|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 16, 2017 14:20:33 GMT -5
Riku: Some time later, the Great Spirit Mata Nui used the last of his power to create the Tablet of Toa, and now lays in his house, dead but dreaming. That's 20XX years before the Night of the Mongolian Safari. This was also the start of magic, but there was a little problem: it was only the physical framework. Anyone wanna take a guess as to where all the magic comes from?
gM: Oh that's simple. It wasn't there back then. You should have said that it was the start of elemental theory.
Riku: … dammit. Shown up in my own field, I suppose. Perhaps I should compare myself in my other fields of expertise with you later, gM.
gM: The only thing you silly mortals are better than me at is Keyblades, since I have to cheat to use one. I am the master of all four elements. I am the Everything of Everything. I'm not just God Tier, I AM a god. Who do you think was fighting the severe distortion on the Great Hakurei Barrier? Who do you think was the only person in the history of everything to actually kill Chara? Who do you think is the person that SBURB fears most?
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 16, 2017 14:22:14 GMT -5
Riku: Oh, sod off, you cocky overachiever. Nobody really cares about you, and nobody really ever did care. You're just another footnote in history due to your own apathy.
John: shut it, giraffe historian! nobody cares about such sniping.
Everyone: Bicker. [==>]
John: Excuse me would you all please stop fighting. Please stop. Don’t make me do the windy thing.
John: okay, so around a thousand years before that night, the first keyblade wielder, the giraffe madrigal, died. at about the same time, the orb of saltwater was added to the tablet of toa and the star of tropical radiance was created.
Mirai: Well, that’s cool and all, but why did I have to be dragged into this conference?
gM: Ezo Red Fox.
Mirai: What about her?
gM: Yukari gave Ezo Red Fox access to the internet and then tried to take her to the shadier side of Danbooru… with all the raunchy pictures of her. Karkat, however, bought her a game, linked her to… um. I hate to say it, Yukari, but you have a lot of perverted followers out there, if the sheer size of that torrent is just pictures.
gM: Oh, and she’s currently reading through the fanfic, too. She’s right about… right before the war in Gensokyo.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 16, 2017 14:26:10 GMT -5
John: so, riku, you're going to tell me everything you know about the night of the mongolian safari
Riku: Do you want the short version, or the medium one?
John: the longest one obviously
Riku: Okay… Let me get my thoughts in order first…
It was an eventful night that happened roughly about two hundred seven million, two hundred six thousand, eight hundred and seventy-four years in the past, starting when Captain Pooh and his friend Stickmaster Jay managed to steal the Star of Tropical Radiance and the Tablet of Toa from the Mongolians-
John: and the mongolians are?
Riku: They're probably one of the first sentient races to exist. It's almost unanimously agreed that they created at least the Eridanus-Supervoid, and it's confirmed straight from the giraffe’s mouth that they created those guys too.
The duo, after running for countless days, rightfully and hotly pursued by very angry Mongolian troops, took refuge in a small Martian hotel manned by what would be the future queen of Mars. While Cassiopeia was bravely holding off the starving Mongolian forces with food, the Star of Tropical Radiance decided to go off.
First, the sky turned a deep, infinite black. It was as if every star, world, moon and black hole suddenly stopped producing or reflecting light, because you couldn’t even see them from space. Then, slowly, the entire multiverse began to have all of its colours replaced by a blinding, endless white: growing ever outward, in a perfect sphere around the artifact.
The Forerunners, one of the first civilized races of reality, knew that this was a bad thing and all packed themselves inside the recently-completed Submachine, locked the door, and jettisoned the whole thing into the Void, an infinite trench of history beneath the Eridanus-Supervoid.
Meanwhile, the strange effects of this night suddenly reversed the magic flow on Tyria (a major Zebra breakout point at the time,) ruining their best efforts to retake their lost lands and knocking out the Elder Dragons. The smallest, Zhaitan, even starved to death.
To compensate for this sudden loss of magic, all empty space became a rift to Zebraspace. Even the space between quarks. This caused such an influx of magic that worlds had their matter heavily compacted, resulting in it taking thousands of years for ambient magic levels to be sufficient for widespread usage to become common.
Riku: Now, I theorize the reason the Submachine was half embedded in Zebraspace is because Chara took the opportunity to pull Mount Ebott from the Void at that time, and the suction from the pull caused it to be elongated along the wall of the Void… which would explain why it also wound up partially in the Eridanus-Supervoid. John: tell me what the difference is between the void and the super void.
