Oh dear god it's the forums

[smashingBrawler]

Alright, where do I begin? smashingBrawler here, native Page of Stars.

Okay, where do I start? I was part of Team Ascending Cascade back in the day. Long story short, nerdyProspector scratched and it turned out our Waste of Doom's big thing basically broke open a hole in reality that was linked to a tunnel that had been formed by a Grace of Void who had been literally floating in the void for who knows how long. We traversed into our own session's post-scratch alternate session, and found that NP existed in both worlds, probably due to Null doing some really weird stuff, and apparently just using him twice in order to set up the Grace.

Either way, we completed the session in the post-scratch world, we claimed the reward and everything. We thought maybe the level of shenanigans involved would save us. It didn't. What I do know is that I've been through about 8 sessions since then, this is now my 10th session that has started and let me just say it is good to see everyone out here, even if a lot of this place feels like a ghost town. I managed to end up in this session with two of my old friends from back in my first session: native Seer of Heart faultyCoordinator and native Witch of Rain sanitysController. It's just the three of us, but it's pretty cool. My first time as either part of Seer of Blood. FC has ended up as a Thief of Hope for the second time now, and SC has, apparently rolled Muse of Dream 4 times in a row. I think she got rain again before that, and SBURB is still trying to undo the damage.

Anyway! I'll be around to give some advice, let people know what's going on when horrorTerror doesn't beat me to it (or anybody else who comes back, for that matter). Which reminds me, actually, HT, we might need to have a chat about some of your colleagues.

[horrorTerror]

Hello and welcome back. Feel free to ask me about the fellow sky squid

[smashingBrawler]

So, first, what is it exactly that happens to our shinies when we come into contact with Other-related stuff, if you know? 

[horrorTerror]

I can't be 'exact' exactly, because most of it is incredibly hard to explain or incomprehensible and in wrong *languages* and I haven't really taken any players personally in ages, but I will...try. I'm in the middle of paperwork so this is a quickthought at best.

Most Others-corrupted material affects the 'game code' reality around it, overlaying it with a less abstractified/more abstractified buffer to keep the effects where it breaks stuff to where the parties involved (other than Sburb because Sburb's pseudointelligence is insane and not in a good *flavor*) can do what they want. Essentially the same stuff that happens when someone else modifies a shiny with just about anything else, but we override a whole bunch of other scripts and can go further than players and basic coding can because of brute-forcing everything with eldritch magic, plus we institute that aforementioned secondary layer of coding-magic that sort of abstractifies/deabstractifies the process of corruption from our end so we have leniency with abstractions and can break everything we want with script errors. We can even corrupt stuff like Flesh undead or Skaia that are normally unable to be shinyhacked (due to Flesh violently preventing Heart etc. from interfering to ensure stuff doesn't break more than it already does, and Skaia's absurdly high shiny level respectively) because we can override all the ancillary junk designed to prevent Heart from just rewriting everybody ever with a physical shiny and calling it a day. While we're hacking up shinies we set up all this stuff on the 'outside' part of a shiny, which is why people are USUALLY not a complete wreck after getting purged of Others corruption unless they actually did something. This stuff we add makes them a conduit for eldritch majjyks and stuff and generally results in the actual corruptedness parts as it builds up and we gain more control. Angels *eat out* space in the shiny to input their stuff, which is why when it gets removed they have holes in it, incidentally.

Well, primarily it's just hacking the earthly side and...well...more metaphysical stuff that's hard to explain. It's still at least partially a soul, if you get the drift (player souls are hard to explain because Sburb does all sorts of weird stuff and realitycoding. That's why you can't sell it to the devil for any form of profit to you when you summon him lol and we can only pluck out someone's dreamexistences to a dreambubble after they are dead in at least some form), but it's also still a regular shiny that can be modified, and dear god can we modify it. Since the Furthest Ring is technically by default in balance of all aspects and then we horrorterrors sit around and glub bubbles and do our horrorterrory things incomprehensible to playerkind, it is not that hard to learn the *balance* of Heart and Rage (perhaps with a sprinkle of Rain and Dreams and Light and Law) with which to make reality obey, and then mimic it with traditional eldritch dark majjyks that being a giant tentacle god means we have a big affinity for, and all that drift. The latter part is why you can fix Others corruption with a hug and some weird bugs or sacred frog auras, while it is much harder to do so for getting raged at or shinyfucked or even hopejected or rained on or dreamed at or law-d over, because it sort of spiritually invokes Sburb or something and that is opposed in such a way that stuff stops working because the reins break.

Personal contact with an Other or their direct sphere of existence has them inflict it straight up with magic, while just sort of bathing in our existential auras from a distance or through equipment associated with it isn't as good access to the shiny so we have to work way slower in order to actually stick stuff on there. Think of it like building a house. It's a lot easier with construction equipment and architectural magic rather than using chopsticks to handle all the work, but if you have enough hands you can sort of still brute-force it over time, even if it'll be a shoddier house overall.


