Shienvien

The Prophecy

Okay... It looks like browsers occasionally do not detect that changes have occurred on the site, and actually load the cache instead of the actual current state when opened. - Which is why I sometimes don't notice new posts unless I see the topic bumped up on the first page and force-refresh.

@Jack: In any case, looks good now. I will briefly post Aemoten again in the evening - right now I have some things to finish I promised to send in today. Ah, and I will try to find my camera cord so I can upload the sketch I made a few days ago. (For some reason, finding the correct wire to connect the camera to the computer can be a hard task... Not as hard as convincing oneself to look through the mess that is a file containing all unsorted files from your decommissioned devices, though.)

Nation-RP subgrouping has given me an idea...

To be honest, I would have *strongly* preferred, if "NRP" (and perhaps arena and tabletop-based RPs, too) were to be made another option in the upcoming tagging system rather than receiving a separate subforum. It is not optimal to manually look through each and every NRP just to see on which level of writing those actually are, especially when the OP has neglected to make any specifications.

The Prophecy

I think I should ask over how severely did Aemoten actually hit and where exactly, just in case... (Since it turns out I managed to unintentionally omit some details I shouldn't, and only caught up on it when my character was described hitting the yth in a manner he should not have been able to according to my mental depiction of the scene.) - In my mind he swung the sword pretty much with all of his might, unhindered, from right upper corner (nearing the front of the yth) to lower left, and the sword he uses is both heavy and extremely sharp (I would have expected it to at least cut to the bone of the uppermost right arm, given that that arm would be the first thing in the way and not the creature's neck; I imagined him more or less swinging as if he wanted to cut the beast - or its neck, more precisely - diagonally in half, and being very close to the creature by the time the blade makes contact). I don't care much whether we go with what I actually had in mind or how you interpreted the post - mostly I just can't figure out where would the sword end up compared to Aemoten and the yth itself and how successful would the creature be in hitting back (with Aemoten initially being at notably less than the yth's arms' length and more towards the back than front if the yth by it's right side if to go by mental image)...

(I should really just remember to describe what he's doing with his sword more accurately... Edit: Or how close he is to what he is attacking, now that I think of it. It is more a matter of distance in the given case than anything else.)

Signature Limit

I have a proposal: rather than limiting the characters in a signature, why not set guidelines for the dimensions?

A more genre-specific interest check system, and likes/dislikes for interest checks.

One thing, though: NRPs are multiple-player, and hence player level comes into play. I personally would have preferred it the free/casual/advanced sections got sub-divided, rather than there being a number of "all-levels" sections which drown the longer and slower posters out. It has bothered me with arena, and it bothers me with the NRP section...

The Prophecy

@Jack on Thaler's words: I did remember how Thaler's words put more stress on the subject being's interpretation ... which was partially also why I bought up the difference-aspect. I kind of doubt yths naturally have a concept for servitude in the sense of doing what a superior being instructs them to like most humanoids and other beings with well-developed hierarchal societies do. [An error has occurred. "Serve" has not been defined. Action has been terminated.] Well, and in any case the word would be demanding the yth to do something it doesn't want to, be what it wants getting out or eating the closest thing available... I cannot begin to fathom how hard it would be to get it across to this particular yth that it should simply go past multiple people to bite a specific one.
(...Did someone actually chain an yth up just to see what will happen if you feed it a hard-to-obtain and expensive illegal substance?)

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@Hymusia/Cthulu (Should I introduce you to my friend, the business-suit Cthulu?): I am most definitely not trying to make you feel bad for anything...? If there is anything to say about what I am doing, then, well, I analyze things. I am more or less constantly analyzing things, and occasionally making remarks over some of said things - which should be taken as either completely neutral expressions of my thoughts and impressions or constructive criticism, depending on how I word them. In the given case, it was actually the first - I wasn't giving an estimation on whether anything would work as much as I was just remarking that such a command would probably be a quite complex thing to pull off. And later I explained why I thought so. I like disassembling things just to see how they work, so to speak (if my occasionally rather elaborate discussions with Jack on how his world functions haven't been an indicator).

