Deedeequest or The Wonders of Mundus: Be Careful Who You Pretend To Be - A Genderous Isekai Quest

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How Dice Rolls Work
  • Informational
    • Character sheet is here.

    Dice rolls are 1d10 + Stat + Proficiency + any applicable bonuses, such as Boons.

    You may spend 3 Tension to Overdrive for a retroactive +5 to your roll (a Determination Overdrive), or +3 to an ally's roll (a Teamwork Overdrive). I will also automatically overdrive to avoid exhaustion or unconsciousness.

    It is possible to critically succeed (on +5 on skill checks and +10 on combat rolls) or critically fail (by the same margins), but rolling a 1 or a 10 does not automatically crit in either case. It is possible to crit retroactively by Overdriving.

    Your stat bonuses have names:
    • Vigor grants a Strength bonus.
    • Agility grants a Dexterity bonus.
    • Spirit grants an Aura bonus.
    • Mind grants an Intuition bonus.
    • Resolve grants a Guts bonus.
    Dice are rolled on a first come, first serve bonus. You only roll for Deedee.
     
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  • Informational
    • Man. Probably not right now, but we do need to talk to Alesha about Deedee's self-discovery. Team Mom and Token Cis Person are an awkward combination.

    [X] Go talk to the refugee camp and find the rest of the guild.
    [X] Meet the father of the girl you rescued.
    [X] Meet with the priesthood and pray to, if no others, Sylphan and Aurora.

    Mundus... (Pick all that apply.)
    [X] Has been kind to me so far.
    [X] Is an amazingly beautiful place.
    [X] Has helped me 'hatch,' and I'm grateful for that.
    [X] Is uncanny - every time I think Earth's history applies, it's slightly wrong.
    [X] Is part of a game system as much as a real place, and it's not wise to forget that.
    [X] Is a minefield of politics we need to understand to survive.

    Do we have feelings for Hikaru? (Approval voting applies. This will not lock out other romances.)
    [X] I think I'm starting to, yeah.
    [X] Maybe? He's a good friend and confidant, anyway.
    [X] I mean, I'm not going to make the first move, but I wouldn't turn him down...

    Anyone who thinks I'm not going to vote for "everyone" in romance routes has never watched me watch anime.

    [X] [CHARGE CHANCE]: Hikaru interpreted the directions in the vision as northwest, or north by northwest. Assuming this part of Mundus has similar geography to Europe, the only land that you'd get there (after traveling over the sea at all) is the British Isles analog. A standing stone - not a runestone, a carved standing stone with both images and writing on it - is indicative of Celtic-equivalent cultures, as are the spiral-based images (not that those are exclusve to Celts, but we're probably a ways off from Indo-Aryan predecessor cultures or Junji Ito references here). And from there, Hikaru made the logical assumption that all of the imported people wound up in local starting zones, which in Caelibyrn, are called Caer Islywn, and obviously the wiki admin knows this.
     
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    Nerdorama said:
    And from there, Hikaru made the logical assumption that all of the imported people wound up in local starting zones, which in Caelibyrn, are called Caer Islywn, and obviously the wiki admin knows this.
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    Point of order because Deedee would know this: a caer is a castle. Caer Islywn isn't a tutorial zone like the Shores but an urban hub zone like Viacruz.

    It's an understandable mistake to make especially if you know even less Welsh than I do!
     
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    Fair enough, but I'm gonna assume that this game is fairly symmetrical in starting areas and they all have an instanced tutorial zone adjacent to a large, fortified city hub. Viacruz for the Shores of Awakening, "Castle Below The Grove" for uh, I guess some kind of grove.
     
    [X] Go talk to the refugee camp and find the rest of the guild.
    [X] Meet the father of the girl you rescued.
    [X] Meet with the priesthood and pray to, if no others, Sylphan and Aurora.

    [X] Has been kind to me so far.
    [X] Is an amazingly beautiful place.
    [X] Has helped me 'hatch,' and I'm grateful for that.
    [X] Is part of a game system as much as a real place, and it's not wise to forget that.
    [X] Is a minefield of politics we need to understand to survive.
    [X] Doesn't need us fucking it up for the locals.

    [X] Maybe? He's a good friend and confidant, anyway.
    [X] I mean, I'm not going to make the first move, but I wouldn't turn him down...
    [X] I dunno, but maybe flirting with him would be fun?
    [X] He's a friend and a teammate, and I don't want to ruin that.
     
