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I have been writing as a hobby for longer than you have been alive. I have been a regular member and roleplayer of no less than fourteen different online forums during that time (including the old RPG), five six eight of which no longer exist.

I was previously a regular on the Homestuck forums, but I became so sick of thread turnover there that I asked around and eventually found the Guild. Since joining, I have exclusively only participated in Advanced RPs. Before Mahz gave NRPs their own subforum, I used to be an NRP regular in the Advanced Subforum. I am a Guildfall survivor, and know/regularly write with a few others.

If you ask anybody who has written with me in previous RPs, they should tell you that I have a generally open schedule, I post regularly and in a timely fashion, and I never drop an RP once I join unless the thread dies. Some of them may tell you that I have extensive expertise within the realms of Biology, Psychology, and Physics, which I will make no effort to validate since there is no way I can provide hard proof of aforementioned alleged expertise to anybody over the internet (though I am happy to try and answer any questions you send my way).

My favorite fandom is the Myst franchise, which seemingly nobody other than me has ever heard of.

I was a Contest Moderator for the Writing Contests Subforum for just a little bit over two years. I wrote the Moderation Policy for that subforum and I ran a contest called the Twelve Labours; you can still go there and see all of them and the entries people wrote for them in the Contests Section and the Victory Archives.

I have been quadruple secret banned from the guild discord. That is not a joke.

Most Recent Posts

@terminal -- It's hard to tell definitively from the layout of the latest post. Is the dimensional funkiness meant to be perceptible to anyone other than Donny and Amielle? My impression is that those were experienced only (or just primarily?) by the two characters affected.

I'm asking because if Luca was meant to perceive all that, I'd have to make some decisions about how/if the clockwork biotech would be affected. Reasonably speaking, they're, I mean, they're built on clocks, so if the clocks start going crazy, I need to address that somehow.


No comment. If such information was available, it was likely obfuscated by an aspect of the narration.
I have hammered at all four of the pillars. Matter, energy, space, and time.

Any further disruption of the Contextual Reality will likely be geometrically aggravated and reduce any chances of getting past act three to near zero - and possibly prevent posters from recognizing opportunities to escape.
"Maybe it's time we all talk like civilized people, without any weapons raised at each other and without any more deaths. Everybody agree?"

@WiseDragonGirl
"Sir, we are not exactly in a state to disagree." The male pavise knight deadpanned. He had largely stopped squirming in place and had adopted a tall, stolid stance - tightly gripping his pavise shield, but having relaxed his right arm. It was still raised, but held in place for the moment by Amelie's redirection orb.

"Who are you and what do you want from me?" He blinked. "I mean, from us." Then Luca's grip on the arrow tightened. Shit. Priority one. "I mean, you need to take us to an infirmary. Now. We have wounded, thanks to you.

@mdk
"There's nothing to tell here beyond what I've already said." The male pavise knight said somewhat gruffly. His demeanor was calm, if his expression was somewhat irritated. "We're just supposed to get you to NNSE statim. We owe a few favors and I don't want to get caught up in all of your shit. We have some solvent and can handle any plating you've got, but you lot aren't going to any hospital or clinic. They'd just kill you in your rooms there. Safest place for you all right now is with Platter Aesch."

‘The decision was made in a hurry, I was sent in last second, directly into the limo…’

@PlatinumSkink
"Bullshit." Hiecro harshly spat the word from where she was sitting on the ground, having finally unclasped the lower hooks for her visor and lifted it up. "But you know what, I don't even fucking care anymore. You trash are all too hot and too much trouble. I don't even care if you actually turn out to be Proxies. We're taking you all to NNSE and then booking it. I just want to be rid of Aesch and out of this fucking town." The bayonet for her crossbow retracted, and she pressed its guard into the ground for leverage as she began to get to her feet, limbs trembling somewhat.

"I'm forming a slug, and you're all coming with us. If you don't like it you can suck on ionized golems after getting fried by the lights. If they haven't all been rigged to aggro on you by now, they will be soon."

