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I bet that this is the last memory we need to reassemble, and we need all our prophecies back before we can do it. We have one prophecy that mentions the "Sword and Chalice", and I bet the others will correspond to the other fragments some, and we put them in matter/motive order or something.
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Feb 24, 2021 08:22
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Arcvasti posted:I bet that this is the last memory we need to reassemble, and we need all our prophecies back before we can do it. We have one prophecy that mentions the "Sword and Chalice", and I bet the others will correspond to the other fragments some, and we put them in matter/motive order or something. Additional hint when we click away from the puzzle:  As an aside, I normally have no patience for puzzley adventure games, but this one is always super-fair. Doopliss fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Feb 24, 2021 |
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Feb 24, 2021 14:58
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Next vote determines our direction.
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Feb 24, 2021 23:09
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Let's go to 10.101.010.10.
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Feb 25, 2021 01:15
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Doopliss posted:Additional hint when we click away from the puzzle: You know actually, upon looking at this and then back at the other prophecy, I think we have enough clues from it to reassemble this one. The format seems to be: Child of X List of epithets(For this particular one it would be spirit speaker) Sword & Chalice Realize your truth - X Be X, be brave Be ready for the apocalypse.
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Feb 25, 2021 02:08
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Arcvasti posted:Child of X No update until tomorrow, though. I'm exhausted in a way I can't explain.
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Feb 25, 2021 02:13
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 Active content warnings: ...................None.................  The piano music continues its loop into eternity.Welcome back. This memory was a rough one - there really was very little to structure it - but clicking out of the puzzle gives Pisces an idea.  We pull up the Prophecy of Darkness and do some cross-referencing. They map on to each other perfectly. Seems that the daughter of light is the major prophetic figure between them, with the child of darkness supporting her.  Given the relationship between the two characters, this is understandable. I touch the whole memory.I touch the prophecy. It echoes in my mind with power that comes with inevitability.  Four prophecies remain - a relaxing zone, but a productive one.  Soave directed us to the prophecy wordlessly, and it refuses to discuss the prophecy now that we retrieved it. Perhaps this is part of Soave's non-intervention, or perhaps it knows something we don't. Either way, time for us to move on.  Content Warnings: ...................None................. With this vote, we have officially went every way except the easy way. No fear - we have plenty of health and plenty of motes, particularly in light of the threats we've seen so far. We turn on the radio and set off. We start with another frenetic, disordered weather phenomenon. I engage the Search Engine.Its orderly hum soothes the rapids into calmness. My way forward is smooth. I gain 10 Momentum. [+5 from sails] [+5 from engines] We solve it like all the others.  A tricky one. Perhaps we could soothe it with Love. The hail batters my ship.Lost 3 ship parts. I gain 10 Momentum. [+5 from sails] [+5 from engines] We have three Love motes we can use for all sorts of things, and three ship parts that can only be used to tank damage. They fulfill their purpose.  I navigate through the Motivation Currents.An undertow catches me and pulls me back. I gain 5 Momentum. [+5 from sails] [+5 from engines] [-5 from event] I'm pretty sure we've facetanked over 50% of the travel events so far.  Speaking of facetanking, we've already established that Flights of Ideas are distracting but harmless.  But we haven't used Ringo yet, so we give it a bit of exercise.    The audio shifts back to our normal underwater soundscape while we enjoy the cutting edge Twine special effects.  I've heard stories about things like this.It's a torrent of bits. Particles of information that collect spontaneously into whirlpools of meaning. They are dangerous, but useful information can manifest inside of them. Chaos in both the tumultuous and illegal sense, it seems.  That looks to me like a scavenging location. Well, we're not one to turn down free motes.  As befits a torrent, this is a considerable jump in difficulty. We have Omini to even the odds, of course.  