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Seele Vollerei: The end of reality, and what came after.

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I don't know that I trust Seele's reading of things. Her world may have collapsed, or maybe not, but that doesn't mean every world did the same. That said, if we want a full explanation we'll need to find someone for her to give it to.

Updoot in ten hours or so, get your votes in while you can. In the meantime, here's an article I found interesting: Is our universe about to be mangled?

(Or if you're a reasonable person who thinks that's a terrible magazine, Mangled Worlds Quantum Mechanics)
 
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I tried apologizing to the snake, but Seele was having none of it. As in, she's so terrified she can't talk.

We'll have to do it later.
 
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Seele Quest: 1.2
  • Threadmarks
    • The snake hisses angrily, and you're hit with the sudden terror that it understands what you're saying. But it slinks off into the darkness regardless. You pause, waiting for it to disappear. As soon as it's gone, your mind feels clearer. You don't feel like you think you should, but it's an improvement.

    "W-what the hell is the matter with me?" You whisper to yourself.

    Half your memories seem to be gone. Everything else is a jumble, but a few stand out in your mind for some reason. It's like... like they were branded into your brain or something. You've never been so terrified in your life. Your hands are shaking and you feel like you might collapse at any moment.

    You need to calm down. You focus on your breathing, taking slow, deep breaths. In. Out. In. Out.

    Eventually, you make it back to a somewhat normal state of mind. You're still scared out of your wits, but at least now you think you can form a coherent sentence.

    "I need to get out of here," you mutter to yourself.

    That seems like a logical first step.

    That first timeline was a mess, and the second one had an... ocean with a... snake, but as you focus less on your thoughts and more on your surroundings, the bubble you push yourself into next seems more intact. There's a whole city, in fact.

    You peer over the edge of the skyscraper you find yourself perched on, and sure enough there's a bustling metropolis down below. The buildings aren't quite as big as the ones that used to be in New York or anything, but they're still sizeable. Everything seems normal here. The people wear modern clothing; it's not quite period specific like in some of the other bubbles, but it's close. Style and fashion may change, but people will always wear clothes, and this one doesn't mix in medieval styles.

    You take a deep breath and let yourself drop down onto one of the lower buildings.

    Maybe you should have apologized to that snake... you'll do that later.

    You land on the roof, little more than a whisper of pressure on the surface. It's a simple matter to jump from roof to roof, heading towards the center of the city. Nothing happens. Nobody notices you. It's almost like you're not even there at all.

    Everything seems so real and tangible. Things are where they're supposed to be. The roads are where the roads are supposed to be. It's all, for lack of a better word, normal.

    Somewhere in the back of your mind, you wonder if maybe this is some sort of trick.

    "A trick? I wouldn't say that," Veliona says. She's definitely being talkative. "More of a... a test perhaps. Or another dream."

    "What kind of test?" you ask.

    "One to see if you're willing to do what must be done."

    You don't reply to that. Veliona has been trying to get all philosophical with her talk lately.

    "I think we've talked about this before," you say to her. "Thrice if I recall."

    "Then you know what I mean," she says, and leaves it at that. You open your mouth, wondering if you should ask what you decided last time, then close it again.

    The city seems to go on forever, which confuses you a little. This world is more real than the previous one, and it has people in it, but it's not... real, and the people here aren't really people. You think you see the same few archetypes in several places. You're not sure you'll figure out what this place truly is.

    You come to a stop on another rooftop, peering over the edge. There's a young woman standing in the alley below, leaning against the wall and taking a breather. She's dressed in a black, skin-tight outfit with a purple stripe down the middle. A long, purple cape flows out behind her. She staggers a little as she catches her breath.

    She looks up at you, staring through you. You do not exist to her.

    You take a deep breath, muttering to yourself. "What am I doing here?"

    "I told you," Veliona says. "You've got to squeeze yourself down. You're far more real than these people, but too little of you is here."

    You don't reply, staring at the woman as she stands up and continues down the alley. You look around you. What are you looking for? You have no idea. Something... something important. Something that wasn't here before. Something that'll tell you what Veliona wants.

