Okay, fixed it.
DruSM157
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STATUS: Today I officially de-fridged the death of a female character who was fridged for RP drama almost 20 years ago. Hopefully it makes sense in the story and comes across as a way better story beat. 8 mos ago
- Last Seen: 2 mos ago
- Old Guild Username: DruSM157
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8 mos ago
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Today I officially de-fridged the death of a female character who was fridged for RP drama almost 20 years ago. Hopefully it makes sense in the story and comes across as a way better story beat.
4 yrs ago
Jokes on everyone I just look like a sad Travis Touchdown who has really really loud shits
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4 yrs ago
You status bar people sure are a contentious bunch
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4 yrs ago
Adding to that, unless you are exhibiting life threatening symptoms (unable to breathe, etc) go to a rapid test site in your area than going to the ER. Local ERs are swamped and overwhelmed here.
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4 yrs ago
As someone who has been stabbed in the past knives are not kinky
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Most Recent Posts
Okay, I think I have something here.
I do enjoy a little bit of madness and some world-ending terror from time to time.
Location: Takayama -- The Gifu Prefecture, Japan
3:29
Nishki couldn’t sleep. How could anyone, on the precipice of their new life, sleep? His stomach churned with a mixture of excitement, anticipation and fear. He was 26 years old, and about to start his job as a Social Studies teacher at his old high school. The thought was hilarious to him. Ten years ago he would have laughed if someone had told him that he would be working there as a teacher in the future; and social studies of all subjects.
He glanced over at the old electric guitar leaning lazily against his small refrigerator. It was a dusty red and black Les Paul Standard, something he’d spent the last twelve years of his life trying to master. In the corner of the room were pictures of him with his old band, the Grape Skulls, in various stages of their punk rock journey, which ended a year ago after Bunta, their drummer, ended things in the worst way possible.
Nishki crawled out of his tatami and cradled the guitar in his arms. He strummed a few chords. G, C, then D. The strum of the metal soothed him, and he closed his eyes.
Les Paul Guitar: 50.000 Yen! Great Sale!
Nishki shifted in his black canvas jacket, looking at the price. There was no way his parents would shell out that kind of money. But just the look of the guitar; blood red finish and matte black; it matched how he felt about how shitty the world was so much.
“What kind of guitar is that?” A lazy voice came from his shoulder. Bunta stood at his wing, his face always chubby and swollen.
“C’mon you idiot,” Nishki grumbled, “It’s a Les Paul.” That style of guitar evoked Mick Jones of The Clash, rocking out against the system. “It’s a super versatile guitar. It’s what we need for our band.”
Bunta eyed up the guitar and nodded. “Yeah, but it’s really expensive. Like...really expensive. I don’t know if you could save up that much, even if you worked for the whole summer.”
“I’ll figure out a way…”
6:00 AM
BEEP BEEP BEEP
Nishi groaned. Fuck. He would have probably felt better if he just hadn’t slept at all. He groaned and sat up in his futon, still cradling the Les Paul. He grinned, and got ready for work.
Location: The Laughing Warg Tavern-- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria
” This is so confusing to me. All this talk about everything goes over my head slightly. Got any insight to lessen my confusion, Kazuma?”
Benkei did his best to break down exactly what all the conversations were spiraling over. “Well, you know how the tagline of Pariah Online is Make Your Dreams Reality.. The peripheral connects us at apparently our REM levels of sleep, and puts us in a shared dream. I guess the main questions are exactly, how do you ‘create’ a dream, and also, how would someone ‘hack’ a dream.”
He looked around the room at both players and denizens. ”I’m worried because at this point, this is no longer a game. There’s no UI, our controls are strictly manual, and there’s the problem with dying. At what point is it even worth calling this a game anymore? We experience pain, hunger, and...other natural things.” When he’d asked a denizen where the toilet was, he’d received a fairly incredulous look. Before, they’d simply been avatars. But now? They actually had to use the bathroom. They would smell if they didn’t bathe.
Games didn’t do that.
Location: The Laughing Warg Tavern-- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria
“If you want answers, you’re going to have to find someone who is involved on the tech side of the game that happened to be logged in when the glitch happened.”
