Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about.
Shards of a Broken Sun [Deprecated; see link in final post for remake]
- Thread starter Baughn
- Start date
- Crossover Sci-Fi
Still seems worthwhile if our other attempts fail.
ω₁
The Long Count
Oh, you're right...
Even so, Amu probably wouldn't know about the existence of a random corporate conglomerate. Not that she'd have any trouble remembering them all if she ran into a list now, she just hasn't had the occasion to do so.
If your write-in was contingent on her doing so... I should probably retcon it, and you should be more explicit in the future.
I should, yes. I'm going to have to start hyperlinking everything, starting a post ago. (I'll also try to keep in mind that the "say, [...]?" construct isn't a clear enough request to take liberties with the content.)
It's not so much that it was contingent on Miki knowing about the existence and/or nature of the Nanjo group. It's just that she would need a rail company to put there, and therefore I needed a rail company to put there; it seemed stylistically appropriate to use a fictional railway company, and more to the point I like making references to things, so I picked the Nanjo group. In retrospect I should have just called it the Magical Mystery Tour (Return Leg) or somesuch; Amu probably wouldn't get it, but you would have, and that was the more important thing.
If you're willing to retcon... JR (one of the major real-world ones, which Amu would definitely have heard of) should suffice? Alternatively, any mildly amusing fictional one.
At any rate, I've had a chance to think about the experimental results and read the later posts, so I'll be posting an analysis as soon as I can get my thoughts into coherent sentences (projected elapsed time < 1027 seconds).
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
None of the charas are terribly interested in fiction, as Amu didn't envision herself reading (or even writing) stories when imagining her own ideal future self. So no, I'm afraid it'll be just a generic "Phantom Rail". Don't worry about the retcon, in this case; it's just the one sentence.
It's lucky you've got Miki here, though. Any of the others -- including Amu -- might have long since run away screaming. They aren't good with anything tasting of ghost stories.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Tasting of ghost stories? Why would anyone want to eat one?
They're full of ectoplasm and fear!
(I guess a Raksha might want one... If they were a sick and twisted deviant anyway, like many tend to be)
Seriously though, I come up with good tactics, and I'm good at putting stuff together, but I generally start floundering in a more freeform environment, especially when it comes to off-the-wall wackytactics like we need in a place like this.
They're full of ectoplasm and fear!
(I guess a Raksha might want one... If they were a sick and twisted deviant anyway, like many tend to be)
Seriously though, I come up with good tactics, and I'm good at putting stuff together, but I generally start floundering in a more freeform environment, especially when it comes to off-the-wall wackytactics like we need in a place like this.
ω₁
The Long Count
Oh, no, no. Fictional to us, real to Amu and Miki. I wasn't thinking about it in these terms, but essentially that was supposed to be ω₁-the-player trying to stunt a railway line into existence in the Vortex World, not Miki-the-character trying to shape one out of dreamstuff. (It's fine as is, though; I don't believe it affects anything important.)
There's a mechanical significance to the term 'scene' in Exalted. I'll let someone else explain it (preferably with reference to the Scene-Long Effect Drinking Game). If that's what Maya means... well, it would be interesting, but I don't see any immediately useful or immediately worrisome consequences.
Still typing; but at this point I think I can safely say that off-the-wall wackytactics are not what we need. Also, ghosts' Virtues are just as tasty as those of the living.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
It could have been a real one.
What happened is... Miki imagined a train, and thanks to the general weirdness of the situation she imagined a fictional train, but she doesn't know any particular fictional trains to imagine. Thus, her imagination invented a very generic one.
If you'd specifically asked for a real one... well, you might still have ended up with something like this; it suits her mood.
Definitely not. The fourth wall is intact, and unseen.
I'll admit that I was thinking something similar, but that isn't what Maya was thinking. She sometimes does see her life in terms of stories.
ω₁
The Long Count
Alright. At this point, Miki should have enough data to conclude that we're probably in a dreamscape; the mesoscale topology and structure is very much oneiric, and not very much anything else.
[X] Call Amu. Tell her we're probably in a dream, and possibly in Dream. See if that helps.
This doesn't really leave me with any good ideas as to how to proceed, though. Either a) we find a better train to board to look for help, or b) we try to Craft (Vacuum) our way home, using Fumi going to sleep and waking up to orient oursel—
AAAAAGH AMU ALREADY KNOWS ABOUT THE VELVET ROOM I completely forgot
[X] Amu: when Miki calls you, say that yes, it does help, and tell her about Igor and the Velvet Room. Ask her to look for a limousine amongst leafless trees.