    You get back to business, flying over the buildings as you search the city for anything that catches your eye. You drift over block after block of skyscrapers, bars, churches, schools, houses... you haven't seen anything out of the ordinary yet. It's all very normal for a city.

    However, there's something odd that you've noticed. No matter how far you travel, you never seem to leave the city. It's as if a small slice of reality has been stretched into infinity. No matter where you go, you're no further than a mile away from any given location within the city.

    You pause near a school, watching as teenagers in uniforms pile into a bus, ready to be driven off to their next class. You're about to drift further when one girl catches your eye. Dangling from her wrist is a lanyard holding something that you can't quite see. Something that glints in the sunlight...

    You drift closer, trying to get a better look. As she climbs aboard the bus, you drift through the door behind her, finding yourself in the passenger seat of the bus. Her friends all laugh and cheer as she raises her wrist towards them, showing off her treasure. She has silver hair, spilling down past her shoulders like two drills. Her eyes are large and pale, her face narrow and her cheeks rosy. Her lips are thin, but curved upwards in a smile.

    She's beautiful.

    It's the wrong kind of beauty. She's not real. You can see the puppet strings, evidence that she was made from your memories.

    You know all the right things to say to make her smile, to laugh, to blush. You could send a homicide detective into a sugar rush. But you don't. You can't. You wouldn't if you could. Something in her still speaks to you.

    The girl pulls down her sleeve, covering up the lanyard. It's still there, but you can't make out the detail anymore. All you know is it has a cute, toy-like design.

    You drift back out the door, staring at the bus.

    How real is this?

    "If I snap myself together, what will happen to this world?" you ask.

    Veliona hums, and you can almost feel her floating next to you. A moment later, she is.

    "I can't be sure. If you repair the cracks in your own world, it may heal these ones too. But that may not be what happens. These people aren't really living. They're barely here. There are trillions of bubbles like these."

    "I'm not sure I want to live in a world where something like this exists."

    "Who says you have a choice?" Vel sighs. "This isn't new, Seele. This is how the universe has always worked. People live on the corpses of the worlds that came before. Earth is built on the corpse of countless microbial worlds, on the corpse of the hadean world before it. Life feeds on life, and worlds feed on worlds. You can't run from it, no matter how hard you try."

    "Yeah, well a fat lot of good running has done me."

    She doesn't reply. You drift away from the bus, not wanting to disturb these people any longer than you have to. You draw near one of the buildings, circling it experimentally. You're about to try and penetrate the wall when you feel something tug on your arm. You turn around, to find Vel hanging onto your arm with both of hers.

    "What?" You ask, annoyed.

    She shakes her head. "We're getting side-tracked. We need to start thinking about how to get home. The Hyperion is a good first stopping point."

    "So I need to gather myself together," you say. You feel like you can do that, now. This world will act like a container, and by the time you fill it up, you'll be close enough to normal that you can deal. No matter what happens. You feel like you're a bank of fog, and not in a good way; you'd feel ever so much better afterwards. Only...

    "What will happen to the world?" You ask again.

    "I don't know."

    You sigh. "I'm sorry, Vel."

    "For what?" She replies, genuinely confused. "This isn't your fault."

    "If I hadn't gotten lost in the first place, we wouldn't be in this mess."

    Vel smiles. "You're not the most reliable narrator, are you?"

    "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

    "You think everything is your fault. It's really not."

    "So you keep telling me." You say, annoyed.

    "Sometimes you just need someone to tell you. It's my job to defend you. Remember?"

    You groan. "Can you give me a break? This world's falling apart enough as it is."

    "True." Veliona taps her finger on the concrete wall, considering. You might miss that, when you're back home. Hanging out with her, like she's a regular person. She's much more than that. "It's falling apart. But, it's not really going to matter."

    "How do you figure?" You ask.

    "It'll fall apart whether or not you're here. If you were to leave right now, this world would continue to crumble at an alarming speed. You'd leave a vacuum behind you. If you stay, it might survive a few days. Maybe a few weeks. But it doesn't matter in the scheme of things. It'll still fall apart. If you'd never come here, it wouldn't exist."