Benkei grimaced at that thought. How many actual techs from the company actually entered the game? Did they need to have people acting as moderators in world? He’d not had to deal with anyone of the sort during his time playing, but surely there had to be someone. ”I’m sure that announcement they made earlier was a one-way communication. With all of the game UI gone, there’s no way to actually contact someone.”
And another question, or perhaps, another fear began to awaken in the back of his mind. What about other players who were already giving into despair? If they knew someone was a moderator, or an employee of Pariah’s company, what would they do? When people were shocked or scared, they acted out. They acted wild. They hurt people.
Benkei’s head perked up as he heard his other companions also talk about the same issue, and he waved them to join Sif and him at their table. If they were willing to discuss this, then they could build some working plan to understand exactly what was going on. With Alja as friendly as she was, perhaps she knew someone.
Location: The Laughing Warg Tavern-- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria
“Whoever hacked the system is breaking everything down. I just don’t understand why or how.”
That was the question. In a system like Pariah, how did one go about hacking a system that most tech nerds still didn’t understand. The idea of connecting unconscious minds, and connecting them to a server of sorts that held a shared dream had always rubbed Benkei the wrong way. How was the dream created? How did it remain stable?
“Everything about this smells bad.” Benkei added. It was enough to make him paranoid. After the events in the dungeon, he’d not slept well. He’d tossed and turned, his technical mind needed to understand what was going on, but everything was so beyond his understanding. He hated feeling like this, feeling completely disconnected and unaware. A victim of the whims of fate of the world. ”How does anyone go about hacking a dream?” That’s where his thoughts focused: how do you hack a dream. And if that was impossible, then how did the world get hacked? Either this wasn’t truly a dream, or this wasn’t a hack.
Location: Belsia Sea, AW 15
The boy felt the wind whip through his shaggy brown hair and tasted salt on his tongue. The wooden canoe he sat in bounced against the waves; well, it was the best description as Old Man Fionello and his sons had shown it around the town that day. Installed above the “canoe” were pieces of wood and wire and cloth; creating a sort of canopy overhead. They’d called it a “flying machine” to which the boy and the others scoffed at it. Man was born of the earth and belonged there. But when Brio and Marco took the machine into the air off the Belsia Sea, they’d made believers out of everyone there.
The sight of the ship breaking from the waves, and then taking into the sky had been dramatic. It had truly been magical for him. He had to try it out. And so, after arguing and fighting with the Fionello family, he found himself sitting in this canoe behind Brio, the younger Fionello brother.
“Are you ready, Ludo?”
He shook his head yes.
The metal machine above them (an engine powered by those crystal pieces of Silvenite that many of the men of the village had left to mine) roared to life. Air and smoke spat out as it shook the entire vehicle with its motions, and the large wooden propeller in front began to spin faster and faster. They lurched forward, and Ludo felt his stomach sink back from the sudden speed.
And then they broke from the waves. Ludo’s heart soared as he looked out to see the sea part from the wooden canoe. It was truly magic. And Ludo knew where his destiny lie.
Location: Isla de Serpente, Southern Belsia Sea, AW 32
The man smoked the last of his hand-rolled cigarettes, puffing a fine mist of smoke from his mouth. Money had been tight this month, and he knew that with the talk of war in the northern nations, money would soon be even tighter.
“Ey, Ludocinni,” one of the older men in the bar called to the man in a mocking tone. “How the hell are you gonna pay me back for all that Silverino if you can’t find work this month?” In the past five years, many of the mines of the coastal areas had shut down, forcing the region to import their Silventite from the northern nations. And after Holsta’s armies had attacked their neighbor Monstu; things were looking worrisome for international trade.
“I’ll find work,” Ludo responded, though his left hand shook slightly. It had shaken since he was nineteen and received a bullet through his hand while he flew a mission over Karst. He’d nearly been shot down but had somehow crawled along at a low altitude towards friendly territory. Back then he’d been a soldier. He’d believed in his country and what they fought for. Being young afforded stupidity. And while his left hand had been badly scarred and half-functioning, he’d still walked away with his life. The same could not be said for many of his old comrades.