The hacking side of this is what triggers traditional Sburban defensive mechanisms, and partially why most of the non-aspect ones are completely useless. The queens and NPC-based-corruption-detection in general work absolutely fine because it is really more noticing something has been altered unexpectedly rather than trying to recover it, the Vault works perfectly because you can eject virtually anything from reality with that.

Ante Matter doesn't work because a. it's unfinished and underimplemented and even set to 0, b. Classes are not as conceptually all-pervasive as Aspects and unless you got [ something ] of [ something that SHOULD be a class] as a title with a class in the aspect slot the beta isn't tested up yet, and c. because everyone and their unearthly grandmother is hacking the potatoes out of Sburb when they corrupt stuff in the first place, or Sburb actively invoked it via alchemyspawning an item or rolling up the corrupted landgens we and angels independently hacked in. The vague corruption stat is similarly an indicator flag set off by the existence of what Sburb can realize is corruption.

Aspect-based resistance buffs and frogs work fine because they know how we work in the Furthest Ring and are such deep fundamental ASPECTS of reality that their pseudointelligences-behind-Whisperings can make stuff happen magically to keep us out. Say, when Squiddissension goes off the N ll says 'GTFO horrorterrors' and erases all our hard work in taking someone over, which is why they need so much corruption in order to be overwhelmed because the Vo d has to get sick of having to deal with it all and give up or be overwhelmed more immensely rather than normal structural setup. When an anti-corruption ability is readied, Sburb is getting desperate at keeping us out so it lets the 'unrestrained' aspects (the divine power inside of universes that most if not all Replayer-chains players will never ever see or experience, sorry~, plus the similarly unmitigated but more wild and balanced morass in the Furthest Ring (it's why furthest ring timespace is so complicated)) out to play in order to directly combat what it perceives as a problem. Frogs are sort of similarly empowered divine magic stuff like player friendships~~~ (Gfrog is called a god for a reason), while weird bugs are more aspect-tied bugfixes.


Here's a sample. Cedar down at Porphyrion makes poorly photoshopped ideaconcepts out of images taken from across space and time in her spare time so I put in a commission and got it back in a few hours. Sadly, I was not detailed enough and she just threw together some stuff that I've barely glanced at.

...oh god it's horribly inaccurate

SPOILER: Click to show

Let's say a Heart player, or even someone with enough mastery of Heart majjyks to do the basic hearty thing of pulling out a shiny soulcore and interfering with it (we'll go with, say, Aurale Noblis/authoritarianEnigma since she's been pretty okay with Heart ever since she finished a session as Seer of Heart), takes out a player core for us (we'll go with Kevin Horde-Leader/penitentGropagas since I've had to actually deal with his shiny a few times). This actually happened on Aurale's Land of Forests and Mountains a while ago when Aurale was a Knight of Light and Kevin was a Bard of Life. Don't worry, he got better and neither of them died.


...



...
Anyways, here's a shoddily written selection of some random obvious things that Aurale can see from casual analysis, which an abstraction has been placed over so the rest of us can see without having to be Heartthrobs.


When a Heart player edits stuff, they do so by directly editing the thing rather than building over it. The game acknowledges this and plans around it.

When Others edit your soul, they don't mess too much with the shiny itself because the game has too much coding associated with that to quickfix, so we just over time build stuff on top of it to work around and slowly winnow it out, then add all the other stuff in.

[smashingBrawler]

Okay so that, that all actually makes sense to me I think. So, my next questions are: When my friends and I made our travel through the furthest ring thanks to the Grace's pathway - what kept us protected the most from interference? Were we just lucky enough to avoid any dangerous Others? Was it the void effects? Was it a result of our Waste of Doom's cataclysm that broke open that hole in the furthest ring? Were any of your kind harmed by either cataclysm? Am I effectively putting an inter-dimensional hit out on myself as I write this?

It's entirely possible more was going on from the Grace's end, she never really wanted to talk about it too much or anything though. She was scarily in tune with Null. I'm just trying to put the pieces together so I can be prepared in case something like that even comes up again.

[horrorTerror]

I have no idea.

More specifically, I'm pretty sure Void does what Void wants. If it set up a special pathway you might not even have fully been there.

