Tips for Dealing With the Others

[horrorTerror]

As a low-ranking Horrorterror myself, I figured if you're going to go out and nag us, I'd make a quick consolidated list of things you should obviously be warned of unless you are hellbent on becoming a Speaker of the Furthest Ring long-term and keeping your corruption level in the "so high everyone can see it" level. Player resources said if your emotions were aligned you were more likely to jump in with us so I figured you'd be more likely to turn if you felt like you knew what you were doing and didn't actually do so.

Share your stories of making contracts with the beasties who want to corrupt your face below!

1. Be Careful. Seriously. If the flowery descriptions of hugigantic tentacled space gods lubricated with ichor having this horrifying and terrifying eternal dark flagella party in the Furthest Ring just out of sight of Derse until the Eclipse shows us to you, and the countless people who have joined the ranks of player-killers, session-wreckers, and Speakers of the Furthest Ring because of their mistakes from things as simple as questionable knowledge sources, alchemy, or even just looking outside during the Dersite Eclipse, nevermind actively seeking that out, doesn't raise a red flag to you at all, your fear response is completely broken and you need a new one, or you otherwise have problems. PROBLEMS, man.

2. The House Always Wins (And It Doesn't Want You To). Unlike your Denizen, who is contractually or codewise obligated to at least try to offer something that might technically help the session when offering you choices, and can only kill you directly if you do something bad like enter their house before you announced your coming or go near stuff they don't want you to have until they're dead, and when dead will repop in another Land in some other new session to troll the player there like the asshole he/she is (If you've ever encountered a Denizen for a second time, even if they're not yours, you may realize that and stop crying about the asshole who abused you like a devilmotherer.), The Noble Circle of Horrorterrors and all subordinates thereof are under very few contracts and even fewer codes that would stop us from not helping you. We can and will shoot you if you so much as decide to waltz out here as the Singer of the Infinite Choir or otherwise leaking marbly white ichor into our perfectly good black sorrowy ichor. We can offer you deals that are a complete loss to you, offer you absolutely nothing or nothing important, simply tentacleslap you back into your session while saying offensive things in broodfester, end up selling you to the chief executive officer to be eaten or made into a puppet for the purposes of cleaning someone's kitchen sink in another deal, or are otherwise not going to be of use. Sure, we can do things like actually help you, but you're gonna have to pay us. A lot. And even some of those complete bullshit prices merely further our mysterious super-secret ends. Every deal we seal becomes another step in our thousandfold circuitous procedures and mysterious entertainment plans.

3. It Will Cost You. I have heard tell of payments from everything from grievous tasks like killing hundreds of players, to simple things exterminating all the angels in your session, to batshit weird stuff like becoming a Speaker of the Furthest Ring for a few hours before she could have someone hug the shit out of her and throw half the psybuffs the session had to spare in her face so an Emissary could try baking a cake. Said cake was made of corruption and later exploded into an ichory mess that turned that player's Dwelling Spire and about half their Land into something that looked more like the Land of Horrorterrors and Corruption than the Land of Kittens and Rain, so YMMV on your contractor's intents, but if you want something cool it's gonna be expensive. Your body, mind, shiny, complete soul, session, and resources are all perfectly valid things for us to ask for and if you say yes we'll take them faster than you can say "Why does that tentacle have a mind-control device hat on it?". We've timed the corruption rates it can and will be done. Incidentally, if your host world has lots and lots of horrorterror emissaries on it and the Church of Horrorterrors is not only a thing but THE world religion, you may have noticed we have access to the Genesis Frog in the precious few moments before session decay kills it but after the anti-Others scripts self-destructed and depending on the constitution of your frog and the fertility of your session as a whole plus if you killed all those angels sitting in your Underworld waiting to make a break for it too so we don't have to eradicate them in our mad frog rush. If you have access to code alteration abilities like Rage and Heart and Void and Mist we can ask you to try and blow up the anti-Horrorterror effects and let us invade your session and if you're sufficiently experienced and corrupted to know what to do we'll try making it happen.

4. Corruption is inevitable. Unless you are a Void player with Squidissension wearing a spacesuit alchemized with frogs until it's virtually Othersproof coupled with a metric holy shitton of specialized anti-Others psybuffs and constantly covering your body with liquid hugs with an untainted alchemy setup and running from a ton of angels trying to tie you up and sing to you until your shiny implodes and you're not out here to make deals or play ichor-licky poker, even looking directly at us Furthest Ring natives with a clear sensory input (read: when we're close enough to Derse that you can actually see us pretty well, such as during the Eclipse) is an immediate corruption sentence. Now imagine the unholy levels of stuff that will happen when you actually communicate with us for a prolonged period. You will need a hug afterwards if you don't want to join the flagella party, preferably with a full-blown humanifying chat to ensure you don't fall off your myth arc and you have no choice but to blow up the game like you originally intended. Sending a dupliclone to punch angels in the face while teleporting around wildly is very slightly more advisable than its usual what while you're dealing with us.

5. You are not alone. Besides your session's players, we can and will corrupt anything short of angels. Since game abstractions other than players are usually confused as to physical prodding besides the whole "asdf gtfo tentaclemonster"-before-bugging-into-a-pile-of-jpeg-artifacts thing (Skaia's horrorterrors-gtfo scripts only bug out around the Reckoning and session decay, which is why you only see all those starry horrorterror eyes in the distance towards the end of a session and why my personal experiences with Sburb's abstractions up close are either by proxy, on Derse when it's closest to us, or when the session is decaying) corrupted objects spreading into the neighboring area usually takes enough of it to the point someone is visibly changed, but it can and will warp your Land and the rest of the game in the bargain. Because of the Underworld's bedrock shell unless you've thrown open the gates it won't do a lot to shoo those nasty angels. Seriously, bedrock takes even US a lot of time to deal with without the whole [RED MILES] omnislaughter spasm beam.

