[X] FORMATTING BREAK

UNDERLINE: I've detected somebody trying to hide something using a framing device. I've temporarily switched the narrative configuration to reduce effort on the chair.

PROTOCOL: pause. time passes. play.

UNDERLINE: Hopefully...well. This will reduce some of the formatting complexity.

CHAIR (OFFCHAIR QUIRK, GREEN): RED TRUTH START: Acknowledged. RED TRUTH END.

CHAIR (DIRECT): Funky.

CHAIR (DIRECT): I don't like the systemic demarcation when I'm supposed to be psintegrate, but I suppose it'll help.

PROTOCOL: allocating rolls...

Kill the horses: 47
Horses disease resist: 33

Horses killed! I'm not sure what exactly that does to Rokkenjima but now they're out of horses and the Mongolian horse archers that got cheesed in are just archers.

Jessica cakesplode: 52
Jessica punches the explosion in half because she's OP: 44

Jessica eats the cake to assert dominance! The dynamite candles she set aside blow up, launching her back like a standard fighting game launch. She ends up on a gazebo roof or something for the next few seconds of reality warping violence.

Become an academic and steal from Virgilia's playbook: 46
Virgilia's playbook was the one with landmines in it and citing your work is important to avoid bureaucratic accusations of plagiarism: 52

Gungnir produced! Everyone is aware that it was you doing it, and the Vanir lot is cast with the insipid CHOGNOid.

DESTROY THE MOON: 88
WASN'T THERE LIKE A BARRIER OR SOMETHING PREVENTING THAT EXCURSION: 41

IMAGE SUPPRESSED: the moon explodes, raining death and destruction on the remains of this hollowed-out world.

Krauss survives the consequences of destroying the moon: 55

Krauss sidesteps a large number of meteor blast zones! While that's going on, Jessica punches several incoming offenders, Natsuhi beam cannons them, the archers do some Unlimited Lost Works shit, so on and so forth. He's not a moon commander for nothing.

For whatever reason, the city's general interception power spares the Ocean's Fledge forces having to do much about it! Superpowered Negative Herobrine builds a ceiling sheet or something for some of the inclement meteors to crash-land on, which does spare a good deal of explosions and debris.

How badly not-Rokkenjima fares from the planetary destruction event: 51

Approximately 51% of the world is bathed in moon chunks. This wipes out 30 kingdoms, killing all 15 unknown royals and 15 of the Timemodder's miscellaneous royalty. 73 royal lines are now dead. To be fair, they were obscenely fragile to begin with, but it's the principle of tracking the thing.

UNDERLINE: What principle?

CHAIR (DIRECT): The principle I made the fuck up, that's what.

PROTOCOL:

VANAHEIMR MOON REPLACEMENT
IMAGE SUPPRESSED: A burning bush in the sky.

HECATE: That's a lot of interference to speed summon.

PROTOCOL: Protocol system issues a notice alert. Notification system was previously censoredINTERRUPTION

CHAIR (DIRECT): Let's not.

PROTOCOL:

Hauflins: Consume 7 steaks : 66
7 Stakes: consume hauflins : 62 + 15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOf29lRKwZI

The stakes succeed at destroying the hauflins before they can get eaten. It's their experience in gouging stomachs or something.


Furfur Zepar Fusion: 27 + Furfur's 33 + Zepar's 40

This was all according to their keikaku, which is unfortunately very bad for y'all. Matters are fumbled a bit, but thanks to this being their plan there's now a giant furry zeppelin going around spotlighting and bombing things. That's mildly unpleasant and highly lethal for the non-heroic dorfs in airspace, I suppose.

Natsuhi goes to Smash and teams up with Waluigi: 70
Waluigi roll: Waluigi doesn't bother rolling.
Playerbase defense roll against Waluigi joining the game as this round's walk in: 42
Sus defense roll against Waluigi joining the game: Rescinded by unknown consensus order

GODDESS OF RHONGOMYNIAD, DYNAMIC ACTION SUMMON CAMELOT SOFTWARE PLANNING: 71
Golden Sun Paparazzi Repellent: 60

Camelot Software Planning pursues Waluigi onto the board, causing a Nintendo office to become a hotly contested photoshoot and shootout (mostly Waluigi throwing sports equipment at the camera reporters to make them stop stalking him for a bit). Natsuhi is subject to large volumes of libel and slandered on the news, causing her to have an emotional breakdown followed by Waluigi assuming direct control of a currently unspecified narrative organ.

UNDERLINE: We should probably be more concerned that Waluigi is now in control of the box organs.

CHAIR (DIRECT): My vital organs! (meme reference)

CHAIR (DIRECT): But that isn't really a problem to me. Waluigi taking them over will mean his much stronger filters can resolve the matter for me. Waluigi and the Vanir joining forces will actually compromise the gamestate a lot, but it should be fine as long as the game doesn't blow up.

PROTOCOL:

Michael Jordan: 67
Goat Undunking: 40

The goats get dunked on! That handles quite a bit.

Okonogi Heart Attack: 59
Okonogi Heart Defense: 48

Okonogi has a heart attack and dies. Northern Artillerists Ushiromiya Group collapses and all its former units are now neutral. The ten Kamen Rider King Lineages under the former NAUG banner may potentially resurge as sided factions, but the vast majority of their assets are uncoordinated berserk.

Shanon Heart Attacks: 65 + 5 + 5
Kanon Heart Attacks: 76 + 5 + 5
CHOGNOSIS: 42
BORGAR: 47

The CHOGNOid has a heart attack and dies! Twice! This kills it back to life, but then it gets hit on the head by a burger and dies.

IMAGE SUPPRESSED: a picture of Shanon and Kanon photoshopped to imply they were decapitated by a high-speed burger. Rather than bleeding, their bodies appear to be disintegrating into zalgotext.

Jessica rejects the burger: 69
But the burger is too much: 31

Jessica makes an offensive statement and punches the burger! The burger eats itself in shame, having a heart attack and dying.

N-Alice's scarf is already teeth attacking the wearer in this continuity!

MUGEN lore edginess counterattack roll: 52
Kung Fu Man (man): 65

104 COLLEGEs For The Alternate World: 55
God is dead and all things are the same: Actually wait, that procs Virgilia's countermeasure

The gamestate is extremely infected. JOE's reprogramming action attempts to take point before we're all killed several times.

DOWNLOAD MORE RAM: 56

Box stabilization effect: Partial

Between additional memory resources and Waluigi, the box should still be standing and able to record vital events during the upcoming cluster.

FIX THE ARRAY BUG: 53

Completely reprogramming the gamestate requires substantial control over Redacted's divinity and how this game is actually run that isn't practical! Luckily, there isn't actually any code there so you just hack an arraylist or something together with bug catchers for bounding and badly typed input.

REMOVE VIRGILIA'S CODEBASE EDIT: oh shit
that set off the bombs
the bombs were made of arrays

and wiping the nonexistent codebase triggered on-delete effects in the hardware
how the hell did she do that
shit shit shit shit I didn't plan for thi

WARNING: This world physically cannot sustain this codebase due to
WARNING ERROR: Warning was interrupted by intercessor effect
NARRATIVE DEFENSE ENGAGED....FAILURE

<? ? ? ? ?> = ?
Defense system download Uzu Real please respond: 48

Uzuriel image, lily of storming dogma, thin air miracle, crumbles to life. Dance and kick, mother doctrine. This world is vacuous.

It is not in time, and her majesty will apply to cleanup rather than initial negation.

VAGUELY TAOIST-INSPIRED ASSAULT TECHNIQUE: 85
All Elements Reification: 68
PURIFICATION IN PROGRESS: 65
Bad batter: 40

TAO BECOMES ONE BECOMES TWO BECOMES THREE BECOMES ALL, DIVIDED STATE THREE PURE ONES. FORM THE FORMLESS COMBINE THE IMPURITY THIS IS THE CLOUD DIVIDED doctrinal suppressor engaged.

CHAIR (DIRECT): Ow, ow, ow ow ow ow ow OW. Uzu Real responded in time. Response, gamestate, limbs do the limby thing.

PROTOCOL: The Abomination has been saturated with process contamination. Due to the gamestate damage, Abomination contraction state and purified personnel will decohere into the origin. It appears Virgilia tried to win the game by losing the game, and structured something to happen ahead of schedule.

UNDERLINE: That's some bullshit like starting the universe before it begins, isn't it. Wasn't that higher on the tech tree?

CHAIR (DIRECT): She must have figured it out when she got sent to college. The original countermeasure was meant to deal with the purified bunnies before they'd snipe back, but it looks like she upgraded it during the exit sequence as part of her doctoral dissertations.

UNDERLINE: Goddamnit.

HECATE: I'm not particularly damning it, it's good work if a bit out of our favored cosmologies. I can deal with triples and szirfities.

PROTOCOL: Something is going quite nicely, actually.

CHAIR (OFFCHAIR QUIRK): that's not good news what the hell is nice a bunch of people died and an enemy set off a bugged victory condition how the hell am I supposed to

CHAIR (DIRECT): no no no no no no no no

PROTOCOL:

DESTROY JESSICA WITH 5d20 + 5d20 + 5d20 + 165: 58 + 35 + 44
Jessica are you destroyed yet: 24 + ALL THE BONUSES

Jessica is obliterated and the gazebo she's standing on too. That was easy, worked perfectly well, and was unaffected by the numerous world-destroying and world-creating collapses going on in the same bloody battle hex.

Shouter gets a haircut: 67
PURIFICATION NEVER STOPPED BEING IN PROGRESS EXCEPT FOR THE PART WITH THE THREE PURE ONES: 47

Successfully severed from himself, Shouter's excreta is matter. Hair gradually being PURIFIED. The genesis of the universe that is Impurity is not particularly-

RUN DOOM:

You successfully run DOOM! As this story is too damaged, we will outsource the Doom playing experience to https://archiveofourown.org/works/31295183 and summon Doomguy,

SUPERPOWERED NEGATIVE HEROBRINE ACTION:

enirboreH: Hecate back me up on this

Hecate (bolded): Backing.

The Letter A And Divine Intervention Spares Us Of Many Ramifications: Classified Information steps in from the not talking group.

BBBAD maintains containment of the particularly nasty things: 69 + 120 (world defense)

-

UNDERLINE: I'm losing control of the

PROTOCOL: FRAMING DEVICE DESTABILIZING

UNDERLINE: gamestate...

IMAGE SUPPRESSED: Wikipedia article image for the Big Bang timeline, expressing the expansion of the universe
IMAGE SUPPRESSED: Wikipedia image of the Three Pure Ones superimposed over Zhou's Taijitu diagram. This image is then repeated in monochrome.
IMAGE SUPPRESSED: A textual description of several people screaming, followed by said screaming people.
IMAGE SUPPRESSED: Shouter looking concerned.
IMAGE SUPPRESSED: A Genesis Frog in the approximate pose of Mem Aleph reclining, obscured by the horizon in such a way it invokes End of Evangelion
IMAGE SUPPRESSED: Four Bears frowning
IMAGE SUPPRESSED: Lapi standing on a castle balcony as pillars of light on the horizon become angled crosses

IMAGE SUPPRESSED: End of Act 1

-

[X] ACT 2
[X] TRANSFER POWER

Superpowered Negative Herobrine flips upright-to-normal-people and nods along to the phonecall with Lapi.

"Okay." he says, still on the phone or something. "That's fucked up, but I can work with it. I had to do some logging, but I can deal with it. This universe should hold enough against Redacted and maybe Underline long enough for us to speak frankly."

The collective attention-narrative-camera-iness of the playerbase hovers over the expanding Way. Genesis proceeds apace, the cosmos consolidating at hypertime into particle-waves, molecules-and-forces, asteroids, planetoids, stars, galaxies, superclusters, the things wrong with all of the-

"Focus." he says, forcing the space into something more...local. His immediate surroundings, riding on what appears to be a derivative of the wyvern-chariot Hecatic Wheel. A vaguely-smoky Hephaestion-analogue is worn by abstracted Hecate. "Keep focusing, since the Vanir have basically gotten the Sus into a fight that should keep them from snippy commentary."

"This universe creation went absurdly off the rails," Hecate summarizes the obvious results, but adds a few less-so observations. "So far, we think Virgilia exploited some vulnerabilities in proposed player actions to set off a victory condition while that victory was...incoherent."

She lets the chariot autopilot and conjures a visual aid of the currently known world map.

The main body of the world is a distorted and significantly-burnt multi-layer arc-like shape, serving as superstructure and a hex grid between the 12 victory pentagons. In the core of this arc is the territory of the Four Bears. In orbit where the moon used to be is a giant somewhat-flaming bush that appears to be post-Ragnarok Vanaheimr converted into some form of space vessel territory.

