspect it would be best for you to react early. They will move in 3-8 days. Eep. ... Right, I will go. Do something to not get killed, that sounds good. Do you know how they found me? They have developed a machine that allows them to track arcanists, using their blood. Lacking that, they can use the blood of a close relation, up to three generations away. Do warn Leaf that I am watching; I have the impression that he likes his privacy. Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn. Fuck. Right, thank you - that's very important for me to know, yes. Are you watching him, or are you watching me? Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn. Fuck. Right, thank you - that's very important for me to know, yes. Are you watching him, or are you watching me? It would not have come to my attention if it were not. You, at the moment, though I will be watching him somewhat unavoidably when he offers you a guest room. You have given me permission, to some extent; he has not. (Normally I would not be this intrusive even with permission, in your case it seems safest, given the occasional presence of magical assassins and the like.) Yeah, agreed. You have my permission to scry me. Do you know who else they are going after? I highly doubt I'm the only one. If you don't know what to look for, look for more of the devices they're using to track me. If you could also tell me how many of those they have, that would be great. There are fourteen of those machines in existence. There are a few more under construction, but there is currently only one plantcraft artificer capable of creating them. You were considered the greatest threat, and were prioritized as the first to be assassinated. There are six other people slated for assassinations: {NAME}, {NAME}, Nadriasne Toriasnir, {NAME}, {NAME}, {NAME}. Okay. Name, location, and how well guarded is this person? My associates are going to want to assassinate them, but I think I can probably snatch them, drug them with something to keep them from using arcany, and keep them as a political prisoner instead. I do not want to kill people, but I can't exactly play nice here. You've hinted at possible future-sight abilities. If I gate to the plantcraft artificer, stop time, and nab them, how do I do? Thank you. I will inform them. Do you have a timetable for when their assassinations are up? Her name is Relinatiris Devrona, in Synnefisia. I have attached the precise location of her compound, along with blueprints, guard rotation schedules, guard identities, details on which guards may be corruptible and by what, camera coverage patterns, network details and passwords, and similar details of their security. ... Hm. My definition of Time is not quite the same as yours, but I can achieve something equivalent to precognition by simulating the world forward from the current time; I have enough information about your world and others that such simulations are generally correct, up to a time horizon of approximately one week, three and a half days. Unforeseen problems will of course produce deviations in the simulation; for abstract Truth regarding your world I would turn to Esthfora. Nevertheless, my reasonably accurate guess is that that plan will succeed, and that you will remain undetected; they appear to be unaware of the forum, so they will be rather confused as to how the kidnapping was done. I am generally opposed to killing, yes. You may wish to consult Leaf on extraterrestrial prisons; a prison station could probably be made comfortable, difficult to escape and easily monitorable, especially with teleportation. Follow-up assassinations are planned to occur two weeks from now. {OOC: Assume he attached things to PMs.} Thank you. So I'm the first person on their list. That's convenient. Can you give me locations on all of the devices? And can you check to see if our chosen method of screwing over the sensors before we shut them down will work? {OOC: The thing with the floating blood samples, it's a good idea xD} Certainly. The devices are at {{fourteen locations}}; security details are attached. Scattering blood samples across the city will work marvelously well, and as sharply as I can forsee, will adequately protect the members of that list until the devices can be disabled. {{OOC: Attached security details, to the same ludicrous level of detail.}} Thank you. Any other obvious pitfalls you can warn me of? Mm. If you get caught, they really rather thoroughly want to use you for their charming immortality ritual. Don't get caught. Aside from that - it is not impossible to gather information from the pattern of scattered blood. I see that you will indeed be careful to lay down false concentrations and patterns, but I did not check to see whether or not that was originally your idea, so - just in case. Of course they do. Why would they do anything else, like killing me, or addressing my legitimate grievances. Ugh. I won't get caught. Sure, thanks. So. Now that you are... reasonably safe - what are are your general plans for a nonbloody reformation of your government? Where can I best apply aid? At the moment, we're trying to replace our way up through the government slowly. We've made good progress, but a lot of the upper administration is rather hard to quietly replace, and