    "That's bleak." You reply.

    "So you know what to do, right?"

    = = =

    I have a vague idea.
    [ ] Pull yourself together.
    [ ] Do not.
    [ ] Write-in
     
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    • Not sure if that's meant to be (a) Kiana or not. Eye color is wrong anyway.

    She's important I imagine, but I'm not sure if she's important to us or not. I'd say just get on with what we're here to do.
     
    [X] Pull yourself together.

    I think Vel is right here. This world is a test to see if we have the strength of will to pull ourselves together and continue on our mission instead of trying to fight the inevitable decay of this bubble when as far as I can tell it's populated by echoes of memories or even to just indulge ourselves in people-watching a world that is... well more normal than anything else we've encountered so far... in a facsimile of vicariously experiencing something of a normal life temporarily. At least that's what I got from it.
     
    [X] Try to talk to one of the inhabitants of this city.
     
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    I'm not sure how real these people, are, and...

    Neither are any of you. We haven't checked.
     
    ...Oh. Well that's... not good. I was just trusting Vel's assessment when she said they we're "far more real" than the people here. If we're so strained across this sea that we're not even tangible here I took that to mean that everyone here were like dreams or memories or something.

    I am a bad person who clearly understands less of how the setting/bubbles work than even I thought and should be disregarded as a rule. :sad:
     
    Alcor said:
    ...Oh. Well that's... not good. I was just trusting Vel's assessment when she said they we're "far more real" than the people here. If we're so strained across this sea that we're not even tangible here I took that to mean that everyone here were like dreams or memories or something.

    I am a bad person who clearly understands less of how the setting/bubbles work than even I thought and should be disregarded as a rule. :sad:
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    To be fair, the series doesn't really say. The AI is inventing stuff from whole cloth, with support from yours truly. I really don't know the answer, though.

    The model I personally have in mind is based on quantum mechanics. There's a sense in different timelines can have different degrees of existence – if an experiment comes out as 3/4 outcome A and 1/4 outcome B, in terms of measure, then your chance of finding yourself in the timeline where you see B is (1/4)^2 = 1/16.

    That's the Born rule, but measure itself adds linearly – if you calculate a list of outcomes, and two of them are identical, you just add them together before applying the Born rule. Measures are complex numbers, though, so 'adding together' can mean 'cancelling out'.

    But that's true for our universe.

    In this one? Like I hinted at with the links to Mangled Worlds, earlier, I don't think the HI3 universe obeys nice, linear quantum mechanics. I'm actually sure of it; any universe which does is one where separate timelines just can't communicate, period. In HI3, they clearly do. Another interesting element of mangled worlds is, if your measure is large enough then you don't need to worry about any such thing – you'll drown out any timeline that happens to contact yours, and it'll be the one that gets affected.

    On the other side of the spectrum, if your timeline has a small enough measure then the smallest touch might make it fall apart. Sound familiar?

    There is, however, no rule which states that – in a universe where quantum mechanics is non-linear – all thought and life must take place solely within the confines of a single timeline. Seele, for one, is currently no such thing. The AI insists that she needs to pull herself together – fine. The very nature of her current existence says she's effectively a native of the quantum sea.

    = = =

    Oh, right! There's a city.

    The city's gone a little loopy, hasn't it? Vel wants Seele to think it's a memory, not real in the slightest, but Velonia's sole goal is to protect Seele. Considering what we've seen so far, both here and, to a degree, in canon, she's interpreting that to include her emotional well-being. Everyone else is pretty much irrelevant.

    I don't think she's lied; that would backfire too easily. The place we're in... will fall apart, with or without us. Seele's touch will make it fail faster, but it would fail regardless; it is, as @Thelxiope mentioned, made of spiderwebs and moonlight.

    This doesn't mean there can't be real people in it. Mangled-worlds or not, there is essentially no lower limit to how low the measure of a world can become while still computing human minds correctly. The only limit is set by what "surrounds" it in phase space, which is situational. At some point it gets low enough that the expected events and causal chains that brains require... fail to happen.