Donny backed away to a safe distance, before trotting behind the corner of a building. As he went, he called over his shoulder.

"Awll this essitement has loosen'd mah bladdah. Be back in fahve, frahnds."

@Doc Doctor
"No you fucking don't!" Hiecro shouted after Donny, hastening to rise but only stumbling in the process and falling back down to all fours. "I'm wise to your fucking game you ginger piece of shit! Geeetuuuhaaahhh buuuhaaakuuu huuuuuuuuuuuuuuur-"

As Donny turned the corner, Hiecro's words lengthened and started to drop in intonation, as if being slowed down and played back by an extremely poor answering machine. Looking back, even her motion had slowed down - she was barely moving at all anymore. The same was true of the male pavise knight and the remaining passengers, whose movements had all become infinitesimal and minute. Looking straight up, a bird that had been flying overhead was stopped mid-flight.

With a clear view of the street ahead of him, other disturbances become apparent. The surrounding area was emptied of pedestrians and loiterers as before, but everything seemed much more cramped. Only the space immediately around Donny himself seemed to be in order - beyond a few feet, the wall of the adjacent building scrunched up and shrank to only a foot in width, and he could abruptly see a short distance around the corner - at a flat ninety-degree angle. The street itself had similarly shortened, and the next intersection down (previously more than twenty meters away) was suddenly only a game of hopskotch away from him - as was that intersection's traffic sphere.

As with everything else, it too appeared to be affected by the strange time dilation. It was evident, given that it was crackling fiercely with curiously slow-moving, streaming ribbons of arcing light - and that it had just fired a bolt of lightning at him.

A bolt of lightning moving at a snail's pace. Looking closely, he could see the branching, tenuous, blinding phantoms of light course through the air, piercing through space in countless fractal spines - all scattered haphazardly outward from the surface of the sphere, but all pointedly converging in his direction.

There was a side alley within spitting distance, across the street, and from within Donny both heard and felt the only source of motion seemingly unaffected by the time dilation. The relative proportions of the alley were remarkably preserved considered how contorted the rest of the world had become - it was dark, cast in a fair amount of shade from the morning sun. The wooden buildings to either of the alley's sides had significantly run-down side panels therein, all rotten and with peeling or else entirely absent caulking - and there was a closed, square-shaped sewer hatch planted dead center in the middle of the narrow, grimy path. Further yet, the remainder of the alley was crunched back into the contorted space otherwise surrounding him, and turned a corner - which Donny could yet again somehow see right around perfectly - which led to a dead-end with a heavy-set wooden door with dark iron fittings set atop a short two-step staircase.

He could audibly hear an active, angry, seething noise. Like a marching stream of army ants devouring everything in their path in the jungle - emanating from seemingly every corner of the small patch of undistorted space within the alley. If he focused hard enough, he might even have heard what resembled semi-coherent words, and laughter.

"-Get back here!" Hiecro shouted after Donny as he turned the corner and vanished from sight. "Godsdamnit." She hissed, slamming on the ground with her free hand and starting to get back up once more.

And here’s a reminder that the Redirection Orb is not invisible, it’s fairly visible due to just slightly distorted light in the area of the orb, though it could still be clearly seen through. It was just currently surrounding the knight, pretty obvious something was being done there.

@PlatinumSkink
Overheard, a bird that had been in flight appeared to have frozen in midair - though it was innocuous and unlikely to be noticed unless any of the passengers looked straight up. And here's a reminder that there are a countless number of ways to describe transient or otherwise ephemeral effects and phenomenon, some of which may be delivered in a fashion that is extremely immersion breaking and likely to have supplanted a more artful explanation. It was just that there were other various nuanced effects in the surrounding environs that were pretty obvious and immediately apparent to the passengers, but which the narrator was disinclined to explain in the moment by taking advantage of precedent established by another poster.