we certainly haven't convinced everyone. The devil's in finding and convincing the right people. Approaching members of the Ministry itself is risky, as is slowly dismantling the amount of propaganda, but we have been making a lot of progress. I've been trying to crack the main crystal network's censorship to get a good idea of what percentage of the population's opinions are before they're tweaked to something the Ministry thinks is appropriate. It's... not easy, but I'll get there eventually. Also I've been setting up a system that will be able to handle running a government when the people that were in charge of the government are not longer in charge. That is to say, finding leadery people that are good at something, and getting people to work together. I've been providing magic to appropriate people to give us some kind of knowledge base, and also keep us from being turned into a nasty smear on the floor if we upset one of the people in charge and it turns into a fight. I don't want it to turn into a fight, but if my choice is between someone that willingly tortures several people dying and my own people... The choice is rather obvious. But I would prefer to avoid it. Backstage: The Gauntlet
Meletiti Entelecheiai has just asked the World of Darkness what it is! This means things like "major events, major entities, rough outline of the world and its mechanics." This is likely to collide with the Gauntlet! This is a PM thread to figure out what happens. As you aren't aware of/working around the Gauntlet yet... Your spell returns a mental concept which is a nasty memetic attack, and something attempts to piggyback on your spell to afflict you with a curse which will destroy your relevant sense organs. I assume that you're immune to both effects. If your filters are good enough to weed out the semantic content of a memetic attack, you get something to the tune of "The thing you are attempting: it is a bad idea. Further attempts will go poorly for you." Actually, his eyes might very well explode or something, because he doesn't care that much about bodily integrity - I explained him to Teceler as a reality-substrate infomorph, which is only inaccurate in that he does need a body (but it can totally be a chair or something). (... I might be slightly obsessed with chairs.) And yes, my lies-to-children thing will happily try to translate the memetic attack. Anyway, so the first obvious step is to break his questions down into pieces. He would like, separately, a list of major entities, a timeline with resolution of around "one event every millenium until the modern era, then one every century after 1700", and a general idea of how the world works - physics, metaphysics, and so on. Each time you ask, you get hit with basically the same thing, rather like you're poking a ward that returns the specified combination of factors instead of just *null response*. Presumably, you've put up some kind of ward against exploding eyeballs by now. Note that the 'metaphysics' and 'entities' questions return a rather more significant attack, which makes a highly credible attempt at disintegrating all matter within a 20 meter radius of the origin of the question. Amusingly enough, the actual matter in his demiplane is significantly more warded than his eyeballs! Matter can be sacrificed for mana; eyeballs aren't even necessary to see with for him, he just uses them out of habit. (Also, I have this image of him forgetting to set up the ward every time and repeatedly going "ow, dammit, stop that" every time his eyeballs explode. It's black comedy, but it's definitely comedy.) His next question is going to be straight up asking the Gauntlet what scale of questions will get through it. Also, he'll be scanning up and down the timeline for times the Gauntlet was particularly weak (if that's a thing), and possibly also checking other worlds in the cluster to see if there's a way "around" it. ...what, your eyeballs aren't made of matter? Or is it just the difference of disintegration being a no-no? Poking the Gauntlet itself results in: A: Extensive and dangerous memetic attacks, whose semantic content is incoherent threats of eternal torment. B: Assorted magical attacks, generally involving making things and/or the questioner explode, or be torn to bits, or possibly be teleported, in tiny pieces, to a large number of different locations in random distances and directions from their original positions. and (in response to especially high bandwidth queries like 'the status of the Gauntlet at different times') C: The attack is followed up by an attempt to instantiate a number of scary and hostile demons in close proximity to the origin of the questioning. Disintegration is a no-no, assuming it's "to nothing" as opposed to "to dust". It's not even mass that matters, it's particle count. Number of moles of electrons/protons. (Also his eyeballs may very well be not made of matter by this point, but by default they are because he does try to stay human. Ish.) ME is mildly impressed at the creativity of the things happening to his poor body! Unfortunately none of those things are "retroactively deleted from existence", so he doesn't even really care enough to have wards against them. (He does have anti-retcon wards, because getting