    In our own world, even if mangled worlds were correct, that's a phenomenon that would occur at the level of fundamental particles, or see a firewall wash through the universe at light-speed. Either way it wouldn't be possible for anyone to notice.

    In this one? The phenomenon is a little more human-scale.

    ...but all of this is just speculation, of course.
     
    More philosophically, how do you measure "real"? Or rather what do you measure it against? All the people in that bubble would argue that they are real, and they'd be right, even as they literally dissolve into the Sea.

    Its not really heartless though. Use it or lose it more than anything. Distasteful though? Yeah.

    We need to do this somewhere.

    And calling the City a Memory isn't exactly wrong either. All of these bubbles are more or less just smashed together pieces of a former Bud/Greater Bubble/sustained reality. Or the shed off pieces of it/things that just spill out of the cracks.

    I don't like it, but the other option would be waiting for an empty bubble (which is a maybe extra question mark level of a thing). I mean... bubbles, so there's most certainly empty ones filled with only objects and such, but we need one that won't fall apart immediately and... Its a mess.
     
    Yeah. My (intensely negative) reaction to my own vote/logic came from how my misunderstanding/misinterpretation led to my making that vote a lot more matter-of-factly than it ever should have been had I grasped the situation better. I've recovered from the immediate and overwhelming wave of self-disgust towards myself by now, but it took a while. (Also a case study in why I typically shy away from participation in settings I'm not at least fairly familiar with.)

    If anyone can come up with an idea/plan that doesn't involve collapsing this bubble I'd jump to it in a heartbeat but I'm increasingly getting the sinking feeling that just may not be possible.
     
    Alcor said:
    Yeah. My (intensely negative) reaction to my own vote/logic came from how my misunderstanding/misinterpretation led to my making that vote a lot more matter-of-factly than it ever should have been had I grasped the situation better. I've recovered from the immediate and overwhelming wave of self-disgust towards myself by now, but it took a while. (Also a case study in why I typically shy away from participation in settings I'm not at least fairly familiar with.)

    If anyone can come up with an idea/plan that doesn't involve collapsing this bubble I'd jump to it in a heartbeat but I'm increasingly getting the sinking feeling that just may not be possible.
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    Kind of? I get what you mean.

    Pretty easy to put yourself in their shoes.

    Its less "impossible" and more "it doesn't matter." The bubble's going to collapse, Seele could probably count the days to its collapse to be honest. These things are not stable.

    We'll probably pop a lot more just traveling through the Sea from the wake we leave behind if such logic applies.

    World of Cardboard trope ain't got nothing on this.
     
    [X] Pull yourself together.

    Do any of the characters we saw act as a reference to some media property, I wonder? Thought it might be Worm at first, with the mention of a school, but evidently not.
     
    So, yeah, Vel has Seele's interests at heart, but literally no one else's - I mean, Bronya kind of gets folded in because Seele cares about her so much - and so Veliona is decidedly unreliable when it comes to 'presenting information in an unbiased fashion.'
    So my model of how all of this bubble stuff works is different than @Baughn 's. It's not really grounded in anything particularly physics-y; it makes a number of unfounded assumptions; and it's definitely a lot more ... self-serving? But it's how I've been making sense of this abstraction, so maybe it'll be useful to other people.

    ...basically, my thinking is... the Sea of Quanta is full of memories. Fragments of time and thought and emotion. Bits and pieces of reality have fallen into it and fractured, and the remains float in the weird soup of abstract potentiality.

    Sometimes, these fragments will assemble into a larger structure - a bubble. But I don't think they assemble the way reality assembles: I don't think they're glued together by causation, by time, by effects following causes and the world shaking out of that in a logical progression.

    I think they're glued together by correlation. By a sort of narrative pattern-matching, if you will. I think fragments cohere into bubbles thematically, along lines of shared emotional feeling or ... similar enough conceptual feeling.

    We know the Sea responds to thought, to attention. I think that's how these bubbles form - that the Sea correlates conceptually related fragments together in response to the mind's desire to impose narrative.

