- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Whatever it is, it will probably be disappointingly boring.
The Practice War [Complete]
- Thread starter Snowfire
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi
Enerael
We Shall Wake to Sanity
They might not be united and thus have a non interference agreement.
Reality can be fragile.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Thus, endless rounds of cosmic pinochle and shuffleboard.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Or they are only what keeps reality still around and uneaten, and the SL are the recruiters that try to plug the holes.
"We are your friends"
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
After the several kajillion times they've swooped down on planets and eaten all the grownups, I can only reply to this with:
JUST WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK WE ARE???
At some point, kicking reason to the curb starts to appeal, y'know?
JUST WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK WE ARE???
At some point, kicking reason to the curb starts to appeal, y'know?
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ressources.
Goooooood ...
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Screw it. DRILL THOSE BASTARDS TOO!
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
He meant 'frill'. Because magical girls. You know.There is no spiral power here
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well then we'll just have to take a weapon we normally use to punch holes in things, AND MAKE IT SPIN!There is no spiral power here
[/hotblooded]
- Location
- Somewhere out there
No, he meant drill, like practice lessons.
- Location
- Staring into the void
I though he meant drill musicNo, he meant drill, like practice lessons.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
The longer we practice, the deafer we get. The more decibels, the better. The longer we practice, the louder we have to play. "Effect" is another word for "sound".
-- The longer we practice, the stronger the practice's effect!
Actually going the way of ship personifications is a way I can see this humanity go.
Literally shipgirls who are aware of the ship as their body and have a human avatar as well.
Like seen in here:
Ship's Administration (Worm/StarTrek/SeaQueens)
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That might explain why there was a single AI on the Shiplord spacestation we see in their Interlude, instead of multiple.
And how there were allegedly multiple AIs in the Tribute Fleet, and yet we've been unable to recover any; if they were the ships themselves, it would explain a bunch of things, including their adeptness at electronic warfare.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Makes me think we're the Krenegee Beasts.
- Location
- Ekaterinburg, Russia
Not as implausible as it sounds, actually. Especially considering the passive generic field of Practice observed in Human cities.
Turn 20 - Aspiration’s Labyrinth
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
Amanda Hawk Personal Diary, May 17th, 2125
The last few months have been difficult for me. Not because of my work with Arcadia, or even the more sensible complications of helping teach part of an entire new generation of Potentials how to use what they can do safely. No, this difficulty has come from something else, something that I was never prepared for, and am starting to realise how badly that lack is affecting me. All of it coming down to one thing. The movement that began after the Second Battle of Sol, that took its name from an artistic rendering of the moment I spoke Purify against the Medicament to wipe it from creation; the Lady in Fire Enfolded. I've spent the last few months trying to work out where my concern about it comes from, where what I now recognise as fear is grounded.
At first I sought aid from the Circles, hoping that among them I might find what I was looking for: someone, or someones, that could give what I felt context. Even unknowing of the deeper problem, I knew that I needed to define what it was in LiFE that scared me. Without that, I couldn't understand that, and any attempt on my part to find a solution to the wider matter of the movement would be tainted by fear. I'd read enough of history to know the cost of acting rashly out of fear. So with that in my mind, I spent days and weeks flitting across Sol, searching for people that could help me find what I needed. Some advised to simply talk to the core of LiFE, to meet with Lillian and the rest of the founders of the movement. Others, perhaps recognising the need of mine to understand what I was facing before I did so, pointed instead to the literature of the organisation. What they told the world they believe, and that I had no reason to doubt.
It wasn't that looking into what LiFE felt didn't help, on some level far deeper than I was aware of at the time, it did. But it didn't give me what I needed. So I kept on looking. Every place I went, I found pieces, I recognised them through the lens of the links that my growing understanding of Practice in that field had started to let me see years ago. Yet they were deeply confusing, too. One quote sticks with me, though, a microcosm of the mess of confusing points, that I knew the day I stumbled onto it would be one of the anchors to the foundation my search was building. I just had to…realise how it all fit together.
'Faith is the substance of things we hope for.'
It's from a song almost a century old, one written by those who believed, and trying to put that into music. When put that way, it made it harder to work out why LiFE was so disturbing, at least at first. I hope that my daughter will be spared the touch of war, even though I know she won't let herself be kept from it. All humanity hopes for a better future, for the freedom that victory over the Shiplords will bring us, and there's power in this shared sentiment. There's a strength in hope, in the united desire of billions to make the world change, and there always has been. What I did at the Second Battle of Sol changed how it could be applied, but it was never something new. Faith shares in hope's origin, too, but the path it follows can be very different. I wasn't sure how I knew that then. Something deeper than thought, an instinctual knowledge that was still not the understanding I needed. But it was an open path, when all others I could see were closed. Something half-sensed, in the chaos of my thoughts, that I could follow.