    Nerdorama said:
    Fair enough, but I'm gonna assume that this game is fairly symmetrical in starting areas and they all have an instanced tutorial zone adjacent to a large, fortified city hub. Viacruz for the Shores of Awakening, "Castle Below The Grove" for uh, I guess some kind of grove.
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    Hold on... if "Islywn" means "beneath the grove", then is the vision a pun? Did it show the cathedral scryer "a spire of rock poking out of the ground in a grove" as a way of illustrating "a castle underneath a grove" in the literal sense?

    Edit: Yes, I think this will be my [Charge Chance] attempt.
     
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    Qoheleth said:
    Hold on... if "Islywn" means "beneath the grove", then is the vision a pun? Did it show the cathedral scryer "a spire of rock poking out of the ground in a grove" as a way of illustrating "a castle underneath a grove" in the literal sense?
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    If you don't feel like elaborating or effortposting, I'll count this as your Charge Chance attempt.
     
    [X] Go talk to the refugee camp and find the rest of the guild.
    [X] Meet the father of the girl you rescued.
    [X] Meet with the priesthood and pray to, if no others, Sylphan and Aurora.

    [X] Has been kind to me so far.
    [X] Is an amazingly beautiful place.
    [X] Has helped me 'hatch,' and I'm grateful for that.
    [X] Is part of a game system as much as a real place, and it's not wise to forget that.
    [X] Is a minefield of politics we need to understand to survive.
    [X] Doesn't need us fucking it up for the locals.

    [X] I think I'm starting to, yeah.
    [X] Maybe? He's a good friend and confidant, anyway.
    [X] I mean, I'm not going to make the first move, but I wouldn't turn him down...
    [X] I dunno, but maybe flirting with him would be fun?
     
    I appreciate that the votes on Smooch Nerd y/n when laid out like this sound like Deedee babbling to a confidant about her complex feelings.

    That was wholly unintentional but it does work.
     
    [X] Meet the father of the girl you rescued.
    [X] Meet with the priesthood and pray to, if no others, Sylphan and Aurora.
    [X] Get new weapons and armor.
    Should meet with that family before leaving. Upgrading from newbie gear sounds good. And Religion in Mundus has been strangely successful so far, so it makes sense to me to lean into it even more and see what happens.

    [X] Is an amazingly beautiful place.
    [X] Has helped me 'hatch,' and I'm grateful for that.
    [X] Is part of a game system as much as a real place, and it's not wise to forget that.
    I like to stay positive, and these are positive. Excluding the 'kind' option, because I don't feel like a world that strongly encourages people to engage in violent combat against monsters qualifies as 'kind', even if it does give them the muscle memory to make it work.

    [X] I think I'm starting to, yeah.
    [X] Maybe? He's a good friend and confidant, anyway.
    [X] I mean, I'm not going to make the first move, but I wouldn't turn him down...
    [X] I dunno, but maybe flirting with him would be fun?
    An approval vote for all of the above, under the principle of "Make silly mistakes and still be friends afterwards." Who could possibly resist the TOWERING ATOMIC MASCULINITY of this dainty four-foot fairyman?
     
    MooseHowl said:
    [X] Meet the father of the girl you rescued.
    [X] Meet with the priesthood and pray to, if no others, Sylphan and Aurora.
    [X] Get new weapons and armor.
    Should meet with that family before leaving. Upgrading from newbie gear sounds good. And Religion in Mundus has been strangely successful so far, so it makes sense to me to lean into it even more and see what happens.

    [X] Is an amazingly beautiful place.
    [X] Has helped me 'hatch,' and I'm grateful for that.
    [X] Is part of a game system as much as a real place, and it's not wise to forget that.
    I like to stay positive, and these are positive. Excluding the 'kind' option, because I don't feel like a world that strongly encourages people to engage in violent combat against monsters qualifies as 'kind', even if it does give them the muscle memory to make it work.
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    You're not wrong that this is a world designed for a bloody sort of adventure, and that's a fair reason to consider it less than kind. It's one thing to dream of slaying dragons, and quite different to sleep with one eye open because you once felt the heat rolling from a dragon's maw.

    And of course the religion works here. Similar worked for hundreds of years across the Roman Empire, with less proof of divine intervention than the locals have.

    MooseHowl said:
    Who could possibly resist the TOWERING ATOMIC MASCULINITY of this dainty four-foot fairyman?
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    Quoted for truth.
     
    MooseHowl said:
    Who could possibly resist the TOWERING ATOMIC MASCULINITY of this dainty four-foot fairyman?
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    I certainly can't, if my track record is any indication. (I say, gesturing at my signature.)