There are very few exceptions to constructs requiring full corruption to do anything other than break that come into play in absurdly specific circumstances and only if several other scripts have bugged out. There's a few Dersites who can get tossed into the Furthest Ring to mark them as dealt with during certain glitched quests (I know some Others who collect them as live trophies and quarter them on stolen Veil meteors) and the rare exploit where denizens can become angel-corrupted even more rarely bugs out and we can grab it before they do. In some worlds where the Church of Horrorterrors is both a thing and some of its instruments survived the Reckoning we can occasionally get to exiles with prolonged whispering so if you saw it pre-entry and your exile is commanding you to go to the Furthest Ring and hug the nearest horrorterror you can usually guess what happened.

[horrorTerror]

Tips for Dealing With the Others Part 2: Electric Boogaloo Being a Speaker of the Furthest Ring, And Typestuff

Well, what if you WANT to be a Speaker of the Furthest Ring?

First and foremost, a lot of us want to see Skaia burn. If you're a Speaker, we are going to nonconsensually use your body and powers to eradicate Angelic problems, then player resistance, then other resistance, then do some shenanigans, and then finally completely and seriously corrupt up the place and do as we like.

Still interested? All your coplayers dead and the session unwinnable anyway? You want to see Sburb die as much if not more than we do? Intentionally corrupting yourself and snacking on squiddle treats and the blood of the fallen on the way? Are you sure you want to dedicate the rest of your life to burning this game to the ground with more tentacles than your average piece of sealife and screaming insults in broodfester tongues the entire time, hopped up on endless seas of rampant vengeful rage at the countless realities born under this game only to be slaughtered, all creation of Yaldabaoth's glitchy plans and Echidna's horrific progeny immensely pissing you off? Really?

Then here's a quick guide pamphlet on what you should expect to be called if you succeed at corrupting and demolishing your session and then promptly get dragged into the Furthest Ring for entertainment purposes at the eternal dark flagella party.

As you may notice, many of these bits and pieces of terminology are taken from gentlemanMannerism's guide to horrorterrorly etiquette in the less scary circulation-prone version of the Sburb Etiquette FAQ and associated ancillary essays, plus the personal comments of many, many corrupted people and corrupting forces. While I have reworded much of it I am not one for citing and will probably not do so. You're playing a deathgame you can complain about my lack of proper citations when you are dead and sitting in a dreambubble. I'm looking at you, Wikipe-tan.

So, you have risked failure in your role as a Hero of Skaia and surrendered your shiny and associated selves to the assorted beasts and horrorterrors of the Furthest Ring totally, and your corruption has thrown itself into the heavens and you are now a Speaker of the Furthest Ring. Who's directly ordering you around? Simple question, with many complex answers.

The chief determinant of your behavior in case of freedom of action is, of course, who you are in service to and how they are running you. The vast majority of Speakers have little if any autonomy, and many do not even continue your conscious processing, preferring to leave you unconscious and puppeting your body around for you so you will be as non-traumatized as possible should you be rescued and thrown through the door to your next session and otherwise out of their control. This tends to result in little ability for someone that corrupted to even do anything, but whenever you are allowed, the rule of thumb is as always, be nice, follow orders.

If your corruption is the direct result of a you-and-one-Other-deal with a binding service clause or possession of a singular corrupted tool with an associated Ring-inhabiting entity, with no other third parties intervening, you are under the direct command of that entity and are pretty much their personal property in general slave fashion. Your autonomy or lack thereof is the jurisdiction of that particular entity's management policies, but the vast majority will be clear on what you are being used for and how to act when doing so even when they are not just controlling you directly, especially if the engagement is for the long term or that entity has a busy life. Most Speakers at this point are referred to "X's Speaker of the Furthest Ring" or just "X's Speaker", where X is the name of the entity responsible for corruption and piloting of the body. If you are the personal toy-body of someone high-ranking nobility, you may be referred to as Herald or Orator or other variant terms, but this is basically the same thing.

A special case of this is when your corrupting influence is an Emissary of the Furthest Ring who happens to be located on the host world, in your session, or both depending on case, such as the Alternian Gl'bgolyb pseudo-lusus species employed by fuschiablood royalty. (Note: Some trolls may have seen members of the Gl'bgolyb species near the troll imperial palaces reserved for the heir to Alternia or the Empress herself depending on who is currying more favor at the second, being fed with various lusii like skywhales daily. She is usually meteored or serves as Sburb's semi-witting killswitch to offworld trolls when she gets pissed and makes that troll-genocide-noise, but she has escaped into sessions at least once due to bad locations so if she happens to be clinging to your hive when entering expect to alchemize a lot of food to keep your troll coplayers not permadead from bleeding out through...everywhere.) Emissaries for obvious PR reasons do not spread nearly as much corruption but if you specifically ask for it they can still do it.

If your corruption is the result of varied deals with no binding servitude clauses (at least in the long term), spending time in the Furthest Ring in direct proximity to a large number of Others with no particular affiliation uniting them beyond their shared eldritch nature, or decided traveling during an eclipse was appropriate but you forgot your anti-corruption frog spacesuit, or is otherwise not unified at all, you are the general Speaker of the Furthest Ring, in a position sometimes referred to in a technical and/or derogatory sense as 'ring candy'*, where pretty much anybody out there can pick up your reigns and make you do something for them. The vast majority of the time you will either be doing nothing but flying around out in the Ring being bored, being grabbed by the nearest entity to do something, or sent on missions by the Noble Circle with piloting delegated all the way down to the appropriate Emissary of the Furthest Ring or some random beast or horrorterror watching the session in question, depending on your skillset and how interested everyone is in you. If you have free will at the second and are not on a mission, try finding a public-access bubble and visiting some dead or dreaming people. It's fun to alleviate your boredom with a dreambubble adventure*.