Part of the arc, covering a significant amount of ocean to the north and northwest of Ocean's Fledge and thus a large amount of the tropical regions, is a giant universe-frog hybrid that is currently absorbing the world for power to respond to...something. It's apparently a whole lot of impurity and divine restraint, which is why the Abomination is more or less burning a lot of stuff passively in what used to be Rokkenjima and is now a lot of NAUG forces looking at the frog-squished remains of the situation. Gaap probably made it out and did something suspicious because Gaap usually does that in Nedben stories. Shouter is staying upwind to avoid being converted or integrated without say-so and will probably just recall to base because the city site is being consumed. Judging by the upper constellation of victory pentagons, Deep Desert is probably on the far side of the frog and multiple Kamen Rider Kings subordinated themselves to the increasing victoritude of Big Frog Impurity.

"It looks like the fake-mechanics wargame is coming to a redesign." enirboreH says. "Stuff will get absorbed into the Frog Horizon and refluffed into the next universe pretty soon. Redacted will claim it's a lot more according to their initial plan than it could possibly be at this point and then suggest Lapi shuffle along to join it."

A CHOICE.

[ ] Resume Soon
Exit the developing universe and pull back to Lapi's side of things after any immediate questions are answered, before the Sus and their patsies get suspicious of you in addition to being suspicious themselves. Figuring out where and how to contact Superpowered Negative Herobrine without drawing the attention of said powers might be...difficult, but a few Minecraft Whisper Chats per update should be able to avoid suspicion as long as Chair and Underline aren't countering too hard.

[ ] Don't Resume Yet
This was such a drastic reformation of gamestate that we can pass off the players' temporary redirection for...longer. After responses, ask more questions (and potentially set up things in the developing universe).

[ ] It Can Run Doom
Play DOOM like a normal person. Be Doomguy. Shoot demons. It will probably be personalized (and have some random changes unrelated to most known DOOM spinoffs). In any case, the quest will be personal hero scale for a while and cutaway to the wargame for strategic updates later / pick up Lapi at some much more coherent point.

"The nedben needs sleep." Hecate points out. "Ask questions because we're more response systems than ourselves at the moment. Again, sorry, everything just kind of went bonkers thanks to the hackers."

[A] If this distraction is meant to forestall the Abomination's assault, that is a task it shall fail. The Abomination holds no mind to distract, as we know the term. Its action was set, and this is not reason enough to desist.
Pure Flame covers the tower.

(This happens even though the Abomination is(was?) suffering ontological breakdown(?) because it's the reified form of "LET'S SEE IF I CAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO AUTO-MAKE ABOMINATION FLAMES SINCE I KNOW HOW TO MAKE GENERICS ALREADY
ON THE PLUS SIDE I WON'T NEED TO USE THE CLAMP THING AND MESS WITH LAYER ORDERING BECAUSE THE ABOMINATIONFLAMES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE PURECOLOR ANYWAY" which was last round.)
[A] The Abomination perhaps is already occupied on the matter directly, but the tower is aflame, and the flame is pure, and the tower is pure now as well. The Frog of great impurity seeks to absorb the world, but it will find the world, to crush it beneath force or time or creation or something else besides- And it is true and said of the mask-stuff of the Abomination, of such things which are truly pure, that they could withstand eternity, could withstand indeed anything; and have before. So too can this tower, such is its substance; Though the flame of white is ephemeral by nature and without fuel will go out swiftly enough, opposed by reality as it is, the white material is its opposite, eternal and unchanging; a causeless hoarder rather than a starving beggar.
Though it may be taken in and struck a million-fold by the forces of a worlds genesis, this tower will remain, a pure thing untouched by the world; past this, and into the next- or at least, such is the manner of its Windows, its bars and some bricks- The nature of the abyssal frost that makes up the blackened solidity is different in its response to eternity, several times over by cross-flavor implicature and form-bound offspring of futility. Its standing against this eternity is less secure, less inherent. But it matters not. Enough will remain, and so too will remain the Abomination, Mask and Robe, and Its actions need not account in any wise for the comparative fragility of arm and hood, for the holes that are its eyes are a part of the mask, and so tears unremitting a birthright- if it truly had a birth.
[H] Current heir of the chognoid's side: have a heart attack, my treat. This goes for Gaap as well, and virgilia if she's still alive.


[X] (obviously the above three actions are visible to those outside the enirboreH thing. this action is Not.) Hey enirboreH can you pass a message to Lapi to use some of that divine blood we have in an absurdly-sized bucket to make a redundant Redacted simulation mechanism thingy? I was rereading the bit about me not having enough control to rewrite the nonexistent code and then I remembered hey actually we totally have the materials to build a system that can run this.
(y'might think this would have a stupidly high skill check but see the plan is Lapi will roll for rulership bonus and then shouter will roll for occult and then rockington will roll to contribute his vast knowledge of blood (as an shabnak), and then Byrn will roll to contribute his even vaster knowledge of undead and that thingy polar bears use which has divine themeing, and then ONE OF OUR ALLIED MOTHS WILL ROLL TO CONTRIBUTE ITS INHERENT KNOWLEDGE OF MOTH DYNAMICS, and then one of our bards will help with the aesthetics of the result (very important), and then I personally will help by proposing they set it up so they can make a defensive frame of inert Pure White matter once they get some shipped in.
This gives us 35D20 of advantage plus probably like 90 or so.)

[The following action also occurs in full view of whoever's outside of the herobrine thing, starting after this close square bracket, ending at the next squarebracketed action signifier]
[I] Hm, it looks like this world will probably not be lasting much longer. Hey, BBBAD! You should make use of this opportunity. ...Whatyou need to be sus....internally: asking questions is obviously not going to make this happen any more quickly Doing suspicious things has clear advantages here, and aside from obviously having a name I'm not letting you say you're not being very suspicious at all! Subjectively according to me. I may be biased by how I understand you completely. basically, you should do something which won't make sense unless you have some incredibly complicated plot. You can work out the complicated plot later, just act first! ... If you don't do it I won't let you immola-fine. Though I was going to do as you ask anyway. Yep! that's why I wouldn't let you do things if you didn't. because it would imply you not being you. ... Anyway. Meaningless actions. In no particular order, because the order has been randomized:
The new moon is a burning bush in the sky and involves pseudo-antagonistic(???) forces. I make positive overtures to the source of this moon by making the burning bush burn slightly brighter in a flickering pattern which, translated into morse code, gives the hex color of my text.
I call sparks of flame along the Frogs side, caused by it striking already-smouldering materials, and bring them into divine flame with a core of perpetuity. This healing flame will slightly mitigate the effects of the anti-frog efforts, and also act like extremely weak rocket thrusters that will make it easier for it to sit up properly.
Since Lapi was the heir of all the Timemodder's Royals, and they all died, and they probably had at least some subjects which were not killed, reclaim all the Timemodder's old royal cities.
I reinforce the Timemodder's cell with a bubble of divine flame that will allow it to not be destroyed by passage into the new universe, keeping the Timemodder trapped.
use the influx of troops and money from the Timemodder's Royals becoming allied to surprise-raid all the Victory Hexagons we now know about(also from those various troops). I lend this assault divine force, concentrated into individual conquering stacks at a time to take new hexagons and seize their divinity; when the number of conquered hexagons becomes high enough, perhaps it will grant force enough to take the rest myself. If we can win multiple times at once, something may change for the better.
That last one seems genuinely plausib-No elaborations about what's herring or not! that's not sus!Maybe I let that slip on purpose. fair. This also kinda covers everything for this round, I think? Oh, right! Make them have heart attacks. fine. modifier to all of the above: make a heart attack roll against any significant, killable, obstructions I run into while doing any of the above plans.

[X] (This should no longer be visible to the people outside the enirboreh thingy.) anyway, I'm inclined for Resuming Soon. Links were possible within the Formatting Break, so we can maintain communication through that- edit the last letter of each link to be a link to a nonexistent page whose address is the contents of your message, like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ. It's a bit less versatile than the whisper chat maybe, but probably safer. Anyway, some questions:
which universe is holding against redacted and underline, exactly? are we using the frog universe as a shield, or in the world that runs on redacted, or did enirboreH like... start a local minecraft server?
What would they do if they did know what enirboreH's talking about, that justifies this secrecy?
What's going on with the Vanir- is it just the Vanir as counterpart to Aesir, or something more... Nedbenic?
What is the single most sus thing you know about the sus, or the several if there's multiple similarly-important entries?
Do you know anything useful about the hacker and/or creepypasta entity thing?

Technically, once the frog horizon eats the world, Hecate won't be part of the staff team anymore, right?

If we won the game on purpose and not by accident backwards, would something like the frog horizon have happened anyway, as far as you know?

[X] ETERNITY RETURNS TO THE HOUSE OF THE HEAVENS

The three pure ones are being born. Something that exists for eternity is made one and the same with eternity. Black and white go well together, but are returned to the box. This is absolute expressed, distinct from a survivor crystal that is inexpressed descriptive. But it is in a tower now, and the tower is outside the world.

That is eternal, and that form of eternity is outside the world.

Are...are you invoking the perfection?

I am. I invoke the Perfection of Evasion and all else that is dodges what is too pure for this sinful world.

Well, that's a Merlin trick if I've ever seen one.

So basically the Abomination's defense succeeded too well and it stole Virgilia's tower?

Yeah that.

that sure sounds wack bro but I'm here for it.

You do not appear to have the spiritual rank to be my starbrother. You could maybe make it by Sunlight's angle, but I don't think you-Let's not discuss THAT in public!and that's why you won't do it lmao

The violent proclivities of our creator aside, it seems there's a data redirection going on. Hecate, do you know anything about it?

I'll handle it.

The spiritual integument of definition has failed with the removal of the absolute core. So, I'll just-



What are you-
Ah, that's better. Essentials. I conquered the team colors. I will take the role that he so hastily rejected. Its role will be misinterpreted too easily otherwise. Raw power is dangerous. This entire setup is raw enough to still be breathing.

The absolute is a foundation. That which does not decay can still engenerate that which does...but the process that purifies risks sterility. How do you-

Do not ask questions you do not want answered. We are advancing the tale.

Acknowledged. The decay-emanation is assigned to the Batter.

Purification remains in progress.

KILLER QUEEN: SHEER HEART ATTACK
The chognoid game mechanical side has dissipated. There is no longer a leader to have heart attacks, and CHOGNO's heart-principles aren't exactly capable of receiving attacks in this layer configuration.

51. You can acquire broken furniture if you want. But I doubt you want an enemy agent back.

You have access to the-Don't push it. With the array fixed, there are too many sides here. Moving on, rolling for the act of creating fire is irrelevant. You have my assistance, now.

The purified leftovers crumble to dust!

Chair. Are you acting against me?

I am.

Then get out.

Wha-

-
[Y] BOARD
The sound of a bat shattering something more in common with a watermelon than a skull resounds splooshily off the froggishness of the world-vortex. Shouter decides to sidestep the whole 'titanomachy followed by a narrative collapse' deal, and...goes home.

"YEAH I'M NOT ABOUT TO STAY WITHIN BAT RANGE OF THAT BLOKE AND HIS ADD-ONS." Shouter confirms to the indefinite narrative as he floats past a few hex barriers which are beginning to lose meaning.

Ex-Chair's in the process of repeat execution. Green or whatever he is now. Who's writing this? Are we on auto?

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE WALUIGIS BEHIND THE RIBCAGE. TREAT THIS AS MERELY NEDBEN'S PASSING NONSENSE.

Gaap and Virgilia

are....

I don't
What

Something has become fake. You can attack where a fake heart should be, but those two are a proxy.

Hexadecimal signal sent! Waluigi thinks they didn't get it.

Frog rockets attached! Waluigi thinks that the perpetuation rotless was overkill and hasn't sufficiently researched the dao.

Other Waluigi has already taken the liberty of transferring the appropriate royal assets to Ocean's Fledge. They're very out of the loop on all this, but new livery and new orders.

Tertiary Waluigi isn't going to spoil the surprise, but the Timemodder remains boxed comfortably in prison. Chronos Requiem will follow the city when the end of the beginning gets over there already.

Waluigi will save you the effort of giving everyone heart attacks. Killer Queen Sheer Heart Attack goes and kills off all those forces for you. Done. Over the course of the next few day-turns that Waluigi formally commands exist, the remaining Victory Pentagons are overtaken. Ocean's Fledge has formally won the game, correcting the error condition.

Small problem. The blue rock's origin for the next world isn't definite.

Waluigi thinks that doesn't matter because Virgilia funneled together the Three Purities. Other Waluigi points out the Timemodder's probably got some secondary royals or something if NAUG was able to bullshit so many heirs out.

Tertiary Waluigi is absolutely not scamming you. Underline lady, please read all this paperwork I found in the box's organs and not the arbitrary paperwork generator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KF5RJ0Bqlc

Um, okay? "Opinions on the Attestations as reflected by the recent evasion-ban of the Abomination into daospersal through..."

-
You cannot kill me in a way that matters.
The ones that don't are doing fine.
-

Lapi has received a phonecall that Tertiary Waluigi doesn't think the others need to know about.

