Fantroll story I'm not going to write.
Sep. 17th, 2013 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpTaking place roughly simultaneously with Hivebent:
A seadweller Space player sees the world ending in a dream, and the location of a crater where the remains of a piece of important software might be found. It's near the hive of her internet-matesprit (they've never met IRL), so she asks her to find it and complete it.
Space's matesprit, a midblood who is the Time player, retrieves the software from a weird-looking computer made from obsidian, an impossibly hard sky-blue metal, candy, and a slinky black dress. Upon returning home with her spoils, she is revenge-killed by the lowblood staking out her hive. Whoops.
Time had killed this lowblood's lusus at a key-signing party, in one of those soda-fueled brawls to which most key-signing parties degenerate. This fight was the culmination of the two's long and bitter fight for dominance over a particular open-source roguelike development framework, about which absolutely no one else cared in the slightest. ("You don't need a framework to make roguelikes, you guys, this is stupid. You're stupid.")
Like Aradia, Time becomes a ghost floating around Alternia. Unlike Aradia, she's not telekinetic, so she can't interact with the physical world, even by typing. She can only communicate with those who are psychic in some way. Fortunately, the killer is.
Time explains to the killer what her new responsibility is going to be: getting that software working before the world ends in half a sweep, and then figuring out a way to kill Time's dream self on its Dersite quest bed.
The killer had been planning to assume Time's identity anyway - in order to escape culling for the death of her lusus - and so grudgingly does this to keep Space off her back. Also, because it will allow her to kill Time at least twice more.
The killer is not really a very good programmer, and Time has to help a lot with the project of engineering her own second death. The process is slow. Time is also trying to teach the killer to act more like her, so she won't be caught and culled before she can get them into the game. The software is still not entirely complete when the meteors begin to fall, and they begin desperately patching in bits of other games.
Space did not immediately notice that her matesprit had been replaced by that other nerd, because the only information she trusts is what she gets from Skaia, and the killer had never appeared in her visions before. By this time she's figured out what's happened - and the killer is, of course, the Void player. Void and Space install and run the incomplete server and client software at the same time, with Space using two computers, and Void running the client and server simultaneously in BRINE.
They don't find themselves in the Sburb session from Space's dreams, though. Space lands in this weird noir-themed detective game, which seems to consist mostly of trying to get out of really unpleasant-smelling rooms. Void and Time get a pretty straight copy of Troll Dwarf Fortress, with the dwarves replaced by crocodiles and turtles.
Time hops into Void's sprite at this point (they prototyped it with something dumb pre-entry, but I don't remember what), and their interface changes, giving them access to both Fortress and Adventure mode. They decide to take turns with each, Void starting with Adventure and Time with Fortress.
Space solves her first actual mystery storyline easily, because it was a recent episode in their lives - Time's murder. She guesses it makes sense that the game knows this, given that it tailors its mythology to their lives, but considers the whole thing shallow and disappointing. She is particularly annoyed at the iguana playing her - she had very good reasons not to notice that her girlfriend was dead, in her opinion!
The next storyline makes her uneasy. The characters glitch out, repeat lines, and forget that she's there. And some of them are not iguanas and chessmen, but trolls, apparently modeled on the three players. On one, her own face looks wrong and distorted. For reasons that are almost certainly rational, this girl becomes her prime suspect.
Space's strange almost-double stands up and disappears during a dialog section. The other characters promptly forget that she existed; it becomes impossible for Space even to say her name aloud without pixelation obscuring her words. The game appears to have forgotten its own murderer, breaking it irreparably. It is a crime without a culprit, causality broken.
Space takes a nap to consult Skaia. She sees herself and Time reaching their true Lands, but not how they can do it, and decides that they should first focus on beating their respective games.
Void's dream self awakens following an assault by some of Time's overzealous crocodile and turtle militia, and meets with Space on Prospit. Prospit's moon has two towers. Void's had never been visible to Space before, for Void-y reasons, but it's there now, appropriately empty, because all of Void and Time's things are in Time's abandoned tower on Derse's moon.
Void points out to Space that Troll Dwarf Fortress cannot be beaten. The only end condition is annihilation - surrender is not an option.
And she and Time don't recognize the game Space was playing. It wasn't on their computer. Is it even beatable in its corrupted state?
Skaia shows them two towers on Derse, and a fourth Land, a barren pink desert world littered with salamander bones. How can there be a fourth player?