So Ludo had taken to the seas, flying down into the Belsian Sea, where the free city-states resided among the hundreds of small islands in the gorgeous sea. He’d been born in a coastal town on the same sea, and he supposed the Belisan Sea was as much his nation as old Riccondo was.
No, this was his home now. The Serpent Islands snaked around the central area of the sea and had become a major trading hub and tourist attraction in the area; as well as a hub of crime and piracy. That’s where pilots like Ludo were brought in: mercenaries who could offer protection, rescue, or even entertainment when the need arose. But with pressure from the northern nations; and the threat of annexation by Riccondo, people had been more afraid to hire daring mercenaries. Even the local pirates were beginning to suffer.
Ludo simply looked out the dirty mirror of the cafe, staring out at the glistening sea. It didn’t matter what the politics were, nor did it matter what jobs came. For him, the sea and sky meant freedom; freedom from the problems of land and the problems of men.
And that’s where he belonged.
Location: The Laughing Warg Tavern-- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria
For every word that the denizens spoke, Benkei held on intently. He’d spent countless hours around denizens, and none of them ever spoke the way Dariel did. The fact that he actually interjected what Sif had brought up, and gave his own opinion on things…
There was no way this was scripted. It was too focused, too particular, too familiar. Too human. Kazama had played countless games during his youth. He knew the separation between game and reality, and it fell many times with the NPC and world of the game. Hard as many developers tried, there were always the limitations that brought a player back to reality. He never thought exactly why he enjoyed the game so much, but he began to realize that it was not simply the polish of Pariah, but how perfectly crafted the world always seemed.
“I don’t think I’ve ever tried flatcakes,” Benkei said agreeably to Dariel. “I’ll have some, thank you.” He then stood up, and gently took Sif’s arm and shoulder into his hands. “Let’s talk.” he said quickly, leading her back to her table, where he sat uncomfortably close to the girl.
“There’s something wrong here.” He whispered to her, a mix of panic and excitement in his voice. ”The way these denizens are acting...it wouldn’t be aberrant game scripting. They’re thinking.”
Sif began to protest; after all the tagline of Pariah was “make your dreams a reality.” It was a system that, as they advertised, connected players to a connected “dream” where they all played. Benkei always believed it was a complete bullshit lie. Dreams? What was this, some fantasy world?
“I don’t know anything about the tech to understand the whole ‘connecting dreamers together’ aspect of it. But if you make it a game there has to be some aspect of control. Suddenly the denizens are unshackled, they can hurt us.” He gave a quick glance at Arie, then back to Sif. “It’s more…real than a dream.” What controlled the denizens? Could it be an advanced AI? The tech that went into Pariah was pretty incredible, but to give that much autonomy to a single NPC...no, that made no sense at all. An AI system that powerful would require an entire city block's worth of power. Perhaps even an entire city.
Were they something like the company’s in-game GMs, forcibly roleplaying? No, that made no sense either. This was an emergency. Even if their job was to act, situations like this would cause that facade to drop.
”I think…” Benkei’s eyes became wide with a sudden realization. A sense of horror overwhelmed his mind. ”I’m scared to say. But you see it too, don’t you?” He thought back to the English textbook they’d read during his middle school class. It was by some weirdly named British author, about some detective or doctor or something. But there was a line he distinctly remembered, and it was something that he could not get out of his head. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Pariah wasn’t a game. But then, the horror that plagued Benkei’s mind opened up into a new question of terror: What the hell was this?
Location: The Laughing Warg Tavern-- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria
They’d all exchanged pleasantries, and the air of the tavern began to change from tense to relaxed again. Benkei did his part to treat his allies to food and drink, though kept his own servings simple: water, bread and meat. He was still in high school, after all, and did not want to break the “law” regardless of the rules of this world.
“So, I suppose Rael went after Graves. But where is Seele?”
“She went after Kazuki.”
“Does anyone have any idea where they all went?”’ He frowned. “Kazuki could very well go back to his apartment in town, though I don’t know if he would with Seele in tow.” Was his brother secretly a casanova? Would he wine and dine and seduce the young witch? He knew his older brother was cooler and wiser than he, but was he also...in his popular phase?
“I don’t know where Graves and Rael could have gone. They’re both loners, after all. The only others around here they possibly know are probably in Mystic Prophecy…”
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