Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)
- Thread starter yrsillar
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- Original Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Disagree with this. Trying to force an immediate death match within the piper is what the hunting option is. The other is starving it slowly. You have it backwards.
The worst option is that it either escapes and returns later, or it leads us on a long enough chase that it recovers it's strength while bringing us up against our time limit. There is no fallback option here.
Sealing it of first, the worst that could happen is it rushes us immediately to try and escape: this is the outcome that we would consider the best if we took the hunt option. The best is that it tries to hide and dies of starvation and exhaustion to the piper without any more fighting.
[X] Perform the sealing first, without the connection to the underworld ecosystem, the parasite will not be a threat.
It would be harder to take care of after sealing because if it decides to focus completely on hiding, we have no way of finding it. We've only detected the parasite, intermittently, when actively engaged in fighting. And only saw it directly when we jumped directly into the liminal. We didn't even spot it the second time we entered the liminal! It's currently off-balance and reacting to some hurt, which gives us a small window of predictability to actually track it down. If we pursue the infection at the breach, where it's densest and most secure, and show that we can hurt it there too, that's exactly when it's most likely to continue learning and react in new ways, like giving up on fighting back and hunkering down in some corner we won't find it. And that's a problem.
Unless we actively, deliberately focus on the parasite, we can and will not catch it. We know this from the capabilities it's shown so far.
More troubling, unless we actually catch the parasite, we cannot know its status. We won't know where it is, or what it's doing. Maybe it flees through the breach, maybe it doesn't, but that isn't knowledge we'll have.
The problem with choosing to seal first is it means we literally will not know if our mission was a success. The primary reason Ling Qi embarked on this venture was to have some peace of mind in a more secure fief while she leaves to the capital for close to 2 months, and then later to the warfront for who knows how long. Leaving a hostile, intelligent, body-jacking liminal parasite of impurity in an ambiguous state is incompatible with Ling Qi's motivation. This is her Home we're talking about; why would she leave this to chance when she's not going to be around to monitor the situation?
For all we know, the parasite could pull a mirror version of the wait-and-target-vulnerabilities strategy we didn't use last time, survive on the impurity we threw into the liminal long enough to watch while the Piper lets its guard down and starts letting its denizens out of its panic room, and ultimately finds its way into the Piper's Lake node. Once in there, its nature would let it subvert the nature of the node into preventing the Piper, or us or any other casual higher realm observers, from even noticing it was infected.
Do I think that's particularly likely? No, that's a fringe possibility. But the problem is that unless we confirm things, unless we "see the body", we won't actually know where the heck the parasite ran off to. It won't be a possibility we could actually rule out. The parasite is genuinely the only true danger in the scenario, because it's sneaky and smart and subversive, and it's wild to me that people don't want to put it down decisively, when we know it's sneaky and smart and it could escape in any direction without us being able to contain or even necessarily see it unless we dedicate our full attention to it. Doesn't make sense tactically, strategically, or -most importantly- to Ling Qi's sensibilities of neutralizing dangers in her backyard.
And lastly, just from a Doylist perspective, our chance of capturing the thing is definitely higher if we pick the choice where we try to deal with it, because otherwise there'd be no reason for the "try to deal with it" choice to exist.
We don't really have a time limit anymore. Not like we did before. With the Water node cleansed and re-empowered, the passive impurity is being handled by the Piper in every region other than the final conflict zone. Which we won't be mucking around in until we actually push for the breach.
Our choices so far have given us breathing room more than anything else. It's the last thing in our list of concerns, atm.
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- Location
- somewhere over there.
- Pronouns
- They/It
I think sealing it off and forcing it to either attack while injured or be hunted on hostile grounds cut off from the environment that sustains it is probably the smarter, less risky choice here. That said, going for it now is what I'd like to see, and just sounds like a more satisfying finale to the scenario after that last flight.
[X] Hunt the parasite down, you have wounded it awfully, best to finish it and then go for the seal.
[X] Hunt the parasite down, you have wounded it awfully, best to finish it and then go for the seal.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
I feel like you are laying out all the reasons that hunting it is a fool's errand and then saying "and that's why we need to hunt it".
I do think it needs to be put down decisively. That's why I want to seal the exits first. If we hunt it, and don't find it, we won't know if it fled or hid. We know the piper can scour it away if it cannot get reinforcement, so I'm a long hide-and-seek scenario, we only win for sure if it can't leave and can't get stronger.
Ultimately, the worst case for sealing looks like the best case for hunting. IE, we force a confrontation.
NaanContributor
Provider of delicious flatbread, and nothing else.
- Location
- Hawaii
[X] Perform the sealing first, without the connection to the underworld ecosystem, the parasite will not be a threat.
We don't know that the Piper can scour it away. That's not a thing we actually know. Li Suyin said the Piper "should" be able to scour its meridians "more easily". The liminal is not the Piper's meridians, though. There is no guarantee of an automatic purging before it can cause issues again.
