limacharlie | 144.98750: PUBLIC CHANNEL, D90 (evening)

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144.98750: PUBLIC CHANNEL, D90 (evening)

[ Hey, guess who has his voice back? Turns out traveling to Mainframe gives you plenty of voices to hear. But is he actually going to report back with anything useful? ]

"All of Man’s works, all his cities, all his empires, all his monuments will one day crumble to dust. Even the houses of my own dear readers must – though it be for just one day, one hour be ruined and become houses where the stones are mortared with moonlight, windowed with starlight and furnished with the dusty wind. It is said that in that day, in that hour, our houses become the possessions of the Raven King."

[ For once, his voice isn't carrying that edge of mocking, actually managing to sound solemn and thoughtful -- not that it lasts. There's the sound of a book being snapped shut, and Lambert resumes the rest of the radio post speaking in his normal tone of voice: just a touch insufferably smug. ]

Maybe Master Strange should consider becoming a poet, if he ever gets bored of being a magician.

[ And then, as an off-handed follow-up to that: ]

All scouts and nightrunners, report in. Let 'em know what they're in for.

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Someone's got to mention that this place is one giant simulation with natural rules enforced and that means if you have any special powers they're probably damped or changed.

[Someone's still a little put out about it.]

Also you won't need as much glamor here as like in Alola, but it's there, because everything here looks low resolution and not very detailed. The people here are kind of divided into types. There are the living number people, and everyone else. If you end up looking like a living number, I can't promise no one will laugh at you.

Knowing our luck if you go out into that world it's possible you'll get caught up in a confrontation with a powerful entity from outside the simulation and if you lose you turn into a slug and lose your personality and memories. So, fair warning.

Good work.

[ Someone actually doing their job: miracle of miracles! ]

Didn't notice too many changes as far as my own go, but I wasn't trying to set anything on fire. Had trouble with yours?

[There's a marked pause. Scout knows here it doesn't matter if she admits to having any powers, but keeping silent is a hard habit to break, and she resents it coming up on a public channel.]

I think it's worse the more you can do.

[ That's an interesting way to phrase it, and it does give Lambert pause, but only for a moment. ]

Then I hope people are actually listening, because that's probably going to be important.

[ He sounds like he's smirking when he says that, but it's back to business right after that. ]

Heard a few names when I was asking around. A Guardian, Polymorph. Pick anything up about those?

Edited 2017-05-04 06:46 (UTC)

I did. They're two very different entities. The Guardian is a, uh, a woman from another city, part of a group with the training and equipment to defend it from games and viruses.

Polymorph's the local prominent virus, I guess there's a rotating cast of them that cause trouble but that's the one that's an issue most often. Viruses go and infect things, and it's got this base in the city that no one will tell me anything about. Anyway it fought the Guardian and now she's still laid up and hurt. People are saying that's why the game went so badly.

[Scout's not adhering all that well to the setting's use of capital letters.]

No one will, or no one can?

[ Those are, after all, two very different things. A locked down fortress, something that likes starting shit, an injured protector... sounds like a recipe for trouble. The wise thing to do would be to stay as far away from that as possible, but on the other hand, it could potentially attract trouble to the Carnival, and that's the last thing they need right now. ]

Any idea what it's got against the people here? Don't want to get caught up in that.

A little of column Aurek, a little of column Besh. No one can tell me what Polymorph looks like, or agrees on pronouns for that matter. It doesn't really care one way or another about the people, it just wants... dominion, or chaos. I think even the Guardian's friends who fight won't move on its base without her, she's the most powerful and knowledgeable.

I don't think special healing works all that well in the mainframe, but if we could get the Guardian back up sooner than she'd recover with what they have, that would help keep the virus away from us.

Hm. You any good with computers?

Not an expert. I know the basics but if you asked about slicing, I wouldn't know where to start.

[She sounds a little defensive. Scout likes to be as good at everything as she can, but 'slicing' - hacking, in Star Wars lingo - hasn't been one of her areas of study.]

I don't even know what that means. [ He snorts. ] We don't have them where I'm from, so you already know more than I do.

It is to normal use what cutting through the lock or making a hole in the wall is to opening a door, more or less. Not my field. I work with bodies, not software.

Should I explain computer games? I think I could manage that.

In there, everything looks like bodies. But I guess if we are going to do something, we'd better not half-ass it.

You mean besides dating sims? Think Shima had that covered already.

Edited 2017-05-05 15:12 (UTC)

Dating sims are sad.

[Said with all the dismissal of a teenager who never got into a given thing.]

It's about simulating an environment. Like how a book does by describing something. It can simulate people too, but all the responses they make are actually pre-written. Not real.

They make it so you can control one of those characters and interact with that simulation, but just in the limited ways written in. It's all about the illusion of choice and free action.

They sound like it.

[ Spoken like someone who's never had to listen to a diatribe on the superiority of the 2D. ]

If it's all an illusion, what does that imply for dying and getting hurt? Still seems real enough when you're inside it.

If you want to read romance, read romance. Don't get creepy about being fooled by the simulation.

In most games it's not full immersion. You lean a certain way or touch a control and your character moves and you start to call it 'me', but most people who make the games don't build in painful feedback. That'd make people stop trying to play.

So they usually have really weird ways of portraying injury, like, a diode being drained but no matter what your avatar's suffered, as long as some is left it's still just as capable as when it was whole. And if it runs out and 'you' die, that's not the end at all.

Some of them are meant to be more realistic than others. It's all relative though.

[ How much of that did Lambert actually process? It's a mystery. In any case, he doesn't ask a lot of follow up questions, just settles on-- ]

Ought to figure out how much of their rules apply to us, anyway. Midway through a fight would be a bad time to figure out none of us know how to stop bleeding inside a computer.

[ He still says the word awkwardly, the concept of the damn thing hard to understand based on the explanations that have been provided to him thus far, but he gets it. Sort of? ]

Well, people in there don't bleed! It's weird. They look like they have bodies, but they're not sacks of fluid. We're normal out there under the glamor, so pressure and binding will still work.

[Her powers are altered there and she can't stop bleeding using the Force, if it happens. Regrettably.]

Try not to get hurt around the locals. They don't have any context for blood and won't know what it means.

Hah. I'm not in the habit of bleeding over other people anyway, so I don't think that's going to be a problem.

Anyway, let's see what we can do about this Guardian ... without getting Polymorph's attention, if possible. [ As a Carnival veteran, he's sure Scout will understand what he's getting at: no need to attract any more enemies than the Carnival already draws on its own. ]

Don't pick the habit up, then.

Sounds like a plan! They wouldn't let me see her but I didn't try very hard when they said no.

Might have to get a little more persuasive, then.

[ Who has zero moral compunctions about using a mind trick or two to get his way? This guy. ]

If it works! And we'd better hope any help we can give on that front works too. I can't rebuild code.

Neither can I.

The question is, does anyone in this Carnival know how?

We'll have to find out. Not a whole lot of slicers or coders here though, I'm guessing.

Maybe someone who works in repairs. They should know their way around machines, right?

I'm in repair and I'm good at it. Trust me, manual repairs and computer codes are completely different things.

(no subject)

whattaprick - 2017-05-09 08:01 (UTC) - Expand

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