- [X] Amu/Miki: Don't give out/ask for too many details, to avoid accidentally shaping an unhelpful mere replica of the Room.
- [X] Miki: everything else can wait; go find that limo!
(Sadly, the train is empty, and not richly upholstered all in blue. It would have been appropriate.)
Given what Miki's already done, this would almost certainly work perfectly. (And the leftover nothing would unsettle, or terrify, Miki and Maya even more.) If we tried to bring that object back into the Vortex World or CRP's effect, however, it would simply crumble like so many dreams.
[X] Call Amu. Tell her we're probably in a dream, and possibly in Dream. See if that helps.
That we're in everyone's dreamscape is slightly less obvious from a Watsonian perspective, although there aren't too many other candidates:
[ ] Ask Maya to imagine a familiar place behind a door (without telling Miki what that place is), then opening that door.
However, if we are in everyone's dream, Fumi's dream-self may be around here somewhere! If Amu's CRP is functioning as a KMP1, and if the collective unconscious isn't discrete from individual unconsciouses (and if I remember my Jung, it's not), Fumi may be able to project herself into the dream realm normally. Of course, she'd also be asleep and running on dream-logic, so there's a limit to how helpful Dreaming-Fumi would be; but she'd be analyzable as a phenomenon, and studying her awakening and asleepening might be informative.2
[ ] Ask Amu if Fumi has entered REM sleep, and whether or not Amu expects her to do so anytime soon.
- [ ] If she is in REM sleep, open a door to Fumi using the expectation trick. She's probably dreaming about being in the basement, keeping the dragon seal calibrated. Possibly she's having a nightmare about not being able to.
While the appearance of a second Fumi on her entering REM sleep would be a clincher for the "everyone's dream" hypothesis, the lack of such a Fumi wouldn't prove much, so actually inducing REM sleep (assuming it won't be detrimental) should be a relatively low-priority test. In about twelve hours, a lot of people will be going to sleep; while we'd like to be out of here before then...
At any rate, this being a dream realm, we're not going to be able to get home just by walking around. If we boarded the train, we'd get somewhere that was itself a dream; our best hope would be for helpful dream-residents to be present. Likewise, the portal "home" will get us to a dream of our home, not to the real house. The only way I know to get out of a dream from within the dream is to fall from a height and hit the ground, and that's not an experiment I want to run: even if it succeeds, the lot of them are physically in the dream-realm, and don't have an anchoring body in the Vortex World to return to. They might be ejected to the VW directly, but it's not a guarantee.
By cases:
[ ] Ask Maya if demons sleep, and if they dream. (If they don't dream, there's no point in trying to fall out of here.)
At a more local level, though, things run on a very Wyld-like sub-Kagutsuchi physics. Things like fog-colored wood and tessellating octagonal tiles aren't particularly normal even for dreams, but Miki was able to make the first and ran across the second.
[ ] Grab hold of one of the holes in your understanding of this place, remove it from your head, and put it on the wall. Look inside; what's there? What replaced it, in your head? Wait, no, probably bad idea.
This is useful because we may be able to make a compass that points toward wakefulness, instead of in any real3 direction, and thence use Craft (Vacuum) to make a path home. (Such a compass may just be a dream-delusion, but it's worth a shot.) Also, Miki gets to be the first person ever to make art out of spacetime.
Also, it implies that the portal didn't work while we were there because we painted a picture of a path to our home. If, instead, we had simply painted a path to our home, it would have worked. (Well, it would have been passable, at least. We'd almost certainly still have been in the dream-world.)
[X] Ask Maya what she thinks of the tessellating octagons, and if she's seen that pattern before.
An earlier comment of Maya's weakly implies that she's used to living in places with non-uniform topography, and only finds the dream-realm weird because of its contents, not because of its fundamental structure. I can't help but wonder if she's also used to living in places with these sorts of qualities. (That's not helpful as far as getting us out of here, but it's nice to get a better grasp of Maya's view of the world.)
1 Kagutsuchi-Mimicking Pattern. I'm probably going to keep saying this until it's a thing.
2 It's also possible that that sort of "oneiric projection", redirected back into reality, was exactly what happened back when Amu had two bodies. Did we ever figure that out?