Riku: That's really simple. The Eridanus-Supervoid is where worlds that still have living residents end up when they are forgotten. The Void is where living things go when they are forgotten or erased from history, as well as empty and forgotten worlds. In addition, things in the Void tend to end up half-digested in Zebraspace given enough time.
John: speaking of, who are these zebras and what is zebraspace.
Riku: We… don't really know. The Mongolians didn't really leave much information on them, except for that they were bitter enemies. Basically everything we know that isn't speculation comes from Demo and and Gaster, and neither really remember much. We don't know who they are, what they look like (other than their impossible form and the Phanto masks they are almost never caught without,) what powers they have as a race, how they live, what their culture is like, how they reproduce, why their dimension oozes magic, or what their weaknesses are.
All we know is that they are incredibly powerful; they existed before anything else; they want their land back; they appear as monochrome formless abominations with a terrifying miasmajesty; and their realm consists of a liquid plasma and a gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate that has the appearance of a pinstriped void which is solid enough to breathe with a temperature so nonexistent that it has looped back to absolute zero again.
In short, these astral horrors live in a monochrome and utterly incomprehensible realm. Thankfully, they listen to Gaster enough that a direct invasion through the largest rift is permanently postponed.
Everyone: So THAT'S how it happened!
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 19, 2017 14:04:30 GMT -5
gM: How about we segway on to -
Mirai: Why is Ezo Red Fox so important?
gM: There is a 100% probability that she will start playing SBURB, a 100% chance that she’ll use her connections with Momiji to get in touch with either Reimu or Sakuya to join my group of heroes; and the odds of her surviving her very first game is about a trillion times less than the current chance of our victory over the Ignitions (which is only about 45 out of a million possible outcomes)… at least based off my calculations. Ran Yakumo could probably do better if she could see everything, but we don’t need another person with that many emotional hangups possessing the thousand-yard stare that sees Actuality.
Rita: So what you’re saying is that in only 45 cases in a million, the universe’ll NOT cease to exist?
Tenkai: Those are some shitty odds right there. Can’t you do anything about them?
gM: The standard deviation for those kinds of calculations is plus or minus a couple powers of ten. And no, I can’t fuck around with Reality that much - screwing with all twelve of the Unthinkable Natural Laws at once is the quickest way to summon the Zebras and usher in the end of all things. I’ve already tried that twice on different dimensions, and I got the same result.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 19, 2017 14:30:18 GMT -5
Tenkai: So what’s elemental theory about? Rita: Something about the Tablet of Toa?
Riku: Yep. It’s like, um, you have this nice flat tablet. Ya carve out a perfect hexagon, look at a map of the island of Mata Nui, and then demarcate the air-fire-water->earth lines. (Yeah, you just bore a nice thick line straight from the position of earth to water, skipping ice and stone.)
Riku: Why? That's where the Neopian school of magic lays and it's pretty critical to balancing out the elemental lines. Then you finish filling out a Star of David in the hexagon, and make two soft lines to the center (at air and earth.) You finish by dropping a binary star system in it (any will do.)
Riku: Now, on each side of the hexagon, fill out an equilateral triangle. Finish by drawing lines straight out from each outer vertex. Now you've pretty much replicated an ancient Mongolian magical relic, and it'll automagically form a nice little web.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 19, 2017 14:31:44 GMT -5
gM: Well, you lost me. Just to be clear, you draw a hexagon, then put a binary star system in the middle, then draw lines connecting the bottom center and top left points to the middle?
Riku: Yep.
gM: And you also draw a line from the top left to the top right, which you were going to do anyway.
Riku: That’s right.
gM: And then you draw triangles on the sides.
Riku: Correct.
gM: And then draw lines from all twelve of the outer vertexes.
Riku: Yes, that’s a fact.
gM: And it automatically codifies not only the Matoran and Neopian systems of magic, but also the Arcatnyan, Skylands, Pokémon, Tyrian, and Kingdom schools; as well as the hypothetical Neo-Arcadian elements?
Riku: Exactly.
gM: The HYPOTHETICAL elements? Plasma, Sun, Sand, Seawater, Snow, Lava, Glacier, Magma, Saltwater?
Riku: Those ones are included, yes.
gM: … And that was a good 20XX plus somewhere between a hundred and two hundred million years before any of those worlds ever existed.
Riku: That is indeed the case.
gM: … I live in a Reality full of crazy.