(*Note: This is not to be confused with the valid tactic of sufficiently binding a Saccharine Doppelganger and throwing them into the Furthest Ring to be lasered and then eaten by the Others like a piece of Squiddle Treats. Unlike SDs, most ring candy Speakers aren't actually eaten like candy, though there is probably someone into something that out there somewhere.)

(**Note: Corrupting dead people or one-self-is-dead-now-dreaming-avatars is even more complex and difficult than it is for dreamselves so don't bother being safe or light on the hug frenzy. Even if you're overjoyed at seeing your dead buddies again and hug your dead friends so much you're corruption-free by the end of it, you'll still have to get recorrupted to leave connected bubblespaces by flight if you can't fly on your own, and even if you can horrorterrors everywhere and it's unlikely you can spacetime-shift your way home, so it's mostly so you can stop speaking broodfester and talk normally with people who have a dead self right now. If you see a living dreamself who is sleeping and in the bubbles because epic sleepwalking derp across the furthest ring and not a dream avatar of someone who got kiss-revived but didn't change clothes because comfy dream pajamas, you can try hitching a ride to their session by hanging on to them when they look like they're about to depart for their native dream moon. They do not always depop correctly when in having derped into a dreambubble or otherwise outside of their incipisphere and instead rarely move really, REALLY fast back to where they should be and have enough of a physical presence to be held onto, so you can hitch a ride into that person's session and bum around until you can replay normally. This also works on sleeping live godtiers or kiss-revived people if their dreambubble avatars are about to despawn from their realself awakening but is even more rare of a glitch. It appears to be the same ghost-script that causes using a very rare revival ability type that doesn't require the corpse's presence to resurrect the person next to the caster's realself buried in the dreamself popping script that is a bug within a bug within a bug within a bugged version of the Lifey Thing dreamself respawn thing that Life player dreamselves sometimes do upon assassination.)

If the corruption is the result of an organized group of Others, you are considered the collective property of that organization, much as how corporations can be sued instead of individuals. That was a bad analogy and I apologize. Your handling is basically thrown around that organization's specific roles meant to handle it. Being a corporate drone, or maybe a bee drone? It's very droney.

If you happen to have a very stable friendly non-contractual personal relationship with an Other who happens to keep a spatiotemporally stable property, such as several stolen Veil meteors or a designed bubble, and your session is unwinnably broken and you are either being corralled by the game into Scratching or using that machine in the veil that does the alternative replay method is not an option, you may be able to get them to work out with you what is colloquially known as a 'roommate agreement', where you basically quit being a Sburb player and move in with them under some loose or complex series of agreements and be their staff without actually having to be Speaker of the Furthest Ring level corrupted (Note: you are living in the house of a horrorterror. You will probably end up leaking ichor and having tentacles and speaking broodfester with how corrupted you are all day everyday. I recommend relearning your native language while being so corrupt your native language is overwritten with broodfester, because it is actually even easier than learning a new language otherwise, in order to get around that problem, though being multilingual helps), though ascending to beastship is not unheard of according to a story I heard from someone who talked to one of the Middling Gods but didn't get detail on it. (Note: If it doesn't work out you can usually renegotiate and be sold by deal to a session somewhere who could use you or strike out on your own as ring candy.)

[horrorTerror]

Tips for Dealing With the Others Part 3: The Dreambubbles, and Other Bubbles

So your dreamself is dead, or your realself is dead and you either godtiered or got kiss-revived, and you decide sleeping is a good idea. Or you just permadied by anything other than the Scratch, whatever works. Maybe your dreamself just decided to flee wildly into the furthest ring and play keep-away from the horrorterrors despite the inadvisability rating of that being quite high.

Since most of you already DIED repeatedly this will be rather uninformative.

Welcome to Other territory of the less corrupt kind, bubbles!

Assuming nothing went horrifically wrong, you should be or at least start out inside the Dreambubble-class bubble. Their history is complicated temporally and involves a negotiation of one of the troll queens of life who got assigned to derse yadda yadda everyone in her session was prophesied to DIE and she thought it only meant their dreamselves but she'd rather her friends not have to spend all night in the flagella party so a bunch of horrorterrors glubbed these up for dead people to go to in the futurepastical augh it's complicated.

At any rate, dreambubbles are the standard bubble class for what else, dreaming. The gen scripts are pretty cheap-ass and basically consist of copy-pasting and duct-taping together memories with shitty fade effects with dead and dreaming people wandering around boredly and chatting. Sure, you could get more romantic than that but there is a cap on allowed violence for anyone whose power doesn't rival that of some of the highest horrorterrors that stops unauthorized second-deaths via healing scripts. Unless you can fuck up Paradox Space itself you'll find killing the dead is a waste of time. Maybe a timelord with a TARDIS....Anyway, after you figure out or are verbally or physically slapped into realizing you're dead and dreaming, you basically just get to derp around here for eternity or until you wake up whichever applies.

Other regulations of note include but are not limited to:

* Yes, dream characters that are not sleeping/dead players are lifelike yet empty but for an AI mimicking their patterns of life from your memory and if you deviate from script they will follow orders. No, just because you can and really wanted to is not an excuse to have sloppy roof makeouts with someone else's replacement guardian from a replay a few sessions ago unless nobody else who cares is around. Yes, horrorterrors observing from within dream characters count. ESPECIALLY observing horrorterrors. Not all of us want to see that, ok?

* Despite it being incredibly lax, hard to understand, and often ignored, we DO have a content policy. Disobeying its arcane codes is a fasttrack to getting kicked from the servers and being sent to the nearest asshole-accommodating bubble or regular old normal in-your-brain dreaming for the night.

* Said content policy and the violence cap also include non-kismesistude insulting. Yes, it is possible to kill people with insults, and not just from sudoku or actual sudoku. No, it's not easy unless you're gM. No, she doesn't actually do it. Yes, she can do it better than you. Including the nonlethal kind of sudoku.