Since before the Second Battle of Sol, I've been be able to sense the links that hold humanity together. Though it was sporadic at first, given time, I learnt to isolate their presence around me. I learned what they were, how they brought us together. Perhaps I was blind to the truth of it, but with the benefit of hindsight, I think I'll find it was more wilful ignorance.
When the world fell apart, what was left of pre-Sorrows humanity had lost far more than just the lives the Shiplords had taken. They had put their hopes, their faith, in reason and science, trusting in it to give them prosperity, to give them peace, and it failed them. The psychic wounds were still there today, if you cared to look. In the lives of those like Kalilah, who'd had the world they'd known torn away from under them and had clung to their sanity in the knowledge that if they let go, our species would die. And then, six months later, some of those survivors had found Practice. That discovery had given them something new to hope for, and in that simple statement lies the heart of the Elder First's greatest work. The societal construct that they forged from the wreckage of a fallen world, that has endured to this very day. What makes us stronger in ourselves, and through that gives the construct power; a cycle so simple that it's breathtaking. The faith that was lost found a new place, in the community that the Elder First shaped and then left to those like me to build upon. The foundations had been there all along, I'd just never…recognised them.
Faith, as the members of the Lady in Fire Enfolded experience it, hadn't been part of the world I'd grown up in, but that wasn't because it hadn't been there. It had just been buried, deep in the harmony that I'd spent decades making stronger. The Circles were, in their own way, a construct of faith. Something bigger than humanity, that couldn't be without them, but the first statement was key. Bigger than humanity, not just a part of it, like I was. And there, buried in its own way, was the lion's share of what scared me so much about it. The Elder First had relied on faith as part of the foundations of the new humanity we'd become. It had been a subtle thing, weaving those bonds into the complex matrix that underlay our society, but now that I could recognise that, I was able to see how deep it went. The Circles were built on the very same framework; faith in the community that made us stronger. Faith, to unity, and back again. But it was given, again, to something bigger than ourselves, which made it far harder for that faith to fail. I'd helped give that belief depth with the creation of the Circles, forming a rampart around the older construct that shielded it from view as much as it did harm. I can't help but wonder if that's why no one sensed it. Maybe this wouldn't have been such a revelation.
The problem, my fear, all of it, it's down to one thing above all else. LiFE gives faith to one part of humanity, to a person, singular, among our species. To me. That runs against everything that the society I've helped create is based on. But I won't call it discord, and it's no imperfection. It is a different melody to life, one that could warp the one I know if left to evolve on its own, but now that I see it, hear it, can understand… It doesn't have to be left like that.
I don't know exactly how to make it happen, but to continue the analogy I've started, there are two songs running through the web of humanity now. One is quieter, but no less powerful for that. As they are, the two could come to clash, and open notes of discord in the vast melody that I can sense behind my eyes if I want to, now. That's a burden I'll have to come to terms with in my own time. But when a musician has two songs that must play together, they don't let them clash. They find a way to give the notes harmony, to bring them together as one. I'm no master of music, but I know harmony. I know, at a level deeper than conscious thought, that whilst the melody I've found in the LiFE movement might be frightening, I need not fear it. There's a solution, one that doesn't call for silencing a community who only wish to emulate someone in whom they see the best of humanity. I'm not sure I agree with them, but in the end?
That's not for me to judge.
Mother of Circles: 94 + 33 = 127. Synergy Greater Success
An Uncertain Grasp: 65 + 30 = 95. Synergy Solid Success
The Web Between: 54 + 32 = 86 + 307 = 393/340
(Solution to the potential dangers of LiFE found. Amanda Hawk gains Trait: A Song of Bonds. +53 to Of Words and Melody)
The last few months have been difficult for me. Not because of my work with Arcadia, or even the more sensible complications of helping teach part of an entire new generation of Potentials how to use what they can do safely. No, this difficulty has come from something else, something that I was never prepared for, and am starting to realise how badly that lack is affecting me. All of it coming down to one thing. The movement that began after the Second Battle of Sol, that took its name from an artistic rendering of the moment I spoke Purify against the Medicament to wipe it from creation; the Lady in Fire Enfolded. I've spent the last few months trying to work out where my concern about it comes from, where what I now recognise as fear is grounded.