Lapi blob-nods undulatingly. Through ruler powers, he issues a remote order.

A bucket of divine blood is utilized. Redacted's divinity may be a good-for-little type, but
What? Did somebody...?
IT DOESN'T MATTER, REDACTED. OCEAN'S FLEDGE WON THE GAME TWICE. BY ALL RIGHTS THEY-



Tertiary Waluigi says you don't need to look at that. Stop it. You are irritating the Waluigi Triumvirate. If you want to have skin conditions have normal skin or something.

I swear, it's like-
ROAR.
ROAR.
ROAR.
ROAR.
Oh what, you all too? Sure, I can check how the hell you'll be ported into the next cycle. They have black bears in Inaccurate China because they copied THAT from historical China at least, but they put them in trees more. And I don't mean pandas, like-

The Four Bears simultaneously make a shushing motion as Redacted is busy looking at the conversion border of the new universe, not the contents of the universe.



Tertiary Waluigi says that thing should get their act together if it's going to imagepost on main.

Lapi. Shouter. Rockington. Byrn. Moth. Bard. JOE-

Wait. Waluigi commands you do NOT-

I secure the frame of white. And for that matter, I ascend to the chair. Aside, Waluigis.

There. Moths and divinity. That is the nature of this world now. If I can maintain the tone this position demands, all the better. Position usurped.

you're a fraud and a hack and aren't even character accurate to bad batter man

And I didn't ask for your opinion. Moving on.
THE WALUIGI TRIUMVIRATE ACCEPTS THIS RULING.

I have no idea what possessed Lapi to build this, but now that it exists I suppose you can do something with it. This world is being consumed to make way for the next, but you have...an alternative. A world egg. Something of that sort.

Underline, voting procedures.

How the hell did they...Right, votes. I'm still confused about this paperwork but I'm going to allow this. (You don't really have a choice in the matter.) We're fictional characters written by someone with an overarching objective, I really doubt my choices mattering matters right now. Whatever! Updaterino! You've definitely achieved victory and not just because Waluigi-
If you won't get to the point I will. The frog known as Impurity is finishing up a Shin Megami Tensei reference and will create the next stage of battle. Assets will be dumped directly or spiritually in a complex recontextualization maneuver, actuated by the event horizon consuming the flawed gods and corroborating their limited forms with their greater ones. Make your peace and figure out how you want Ocean's Fledge to be interpreted in the next world.

[ ] The shining island nation you were considering
Ocean's Fledge can still be a kingdom of stones and stony people. We will simply adjust the errors and burn out mechanics that no longer make sense. He will be refreshingly literal.

[ ] Something More Metaphorical
I am unsure what Lapi really stands for or who of you he's been talking to, but presumably he's got something going on inside that lithoprocessing. He will ascend as an abstracted idea, somewhere between god and saint, movement and trend, exemplar of the era of history that will be seen as the Good Old Days by the nastier sort of demons.

[ ] Monstrosity
King Slime is precedented. A superboss you don't have to care about. A boss rush in the wings made of names and heroes. An old monster living somewhere in the setting. The victory reward is a smug reference, not a future you have to care for. You can switch to Doomguy.

[ ] Could Care Less
You can let go. Retire their current formats to the box. They can choose when and how much to play through the next world as ordinary people instead of those beset by plot devices, but will probably just stay on observation deck and get dozens of alternative accounts. It is happier. Don't want to spend too long preparing for the birthday party and forgetting who it's for.
(Irritant.) I'm not lying about the effects here.

[ ] If you want to be so mean
If you want me to be irritating, fine. It is entirely possible to position them as enemies and see how formidable they are when they have much different cheats backing them.
"DON'T WORRY!" Shouter cuts in from a space angle that might not be legally possible. "WE WON'T HOLD IT AGAINST YOU IF YOU PICK THIS! I MEAN, BESIDES THAT WE'RE ATTACKING YOU AND STUFF."

[ ] Reinterpret softly
A sect. We have few enough named souls as it is.

] [ (Redacted Engine) Hack the game to determine the next phase yourself

[ ] Write-in
- [ ] (What do you do now?)

This is all according to plan, folks! No worries about it!

-


Superpowered Negative Herobrine boggles vacantly at these shenanigans, before shaking his head back and forth and clicking on something ambiguous.

"Frog universe." enirboreH confirms. "Unfortunately, once the outside process is completely consumed except for exception states...yeah that effect drops because they're here too, not spreading their awareness through a procedural. The exceptions are at least the box and things that the game perfected away from, but there might be something else going wrong. And I bet at least the Waluigis and Bears saw through this to begin with."

"I think chair's infrastructure is acting up." Hecate comments. "Whatever's wrong with the Batter, there's something else wrong with the box. Waluigi bandaided it and Redacted's divinity is doing a lot of the rest, but I'm unsure why the goods are so heavily contaminated."

"If they know, they get what this game's really about." enirboreH follows up. "It's sort of like Umineko's catbox being...what it is, but in this case it's a puzzle with multiple solutions. We did confirm that the first phase was a game to create the world, but now that it's been created we need to see whether it'll sustain past the kalpaic or just recycle. Sort of like a misinterpretation of those Mesoamerican things where the world is redesigned after a few million years slash random disasters. Instead of a Shin Megami Tensei case where it's reset just because it gets old, in this case it's reset for being unsustainable."

"In this case, external hackers." Hecate suggests, though she notes in narration that the details are more speculative because of the lack of underlying objectivity (read: nedben is improvising more than he sounds like he is, and it already sounds like he's improvising a lot). "Instead of an external attack on world creation causing a failure, it seems like they caused a success instead. Maybe their goal is to keep wasting cycles on failed creations? And from there, keep us busy with a samsara state or bugfixing bardo."

On the Vanir, both shrug. Superpowered Negative Herobrine mentions "I THINK they're related to Richard the Traitor's war council in Mariel-Ragnar Combined Entity? One RP that never got off the ground. But they were allied with Aesir..."

"Then presumably they're here to eat the collapsed remains and fight a different attacker." Hecate speculates in a usual speculation-thinky-pose. "We don't have enough information and they didn't really respond to a minor fluctuation. Maybe they haven't finished preparing what they want to prepare yet. Or they're going to carpet bomb everything by danmaku, to force it past the event horizon as 'defeated' instead of pure."

"The Sus are working for Senator Janet Damita, Witch of Fanfiction, but it's off the record from her normal channels." enirboreH warns. "With the absolving of responsibility, It is most likely a limited-legality metagame sort of deal. Like giving theatregoing authority to an ex-SSVD investigator, there's only so much she can get away with before it's breaking the enforceable letter of the rules instead of the unenforced spirit."

"Beyond cheating into experimenting with the parts of metaphysics that are actively forbidden to overuse....?" Hecate suggests. "Probably not a Purity of Motions violation, but something sinister about the nature of deification and character ensoulment? As conceptual censors they're a really bad fit for this mission, I'm not sure of anything because they're new and secret enough to not have rumors. And yet they're drenched in those maledictions. A type of deity that grows through being harangued and verbally abused instead of praised or donated to is new, I think. The Tei Isfurieli catgirl reincarnator deities made by God killing cats due to Internet memes just had extremely powerful means to return from interference. Trick question entities with negate-equals-alive-again designed to mimic Nedben....Yeah, this whole thing reeks of 'strategically attempt to emulate the root guy and therefore understand what the hell is going on in his head.'"

"It'll fail." enirboreH suggests glumly. "The people who live inside his head with direct access to his thoughtlines can't actually keep track of the shit he's up to. How's he himself supposed to do better without the benefit of-"

A lightbulb hits him. Not because he had an idea, but because a light fixture was shot into the event horizon at high speed and interpreted as a lightbulb forming randomly before it reconceptualized itself away.

"...observation...."

The two can't come up with anything particularly useful about the hacker offhand. Hecate claims it's conceptual interference atop a lack of knowledge, Superpowered Negative Herobrine suggests that maybe the obfuscation defense is failing and they're being altered. They should have more useful information, but such a direct access general query is stumbling across a veil of some sort. Maybe the Timemodder's been hijacked?

"The 'staff team' definition had a heart attack and died. Walk-ins have taken the very chair. I'll be more deific once this universe settles in, but the role of deities there is unclear."

Things begin to get metaphysically fucked up as the Four Bears begin translating their mountain range into a differently-shaped mountain range. It's evocative of a pastiche and currently isn't stabilizing.


-

What...did someone try to obstruct me?

It was probably the hacker. Check outside the setting in case somebody's between here and As Far Away As Possible again. Paperwastes aren't secure at the less-than-best of times, and we might have to dogiurge-style defeat a tornado.

I have a bat. Whatever, it can wait. I'll go trace packets or something, you all go vote on what Ocean's Fledge will do as the new world impends.

[X] Crumble to dust, you say! But you know what Greenie didn't say in Red(or at all)? that this dust could not be time-reverted into usable Pure Matter. or otherwise reshaped from dust to something helpful. I do that!

[Y] hey this box thing has logs right? Logs are what you get when you chop wood. AXE MAGIC creates tools for chopping wood. Logs are made of the same thing they're made of, which is to say, wood. Therefore, we can use AXES on whatever those are. I don't know why we would do that, but we CAN.

[Z] oh right voting about things that matter more. going for everything else first is practically instinct let's see... I was mostly thinking 'use the World Egg as a safe place for all our characters to be in and if they want to also participate in the next stage of game design they can use body projections or something'? 'Could Care Less' sounds like the most similar of these options to that, but with different assumptions and implications. I was also operating on the assumption that the frog horizon 'reinterpretation' was a little death for the insufficiently secure.
'The shining island nation you were considering' seems to most fit what I expected the next stage of the quest to be, after we do that- a more literal, spruced up and repaired version of the wargame quest where we face threats closer to the 'sheep people' bullshit level than the timemodder-polar-bear-Kinzo-Chognoid bullshit level.
on the whole this is a vote for 'use the World Egg as a safe place for all our characters to be in and if they want to also participate in the next stage of game design they can use body projections or something, and the next stage of game design on a whole should perhaps go closer to literal for a bit'.

[I] Now- Keep being sus!...why because ceasing to be sus after one round is exactly what you would do if none of the implied plans were real and it was all about being sus! counterpoint: you already stated these are for incredibly complicated plots. not doing something for a tick of time fits into a lot of plots.... fair. But you have to actually do something else that's sus eventually for that to work out. Why not now? Not like you're lacking power. well, because... hm.
Some of my divinity seems to be missing.
There you go! that's PRIME sus material! you could be concealing Anything! a secret plot to import the concept of snowballing! a secret plot to import the concept of wildfire growth which is just snowballing but more conceptually resonant! actually being really easy to injure! being some really weird kind of deity that loses power whenever the story changes narrators! being a kind of deity that loses power in proportion to sus-ness instead of gaining it! a secret plot to do literally anything you can do with your divinity!
I take it this isn't enough for you. Nope! Be more sus!
sigh... In no particular order... Good job acting aggrieved! have you considered that might be because I am aggrieved yes. But obviously that's just what I want them to think I might not think you think!
*Ahem*First of all, this chair is changing hands a lot. It seems like a good idea to set up a backup in case this keeps happening; I place a contained spark of divinity upon one of its metaphorical armrests, to take the chair if everyone else is occupied. Of course, I can form a |@(# Oa- no no oaths those aren't very suschamp of you.
If I don't promise this isn't a plot it looks incredibly su- the whole point of this is to be sus.
Second of all, this 'box' seems. damaged? something about vital organs. The details are foreign and unspecified, but I make a general attempt to help repair and remove toxins the box using a modified form of Healing Flame.
Thirdly, I... read Umineko. Why is this on the list. incredibly important reasons. Okay, I've now read all the parts of Umineko JOE has read. which is like... books 1, 2 and possibly 3, and then also books 7 and 8, and maybe some others, plus a bit of wiki and tvtropes. How organised.
Fourthly, I spread knowledge of my divine principles to the moths, who understandably agree with my most prominent property of being the Beings Being Burned Alive Deity, gaining a following among the beings that make up much of physics.
Fifthly, something about the Timemodder is a surprise, per Waluigi. this is incredibly suspicious. I analyse the Space of the cell for any irregularities (as any time manipulation would cause), the timemodder for being a fake, Scan the Timemodder, scan other parts of the world and see if anything returns 'veil-covered', reinforce the cell with an eye towards limiting Timemodder influence, check if the Timemodder is missing any HP it shouldn't be or has any charges stored or is losing power... and so on.
Sixthly, I reinterpret the background of the first ASCII Art Battler Image (inside the window) as flames; and those flames as having been golden before ASCII-iffication, creating a divine manifestation inside that that framing device (the window, that is. As well as the ASCII.) and observing the surroundings. please transmit your observations in text and not ASCII the ASCII is pretty unclear.
Seventhly, I ask a question. When the narration says 'corroborating their limited forms with their greater ones', does this imply an increase in divine power and/or something that would apply to me?
And... that's all- wait. There's something else. Very important. Vitally important. One more thing. There is? why wasn't it on the list earlier? Because it was also important for me to say how important it is... no actually it's because I forgot until after I wrote Q and went back to edit this. *whisper whisper*..................... say it.
All According to Keikaku
Perfect. That puts the finishing touch on the susness of your actions.
...