Troll Dwarf Fortress is slightly less brutal than human Dwarf Fortress, in that the parent civilization's monarch is always the Condesce. (This is the case in every video game on Alternia which features a monarch.) Once your fortress becomes the capital, the Condesce moves in. And when that happens, she can easily dispatch any enemy you might encounter with little difficulty.
Time finds that their game's Condesce is an awful lot like the real thing - in fact, she turns out to have been made from a captcha of the real thing's brain! A perfect copy of their Empress, which has been... included in every single copy of Troll Dwarf Fortress, ever since its creation by the shadowy programmer known as The Autistic, thousands of years ago?
It becomes clear that Troll Dwarf Fortress was, from the beginning, the Psiionic's revenge upon the Condesce - millions of doomed duplicates of her, forced to fight primitive imaginary armies in limited imaginary worlds, until the game is finally closed or erased by the bored player - one who should have been her own despised subject, in the world where she truly belongs.
Time should probably not have gotten her fortress tough enough for a Queen so fast. It was not a good idea to let their unexpected Life player learn that this was not the first time she'd ever played Dwarf Fortress.
But don't worry, girls, she's on your side! How could she not be? It's how she was programmed!
Here, I just made up names for them:
Space = Master Yohdah.
Her quirk is that she talks like Yoda and in all caps, because I think a noir lady talking like Yoda and in call caps is funny. I just don't think that I need a real good reason for what I'm doing here. She tries to make the other two call her Master, which they won't. Her lusus is a water dragon.
Void = Yamete Kureee.
She yells at people to stop doing unpleasant things to her a lot. She's had a hard life. Her lusus was a rat, and she buried the remains, so she couldn't revive it in the sprite.
Time = Obladi Oblada.
Life goes on, yeah. Because... because she dies right away. It's not a good joke. Her lusus was a snake, which Yamete probably killed; I haven't decided, or whether Yamete kept the bones, or whether she even gets a sprite which she might put said bones into.
Life = Heeman Peixes.
It's "Meenah" re-arranged so it sounds like "He-man." What do you people want from me. Her lusus was prototyped in some other sprite in some other game session, by some girl who totally doesn't matter at all. I haven't decided whether she gets a sprite herself.
A seadweller Space player sees the world ending in a dream, and the location of a crater where the remains of a piece of important software might be found. It's near the hive of her internet-matesprit (they've never met IRL), so she asks her to find it and complete it.
Space's matesprit, a midblood who is the Time player, retrieves the software from a weird-looking computer made from obsidian, an impossibly hard sky-blue metal, candy, and a slinky black dress. Upon returning home with her spoils, she is revenge-killed by the lowblood staking out her hive. Whoops.
Time had killed this lowblood's lusus at a key-signing party, in one of those soda-fueled brawls to which most key-signing parties degenerate. This fight was the culmination of the two's long and bitter fight for dominance over a particular open-source roguelike development framework, about which absolutely no one else cared in the slightest. ("You don't need a framework to make roguelikes, you guys, this is stupid. You're stupid.")
Like Aradia, Time becomes a ghost floating around Alternia. Unlike Aradia, she's not telekinetic, so she can't interact with the physical world, even by typing. She can only communicate with those who are psychic in some way. Fortunately, the killer is.
Time explains to the killer what her new responsibility is going to be: getting that software working before the world ends in half a sweep, and then figuring out a way to kill Time's dream self on its Dersite quest bed.
The killer had been planning to assume Time's identity anyway - in order to escape culling for the death of her lusus - and so grudgingly does this to keep Space off her back. Also, because it will allow her to kill Time at least twice more.
The killer is not really a very good programmer, and Time has to help a lot with the project of engineering her own second death. The process is slow. Time is also trying to teach the killer to act more like her, so she won't be caught and culled before she can get them into the game. The software is still not entirely complete when the meteors begin to fall, and they begin desperately patching in bits of other games.
Space did not immediately notice that her matesprit had been replaced by that other nerd, because the only information she trusts is what she gets from Skaia, and the killer had never appeared in her visions before. By this time she's figured out what's happened - and the killer is, of course, the Void player. Void and Space install and run the incomplete server and client software at the same time, with Space using two computers, and Void running the client and server simultaneously in BRINE.
