etraya | un: theball

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! ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Then you've probably met at least one of my friends. They're the only elves I've seen around here so far. Though that doesn't mean there aren't others too.

Anyway, that sounds really bad? [ Could any of them come here? God. He's unlocking new fears by the day. ] I have to assume it's like, a parasite-type thing? They take over and steer around humans as they spread their bacteria and stuff? I've never really heard of anything like that before.

What happened?

[ He's hoping the answer is simple: we killed them. ]

I think so. Adaine and Fabian?

[How much of this does she even want to share? She has no strong feelings about keeping the Protectorate's ineptitude secret - but so many of her details are second hand.]

Kind of. It's a bit more symbiotic than that.

It's a really long and pretty horrible story - most of which I wasn't actually around for. But we did kill him eventually, if that's what you're asking.

[That part she was present for. That part she actually played a pretty massive part in. But she's not going to go into it.]

Yep, you got it. They're my party members back home. Fabian's half-elf, though, just so you know.

[ The distinction matters, especially with Fabian's glassy-eyed worship of his very, very human Papa. ]

That is exactly I was asking. How did you kill him? This place has been bringing entire locations from people's homes, though I haven't figured out whether they're exact copies or if they're literally being teleported here. By the same token, I don't think it's impossible that these alien bacteria could show up too. Might be good info for us all to know.

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.]

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?

No, we actually used a dog first. The dog was alive (Still is).

Actually I think it was a wolf?

I don't actually think we could beat him a second time if he came here full strength. He did wipe out most of the human race across the known multiverse. We only beat him because we had a massive army of Parahumans to keep him busy. [And also because Taylor Hebert mind controlled that army to follow her exact directions like ragdolls and keep them from fighting among themselves. And there was also the Simurgh.]

In terms of scale, I don't think it would make sense that the entities running this place would throw in something on their level as like, a test.

Edited 2024-06-16 01:15 (UTC)

I'm glad the dog's still with us.

[ Raiding a graveyard is one thing. Killing some dog is probably worse? ]

In that case, let's hope that he doesn't come here. I didn't actually think that the powers that be here would bring him in as a test. But maybe by mistake? I'm not sure how I feel about the screening process of bringing us in. Granted, everyone I've run into has been pretty nice. I just hope that they don't forget about screening for character if they're looking for more brute force.

How big was the army?

The dog was the size of a truck. Just for context. But yeah, agreed.

I think they'd have to significantly depower him to make him viable as a subject to begin with.

There's other threats I'm more worried about turning up. Giant city destroying monsters called Endbringers. That'd be viable with our numbers and our strengths.

The numbers we had when we started were technically in the high thousands. All people with superpowers. Those numbers fragmented when people started ditching the battle to pursue pointless political aims or to go kill people they had a grudge against. At the final battle, the numbers had been rounded down to a few hundred actively on the front lines while others worked from the back.

Do we know for a fact that they depower people here? Has someone else shared that happening to them?

I'm pretty sure we could collectively deal with city destroying monsters. I'd be surprised if there's any world out there that doesn't have a city destroying monster or two, honestly, but tallying what sort of threats other worlds deal with sounds like a separate spreadsheet.

[ Spreadsheets are probably pretty useless anyway. This is quickly spiraling out of control. ]

I'm sorry about what happened to your home. It sounds like it got pretty grim. [ Some of her friends probably died. Sucks. ] You were one of the ones on the front lines?

un: theball | text

no subject

no subject

no subject

1/???

2/???

3/3

no subject

worm spoilers (i was actually misremembering about the corpses whoops)

it's ok, if they DID go for corpses that would be totally sick

Re: it's ok, if they DID go for corpses that would be totally sick

no subject