John: don’t we all. Tenkai: Amen. Let’s drink to that.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 19, 2017 14:35:28 GMT -5
Mirai: What’s this about boundary physics? Yukari: Exactly What It Says On The TingM: … Nefer007, I know you’re the one typing and watching this game. Could you please not link people to places that aren’t Youtube, KHInsider Music, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, or your deviantART page? Even if you only heard about this place through word of TvTropes, this isn’t an irregular webcomic.John: ??? Rita: Specifically, the main point of boundary physics is how it screws up normal physics.Tenkai: Yeah, you have to start with taking each individual particle in the region you want to make a boundary and setting each particle’s velocity to exactly i in all directions. Thankfully that’s not too bad, as you only have to make the same calculation 360 times and then you can just repeat the whole pattern 360 times. However - Rita: you next use a tuning fork to tell it how big it needs to be; use a harp to set the direction of growth; and then sing about bees in silly hats to determine the shape, which all depends on the pitch and length of the second note in the fourth line; and - Yukari: you have to pour enough divine energy or Force energy into it to actually grow the barrier to that size, and then you have to - Tenkai: first break a pure silver mirror on the boundary, followed by a bottle of champagne that is at least twenty years old -Rita: and then you throw a handful of ice cubes at it. This is done because -Yukari: you then have to have someone else cast Magic Missile at it and have it impact the boundary, and the only way to do so is to use ice -Tenkai: which for some reason sticks to the barrier -Rita: and since the ice cube is stuck to the barrier, the shock of the spell impacting the ice - Tenkai: gets transferred over to the boundary, as per normal physics would indicate.Riku: And then you duck, because the spell is also reflected back at the barrier builders.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 19, 2017 14:40:37 GMT -5
Tenkai: Exactly. You don’t want to get hit with the spell, because then you have to make a DC 50 check versus CHA to avoid being consumed by your own boundary. That will drastically reduce it in size, to the point that if just two people fail that check, the entire thing implodes on itself and the whole thing goes to waste.
Rita: And even if you do make that check, getting hit by the reflected spell makes the barrier far weaker for each person hit, thereby requiring even more upkeep.
gM: But wouldn’t breaking the mirror severely harm your chances of finalizing the barrier?
Yukari: Yes. That’s why you need to bring Hina along, as well as make sure that the wind is blowing due north when you sing the last line of the song about the bees -
Tenkai: don’t forget about invoking the name of The Good Elephant -
Rita: followed by throwing salt at the barrier to finalize it.
Yukari: It’s tradition to throw it over your shoulder for that extra pinch of luck. You’ll know if you were successful if the salt halts its horizontal movement and sets its vertical velocity to -1 times the sum of the absolute values of its x-velocity and y-velocity.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 23, 2017 19:12:04 GMT -5
John: i think the next thing on the list is magiscience and magibiology, or should we just do all the biology topics together?
gM: Eh, let's do the regular science first. My old man was a biologist, you see, so I'm actually familiar with that subject… although my knowledge is probably quite antiquated by now, given that I was one of the first ten million players of SBURB. I think I might actually predate Chara.
Yukari: Well, that's easy to do. About ten years ago, I managed to get Riku, Vexen, Marisa, Patchy, Luke Skywalker, a few of the old witches of yore (Morgana and that one Greek demigoddess come to mind) and Merlin together in a room to talk shop. I think Kaihua Purring and Ellen showed up as guest speakers as -
gM: The fifth of those is not like the others.
Yukari: Hey, he was curious as to how the Force stacked up to magic. Turns out only Purring could really tell the difference. In the end, we decided to use yodas as the unit for Force energy output, caved in to Marisa’s request to use the Master Spark as a baseline for magical energy output, and decided that the Force was a type of innate non-elemental magic that smelled of cinnamon and strawberries.
gM: WHAT.
Rita: *spit take*
Tenkai: *chokes on cookie*
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 30, 2017 10:09:00 GMT -5
Riku: bwuh?
John: to borrow a line from tG, i say:
John: what
gM: DON'T YOU DARE SLANDER THE STAR WARS FRANCHISE LIKE THAT EVER AGAIN, BECAUSE I WILL HAUNT YOU THROUGH TIME AND SPACE - eep! Shit it's gonna -
Riku: Yep, she's a native Dame of Rage all right. Let’s adjourn for a tea break until she can get back online.
Tenkai: *still sputtering*
Mirai: You okay there buddy?
Tenkai: *shakes head*
Rita: Here, have some tea.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 30, 2017 10:12:26 GMT -5
gM: I'm so sorry about that. Sometimes if I get annoyed I laspe into [purple prose].
John: huh, that ren guy just sent us a letter.