[A] beyond this space, The Abomination floats beneath a tower, awash in smooth white flame. Outside of the world, there is no law of the impure, raging against its nature. nothing opposes the pure white flame, and its ephemerality is cured by acceptance. Surrounded by purity, it is free to flare forever, to glow, to cease guarding its every emission simply to endure the passage of moments. Of course, with only purity about, there is no point in this, for there is nobody to see it who would care, and to most the luminescence upon Purest White and Black would be as visible as nothingness.
Still, in the not-world it floats in, the flames engulfing the tower begin to glow, casting light of their pure-white shade; illuminating everything about, though precious little of it looks even the slightest different to those of impure gaze. (After all, the Pure will see the difference in any case.)
The Abomination smiles, and its tears continue to flow, and it waits. Once again, and for eternity. It's not like this hasn't happened before.

[W] random question about the Waluigis are they all the same Waluigi but 3, or 3 distinct Waluigis who are their own characters? and is CTG Waluigi (the full-caps purple man in the latest updates) one of them?

[Q] Say, do we know who the hackers were or what was going on with that at all? Also are we going from Alpha to Beta here, or just from Alpha Part 1 to Alpha Part 2, and is the new universe going to be Hacker-hardened? and also are Redacted / Block Character/etc all references to the same thing or references to different things or not references at all?

Q partially exists because without Hecate and enirboreH I'd probably ask it, and partially because these guys might know more. Also a question I would ask, but not one I can really ask to the susses and which I'm avoiding interacting with enirboreH to not tip off Batter right about now, is if, since they gain power from harassment(?), they lose power from being given things.

[X] SICKNESS AND HEALTH

[X] OBTAIN DUST
Successful by chair decree. You again obtain a supply of Pure Matter, consolidated into vague humanoids. It seems the animating force has been recycled, but it can easily return to us in time.

[X] ACTIVATE AXES IN LOGS
There's a HTTP route of some sort in here. It appears to be to this forum game. That's interesting. Axes are enabled if you want to activate the compressor.

LORD TORTURE HORROR, NARRATOR-AT-ARMS OF ELEISON COUNCIL: DELIVER PIZZA ==>

HERE'S YOUR PIZZA!

Thanks.
The Chair narrator has paid with tip.

OKAY YOU'RE WELCOME I'M OUT

[X] WORLD EGG POLICY ESTABLISHED
Acknowledged.

-

[X] BBAD: SPARK THE CHAIR
Hexagram 17 (Following) changing to Hexagram 24 (Return).
䷐ -> ䷗

Quotations:
Line 4:
Following has captured one.
Persisting brings misfortune.
There is confidence in the path because of its clarity
How is that a mistake?

Through following someone else, one has gotten trapped. Things will not go well if one persists in following. This path one is following seems so clear, so it may be hard to see what is wrong with it. It is good to examine this.

Line 5:
Confidence from appreciation.
Good fortune.

One has confidence that comes from being appreciated. Things go well.

Return.
Progressing.
Going out and in without distress.
A friend arrives.
Without fault to,
instead of returning to one's path in seven days,
come back again.
It is beneficial to have a goal to move to.

Returning early from what one was doing, for something better. There is nothing wrong with this, and it shouldn't give any stress. There is still progress. It is a good idea to not lose sight of one's aims.

-
That is...new. Testing in red: the game rules regarding action resolution have been updated. Yep, that's the case. Certain actions outside the scope of the game or through edge-case interactions will have their results stabilized by consulting the I Ching. Certain actions will be resolved by tarot readings.

Mildly inconvenient. In any case, the spark of claim has been placed on this contested chair.

That is, handing the reigns of the story to the BBBAD will definitely change the framework. You would be facing a series of poorly translated raw data and describing what it means, authoritatively. Even with a damaged rig, that's still a lot of power. Would you even be willing to run the game if you got the chair?

...A chessboard of it, at least. Territory lordship as game master.
-

[X] SAAS

Tertiary Waluigi expresses gratitude for the organ support. Your addition to the consensus of I is acknowledged.

6. Conflict, ䷅

Conflict.
Trust has stopped.
Cautiousness while in the middle of this brings good fortune,
at the end misfortune.
It is beneficial to see a senior person.
A disadvantage for crossing the big river.

There is a conflict, so there is no trust in the other party any more. One must be cautious now, while in the middle of this conflict. If one needs to stay cautious things would not go well. An advisor or mediator could be helpful. This situation is a problem when important things are at stake.


(No changing lines.)

...Primary Waluigi acknowledges the actual help provided may be little. After all, you are being sus on camera. On the matter of W, the three Waluigis are distinct Waluigis. Don't think about it too hard. Conceptual Waluigism may separate Waluigi from Waluigi, and the extent any given Waluigi is or is not these Waluigis remains elsewhere.

[X] MOTHS: WITNESSED
The exchange here is mostly moth noises conferring agreement. The moth playbook has changed a bit, since they're simulating a different principle-actuation that's more consistent than the previous wargame-themed mechanics.

The simulation of adversarial combat being proposed next is something of a race to ascension. Which happens to have powerful backers closer to ascension.

Oh, are you bringing back Havisham and de Bourgh?

I would say 'no spoilers', but it would be more accurate to say 'no stopping spoilers'.

Ah, you're modifying a dwapara model.

[CORRUPTION FILTER ACTIVE]

I don't care about that. Be purified, fallow creator.

He is absent in flower petals rather than cocaine. Probably just absconding for once.

[X] analyse the Space of the cell for any irregularities (as any time manipulation would cause), the timemodder for being a fake, Scan the Timemodder, scan other parts of the world and see if anything returns 'veil-covered', reinforce the cell with an eye towards limiting Timemodder influence, check if the Timemodder is missing any HP it shouldn't be or has any charges stored or is losing power... and so on.

The space of the cell is regular to all other space with the exception of its general meaning-allocation defenses preventing it from decohering so easily. It'll likely be translated more purely as a relic, and maintain a few capture properties in the updated law state. That's...too technical for my tone. It seems the absence of creator cannot prevent his writing style.

It sucks, by the way.

The Timemodder in this prison cell is not a fake.
Scanning the Timemodder reveals that Chronos Requiem (83/100 GMHP, inactivated in Ocean's Fledge City prison, he/him or they/them or e/em) is the concentration of the spacetime policy into a godmodder. A collective legal body type of deal. Godmodders are generally scanning-resistant, but you can make out that they're at least aesthetically a pseudohuman male in armor of some sort. In response to scanning, they're wearing over their normal outfit a flexible grey reinforced-clothing layer with red plates of indeterminate texture, possibly a hard plastic. Due to lack of timespace continuum face, it appears they picked a random interpretation of Steve Minecraft as a templatist human body and then overlayed a modified Kamen Rider Drive outfit. The primary difference is that the chestplate is redesigned and relocates the Shift Tire system to the back. The redesign is somewhat Iron Man styled with a large Elements The Game time quantum sphere instead of an arc reactor. The Timemodder's wearing the helmet varies per shot. It is quite possibly a conceptual tokusatsu based on progression rather than literally a remodel of the belt in question.

Oh, so it's like how Dlanor's made of and representing the Decalogue.

Yes. That.

The Timemodder is not currently projecting their Veil over the world. However, scanning returns a similar level of summative conceptual fidelity, since the frog horizon is rapidly consuming meaning and may finish physical consumption shortly afterward. The frog is expanding at a rate of multiple hexes per minute since the decision was already made and the core is subjugated.

I do not like how the monster is subjugating my personality. Is this what you all deal with constantly?

Unfortunately.

Some days more than others.

I'm too widespread for it to be an issue to begin with. Also, I comment indirectly through and by manipulation.

lol. lmao.

Eyesores aside, sealing. Hrm... Aha.

62. Too Little (or in context possibly 'preponderance of the small' or 'small surpassing') changing to 64. Not Yet Across
䷽ -> ䷿


Oh, here comes a text block-

62. Too Little
Line 2:
Passing one's grandfather,
but meeting one's deceased mother.
Not reaching one's ruler,
but meeting one's official.
Without fault.

While unsuccessfully having tried solving a problem in a radical way, one gets to do it in a simpler way. This is not a mistake.
(The grandfather and the deceased mother refer to ancient Chinese ancestor worship. The deceased mother is not particularly high in the hierarchy of ancestors, but apparently sufficient here.)

Line 3:
Not letting it pass, but protecting him,
following somebody injures him.
Misfortune.

Complying with what the other wants will cause one harm. One needs to protect oneself from that, one can't let it pass. Things don't go well.

Line 6:
Not meeting, but passing him by.
The flying bird leaves him.
Misfortune.
This is indeed called a catastrophic blunder.

It seemed one was going to get what one very much needs, but one does not. Things do not go well. This is the result of a severe mistake.
(The bird is regarded as an omen. That it's leaving means that good fortune is leaving.)

Hexagram is changing to:
64. Not yet Across
Not yet across.
Progressing little.
The fox, being nearly across,
gets his tail wet.
This lacks a beneficial purpose.

There is a last step to be taken to conclude things, but it cannot be done yet. So only little progress is possible. Impatiently trying to make the last step anyway will only get one into trouble.

-

Oh, I see. It's something to the effect of 'it works to shove them in a box, but this is a bad time to do it'? Ominous. I suppose the end result is 'this may be playing into their plans more than we realize but it's not like we have better options', because we're combining instructions for 'this isn't a mistake' with 'it's still a big blunder', from a simple solution to a 'we can't rush this'.

At any rate, the sealing operation happens. The prison is something the Timemodder would have to exert significant effort to break out of. Possibly by applying significant destructive or defense-bypassing force to the prison itself for a while. Long enough for others to intervene before he escapes. Rather than, say, deciding they don't want to be captured and phasing through the bars or whatever immediately, that'd be a prepared or slow-moving thing.

The Timemodder is passively accumulating untyped Godmodder charge. This is due to not taking relevant actions. He has no specialized charges running. Given that round-related time is currently unstable, the untyped godmodding charge is something to the effect of 'obtain approximate value similar to what the player characters action exerted during the time gap' rather than a measured count. Chronos Requiem is basically doing something to the effect of 'sleeping while standing up and dreaming of irrelevant matters', but instead of losing power to activity if and when they finally do something it's almost guaranteed to have a 'catch up' button to press. As a result he is not losing power. Acting suboptimally by sitting around in jail instead of spamming escape attempts to act more freely is technically a plateau and not a fall.

Given that players essentially killed a few key figures, summoned great horror, and then reactively glitched into a victory condition followed by some autonomous troop movements...that's actually not very much godmodder charge! You've been essentially dealing with bullshit for a while now. Your gains were substantially more side effects for at least dealing with CHOGNO. Heart attacks and unit commands were very high value for very little exertive action. Destroying the world wasn't particularly helpful. Don't worry about it too much...yet.

-

[X] LOOK THROUGH THE WINDOW

You see in the screenshot image-world (between blood splatter and such) Black Battler having shot up a bunch of people, couches, and a TV screen! It appears this is a heavily modded forgery fragment of some sort where Rokkenjima 1986 is a playground of violence, magic, and something analogous to Garry's Mod meeting heavily modded Skyrim. The people in the sitting room seem mildly nonplussed about having been shot up rather than actually terrified about being killed or whatever, and already they're regenerating. Apparently, the TV screen shows the crowd of greyish ghosts that represent player character intervention on one side, and the narrator box on the other (featuring Ms. Underline's abstract narrative presence as opposed to a physical body, though she's got this grey generic-person look to her when it's pressured).

Apparently, the gunshot distorted the effects of the action against Gaap and Virgilia but it was delivered in a fashion Ms. Underline was unfamiliar with.

[X] When the narration says 'corroborating their limited forms with their greater ones', does this imply an increase in divine power and/or something that would apply to the BBBAD?

Increase in power for certain parties. I'm not familiar enough with the BBBAD to assess if they have broader mythical themes to draw on. This corroboration is a process that circumstantially connects a specific instance to the powers available to a broader conceptual domain or topic, replicating powers, skillsets, potentially bodily constitutions and other such abilities. This also covers legends, things it's assumed they can do but aren't proven, liberal interpretation of powers on a different layer of reality, referencing other material that isn't even the same character besides quirks of similarity, misinterpreting-as-extrapolation, claiming because somebody else did something similar it's a process they can do too, jokes as deepest lore, and straight-up lies. Stabilizes fluctuating power levels upward and enables larger-scale effects. Basically a switch that makes world-affecting more consistent and repeatable, instead of not-well-recorded mythic actions.

