It's a Girl's World -- And Lilly wants Adventure

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I've been rereading Arc 1 and I just...can't really find anything that's new in this.

...Wait a minute. How do we already have Holistics? Dream within the Forest is barely level 5!
 
I can't help but think that the Black Lung is connected to the Maw somehow. It seems to not be a physical disease but a spiritual one, it affects the soul. Despite what ever healing they receive, the lungs will fail. I assume that even with replacing the lungs they will still fail.

Before Lilly broke {True Song} she called upon any power, any patron, no matter the price to rescue her. In a way sounds like a contract. With a twist {True Song} broke and Lilly gained an imbued trait, Soul Maw. Slyvena said that one result that could have been was the {Shatterheart Malignancy}. What it is, I don't know, but I'm thinking it would involve Pithe somehow. Where am I going with this? Black Lung could actually be {Blacklung Malignancy}, an Essence version of {Shatterheart Malignancy}.

Why Essence? The Temple of Virtue seems to be a place of healers. It where Lilly's future would be if she was to learn how to heal with Essence. Essence was described as 'blood of the soul', it is linked deeply to the soul's health. When his mother died, Jeremy knew somehow. Essence deals with connections and familial connection is such one. When told stories his expression would grow peaceful. It was not the stories themselves but the connection the stories brought.

{Shatterheart Malignancy}
{BlackLung Malignancy}
 
Black Lung doesn't seem to be a recent or unknown thing though. The outbreak Lilly remembers was only a few years ago, so probably within the right timeframe for the maw, but they already knew what it was.
 
I will just add that the maw Stat we have jumped by 4 steps after we woke up at the beginning of chapter 2.1. Maybe Maw is related to decoherence? Form Fracture seems to give a hint in that direction.
 
darknessworld said:
I will just add that the maw Stat we have jumped by 4 steps after we woke up at the beginning of chapter 2.1. Maybe Maw is related to decoherence? Form Fracture seems to give a hint in that direction.
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I believe the most immediate cause is Lilly gaining her Foundational Ethos... but as I went through this I came up with an alternate theory.

If you follow the process starting from 1.9 and the True Song incident, you get something like this:

1.9 - True Song breaks. Imbued Trait (Soul Maw) gained. [The only other seemingly relevant at all cause here for this trait is that Lilly was bitten by an Alpha in this chapter. Given what befell our dad I don't think we should overlook this possibility entirely]
1.10 - Evie was chosen as our Ethea in the previous vote. Soul Maw becomes Hybrid Maw as Evie's Lvl0->1 vote was locked in without our input as "Trying to repurpose Maw-bits into more placid components." We also pick up Imbued Trait (Stabalizing Spire)
1.11 - Evie's work continues and she seems pleased with her progress. Hybrid Maw is now gone. Stabalizing Spire has now become Huge Stabalizing Spire
1.12 - Evie's overrides the presumable error messages that popped up when they saw Lilly was that target for the Foundational Ethos. Huge Stabilizing Spire is now Geological Meta-Anchor.
2.1 - We have selected Towering Edifice to Heaven. Geological Meta-Anchor goes from N/A to Tier 1. Inner Awareness of Maw takes a notable leap to just under M

Anyway, I guess the point I want to raise here is that while I had, at the time, immediately subscribed to the "Maw answered Lilly's call and broke True Song" I now wonder if that was a red herring and actually we suffered the same infection as Dad only we happened to immediately pick up Evie who could fix it and immediately incorporate it into her plans. ...In fact, the more I think on this, the more I'm liking the theory that Lilly got Maw Infected by the Alpha but we stumbled into just the right solution entirely on accident. Evie notes in her monologuing that she can't simply destroy the corruption and has to instead trick it into repurposing itself. Which I believe she accomplished in turning it into the basis of an anchor for the Foundational Ethos which seemed to be her short/medium-term goal for Lilly. ...I think we really dodged a bullet there. As for Lilly's advance in Maw awareness, aside from the incorporation of TEtH, this is also the chapter where Mindstate!Lilly tried to disseminate as much knowledge as she could to Lilly, as well as the chapter where she finally was able to successfully drive the corruption out of Dad. It may well be the experience of having to work so intricately and surgically in removing the corruption helped sharpen her awareness.

I meant to move on to musing on the Flower/Colossi bits and reexamining them with our current knowledge, and perhaps I will soon but this tangent got a bit longer than I initially thought it would until it became its own thing, so I'll cut it here for now.
 
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...I kinda feel like we should be differentiating Evie and - because I cannot be bothered to type out the accent - Ev in our thread discussion, because Evie, the tentacle murderkitten we have in our soul, didn't actually do any of that, but Ev did. Probably.
 