At first I sought aid from the Circles, hoping that among them I might find what I was looking for: someone, or someones, that could give what I felt context. Even unknowing of the deeper problem, I knew that I needed to define what it was in LiFE that scared me. Without that, I couldn't understand that, and any attempt on my part to find a solution to the wider matter of the movement would be tainted by fear. I'd read enough of history to know the cost of acting rashly out of fear. So with that in my mind, I spent days and weeks flitting across Sol, searching for people that could help me find what I needed. Some advised to simply talk to the core of LiFE, to meet with Lillian and the rest of the founders of the movement. Others, perhaps recognising the need of mine to understand what I was facing before I did so, pointed instead to the literature of the organisation. What they told the world they believe, and that I had no reason to doubt.
It wasn't that looking into what LiFE felt didn't help, on some level far deeper than I was aware of at the time, it did. But it didn't give me what I needed. So I kept on looking. Every place I went, I found pieces, I recognised them through the lens of the links that my growing understanding of Practice in that field had started to let me see years ago. Yet they were deeply confusing, too. One quote sticks with me, though, a microcosm of the mess of confusing points, that I knew the day I stumbled onto it would be one of the anchors to the foundation my search was building. I just had to…realise how it all fit together.
'Faith is the substance of things we hope for.'
It's from a song almost a century old, one written by those who believed, and trying to put that into music. When put that way, it made it harder to work out why LiFE was so disturbing, at least at first. I hope that my daughter will be spared the touch of war, even though I know she won't let herself be kept from it. All humanity hopes for a better future, for the freedom that victory over the Shiplords will bring us, and there's power in this shared sentiment. There's a strength in hope, in the united desire of billions to make the world change, and there always has been. What I did at the Second Battle of Sol changed how it could be applied, but it was never something new. Faith shares in hope's origin, too, but the path it follows can be very different. I wasn't sure how I knew that then. Something deeper than thought, an instinctual knowledge that was still not the understanding I needed. But it was an open path, when all others I could see were closed. Something half-sensed, in the chaos of my thoughts, that I could follow.
Since before the Second Battle of Sol, I've been be able to sense the links that hold humanity together. Though it was sporadic at first, given time, I learnt to isolate their presence around me. I learned what they were, how they brought us together. Perhaps I was blind to the truth of it, but with the benefit of hindsight, I think I'll find it was more wilful ignorance.
When the world fell apart, what was left of pre-Sorrows humanity had lost far more than just the lives the Shiplords had taken. They had put their hopes, their faith, in reason and science, trusting in it to give them prosperity, to give them peace, and it failed them. The psychic wounds were still there today, if you cared to look. In the lives of those like Kalilah, who'd had the world they'd known torn away from under them and had clung to their sanity in the knowledge that if they let go, our species would die. And then, six months later, some of those survivors had found Practice. That discovery had given them something new to hope for, and in that simple statement lies the heart of the Elder First's greatest work. The societal construct that they forged from the wreckage of a fallen world, that has endured to this very day. What makes us stronger in ourselves, and through that gives the construct power; a cycle so simple that it's breathtaking. The faith that was lost found a new place, in the community that the Elder First shaped and then left to those like me to build upon. The foundations had been there all along, I'd just never…recognised them.
Faith, as the members of the Lady in Fire Enfolded experience it, hadn't been part of the world I'd grown up in, but that wasn't because it hadn't been there. It had just been buried, deep in the harmony that I'd spent decades making stronger. The Circles were, in their own way, a construct of faith. Something bigger than humanity, that couldn't be without them, but the first statement was key. Bigger than humanity, not just a part of it, like I was. And there, buried in its own way, was the lion's share of what scared me so much about it. The Elder First had relied on faith as part of the foundations of the new humanity we'd become. It had been a subtle thing, weaving those bonds into the complex matrix that underlay our society, but now that I could recognise that, I was able to see how deep it went. The Circles were built on the very same framework; faith in the community that made us stronger. Faith, to unity, and back again. But it was given, again, to something bigger than ourselves, which made it far harder for that faith to fail. I'd helped give that belief depth with the creation of the Circles, forming a rampart around the older construct that shielded it from view as much as it did harm. I can't help but wonder if that's why no one sensed it. Maybe this wouldn't have been such a revelation.
The problem, my fear, all of it, it's down to one thing above all else. LiFE gives faith to one part of humanity, to a person, singular, among our species. To me. That runs against everything that the society I've helped create is based on. But I won't call it discord, and it's no imperfection. It is a different melody to life, one that could warp the one I know if left to evolve on its own, but now that I see it, hear it, can understand… It doesn't have to be left like that.