    Practical examples. Take the earlier bubble, where Seele accidentally projected herself into mismatched memories of sisters and family and home; where 'Catalia' was simultaneously older and younger than Seele.

    Take this city. It's a mess. It doesn't fit together nicely in space. It goes on forever, and yet Seele is never very far from anything else in it.

    So, I think ... I think this city is ... is made out of city-ness. The people in it are made out of mixed bits and pieces of people who fit in cities. It's a jumble of bits and pieces of memory that are city-flavored, glued together by its inhabitants, and by Seele, expecting it to be a city. It's unstable - of course it's unstable - because all of these fragments are of differing sizes and shapes and materials, and they don't fit nicely together. There's friction. There's losses. There's ragged edges and holes and weak seams where the whole thing starts to crumble.

    But I do think that when it inevitably does pop, that's not - that's not

    Okay it's still the end of this little world and everyone in it. But it's not the end of the fragments.

    When you disassemble a Lego house, the house is gone, but the bricks remain. You can build other houses, or rockets, or castles, or pirate ships, out of them.

    This bubble is going to go, no matter what Seele does; but its components will reconstitute into other bubbles, in response to other thoughts.

    'Traveling' between bubbles, under this paradigm, is less about moving in any real sense, and more about correlating. It's a matter of telling the Sea "Actually, no, I'm not part of this story, I'm part of that one"; and the Sea, obligingly, reorganizing around that assertion - either slotting the traveler into an existing bubble, or possibly assembling a new one to spec.
     
    Alcor said:
    Yeah. My (intensely negative) reaction to my own vote/logic came from how my misunderstanding/misinterpretation led to my making that vote a lot more matter-of-factly than it ever should have been had I grasped the situation better. I've recovered from the immediate and overwhelming wave of self-disgust towards myself by now, but it took a while. (Also a case study in why I typically shy away from participation in settings I'm not at least fairly familiar with.)

    If anyone can come up with an idea/plan that doesn't involve collapsing this bubble I'd jump to it in a heartbeat but I'm increasingly getting the sinking feeling that just may not be possible.
    Click to expand...
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    It's a story. I mean, you know that, but it bears stressing: These people aren't real. What you argue for, here, doesn't reflect on you as a person – especially not if you don't know all the details! Details which the AI is making up as we go along, soo...

    So, in any event, there's no reason to feel upset at being fooled by someone who was deliberately trying to fool us (Seele), when we know even less about the situation than Seele does. Seele, at least, had enough background info to be worried by the situation.

    (That this happened organically, without any prompting on my part, is a little scary though.)

    Apart from that, I'm perfectly happy to go on speculating, like I've done above. Thelxiope is probably closer to right about how the situation will actually play out, because GPT always does that, but on the other hand... it always does that. My job is essentially to make sure that's not always visible.

    (Questions feed the author just as much as speculation does.)
    Thelxiope said:
    So, I think ... I think this city is ... is made out of city-ness. The people in it are made out of mixed bits and pieces of people who fit in cities. It's a jumble of bits and pieces of memory that are city-flavored, glued together by its inhabitants, and by Seele, expecting it to be a city. It's unstable - of course it's unstable - because all of these fragments are of differing sizes and shapes and materials, and they don't fit nicely together. There's friction. There's losses. There's ragged edges and holes and weak seams where the whole thing starts to crumble.

    But I do think that when it inevitably does pop, that's not - that's not

    Okay it's still the end of this little world and everyone in it. But it's not the end of the fragments.

    When you disassemble a Lego house, the house is gone, but the bricks remain. You can build other houses, or rockets, or castles, or pirate ships, out of them.

    This bubble is going to go, no matter what Seele does; but its components will reconstitute into other bubbles, in response to other thoughts.

    'Traveling' between bubbles, under this paradigm, is less about moving in any real sense, and more about correlating. It's a matter of telling the Sea "Actually, no, I'm not part of this story, I'm part of that one"; and the Sea, obligingly, reorganizing around that assertion - either slotting the traveler into an existing bubble, or possibly assembling a new one to spec.
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    This is how AI Dungeon always works, even when it shouldn't. As per above, my job is to ensure it doesn't happen all the time. And also to dress it up in physics-speak, because physics-chan is my waifu.