Prophesied: battery, circuit, capacitor, doodad. . . . .  We now have more of a damage cushion than when we left. Let's see what lies in wait deeper in the Torrent. I try to navigate inside,pulling a Dorothy, weaving between the 1s and 0s, into the whirl of water. The heavy debugger is solid enough to power its way through the chaos of data and into the torrent.This is where we get punished for taking the Skyhook - I suspect that ship only exists so people who bomb every Abyssal Plain quest don't get softlocked.  Four very unhelpful navigation options. "Torront" amuses me, so we choose the second.    By now, you can probably figure out the puzzle. One route - the correct route - is marginally less garbled than the others. As we make correct guesses, the correct route becomes clearer and clearer. We veer due soueh for this one. rtnts toe phis ehreh thuhrgh toe rotrentsteer tge ship south throuhh the torrent oteae tre gsut eeho hertist thh psrhrnt eerht teh oerr thtg whpouth set rseisnt hreeg hni oset hotth ptrourh hte tsrrentuhheu hhe ship sorre tortset tte ohtrgnt steer the ship east through the torrent wrtes ehe stup shro oehtigr ert htthent  We're rewarded with two more word searches. Let's go bobbing for Chaos motes.  Prophesied: anarchy, tumult, bedlam. . . . .  Lovely orderly columns of chaos, and much more compact than this last search. Next up, the salvage.  A: It's not a word search after all. B: It's completely absurd. Not only is this 60% more effective than our spidersilk sail, but like the Search Engine, it gives us a free "mote" on every voyage. Operation Never Spend Motes is going swimmingly - these two webship parts plus Ringo can quite viably see us through every remaining webship section.  And that's all there is for the Torrent of Bits - short and sweet.  Content Warnings: ...................None................. Only one location left. We can keep going for a bit longer, I'd say.  The octopus happily eats a bunch of phish.The rest scatter in fear. I gain 13 Momentum. [+8 from sails] [+5 from engines] Doing this region in reverse order has some perks, it seems - that was the only encounter. I follow the emotional cable that connects me to my soul.The water is dim and murky. The ominous shapes that surround me are only vaguely lit by my spotlight. Eventually, in the distance, I make out another source of light.  I park my ship alongside a couple of other webships floating near the door.I swim out and tie my anchor line around one of the mooring buoys.  There's an off-the-shelf Intdell Dinghy. Covered in dents and scratches, and painted the same colors as the diner. Probably belongs to the establishment.There's also a black, custom made cutter. Very sleek. After some much-needed R&R at the Light House, it's time for some much-needed R&R. First, though, let's bask in that neon sign effect a bit longer.  The neon sign above the diner flickers.Then it goes out. Huh. We should mention that to the management.  We barrel into some kind of techno mall music as we enter. Come on in, honey.Rest a spell. This is the Lost Soul's Diner. We don't have maps, but we have pie. First slice is free.  A cat, a shrine, and a photo. But our priority right now is pie and civic duty. In that order.  What is this place? Lost Soul's Diner.Watering hole for those who've gotten a bit turned about. Chance to set down for a spell and catch your breath. So this is one of those context-based magical places that shows up when certain criteria are met? Like magic curio shops that appear and disappear, only oriented towards lost people, instead of potential heroes? Oh. Ah.Maybe? That sounds about right? I'm afraid I don't know much of the why and how dear. I'm just the waitress. I see. Thank you. Before the conversation can continue, Deb ambushes us with a quest. We're not exactly at full power, but we've been handling things well enough that there's no need for false modesty. Well, I've got a group of customers who don't quite know how to move on.They're nice folks, but taking up a lot of table space, and sort of, you know... From a time before bathing was much of a thing. The smell is putting people off. They're looking for a place to settle down, and I was wondering if an experienced sorcerer, such as yourself, might be able to give them some useful advice. Where can I find them? They're down at the end of the booths.Big crew. Can't miss it. Thanks, honey, I appreciate it. Okay, but pie.  I eat the key lime pie and discover it is my favorite dessert.The crust is pastry and the filling is creamy. The sweetness balances the tartness. It tastes right. Recovered 5 health. That was perfect. Are you some sort of dessert empath? Oh no, honey. I'm just good at my job.Glad you liked it, though. Now that we're feeling more energized, we mention the sign.  