I don't know exactly how to make it happen, but to continue the analogy I've started, there are two songs running through the web of humanity now. One is quieter, but no less powerful for that. As they are, the two could come to clash, and open notes of discord in the vast melody that I can sense behind my eyes if I want to, now. That's a burden I'll have to come to terms with in my own time. But when a musician has two songs that must play together, they don't let them clash. They find a way to give the notes harmony, to bring them together as one. I'm no master of music, but I know harmony. I know, at a level deeper than conscious thought, that whilst the melody I've found in the LiFE movement might be frightening, I need not fear it. There's a solution, one that doesn't call for silencing a community who only wish to emulate someone in whom they see the best of humanity. I'm not sure I agree with them, but in the end?
That's not for me to judge.
Mother of Circles: 94 + 33 = 127. Synergy Greater Success
An Uncertain Grasp: 65 + 30 = 95. Synergy Solid Success
The Web Between: 54 + 32 = 86 + 307 = 393/340
(Solution to the potential dangers of LiFE found. Amanda Hawk gains Trait: A Song of Bonds. +53 to Of Words and Melody)
Last edited:
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
This one...jeez. I thought the last section was hard, but this? For those unaware of it, I dumped out a bunch of what ended up in this update to the Discord chat a few days ago, after days of bashing my head against a wall and no less than three attempted rewrites. More thank yous than I can properly express go to the people there that helped me wrangle that mess of confusion into something coherent, and for giving me the space to realise what the problem actually was. You helped. A lot. Without their help, I don't know what would have come out of this update; certainly nothing like this.
This got really, really deep into some of the basic philosophical and conceptual functions that PW humanity is built on, on where certain parts of human nature as we know it today ended up going, in a way that would make them productive - you can't just remove things like this. Humans are intensely spiritual beings on one level or another - we believe in something, all but universally. I won't go into the complexities I've touched on above, but if you do have questions - and I bet a few will - I'll do my best to answer them in as much detail as Amanda can right now. She's still trying to conceptualise how everything she can now see and hear (if she focuses on it) forms a coherent whole, but there was enough on a macro scale to see that what she was scared of wasn't as insurmountable as she'd thought. And yes, she was scared. LiFE terrified her, because at its core, it went against the entire foundation of her reality where faith was concerned. She could read about how people put faith in people, or smaller things than they do now, but even then it didn't really make sense. It was something she didn't understand, centred on her, and that would be frightening to anyone who isn't a hopeless narcissist.
Now...well, she still might not understand why people have chosen to believe in what they see her idealising. But she can see a way through it that won't hurt anyone. And that helps a lot.
This got really, really deep into some of the basic philosophical and conceptual functions that PW humanity is built on, on where certain parts of human nature as we know it today ended up going, in a way that would make them productive - you can't just remove things like this. Humans are intensely spiritual beings on one level or another - we believe in something, all but universally. I won't go into the complexities I've touched on above, but if you do have questions - and I bet a few will - I'll do my best to answer them in as much detail as Amanda can right now. She's still trying to conceptualise how everything she can now see and hear (if she focuses on it) forms a coherent whole, but there was enough on a macro scale to see that what she was scared of wasn't as insurmountable as she'd thought. And yes, she was scared. LiFE terrified her, because at its core, it went against the entire foundation of her reality where faith was concerned. She could read about how people put faith in people, or smaller things than they do now, but even then it didn't really make sense. It was something she didn't understand, centred on her, and that would be frightening to anyone who isn't a hopeless narcissist.
Now...well, she still might not understand why people have chosen to believe in what they see her idealising. But she can see a way through it that won't hurt anyone. And that helps a lot.
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Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
The philosophy going into this update was exhausting.
But thank you. Seriously. Getting that sort of stuff 'right' is hard, but it's rewarding too.
Huh. That was a shitton of philosophy.
I can almost see Mary or Vega smirking at her when she eventually came to this realization, because they did the same aeons ago.
Now Amanda's highest stat is no longer Diplomacy, but Practice.
For reference, Kalilah's Practice rating is 35, and she is First Awakened; Amanda is now only 1 point less.
And I'm still eyeing that ????, especially given the fluff description of the new trait.
I can almost see Mary or Vega smirking at her when she eventually came to this realization, because they did the same aeons ago.
Welp.
Now Amanda's highest stat is no longer Diplomacy, but Practice.
For reference, Kalilah's Practice rating is 35, and she is First Awakened; Amanda is now only 1 point less.
And I'm still eyeing that ????, especially given the fluff description of the new trait.
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
Curiously enough, less than you'd think. Mary isn't focused that way, and Vega..well, she might have been aware of it on some level, but nothing so conscious as Amanda has it. This is a cultural worldview thing more than it is a personal one.
I guess we will need to finish "Of words and melody" to unlock the ??? part.