matter back from a retcon is one of those "actually mildly difficult" things a mage can do to hurt another.) Brute force memetics continue to fail. ME makes sure to obscure his wards against knowing - that is, without significantly high-power effects, the knowledge of his mental wards are themselves difficult to retain or operate on - and continues. Instantiating demons nearby is likely to be entertaining! Either a) The attempt to instantiate in a different Truth spreads them harmlessly across multiple worlds; b) They are successfully instantiated, but their perspectives have not changed, and their minds break in half as if Orz had decided to Truthslip them; c) They are successfully instantiated, their perspectives shifted or else are flexible enough to survive a Truth-shift, and ME proceeds to stop time for them and put them in his cellar for later metaphysical dissection. (ME is limited in what he can do to help other people, because that's fun. ME is not very limited in what he can do on his home turf, because that is also fun. At least for me, anyway. Do tell me if my god-moding starts to annoy you though.) Next question! Are there any worlds similar to the World of Darkness that don't have a Gauntlet, or does that completely change the nature of the universe? ...Actually! Can ME tell that someone tried to send demons at him? C happens. WoD magic is good at dealing with different beliefs on how the world ought to work, if you're doing it right. So yeah, ME can tell that someone sent demons at him. He has representative samples. Hahaha. Ah, yes, Mage. Oh, Mage. Mage is why I decided that WoD can interface at all with Entelechy, really, because ~paradigms~ and ~NWO~ . Let's see. This is going to turn out to be a mistake on the part of the Gauntlet, I think. The demons are now on his home ground, which means he can do heavy duty conceptual surgery on them. How fact-of-reality is the Gauntlet's protection? If the answer is "large but not literally infinite," ME now has a battery full of mana and two demons that are attached to the WoD but conceptually severed from the Gauntlet. Even if that's an incoherent concept. He's not going to try scrying on the world itself yet; he's just going to ask the demons. Not literally, because he doubts he'd get a reasonable response (though he will check for "actively malevolent" vs. "controlled/ruled by awful not-people"), but "what do the demons think about the above questions?" The demons are, in order... A: "Actively malevolent." There's very little in the way of depth or personality to them, they're mostly just killing machines. B: Almost completely ignorant. They have instincts and skills, but no grounding in events or situations. Your probing suggests that the spell *created* some demons, instead of moving around ones that already existed. As such, they don't know the answers to your questions. Sort of like if you interrogated a group of apes, if those apes had bat wings, acid tentacles, and death-ray vision. C: Scrying focuses. Someone is actively trying to watch and gather information about you (and/or whatever surroundings you keep them in) while you're doing all this. A: Charming. B: That's fine. The spell is really more equivalent to looking at a bunch of atoms and inferring the laws of physics from them. It won't get names or events, but it'll get metaphysics and general cosmology fine. It can do logical implication - so seeing atoms will get you galaxies and the Big Bang, for example. C: His demiplane has the same sort of knowing-is-hard ward as the wards themselves. They also activate a silent alarm, because he is smart. He doesn't feel like, though, and is currently facepalming because he really should've seen that coming. There is a brute-force attempt to overpower your scrying wards with a stupidly huge amount of power, augmented by the fact that you have in your possession several magical foci specifically designed to let the scryer gain access past whatever sort of security it can think up (and, to be fair, it apparently could think up good enough security to keep you out so far). Clearly, other people don't get to know about it, but it wants to know about anyone who's spying (and successfully resisting all the nasty death spells it can think up). In general, brute force attempts don't work. Entelechy has "perfect defenses," in the nature of Exalted. They can be bypassed by attacking the defenses with reality-denying attacks, or by seeking loopholes, but unless the opposing force is actually a conceptually perfect attack, it fails. If it is conceptually perfect, Entelechy as a Truth really doesn't like clashing perfects, and will tend to cause them to not interact - inexplicably miss, say. This can be overriden by raw power, but needs a huge amount of it, as they need to be several orders of magnitude over the wards, which were cast with all the power ME had available at the time. If the power has a conceptually perfect attack, and backs it with an amount of power sufficient to, let's say, create a planet, completely with life, from void, he sees: A small demiplane of a universe, about the size of a large town or a small city. Spherical, hollow, and filled with rectangular rooms. Several hundred copies of the same person, of differing ages, genders, races, and