3Not that any of the directions around here are meaningfully real, but you get the idea.
[X] Don't board the train; it's not going anywhere helpful.
[ ] Ask Amu if any medical supplies would be useful for Fumi. If so, open a door to a clean, brightly-lit clinic in summertime, and raid it.
[ ] Go back and check on the attempted portal. It may, like the train station, have spontaneously become useful. And/or spooky.
- [ ] Failing that, if you feel up to believing another impossible thing before breakfast, paint a portal to the palisade. Not a picture of a portal; just a portal.
- - [Q] If it works, celebrate by taking everyone out to Milliways.
- There's a great deal of unexpected preexisting dream-structure here. Either it's being unconsciously generated by one of the people here (as Miki has done deliberately), or it's preexisting detritus.
- It's connected in ways surprising to both Miki and Maya, so it's probably not either of theirs: it would make some sense to at least one of them.
- Maya can't shape this place anyway.
- If it were Fumi's dream, I'd expect the dragon seal to have shown up by now, since she's been doing nothing else but working on it.
- Technically I can't rule out that Amu's body is in a coma in reality and that we're all in her head. Sadly, that's less of a joke than I'd like. Still, Amu's more likely to imagine something that Miki will think is largely coherent.
[ ] Ask Maya to imagine a familiar place behind a door (without telling Miki what that place is), then opening that door.
However, if we are in everyone's dream, Fumi's dream-self may be around here somewhere! If Amu's CRP is functioning as a KMP1, and if the collective unconscious isn't discrete from individual unconsciouses (and if I remember my Jung, it's not), Fumi may be able to project herself into the dream realm normally. Of course, she'd also be asleep and running on dream-logic, so there's a limit to how helpful Dreaming-Fumi would be; but she'd be analyzable as a phenomenon, and studying her awakening and asleepening might be informative.2
[ ] Ask Amu if Fumi has entered REM sleep, and whether or not Amu expects her to do so anytime soon.
- [ ] If she is in REM sleep, open a door to Fumi using the expectation trick. She's probably dreaming about being in the basement, keeping the dragon seal calibrated. Possibly she's having a nightmare about not being able to.
While the appearance of a second Fumi on her entering REM sleep would be a clincher for the "everyone's dream" hypothesis, the lack of such a Fumi wouldn't prove much, so actually inducing REM sleep (assuming it won't be detrimental) should be a relatively low-priority test. In about twelve hours, a lot of people will be going to sleep; while we'd like to be out of here before then...
At any rate, this being a dream realm, we're not going to be able to get home just by walking around. If we boarded the train, we'd get somewhere that was itself a dream; our best hope would be for helpful dream-residents to be present. Likewise, the portal "home" will get us to a dream of our home, not to the real house. The only way I know to get out of a dream from within the dream is to fall from a height and hit the ground, and that's not an experiment I want to run: even if it succeeds, the lot of them are physically in the dream-realm, and don't have an anchoring body in the Vortex World to return to. They might be ejected to the VW directly, but it's not a guarantee.
By cases:
- Falling does nothing to non-dreamers. In this case we'd better have pillows at the bottom of the shaft.
- Falling ejects the faller out of Dream, and their body pulls them back. In this case Fumi's real body, inside CRP, will wake up if her dream-self falls.
- Falling ejects the dreamer into the Vortex World. In this case Fumi's real body, inside CRP, will not wake up if her dream-self falls, at least not immediately; it might do so after a moment. Or, alternatively, it might kill her, as her soul attempts to manifest in the Vortex World without the benefit of a body.
[ ] Ask Maya if demons sleep, and if they dream. (If they don't dream, there's no point in trying to fall out of here.)
At a more local level, though, things run on a very Wyld-like sub-Kagutsuchi physics. Things like fog-colored wood and tessellating octagonal tiles aren't particularly normal even for dreams, but Miki was able to make the first and ran across the second.
This is useful because we may be able to make a compass that points toward wakefulness, instead of in any real3 direction, and thence use Craft (Vacuum) to make a path home. (Such a compass may just be a dream-delusion, but it's worth a shot.) Also, Miki gets to be the first person ever to make art out of spacetime.
Also, it implies that the portal didn't work while we were there because we painted a picture of a path to our home. If, instead, we had simply painted a path to our home, it would have worked. (Well, it would have been passable, at least. We'd almost certainly still have been in the dream-world.)