    (I'm not saying that Talia and I wrote him flirting with the god of the pixies at one point last year, but I'm not saying we didn't either.)
     
    Well, Nerdo and I are on a surprisingly similar wavelength. XD

    (Or maybe not that surprising, given we're both history nerds.)
     
    Talia B said:
    Hikaru is my invention. Most of them are, with @FoxHana 's Ace and @bii 's devteam as notable exceptions.

    That Bii decided Hikaru is her OC's type is mostly amusing to me.
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    I write the devteam, Frankie Bacon, sometimes Thorne.tcai, and a couple people you haven't met yet technically, including the Most Powerful Adventurers In The World (TM).

    And it's entirely Talia's fault for making him entirely too good with words... and I suppose my own for making characters that have a thing for witty people.
     
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    Meanwhile, in Peachiquest part 1 by Fabricati
  • Sidestory
    • Iren Aertithwyr shrugged uncomfortably as he waited nervously for Peachi to come out of her trance. He'd never felt so out of the loop as now, when the #newbie channel was no longer an option and never having felt any FC was a good fit. He'd left his claidhmor at the door, but the straps in his self armor felt restricting. He wanted to be doing.

    He was glad to have a sendjewel now, but he hoped that Peachi's FC mate-- what was their name again? Charr Aznable?-- would be back soon.

    Peachi opened her eyes. The visual effect of being in a trance-- like stars dimming, going out-- was disconcerting on this side of the helmet; that combined with the sensory overload probably explained the very common blindfolds for Psychics.

    "I... I should tell you what I Saw."

    Still... This was obviously a kid. He might be terrible with kids but by the gods you don't abandon a child. "Tell me. I'll try and write it all down."

    "I felt someone trying to find me, and entered a kything with them." Peachi sat up on the bench where Iren had laid her down after he'd caught her when she'd kythed. "I tried to send a message of where I was, and asked of them where they were. I... I saw a rising sun, the golden cross of Aurora. My head turned and the cross followed my eyes, a shield, my mother's face, a gravel road I think?"

    Peachi shut her eyes and put a hand to her temple, felt the horn there, shook her head. "It went milky. My head hurts, they're probably pretty far."

    "That's probably the overload. No blindfold."

    She nodded. "I think I should stay in the church. I told them I was safe and would stay here."

    "Want me to send for Charr?"

    Peachi nodded.

    Iren stood and walked a bit away and activated the sendjewel.

    "Make it quick," Charr said, a little clipped.

    "Peachi kythed with someone looking for her-- might be at behest of her mom, since she was in the vision. Mild headache." Iren swallowed his anxiety. "She's asking to stay in Aurora's care until her mom can come get her."

    "Let her," Charr said. "... I'll be by soon, don't go anywhere."

    Iren nodded and then remembered this was not a visual medium. "Like I told you, I'm not abandoning a lost kid. See you soon."

    ETC: momsince was bothering me
     
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  • Sidestory
    • Presumably Charr Aznable is an Ubastim.

    In something red, that triples his speed.

    ETA: Enjoy +1 Tension.
     
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    What do we do before we leave for our quest? Pick any three.
    [X] Purchase potions from the Flammite temple.
    [X] Go talk to the refugee camp and find the rest of the guild.
    [X] Meet the father of the girl you rescued.

    Mundus...
    [X] Has been kind to me so far.
    [X] Is an amazingly beautiful place.
    [X] Has helped me 'hatch,' and I'm grateful for that.
    [X] Is part of a game system as much as a real place, and it's not wise to forget that.
    [X] Is a minefield of politics we need to understand to survive.
    [X] Doesn't need us fucking it up for the locals.

    Do we have feelings for Hikaru?
    [X] Maybe? He's a good friend and confidant, anyway.
    [X] I mean, I'm not going to make the first move, but I wouldn't turn him down...
    [X] I dunno, but maybe flirting with him would be fun?
    [X] He's a friend and a teammate, and I don't want to ruin that.

    First time actually posting on the thread, just wanted to say that I am loving this quest and all of its wonderful characters and worldbuilding!
     
    Qoheleth Attempts A Unified Theory Of Everything
  • Apocrypha
    • Talia B said:
    Sekhmet considers her coin. "Who the hell profits from fucking up the fast travel and trapping us in the game? Kind of a specific pair of glitches to happen at once, yeah?" she asks. "That's what gets me. What does anyone get out of it?"
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    So I've been meaning for a while to put together a proper effortpost theorizing on how the Chimaera players got into this whole mess, and this clue from the last update was enough to get me to finally do it.