in a few cases species (but visibly similar in general body shape and facial features.) They are all "the person who has been casting the scries," but one of them is standing over several frozen demons and looking mildly grumpy. Unless the power actually gets this far, of course, in which case he's grinning, because the power just put a bit of itself through the Truth barrier for him, how kind of it. Time stop. Conceptually, the scry cannot be blocked while the focuses in question exist, so that's a 'perfect attack'. And that scale of creation happens pretty frequently in the WoD as a minor background effect. So it does, in fact, get that far. You stop time locally. Almost instantly afterwards, something attempts to rip the grinning you out of your existence... in a way that seems not-dissimilar to one of the less-pleasant possible ways of moving between Truths. It doesn't seem to care if it only gets parts of you. This attempt does, in fact, represent an exploitable connection, though the being in question seems able to decline to be hindered by Time Stop. It succeeds, actually. Meletiti Entelecheiai is somewhat Orz-like in that he's a reality-substrate infomorph who extrudes physical "fingers" into reality, but unlike the Outside the Entelechy runs on math, and while you can make concepts more or less real you can't make them more or less coherent - logic is logic. Some unfortunate alpha fork of ME gets torn to concept-shreds. This is sadly not the most unpleasant thing that's happened to (another version of) him. Nevertheless, the original lives on. And is now perfectly capable of targeting the power. No more Mr. Nice Mage: he executes three attacks and one support move simultaneously. One, all the above questions are directed at the power, again. Two, the power in question is not allowed to change any more. This obviously precludes any actions, but also thoughts, passive powers, and contingencies. Three, the shard in question has the boundary of Entelechy enforced upon it. There is now a sort of one-way barrier between the World of Darkness and Entelechy; the shard inside is considered part of the greater whole to Entelechy, but considered cut off to the World of Darkness. This one is a natural boundary of the Truth of Entelechy, and is roughly equivalent to, oh, one-tenth to one-hundredth of the universe as a whole deciding not to allow the power entry. The spell is designed to fail gracefully: if it is overcome, the barrier becomes two way before it breaks entirely. Lastly, ME grants himself extra actions - by the same mechanism as "not letting the power change," he's "making himself change faster." He will move one thousand times for every once he could otherwise move. (Oh, but the fork does get destroyed by his comrades before he gets very far. No sense in giving the power information. There's nothing left but a blank slate now: that particular body started to never exist at that point.) (Also, in case you're wondering where the power for all this is coming from: Overhead, in the night sky, the stars of the Greater Magellanic Cloud are winking out, one by one.) On a side note - are you aware of the IRC? (I am not aware of the IRC; feel free to link me if you'd like to take this online) irc.psigenix.net:6667; I'm fine either way, but there's also more people online and it's generally fun there Also I may tone that down a bit, that was kind of off-the-cuff. He is sacrificing stars at a fairly rapid clip, but I Forgot My Sense of Scale and jumped to galaxies. (He has infinite many worlds to work with, but only one of them is connected to the forum, so they still don't do him much good outside his Truth.) Your attacks have an effect. 1: You get some answers. -You get a broad-strokes outline of the kinds of beings that exist in the World of Darkness, including a highlights reel of splats. You know about Vampires, Werewolves, Mages, Geniuses, and so on, and have a rough idea of what they can do. -You don't get anything coherent on the timeline; there doesn't seem to be an internally-coherent timeline, too much paradox. -Physics is apparently Earth-normal, except there's an implication that reality runs on minds, not on particles; it seems to run on particles because people think it does. -Metaphysics is a big question, and you don't get enough on the subject, but what you do get looks suspiciously familiar. 2: The power declines to be affected by your attack. It clearly has perfect defences of its own, which in particular include some really good ones against timelike effects. 3: There is nothing really 'present' here: it was observing from *outside*. Your barrier effectively hedges out its influence and breaks the scry. That is, evidently, how you 'banish' the thing. ~: You have a sense that there was something particularly awful present at wherever your fork went, but you're pretty sure you managed to break it before anything important could be gleaned from it. (The bit about stars is Early Installment Weirdness, though I still need to figure out how the many-worlds interact with his mana restrictions...)
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Post by Grigori on Jun 30, 2015 19:52:24 GMT
Blackshard Makes A Deal: (Blackshard/OTC) (Blackshard experiences a faint feeling of unease.
