Can I ask why we're afraid of the marketplace?
Sure, we'll catch a little attention, but we aren't playing a character afraid of attention, and it's too public for something bad.
There seems to be this idea of "let's take our utterly untutored apprentice magician into Exciting Dangerous Adventures!" As opposed to "let's visit places with people who can help us learn and grow!"
I know not everyone here plays
Ignition, but... It's like, Jade had a pretty respectable set of (PMMM) magical girl powers before she even set foot outside her home dimension. The fact that she powered up insanely quickly after that point aside, she was not, for lack of a better term,
squishy. For Jade, exciting adventures made sense, because she had the power level to kick some ass. Melia... probably doesn't. I mean, her elementals could probably cause some pain and harassment to an attacker, but a rampaging orc or a pack of wolf-monsters that can't be easily driven away by a few 'swishes' across their nose from the fire elemental... That isn't really something she's equipped to cope with. Whereas Early Game Jade would just go [summon halberd] [ka-bisect] [problem solved]
So I think a lot of people are in the mindset that we can cope with trouble but need to look for adventure, whereas I would argue that our ability to cope with trouble is minimal and we need to look for
power.
If the pool of blood is a trap, it's set for something with non-human preferences.
[] A pool of blood.
[] A bustling marketplace.
[] A magical demonstration...?
You're misunderstanding. The pool of blood isn't a trap in the sense that "if you see it, you'll want to go to it." We're opening a dimensional rift here. We're only seeing a piece of the overall
thing the pool is part of, just as when we see the marketplace we don't see the whole city and when we see the road we don't see the kingdom.
What we're seeing may be in some sense the 'digestive' part of a larger system designed to entrap beings and feed off of their suffering or life force (either of which is symbolized by the pool of glowing blood). There may be a 'mouth' elsewhere that is designed to do the entrapping within its own dimension, or it may have servants of some kind that kidnap other beings and feed them to it. However, our ability to see into the digestive part of the system doesn't mean we'll be able to escape it from the inside. A mouse that appears from another dimension halfway down a snake's gullet isn't going anywhere.
[Yes this is conjecture- but tell me I'm
obviously wrong about this and why, and I'll be impressed if you have a convincing reason to say so...]
I don't think that's how it works.
EDIT: Oh, and in case anyone missed it, there were a few pages of discussion on the potential destinations before the full update was posted. I posted a partial with a temporary threadmark a few days back.
Duly noted; will think about that (my reply to both comments).
That might not be magic, you know. The ambient magic levels there are quite low. While I suppose it's possible their magic ecology is different (perhaps it takes the form of crystals, and is mined, rather than being in the water or air), it's also possible that magic isn't a thing there. At which point, we may run into some problems.
Edit: Or, worse, there's a masquerade going on. That could get us into even more trouble.
Those are valid points and arguably reasons to vote the 'demonstration' option below the 'marketplace' (which I did) or below the 'road' (which I didn't). But... not so much the blood.
Which
really really looks like a place we should avoid. I mean, I get that this could be some kind of weird double-agent thing where a choice that
looks very bad is in fact good because our own instincts are bad. But I'd much rather trust our instincts for what kind of places are and are not secret wells of horror, than systematically distrust them. The vast majority of a time, when your instincts look at a place and go "NOPE NOPE NOPE," they're telling you that for a reason. Ignoring that is, for example, how a lot of people get mugged- they walk into the kinds of places criminals frequent, ignoring the danger signs. Consequently they are trawling themselves in front of criminals as a person who is vulnerable and
not alert to the danger.
Let's not be that kind of person. Let's avoid places that look obviously, specifically bad.
I am seriously worried about the pool of blood winning...
