un: theball | text

[stresstokens]

Hey. Hope everyone's recovering from that stupid maze okay.

I'll just get right down to my point of inquiry. For a place that claims that we're meant to save the universe, I've noticed a pretty dramatic human-bias around here that strikes me as kind of odd, considering how diverse the universe actually is.

So I'd like to get a show of hands. Who here is from a world where humans are the only sentient species around, and who here is from a world with more than just humans kicking around? What other sorts of species are around? I'd like to know how much of it is selection-bias based on who's running this place and how much of it is them drawing from places that just don't have any non-human populations. I wouldn't mind hearing about what sorts of non-humans you have around either, but that's probably less important, statistically speaking.

Lastly... what do you see when you look at this picture?

[ Inserted is a photograph of a suave looking goblin man in a tuxedo with a pencil-thin moustache. He's holding a champagne flute towards the camera with his arm around -- something. If you've been infected by the curse, you'll see the goblin man's arm is around a black tabaxi woman, but if not, his arm looks as though it's simply hanging in mid-air. ]

[ OOC NOTE: due to the extremely low likelihood we'll ever get kalina in-game, the picture is just for flavour! if you'd like your character to be infected by the shadowcat and thus able to see her image in the photo, it would be due to any circumstance in which any of riz's bodily fluids were absorbed into their own body in some way, i.e. blood or saliva. feel free to handwave a circumstance in which that could happen, even if it's riz's blood lingering on one of the labyrinth's traps that then got into an open cut of theirs, a glass in the labyrinth he drank from that they then used, etc., etc.! Please see this comment for more information! ]

Comments

[wannasmash]

it's nice to meet you.
goblin is a word in my language, but they're only stories where i'm from. if i was still back home and someone on the internet told me they were a goblin, i'd just think they were trying to troll me.
uh
hm

[ Oops. ]

do trolls exist in your world as well??

my quirk is registered as super strength. everyone has to do it with their city hall, since some quirks can be dangerous or affect us in an emergency.

[ It's not a lie, per se. He does have his Quirk registered as that. It's just not the whole truth. ]

[agoddessonce]

[ So, this is a very long text message that, on an interface as confusing as Etraya's little network devices are, is going to take a while to read and respond to, while making sure she can answer to the best of her ability.

So she decides to make a concise little list! ]

1-a. Yes. We are mutants, and the mutation manifests in different ways. [ Brief, no-nonsense. This is fact, and she won't budge on it. ]

1-b. There is a wide range - to list everything would take far too long. Some common ones are telepathy, enhanced senses, some affinity for an animal or beast of some kind, enhanced strength, and physical changes such as a change in skin, or new or different limbs.

2. So you have encountered people unfamiliar with goblins and other races here, but they have not treated you any differently. Our alleged charter appears to be saving multiple universes - some of them would likely have humans only. Others may have the races you and I speak of. What, then, is the concern if I may ask?

[ She doesn't understand, but she would very much like to! ]

1/???

[ontologically]

2/???

[ontologically]

[infirmiere]

No worries, kiddo

To be honest, a curse that means I can see a weird cat lady (no offense to other cat ladies) is not the worst thing I have had passed on to me. I've had cholera twice.

3/3

[ontologically]

We exploited his emotional fixation on his dead partner organism by dressing up bodies living and dead to look like her until he was so distraught that he just let us kill him.

[Yeah, they esssentially bullied him to death. She doesn't feel bad but it was maybe a bit of a dick move.]

[tocastashadow]

Never heard of it. I'm from Baldur's Gate.

What about that man in the picture? He's too green to be a halfling or gnome, and far more debonair than the average goblin.

[equivo]

It is what it is. Which is fucked up, but that's the world we've got to work with.

It could be a sampling bias. There are Earths that don't have many people with powers, or theoretically any. Or maybe that's just how Earths tend to go. It'd be helpful if we could get a look at a broader selection, but I guess we work with what we have.

When you've got your chart done, I wouldn't mind taking a look at it. I'm not a multiverse expert, but I have read a couple articles.

[ A couple hundred. ]

I'd say we don't have magic in my universe, but given the amount of things I thought I could count on that have turned out unreliable I might have to pivot to agnosticism on that.

And a little cultural tip: where I'm from, most people would be offended if you asked them that. I'm not, but just as a heads up.

[spinoff]

Basically.

Well, it makes sense. If there's more races, there's less space, but more variety. So if there's all these other races, your world must look pretty different than mine.

So green and small? Or is the "small" thing just a stereotype from my world? Or the green thing?

(oh yeah and this isn't private bc privacy filters don't exist)

[furiousfists]

Yeah, might be best not to poke at that hornet's nest.

[ Oh, Adaine can read between the lines. But she's a bit taken aback. Riz would normally be much more careful than that. ]

What happened? Something in the labyrinth? Did you get hurt?