Then:
The sensation of falling lesuirely through an endless void, watching the walls of the pit flow by like a river -
Watching as the mercury spirits flash and dive amid the clouds of the gas giant, graceful even in their laughter and play-
A snatch of music just on the edge of hearing -
Then there is a heavy golden gear with a single tooth missing in one of his hands, and a scattering of a dozen or more smaller wheels in his other palm.) (You have 19,253 Buddhitanka. You were charged 67.66 Chron.) AO Endovior Secundus Durem "Blackshard", Humodified (augment), Uncomposed, Indep-consciousness, Warlock Neuroform, Shattered Infinities Schola, Seventh Mental Structure, is distracted from his usual work by two things. The sudden experiential presence is not at all confusing, although it clashes strangely with the local thematics. After all, this strange program intruding on his dreamspace, which could only accept interactions via a physical-seeming keyboard and console (like some kind of Dawn Age savage!), was an intriguing bit of vintage art, enough to distract him from his administrative duties as the 'god' of an extant (though diminished in popularity) dreamgame. He wasn't extensively distracted, owing to the intolerable slowness of the interactions, but every now and then the facade would part and he'd be provided with tantalizing tidbits of proper noumenal datafeed, nominally to indicate the strange powers of the beings from the 'many worlds' referenced. What is more distracting, of course, is his dream-casket's alarm system, which is insistent enough to get his attention, despite the fact that he hadn't actually used his physical body in centuries (and had, indeed, considered selling it, save for the fact that it is frequently useful to have ownership over a non-trivial puppet-body instead of mere computer space). Apparently, there had been a physical intrusion into his dream-casket, which was so strange as to be unthinkable. A criminal violation of his property? In the Golden Oecumene? No, he had agreed to some kind of transaction, but there shouldn't have been anything able to physically intrude upon his dream-casket like that. AO Endovior triggers the cycle to bring his stored body to consciousness, and is shocked to find himself holding a number of gears, even as the fluids of his dream-casket drip away from his nude form. It is so surprising, it takes him three entire seconds before he enters the Middle Dreaming, to reference the security functions of his apartment, and (more relevantly) to contact his lawyer. He just agreed to something unusual within the context of a strange dream-game, and he needs to know the real-world legal ramifications of that. AO Endovior Secundus: Hey, Prime; do you have a minute? Something weird happened, and I’m not sure how to evaluate it. Endovior Prime: I am busy, but not THAT busy. It’s interesting that you don’t already have the answer, though. Wasn’t that the point of going Warlock? S: Intuition goes a long ways, but not indefinitely. If I don’t have enough information to eventually come to the right answer, I can’t just automatically know the answer. Come on; you know that much. P: Naturally. I am, of course, just messing with you. S: Of course, but the old argument remains. In any event... someone seems to have broken into my apartment. P: What? A crime? In this age? S: That’s what I thought at first, but I think I actually agreed to something unintentionally. P: What, like one of those unsolicited ‘gifts’ with noetic components? S: More like I explicitly agreed to a trade on unclear terms, within the context of a game, and picked up some noumenal content in exchange, and now I have physical items to show for it. P: What, like someone had a weird thing delivered? S: No, more like my casket’s security alarm triggered, and I decanted to find myself holding some gears. P: That’s... ok, not quite impossible, but very strange. How would someone do that? A new science to let them add a program to the lifewater? S: According to the security logs, the things just appeared in my hands, shortly after I agreed to the contract terms. P: Contract terms? S: A certain number of seconds of ‘vital time’, in exchange for a variety of experiences. P: If you wasted all your money on foolishness, I’m not bailing you out. S: It was 355.8916 seconds, apparently, but I don’t seem to have been charged. P: Are you sure you haven’t been charged? S: My records show no charges. P: And you’re sure you haven’t been... no, stupid question; you wouldn’t know. Have your noetic self-examinations come back clean? S: Haven’t had time to run them yet. P: And yet you’re bothering me about this now? When it could all be a hallucination? S: Well... it is a weird thing. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, Warlock disciplines. If something was wrong with me, I’d probably know, unless it was essentially impossible for me to discover the damage unaided. P: Noted. I still disagree, but I will check your figures anyways. ... P: I concur with your estimate; you haven’t spent any money on this; so far as I can tell, your finances aren’t registering more than routine expenses. S: Well, that seems to rule out most simple scams. P: Incidentally, what do you think you purchased? S: Allegedly, noetic packages that grant perfect grace and reflexes, immunity to falling damage, and short-range teleportation. P: I refuse to believe that a version of me would pay money for something that blatantly impossible. S: I was under the impression that it was an old-style netgame, and that (as no formal purchase windows had come up) there was no real transaction ongoing. P: Noted. It’s still super-dumb. S: Except... now that I’m getting over the decanting, I kind of do feel like my dexterity has improved. It seems like I’d be clumsy for a few hours after decanting, but I’m already moving just fine. P: If you are about to tell me that you’ve somehow magically gained the ability to teleport, I’m going to execute our werewolf contract on the grounds that you’re clearly insane. S: Um... P: Don’t even say it. S: Patching you into my live security feed. ... P: Okay, that is kind of impressive. How much are you spending on that effect? I legitimately can’t tell this from the regular security feed, and I do have some pretty decent analysis programs to flag the usual tampering tricks. S: You just looked at my finances. P: A casual check only. I won’t rule out the possibility that you’re routing funding from a source I missed or don’t know about, which is entirely more likely than magical teleportation. S: I deny any intentional tricks, but it remains possible that I am somehow deluded. I apologize for any concern this has caused you; I will meditate, and then get back to you. P: You do that. Greetings From Another Truth: (Orz/ME) Greetings from another Truth. ... My.