    ...um. Can we pretend that last line was written by GPT-3?

    In any event, it's worth noting that, while GPT is opinionated at times, it's fundamentally still beholden to what I do with it. So here's a general rule, which I apply to pretty much everything I write...

    If you vote to do something, and provide a reasonable excuse for how it can happen, it almost certainly will happen. GPT makes that less of a hard rule than it usually is – witness the lack of snakey apologies, as yet – but I'll certainly try. I will also, because I look up to Urobuchi-sensei, do my best to also interpolate all the consequences you haven't thought about.

    Vel is right, this is a test. Not a test that anyone built, but a test nonetheless. We're being tested on what we care about.

    Velonia will stop us if we do anything positively suicidal, and warn us if we do anything that might hurt us. She's pushing for ignoring the consequences to the place we're in, because she knows Seele cares a lot more about the people she loves than about any number of random strangers, and also because these really aren't quite as... real as we are, even if we're also so spread out that the tiny fraction of Seele that's able to interact with this place comes off as a ghost.

    But if Seele decides she does care, then I don't think Vel would have any reason to stop her.

    We appear to be fine, after all. There's no obvious reason why she can't survive here, in the sea, essentially forever. She's done it before, for years.
     
    In any event, I took a few minutes to find out what will happen if the story continues as voted-for.

    It includes this beauty of a line:
    You stand up, staring at your hands. You're a demon. Demons are evil.

    I won't deny, I'm frequently amazed by this AI.
     
    Seele Quest: 1.3
  • Threadmarks
    • "It'll fall apart whether or not you're here. If you were to leave right now, this world would continue to crumble at an alarming speed. You'd leave a vacuum behind you. If you stay, it might survive a few days. Maybe a few weeks. But it doesn't matter in the scheme of things. It'll still fall apart. If you'd never come here, it wouldn't exist."

    "That's bleak." You reply.

    "So you know what to do, right?"

    You nod. "If I leave, the world falls apart. If I stay, the world falls apart. If I leave, people die. If I stay, people die... There's no real way out of this."

    "I know you'll figure it out," Vel says with a kind smile.

    "That's not helping," you say, exasperated.

    Vel just shrugs, and looks towards the sky. The sun is setting, and the light filters through her hair in an almost heavenly way. It's distracting, almost enough to make you forget about the situation at hand. But it's Vel. She's made a sport of distracting you. You look at her, waiting for an answer.

    She sighs, and starts to walk away. "Good luck, Seeley. You'll figure it out."

    And with that, she's gone. You're alone in the alleyway. The people around you go on with their business, completely unaware of the reality that's falling away at this very moment.

    "Alright," you say to yourself. "Let's do this."

    You have a mission. Save the world, or whatever's left of it. You suppose you better get started...

    You suppose you better get started...

    Just one question remains: how?

    You stand up, staring at your hands. You're clearly a demon. Demons are evil. If you were a good person, you'd at least talk to one of the people here, make sure they're not real. The least you could do is stop a few of them from dying. You're also a valkyrie. Ai-chan would be disgusted if she knew, but Vel's right. If you don't leave, you'll be directly responsible for the destruction of this world. If you do leave, well...

    This is your decision. You'll have to live with it.

    Story of your life.

    ooOOoo

    Nothing much happens at first.

    You sit on a bench, watching the people pass by. There's not many at this time of day. College students mostly, with some scattered workers and parents dropping off their kids.

    A dark-haired girl walks by alone. In her hand is a folder, which she glances at every now and then. She looks your way – you're not a ghost anymore. Anyone can see you. The girl's eyes widen, and a tinge of fear runs through her body. She quickens her pace, moving away from your stare.

    That's, huh...

    She's not just a dream-person.

    You stand up, walking after her. You raise your hand slightly – you're not going to hurt her. Well, at least not right now.

    "Hello," you say.

