The Dissatisfied, an analysis
We, us, the Dissatisfied, humans apart from humans, what are we? This is a question often asked both by those who have heard of us, and by many who are classified as one of our number. It is not altogether unusual for one of us to have either no understanding of what we are and how we are different from others, or an incomplete one. After all, rarely does any of us have a real opportunity to learn much about the traits that bring us together aside from what paltry scraps they can glean from their trickle of bleed through. Thus I, The Researcher, have set out to lay it plain for the others.
The beginning of the Dissatisfied lay, like many other fits of absolute lunacy, with a nigh omnipotent (less useful than it sounds honestly), neigh omniscient (not that anyone can really claim more than that, and honestly even that is just a small slice of the knowledge pie), but not altogether wise (mostly in the sense that he ignores what wisdom he has rather than lacks it) idiot. This idiot (also known as The Greatest and Worst of All Humanity), thought to himself one day while looking back on his life "It was really hard for me to get where I am today it is a pretty great place to be. I should help all my alternate possible selves out in moving towards it. I am sure they will appreciate the hand." He thought this having attained supreme power essentially so that he could laze around doing whatever he wanted for all eternity (much less innocent than it sounds actually). So, from that spectacular leap of logic he made another, one so absurd that no culture to my knowledge has made a word to describe the degree of senselessness in the jump. This moron decided that to help his alternates out he would link them all with himself, so that skills, memories, and raw power could flow from him to them. Most unfortunately for reality at large, he did not stop developing his plans right there.
The great idiot went through a long process of working out how to go about enacting his insane plans and revised them many times along the way. He changed it from a simple connection to himself, to a connection of all of his alternates to all of their alternates. Essentially he wanted to connect all beings born of the same set of possibilities as him (it is well known in the field that all of the alternate selves an individual may have are all born of the same set of possibilities, it acting as something of archetype though honestly these sets are so huge that people with completely different traits and lives could be of the same one). Of course this is a task so huge that it would be absolutely impossible even using an array of the most powerful multiversal scale computers in existence. So, he had to find a way to either bypass the need to act on an absolutely untenable scale or make the process a self-propagating work in progress that would never be finished. Naturally, the idiot went for the first option and decided to embed the connection in the shared archetype of his alternates in such a way that it would manifest in absolutely every one of them.
The actual details of what the ritual involved are scare, save to say that quite a lot of trouble was caused. Many tried to stop it, and to others it was simply entertainment. No one really expected it to work. Even those willing to die to stop it were more concerned that the idiot would irreparably break something important to the continued functioning of reality. Against all odds it succeeded. In the course of my research on the subject I have uncovered that the moron set up a shaping array that would make his success more probable the greater the odds stacked against his success were, a feat nearly as absurd as the creation of the Dissatisfied in the first place.
Unfortunately, information on what precisely happened during the transformation is scarce and unreliable. There are reports of phantom limb syndrome, erratic shifts in personality, prolonged comas, and many other odd and concerning phenomenon. However, many of the reports seem to be overstated, or the result of people spontaneously acquiring or adapting to having new and extremely varied and useful capabilities. Some of this may have simply be a result of people being unshackled from their own lack of ability.
The basic effects of the connection are termed as bleed through. Memories, skill, and experience bleed through the connection from person to person. While the connection is applied to all Dissatisfied, for still unknown reasons, the strength and how activity of the connection is varies from person to person. For most it is practically unnoticeable despite its rather dramatic effects on most aspects of life. At a minimum the connection makes learning nearly any skill or delving into any field of knowledge more akin to remembering than learning, often greatly speeding one's progress in the skills development.
However, this is not a universally helpful effect. In the case of skills or knowledge that are superficially similar to, but fundamentally different from, something bleeding in through the connection, the incongruity can actually make it significantly more difficult to progress until one has dealt with the faulty assumptions born of the bleed through and has gained a basic grounding in the field. This phenomenon, though rare, is more common than one might believe as an individual Dissatisfied with the lowest possible connection strength and activity will only be pulling in bleed through from the closest of their fellows. Indeed, such problems all but disappear amongst those who have either stronger connection, or who have fully activated and taken control of it.
While the connection is for the most part unnoticeable even at moderate strength, it is not uncommon for one experience or another to bring one into contact with it. Whether it be from some disturbance coming through the connections, a traumatic experience, the result of meditation or contemplation, or even in a dream when a Dissatisfied first connects with the Doorway, the activity of their connections strengthens by a noticeable margin. The individual may believe it nothing more than a dream, or a delusion at the first contact, but from one follows another and eventually they will be able to envision the fount of their connections in a place at the back of their mind and existence.
It is described in a variety of manners, the most frequent being a floating gate of varying material with some form of inscription on it, usually tightly shut. Other common appearance include fountains of varying descriptions, usually with no more than a trickle of water flow, a great tree covered in flowers, mostly yet to bloom, an array of closed doors in a hall way, even a nebula just starting to condense into a star. For the most part however, it appears as the great floating gate. The surroundings also vary wildly from simple endless white or black planes, to an endless expanse of water and sky upon which one can stand, naturalistic environs such as mountains or the sea, triumphs of architecture and technology, altogether stranger places defying easy description, or even ordinary places place like the individuals bedroom.