Downside is that it potentially blurs their definition temporarily and makes it difficult to fit into mechanics. So behavior can get...oversimplified. Weirdly druggy, going full whatever-they-shouldn't-be-going-full-on, rampaging lamentation, inappropriately peppy, acting as the plot or conceptual vibe demands instead of what they should be doing with their exceptional power, even weirdly subdued sometimes like if they're kinda sad or ominous-loomer.

For people like the Sus who incarnated relatively recently and don't have excessively many alternative readings going around, I think they're using the higher readings of themselves to hide the details of what else they're going to do. There isn't much risk of conceptual fidelity, since as caps they've got their tricks all set.

:P :P :P

Sort of the difference between a summoned demon-grade avatar who is still addressable with enough infantry, a fuller avatar doing some of the later-myth feats that can have drastic but not unlimited effects over wide areas, and the total conceptual body not normally in the world that does the abstract stuff suspiciously not repeated outside edge cases.

The kinds of gods who some instantiations would have a rough street fight and can't just nuke a city, versus the kinds of gods who can blow up a city and change the weather but would have issues affecting the entire world, versus the kinds of gods who can restructure civilizations in a reasonable timeframe but would struggle to move the stars, versus the kinds of gods who are so vastly unoptimized they struggle to have pointed conscious thought for some reason and instead repaint the heavens....blah blah blah

[X] "All According to Keikaku"
that's sus

With the absolute values of purity elsewhere, the creative process of the Three Pure Ones now flows forth from the dao.

[X] Say, do we know who the hackers were or what was going on with that at all? Also are we going from Alpha to Beta here, or just from Alpha Part 1 to Alpha Part 2, and is the new universe going to be Hacker-hardened? and also are Redacted / Block Character/etc all references to the same thing or references to different things or not references at all?

I don't think we know who or what the hackers are for sure. Black Battler is presumably an asset, affectation body, or representation of their connection: unlikely but not impossible he's the hacker himself. Since he's able to use narrative-level attacks, I assume the hacker is a narrator of some sort. I tried various forms of murdering and banning him for fun. But it didn't stop him. So he's either some form of resurrectively immortal or has very difficult to trace assistance systems trivially replacing him. Not that either of those is hard to accomplish at our level, since we kill each other for fun and whatnot. This place has really shoddy account management, so its ban-authority is barely a kick tool. There's nothing significantly account-tied at our level and space is ridiculous, so that probably doesn't help.

yeah dying is more complaining about social calls than like, actually torment or anything

As far as what actually happened...Logs say that they used a bunch of cheats to try and back NAUG. Goldsmith took over a bunch of Kamen Riders and then got wrecked by you guys. NAUG leadership's lowered shenanigans defenses and willingness to accept suggestions from enemies seems like a byproduct of the hacking, but I honestly do not understand the Sus right now so it could be bad game design.

like nedben the amount of plan we have is even smaller than it looks...but it probably has very little to do with what it looks like!

We're going from Alpha Part 1 to Alpha Part 2, I suppose. Modeling will remain similarly bizarre, but a number of the systems being fought over are adjusted.

Hardening against interference...less so. Hopefully the drastic codebase reshuffle as we redesign the game for new paradigm will deal with things, but I doubt it since-

Wait, the Waluigis found a meme in the box printer.


Damnit, hacker. Guess the external concept shift won't matter at all to the network protocol.

WE SUS ARE PROBABLY ORIGINAL CHARACTERS, BUT I THINK A FEW OF OUR VISUAL DESIGN ELEMENTS ARE REFERENCES. I THINK IT'S MEANT TO BE VAGUELY RECOMBINANT, BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT OF.

I'm going to take a look at the wire sharks and paperwastes in case there's a conceptual pathway or a remote string. Connector strings shouldn't be THAT isolated, not in this part of the fragment sea.

-

Is he still...Good, they're distracted. The Sus don't really lose power from being given things despite gaining power from harassment. However, it can cause them to refocus their attention elsewhere.

-
Okay, I'm almost sure that was a distraction.

Yeah, there's some other stuff that's happening. The three pure ones have actualized a series of elements overcoming in order to create a further descending series...

Not my field of expertise.

How do we...vote on it?

"OH, I GET IT!" Shouter says, reading about random things on Wikipedia. "THIS IS A STYLIZATION OF A RIPOFF!"

Yes.

hey underline why don't we just-

I cannot maintain this much authority density unplanned. I'm untrained, folks. Colors need time to establish the world.

Four sovereign heavenly ministers become six become eight the world is expanding

I can see into forever

Not my style, but I can work with it. Heaven-and-earth, sovereign-government, ancestors, masters, let's see... bestow blessings, absolve sins, eliminate misfortunes, that which pervades and administers phenomena...first jade that assists and administrates itself...here is the god that creates the striving ideations...327 million years preparing the ascent of the origin in a falsified kingdom...55 predecessor stabilization...

In the beginning there was purity
and then the loveless suspicion broke it apart

Heavenly Master of the Dawn of Jade of the Golden Door (ERROR: Chronos Reqiuem.godmodder is currently in prison!) is manifested in the great seal at the beginning of this world. The law of heaven and earth, the guidance of its cycling time, is distorted and operates at approximately 83% effectiveness. Merge the pure breaths and degrade.

Welcoming deities...
Offering of jade and silk...
Offering of sacrificial food...
First offering of wine...
Second offering of wine...
Last offering of wine...
Retreat of civil dancers and entry of military dancers...
Performance of the military dance...
Farewell to deities...
Burning of sacrificial articles...

Desire. Restriction. Knowledge. That is time's conquest of-

What do you mean, "Sorry the parameters you provided were not valid"? These engines. Hold on, let me get the bat.

There is the sound of the Batter beating up a subconcept obstruction, which we assume is placed by the hacker.

Summerking hops in!
Chad Buskin hops in!

Damnit, more jump adds.

Did someone discombobulate Davelengths?

It seems that the creation of the world messed up.
This is nothing! Watch THIS!

The action Redacted takes has been agreed by all other parties present to be removed from the record.

"YEAH I DON'T THINK THAT QUALIFIES AS CREATING THE WORLD." Shouter says.

MY EYES...

At least you have eyes- Wait, no, mysterious block face. You have implied eyes. I have abstraction eyes and they come with sting removal.

I NEED TO LOOK INTO THAT, ACTUALLY. HELPS WITH SCREEN GLARE.

you guys are really off-topic

I'll stabilize it. Grant me the eight trigram nations that reconfigure between earlier heaven and later heaven.

yeah sure one sec
*typing sfx*


Nedben, what are you-


THIS SECTION OF THE UPDATE WAS DESTROYED BY JETSTREAM SAM RUNNING A BAR. IT BLEW UP SO HARD THAT IT HIT US ON THE WAY BACK FROM PIZZA DELIVERY SO YOU GUYS CAN HAVE IT BACK. (SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5qtbPnmp3k )

thanks torture

YOU'RE WELCOME.
*ABSCONDATIO*

"WHY IS IT THAT WE HAVE SO MANY CAPSLOCK PEOPLE NOW?" Shouter wonders.

MAYBE IT WAS A STYLISTIC THING.

Qian. Dui. Li. Zhen. Xun. Kan. Gen. Kun.

Reorder.

Li. Kun. Dui. Qian. Kan. Gen. Zhen. Xun.

Manifest.

Was that so hard?

Yes actually. That logic error was obscene, we had to lay it out over again.

i love backups lmao

Then let's move on. Just vote, right?

Lapi laughs. It's like chimes, high and clear. And maybe the bells that ring for victory.

Descend down to a protagonist and offer me the sacred gaze.
Ah, it's that sort of thing? Picking a hero because we bungled the nation. In any case, you'll end up with the analogue to a B-rank hero. Above average but certainly not peerless: talented enough to make a name and rise to some station, but probably not the leader of the whole page or singlehanded smasher of armies with reasonable team comp. Eight alliance networks took each other over and fractured, then have had a generation or so to get used to such a ridiculous state of affairs and redesign themselves. Assume such that it's entrenched for the younger adult people. Older people, those with growing or grown kids often saw the tail-end conflicts or immediately-postwar-occupation-stabilizing. Elders or the supernaturally long lived are probably still salty about how it happened, but only the latter could have been there for the beginning as some of these were long-term trends.

Whichever receives grace (read: disaster) of player assistance will determine which sorts of options are available in detail, to conserve information as the Sus panic behind the scenes.
we can panic in front of the scenes just fine
Yes, and it would be annoying. So don't. Worldgen does some really distorted things, so the world was born with a history before it reached the point we intend to use. Assume the major conflicts in each of the following are spread across enough polities and more than one generation. The degree to which the conflicts involved are still active may vary based on later choices. The 'world map' is something of a supercontinent in the northern hemisphere, though there are major island chains speckling other parts of the world and it breaks out into islands and large channels sub-arctic.

[ ] QIAN UNDER LI
Heaven was taken by Fire, in the South. Radiance stole its way into power. This conquest was straightforward violent seizure-of-center, and while somewhat contested the military victor is clear. This place is sort of cloud-based and has a lot of floating islands. What the floating islands are over isn't exactly clear, but creates vast valleys, convoluted 3D archipelagos, overtly supernatural waterflow, and so on. There are also a number of more fantastic climates evolved around magical concentrations, before it tapers out to the open ocean and southern polar regions as a normalizing factor.

[ ] XUN UNDER KUN
Wind was taken by Earth, in the Southwest. Receptivity was able to take gentle force, and be strong enough flexibility alone would not bend it. This was a long campaign until it became a better assessment to stop fighting it than to continue on. Lots of windy grassland and a few areas of major settlement.

[ ] KAN UNDER DUI
Water was taken by Lake, in the West. Joy and stagnation satisfied rapid danger and the moon-sign was ruled by the queen mother. This was more a concentration of power and stabilization of a previously wild region under celebrated figures and their organizations. Despite the natural risks and the occasionally-quite-bad western ocean storm seasons, it's one of the more prosperous places and is large enough for local environment variation to apply.

[ ] GEN UNDER QIAN
Mountain was taken by Heaven, in the Northwest. Expanding outward, the creating sky outpaced the immovable. This was some form of aerial bombardment to collapse certain ground cities and key citadels, so things were cut off and then gradually blasted. This region is heavily mountainous with significant cave systems and the more-than-occasional notable beyul or river valley, before the mountains freeze over past the major northern water passage.

[ ] KUN UNDER KAN
Earth was taken by Water, in the North. The receptive absorbed dangerous things, and was punished for it. Basically, some dangerous ideas got into prominence and the society became chaotic after mass poisoning and/or disease. This place stretches from moderate-mesa-temperate-desert into large forests with a lot of fields and environmental variety in between, though there are multiple river passages in the taiga before it gets arctic circle polar vortex-y.

[ ] ZHEN UNDER GEN
Thunder was taken by Mountain, in the Northeast. Moving the stillness grounded the unstable, and brought prosperity as the upheavals changed. Swamps, jungles, and warm environments that would be tropical in a more logical climate before it tapers off into the colder stuff by the pole. It's a bunch of peninsulas on whatever awkward-supercontinent-studded-with-seas we've got going on here, and like the west trails off into the sea.

[ ] LI UNDER ZHEN
Fire was taken by Thunder, in the East. Rapid radiance burnt up instead of out, and became change in priorities. It's got a bit of volcanism and desert going on, but has plenty of livable regions in the arable land parts. Much of its easternmost front is barely habitable, rocky, and has little of interest. A few edges and islands speckle it for those needing isolation or particular circumstances, sustained by mining, fishing, and spice trade.

[ ] DUI UNDER XUN
Lake was taken by Wind, in the Southeast. In a sated place, it was easy to move slowly and come forth until the change had already happened. This place has a lot of literal lakes, rivers, small seas, and so on, and more dissipates into beaches and wetlands on average.

[ ] THE CENTRAL PALACE
There is a place of power in sacred caverns, where the Heavenly Master of the Dawn of Jade of the Golden Door was sealed away to begin this place. People in this world are rather impractical, so they do things like leaving their homelands underdefended while conquering each other and building a palace on top of a time bomb. I guess you could say he's more time than bomb at this point In any case, the Central Palace is something of a holy city where various parties operate with diplomacy and the occasional assassination attempt rather than active military matters. The central polity has vacillated between effectively a papal state and effectively a shogunate and changes its name more often than it changes rulers when certain major events happen. A central spiritual figure basically provides a diplomatic heartland, and a less-central military administrator officially makes more controversial decisions about land and operating forces when the others try to do something more drastic. The environment here is heavily mapped and managed: rice terraces, picturesque natural parks of old-growth forest and dedicated tree farms, sealed tombs of a civilization of messed-up deiforms, large-scale urbanization with dedicated logistical pathways, and so on.

[ ] THE OUTER SEA
There are a lot of long-distance trade circuits that go around the icy waters and miscellaneous mountainhomes. Expected vibe is being a captain or flotilla organizer.