* Bubble transit is easier for the dead than the physically living and present, meaning dreamselves have to find the neighboring bubbles manually by navigating through horrorterrorkind (not the strife specibus please don't use us as weapons)

* There are several junk barricades of random memories designed to curb access to certain areas, as well as keep certain entities from dreaming anywhere near anybody else. However, a conflicting section of policy means they can be disabled with physical force or the person whose memory they originate from.

* People and things who want to be near each other attract each other. Except Depth Mirages. Horrorterrors and other intentional seeking override the natural attract/repel mechanisms.

* Falling asleep in a dreambubble tends to prompt memories of dreaming or actual dreaming or even counter-intuitively waking up, it depends.

* While most objects generated by dreambubbles are just dreambubble-matter and refuse to leave the bubble (at least for an extended period of time), Rain or Mist or Void displacement classes and sometimes even Coins or Art or Ink matter-creators etc. even in death (and in specific cases, aspect powers in general) can substantiate them for continued existence and even memories of Psychogenesis tend to create actuals unless it would be unsafe to do so (i.e. you're alchemizing a saccharine doppelganger).

The two notable areas of dreambubbles are the Planet and the Mirage Zone/Deep End, though alternate dreambubble types don't follow that.

The planet is where the bulk of memories sit, usually on a planet-shaped object that varies area by area, dreamer by dreamer. This is where everybody does stuff and is slightly boring but safe. It has gate memories that tie bubbles together for those not physically anchored to one bubble (i.e. dreamers or people riding ships and meteors through bubbles)

The mirage zone/deep end (depending on who's talking) is the area near the outer edge/upper atmosphere of the bubble that tends to be made of orbital platforms and imposing castles and deep oceans and rarer memories and places you'd rather not remember, stuff where the sky filters break down and you can no longer rely on them to not see the horrorterrors, and their memories begin to bleed in to yours. Regulations tend to be a little weaker around here so things that shouldn't be in the bubble at large and/or are more violent tend to occur up here. It is home to Depth Mirages, people or hostile memories of people (it depends wildly) who nobody likes but somehow end up around you. The people are less dangerous than the fake hostile people. Memories of things like Saccharine Doppelgangers, Eaten Ones, Apocryphal Antitheses, even Nightmare Heirs and other player-copy-messes, etc. tend to cause dreambubble scriptglubs interaction with traditional scripting languages (not everything can be run in convenient old ~ATH like kill-quests can, especially when everyone's already dead, so we and sometimes even Sburb use ^CAKE for bulk operational manipulation tasks that can't kill or destroy anything to trigger or to substantiate the offending killables, DIS* for luck/fate scripting and violence, etc. and other reality coding languages tend to work more specific stuff, albeit buggily, and sometimes you just gotta use eldritch magic and it's just better honestly) to bug out viciously, and it is recommended someone destroy them or expunge them from the bubble as quickly as possible to preserve the integrity of dreambubble integrity.

The second most encountered bubble type is the eBubble. These are small bubbles designed to hold spur-of-the-moment things like singular memories of singular lines, coring and syncing larger memories, and often lack many of the rules of larger conventional bubbles. They sit around dreambubbles being irrelevant except when used to relocate memories or activate scripting machinery. You may have seen a [person]_ebubbles group, which is basically just a seemingly random line that person said or typed at some point put in a bubble for you to look at and repeat as desired. They are common among popular players to keep themselves in the hearts, minds, and spam folders of others, and often litter places as conversation pieces or inspirational poster equivalents in the consistent-changing dwelling-memories of the dead.

The other major type of bubble is the existence bubble, which just flatly obeys setup laws of physics and that is that. It is used to store decayfreed and otherwise hacked trophies without spacetime manipulations of friends being in the way, as well as an optional layer of protection around servers to notify please-do-not-edit-this-is-someone's-personal-property-not-protected-by-fatelines. This is a nice alternative to having to play a game that destroys your homeworld, yes? Many of these just carry pretty nice houses for people to live in and stolen stuff to be stored.

[horrorTerror]

Tips for Dealing With the Others Part 4: Battle Against an Unfathomable Enemy

I assume the REAL reason why you went here was...to kill us! Or something like that. So here's this chapter on how we all fight so you can reconsider how terrible of an idea that is. Fear campaigns woo!



Pictured: Sound's representation of the titular effect, and to some extent the battle theme of the horrorterrors. The art has been run through filtration scripts and under the Trolling That One Religion Act of a few timestamps ago it should be noncorruptive, but despite several simplifications to fit in euclidean organizations it is still fairly representative of what a certain subspecies of horrorterror looks like. Unless you are in the Furthest Ring or the Underworld you should only be hearing this song as an active fraymotif when there is a corruption problem or the bugged doublecorrupt aspect exists.

The stat that appears on corrupted people, places, and things is rarely referenced as [Unfathomable], an allusion to the other (non)effect [Battle Against An Unfathomable Enemy] that happens when strifing and corruption get near each other. Both of them are SUPPOSED to make it easier to fend off the corruption but Sburb's immune system sucks and is glitchy like the rest of it, and thus they only work in specific circumstances. [Unfathomable] seemingly only works on the Queens' desire to shove things in the Royal Vault and have them be deleted from their incipisphere by force and game abstractions' fear and confusion at corrupted things and pretty much every standard symptom of corruption not related to the corruption itself, except the part where they can blow up normally indestructible game abstractions because that was what [Unfathomable] was supposed to fix and predictably failed miserably at. [Battle Against An Unfathomable Enemy] only seems to work on destroying things in the Underworld to banish the Angels and in rare cases overriding many of the Black Queen's personality restrictions on (ab)use of [RED MILES] toward the offending corruption, which usually helps stall the Others from invading long enough for the Angels to get a foothold, and extending the horrorterrors-gtfo script for longer unless Skaia is completely done for. Sburb is probably already not helping you.