Abruptly, Amelie's redirection orb vanished, and she felt her own innate affinity with her spatial magics go haywire - her senses pinwheeling like a compass trying to find true north in a lodestone mine. As if distinctions such as direction and distance had suddenly lost all meaning and were illusory, and that the whole of the world was rushing in to collapse upon her all at once and as though the land was rising up to meet the sky with all the horizon about to be swallowed whole by finely honed ivory talons.
Alright, I have waited long enough. I need to post soon or run up against my own deadline.

Unless the tagged poster in question posts soon, expect another disturbance.
As a reminder for those who might be interested and for any hopeless romantics out there in particular - there will be opportunities to exit stage right without dying.
The fallen knight had dropped his gear in falling, and if it could stop the shots that Donna had fired at them, it might be able to stop more than that.

Also, the magic here seems quite intent on undressing Amelie. Which is quite unnerving. Hah.

If we can get another mistaken gender flip directed at one of the seven passengers this will have all the makings of an anime.
From but a few feet away the knight would find a sudden gout of pure, blinding pain hitting her visor. Were she to swing unseeing at Donny, she'd find that he was no longer occupying the space he had been in. Ghost-like, conservative, his presence was suddenly behind her, his illegally strong stun gun thrusting into the small of her back and boasting a kick badder than an apartment wall socket.

@Doc Doctor
The stun gun snapped and crackled menacingly for all of half a second before it emitted a distinctive popping noise, sparked excitably, and then died in his hand. Hiecro had thrown down her pavise - which fell over only to slowly pinwheel end-over-end as it drifted off through the air - and was busy wiping down her visor with her freed hand without much success, shouting threats and promises of eunuchdom all the while, appearing completely oblivious to Donny's attempted electrocution. She swiped blindly at the air with her crossbow's bayonet ineffectually, overbalancing herself in the process and falling flat on her rear beside Donny with a loud clacking noise - almost like plastic, but the armor seemed to be metallic. At least, it seemed until Donny got a closer inspection and saw flecks in the polished finish of the armor and determined that it was merely painted to look like metal. In truth it seemed to have been made from some kind of ceramic or plastic.

Amelie couldn’t do much, but at least neutralize one opponent. If she managed to catch him, she’d search with her legs to see if she could recover the submachine-gun she had put down earlier, not letting go of the man with her eyes. Her eyes would be the one thing keeping him in place, as she glared with shaking hands holding her shirt with spikes on it stretched before her constantly.

@PlatinumSkink
Amelie found the effort of redirecting the man's motion to be much more difficult than anticipated. Her redirection orb was letting her redirect the kinetic energy of his movement just fine, but there was some weird kind of corrective force inherent to his motion. He started to raise his right leg to move, she redirected the energy to keep him still, and then the redirected kinetic energy seemed to be swallowed by the air before reappearing and amplifying the original motion. Thankfully whatever was responsible was operating with diminishing efficacy, and with some extra effort and focus she was able to keep the pavise knight rooted firmly in place.

"What-" The man grunted in frustration, his eyes wide in apprehension despite the snarl on his face as he stumbled in place in his effort to move. "Wha-oh, to Hades, Hiecro cut it out! He can't hurt us anyway-" He continued to struggle - Amelie noted that he seemed particularly invested in raising his pavise off the ground again - but he had turned the brunt of his attention over to where Hiecro and Donny had started their slapstick routine.

"HEY!" he shouted, hoping to get everyone's attention -- which admittedly might have been difficult amidst the continuing battle. "HEY!!!"

He held the arrow an inch away from his own throat.

"Knock it off! Or the next one to die is your biometric pass!" Priority one is to protect human life. "I mean it!" He was almost certain that he really did mean it.
Sheer rage overcame Fortune as he turned to glare at the two 'knights' that had made an attempt on the Damsel's life, a growl escaping his throat as he demanded with surprising conviction "STAND DOWN NOW BEFORE YOU DISGRACE YOURSELVES AND YOUR MASTER FURTHER WITH YOUR DISGRACEFUL, COWARDLY AND THUGGISH BEHAVIOR FURTHER!"