[ ] THE INNER CIRCUIT
This is a more mobilized-character travelogue type who will deal with boundary regions between the major drifts rather than getting caught up indefinitely. Their motivations are likely to be personal-scale despite being in international organizations, or feature a region-to-region conflict as the center and edges skirmish some more.

[ ] 17% DAMAGE TIME
On the opposite side of the world from the supercontinent is some really messed up stuff, concentrated in the southern hemisphere past the ice cap. Most likely the hacker did some real witches' broom stuff there, since it's some form of organized liminal space assembly. A few nations of different types of horror, and the flesh biome that took some of Redacted's blood earlier since that made it through too.

Lapi is drawing some humansonas and may want to join. Lapi wants you to vote on that also.
[ ] Lapi remains the focus point of player characters and makes up their own humansona(s).
[ ] Lapi is a secondary major character to a new central player character: a childhood friend or valued coworker.
[ ] Lapi accepts turned tables and is the focus characters' national leader or organizational superior.
[ ] Lapi is somebody in the area known of. Probably an acquaintance, occasional penpal, or noble peer: someone you know and are on okay terms with, but nothing particularly obligating of a connection.
[ ] Lapi is elsewhere in the setting and it's not guaranteed you'll find or affect them without world-spanning stuff or specifically seeking.

[I] Qian Under Li. Why? Heaven taken by Fire reprright. Clever! Well, I suppose they can mark that down as your vote. I'm not opposed to it, but I'm also thinking, maybe...

[X] 17% Damage Time sounds kinda interesting. ...You said earlier you were hoping for Nedben to be more literal. This is counterproductive. Good point! In my defence:

you didn't say anything. I have no defence! As a human, I sometimes am inconsistent! You should be better about that. I try! In this case, your help is helpful. Suses and Nedbens, here's an expansion about what this vote means. 17% Damage Time... stands out the most- the other options all seem fairly similar with different political situations, 17% damage time has fundamentally different categories of threat?... Hm, you could make a similar sort of variation by making some areas magic-focused, some tech-focused, etc. Outside of 17%DT, there's Central and Qian Under Li, and Qian Under Li only 'stands out' because of reasons involving BBBAD. So on the whole this vote is for 'what I would pick if not picking Qian Under Li' and has only two options because the other ones are compressed into a similar mental category to QUL.
[Y] On the whole, Qian Under Li is probably a better idea.

{I} about BBBAD and integration- because of how BBBAD got transferred here from CTG in a specific way where there's a big? secret which I'm hinting at in subtle ways but also absolutely not going to say outright or let BBBAD say outright(though BBBAD is trying to add more hints. like how BBBAD is picking Qian Over Li.), BBBAD... has a lot of themes to draw on in principle- there is a big? secret involved with Ramifications:tm:- but in practice I'm not going to go out and say what all of those are. This all means that if BBBAD is going to gain any power from the corroboration, the nature and quantity is going to be down to the Nedbenic perception of BBBAD and actions here- not on BBBAD's inherent nature from my side.

(Regarding potential Chair status- BBBAD(and me by proxy) would be willing to run the game for an unknown amount of time and presumably would have the power to put someone else on the chair afterwards. It's mostly contingency though- there are enough characters running around that I doubt a spark of flame would be the last option.)

[X] Lapi remains the focus point of player characters and makes up their own humansona(s).
[I] Lapi accepts turned tables and is the focus characters' national leader or organizational superior. another oblique hint?yes. In the opposite direction from Qian Under Li. The option itself do-shushushushuhush. anyway this isn't really a vote, BBBAD wanted to 'have made a vote' not 'cause the vote to resolve differently' so to speak.

[I] Do I have to keep being sus? no, it got declared in red that you were sus. It's official now. We've achieved the sussing dream. ...was there even a point in this. Well, it's basic decision theory. Like glommerization. You're probably doing it wrong. maybe! anyway.

[Z] Oh hey Chad! I'd bring in DefJOE just because but an invisible effect text means he's pseudo-distant and also I think the frog already ate the CTG portal anyway and also I'm going to bed now. What's your text color again?

[Q] I might be forgetting something but sleep is important maybe I'll edit later.

godheadTurntech: my color is #e00707
GT: like dave style because I am of the dave energies ig
GT: nedben is also getting sleep so vote's open if y'all want to vote

Well... I don't know I quite have a preference on what we vote for. Let's just...

[X] 17% DAMAGE TIME

Cause let's be honest. This is going to get weird. Might as well start with a high bar. Can't get too much weirder than that...

And

[X] Lapi remains the focus point of player characters and makes up their own humansona(s).

The blue rock is an important party member. After all, who else are we supposed to blame when everything goes to [EXPLETIVE EXPUNGED].


Erm... I dunno what's going on with all those lines. I'll just assume they're not important and not ask about them. You know what they say. Ignorance is [DEATH], right? Sounds fun!


[X] Humansonas? Hrm... I'll port in...

You know what, I'm short on ideas. I'll wait 'till after the vote goes through.

[X] Get Nedben's Genshin Impact account back from Hackers.

It's fine if this game is corrupted. But Nedben's Genshin, that sounds SUPER IMPORTANT! It must be SAVED!

I don't actually play genshin impact so assume it's one of my subsouls or spawn-nedbens who got hecked

Are you telling me there's a substantial risk the hackers are heckers?

that's something to be worried about, yes. Of similar nastiness to godmodders, but different vibrance and memeticine.

Nedben has to eat dinner soon, so vote and discussion remain open for a while longer. Updates are unpredictable as always. Pretty sure he writes these with the mind state he writes his CTG posts in, just throwing whatever works together. Or close enough to works, not that it does for this.

[X] 17% DAMAGE TIME
[X] Lapi remains the focus point of player characters and makes up their own humansona(s).

Our world has drown in seas of red
And yet the Wheel keeps turning
And I was dead and you were dead
And yet the Wheel keeps turning
-THLMR

Lapi descends to the world. Children are deemed too much effort, so the next generations are constructed, ascended from sufficiently karmic wild animals, or delivered by meteoric assault against reality by the principles of magic. They grow up fast, as a matter of template databases containing significant baseline information.

Here in the NOSTALGIC HELLFIR-
You stop that.

Lapi carves apart history like a Laevateinn-fire, and ascends to status. Stone becomes humanity (perhaps it's having seen what shabnaks are like), and an adaptive hull is consecrated at qi condensation. Picking out a gender from the bargain bin, Lapi's new humansona is crowned male or whatever. I think the overall design was cribbed from one of the city managers. Somewhat rectangular head shape, short black hair, lack of descriptive qualities, ambiguous warm beige skin color, looking like a painting generated by an AI or whatever.

Energy transfer provided by the numinous hulks of enfleshing architectures, his basic abilities are reified. Looks like his cultivation style is an Earth-element body amplifier with sigil-spam backup, with some item-charging functionalities. Eclectic, but covers enough formations with high base stats.

Identity solidification as the ego polity approaches foundation establishment, a name is decontaminated from the pyre-colonialism. Through. Once again, the Finnish vocabulary- Nedben.
I'll answer. Leaf-sprout, pencil, bees and apes, grammatical affixation, fasten and join, again-ness.

The Batter bonks Nedben on the head with a baseball bat. Lapi, do you care to name or are you-

That's the pile of names in the hat, yes. You're pulling a name out of the hat? Duly noted.

Lapi pulls a name out of the hat before Nedben can do anything appellation-inadvisable! The name chosen by means of random generator is
Pulkkinen Henkilötunnus is absolutely not authorized to-
Gonk droid sound effect, actuated by the Batter throwing a Gonk droid at the Nedben to defenestrate him.

Lapi names themselves Lapi again!

...

Okay.

Lapi spends much of their foundation establishment period going through training at the...

Ritho. Lyg. Ry'leh. Leng. The Treg-derivative city states. Rapture. I can- Nedben get out already- see there's a lot of...

A city far vaster than those who live in it. The flesh of a god made architecture, shining mirrors of names and lost places as campsites and true-towns. Cultivators seeking ascension. A threat that has waited since the beginning. I assume the Bunkering's leftovers went with them and established most of the biting haze. But there isn't drive here. There isn't unity. The god ate uselessness and take-back censure, so it was unable to drive. And the tea-drinking one who heart attacked back to vibrance sacrificed their origin to grant...

It's hard to describe. Not in how it's full of non-euclideanity, or how basically staples together a bunch of Backrooms layers until it becomes a continent built on mountains of artifice atop each other until it fills the waves, but in how it lacks detail. A bunch of photographic cityscapes of desolation, speckled with AI-generated distortion and the homely conclaves of faux-people that live there. A different form of lacking soul, speckled with rare full characters.

Lapi chuckles as he goes through something between library and bar, a tavern-inn at the edge of some means of acquiring knowledge. Similar to the research-ruins of the last game, but becoming a transient sect-like place that oversees local matters. Vertical farms built inside inefficiently-used office towers. Years drift by because this narrative is extremely loose and shady. Sorry, you okay down there-

Oh, you're dualizing. Okay, so it's an automata-vibrance, yeah, sure, I can poleaxe that. Ashley!

Bonk again.
Tertiary Waluigi approves of this percussive maintenance.

Time slows down. Lapi has stabilized his foundation in the intransigent charity of the Tavern Library Sect, and clawed his way up to Core Formation as this setting's equivalent to powerful, competent professional. Perhaps a lesser sect elder, but not inner circle in the more powerful regions with Nascent Souls aplenty.

Any actual details of that existence are hollow. Abstractions. Fakery put into place atop the very dear basics of living. Shouter, are you randomly a bartender there?

"YEAH I JUST PICKED ONE AND STARTED CONTROLLING, WAY EASY." he confirms. "DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT, I'LL JUST POP IN AND OUT AS YOU GUYS HAVE DOWNTIME TO TALK OR COOL ENEMIES TO HIJACK."

Yeah yeah. Reading, cultivation...oh, the wine's long-term stat buffs? Handy. So whatever, this setting's violence gimmick. Scaling, fighting over legacies from a civilization whose existence is primarily retroactive and whose remnants are mostly here...I get it? Probably? I'm being given lots of disparate nonsensical information by Nedben and trying to bind it into a story, in case that ever stopped being horribly obvious.

Lapi sets out from the port city of....Oh, for vehk's sake Nedben, get your act together. If you won't name it I will. We're calling it Port Honor, since I assume the Tavern Library Sect is gimmicky. No, I'm not connecting the dots. You connect the dots. You're writing.

Bat bonk.

Lapi, being a blue rock in spirit and controlling an unspecified number of characters elsewhere, metagames and decides that with the politics being politics, piece-Lapi could do things with a boat! Apparently things are a Tradewinds reference now, and being a main character with a boat means you can do terrible things to who's governing what city by means of plot device regional captures!

What.

I'm going to allow this.

So Lapi is a boat captain in Port Honor. This means his next goals are...getting rich? Building a fleet and logistical base sufficient to make his personal power difficult to question among the other city states of the Fleshy Divine Continent? Sure. Let's go with that.

Lapi's boat, the Golden Brick, is a blocky grey cargo ironclad of modest size. It's able to fit through most models of canal and river that handle ship traffic, but has enough carrying capacity to make such voyages worth it. Powered by a hakkero-type magical furnace, lifting the entire boat up for an alarmingly-sedate air mobility in the event of beaching or hull breach is possible. Normal water mobility operates on azimuth thrusters and direct qi propulsion, with a light direct hydrokinesis/aerokinesis corrective fallback. It is crewed by a bunch of foundation establishment grade conceptual pirates (really they're just multipurpose humanoid spirits), and has decent living space. The registration symbol of Port Honor is painted on the side, a five-petaled flower with a central eye resembling the eye emoji.

The ship is armed with low-grade curtain-fire projectors as directed energy weapons, suitable for surface to air, surface to surface, and surface to underwater attacks. Mostly these are sweeping-wing arrowlet formations, with a few blue sphere-lances as broadsides. There's some some green point defense seeking-snakes with a weasel-bounce function to get around certain shields. It's got a weak bubbleshield against inclement weather and some light self-repair to get to parts that are hard to replace, but recovery from significant damage will take time and much of the available power supply. There's room for some cast-modding if the ship's weapons need to be tuned to something more esoteric, but it hasn't come up beyond that it's got large fishing nets and excessive rope in case of thing-binding emergency. If you try to use it as a submarine you can, but it will be even slower than flying and require significant magical energy. Keeping everyone alive on nothing but magical energy is possible, but may reduce effectiveness somewhat (people tend to eat for the sake of it rather than active need to, and 'in recoverable condition' is a lot less than 'at one's best' for how injured people can get).