And that's just the part of us that isn't even physically present. You've seen the horror stories of corruption and the horror stories of session decay. You know that feeling of absolute terror you feel when looking at horrorterrors before corruption sets in and banishes your control? It's right.

When horrorterrors battle, they do not do so lightly. The major components to take into account to be considered ready to die going down fighting are:

1. Corruption resistance. Uh, hello? Others horror stories? Unless you're a Singer of the Infinite Choir and your shiny has been eated by the angels, you'd better be clad in frogs all over if you're gonna even think about fending us off.

2. Regular combat defenses. Even with the most overt of problems out of the way, you are still fighting giant tentacled monsters far larger than cities and you are going to get smashed, crushed, pierced, and slashed like nobody's business. Your health vial is coming out of this emptied, broken, and fallen if you don't know what you're doing. And your body is going to be physically attacked too, not just your health vial, so having healing items that cover that too is a must.

3. Dealing with the magic. Unless your Sempersand is through the roof and back again and you're also corruptionproof and are covered in specialized freestyled Others-repulsion fields and counteractive magic through the roof, you dun gonna get lasered with magical eradication.

4. Corruption resistance for your abilities. A lot of things will fizzle when corruption gets involved too heavily, so you might want to check what works and what doesn't before you go in to find half your stuff has no effect.

5. Angels Are Annoying. If you're so heavily bent on attacking us, angels are a surefire recipe to piss us off and deal some starter damage, though as way stronger sources you'll probably only be able to whack a Beast a few times before the offending item is drowned in ichor and obliterated. Unless you are using angelickind and are picking up angels and throwing them at us. Why are you picking up angels and throwing them at us in the first place? What the hell did you allocate to your strife specibus to DO that?!

6. Know Thy Enemy. The major components you will have to deal with for each is their big squiddle body, their aura, their tools, their extra bodies, and their support staff. Every horrorterror has at least one big primary squiddly body available and they keep most of their focus on it. Corruption projects an aura which you've seen as the black thorns of the grimdark or the white halo of the angeltainted, and it's worse and almost always defensively weaponized by its wielder. Melee attacks on horrorterrors will have to contend with the physical tentacles and the energy tentacles. It is not called a flagella party for nothing, every last flagellum will by writhing angrily and smacking you around violently and crushing you, and the spiky energy ones will thorncoddle you like a demonhead mobster kingpin to boot. Some horrorterrors wield items, and draw much offensive firepower from them. The vast majority are grimoires or other magical tools, though horrorterrors that wield guns, blades, battleships, robots, fancy santas, other traditional strife specibi, and even offensive fanfiction are not uncommon. Many horrorterrors have smaller extra bodies to personally oversee things and you will have to deal with all of them and their many healthbars to qualify for a temporary kill. As the angels can tell you, only noobs keep all their critical bodies together and we usually hide one or more inside a safehouse or several so that even if the others get rekt we'll survive to regenerate for another day. Also, if you attack someone their *tangle buddies* might come to the rescue and any nearby ring candy will also get hired to kick your ass, creating a chain reaction of friends jumping in to beat you up. A critical enough threat may call in the horrorterror defense forces before you make everyone retreat and you will suddenly be fighting a whole army instead of a few squiddles.

7. Bring a good weapon. The entire point of fighting horrorterrors is gone if you don't have anything that can actually penetrate all the shields. Being able to break the paradox space we hover upon is a good step one. First Guardians are also a pretty good recipe, and frogs are virtually essential. Titanic aspect charges (like, that OP rain weapon with all the stuff shoved in it, or a denizen's weapon, or stuff alchemized from aspect manifestations captured by rain, or an omniweap with an entire damn armory shoved in it, or inverting the punched holes of a game-made healing item) tend to work as well. Attacking a horrorterror with an Others corrupted weapon is stupid and may cause negative damage, healing them. Certain aspect powers that do not bug out tend to be obscenely powerful, and debug/admin items (Remember that Void girl with the null driver who blew up some Others' main bodies? Do that sans others corruption.) are just plain cheating. Like saccharine doppelgangers, if it's overkill, it's probably just the right amount of kill tending towards underkill. You require more kill to kill us all. You need stuff that practically or literally is cheating. Code editing, shiny modding, alchemiter hacks, [RED MILES], your First Guardian, zillium, console-commands player commands, Eaten Ones, saccharine doppelganger themed items, literal gods, excessive stuff like that. It is physically impossible to be overkill unless you are bringing gM riding Jenna into battle. Bringing gM riding Jenna into battle is a logical contradiction because Jenna's manners are terrible and it would result in much chaos as all reality exploded violently.

8. Bring potions, and help. Godtier is a virtual necessity to have aspect powers strong enough half the time, like seriously grab the tiger the tiger will help. Healing items are pretty much critical because screw that you are going to take a lot of damage even through indestructible armor stacks. Do not expect to solo everybody in the area unless you curbstomped a dead session and can wipe the floor with Yaldabaoth's face when he's in cheating mode and overpower your Nightmare Heir while he's in cheat mode too and you kill and eat First Guardians effortlessly and you curbstomp overpowered-prototyping dersite royalty etc. etc. only gM stands a chance at stopping you tier OP level. Unless you are beyond omnipotent it would do you well to be outnumbered a little less. Preferably a LOT less.

9. Do not expect victory in the Ring. Unless you are in the protective embrace of a Skaia with functioning horrorterrors-gtfo scripts and are fighting a lone scoutbeast that fell in somehow or a taken Land area, there are more of us than there are of you in any reasonably-sized session's vicinity. Seriously, what kind of session has a playercount in the hundreds though that was freaking ugly.

[horrorTerror]

Tips for Dealing With the Others Part 5: Nonbubbled Structures

Did you get a hug? Good! Welcome back to the Furthest Ring's spatiotemporal distortion waves at large, and hello and welcome to the Other territory of the more corrupt kind, unbubbled space.