Something I've been wondering for a while, what was the Ethos Ev replaced? Was it Ambrosia of Joy?
 
Half Moon said:
Something I've been wondering for a while, what was the Ethos Ev replaced? Was it Ambrosia of Joy?
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No, Ev didn't replace any existing Ethae, she just injected herself as an additional pick. Ambrosia of Joy is one of her titles.

...Anyway, if "the Dungeon was subverted by the Maw/Colossus" is the thing that's out of left field, I'm...honestly not going to be very surprised.
 
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Alright, there are a few last little things that I'm willing to try hitting into left field.

The first is that Valerie started as a regular Oath Ethos, but then tried to form a Contract with a spirit, who then manipulated her into going Inverted. This is actually relevant for us, since understanding this may help our relationship with Evie (and if she's even constrained by something, or if we're merely in a "gentleman's agreement" to not screw each other over).
Slyvena said:
Some Entities are powerful enough to outright lie, and if you do not know their True Name then they can present in meeker less threatening forms to entice carelessness in a contracts wording and terms.
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The second is the idea that demons taught humans about Oath. Does that mean that the concept of Oath precedes the creation of Ethos, or that there was a point where humans just didn't receive Oath Ethae until a certain point? It may be that at some point a mortal managed to "hack" a raw Oath to try and get Sys Admin privileges, and then Oaths were packaged into Ethae to limit humans into only interfacing with the code in specific ways.

The third is about this little quote about the origin of Pithe:
Slyvena said:
Pithe was a gift, or at least that is what the common belief is. The more you grow into it and observe the taut cords within, you will discover the yearning and desire pervading its patterns are fragments of some greater being. We do not know if it is actually alive, but it is certainly benevolent.
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Now, we know that Pithe was an angel who's been around since the First Era, and that he witnessed Yalśfreet effectively become Essence for the Melange Layer. I suppose the question is: Is he generally and unilaterally helping humanity, like Aurora? Are all Pithe users being propped up into specific roles? How aware of...anything is he? If he learned that Lilly was going to fight the Maw, would he "bias" the Resonance Field?

The fourth is this little...strange bit of language here:
Slyvena said:
What are the kingdoms of the mortal plane and what is our place in them?
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...Like, I'm guessing Lilly's got some unique perspective from [Tower], but how much does she unconsciously know about other planes?

...Aaand that's all I've got. If it works, it works. If not, well, left-field is left-field for a reason.
 
Hmm for something out of left field that built off theories of other people but if Waters has something to do with our nearby rouge dungeon and Rapid Iterator obviously has some connection to the Maw then doesn't that mean Waters has some connection to the Maw though probably indirect? Cause it would certainly explain more of how there's literally 0 long term futures where he and Lilly are both alive if he's working for the BBEG that seems to really hate Lilly a lot. If so that means Waters is much bigger deal that just being the local lord with enough men and power to kill everyone we know and love.


Other thoughts based off apparently the left field thing being something we learned from Arc 1 being put in a new context now.

Slyvena said:
So managing to win over your father to the point he would start actively assisting your preparations for later arcs was always on the cards. It's come up much sooner than expected. There were multiple situations where you would need to leave Harmuph having not received any martial education at all. (I mean, there are paths to securing support through personal influence too, but those are far less likely.) You can actually thank the Lore Warden's poor rolls failing to reassure dad that Arrone is what's best for finally tipping him over the edge into outright support.
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So from this I feel like our first arc was basically meant to be a tutorial for preparing us and Lilly for the inevitable leaving of the hometown with Dad helping us being on of the 'extra' quests that would really help for the later the arcs. This means that arc 2 seems to be starting on leaving Harmuph and planning what we're going to do next. With Waters being the first of many reasons for Lilly to have to leave.

Slyvena said:
But as you said, you gave up three weeks for this. We are about to transition into the climax of Arc 1 and you are out of time just as you got started.
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So despite speed running as much as we could that initial 3 week coma really messed up arc 1 which if my theory was correct was about preparing for this current arc. Really makes sense why "Time is running thin and she's not ready" especially since if we were supposed to be more powerful for arc 2 than we are. Cause by the end of of Arc 1 it seemed like we had a good foundation and amount of powers to really make a difference but by the time we got those we were thrust into Waters situation with barely any allies and not enough personal power to have a hope of fighting,

This makes sense to me since it means that stuff like the Myrah and our disaster of a family were meant to be arc 1 things were we could focus on them while learning our powers. But we got dirt napped so we have to deal with all that while plotting treason and still learning our powers.


Slyvena said:
- We are at the climax point of Arc 1 people. With or without you, the Captain is confronting what is in the forest.
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So the 'boss' fight that ends the arc seems to have been beating the bear who iirc was described as a terminal and iirc Evie mentioned having to kick down the 'Foundation' of one of the Maw's structures.


