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[Exalted/SMT] Shard of a Broken Sun

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al103 said:
Well, it just mean that proto-primordial should ascend in primordial status for our last life not be in wain!
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"Just."

I... consider it a valid possibility, but we need to think about it some. We're playing Exalted, which means we need to keep in mind the principle of "we can do this. Should we?" as much as we can.

The main drawback is that it stops us from continuing to help this world if Amu sacrifices her own life. And with Compassion 5, that's going to be a dangerously frequent temptation for her. If we can't get Amu immortal (at least unaging) by some means after doing this, I'll consider it a dealbreaker - if we die, humanity goes back to their canon MegaTen status of fucked with only delaying actions possible at the best.
 
Giygas said:
Given that we were already being destroyed by being outside the realities, becoming permanently a Piece of Amu should be that great of a problem.
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No, you weren't. There's no damage to you-the-exaltation yet that can't be fixed in a matter of hours, and there won't be. Kagutsuchi is suppressing his own reality, ordering physics to stand down, but you're not dependent on those rules.
 
Quickshot0 said:
I'm kind of confused what applying Dream Affirming Projection on the Dragon Stream is supposed to accomplish. Is this like trying to turn it in to a Chara or some such? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the exact goal here, but I can't help but wonder about the safety or perhaps even sanity of this move...
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Bit of random spitballing while not entirely awake, I've already crossed it out.
 
........ said:
Bit of random spitballing while not entirely awake, I've already crossed it out.
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The idea shocked Baughn, though. Perhaps the relationship of the Demiurge to a physical object is metaphysically similar to the relationship of Amu to the charas?
 
Baughn said:
No, you weren't. There's no damage to you-the-exaltation yet that can't be fixed in a matter of hours, and there won't be. Kagutsuchi is suppressing his own reality, ordering physics to stand down, but you're not dependent on those rules.
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Not being destroyed now, being destroyed at the beginning of the quest, when we were outside reality. Becuase i doubt that Kagutsuchi will not send out from its new reality when he will restart it.
 
Giygas said:
Not being destroyed now, being destroyed at the beginning of the quest, when we were outside reality. Becuase i doubt that Kagutsuchi will not send out from its new reality when he will restart it.
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That was all the way outside of Amala. The Amala Universe is a big place, much bigger than this one single world.
 
Winged One said:
The weird conceptual thing that's happening to everyone's bodies... could we exploit that? Maybe make our themes of perfection and victory into as close to reality as anything else?
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Baughn said:
Only if you figure out the implications.
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I think we need to be paying more attention to this..

I am also against sacrificing our own indestructibility and/or any of the Charas.

What I'd really like to know right now is what precisely we think Kagutsuchi is trying to do to us. It isn't shaping, we saw him try that and it bounce, so what is he doing that is trying to wipe us out of existence so effectively? Once we know that, we can figure out what to do better.
 
I'm personally inclined to go all in, but that's because I like Amu too much to think of the exaltation surviving her. Can't do it, even if it costs the exaltation eternity. x.x
 
Baughn said:
That was all the way outside of Amala. The Amala Universe is a big place, much bigger than this one single world.
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Okay, then i understood wrongly the scale of the destruction.
Happerry said:
I think we need to be paying more attention to this..

I am also against sacrificing our own indestructibility and/or any of the Charas.

What I'd really like to know right now is what precisely we think Kagutsuchi is trying to do to us. It isn't shaping, we saw him try that and it bounce, so what is he doing that is trying to wipe us out of existence so effectively? Once we know that, we can figure out what to do better.
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We need more occult!
 
Happerry said:
I think we need to be paying more attention to this..

I am also against sacrificing our own indestructibility and/or any of the Charas.

What I'd really like to know right now is what precisely we think Kagutsuchi is trying to do to us. It isn't shaping, we saw him try that and it bounce, so what is he doing that is trying to wipe us out of existence so effectively? Once we know that, we can figure out what to do better.
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Here's my guess.

I think it's operating at the equivalent level of the Shinma or below. The first thing it threw at us would be the equivalent of Balor's shaping attack, hella strong, but easily noped if you have the ability. What it is doing now is the equivalent of the Salinian Working, or perhaps on an even deeper level, like the Three Spheres Cataclysm.

