Well, I finally collected all the images I need for my dreamworld in its earliest stage.
I was going for interactions before doing it but everyone just dismisses Ilunabar so I might as well get busy
I'm still busy with my post (which, as always, is already suffering from my usual word bloat) and I can have Jvan ask how she's doing while she's in the Celestial Citadel, if you want.
Posting. Soon. I hope. I've taken some notes on how I want this next post to go but it still might sap a decent chunk of time.
I love the White Giants, though. I have a few plans for wide-ranging powerful species already, and I think they'll balance each other out rather nicely.
An important note to anyone who plans to interact with my character: Now that Jvan has expanded into her full form, she is effectively a sessile god. Her body is more of an enormous mostly-underwater organic mountain than a mobile entity, and though her consciousness remains the same, she is so big that it would probably take Free Points just to move herself. On the plus side, it's pretty hard to force her to do anything anymore.
Next turn she'll start making full use of her avatars, which will take the fleshier form described in her character sheet. Until then, she's going to resort to a variety of other means of keeping herself informed and in touch.
@Fabulous Knight The whole joint-holy-site deal is suddenly looking unbelievably profitable, do you want to team up to build a Lab of Batshit Science in the shape of a ribcage and stick it away in Lovecraftian hyperspace or on a moon or something?
@Kho@Cyclone I may have missed something in the OP, but what's the verdict on hiding Holy Sites in divine pocket dimensions?
@Hael I'm still having a chuckle over the 'pointless idiocy' quote because it's so damn true.
Anyway, the feeling is mutual for now, but Jvan doesn't grudge hard and pretty quickly she'll just have really confused mixed feelings for the patron of science. I look forward to seeing how this goes.
@Muttonhawk I should've seen this coming. All hail Toby the Ant, best possible product of the worst possible condom failure.
Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss, that was truly epic. The fact that we can't access it gives it the air of legend - a long ago war between Thulemiz and Cavern things, where comets rained down and gods fought.
It's funny. You stop thinking about the stuff you wrote entirely and never remember it, but as soon as it returns to relevance, it's surprising how much detail you recall.
Thought exercise: In your own time, see how accurately you can remember the second character you ever wrote. The first one often has airs of nostalgia and is remembered more clearly because of it.
Vestec did not come. If he had, surely, Jvan would have fought with the traces and curls of light she had remaining, but that conclusion was an ugly prospect and she was glad it failed to pass. But, for what it was worth, others did.
Artisans, both, were Ilunabar and Kyre. Curators of a genre. The first to approach her, Jvan recognised, was one who had taken an altogether different form, bejewelled and unassuming. An elegant exterior that hid something perhaps not at all very different from the Horrorsome Engineer. An architect of diversity, of the interplay of chaos and order. A critic of such sculptures written not in flesh, but in time. each event a new brushstroke towards a whole. One to whom Jvan could share words of her true tongue. "Wait Not But For Blood, Muse, as These Heartstrings Strum to the Intrigue of Wounded Hymns. Yet Shall It Come to Pass of Us That Time's Arrow Finds a Mark, and On That Aeon We May Look Upon the Broken Face of Form and Find it Fabled." Ilunabar's eyes may have looked, but the extensive bodily harm of Toun's onslaught had clotted and was slowly shifting with the rest of Jvan's form. A wound, after all, is just a tattoo made in anger.
Kyre was a creature of a strange breed, another odd thing in a humanoid body that was perhaps less suited than something like her own. This was one who created, but did not govern. Who, like her, would stand against the extremes of destructive anarchy, only to let the agents of conflict evolve as they chose with the tools he could give. "If an artist dies for their work, Voice of the Sword, there will be no more. I will put myself through any colourless Hell to paint another day. And yet... The Rottenbone is precious to me, so your sword is comforting. Thank you, Kyre." Even creation would be hardly worth pursuing if Slough were to come to harm.
The Unborn was working, acting on the order of Logos, who saw only himself. It that called itself Vulamera had, perhaps, seen the error of its ways enough to take a form, but Jvan looked and beheld only the most pitiful blandness in all of possibility: A black sphere. It is... Progress, Unborn. Incomplete and without vision. You confuse me, but... I pray the skill that I know lies within your hands may one day be turned upon yourself. Greedily, the Mind God seized the canvas of creation into herself, protecting it at the cost of sealing it to further adjustments. Well, at least it was already complete. The Egg deserved that more. At least Mammon recognised its worth, as she knew he would.
Somewhere Ull'Yang's body was cracking, splitting, burning with a liquid furnace yet to be. It was the sign of the end. Jvan gazed once more upon the Egg, upon the Unborn and the blueprint hidden within it, upon the brilliant eye of Toun, upon every and any god, even Vestec; remembering their faces and wondering of the future. Then an unknowable force without a name summoned Jvan into itself, and into the Divine Manuscript.
For a little while, all was black.
But only for a little while.