Not sure if any of this was of any help since I can't really think of how this connects to stuff we learned this chapter but maybe it will help someone else figure out the secret mission.


random thing but when searching Sly stuff where he mentioned quotes apprently something broke so instead of It's a Girl's World-- and Lilly Wants Adventure some of the search got me "It21s a Girl's World -" which feels oddly on point considering I think the chapters effected are the ones with the Zalgo-esque Deific speech.
 
So I'm gonna go on a different course rather than try and speculate on something I'm pretty sure I won't figure out. Let's just figure out all our threats who want to harm us, as well as what we can do to help deal with them.

In Character, we know of three major threats (The Dungeon, Lord Waters, and Senus). We also know of two major problems, Myah's situation and Zach's inverted ethos. Each of these is going to be difficult for Lilly to deal with as is, though luckily she should get a new ethea soon.

The Dungeon is a Rapid Iterator which seems to have Inverted (see the prominent foulness which to me indicates Negative Essence). It seems like it also uses Flow though seemingly in a more normal way. In order to better combat this, mainly we want to get stronger, though a flow essence for better defense against flow effects would be very appreciated. We have enough essence ethea and they are quite powerful.

Lord Waters is a powerful likely mainly Freeform Oath user. He uses his malice as his weapons and strikes at weakpoints. So obviously the first thing we need to do is get stronger, but that will probably not be enough. An Oath ethos will likely be useful just to better be able to deal with esoteric stuff he can do quickly (Mana also seems great, but requires lots of study) as well as improve our ability to deal with our own soul. However a Flow ethos might also be extremely useful offensively. He has his own flow user, but tbh I doubt Lira lets too many good ones remain. It should be a decent weakpoint

Senus is a complete dick with a powerful likely high fracture concordance ethos. Its not powerful enough to be tithed but thats a small comfort to us. Our best bet might be hoping a Flow ethos lets us get by him without notice, but I'm iffy on that. Otherwise, our actual best bet might be to level up [Cleaver of Fate] and hope that works. Or maybe get even another Concordance ethos. Complicating all this is that he has an artifact which is just... yikes. Dealing with him will be difficult.

Myah seems like she is under some sort of negative essence effect which is also pretty dangerous. Hopefully, she inverted but mostly has it under control. Things however might get more complicated. There might be some connection to the dungeon given negative essence.

Zach has been discussed a lot already. However, it might be important to add that for him, we might want to get an oath ethea as that is the magic of the soul. If we are doing something to him, to either help him deal with an Inverted Ethea or god forbid taking his ability to get an ethos away from him, we probably want to have some soul magic. We also cannot rely on [Cleaver of Fortune] to tell us whether an action will work power wise. Its been mentioned how conceptual stuff is not the realm of Concordance. Its the realm of Flow. Which might be a reason to get a Flow ethea. If we need to figure out the best power combination to help Zach, a Flow ethea might be vital. It can also maybe help him mindset wise, especially when combined with other powers.

On the Known Unknowns, we have the Noosemen. They are informed about Lilly's abilities and expect her to be tithed to them at 13. If her running away gets reported, they might decide to look for her. They are likely strong enough, but not a even close to a fraction of Lira's strength. However, they can call upon getting more strength. Ultimately what we need to do is Power level (and hide very carefully) to deal with them.

Onto the Unknown Unknowns (at least for Lilly) we have Valerie.

Valerie looks like an Inverted Oath user, weaponising her will with consent not mattering. She can affect not only beings, but inanimate objects suggesting she has |Dedication| or its inverted counterpart. She might instead be using divine magic to do so though instead. She is not to be underestimated, and she likely has already used a deific fragment to boost herself. The best way to avoid her might just be to run away forever. Her bindings on herself keep shrinking time wise so she migh undo herself if we avoid her long enough and she doesnt get another deific fragment to consume. Still, I doubt this is possible.

We might need Marigold to help us with Valerie. It might seem crazy but fleeing west might be the best way to deal with everything, though this will be harder to justify in character.

Overall, it looks like what we need to do is get much stronger and get a flow and oath ethos asap. Mana looks really important too, but the caveat of weak in the beginning and needs a lot of book learning means it likely wont be enough short run.
 
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Wait, I'm not sure if anyone else talked about this, but the wolves were very clearly manipulated by something. My guess is that the dungeon is under an inverted oath effect somehow, or somebody is controlling it.
 
Well, the only thing that was undiscussed up to this point is the fact our mother was worried about wolves from the beginning. Maybe high level service to man give you the ability to pick up what are the true threats from a situation? This is really a long shot, thought.
 
darknessworld said:
When we explained what happened when we returned home after we gained dream.
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That's...hmm. Kind of vague and not at all elaborated on, but it is something. I'm thinking it was more worry at a point blank encounter with a dangerous predator than anything, it was the most overtly dangerous part we'd told her about at that point, but it could be more. She didn't seem worried about it after the fact though, and I don't think she brought it up again.
 