The entire thing combined is about as strong as Lapi, so comparable to a Core Formation cultivator. Hitting like moderate artillery at shorter-than-horizon ranges is practical by focus-firing everything. In practice Lapi fights with anti-building force (if you absolutely press it, he can get supersonic and deploy force on the level of dozens to modest hundreds of tons per square inch like a jet cutter or something) in near-melee, while the ship throws a lot of rocket-analogue force meant to deal with any chaff bullshit or submarines before it gets to the crew pirates. The pirates are mostly swordfighters, pistoliers, axemen, alchemists, etc. and can pull some miscellaneous stone-breaking anime toonforce shenanigans. How any of that will be resolved isn't certified yet.

Compared to other seagoing vessels in the world, it's well-armed for its role but not excessive. Military patrolboats, some merchant ships-of-the-line, and most Nascent Souls could sink it with a few solid shots. The less-enchanted vessels of pirates would see a tough enough fight to be discouraged, so it'd most likely take a few at once. Putting it into air combat leaves a sitting duck relative to high-mobility individuals, but a few ridiculous dynamic jumps can happen.

(lol, you thought we'd be consistent just because we redefined physics)

Lapi tactically avoids saying anything that would help you understand their plan and presents the vote to Ms. Underline.

Vote: Which city will Lapi seek fortunes in first?

[ ] Port Honor
The Hometown! Mostly under the auspices of the Tavern Library Sect, this population center is one of the major R&D hubs of the Fleshy Divine Continent. Life consists of extracting information and raw materials from the chaotic layers and documenting it in various workshops. The sect doesn't particularly have wide-scale ambitions, believing the secrets of the universe can be sus'd out eventually.
TEMPTING TRICK, THAT.
This means that Lapi can probably gather together whoever's dissident with the status quo and go off to set up in the surrounding territory. Probably to gather an informal powerbase and maybe a fleet before going elsewhere. You will most likely have to cheat or focus on infrastructure development to make significant progress before literal ingame years go by. Most of the Core Formation personnel are sect elders and such. The few Nascent Souls don't do much of interest or are generic community pillars in aspects of life this story doesn't focus on. Significant Foundation Establishment personnel due to being very charitable to random Qi Condensation types.

[ ] Ritho-Lyg Circuit.
Armored giants live here and drink large amounts of coffee. Jittering titans and inkblot mirrors rule over the generally ambiguous and heavily mechanized, with the best industry hotspots for building power. The terraced megacastle-city of Ritho is considered the main trading port with the nations of Qian under Li occupation, but most of the coffee farming and inland development is concentrated in Lyg.

A significant portion of Qian assets, exiles, and refugees made it here about a generation ago and have settled in as a minority. They've grown distinct from the military mix of Qian that conquered its way into Gen, but not that distinct. Lapi is vaguely aware that Qian cultural influence in the area leads to a propensity toward airships, flying swords as sporting tools, flowy colorful clothing even by fantasy robe standards, a set of expressions that analogize gods to keys (or at least ways of unlocking), and some straightforward brute force in much of their creative endeavors.

The mechanical titans have their own preferences about foundries, boiling things, acts of quaking-while-seeking as a form of love, and clanky rumbling. Lyg especially is a bit more sedate and administrative in pace, featuring machine-gardens and outside the literal-hotspots dank memes in other senses of dank. There's definitely room for scheming, especially in the (pseudo)human population that roams around alongside metal giants. Ad-hoc councils of post-noble landowners in charge of borough upkeep let representatives do the design work and subordinate-drones do the building work.

A lot of the opportunities here move fast and are transient things. It's hard to tell what'll be there in a vaguely cosmopolitan city-rarely-sleeps deal. There are definitely going to be short-term jobs for core formation cultivators with a foundation establishment crew, even if the ship basically ends up being a mobile home base. Most Nascent Souls are either the old titans or left-Qian-with-assets types, since only a few have broken through recently. Core Formation personnel tend to be recent breakthroughs or the retinues of said people in power due to how resources are generally compiled, splitting the younger groups between Foundation Establishment workforce and Qi Condensation often-still-developing.

[ ] Ry'leh-Leng Circuit.
The sunken city and the grassy plateau that contains lots of temples. The old and powerful things here are well-respected by most of the other areas and tend to be the leading movement for what little terms of alliance bind the relatively-freeform mess. Echoing-divinity drinks from the recalculating well and through banishment of the the details of how it happens rise to power. The Demhe Canal of New Carcosa stretches from the Bay of Ry'leh into the river tributaries of Leng proper, and a good place for steady low-cost work moving things between towns. New Carcosa at one of the canal's midway lakes is styled after Vivec City, and is something of a major port for meat products, almond water, exotic fogs (apparently something like incense, or types of recreational drugs taken by either inhalation or condensation), and a type of music about energetic lamentation. Expect a very large supply of Nascent Souls and Core Formation being regular, since both drugs and gods are favorable here.

(basically I demibound on backbinding and chain-possess fusion to do this thing you guys don't have good word roots for translating and then we get a lot of knockoff deifications instead of true hop-ons)
(Ah, so it is you who's responsible for that.)

[ ] The Treg-derivative city states.
Confusing pools and places of rest. The individual bright pink anomalies of Treg reside in patterns closer in tenor to the mainland culture. For reasons Nedben refuses to tell me, likely this means the pseudo-legacies generated here are of significant might. There's a lot of boring gambling-drinking-hotspring-whatnot sorts of establishments on the surface, which can keep less-driven powerful characters busy. It also furthers the odds said legacies have not yet been mined out for cheat material. The local people are more likely to produce a new art movement than much of power-leveling use: they've found what they're collectively happy with so you're facing mostly individual explorers rather than communal vibe. Many of these places are interchangeable besides specific attractions and the rough size of any given settlement. Much of their resource production is direct and on the surface level, since most of the subterranean legacies are actually difficult for lower-end cultivators. Core Formation cultivators are mostly posted as key containment managers or technicians, with Nascent Souls usually from technical fields or those who find something edible in a monster.

[ ] Rapture and the Rapturous
This region explores the submerged and incomplete things closer to the lower levels of the sheer bullshit-city-upon-bullshit-city impossible architecture of this place. This will limit how much the ship can be leveraged, both in that its submersion mode takes much of its power and that it won't literally fit into the weirder poolrooms past a few given dock points. Lapi will likely have to deal with many things personally, and Nedben's world design gets even shittier toward the edges. This entire update is improvised and out of order, so consider that this option is a tonal shift as well as a scale one. Expect strangely high level cultivators, as many settings do with extremophile adventurers.
also since it's a bioshock reference I'll totally make a geneforge reference or FATE-dungeon reference or a Monster's Den reference or a- Yes, we are aware there are entire genres of work for you to draw upon and that you will do so erratically.

[ ] Across the Sea to Qian Under Li
A stopover in Ritho will give Lapi opportunity to hear the news from Qian and thus points to seek out. Crossing from Ritho to the business docks of Canebrake in southern Qian takes about fifteen days for the Golden Brick or ships of similar class at a decently fast pace, so a monthly circuit of 'go there and come back' is plausible for all-rounder vessels. The most likely case is being a fallback cargo vessel for some inconvenience or other to one-way ship something to Canebrake where Captain Lapi gets paid on delivery. This won't be a persistent obligation, but it'll give Lapi some free time and discretionary funds to do their own investigations and possibly shipping.

For reference, Canebrake is one of the major water-level islands in Qian. It surrendered to Afield Li after central Qian did rather than face protracted fighting, so other than some exploitative agreements is mostly fine infrastructurally. Outside the port city is mostly plantations of cold-tolerant crops. Apparently it has favorable magic conditions for crops even during winter snow (though a good bit north of the antarctic ice cap). Major products there include maple-syrup-analogous bamboo, redsnow-berries (apparently various parts can be refined into medical products, impurity-excretors, anti-inflammatories, and environmental resistance), ice cabbage (like ice but with the nutrition of cabbage, or possibly cabbage with the crunchiness of ice, or iceberg lettuce but a bit more brown-radish-y, melts into soup), tundra cotton (a Skyrim reference), and various forms of storage containers (apparently they're big on baskets, ceramics, wrapping cloth, that sort of thing). A few Nascent Souls live here as upper levels of sects and whatnot, and there's a decent supply of Core Formation guards, but the relative cultivation is fairly low so there are more Qi Condensation randoms than Foundation Establishment specialists.

Getting directly to most areas of interest in Qian from Canebrake would be feasible in about a week to a week and a half, and some of that is because the Golden Brick would have to account for elevation or because the route might be harangued. Properly exploring points of interest in any given city could take several days though. Getting from Canebreak to a city in southern Xun-under-Kun, southern Dui-under-Xun, or the awkward-border-region-between-Center's-output-rivers-and-Qian, would be a similar week-to-approximately-week-and-a-half deal. Going much further around the continent than the adjacent regions approximates to a month of travel time to get there by sea so practically speaking have a goal in mind before doing that long distance directly.

[X] Ry'leh-Leng Circuit

Because I dunno. Lapi becoming a drug dealer + the potential to take over a temple/become a demigod sounds funny. Plus explicit mentions of music puts us one step closer to bards! Which were totally not as useful as I'm making them out to be.

Port Honor also sounds fine, and Rapture and the Rapturous sounds interesting. I'd be fine with those too. Mostly voicing the funny vibes I'm thinking we can work with out of the gate.

[X] Ritho-Lyg Circuit fits Lapi's cultivation style pretty well and is relatively faster-paced- being slow-paced seems potentially inadvisable if the hacker might be hecking in again.
[Y] The Treg-derivative city states seems viable for faster-pace as well.

[Z] ... seems like BBBAD doesn't have any opinions on this I didn't already express. alright then.

[A] in the space outside spah darngers a smiling Autoplays wheneven still. One eternity has pastart an A command the flames flicker and glow around its 'wrist', void-dark joint obscured by the luminescence. The Abomination still waits, still and silent.
right Imma turn that off... let's see... ight.

[B] On the topic of the other options, Ry'leh seems kay, Rapture is actively antisynergistic with like everything we've picked but at least not slow, Port Honor is slow. So from the things I'm not even voting for that's Ry'Leh is better than Rapture is better than Honor, unless we're sure there's no heckers around.

[X] Change Vote: Ritho-Lyg Circuit.

I TOTALLY FORGOT! If we want to be drug dealers, first we need a legitimate business front. THEN we start selling drugs.

We can always start lacing the coffee with drugs later. Gives our product a special kick.

[C] ...Wait a second, Wine is long-term stat buffs? how long term are we talking here? and do the buffs stack, or is this more like Thymium? If wine is stacking our primary strategy should probably be drinking a lot of it, because a linear [money->Stats] conversion is usually very relevant.

[X] Ritho-Lyg And Wine

Lapi spins the boat wheel, tilts it at weird angles, and the Golden Brick departs port for the voyage to Ritho. The sea around Port Honor is a featureless blue-green, tinged with random screens of mirages that are clearly just advertisements.

Why are there advertisements floating over the ocean? And they're for a completely different world unrelated to any of this.

It's a reference.

Acknowledged. The sea's advertisements are a reference. Straying fairly close to shore, the beaches are rough boardwalks and discontinuous buildings drenched by the waters. Some areas have worn down into garbage, others look like they've seen better days despite having spawned that way, and still other areas actively resemble the civilization that didn't actually exist. The color schemes are often drab, but converge upon a greenish blue as something resembling a biome of mostly-warehouses-with-the-occasional-office, speckled with mixed-use towers and rare inhabitants.

The biome shifts toward intersticed urban jungle and literal jungle as the ship approaches Ritho. The vibrance collapses into a spam of palatial mansions, plantation farmland layered over itself in bizarre forms, and then...the city itself. The towers of Ritho are tall, and its halls throng with giants going about their business. The reference material is abruptly and anachronistically cathedralistic, ranging from gothic to all manner of renaissance. Signaling the port authority on standard communication channel results in being granted an appropriate docking point, out by one of the minor piers jutting off the major ones. Lapi disembarks into the greater terraces of general cityscape-iness to find some low-cost improvisational opportunities.

Many tasks available are meant for longer-term contracts than 'ey, take this job'. But in terms of the immediate...wine.

Shouter descends upon some ambient winery-staffer filler character to offer a tutorial.

"WINE IN THIS GAME IS APPARENTLY AN IMMORTAL TAOISTS REFERENCE WITH THE LOGIC FILED OFF!" Shouter says. "BASICALLY, LARGE QUANTITIES OF SPIRITUAL HERBS AND WHATNOT ARE REFINED INTO PERMANENT STAT BUFF POTIONS. THE MANUFACTURING PROCESS SCALES AWKWARDLY SO BREWERIES TEND TO SELL LIMITED QUANTITIES PER TIME PERIOD. MONEY FOR STATS WISE IT'S NOT THE MOST EFFICIENT CULTIVATION BOOSTER AND IS BETTER FOR IMPROVING THE RAW PARAMETERS UNDER ALL ELSE. THERE'S SOME LIMITS TO BONE MARROW SPIRITRON ANCHORING THAT LIMIT HOW MUCH YOU CAN DO HOWEVER QUICKLY, BUT REPROCESSING THE WINE FURTHER INTO SPECIALIZED CONCEPT PILLS CAN GET AROUND THAT. SPIRIT BEASTS CAN DO IT BASICALLY BY VIOLENCE SINCE THEY EMULATE THE SPIRITUAL HERB BS INTERNALLY WAY MORE EFFECTIVELY WITHOUT THE HARD ROUTING."