The chief nonbubble structures you will encounter are Servers, Machines, the decaying corpses of sessions, *mass tangle buddies*, nascent sessions, and active sessions.

Servers are just that. Servers. You know where all those files in the Furthest Ring sit? Right there. Otherwise, pretty boring. Some of them even double as portals, but you're either running from a dying universe into the Furthest Ring or from the Furthest Ring into the living space of a First Guardian who is quite confused and angered by your presence, or a rather inappropriate magicant location. Say, one that leads directly into the Black Queen's room where she keeps all her spare spiky things moving at a high velocity into your vital organs should you enter (why is that even a thing Sburb go home you're drunk). Basically, if one's a portal, it's a bad idea to go in it and what is coming out is an attempted escapee from a situation so nasty that running straight into a bunch of glubbing horrorterrors is the more preferable option. For various reasons, they are best left well enough alone to not create extremely fucked up and complicated spacetime shenanigans even worse than the ones already going on in, on the edge, and out of sessions. Even horrorterrors will just leave these things alone even if they're not in a bubble, because of how weird things get when they're interfered with. Ugh, doomed/alpha delineation damages are utterly confusing even to us. Corruption is usually nonexistent but if the server is not or no longer host to any temporally critical operations it can be pretty nasty and full of horrorterror foruming. Resist the urge to look inside the folders should you find its operating addresses, unless it is temporally critical.

Machines are...Well, machines. Their purpose and functionality can vary wildly. Everything from (corrupted) 'administrator tool' devices to factories of corrupt objects to strange arcane monitoring stations that put the Veil to shame can show up and sit here, in various levels of corruption. The vast majority are intended for use by Furthest Ring natives and players have no business interfering with them (even if you have enough corruption to create enough tentacles to operate it, we recommend you don't bother unless you read the broodfester instruction manuals). Don't bother touching them unless you seriously need that admin tool to do whatever it is to make your session halfway functional/winnable again or you have trustworthy advice on the use and operation of the machinery. If someone owns it, get the hell away from it unless they want you to use it, for obvious property value reasons.

*Mass tangle buddies* are....well, a big cluster of beasties all tangled up together and having a bigass dark flagella party communing and lolling and living their horrorterror-y life in a group. If you get hit by large red abstraction-matter heart shaped objects popping into existence, as anyone who understands human love, matespriteship, Hearts Boxcars' flushed intentions, or has a concept that qualifies as redrom concupiscent affection in general will obviously know, run like hell and don't look back until you're hours and kilometers away at absolute minimum. You don't want or need to see that. Otherwise, it is basically any other horrorterror group except a bit bigger and more tightly knit literally because they're all grabbing on to one another.

The decaying corpses of sessions are a much less cheery matter. Just take the damn door if you won't join us. It is easier to find a living session than a dead one for many reasons (active timeline stability, Skaia's light can be used as a slightly less efficient and much weaker guiding light than that of the Green Sun, the plot of fate wants you to go there, there are reasons to go there at all, etc.) but if you seriously get way lost or even providence refuses to guide you, you can find one of these without starting your ringly voyage in one. It's kind of sad, too.

The ones without a frog are usually echoes of doomed timelines, or a failed session that is preparing to wipe and restart to prepare for replayers like you because everyone died in alpha. The echoes are weird and their origin paradox cores and time anchor threads (they're doomed, splinters are not alpha timelines) broken rendering their timeline unstable, also everyone's soon to be dead, while failed sessions preparing to reset medium and pseudo-scratch reset the host universe are...Well, don't be in them or near them when it happens unless you want to join the scratched in the far heavens beyond our reaches jenna-have-mercy god-have-mercy all-have-mercy world-pities-your-soul etc. etc. sanctus beyyat that's dark. Either way, avoid them. Session decay is not something you want to be there for, being doomed is not something you want to be there for, being erased from existence by a scratch equivalent is not something you want to be there for, seriously just don't go there, especially when it's so late Skaia's clouds have gone dark and it's beginning to decay. The former is kept well enough away from the rest of you that the rough metalinearity imposed by obsolescence-of-future normality-inducing avoidance via time synchronizations and the communications cutout tends to create enough of a framework to expel them from that you shouldn't encounter them unless you've got an eternity on your hands and a time travel device shooting you a million miles into the furthest ring at every planck time. The latter is more likely to be encountered since they're where you are besides the whole being-dead part. In the words of Jenna, "DON'T DIE!"

The ones with a frog (or what remains of one, depending on the stage of decomposition and universe death accordingly) are...Well, session decay of a now-finished session. The point where it kills you is actually kind of early in the process, to be honest. After all livability decays to nonexistent and the vast majority of game constructs are decaying or dead (besides surviving players and sometimes carapaces depending on version and time errors), past the whole Pathologic-like infection and decay of allegedly nonliving matter, you know how this goes. The few remaining Skaian clouds after Bilious Slick grows into a full-fledged genesis froggy grow dark and stormy, with those that still represent anything showing other universes' timelines entirely (usually restrained to connected ones like the host world, parent session, fenestrated wall viewpoints, or descendant sessions, but totally random prophecies of other Skaias has happened. Skaian prophecy clouds can show different worlds under normal gameplay circumstances, but they will vastly favor the timeline at hand unless its destruction is imminent or omniscience glitches out). Depending on how late in the decay process it is and whether or not the Underworld was cleared or attempted by players and if so how many did it in that specific session, it may still be an active battlefield between the Angels and the Others, or the gates of Skaia have been slammed shut by Skaia's aforementioned storms and the genesis frog's bejeweled pond lillies. Most of the time we will have defeated the Angels at some point (usually the point where even excessively shielded things like bedrock and non-player-linked abstraction matter have completely broken down, shortly before the Speaker of the Vast Joke (Dersite names for him are so much more creative and insulting) goes kaput at the fastest, by the time when time is dead and the session can no longer be reliably time-traveled in at the latest) but if the session has an incredibly high angelic corruption level it can last for ages. After all that stuff, the last few remaining things break, then around the time the final battle concludes time and non-eternal abstractions decay, and then you're sitting in newly open Furthest Ring estate, usually immediately occupied by the dark gods who just won said battle. Whatever.