I also like when my own things are taken through, since sometimes it brings up aspects you yourself did not think of, and having to explain why something works in one way or another is often enough a good way to make it easier to later put it down in written word in a more eloquent manner than you'd have done so yourself with the first take. Granted, my manner of debating sometimes tends to come across as a bit aggressive in plain text, which in turn might drive some people away from bringing such topics up ... which is a pity, really. I don't feel the need to defend my concepts - I constantly seek to adjust them so they'd be more complete, more logical, and so forth -, and much like my personal beliefs, if someone shows me that another way makes more sense, I just might go for it, depending on how much effort altering everything on the go would take (just remember my notion on already-published works). If not for the line at hand, then at least keep it in mind for the future.
It's always the matter of "why didn't anyone just tell me (sooner)?", and never that of being done injustice to. (Has the fact that I am not a "pure" writer and artist affected my way of seeing things? Most likely. A programmer will expect other programmers to painstakingly scrutinize every single line of their creation and consider it a perfectly natural part of life, whereas most writers tend to be very taken aback by similar treatment, especially in the beginning. And I tell you, the world of writers tends to be a lot more biased, opinion-based and brutal in the end - along with more praise comes more open hostility...)

I am not judging Thaler. Even less, I am implying that she should act differently. (I, however, very frequently *do* get people asking for my advice in how they "should" play a character... At which point I will most likely simply say that in a way that is realistic for that person. I will gladly help with designing technology, anatomy and to an extent society - that would work with the environment - but there is no specific way one "should" play a specific character aside of paying mind to realism and continuity.) As for Thaler, I can in fact perfectly understand why she's acting in the way she does, and that's usually a sign of a good writer. (Is my own character "perfect"? Of course not. His intentions might be good, but it doesn't mean that he won't approach to some matters in a manner worthy of a groan and hitting your head against the keyboard for a few times.) It's as you said - perfect characters are boring and artificial. Characters should be independent beings with their own lives rather than pieces of chess you move around as you see fit.

- Written just because I prefer people to know where exactly I stand.

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@Jack on Nilick/Koraakan: Hmm... Okay. As for Nkaa Raakan* oneself, then the one would still treat Nilick's predictions as just that - as predictions, and not the hard reality the one oneself deals with. The one is not someone that tries to lead the world according to one's own will as much as the one is simply a force that (mortal-initiated interactions left aside) sets things back towards how they should be in a natural state once they have already gone too far askew. Basically, it can be said that normally the Balancer always reacted to happenings retroactively in the canon. (Well... Kind of how, if you decided to build an infinitely tall tower, gravity would eventually get fed up with it and just make the tower collapse upon itself.)

As for mortals gaining knowledge of the future by asking Koraakan what the Oracle knows of the matter... I suppose it would basically fall back to the usual barrier of information overload that has always governed information trades with the one (for the purpose of the example, lets just assume that the requester always has what it takes to give in return). Namely, while it is possible to gather usable information this way, you have to already know quite closely what you're looking from and where should you look it from, and even then you had to be extremely careful. (Aemoten was, and even then I have stated that his obtainin information about the Unmentionable One is largely resonsible for his poor mental state.)
If someone were to simply ask what Nilick knows of ending or curing the Withering without narrowing it down further, then they would quite simply receive everything that fits it by the literal definition - every single attempt, every single speculation, every single wish, the results and prognoses for every single attempt and speculation ... and buried somewhere under it all, the answer that was actually being searched for, too. At once. As very vivid thoughts and memories. Which will simply break said person's mind.
Alternatively, you could ask a karakon, since they are protected from their minds breaking upon something like that and to an extent can use their own logic to narrow the selection of information down by giving additional specifications, but even then, the sheer amount of information that would be returned upon such generic question would mean that unless you are simply utterly, ridiculously lucky, the karakon will easily spend a few dozen years pondering, discarding one useless instance after another until one that seems to fit is found. 'Cept since karakon are very limited resource, the karakon would probably be summoned somewhere else in between.
(Of course, it also remains a matter of asking the right question... But that can be much harder to do than it sounds.)