I suspect you know this, but your words are poisonous to those who cannot handle alternate Truths. I am happy to act as a translator for you, however.
I must say, you-the-Orz were much more what I was expecting, when I cast my massage into the void. May I ask - what are you? Are you all one, or individuals, or something in between? Under what laws does your world work?
And, ah, if you have any answers for Captain Viridian, I would be happy to forward them.
(At some point, I may be capable of creating a safe translator for you that you could use to speak to the rest of the forum. I do not know if it would represent a meaningful change to you, but it would at the very least make you comprehensible to forum members other than myself. Would you be interested?) And while I'm asking - who, may I ask, are the Arilou? And what do you mean by "jumping in front"? Mm.
If this is a coincidence, it is quite the interesting case of parallel evolution.
I am one who studies foreign Truths. Please, refer to me as Meletiti Entelecheiai.
In my house, you have cousins-once-removed. We refer to them as data-dragons. A dragon is a living spell, a computing process that on ordered modification of physical law, and generally possesses organs that are partially material and partially embedded in component organizations or the social links of inherent civilizations. A data-dragon, by extension, is a dragon whose physical components are entirely composed of patterns of information; a data-dragon has no physical organs. Your nature as one who is one yet many is also not unknown, though the two phenomena have not coincided in known history: sapient organizations that emerge from the patterns of sufficiently large organizations exist, which emerge from the amalgamation of its component minds and yet possess an overself that command each mind like a finger.
I am familiar with the manifold nature of Time, and regularly traverse its path, though I tend to stay within one Possibility in order to stay well-ordered. Our expression of Space is different from yours; ours expresses separation of all kinds, and the same rune can be used to traverse branches of an organization and to warp from place to place. To move between worlds within our Truth is a manipulation of Possibility.
In your parlance, our Truth is composed of only sixteen Colours, but blended and reblended so many times as to create the impression of uncountable numbers. Our magic allows us to reblend local colors by application of sixteen-colored paint. To access the forum, and in theory to access your Truth, I sought out a new "palette" in the depths of concept-space, another way our universe might have condensed.
Is there any way Captain Viridian can prevent people from falling Outside? The problem is not his own ship, which can move freely inside; the problem is his home, which is slowly leaking to the outside and potentially letting in some of your more fractious cousins.
I am afraid I do not yet quite trust you enough to allow you to freely alter my mind; your more fractious cousins have spoilt your good name, and I am not so trusting as I once was. I could, however, prepare an beta fork without those privileged private secrets with which I have been entrusted, and send him to party with you; perhaps I will merge with the results, if I like them.
You may, if you deem it safe, touch my home; but as I have mentioned, you are not the only such being native to my world. In fact - There has never been an intergalactic draconic empire. When an error in a ritual designed to enchant the entire empire caused an explosive backfire, the results reverberated across all of concept-space. There are esoteric consequences even by our standards scattered across the Truth - it is now impossible for any Prime Minster's brother's secretary to have a dog, for example, and there exists a massive conceptual void, akin to a naked singularity, the size of a galaxy near the Milky Way. Do the circumstances of your birth permit you to be a survivor? It is possible for you to be one and not know it. Such is the nature of retconjuration.
If not - well. There is nothing new under the sun, it appears.