Were you SURE you were even fully in the Furthest Ring specifically because of that pathway that Doom broke open and Void built? Voi has its own sort of partial-alternativespace pocket dimension holdbu ble where Magicants and other interspatial spacespaces underlying most of everything like a Magicant underlies a session, usually jammed somewhere between Strata and Ring, because it's like weird and stuff and like Space and Time is sort of a super-aspect (although way less relevant to universes), and if anyone could channel it open enough and long-term-passively for it to actively transport things bigger than a person rather than just hold rooms or a thief/rogue phasing partially o t of existence it would be a Grace. Basically whenever you *tunnel* apart spacetime itself in the Furthest Ring, you run into the V idy Things and a whole bunch of seizuretastic rainbows, and then you can *dig* a little bit *further* to reach the Strata where stuff's just high-energy crazy infinityceptions. I think your Doomchild stopped *tunneling* at the voidy level and then the Grace dragged everyone through it partially while keeping you just aligned enough so that you could physically encounter but not have problems with Furthest Ring existentiospaces. You know how Void dreamselves can sometimes decide to flop off out of reality into somewhere which isn't real or anywhere or all the way out to physical dreambubbles in some form of weird dreamless sleep? The reason they don't accidentally hit horrorterrors at FTL velocity when returning to their dream moon is because voidy paths like the one you used, albeit way less intense and probably slower.

The aftermath of broken universes falls into there I think, something something antithesis to Mist. I haven't had to deal with it beyond that it's basically what long-term gates tunnel through and how Void players don't have to plan their routes to not hit people at several times the speed of light. Provided nobody particularly wanted to off anyone that timestamp you would really only have to focus on not hitting stuff so yeah you probably did.

If you rip a hole in the Furthest Ring the aspects have to knit it up once whatever it is stops screwing it up, so if Doom decided 'THIS PATCH OF SPACETIME IS NOW DOOMED BYEBYE' and ripped it out of place, that's a thing that can happen and doesn't really do much in the long term once the aspects rebalance over it. Provided nobody was hit by the initial blast nobody should have been hurt at all tbh. Deicide is not that easy, especially since nobody keeps all their bodies in one place anymore so they always can come back from somewhere else, and Space and Time from what I've heard are usually way noble about getting punched in the metaphorical and metaphysical gut with aspectsplosions all over the place so they're chill if it's something more conceptual than a rando player on their own volition.

You're probably innocent in all this, and if the Blight and Null really desired that THAT HAPPEN, especially together of all things and Null doing the passage with Doom doing the opener, it's probably not all that problematic even for those directly involved.

If Null had an OPINION and Blight AGREED, then this is probably pretty immense. This plays into a cosmological theory I and some other Others have been developing that the Aspects are getting tired of Sburb's shit because they've kind of grown attached to all the champions they get and are getting pissy about having to discard them and raise up more often than not directly opposing and identity-established people. The fact that two cataclysms and a Scratch-escape stacked up is pretty impressive too.

I have relatively little proof of my own beyond 'Rhyme cataclysmblocked a Sburb plot' and now 'Void and Doom teamed up to do something unnecessarily complicated outside of their normal domain in potential hopes of testing something', but some of the higher-ups whispered about it and some science types were looking into it recently and still are.

Idunno lol voidy shenanigans are designed NOT to hit horrorterrors by accident, so Void is probably most responsible here.

[smashingBrawler]

Alright, cool, thanks for putting all of that into some easier light. I was more concerned about if like, some Other was particularly fond of something caught in the initial Doomsplosion. Good to know that it's more doom and void doing weird stuff.

That said, what if this is all what Skaia wanted? The Grace was never actually in a session as a player, she was the guardian to nerdyProspector in both cases, as far as I understnad - somehow, though, there was a third iteration of her which existed out in the void. I'm still operating under the assumption that something huge was going on with her, but I'm no expert on N  l and I will never pretend to understand what it is or was doing.

[horrorTerror]

Guardian alignments aren't usually that powerful, being just echoes of (in the case of pre-scratch potential) champions' natures if I remember correctly from that one book with the bombs in it. Did the Time player in the post-scratch session have a Scratch construct available at the end and a Denizen was available? Someone or something might have set it off as you all left which could have created a second scratched-verse. While I struggle to conceive of a situation where Echidna would kill a whole universe in contradiction to the World, anything sufficiently powerful can set off a scratch construct so who knows.

Maybe the Grace was just a single-nullie. Graces are passive, so they wouldn't pick an active path...I don't know. Maybe she's destined for something greater if she was just floating out there. She was godtier in the void, right? You shouldn't have been able to tell the title otherwise, unless I missed something.

Skaia's whims are pretty confusing when they're whims at all beyond 'process luck/predestination bullshit' and 'defense portal alignment'.

[smashingBrawler]

Yeah, she definitely wasn't the guardian when we met her in the void. Yes, there was also a scratch object in the second world, and here's part of where things get really tricky, and I guess I should've lead with this. We activated both scratch devices. We managed to pull it off the second time with everyone getting out and into the reward. My world was almost certainly the post-scratch verse, though we did not put this together at the time. I guess it's possible that the session my original world's scratch device created had the Grace. Man I have had way too many close calls with scratching. Anyway, long story short, she was alone and a badass, but she definitely took after NP's guardian(s?).