*There, by the way, is a meaning behind which label I use. "Koraakan" mostly refers to mortal depictions and understandings of the deity, "Keeper of Truth and Balance", "Six-Eyed God", "Bloody Balancer" and a few other descriptive names more narrowly refer to certain specific cultures' understanding of the deity, the Varaagic "Nkaa Raakan" refers to the force/deity itself in the purest form, "the Balancer" being the self-incarnation of the deity as the one takes action on one's own accord ... and "the Weighter" (which I've mostly been using in the posts) generally refers to the mortal-summoned incarnation, and also the incarnation that draws upon the karakon for reference and action-determining the most, thusly being also the most mortal-like and relatable form the deity can potentially assume.

The Prophecy

And in the end, the only reasonable person in the group is Etakar, since he's been trying to suggest just leaving through the hatch and simply getting away from the battling gods for a while. XP

(Yes, I recall what her words do... It's just "go and bite that person there, and not any other; also don't walk over those guys lying on ground and just ignore those other guys trying to poke holes in you, m'kay?" is much more complex than "back down", "sleep", "stop", "kneel" or some such command, and making it last for long enough on a half-mad being that's all "Freedom!!!" and isn't even humanoid (at least in my mind, mind-controlling things that are different from you is always much more hard to do than controlling ones similar to you) will only add to the load. Back in the old RP, you stated that using the word thrice in one day is pretty much her last limit...
Hmm... And what's stopping Rilon (as a much more powerful user of proper true words and the one who first convinced the beast to get free) from simply going "Oh, you want to play this game? Okay! Stop. Turn. Kill." Or just making the yth's head explode, making himself immune to being bitten, or doing any other counteractive thing being a deity makes relatively easy - appearances are deceptive with them, after all, and the only reason Rilon might be a bit weaker now is the fact that the main part of him is trying to not lose the Black Thorn against another deity. ...Ehh, Shien, just stop thinking, will you?)

The Prophecy

How does yth make weapon? Yth bite god?

(...It would take a whole deal of power and complexity from her words to control this supposedly highly intelligent and driven-mad beast for more than two or three seconds. I somehow imagine it would be as hard - if not even harder - to control as the average human.)

The Prophecy

Well, more or less... As long as it is not unbendable - and nothing set in the future is - then Nkaa Raakan oneself does not deal with it. It is because of that why the One as the Weighter is essentially using another mind (or, well, two actually, but this would get even more complicated to explain) to determine how the physical form will act.
Uhh... And how exactly does Nilick's mind and predicting work? I kind of assumed that she would draw the information up and do the probabilities when asked, not calculate in advance... And how would it all with interact with her slumber?
(Meanwhile, I'll try to come up with an eloquent explanation as to how the management of information with Koraakan actually works - as I woke up around four in the morning, I am pretty much feeling like going back to sleep right now. In any case, the sheer vastness of the amount of information in the world makes the handling of it - as it would reach mortals - that much more complicated.)

As for the tail-spikes, then the damage done to those within the time-frame those have been subjected to the flames can be considered insignificant.

The Prophecy

I did notice the bit about the flames, but concluded that the same as applied to the rest would apply to Koraakan's tail, too - as in, the flames would be passively burning off the scales, layer by layer - which would have lesser effect due to the fact that the One is actually actively growing addition to that part of oneself.

I actually covered the bit about the limitations of the Weighter's omniscience in the old OoC - namely, there is no "would be" for Koraakan at all, not even in terms of painfully obvious things. (If I picked my teacup up, held it next to myself above the bare floor, and then asked whether it'd hit the floor if I let go of it, it would yield no result whatsoever. That question cannot be answered.) The only way the Six-Eyed God has anything akin to predictions or logical derivations from the events of past or present is through the karakon (which is actually what is being used here, too; also note that during normal bargains, you won't get a karakon's assumptions, you essentially get what could be considered raw data, which incidentally might simply tear your mind apart depending on the type and quantity) - and the karakon, while having access to the knowledge and being immune to simply going insane from it, are otherwise as slow in sorting through it and as capable of making false conclusions as any mortal. (As it is, there is obviously a focus set on what Rilon is thinking.) - Here I will also note that I am writing Nkaa Raakan in a bit more ... humanized way than the One actually is. I could try to give a more apt depiction, I suppose, but it wouldn't read as conveniently...
Am I making sense?

(Removed the bit about Rilon not caring about family ties, though.)