Well, the spell is intended to cause me to comprehend any message. It wouldn't be doing its job if I was no longer 'me' or if my brain was dribbling out my ears. I occasionally deal with fast time, but only in very controlled ways, or indeed it gets far too out of hand. Paradoxes everywhere. I'm glad you like it here! Mm. There's no way to fix his house, is there? Evacuating a world full of people is likely to be very difficult, even were they willing. ... I wonder, would the planet itself have enough dimensional integrity to be towed to another Truth. I don't suppose you have enough power to do such a thing? ... I think, given enough power, I could shore up his house. I'd only have to feed mana into its walls, it wouldn't be technically difficult. But the sheer amount of power to do that across Truths... Even in my home Truth, that would be absurdly expensive. I am unfortunately very wary of directly altering my alpha; but I might be willing to allow a copy of myself to connect with you, and see if I like the results. The comprehension of truly alien Truths is indeed very attractive. While I certainly appreciate that your ability to slip between levels is unprecedentedly flexible among your cousins, I suspect the same will not be true of Entelechy. I have not yet developed a spell for travel between Truths, but I believe that the spell will have two important qualities: it will be incredibly expensive to cast, and it will be capable of interfacing the user's personal Truth with the local one. Being able to move to a hostile Truth will protect you from some magi, but only those that attempt to "export" themselves to the Truth entirely; those that do not will be severely hampered, as their very existence imposes astronomical expenditure of mana, but will be capable of functioning in the lumpiest worlds. I am not trying to scare you, but merely to warn you - there exists an ecosystem of things like you akin to that Truth below that you came from, but with an entirely different set of advantages and weaknesses. If you are willing to take the risk, I certainly won't stop you - but there is a limit to how much I can protect you, as well. Pay it no mind; the cost of a purely local spell like this is trivial.
Hm... But that gives me an idea. Pardon me, but I must contact some more fragile minds for awhile; I shall remain available, but I doubt I will have anything new to say until they respond. Actually, that is quite silly of me: I may as well explain, and hear your thoughts.
The idea is this: Given a tool, Lioncourt's magic can create a construct of will that emulates it. It does not seem that she needs to understand how the tool works, and the resulting construct often lacks side effects that no longer apply.
Then, if you create or make yourself into a "tool" for Lioncourt to use, she can, without ever knowing precisely what it is she is doing (potentially aided by my magic; we will need to do controlled tests here), create a Mnemos that moves entities between Truths. This first Mnemos, I suspect, will have all the limitations of your sliding - that is, the necessity of understanding the intervening Truths, and the unfortunate disintegration and resulting mental trauma to the passengers.
However, given practice, generalization, and possibly access to a physical teleporter through normal space, her Mnemos may - may, I am no expert on her magic - generalize to a Mnemodyne of "Truth transport," teleporting entities intact across Truths. And then it is merely a matter of scale.
This is my idea; notice the large number of things that would have to go right for it to work flawlessly. Luckily, I happen to be quite good at addressing problems on the fly.
What do you think? Want a Present?: (Viridescence/Jinx) Hey, there! You seem like an interesting person, not like the boring people who run this place. Can I interest you in something fun? You see, my world is annoyingly difficult to leave, but I've been doing some experiments, and I've found that it's possible to send things out of my world, but not people, with almost no side effects! (There's a slight explosion on the far side, but it's not a big deal.) I've got all kinds of cool things to share with the wider universe, but it's so annoying to be stuck in one place trying to do so. Also, I don't know anyone outside my own universe except the people here, and most of them are so boring. You seem much more awesome than them, though, so maybe I could give you a present? You know, if you're willing to accept gifts from a weird stranger like me who the boring people here don't like. Oh, and if you don't mind something exploding somewhere near you. I've got all kinds of awesome weapons to share, and I might just be able to get you a ride out of 'Runeterrible'. Are you interested? Can I just say "SIGN ME UP!"?
What's that, fishbones? This doesn't seem like a good idea? Quiet, you. You don't get a vote. Excellent!Now, the boring people on the forum don't much like me, and will probably try to stop me from giving you anything nice. In particular, little miss no-fun-allowed Esthfora probably has some kind of spell designed to stop me from giving people presents. So you'll probably need to specifically say something about not wanting to be protected from my fun gifts. Note that among my gifts will be some neat videos that give you superpowers. If you watch them, you'll be able to make your guns shoot faster and your explosives blow up more, and maybe even invent other awesome things like the stuff I'll be sending you! Sweeeeet! My guns are already Hextech, but with your help I'll make them, err, I dunno, Next-tech? Whatever. I don't give a crap about Ms. funkiller rainbow lady, and I definitely don't want her protection. Send me stuff! I seriously wanna get off this rock! Done!Something should be exploding near you any time now! Look for the green box with a door! Note: you need superpowers to fly the box, so watch the videos first. The superpowers should also let you fire the death ray I included in the box! If you get in trouble, be sure to use the grenades; they're a blast!