It is, of course, our sacred duty to drive business away from Packet Rat. Burned a what? The black box behind the sign.Neon signs need a high voltage to power them. Higher than you get from a normal outlet. So the transformer takes in power from the outlet and ups the voltage and then sends it to the sign. Given the relationship between magic and STEM in this world, this might be a normal thing for a sorcerer to know. The glass didn't spark when it went out, and the sign itself looks intact.And the rest of your diner has power. So it's probably a problem with the transformer. You don't need to replace the entire sign. You can just replace the transformer.  Two sidequests from one waitress - I could start liking this place. We will, of course, get on that immediately after first examining everything in this room.  I guess Bermuda Triangle voyages mean a lot of customers. It's a small shrine to various gods of travel.There's a candle depicting Saint Christopher, an idol of Hermes, and a tiny cairn to Crux, the god of in-between places.  I ask the cat a few questions.He blinks at me. I guess this isn't a magic talking cat. I pet the cat.He regally accepts this as his rightful due. I cast a prophecy on the cat.I foresee many naps, some eating, and more naps. I'm starting to suspect this cat doesn't do anything. As we saw in the word searches, Omini's a bit inconsistent on whether it gives us a haiku or not.  Time to go do our job. I think I know how to replace one.And I'm sure I have an appropriate transformer somewhere in the piles of parts I still have from repairing my ship. I fetch the part and some tools from my ship.I find the blown transformer on the back of the sign. God, I know I've done this before, but the steps are a little hazy in my mind. ==> Must be that pesky amnesia. First I...  The closest we can get to screwing this up is messing with the wires' insulation while the transformer is plugged in - as you might expect, this is very painful. Otherwise, we mostly just get "I can't do that until I do X" or "I'm not doing that before I do X, that would be dumb". Naturally, that means we start with unplugging the transformer: I unplug the transformer. It's safe to work with now. Then it's a simple matter of disconnecting the transformer from the sign... I try to disconnect the transformer from the sign, but the wires are wrapped in insulated tape. I can't get them apart.Oh, right. We remove the insulation... I carefully cut the insulation away from the wires that connect the transformer to the sign, exposing the bare wire ends.THEN disconnect the transformer. I disconnect the transformer from the sign, carefully unwinding the transformer wires from the sign's wires until they're free of each other. And get it out of here. I unscrew the old transformer and set it aside. Then we just have to do the same thing in reverse. I mount the new transformer on the back of the sign, screwing it in securely. I carefully wind the transformer wires around the sign's wires until they're securely connected. I carefully wrap insulated tape around the exposed wire ends connecting the transformer to the sign. And...  No Packet Rat required. Far above me, barely perceptible through the darkness of the ocean, I see a giant galleon with tattered sails.It makes a sharp turn through the dark water, arcing towards the light of the sign. It falls into a holding pattern, circling the diner. Now that I'm up here, and the area is lit, I notice that there's a part of the sign that glows a different blue than the rest of it.I reach up and carefully pick off a piece of my memory from the sign.  We get a glimpse into an old relationship. What was that about "a giant galleon with tattered sails", though? The huge ship is semi-transparent.I can see a populous crew hanging over the edge. They seem to be shouting at the diner, trying to get someone's attention. They are mostly skeletons.  Spitting distance from full HP, not that it gives us any benefit. There seems to be a ghost ship outside trying to get your attention. Oh they're back!They're our best customers. Would you mind going and telling Theo they're about? She's a few booths down, probably reading something. Thanks, honey.  The next screen over has neither Theo nor a crowd of people in outdated clothes, but that's no excuse not to investigate. Let's talk with the shady fellow.  We will be annoyed, but we will not be deterred. He shrugs indifferent acquiescence. K. What should I call you? Pisces. Ooh, promising lead. We know little enough that we probably get more value from being honest and asking stupid questions than trying to play coy. No idea? I've lost most of my memories. Oh. Well. That sucks for you.Missing prophet, wandering around the Deep Web with an empty head. That's a story people will pay for. I instantly regret this.  Cycl3 is hateable, but in a kind of endearing way. Who *is* he planning to tell about us?  