This would be why it's having a bad day. The Shaping would be relatively cheap compared to altering metaphysics to crush people out of existence. Shaping is imposing a state on reality using your magic, this would be redefining what reality is in the first place. Amu's immune to Shaping, but that doesn't matter if the very concept of "Existence" or "Separation" no longer applies. The Exaltation can handle this to some extent, but as the Salinian Working and Three Spheres Cataclysm show, the Exaltation can't preserve everything.

I think it's trying to make Amu's existence irrelevant, then it's going to reapply whatever laws of reality it wants.

A hint of what we need here could be in the Infernal Exaltation too. A Solar Exaltation works within Fate. It alters at will, but they are caught up in the Loom of Fate and function as part of Creation. The Infernal Exaltation on the other hand defines its own Mythos, it's own internal narrative, and it sticks to that. For Solars that kind of act is seen with CRP, but Infernals do it as a matter of fact.

Sorry if this is somewhat hard to understand, but I hope we can build on this.
 
Let's think about what it's doing. It's quite literally telling us into a shell of our former self. All that exists is the boundary between us and not us. The contents of neither side of the bounday exists, neither inside nor out.

Let's think about what that could mean. I suspect Cytokinesis is on to something by saying this is a shinmaic manipulation. If so, dipping into the Infernal toybox may be useful. The Primordials existed before Time, before reality was defined and they chose which Shinma defined existence. I wonder if She Who Lived In Her Name has anything useful here.

If he's simply gone and removed a whole set of rules that define us, it may be much cheaper and easier for us to substitute our own personal set.

This may also be a time when we want to deploy Amu's own shaping abilities, rather than mote fulled Exalted ones, if we can think of a way.
 
Hey, i just found a potential solution to our problem.
Baughn: what is the cost to brute force the activation of a charm that Amu can learn? Because Chaos Repelling Pattern seem to be a good solution to our current Problem. Of course, it could backfire and rewrite reality to a creation model, with unknown and likely !FUN! conseguences, but it surely beat being undone by reality.
 
I found Baugh's description of the Metaphysics and I thought it was important to bring up here.
Baughn said:
More precisely, it goes something like this:

Actual physics (quantum graph theory) -> Shinmaic laws -> Essence -> Primordials, etc. -> Loom of Fate, Creation -> "Humanity".

Actual physics (quantum graph theory) -> planck-scale "lifeforms" -> Magatsuhi -> Kagutsuchi -> Earth -> Humanity?

Or at least, this is the way your shard understands it at the moment. The local "physics" is a deeply layered, but somewhat leaky abstraction; in particular, human minds do not run on the physics Kagutsuchi implements, but rather on the more fundamental substance more commonly known as "Magatsuhi". This sometimes allows them to bend the rules they're supposed to be following.

Autochthon, having been commissioned to create indestructible exaltation shards, was fully aware that he could only make them truly indestructible so long as they remained in realms that follow the shinmaic laws, and that those laws themselves might eventually fail. Therefore, he created them capable of propagating those laws on their own, and intelligent enough to interface with any other systems they might run across.

Which is to say, in exalting Amu it's pulling off a truly bullshit level of physics-engineering. Fortunately there are enough parallels between the two systems that no-one is going to notice what it's doing without looking very closely; for instance, Essence and Magatsuhi are interchangeable for many purposes.
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So here's my hypothesis. The original "Shaping" attack was Kagutsuchi manipulating itself. That was easy for it, with whatever blocks out of the way that prevented it from doing that before the Conception.

How it's trying to crush us now is with Magatsuhi. It's own mind should probably run on Magatsuhi, so it's applying it's energies in order to strike at a more fundamental level. This is expensive and difficult to it, hence why it's having a bad day, but it only needs to do it for a little bit if it wants to crush us out of existence.

Alternatively, it's working at the 'plank-scale "lifeforms"' level, which is even more difficult to it. This would correspond to Shinma manipulation. I'm going to assume it can't undermine Actual Physics, so that is as deep as it can possibly go.

Fortunately, Autocthon ensured that we can actually act on that fundamental level or above it. We've already taught ourselves a lot about how reality functions. Maybe we can apply those lessons here to prevent Amu from being crushed out of existence?
 
I hope so too.

Honestly, I would be okay with sacrificing our reincarnation ability if it gives Amu a better chance, but that's just because I'm a filthy heretic with too much Compassion :)

Ideally, we find the path that costs us the least while saving the most people.
 