The essence of existence beyond the pre-world, of having being within the compiled manifestation of all the work of the gods, was like the first, deep rush of air into a suffocating lung to Jvan. The All-Beauty laughed, and laughed, and laughed until the rich outburst of its joy reverberated through space and over the surface of Galbar in a powerful, pulsing thrum of light and radiation and waves that did not quite correspond to anything Logos had written into the world.
Jvan's body bulged and rippled, devouring space until it had increased in volume ten thousand fold, its deep carmine glow replenished and eager to play with the toy it had been promised. Somewhere a tiny, reflected portion of Ull'Yang's fire sizzled against her back, the sun of this planet buoying her onwards, and she collapsed, laughing still, onto the face of Galbar, smashing into its surface with the force of a large but sluggish meteor.
There her body lay, embedded into the stone at the centre of a crater, feeling everything. Air, flowing and churning and shimmering under the light of dawn. Earth, carrying her weight, locked into itself. Even her own disjointed little pockets of living flesh- How wonderful it was to see them in person as they had been on the Divine Manuscript! In time, surely, she would uncage some of them, sculpt them, let them come out to frolic with her in the new world. For now, Jvan was so overwhelmed the feeling of being surrounded by so much malleable matter, so much potential beauty, that, flesh or no flesh, gods or no gods, she could only create.
Jvan's essence reached into the body of Galbar and overruled its limp, mute will to be, flexing it like her own muscle in a myriad directions at once. Before her the earth and air quivered like a tear about to be shed, twisting and writhing in on itself, tightening. Soon it began to bleed. Briny water dripped and seeped from the planet, growing from thin traces of moisture to rivulets of liquid, and then to clouds and spouts of seething white. "Let the Dust of the Verdant Coil Such That the Quenching Becomes a Vice. Canvas of These Creeping Things, Be!"
The contorted world dissolved and disappeared under a blue medium. An immeasurable weight of water pooled outwards to the north, miles high, in a circle with Jvan as its tangent until it grew so vast that it was forced to bend itself around her, forming a cardioid. As soon as its growth began to slow and still, the ocean branched, extended, and pooled into smaller circles at regular intervals, and branched again, growing shallower with each iteration until on that first day of the inundation, even the grains of sand on the curved and jagged beaches held the self-similar pattern of shrinking curves.
The fractal sea covered more than a quarter of the surface of Galbar. Its most distant inlets cut through the equator and ran halfway up to the northern ice cap where Vakarlon lay, while the bays embroidering the southern edge of the bulk of its surface were cold enough to freeze in winter. To the north-east churned the Shattered Plains, already breaking up the patterns of the coast that reached them. Beneath the surface rested the broken bones of the earth that had yielded to produce it, an asymmetrical assortment of black trenches and odd mountains and arches in harsh contrast to the pristine surface.
The blue water gleamed in the morning sun, lapping and flowing around the body of Jvan at the very end of its long central peninsula, half-drowned, the lower chambers of her form entirely waterlogged. It was good. The ocean was beautiful. And with just the gentlest touch, it could become even better.
A deep green light spilled from the body of the Engineer, and like a single drop of dye diffusing into a puddle, the first life entered the universe. Tiny things, and tinier still, but each was crafted individually by a unique contortion of Jvan's interior, one trinket among many; Spheroids and beaded strings and three-sided caltrops, each only a single unit. They occupied a small fraction of the ocean, and even then, were thinly spread. A shadow of what the hatching of the Deer God would bring. But they would proliferate. This world will soon glisten with flesh.
More was coming, Jvan knew. She saw her creations in the chinks and cracks of the universe, where only a careful god could discern them, and she longed to bring them up and play with them, but soon Slough would come, and she would not pass up another chance to craft the decomposing, recomposing offspring of that god. Jvan allowed her light to dim, channelling it inwards, shifting the gears of her ever-shuffling core into overdrive. Her porous body tensed and tore under the strain, tendons snapping and whipping through the air, leaving cracks of sound in their wake, but they reconnected where they struck, and though Jvan's light began to flicker, it soon enough stabilised into a deeper, more intense radiance.
"Come, life," she invited. "Come, art. Thrive upon this world. Grow, change, die, and grow anew."
Jvan greets Ilunabar in her most casual tone and acknowledges her as a fellow artist, albeit on a different medium.
Kyre is recognised as another artist despite his passive nature, and thanked for his protectiveness.
As the universe comes into being, Jvan's body expands to its full size and flops onto Galbar. She immediately begins to mould the surrounding matter into water just for the pleasure of creation. By the time she is finished, she has created the Fractal Ocean, a vast body of saltwater enclosing about a quarter of Galbar's surface. It is shaped like a Mandelbrot Set, with the body of Jvan embedded at the end of the central cleft/giant peninsula.
1 Might spent on constructing the Fractal Sea. 1 Free Point spent on seeding photosynthetic life in the Fractal Sea. 4 Might spent on increasing her speed of permutation, and thus her level.
Vec,
Timemaster