Taking a deep breath, he quickly followed up at a somewhat more softer yell "These 'extra's' are with me. If you dare try to attack them again, I will end your disgraces on all bretonnian knighthood myself. Is that understood?!"

Hiecro continued to swear and futilely wipe at her helmet with her left hand, but ceased swiping at the air with her bayonet - though she kept a firm grip on the compound crossbow nonetheless. The male pavise knight seemed to be more inclined to listen, though his attention was wavering between Fortune and Luca as the apprehension of his expression turned to bemusement.

"Look, we were just trying to protect you. Don't you know there's a hit out on all of you?" He said with some exasperation in his voice, only mildly tinged with anxiety. "I was only told about FIVE passengers, for all we knew those two were sent by Leona or Ceto or the Iris or Apollo knows who else..."

@Bright_Ops
Fortune's perception of time froze again, and a flashing glimpse of that other reality swam through his vision once more.

As he fell to his knees his mouth was opened in a soundless scream, the sheer pain more then enough to choke whatever cry he might have filled the air with. He didn't know how anyone else would respond to his pain as it was too much for him, his eyes rolling into the back of his head as he collapsed forwards as the blissful blackness of unconsciousness claimed him.

A dream of the male pavise knight's last words rolled sonorously through the darkness of his rapidly descending cognizance. "Kid, it does not matter if you kill yourself. You were sent here just to suffer. Nobody would care..."

Reality proper - or what passed for it - snapped back into focus. Fortune was abruptly confronted with the accusatory questions of the pavise knight, still awkwardly squirming and struggling in place as he spoke.

"Why the hell did you even bring them? How come the spotters never saw them enter the limo? How the fuck do we know they aren't going to give away our position or undermine the barricade at the university? And WHY THE HELL CAN'T I MOVE?" His tone turned from confused to infuriated as he practically shouted the last inexplicable question.
<Snipped quote by Terminal>

I was trying to resolve the pre-existing paradox by merging the two realities myself in having the gunshots occur, but without my death, before you could do so otherwise. Apparently I failed. Though...if I may ask, how exactly did such a thing create a third knight?


The specific reason you failed was because Donny had already reacted contingent upon Hiecro verbally threatening Amelie - I.E., an act that was also contingent upon Amelie not having conjured the redirection orb. Which she did. Donny's narrative created the alternate branch, and then Kael's own narrative created a paradox since it contradicted both the original branch as well as Donny's new branch. Your attempt force-merge did not quite work out because the reality you aimed to create retained the paradox, which I opted to purge.

As for the knight - that touches upon material which I think should be left to you and the other posters to investigate IC.
...Doc Doctor, you killed me.
And yet, I am still alive.
Note to self: Arrange your death in some manner.
It will totally be a mistake. :p

(JK...probably...)


As long as we are pointing fingers: While Doc did establish the branch that killed you due to establishing a context where Amelie did not raise a redirection orb, you had and failed to grasp the opportunity to save Kael's life by only responding with the Kael in the branch where she did react. If you had replied for both Kaels - perhaps describing how he had dodged/whathaveyou in the alternate branch - he might not have died.

Interesting extenuating fact: You also explicitly responded to both branches at once in your post by having Kael react to both the redirection orb and Donny's gunshots. This created a minor paradox that was resolved by merging the two branches, creating the third pavise knight as well as transporting a Kael corpse into the current contextual reality.

I hope you are all taking notes.
Some notes,

@Doc Doctor, the bayonet was added in for your last edit. If Donny survives Hiecro's attack, you will no longer have to worry about it.

Also: We have our first casualty. @Cruallassar has lost a life. If the iteration had not been temporally disturbed by the two absent posts, and if Donny and Kael had not delivered their incompatible narratives, Kael would not be able to appreciate his own sculpted corpse. On one hand this is good since he gets to keep going. On the other...

-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
Challenge Parameters, Lives, Rule 1

The lives/roster list has been updated.
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