Alectai said:
I hope so too.

Honestly, I would be okay with sacrificing our reincarnation ability if it gives Amu a better chance, but that's just because I'm a filthy heretic with too much Compassion :)

Ideally, we find the path that costs us the least while saving the most people.
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Burn the heretic!

It's sad, but if Amu dies in doing this (but succeeds), we can still save the world by Exalting another person. Sad as it is, we don't have that much invested into her. Cold calculus as it is, I do not think permanently sacrificing our reincarnation ability will help out in the long run.

She's a cute kid and we should do all we can to save her through reasonable measures, but sacrificing our ability to bond to another host is a step too far in my opinion.
 
Alectai said:
I hope so too.

Honestly, I would be okay with sacrificing our reincarnation ability if it gives Amu a better chance, but that's just because I'm a filthy heretic with too much Compassion :)

Ideally, we find the path that costs us the least while saving the most people.
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I would classify okayness with sacrificing our reincarnation ability as high Conviction(not necessarily an excess, if you're willing to consider other options), and the impulse itself as high Compassion. But that's quibbling.
Cytokinesis said:
It's sad, but if Amu dies in doing this (but succeeds), we can still save the world by Exalting another person. Sad as it is, we don't have that much invested into her. Cold calculus as it is, I do not think permanently sacrificing our reincarnation ability will help out in the long run.

She's a cute kid and we should do all we can to save her through reasonable measures, but sacrificing our ability to bond to another host is a step too far in my opinion.
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I find myself mostly agreeing with this, but if we end up letting her die, I think we should give Amu the chance to sacrifice herself, rather than be sacrificed. Perhaps I've been spending too much time with raksha, but it gives her a better end to her story.
 
If Kagutsuchi attacked Amu at the level of magatsuhi manipulation, she'd be dead; she doesn't stand an icicle's chance in the core of the sun of tanking such an attack. Excellent thinking, but so far it hasn't really noticed her.
 
Baughn said:
If Kagutsuchi attacked Amu at the level of magatsuhi manipulation, she'd be dead; she doesn't stand an icicle's chance in the core of the sun of tanking such an attack. Excellent thinking, but so far it hasn't really noticed her.
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So forcing a Chaos Repelling Pattern, which satures the reality around the solar with essence, could be a good method to defend against him?
 
Hm... Then this really seems like a "Mental Crush" effect, or just mental strain overall. Amu has the capability to ride through this, but with all the limit she's accruing her mental state just can't handle it.

Higher Integrity/Integrity Charms would have really come in useful if that's the case. I can't think of much we could do if that guess is right. We could try to take some of the processing load onto ourselves, but I think we've already done that as much as we're able, and the SNR ratio means that could end up really badly if we send out junk data to her.

I'm going to have to sit back and think about this some more.
 
veekie said:
Odds of the above working?
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Lightening the load on Amu by replicating the pattern herself? Um...

She doesn't qualify to learn the charm, she'd be skipping the training time, and you'd be skipping the adaptation time. Call it fifty-fifty that it'll make things worse.


Cytokinesis said:
Hm... Then this really seems like a "Mental Crush" effect, or just mental strain overall. Amu has the capability to ride through this, but with all the limit she's accruing her mental state just can't handle it.
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It isn't a mental effect. Coping with it has mental effects, but...

Oh, I'll tell you straight out. Kagutsuchi is suppressing physics; that's what he does, to clear the way for creating the vortex world. It doesn't count as a shaping attack, since he's just not doing what he normally does. Very forcefully, but none of the force is applied to Amu specifically.
 
Baughn said:
Oh, I'll tell you straight out. Kagutsuchi is suppressing physics; that's what he does, to clear the way for creating the vortex world. It doesn't count as a shaping attack.
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Whaaat.

Can someone who knows the relevant metaphysics of the two worlds fill me in what this means, and why the blazes it isn't a shaping attack?!
 
Demonic Spoon said:
Whaaat.

Can someone who knows the relevant metaphysics of the two worlds fill me in what this means, and why the blazes it isn't a shaping attack?!
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Well, I'm guessing it's more of a "shape the ground out from under your feet so you fall" kind of shaping than a "shape you into a corpse" kind.
 
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