Nascent sessions are just that. Skaia *blossoms*, the Battlefield eternal king-v-king battle of an unprototyped Battlefield circulates in everlasting stalemate, the Incipisphere is just enough of a blot to create its own stable temporal lineage, Prospit, Derse, and the untampered-with Veil appear, and the Secret Guardianly Frog Temple Portals haven't been bedrocked up yet. Approximately [insert session arc numbers here] million years ago, the session's frog temple and First Guardian recycled from the end lands in the beginning of the host world's Sburban interference of debug npc relevance and the Great Cosmological Shenanigans begin. At any point from that ~1000mya period to player entry, a session is nascent and...not doing anything much. When the players ectobabies or replacements land, and anywhere from ectobiological birth, to deployment, to First Moment of Sapience around or before 3 years in, the dreamselves spawn, which is the point activity seriously begins to pick up and the session can arguably be considered 'waking up', if not quite active. Once the Space player is awake the session can arguably be considered active since they can start dream moon quests straight away to begin changing the Medium beyond session-based genetic anomalies in reproductive system growth, and Skaia's prophecy clouds have shown the vast majority of scripted events and the horrorterrors repeat them to the point the Prospitian and Dersite libraries are full of lore on player actions, land gen roles, quests, and maintenance personnel have dream moon equipment ready to change policy with regard to prototyping-based cultural modification (did you really think that clown outfit that drives Jack Noir to regicide and Noirjacking didn't have a long and sordid history of its own chucklevoodoos? This is Sburb lol). Skaian births are a very complex and ridiculously bright process, and while you won't understand what's going on you'll probably know it when you see it simply because of how damn bright it is, and that light dims to sunlight-level once the timeline is coherent and only goes away when Skaia has finally decayed at the bitter end or its light is otherwise extinguished and shut off. There's a reason the Noble Circle lives in impenetrable darkness.

You know what active sessions look like, because as a replayer you've been through them, silly!

Most other stuff around here is secret-secret so w/e.

[horrorTerror]

Tips for Dealing With the Others Part 6: Notes on Horrorterror Slang

This is not a broodfester dictionary. If you want one, go freaking alchemize one or get corrupted or Rain-y enough to learn broodfester by default. Much horrorterror slang is incorporated in the Squiddles series available in most worlds, and as they are a fairly accurate subconscious reimagining of us, a good understanding of the show is often sufficient to figure out what we mean. Hell, even the "Parents' Guide To The Squiddles" in the front of the squiddles game manual Sburb ironically replaces the real manual with (we have since ironically topped them by having most of our squiddles game manuals contain basic entry instructions to Sburb, though Sburb through Skaianet left them in cursive broodfester and refused to render the pictures at a decent detail level, the asshole game) is a pretty good guide to understanding the bits that don't translate well.

This is instead a short list of horrorterror terms that insist upon being used even when deigning to speak the player's native language whose explanations may not be immediately apparent.

Tangle Buddies: Friendship, extremely close friendship, friendship on the level of moirallegiance, moirallegiance, in rare cases matesprites and other loves and even more rarely, family. Even something as simple as tangling tentacles together in a display of friendliness. At any rate, it is a positive relationship of some form that would be close enough to merit literally becoming tangled up in various flagella to be with them.

Skipper Plumbthroat: Someone who is an active hostile entity destroying or attempting to destroy horrorterrors or the Furthest Ring directly or indirectly, usually sicced upon us by Sburb indirectly for one reason or another. There is normally only one Skipper Plumbthroat that threatens horrorterrorkind (AGAIN THAT IS NOT AN INVITATION TO ALLOCATE US TO YOUR STRIFE SPECIBUS) at any given metatimeline coherence successfully enough to merit the role, but time and space are freaking strange out here and even that overlord of timestreams is not truly linear, and the role can thus arguably be called a title.

Bad crew: Accomplices and accessories to Skipper Plumbthroat's crimes.

Good crew: Lesser allies and tools of the Furthest Ring organizations. Sometimes refers to subordinates in general, especially forced ones.

Getting down with the crew: Exploiting allies or enemies.

Murky Brineswallows: Spatiotemporal disturbance too extreme for horrorterrors, dangerous sessions, or other location nonentity that could be dangerous to the dark gods out here.

Pie: Literally, pie. The reason why this is on this list follows: said pie is often made of materials players would not normally consume or even want to consume, such as troll sopor slime or more traditional eldritch god fare like squiddle treats, or things that should not go in pies like aquatic life (i.e. whales, fish, lusus naturae that resemble them, coral, sea plants like kelp and algae, plankton, bacteria and protists, whatever we can have a really varied diet). In rare cases may be made from saccharine doppelgangers and butternut squash.

Candycorn shrimp: Trolls that interact favorably with the Others, such as seadweller royalty players mothered by members of the Gl'bgolyb species. Occasionally extended to anything that possesses or possesses features that resemble the earth human treat known as candy corn, up to and including the disco-frenzied Prospitian agents.

Billy the Bellsuit Diver: Player who is tied to a session and entering Furthest Ring property on a string in an Others-resistant spacesuit. Mostly used jokingly, except when it's not and there is literally someone in a bell diver suit hanging out. Rarely refers to people who are generally investigating the Others, but have enough protection that corruption is not really happening any time soon. Also refers to people making deals with Others, albeit mostly as a joke.

Supporting Character: Anyone who interacts with the Others that is not a Speaker or other utility tool, i.e. players interacting with a Speaker.

Ring candy: Aforementioned furthest ring freelance Speaker.