[X] Ask Maya what she thinks of the tessellating octagons, and if she's seen that pattern before.
An earlier comment of Maya's weakly implies that she's used to living in places with non-uniform topography, and only finds the dream-realm weird because of its contents, not because of its fundamental structure. I can't help but wonder if she's also used to living in places with these sorts of qualities. (That's not helpful as far as getting us out of here, but it's nice to get a better grasp of Maya's view of the world.)
1 Kagutsuchi-Mimicking Pattern. I'm probably going to keep saying this until it's a thing.
2 It's also possible that that sort of "oneiric projection", redirected back into reality, was exactly what happened back when Amu had two bodies. Did we ever figure that out?
3Not that any of the directions around here are meaningfully real, but you get the idea.
[X] Don't board the train; it's not going anywhere helpful.
[ ] Ask Amu if any medical supplies would be useful for Fumi. If so, open a door to a clean, brightly-lit clinic in summertime, and raid it.
[ ] Go back and check on the attempted portal. It may, like the train station, have spontaneously become useful. And/or spooky.
- [ ] Failing that, if you feel up to believing another impossible thing before breakfast, paint a portal to the palisade. Not a picture of a portal; just a portal.
- - [Q] If it works, celebrate by taking everyone out to Milliways.
This doesn't really leave me with any good ideas as to how to proceed, though. Either a) we find a better train to board to look for help, or b) we try to Craft (Vacuum) our way home, using Fumi going to sleep and waking up to orient oursel—
AAAAAGH AMU ALREADY KNOWS ABOUT THE VELVET ROOM I completely forgot
[X] Amu: when Miki calls you, say that yes, it does help, and tell her about Igor and the Velvet Room. Ask her to look for a limousine amongst leafless trees.
- [X] Amu/Miki: Don't give out/ask for too many details, to avoid accidentally shaping an unhelpful mere replica of the Room.
- [X] Miki: everything else can wait; go find that limo!
(Sadly, the train is empty, and not richly upholstered all in blue. It would have been appropriate.)
Ugh, yes. Dreams and real time don't have the closest of relationships. Amu's in CRP, though, so whatever her time-sense says is probably VW-synched.
Given what Miki's already done, this would almost certainly work perfectly. (And the leftover nothing would unsettle, or terrify, Miki and Maya even more.) If we tried to bring that object back into the Vortex World or CRP's effect, however, it would simply crumble like so many dreams.
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ω₁
The Long Count
TWO! TWO ELECTRIC SHEEP! A-HA-HA-HA-HA!
More seriously, the end result is:
[X] In careful consultation with Amu, look for the Velvet Room.
... which I only discovered we knew about near the end, while I was looking up whether or not charas have been observed to sleep and/or dream. I would have rewritten it with that as the focus, but I figured it would be better to just post it than to keep people waiting further.
(EDIT: On the other hand, collapsible spoiler blocks are a thing. I've edited the post to use one.)
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Actually, the Velvet Room is a scarily good objective at this point in time
Given it can freely connect between the CU and Vortex World. Have Amu imagine the limo coming by, and if we're lucky, we can dump Fumi off on Igor to handle.
At the very least, the resident toughs of the UC know better than to try and mess with Philemon's lackeys
Given it can freely connect between the CU and Vortex World. Have Amu imagine the limo coming by, and if we're lucky, we can dump Fumi off on Igor to handle.
At the very least, the resident toughs of the UC know better than to try and mess with Philemon's lackeys
It makes sense. Both factions are dicks, so we need to become the Cosmic Neutral, and murder them both until they leave mankind alone.
Giygas
Cutest Sawk i could find. Lucario is a nice extra.
Hey, about learning to Craft: If i don't misremember, Baughn once said something that could be interpreted as dividing the Training times by the number of Charas that train with us. Does it also count for the Favored Abilities of both Charas and Amu, allowing Amu and the charas to train even faster?
And also: will All-Encompassing Sorcerer's Sight have the same effects of the canonical version, or given that we are in a different setting will be more/less powerful or just different?
And also: will All-Encompassing Sorcerer's Sight have the same effects of the canonical version, or given that we are in a different setting will be more/less powerful or just different?
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
You can. If you're spending time doing that, you're not using it on other things.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Not a direct division, but it'd speed things up at the cost of unsettling them.
The same, but different.
Gotcha. At present it seems we do have an hour to blow, and it's useful for knowing wtf.