They don't find themselves in the Sburb session from Space's dreams, though. Space lands in this weird noir-themed detective game, which seems to consist mostly of trying to get out of really unpleasant-smelling rooms. Void and Time get a pretty straight copy of Troll Dwarf Fortress, with the dwarves replaced by crocodiles and turtles.
Time hops into Void's sprite at this point (they prototyped it with something dumb pre-entry, but I don't remember what), and their interface changes, giving them access to both Fortress and Adventure mode. They decide to take turns with each, Void starting with Adventure and Time with Fortress.
Space solves her first actual mystery storyline easily, because it was a recent episode in their lives - Time's murder. She guesses it makes sense that the game knows this, given that it tailors its mythology to their lives, but considers the whole thing shallow and disappointing. She is particularly annoyed at the iguana playing her - she had very good reasons not to notice that her girlfriend was dead, in her opinion!
The next storyline makes her uneasy. The characters glitch out, repeat lines, and forget that she's there. And some of them are not iguanas and chessmen, but trolls, apparently modeled on the three players. On one, her own face looks wrong and distorted. For reasons that are almost certainly rational, this girl becomes her prime suspect.
Space's strange almost-double stands up and disappears during a dialog section. The other characters promptly forget that she existed; it becomes impossible for Space even to say her name aloud without pixelation obscuring her words. The game appears to have forgotten its own murderer, breaking it irreparably. It is a crime without a culprit, causality broken.
Space takes a nap to consult Skaia. She sees herself and Time reaching their true Lands, but not how they can do it, and decides that they should first focus on beating their respective games.
Void's dream self awakens following an assault by some of Time's overzealous crocodile and turtle militia, and meets with Space on Prospit. Prospit's moon has two towers. Void's had never been visible to Space before, for Void-y reasons, but it's there now, appropriately empty, because all of Void and Time's things are in Time's abandoned tower on Derse's moon.
Void points out to Space that Troll Dwarf Fortress cannot be beaten. The only end condition is annihilation - surrender is not an option.
And she and Time don't recognize the game Space was playing. It wasn't on their computer. Is it even beatable in its corrupted state?
Skaia shows them two towers on Derse, and a fourth Land, a barren pink desert world littered with salamander bones. How can there be a fourth player?
Troll Dwarf Fortress is slightly less brutal than human Dwarf Fortress, in that the parent civilization's monarch is always the Condesce. (This is the case in every video game on Alternia which features a monarch.) Once your fortress becomes the capital, the Condesce moves in. And when that happens, she can easily dispatch any enemy you might encounter with little difficulty.
Time finds that their game's Condesce is an awful lot like the real thing - in fact, she turns out to have been made from a captcha of the real thing's brain! A perfect copy of their Empress, which has been... included in every single copy of Troll Dwarf Fortress, ever since its creation by the shadowy programmer known as The Autistic, thousands of years ago?
It becomes clear that Troll Dwarf Fortress was, from the beginning, the Psiionic's revenge upon the Condesce - millions of doomed duplicates of her, forced to fight primitive imaginary armies in limited imaginary worlds, until the game is finally closed or erased by the bored player - one who should have been her own despised subject, in the world where she truly belongs.
Time should probably not have gotten her fortress tough enough for a Queen so fast. It was not a good idea to let their unexpected Life player learn that this was not the first time she'd ever played Dwarf Fortress.
But don't worry, girls, she's on your side! How could she not be? It's how she was programmed!
Here, I just made up names for them:
Space = Master Yohdah.
Her quirk is that she talks like Yoda and in all caps, because I think a noir lady talking like Yoda and in call caps is funny. I just don't think that I need a real good reason for what I'm doing here. She tries to make the other two call her Master, which they won't. Her lusus is a water dragon.
Void = Yamete Kureee.
She yells at people to stop doing unpleasant things to her a lot. She's had a hard life. Her lusus was a rat, and she buried the remains, so she couldn't revive it in the sprite.
Time = Obladi Oblada.
Life goes on, yeah. Because... because she dies right away. It's not a good joke. Her lusus was a snake, which Yamete probably killed; I haven't decided, or whether Yamete kept the bones, or whether she even gets a sprite which she might put said bones into.
Life = Heeman Peixes.
It's "Meenah" re-arranged so it sounds like "He-man." What do you people want from me. Her lusus was prototyped in some other sprite in some other game session, by some girl who totally doesn't matter at all. I haven't decided whether she gets a sprite herself.