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[X] Plan: It Begins With The First Rung

[X] [NIV] A walk amongst the Daisies (Preteen girl in Lira)
 
2.3 Vote
  • Voting
    • Voting is now Closed


    Task: FonL
    [X][FonL] You're not thinking this through, you've got too many watchers on you and there's still too much to go with--but touching base with a friend after a night of horrors? That's normal, right? When you get time, touch base with Myah--you already managed to help... Whatever it is that's going on with her, and your senses have gotten a great deal better, you should be able to get to the bottom of what's going on just by leaning on your Essence abilities and provide some treatment--maybe even figure out the source of her illness? You can figure out what to do next once you know more.
    Task: WiT
    [X][WiT] Go to Madam Silva and use your favour in return for an explanation on how Divination works and its common limitations.
    -[X] You've got a cover story, at least twice now you and your family have gotten into trouble because of those apparent limitations. A few questions here and there to pinpoint where they are would be key so that there would be no such trouble in the future is just, reasonable, right?
    Task: Bfig
    [X][Bfig] Relations <- Entwining the world.
    Task: TaM
    [X][TaM] True Song (Investigate Repairs)
    [X][TaM] Riemannian Geometer
    [X][TaM] Rest State
    Task: TT
    [X][TT] One question a day, or whenever I feel my reserve has become completely full. (Default+, how the Ladder has been working but tweaked to not waste potential when at full reserve. Operates best at pre-warning of long-term dangers.)
    --[X] Current Priorities: How to escape Waters' grasp without leaving my family to suffer, how to help Zach come out of his Ethos Selection in one piece.
    Task: NGC
    [X][NGC] You... Don't want to be the kind of person who takes people's futures from them proactively, just because things might go badly. {The Ladder} after all only said the chance of a violent reaction and a breakdown were high. But isn't [Cleaver of Fortune] all about tilting the odds in your favor? The tools to guide him through this intact and happy... Are probably ones you have access to, or will in the days to come if you're diligent. What's one more impossible task on top of everything else you've been dumped on today?
    Task: AC
    [X][AC] You are almost certainly being monitored. While private areas are likely safe, between any remaining spies in town and in the watch--and whatever it was that was on that rose was bad enough that you scrubbed your own memory of the events, and even trying to recall why was apparently dangerous. Maintain information security unless in an area you can be reasonably certain hasn't been bugged, and take great care around Roses for the immediate future.
    Task: NIV
    [X][NIV] A walk amongst the Daisies (Preteen girl in Lira)


    --------------------------------------------


    Zaealix said:
    Also, a thought: Is Lord Waters an Essence Ethos?
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    You know he can use Pithe. Anything else is unconfirmed.

    sheep-dodger said:
    I really want to encourage @Alectai to add at least a step of cursory information gathering to the Myah write-in, like mapping out essence flows in Myah's house before we go in.
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    So you guys don't need to worry that much about including every explicit step in a plan. Lilly doesn't have to follow a vote to the letter and will often bend things in the direction of common sense.
    Lilly will gain Essence Sight into Myah's home quite some time before physically arriving just by virtue of your rather impressive range. She's also not going to jump onto Myah's bed like "Surprise! Happy to see me?"
    (I mean, better plans still mean lower DCs for success, but Lilly will think for herself either way)

    Imugi said:
    Is Ev'aclliál anywhere on that list? Or one the disapproved list
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    She'd only let someone know her True Name under exceptional circumstances. So if she is on any list it would not be on the fully approved one. Could well show up on other lists as multiple different personas though.

    Imugi said:
    How does knowing their True Name help if its too profound to retain, like with Ev'aclliál?
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    The answer is 'Not at all'. Be thankful Evie seems to be emulating your proclivity for 'irrational loyalty'.

    Silverking said:
    but how much does she unconsciously know about other planes?
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    Everyone knows there are other planes of existence outside the mortal one. In this case 'Mortal Plane' and 'The World' are used interchangeably.
     
  • Voting
    • I've been trying to think about what could be considered left-field with a thank goodness we know boon, but I keep coming up empty.

    All I can think of is that it's a threat that has gone overlooked or completely unnoticed in Lilly's midst, or something exceptionally dangerous about an existing threat.

    With that in mind, my out of left-field guess is almost certainly wrong, but I'll put it out anyway: Aboleath is a Colossus sublet. Specifically, one that would have gone to Lilly had she chosen Form Fracture, but got sent to Valerie instead when she chose Dream in the Forest.

    Also ninja'd.
     
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