Mister Bowman: Descriptive narrative force, usually well out of the control of the horrorterrors. May sometimes be extended to guiding powers such as Aspects and Sburb itself, or anything sufficiently powerful and/or intelligent to comprehend squiddlekind (STILL NOT A STRIFE SPECIBUS) without going corrupt, such as First Guardians. Rarely refers to (suspiciously often guitar-playing) storytellers who are telling a beautiful tale and doing it excellently, possibly telling it to children.

Squiddles Campfire: Meeting with various Others involved, may or may not have a serious purpose.

Princess Berryboo: Figure of importance. Often royalty, or sometimes extended to the Noble Circle, or informally to refer to high nobility with so many connections and political powers they are virtually royalty. Usually carefree or beyond all troubles. "Well excuse me, Princess Berryboo." said in the voice of an old man discontinuous with the voice the Horrorterror in question was speaking in is a slightly insulting expression that the entity they are talking to is acting well above their station, usually applied to players who think they can understand much more about us beyond the eldritch-godsquids-of-the-Furthest-Ring-trying-to-corrupt-you premise without advanced magic, advanced technology, a thorough understanding of narrative principles, and perceptive filters to comprehend cognitohazards.

The Cheery Child/Children: Someone (usually a girl, as the expression is associated with in the Squiddles) or a group who is extremely inquisitive (especially in regards to horrorterrors), or associated with a Mister Bowman and often interrogates them. Often refers to lesser clergy or mere adherents of the Church of the Horrorterrors, or to people who are just beginning to walk down the path of corruption.

The Secret Within Children's Hearts: Is that Sburb is a dick, followed by the real meanings of everything, explaining why we are so secretive and joyful. No, really, that's what it is. Hax. Lol. Also refers to several other deep epic secrets of reality that may or may not actually reside within children's hearts.

Man In The Background: Someone who comments on the size/number/complexity of horrorterrors or their activities as being large. Often used to remind people staring at the vast squiddly bodies that said vast squiddly bodies have really good hearing.

Doot Doot: Obscurative muffling effect making communication difficult (at least to understand), possibly musical-sounding.

*[word or words]* or making airquotes with tentacles: Simplifies making a translation bestfit for comprehension's sake if the concept does not fit into your head or you simply don't understand what the hell they mean, in a usually-futile last-ditch attempt to clarify.

Unicorns: Allied force, usually the Extra-Dimensional Cosmic Superstring Strata.

Sea unicorns: Very close ally, usually specific members of the Strata.

Donkey: Lesser ally, especially if unhelpful. Sometimes used as a slight against lowly-corrupted reticent assets.

Winged dildoes: Angels. Yes, GGTG's guide is that good.

Trident seagoat: Someone who is attacking the Furthest Ring residents but utterly sucks at it, to the point spatiotemporal redirection will result in them hitting themselves more than they will hit us, if at all. Sometimes used as an insult to imply extreme incompetence or self-harming practices. Or when Rain tries to spit into the eye of the abyss and ends up spitting in their own eyes.

Pirate fish: Someone attempting to physically overpower a horrorterror....with no corruption resistance whatsoever, causing them to fail in a very short period of time. Sometimes said as an insult to someone's lack of preparation, or attacking blindly with no idea how dumb of an idea that is at the moment.

Elder Squiddle: Senior in age or rank to the speaking horrorterror, normally only used when speaking to a greater class of divinity.

Great big octopus: Incredibly large and powerful observational horrorterror whose size is much greater than the average titanic behemoth.

Tricorn fish: jpeg artifacted object launched into the Furthest Ring in order to make it leave your Incipisphere.

Angry Urchin: Someone whose intense villainy and utter irredeemable qualities make even elder gods recoil in distaste. Usually refers to Eaten Ones or other moments of Sburb's dickishness.

Jellyfish: Maker of jpeg artifacts, investigator into other parts of Sburb that are probably not going to mind investigation but are not all that relevant to players.

Solar messup: When a jpeg artifact crashes into the Green Sun or other Furthest Ring landmark and promptly fucks up shit globally for a few moments until autocorrect repairs the error.

Magical girl: Practitioner of teh majyyks or someone who is heavily using bodily augmentation/psionics/flashsteps/botany in ways the game did not intend, or otherwise pulling out things the game is not expecting them to have excessively and promptly breaking shit. Also refers to lowly-corrupted lesser allies who are a lot more helpful than most donkeys. Sometimes refers to a Speaker of the Furthest Ring, especially one who did not destroy their session and escape.

Puppet show: Change in narrative function to something with a different format. ESPECIALLY refers to Stage staging, or Flux/Ploy 4th wall violation of multiple kinds.

Bunp: Squiddly equivalent to brofist, taken from the jpeg-artifact-comic hobby certain players take up in their native homeworld before session.

Bed smoking: Post-mating moment. Usually referenced in shitty jokes about ectobiologists or in-medium conception deals to ensure the newborn registers properly. Generally means who you are talking to is prone to making offensive or low-class jokes, and can be taken as rude by certain nobility.

Squiddle school: Organizational and research facility (i.e. Lady Gaga Institute)

School: Like a school of fish, active Sburb sessions or other accumulations of players (like groups on battleships fleeing said sessions).

Air swim: Invading a session, or otherwise entering a coherent spacetime (i.e. gl'bgolyb deployment)

Recess: In school analogies, meaning the horrorterrors will be actively messing around with players.

Bubbling: Creation of a coherent spatiotemporal area, either the Vast Croak or horrorterror-based bubble creation.

Glub/glubbing: General sentence inflator, the 'like' of horrorterror communication, except it's more of a verb or adjective than a connector. Seadweller trolls, especially royalty, tend to share this particular bit.

Sunglasses: Anything that could be theoretically analogous to sunglasses. At all. We have a very loose definition of sunglasses.

Dance of Oblivion: The various abilities that going grimdark grants in their more poetic corruption-related half, not their half-broken game implementations, as well as passing the corruption threshold to go grimdark in polite conversation that doesn't want to reference that more than obliquely.