And your argument here is inconsistent. First off, if the parasite runs away back through the breach into the underground, that's actually more or less fine. Because it wouldn't be able to get back through the seal, once it's put up. Threat ended. The problem is not knowing if that's happened or not. The worst case of the hunt, where we fail to find it and then put up the seal afterwards and hope for the best, matches the best case scenario in putting up the seal first because we'll have the same end-state: a seal that is up and no clue where the parasite is.
Deliberately hunting the parasite now is the only path we have to a better outcome than that. Putting up the seal first gives us no advantage in taking out the parasite, because we're putting up the seal in both options! There is no "no-seal" vote.
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CedeTheBees
Probably high right now
- Location
- Somewhere
- Pronouns
- They/Them
[X] Perform the sealing first, without the connection to the underworld ecosystem, the parasite will not be a threat.
I think that Abeo is fixating way too much on the impurity we just dumped into the liminal, as if LQ had just inadvertently gifted the parasite with a wealth of power it didn't have access to before.
LQ stated that the parasite has no skill to pull things into the liminal, only to reach through.
Matter without active support in the liminal gets quickly dissolved and unmade. Dead and corrupt meat and filth is no different.
I feel that the argument that "a cornered beast is at its most dangerous" is being taken to the extreme.
Sealing the breach first is being treated as a loss condition. As if after we cut its escape route the parasite will go berserker and double its strength or go into perfect, indetectable hiding.
But if we hunt it now, it will just roll over and let us end it without a fight.
Right now it's hurt and startled, and it has lost a significant amount of corrupt mass.
If we try to seal the breach now, we'll force it to hurriedly gather whatever impurity it has left available and without time to recover or implement complex plans.
While defending the seal, we'll destroy even more of its resources and cut off any avenue of obtaining more.
I just don't see any argument, beyond mere conjecture, that we won't be able to locate the parasite after we seal the breach, when it will be a its weakest and most vulnerable and exposed.
LQ stated that the parasite has no skill to pull things into the liminal, only to reach through.
Matter without active support in the liminal gets quickly dissolved and unmade. Dead and corrupt meat and filth is no different.
I feel that the argument that "a cornered beast is at its most dangerous" is being taken to the extreme.
Sealing the breach first is being treated as a loss condition. As if after we cut its escape route the parasite will go berserker and double its strength or go into perfect, indetectable hiding.
But if we hunt it now, it will just roll over and let us end it without a fight.
Right now it's hurt and startled, and it has lost a significant amount of corrupt mass.
If we try to seal the breach now, we'll force it to hurriedly gather whatever impurity it has left available and without time to recover or implement complex plans.
While defending the seal, we'll destroy even more of its resources and cut off any avenue of obtaining more.
I just don't see any argument, beyond mere conjecture, that we won't be able to locate the parasite after we seal the breach, when it will be a its weakest and most vulnerable and exposed.
There's no reason to expect it to be exposed after a drag-out fight. This is a large environment, the liminal is even larger, and the logic underpinning the seal-first option demands that we spend no time looking for it. It ends on "the parasite will not be a threat", if this is Ling Qi's thought process then she is not going to expend more effort tracking it down.
And the moment when it's weakest and most vulnerable is exactly when it's most likely to run off and hide rather than stick around and politely allow us to kill it.
I do not accept the logic that with the seal in place, the parasite is not a threat. It's too strange, too adaptive, and too poorly understood for me to be confident in its inevitable, passive neutralization. Option 2 commits to that belief, so I don't support it.
And the moment when it's weakest and most vulnerable is exactly when it's most likely to run off and hide rather than stick around and politely allow us to kill it.
I do not accept the logic that with the seal in place, the parasite is not a threat. It's too strange, too adaptive, and too poorly understood for me to be confident in its inevitable, passive neutralization. Option 2 commits to that belief, so I don't support it.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah I think people are confusing why a cornered beast is dangerous. It doesn't gain power or cunning or anything, it's just desperate enough to take very risky actions, or even potentially act out of pure spite.
I'd rather not play whack a mole, and just cut off it's access to any benefit of the breach.
[X] Hunt the parasite down, you have wounded it awfully, best to finish it and then go for the seal.
WWtDSD
What would the Doom Slayer do?
WWtDSD
What would the Doom Slayer do?
- Pronouns
- He
[X] Perform the sealing first, without the connection to the underworld ecosystem, the parasite will not be a threat.
Do we actually know the separated limb LQ transported to liminal is anything more than a dead limb . what gave you the idea it will be a threat going forward or the parasite have any control over it
- Location
- Finland
I don't think the idea that the stuff placed in liminal is somekind of ongoing risk is well supported.
Generally Ling Qi knows what she is doing better than us when it comes to cultivation, so if she decided it was a safe disposal method, i don't see much point in assuming she is wrong.
Putting the seal and then dealing with any remaining risks seems like abetter idea than leaving the opening while hunting for corruption just because it stops further corruption from coming in, and kinda forces existing corruption to come to us or be cut off.
Generally Ling Qi knows what she is doing better than us when it comes to cultivation, so if she decided it was a safe disposal method, i don't see much point in assuming she is wrong.
Putting the seal and then dealing with any remaining risks seems like abetter idea than leaving the opening while hunting for corruption just because it stops further corruption from coming in, and kinda forces existing corruption to come to us or be cut off.