[ She can't imagine it would be any other sort of bodily fluid that would have been exchanged. Not with Riz. ]

[pangzi]

It is Earth. Though it may or may not be the same Earth as other people have mentioned. As far as I'm aware, there are multiple parallel Earths being represented here.

For curiosity's sake, what would I be seeing if I could see what I'm not seeing? Or am I better off not knowing?

[projected]

Extraterrestrial. As to why they came to Earth, it's a range. Some are refugees, others were invaders at one point or another. There aren't a lot of them, not even enough to establish communities on Earth. Meta-humans are considered humans, but some individuals may not identify as human anymore for their own reasons. Sometimes superiority, other times inferiority.

[ichoosefight]

weird.

what happens if you see the cat? do you die or something?

[stresstokens]

No, nothing like that, or else I'd be super dead right now.

It means that the shadowcat can see through your eyes and hear through your ears. She's seriously bad news, but it isn't inherently dangerous unless you happen to be crossing her. And she's not even here, so it's a moot point for the time being.

[stresstokens]

I had a funny feeling that it would be something like that. I guess just asking for refuge didn't cross their minds, though I don't know how well that would have worked either.

What happened?

[anewhope]

One of their own rose against them and they were banished to a place known as the Phantom Zone.

[stresstokens]

Death by emotional torture.

[ Cool! Horrifying! Absolute desecration of the dead! But hey, if it works, it works. It's a very Figueroth Faeth move. ]

That's a new one. But I guess it's relatively replicable if worst comes to worst. Did you guys just like

Raid a graveyard?

[stresstokens]

Yeah, Trolls exist. And probably wouldn't be happy that their name is synonymous with tricking people for fun in other worlds. But in that case, I'm guessing your guys' impression of Goblins isn't so great either.

But hey, as far as superpowers go, super-strength is a pretty sweet one. You kind of hit the jackpot, huh?

[stresstokens]

[ Sorry, Ororo! Riz has a bad case of can't-shut-up disease and unfortunately for everyone around him, it's incurable. ]

That's interesting. It seems consistent across all of the Earths that people have been talking about here too, even if everyone has different terminology for it.

If I were to take them at face value, which I don't, my concern is that non-human worlds would be deprioritized over the human ones. And that if we look at our population, that whoever's in charge here will want to prioritize those worlds too. Even if people are generally kind, it doesn't mean that they'll still treat you equally. It's not as though Goblins are particularly well-liked, even where I'm from.

But I guess the emotional answer is, it's just weird. Where I'm from, there are all sorts of races. Humans, Elves, Orcs, Tieflings, Kobolds, Dragonborn, Gnomes, Aarakocra. Coming to a place that's almost only Humans just came as kind of a shock.

[stresstokens]

It could be. But the fact that there could be a sampling bias at all menas there's a whole lot of you Earth guys, which I find even more interesting. As far as I know, my party's the only bunch from Spyre. I should be done compiling all this in a day or so. You can come by and see the clue board.

[ He should not. There will be several of them. Riz is only acting cool via text -- in actuality, he's absolutely spiraling. ]

Sorry about that. [ But Krouse isn't answering the question, which doesn't get past Riz. Insert another little tick in his mental categorization of Krouse: the dude absolutely has secret powers he doesn't want to share. ] Is it considered a bad thing, having those powers?

[stresstokens]

No, your world got both stereotypes right. Which is kind of weird, actually? There's got to be some sort of planar bleed going on or something. We're considered to be a small race, like Gnomes and Halflings. Most of us will get to be around four feet tall at the absolute tallest. It's honestly kind of inconvenient.

Do you guys know about elves too? What sort of stories do you tell about them?

gotcha!!

[stresstokens]

Yeah, I did. A few times. I was careful to only bandage myself up, but I didn't do my due diligence in cleaning all of it off of the maze itself.

[ It was a stupid mistake. He'd been so focused on getting to the end of the maze and, frankly, getting through the whole thing alive that he hadn't even considered it. ]

I hope it was just the one woman. I'll do better next time.

[stresstokens]

I have no idea what cholera is, but shouldn't you learn more about what I'm talking about before just shrugging it off like that? For all you know it could be really dangerous!

[stresstokens]

Definitely multiple Earths. Everyone at least seems to have slightly different terminology and definitions for a lot of common concepts. If everyone could put their heads together, I'm sure we could identify just how many.

[ If they really wanted to. Which Riz doesn't think they do. People around here can be a bit cagey. ]

You'd see that he's in the picture with a Tabaxi woman. That's basically a humanoid cat, if you don't know the word. There's really nothing very sinister about it unless you're like involved with the whole thing.

[stresstokens]

Is Baldurs Gate the name of your world, or the name of your hometown? Because Spyre's the name of my actual world. I'm actually from a place called Elmville. Either way, that's confirmation we're from two totally different worlds.

Case in point: Goblins can be debonair! Or maybe the ones you've met just had no reason to dress up. So yeah, that's a Goblin in the photo, like me. And I happen to think I'm a pretty smart dresser too.