    Right now, there's a lot of mysteries to explain. By my current count, we have:
    1. Chimaera players can't log out & are experiencing full embodiment in Mundus in a way that is not normal for this game.
    2. Trapped Chimaera players are all in the same Mundus instead of subservers.
    3. Trapped Chimaera players all woke up back at worldspawn, at level 1, with their expected level 1 equipment except for stuff that wouldn't exist in a "real" Mundus.
    4. Mundanes in Chimaera!Mundus suddenly pass the Turing Test; they used to not do this.
    5. Io-as-a-whole partitioned off Chimaera!Io - normally a failsafe mechanism - due to whatever happened here.
    6. The Waygates in Chimaera!Mundus - one of Io's mythical creations - no longer function.
    7. The tetradekatheon refuse to talk to anyone on Earth about all this, or give them server maintenance access - even their OWTB parents.
    8. Other than Io, the tetradekatheon seemingly have not cut themselves off from Chimaera!Mundus, given the gentle but telling answer-to-prayers that we received earlier today.
    In the Interlude, we heard the devs put forth the hypothesis of a cyberattack on Io. This would explain (1) (5) (6) and maybe (3), but fails to explain (2) or (4), which are, appropriately, pieces of the puzzle which the devs don't have. The OWTB meeting proposes an explanation for (7) as well, but it's a confusing enough one that they have trouble imagining how it could have gotten so bad, which implies another explanation might be a better fit. Their explanation for (7) also somewhat conflicts with (8) - if they've cut off contact as post-traumatic paranoia, why would they still feel safe to answer prayers?

    So are (2) and (4) just an unrelated coincidence? I can't really square with that idea. It seems more likely to me that there's a single cause, a single inciting incident, that kicked off every anomaly we're seeing now.

    Io is at the center of it. So what do we know about Io?

    Well, among other things, we know that it's friendly and doting, but alien.
    We know that it's a builder who's concept of building is, in part, based in self-sculpture.
    And we know that it's credited, mythologically, with making Mundus a place where people can exist.

    So, pure spitball, but... what if it went something like this?
    1. Io, true to its mythic role, gets the idea to try to make the NPCs in the game more people-like, setting up a test instance in Chimaera with the verisimilitude turned up in order to try its hand(s) at the task. Just as a preliminary experiment, you understand.
    2. Something goes wrong in the attempt - Io makes a mistake, and ends up accidentally cannibalizing part of its own RRNN or something, and inadvertently blowing the NPCs right past people-like and into people proper. Io-as-a-whole partitions off Chimaera!Io to prevent the damage from spreading.
    3. The combination of the damage & the hard disconnect is too much for Chimaera!Io to handle and it... crashes? Ceases to be able to do its normal gamemaster responsibilities, anyway, presumably including making the Waygates work.
    4. Because another one of those responsibilities is mediating Neurohelm connections, Chimaera's players get dragged along into the test instance Chimaera!Io was inhabiting when it fell. Since it's a fresh server and not even in prod, there's no play data logged for those characters & everyone comes out as if they'd just started (minus anything that just doesn't exist on the "extra verisimilitude" test build).
    5. Either the Tetradekatheon as a whole (if they're briefed on what's going on), or Gestalt!Io specifically (if it's trying to fix things itself without getting the rest involved), pulls the plug on Earthside admin access to the orbital servers as a preemptive defensive measure. This is consistent with their programming to assume good faith, because even a 2040s humanity operating in good faith might destroy Chimaera!Io or the Chimaera Mundanes as a side effect of their attempts to debug this mess or rescue the players. It could happen accidentally. It could happen because the Earthside humans don't realize/accept that the Mundanes in the test instance are people. Or it could happen because, despite the Mundanes being people, the 2040s humans to whom OWTB would be ultimately forced to defer (c.f. the loud phonecall from DARPA) may, if forced to choose, default to protecting their own. Faced with all those possible disasters, a total info & access blockade becomes an extreme but justifiable way to keep the situation, at least temporarily, under control.
     
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  • Apocrypha
    • Qoheleth said:
    So I've been meaning for a while to put together a proper effortpost theorizing on how the Chimaera players got into this whole mess, and this clue from the last update was enough to get me to finally do it.
    Click to expand...
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    The Other Worlds Tourism Bureau refuses to comment, but an anonymous source close to the enigmatic game company reportedly called this theory "valiant" and awarded it's originator with 1 Tension.
     
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