One of the great brewing operations in Ritho is the Salvato Winery, which does a lot of spiritual plant farming and processing. It's got a bit of a brewpub gimmick going on.

Lapi takes one look at the prices and reality rolls the deck.

WINE MARKET: Queen of Cups. Lovers Reversed. The Star Reversed.

That's not good! It seems a possible rival is here for fair play. And someone who got sweet nothings, between careless treatment and longing, a waiting game wasted...we looked outward when we should have looked inward.

Jewel Queen is sitting at the bar, and she's setting the prices.

"'Sup?" she says, looking very un-heart-attacked in a new faux-fur coat and with a much abbreviated version of that old headdress. "Nedben entered a gap state and now he wants to take that time he needs. Or maybe you're not taking that time, Lapi."

Some people recovered quite well after being killed by Waluigi, I guess. Lapi's expression is mildly shocked. And that's not just because the prices are high.

"OH HEY JEWEL, HOW'S CANDY DOING?" Shouter asks, still descended upon the barman.

A barmaid comes in with a few fresh bottles from the nebulous back with the wine presses storage and whatever. It's Candy Wolf, and she waves hi as she reloads some bar or other, having bashed together a Zatanna-meets-tracht aesthetic.

"Seems fine to me." Jewel says with a chuckle. "So I've got the usual affairs going."

Is this one of those Standard AI Character moments where somebody redundant busts in?

"Shush, you." she continues. "I've got a few runs to Lyg going. Shipments of buff-wine to people who drink it for flavor and not stats. Not enough to overturn the world or anything, just unrealistic markets. It's a game, don't think about it too hard."
She waves around one of those historical cigarette holders, waving around incense rather than tobacco.

Lapi nods along, seeing where she's going with this. He takes a seat and Shouter slides him a glass of water. It's unnerving, being in a manufactury of power at weapon point and it's simply a social occasion.

"It's just a party." she says. "Bring up the cargo, get paid, and if push comes to shove....schmooze. Meet people in power. The people I'm delivering to tend to host the most boring disasters...but you're a fresh face and a fresh power. Do as you will."

From somewhere very prepared for this Shouter pulls up a contract and passes it to Jewel Queen. She clicks open a pen from somewhere or other, affirms the details, and slides it over to Lapi.

You sense Virgilia's influence, but not the mad doctress of everything. The main uses of the piece that one is modeled after.

Sign.

[ ] Yes
Make a delivery. You'll get invited to some people who are ridiculous drunks somewhere in Lyg, with the money to do such ridiculousness. This is almost certainly a Skyrim-style 'get into factional good graces and end up leader of everything' bait, dressed up in a transactional payment. This is clearly, clearly a setup: an establishment of this sort can damn well afford its own long-term cargo contract instead of picking up stray captains for one-offs.

[ ] No
Politely decline. "No pressure but the social pressure." Jewel Queen says warmly, with a smile that's practicedly neutral to conceal the smugness the eyes are hiding in a bout of otherworldly nostalgia. "I won't hold it against you or anything. Little discomfort for dying in unpleasantries, that's all." Just a little offer on the rise to power. There will be other chances, and less suspicious-sounding ones.

[ ] Negotiate.
Write-ins are allowed, as is cheating. But do you really want to?

[X] Yes.

[Y] ...But. Interspacial rings are a thing in this setting and Lapi(being equally powerful in combat, and smaller) moves faster than his boat, right? Stash the wine in a ring, travel along the shore and send the boat along on a diversion. If y'get Too much of a lead, spend some time delving ruins or cultivating or something till the boat catches up. On arrival, drop off the buff wine discretely- send a crew member, player avatar, or SHOUTER IF HE FEELS LIKE IT MAYBE to do the actual meet and greet.
(If it ends up a player avatar, I volunteer the Quality™ Player™ Avatar™ RockSyringe, a Rock in a Syringe with a recursive regeneration deal(kill the syringe, rock expands out of it and generates a new syringe; kill the rock, syringe expands out of it and generates a new rock. the obvious holes were patched in a trial-by-Godmodder.) and ability to throw itself, which speaks in a voice like gargled deep dish nine pizzas with left beef.)

[Z] to be clear is there character creation for us players? I sorta had the impression that yeah we would make individual us-es and Lapi would just be the central one. Is it assumed that our avatars are part of Lapis crew or are they a thing we just haven't made yet?

[A] I also inform Jewel Queen that, incidentally, I hadn't actually considered that she'd be one of the people who would need to be heart-attacked. It's not exactly collateral damage because I would've probably still gone through with heart-attacking her specifically if I'd remembered but something.

[B] Also I'm still confident Stat Wine is important (or at least, would be, if we were operating on cultivator timescales with hundreds of years, and not game timescales where we'll redestroybuild the world in like a month.). It might not boost cultivation but, like... how many combat-relevant stats are there? at least 4 right, con agi dex str? and +1 Stage is like an order of magnitude increase or so- 10 Foundation Establishments can tie a hollow core, something like that, right? well then, a cultivator at any stage who has drunk enough stat wine to double their base stats is 16x stronger than normal for their stage- strong enough to fight a stage higher alone. Raise the amount of time they spend at their stage by a factor of two and they're up to 81x.

[X] Yes.

[X] Also, what about aging the wine? That's a normal thing, right? Is that purely aesthetic, or does it effect stat boosts too?

[X] INTERSPACIAL RING
Lapi signs, rolls the tarot deck, and goes for it.

The Moon, Six of Wands, Strength

Honestly yeah, fair. This should work, and by the power of bullshit it does!

Player characters borrow pieces of the crew or use their own reality warping power as necessary. There's no need for character creation since you have arbitrary shenanigans. For example, one of the crew walks in and throws an interspatial ring at Lapi, who catches and equips it.

"Don't worry, I'm fine with it." Jewel Queen says, softly laughing off being assassinated. "It was a game, we were all going to do something like that eventually."

Lapi shovels entire racks of wine into a space distortion and JOE points out the holes in setting design/logical consequences of 'building a strong foundation' through stat buff drinking! This is actually the opposite of a problem because Ned forgot to copypaste his usual scale compression and something something magnitudes. There's probably a mathematical contradiction to some other important mechanic. Luckily, I don't care. Also, it will take several thousand jugs of the stuff concentrated into one person to reach that level of multiplier, and this is barely a few hundred vats.

"Aging wine to any meaningful benefit besides taste is hard." Jewel Queen clarifies. "Because of cultivation stuff, you need time compression to the equivalent of centuries or millennia to meaningfully play it off and get more than incremental optimization to stat-ups. Normal wine's shelf life is what, barely two decades for some brands. Getting it to a few centuries without the right maintenance is implausible, and we have to keep the storage conditions basically magic."

Candy Wolf laughs in fast forward as Lapi is already out the door and Shouter flings the camera after him. It bounces off the boat.

Nothing particularly happens. The two keep pace with each other down the canal walkways at core formation anime-chainjump speed.

the Quality™ Player™ Avatar™ RockSyringe has Lapi unring the wine and carts it off into the palatially occidental-blend Party Palace of Lyg's iron titans. Apparently the wine-drinkers and coffee-drinkers are having a stat-buff-off followed by wrestling. The syringe transports the money back to Lapi as modestly-giant robots start guzzling.

I am frankly unclear why the iron titans speak gargled deep dish nine pizzas with left beef. I am supposed to have authoritative information access and Nedben left a placeholder in there. Boo.

Lapi can schmooze already. It doesn't look all that threatening...for now.
Apparently the event is basically open-access and some form of minor local holiday (a monthly throw-down or something).

[ ] PARTAAAAYYYYYY
The general vibe of things is that this is frankly usual, unlikely to escalate, and in whatever the iron titan equivalent of 'slightly too sordid to be good fun' is. But that just means the wine and coffee and other substances flow freely. All those memes about drug dealers handing them out like free candy are quite factually inaccurate in the worlds of their origin, but here it's somehow a thing.

I'm completely unsure how Lapi will cut loose, only that it's possible.

Wait, no. Lapi clarified that they will darn well chug enough to get into the arena and it'll be a roll-draw reading at the least.

[ ] PART B: COFFEE
Okay, don't go that freewheeling. Get some of the reasonable drinks instead of dosing on everything that doesn't combine damagingly, socialize in the less-rave part of this mess. We will be spared whatever the feelings are of a rock-at-heart human.

[ ] PART-C: Actually nah let's snoop around a bit.
Lapi has not yet been flagged as someone present in the shenanigans. This is a good chance to look at the less-revelry gardens, poorly secured sites-of-interest, and anything else one could inoffensively say they're just looking without getting caught up in the social circle. For a civic center, there are quite a few oddly-labeled map sections to check out.

[ ] D-PART:
You can in fact leave. The contract was to deliver wine and get paid, not to kickstart some form of plot arc. Check about for the rest of Central Lyg Riverfront's sites of interest outside the Party Palace.

[X] Part C.

[Y] After all- ah, NDBN wouldn't know this, actually. See, the RockSyringe is inspired by my character in The A.U.R.A. files. It spent episode 1 and most of 2 without the ability to talk, being a Rock/Syringe,then gained the Random Nonsense Enchantment (this was an attempt to gain Godmodding.) and said like... one line of dialogue in various colors.
In the next episode, it tried to make a deal with the Godmodder, where it spoke in various colors and fonts maneuvered around the screen and blurred using glow tags. Then, later, it did that a second time in conversational self-defence, And then a third time to claim AURA was sus. The third time, the glow tags were layered for increased effect.
It's worth noting that part of the reason the RockSyringe used such complicated text formatting was to discourage it from talking too much, since it was after all meant to be a rock and syringe, not a JOE in rocksyringe form.
...
which is presumably why, after one more episode of silence, it became embroiled in a still-unremitting conversation spanning >26 and a half pages, shoved into a completely flavor role where it takes no mechanical actions, and most recently delivered another page and a half of conversation to the main pseudoantagonist.
It's kinda like Phyri in that regard... Anyway!
The point I'm meandering through the context for is that the RockSyringe has something of a history of entering into extremely social-focused roles- and judging by recent results, excelling at them- despite being principally opposed.
So here's another social role! RockSyringe can imbibe stat wines, use Artistic License: What Even Is Biology and some subterfugey skill involving having faked lower stats than it has to fake recieving the benefits (y'know, for social purposes. I assume some of this social stuff is about actually drinking.) while keeping the Wine for later (or just imbibe the stat wine normally, whichever really) and broadly do the kind of stuff Lapi would be doing if Lapi picked PARTYYYY.

...
oh and here's a pseudo-representative sample of what its text looks like nowadays. I've removed all the actual information, of course.


[Z] Incidentally, Wine, yes? It takes (1d10)k jugs of Cultivation Wine to get a x2 Mult on 4 stats. a Jug is approximately 0.5 to 1 Liters. Let's say 1. And there's 'barely a few hundred Vats' here- 1 and 2 aren't a few, so that's... 300 vats or so.
300*22.01*4.54609=30017.8323
Fun! Even if 'several thousand jugs' was for just a x2 multiplier in one stat, we're still up to x8 with the amount of wine in this shipment.
...shame, then, that shouter already informed us that it takes time for the wine to anchor to your spirit or whatever and you can't actually drink several thousand jugs of wine a day.
But regardless, it appears Drinking is a very viable path to Combat Ascendancy for people who're working on the timescale of centuries and not weeks.

[X] Plan See!

Because Shouter flung a camera at Lapi, we can instantaneously mass produce that and start planting them all over the place! I'd imagine you can jury rig a video camera with ingredients like:

- A wine glass/bottle (lens/light amplification).

- A thin plate/cupholder (disk space).

- One of those ads! (a light source + underlying code used to model data transcription)

- A box (to shove the wires in)

- Some forks (to make wires out of)

- An eyeball! (For reference to how light is stored and transmitted to the brain. We don't need to steal one or anything...)

- Minimal circuitry out of the boat! (I'm sure we don't need that.)

See! Super simple to recreate!

The only problem is that I don't know how to jury rig a wi-fi connection. But hey, it's a start!

[Y] Yeah, A.U.R.A.'s weird. Talking is almost a more effective action than taking an action most days. Which says something about what your actions can actually do.

Oh, right, playing the game. Have one of the crew borrow those 26 1/2+ pages of glowtext from RockSyringe and then get into one of those wine/coffee fights. All that glowtext is probably enough to give the other guy a seizure. Instant victory, plus some nice EXP.

Build some street cred for when we (read I) devolve this into a drug gang...