Much has been made of the appearance of the Doorway among those like myself. What determines its appearance? Is it a result of an individual's psychology, of their experiences, or even of their potential? Perhaps it is a result of the traits of the closest active dissatisfied. Maybe it is just a matter of personal preference, of what feels most comfortable. Sadly, it has been difficult to impossible to collect a data set of significant enough size and thoroughness on the necessary scale to actually be able to answer most of these questions. Save that generally the appearance of the Doorway changes over time as it is pushed further and further open and as an individual grows and changes, and that sometimes the shape of the Doorway is related to what bleeds through. While there are outliers to this, we have met few enough that it is impossible to discern any kind of consistent cause behind the lack of changes.
That tangent aside, the further open the Doorway is, the closer to completely active the connection is, the more that bleeds through. What an individual may be furnished with reaches beyond the simple learning of skills and knowledge as if they were remembering how to ride a bike, to the experiences of others in the network and even to their memories in rarer cases. Sometimes elements of the biology or of other frameworks of both physical and spiritual existence bleed through the Doorway before the connection is completely active. This being said the more extreme the case of bleed through and the more extreme what is being carried through the connection, the rarer the occurrence. However, this is saying relatively little with the sample sizes we are working with. When dealing with the near infinite possible alternates a given individual may have even rare to near-unique occurrences seem relatively common when they can be placed aside one another and still add up to multitudes.
Once the connection is completely active, the individual gains a great deal of control over the bleed through both to and from themselves. Essentially, they can directly give and receive knowledge, experiences, and even portions of another's core Shape (see Shaping) through the connection given proper consent between fully open individuals. There have also been a few recorded cases of involuntary synchronization between individuals in extreme circumstances. For the most part these have been generally beneficial to both individuals usually with one acting as a donor to help the other through their issues, often forging strong and lasting ties as a result. However, some of these incidences have left those on the receiving end on a spectrum from so completely changed they do not recognize themselves, completely destroyed, or even as little more than an extension of their donor's person. Such cases have fortunately been rare to non-existent and in all known cases an unfortunate result of an unprepared individual either forcing or being forced by circumstances into a synchronization with an individual of the network whose general parameters are either so far beyond theirs as to be problematic, or so incompatible with themselves either mentally or physically that it becomes a problem. Such synchronizations can be done and maintained voluntarily as well generally only becoming a problem when they happen between and open and a closed individual or individuals. Some factions among the Dissatisfied maintain a permanent synchronization between groups or even the whole of their membership.
The actual process of opening the door and taking active control of the connection can happen in a variety of ways. The most obvious and unfortunately most frequent is through either a series of traumatic, highly emotional, or dangerous experiences, or through one intensely traumatic, extremely emotional, or absurdly dangerous experiences. This usually happened by way of either a large shift in perspective brought on by extreme circumstances, or more frustratingly through safety mechanisms inherent to the connection itself (as problematic a thing as it is, it was made with our best interests in mind, if not by someone really thinking through what he was doing). Less problematic methods usually involve at their root some manner of shifting one's perspective. Some have been recorded as opening their Doorway through a series of life altering or significant decisions, others through meditations, and still others through the crossing of some great threshold of their life. Examples of experiences that have opened the Doorway include anything from ascending to the peak a tall mountain (or if you are one of those really intense people climbing a difficult and dangerous cliff face), to getting married, to winning an election, even just realizing that one can indeed quit their shitty job could qualify.
Other effects of the connection are more psychological and existential. The connection has brought the shards of the shared set of possibilities that each of us alternates represents closer together than ever. It has had both a homogenizing and a diversifying effect as a consequence of this. This first is as a result of the existence of the connection itself and of the bleed through granting a set of relatively consistent traits that can be found in most if not all dissatisfied. I will not list them here for the most part as that would be its whole separate analysis and may not end up being entirely relevant. However, this first tendency leads to the second in two ways. In introducing the shared trait of dissatisfaction, with reality. with themselves, in general, and with something altogether more difficult to explain, the Dissatisfied tend to strive in whatever it is they choose to do. They strive for the new, the unprecedented, the unknown, or just the really cool. Ultimately, they go after whatever is most satisfying to them. This has caused a significant degree of diversification amongst those seeking ever more far flung or interesting paths of development and taking them to extremes. On the other hand, the homogenization effect itself has motivated many among the Dissatisfied who are worried about losing their identity or individuality to develop their own character towards uniqueness. Which is simply a fancy way of saying that we often end up trying be an eccentric and end up as some kind of weirdo. Sometimes this shows, and sometimes the shift in though and behavior is so foreign as to be unrecognizable until is butts its head against more common modes of thought.
Last, I shall address the rumors of certain rituals through which the Dissatisfied can call upon the lunatic who connected them all to resolve a most dire situation in front of them. All I am willing to say of this is don't do it, really. It exacts a heavy price and the ritual often naturally takes form in your head as some kind of edgy bullshit. Like for example, shoving a rune carved rail road spike through you eye socket into your brain. Which may not kill you if it works, but what ever you pay for it aside, almost isn't worth it for the sheer embarrassment of having to do something like that. If you have come up with a better, less stupid, less edgy ritual please come forwards. As to the price, I have no earthly idea, no one has been willing to speak of it. At all. It really makes you wonder what sort of asshole the idiot who caused all this is.