Yukari: “You are making a mockery of magic, please stop?” “What about faith-based magic, where does it fit in?”
Riku: What's your thoughts on the matter, Rita?
Rita: From what I recall, faith is equal parts non-elemental, holy, dark, and life, with a smidge of that deity’s domain element (although I remember that YHVH’s divine power is one part physical to two parts holy.)
Tenkai: How the hell would you know that?
Rita: Lady Rumi is a Catholic, and she called in a favor with the Pope. Trust me, we were all astonished that the barrier actually worked.
Yukari: Huh.
gM: Interesting. Wonder if the old guy’s still alive.
Riku: Last I heard, he wasn't doing too well. Had to ditch his divine-as-fuck beard to manifest that classical sculpted torso again. Word on the street is that the Dragon Palace is letting him crash there as he recovers from the crisis.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 30, 2017 10:16:07 GMT -5
Rita: Let's go with the Ignitions. What are they, and why should I be so worried?
Riku: How about we start with the fact that their first two leaders got their butts stomped so hard by Purring that they joined the fight against them?
John: not to mention she destroyed them all while dead.
Yukari: And despite all of that, after a whole, oh, 15 years, they've come back wearing green. Oh, and they're more corruptive than ever.
gM: My best guess is that they're going to kill Skaia to try to take over the universe. We know that's not going to produce the desired effect. Can we talk about land mechanics now?
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 30, 2017 10:18:02 GMT -5
John: sure thing. this new SBURB uses a simplified version of the old one's mechanics: the lands of x and y and frogs have all the land modifiers visible; land modifiers relating to aspects, sources of corruption, pumpkins, and the circus are applied on a ebonpyre-by-ebonpyre basis (only the calmest of ebonpyres are safe from having their biome overwritten;) and dungeons are immune to biome effects.
Riku: Underlings also don't like to leave their Ebonpyre. You can use them to figure out Ebonypre borders along with gravitational shifts.
gM: I've noticed that the Atomic and Tribal Ebonpyres tend to have aspect and corruption-related biomes. Any reason why?
Riku: That's to increase the difficulty passively. SBURB often flips out violently if you try to make the game easier and will always push back. It also keeps repeatedly making pumpkins exist and/or unexist. We think it has something to do with stairs and GAXEKIND.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 30, 2017 10:23:44 GMT -5
Tenkai: Oh, who's this Chara person you guys mentioned earlier?
John: basically the biggest threat since the ignitions.
Riku: A notorious player-killer and the scourge of all life, from what little legends I’ve heard of her.
gM: azureGoddess, 「The Ancient Genocider」. A gestalt lich formed from pure DETERMINATION with an aeons-long blood oath against all life. Currently still scoring kills in Reality despite being dead in Zebraspace. She still carries the knife that she used in Mount Ebott. She has only suffered one defeat in her infinite lifespan: she lost to yours truly.
gM: Some people say that Chara Rosemary is death incarnate, and quite frankly I believe them. Did you know that SBURB was supposed to be a open-source public project? The grim darkness only set in when she arrived: her revenge was planned out over a patently near-infinite timespan. John, you only delayed the end of all things with your homestuck victory. The Reality you and your friends didn’t not create in your native canon barely made a million years before it was destroyed.
gM: Oh, and it gets worse - that plan of hers? It’s moving towards its conclusion at the speed of plot.
Tenkai: You can measure the speed of plot, right?
gM: No, you can’t. The speed of plot is all the speeds. ALL OF THEM.
Rita: I’m a little rusty on what a Keyhole is. Can someone remind me what a keyhole is again?
Riku: The heart of a world. It's every Heartless’ goal to find and consume the hearts of worlds, and the mission of most Keyblade bearers to seal these first.
|
|
|
Post by Nefer Nightbug on Jun 30, 2017 10:27:41 GMT -5
Mirai: Can we get to the biology part?
Rita: Not until we get to the fully-integrated waifu systems.
Tenkai: I was told there would be D&D. I wanna play D&D.
gM: I haven't taken enough potshots at the author yet. Nefer007, you are a mad man. You suck so hard, you could give Kirby a run for his money.
John: my hammer shall make RIDICULOUS HATS for us to try on! :B
Riku: …
Yukari: Most of those are wonderful ideas!
Mirai: Goddammit, you gap hag, stop cheering them on. I need to get back to work as soon as possible.
Riku: Uhh… Mirai-san, you shouldn't say that in front of my mother. She… tends to run the people that say that over with a train.
Mirai: don' care, wanna just get this done.
|
|