    What is it you're trying to do? You're not sure. Your existence is filtering into the city, like an ethereal wind of change. People notice things are off. They're scared, even the ones that are little more than person-ness, and for good reason. Your very presence is warping this world.

    You can see that instinct warring with the girl's rationality, with eyes that are telling her you're an ordinary fifteen-year-old. What is it you're hoping for? Maybe that there's not enough humanity in her to answer.

    But there is.

    "Can I help you?" she asks.

    You stare into her eyes, trying to find the words. Then, you smile and shake your head.

    "No. But thanks anyway."

    She frowns, but says nothing else. The girl walks a few steps further, then turns around.

    "You should go home," she says. "You don't look well."

    Oh. You look down.

    She walks a few steps closer.

    "Are you okay? Can I... help you with anything?"

    No. Go home. This world is doomed anyway. You shake your head.

    The girl glances at you one more time, then sets her face in a determined expression. She walks a few steps, then turns around once more.

    "What's your name?" she asks.

    Without thinking, you answer.

    "Seele."

    The girl's eyes widen. She looks like she's about to say something, but she doesn't. Instead she looks puzzled, like she's trying to remember something.

    "Seele... I think I used to have a friend named that," she says. "Well, nice to meet you, Seele. I'm Yvette."

    "Nice to meet you too," you say.

    "I... do you want to talk about it?" she asks. "You look really stressed."

    You stare at her with a mixture of awe and pity, wondering how she could be so kind to you. Can't she feel what's happening? The world around you is growing hazy, like it's not even quite there anymore. It's falling apart, unable to take the strain.

    "You're very kind," you say. "But I can't."

    "If you need help, I could..." Yvette starts to say, but then she looks around nervously. "Never mind."

    The park is beautiful. The sky is blue, the sun shines, and there's a cool breeze. Whoever came up with the idea of the city having a park in the middle was a genius, and whoever designed the flower beds was a poet. There's purple and black pansies, yellow and red tulips, white daisies, and dozens of other types of flowers.

    You sit down on the grass, staring blankly up at the sky. The clouds move past, but you're not really watching them.

    Yvette sits next to you.

    "What's up?" she asks.

    "I'm scared," you say simply.

    Yvette doesn't say anything, but instead wraps her arm around yours. You appreciate the thought, but it doesn't really help.

    "I think I remember your name," she says slowly. "I think... we went to school together. First grade? You're Seele Vollerei, right?"

    You nod silently. You might as well. You'd have liked to go to school.

    "Why are you so scared?" she asks.

    You open your mouth to answer, then pause. It takes a while for you to come up with an answer.

    "I'm scared..." you start to say, then sigh. "I'm scared I don't know who I am."

    "You are who you make yourself," she says simply.

    You stare at her for a while. You can't argue with her logic. With a heavy sigh, you place your head on her shoulder, and promptly fall asleep.

    A few hours later, you wake up. The sky has turned a hazy orange, and the sun has nearly set.

    "Good morning," Yvette says happily.

    She's... ghost-like. She's not actually there anymore, is she? Or maybe she is. You don't know reality anymore.

    "It was nice to see you again," she continues. "I'm sorry, but I have to go now. My parents are calling me."

    There's really nothing left outside this park. Nothing except a fog that is, in some sense, you. It's hard to explain. You're the whole world now. The disease has spread everywhere, and there's no reality except yourself, rapidly condensing. If you so much as move, the world changes. You're at the very edge of reality, and you can't go back. The only puzzle piece you haven't devoured is sitting right next to you.

    "I'll... miss you," you say.

    She smiles, then gets up to walk away.

    "Yvette–"

    She spins around.

    "Yeah?"

    "I'm scared," you say, your voice barely louder than a whisper.

    "It's OK to be scared," she says softly.

    What do you do?

    = = =

    Oh.

    I suppose I should be clear, I wasn't expecting this.

    [ ] Let her go.
    [ ] Do not.
    [ ] Write-in
     
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  • Threadmarks
    • No, but seriously, why does everything turn into crazy existential horror even when I'm not trying for that?

    As much as I know GPT-3 is good at catching tone, this is ridiculous.
     