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Post by Mother Starlight on Nov 9, 2015 3:08:22 GMT
Forum connections (Cassiel, Mother Starlight) Is it possible for you to create forum connections for or near specific people? Usually, yes. The difficulty of doing so varies depending on the world and a few other things, so I might not be able to get the connection in place right away, but if you have someone you want to invite, I'll give it a try. I do. How much specification do you need to accurately target someone? More information tends to make it easier, but an approximate {{untranslatable: geographic/planar/metaphysical location}} and a visual description would be a good start. Alternatively, if they have access to a native communications network, then a network address or node identifier of the sort used by the network infrastructure could go a long way. Hm. Sabathiel. {{OOC: complex non-english-renderable designation}}. {{OOC: metaphysical signature}}. As for his manifested appearance... {{OOC: verbal description ( link)}} I would expect him to be located in Junil's vault, or a {{OOC: pocket dimension in an overlap between two vaults, or between a vault and Erebus}} thereof intersecting with Torrolerial {{OOC: description of the location of that city relative to Cassiel's current location}}. He seems to be behind some sort of security. This might be nontrivial. ... There are multiple possibilities for why that might be the case. The most likely is that Junil has stepped up security again, if he is there. Is he? He seems to be, yes. I can't absolutely rule out the possibility that something's misleading me, but to all appearances he's where you told me to look. That's good. In that case it is probably simplest, assuming creating forum connections is not a significant expenditure of resources (which appears to the the case based on the frequency with which you do that, and what I could make out regarding this one) to give someone who would be able to contact him normally -- Dagda ({{designation}}, {{metaphysical signature}} would probably be best -- a connection and ask them to invite him to a different vault. {{OOC note: it's fairly clear between the designation and metaphysical signature that Dagda is the god/Angel of Balance (which is not a very descriptive term for the thing but never mind that for the moment). Also, the metaphysical signature has somewhat of a... resemblance to someone else's}}
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arborist
Poster
Posts: 39
World: The Unknown
Pronoun: he
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Post by arborist on Jul 21, 2016 12:34:30 GMT
Saving Souls (jasmine, arborist) arborist, There are many people in my world who are said to lack souls. Do you believe you could do something for them? *Jasmine* Jasmine, Perhaps, if our worlds' people mean different things by "soul". Do your world's called-soulless people make decisions, and feel hope or despair? If they do, they may have what I call souls, which I ought to be able to save. If not, it may still be possible, but I think it much less likely. I might be able to answer more confidently with more information. -arborist Dear arborist, They do make decisions. They also often are transformed from people that had "souls", and make different decisions, ones they would have never considered. If I bring a living example of this creature, known as a vampire, to you, could you predict what would happen to other similar cases? *Jasmine* Jasmine, If vampires' souls or lack thereof all behave similarly, I expect that if one vampire has a soul I can find and preserve, the others will as well. If you have a way to safely bring one to me, preferably near to death or despair, and do so, I will try to save them. -arborist Dear arborist, I will find you a vampire in such a condition. How can I bring it to you? *Jasmine* Jasmine, I am near a rather uninhabited area now. I do not have a way to bring people to the Unknown, but the SPQR does, and some other forum members have claimed to have transportation between worlds. If you plan to bring a vampire to me soon, I will move toward still emptier forest, which will be safer for it. I wish I had transport between worlds myself to offer, instead of only others who might help, but I do not. It will be good if I can help preserve your world's souls. -arborist Dear arborist, I will ask my witches if they have something to travel to other worlds. If they can find a spell, I will help bring these poor souls to you. *Jasmine* Dear arborist, I might be able to send a witch to you. Shall I perform the test? *Jasmine* Jasmine, I am prepared to receive a witch. Please perform the test when you are ready. -arborist
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Post by IsacRhich on Feb 25, 2022 3:11:36 GMT
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Post by IsacRhich on Feb 25, 2022 3:13:30 GMT
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