    ...I have never encountered a situation where these were more appropriate. @Baughn, I'm worried (well, 'worried') that the AI is an irredeemable Jenna Moran fan.
    • A gamble may save you, if luck is kind.
      • Seele mostly believes in Bronya, which isn't the best anchor for saving some random person? It's not like gambling on the power of Love or Friendship; giving a rousing, Sailor-Moon style speech about how amazing Bronya is is ... unlikely to be particularly efficacious here.
    • You may cling to that which becomes unmade.
      • This is mostly meant for scenarios where fighting is possible.
    • Corruption builds slowly.
      • Not the right context for this one.
    • A fierce, passionate struggle can hold the OutsideSea of Quanta at bay.
      • ...this would be easier if Seele really knew anything about Yvette, but it might still be workable.
    • An honest effort survives.
      • One of the better options, and more in Seele's wheelhouse than "A passionate struggle."
    • To see is to engage in a dialogue with the seen.
      • ...potentially. It's very Seele, too.
    • You may draw the curtain before the stage goes dark.
      • Likewise very Seele, though given that this basically boils down to "shut your eyes and hope for a miracle," it's not really what I'd call a solution.
    Alright, I can work with these. Thanks Jenna!
    [ ] Do not.
    -[ ] Grab her hand to stop her going. Ask her about herself. About her family. Her friends. Who she is, and why she matters. What the world is losing by letting her dissolve. Remind her, remind the world, that Yvette is real; that she exists, that she matters, and that she shouldn't die. Hold onto her and do not let go.

    [ ] Do not.
    - [ ] Take her hand in yours. Watch this world's last sunset together. Promise that you won't forget her, that you will find her again, even as the world dissolves around you.

    [ ] Let her go.
    - [ ] Watch. You owe her that. Watch this world end, and watch her. Don't let her fade away, unseen or unnoticed. Remember her. Remember Yvette.

    I don't know which of the first two I favor. I'll let that percolate for a bit.
    Higanbana said:
    "Maybe a good person would double tell you this story pop this dream bubble."
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    "It is, I wish to stress," said Veliona, "the right thing to do under these circumstances. It is logical, sensible, and sane."

    Seele is much more of a Strategist than a Deceiver though
     
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    Thelxiope said:
    [ ] Do not.
    -[ ] Grab her hand to stop her going. Ask her about herself. About her family. Her friends. Who she is, and why she matters. What the world is losing by letting her dissolve. Remind her, remind the world, that Yvette is real; that she exists, that she matters, and that she shouldn't die. Hold onto her and do not let go.

    [ ] Do not.
    - [ ] Take her hand in yours. Watch this world's last sunset together. Promise that you won't forget her, that you will find her again, even as the world dissolves around you.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    I think the first of these is probably more likely to actually succeed, mainly because it seems like something the bot would be responsive to, from what little I know about it. It definitely feels like something the narrative should be more responsive to.
    On the other hand, I kinda like the second better? Especially if Yvette actually does return later. All of these are honestly great though.

    [x] Do not.
    - [x] Take her hand in yours. Watch this world's last sunset together. Promise that you won't forget her, that you will find her again, even as the world dissolves around you.


    Thelxiope said:
    Seele is much more of a Strategist than a Deceiver though
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Yeah. I'm not all that familiar with Honkai Impact, but she does feel very Strategist-y. I wonder what her bane is...

    Thinking about this is making me think 'Deceivername's Superpowered Dark Side' would be a fun pState.
     
    Well, "A Passionate Struggle" has always been my favorite Answer To The Bleak, so

    [X] Do not.
    -[X] Grab her hand to stop her going. Ask her about herself. About her family. Her friends. Who she is, and why she matters. What the world is losing by letting her dissolve. Remind her, remind the world, that Yvette is real; that she exists, that she matters, and that she shouldn't die. Hold onto her and do not let go.
     
    [X] Do not.
    - [X] Take her hand in yours. Watch this world's last sunset together. Promise that you won't forget her, that you will find her again, even as the world dissolves around you.
     
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