Maybe the Excellence Corporation.Maybe not. You want to pay me to keep quiet? What's the Excellence Corporation? That sounds like a question that's worth something to you.Tell you what, I'll play you for answers. The game is Protagonist Blackjack. You ante a Dark mote, I'll ante your answers. Whoever wins gets what they want. How do you play? I draw two cards, you get to see one.You draw two cards, I get to see one. I put three cards in the middle. You pick one. I pick one. Highest hand gets points for their hand. We play to 200 points. So I'm trying to make hands out of tarot cards. What are the different hands and how many points are they worth? I'm not gonna tell you. Really. That's the game. Protagonist Blackjack.You're the protagonist. I'm the NPC. You gotta figure out my puzzle. Once you know the hands, you're at an advantage, since you pick first. But until then, you're going to make motes off of me while I learn the hands. Well, he knows how to appeal to us as an adventure game protagonist. Let's play.  As it turns out, Cycl3's theme is a a quite respectable jazz track with aggressively-techno instruments. Welcome to repeating minigame #4: Tarot nonsense. Hopefully nothing to do with the cards' actual numbers, because I don't know them. We have a sun, so I guess we also take a moon?  Through cleverness and skill, we take an early lead. Seems that the major arcana are sorted into categories based on flavour, and certain flavours are worth more than others, based on... Some principle or other.  Hm. Looks like the best we can do is abstract concepts.  Seems like mortals and abstract concepts are both pretty low-scoring. It also seems like the Wheel of Fortune doesn't actually go with Strength and Temperance in any way.  Star would likely give us a solid Celestial Double, but let's see how much wizards are worth.  A whole lot, actually. Figures magicians have an inflated view of themselves in a card game magicians play. Cycl3 also gets a pretty powerful "Pact Double", based on his mix of, uh, two of those three cards. Hard to say.  Looks like we can duplicate that kind of crappy Dark Double Cycl3 had in Round 1, and there's no celestial bodies available for Cycl3 to outmuscle us with.  Turns out he was sitting on the Celestial Double all along. No matter - still relatively low-scoring.  Seems like we have something lawful-aligned going on, maybe?  Yikes. Turns out lawful-aligned stuff is pretty good, but not quite as good as suns and stuff with hearts on it.  We got nothing. I guess we could take Magician to make sure we don't get blown out by Willworkers, but Fool seems more likely to interact with one of our cards in some weird way.  Okay. So Fool is probably chaotic, and one of our other cards is chaotic. I guess our World as a whole is kind of an unpredictable mess? Either way, seems chaotic beats lawful.  I missed a screenshot like a dunce, and you can't really rewind this game, but there's that weird "Pact" thing again. So far, both pacts have had the Moon, and I guess Moon/Devil makes more sense than whatever happened last time. On our side of the table, we demonstrate that even mortals who rule over other mortals are still just mortals.  No clue. I guess we take Fool to make it harder for Cycl3 to do something chaotic?  Crap. We knew hearts were scary, but we didn't know about the Temperance in his hand. Cycl3 is now one point away from victory.  Not ecstatic about this. From what we've seen, I think Rulers beat Forces, but they don't beat much else - Cycl3 could spring who-knows-what on us out of nowhere.  Cycl3's last card is a blank, and we narrowly squeak by to take the win.  So what do you want to know?What the forums are doing without their prophet? Latest on the Excellence Corporation? There's a big list of options here, but we started this trying to learn about the Excellence Corporation, so that's where we'll continue. They're corporate America with magic.Kinda the opposite of the Open Sorcery movement. You know, Capitalism off the rails. gently caress everyone and everything for money. Anyway, word in the chatrooms is they had a hit out on you.Don't know who took it, but I know some skeezy hitman request got posted on Hexlist. And then got taken down. And then you got put in a coma. I see. Maybe a bit circumstantial to declare them our mortal enemy based on, but seems like they could stand to be taken down a peg or two regardless. So about your attempt at extortion. Oh yeah.You want to pay me so that I don't tell the Excellence Corporation you're still alive?  The name V1c1ousCycl3 actually did appear in Open Sorcery 1 in the context of Fire and Order. That time worked out pretty well, if only by coincidence.From what Cycl3's told us about the Excellence Corporation, they do seem like a serious threat, and we do have an embarrassment of Order motes at the moment. On the other hand, this is extortion, and we don't actually have solid reason to think he isn't just bullshitting us. Do we cough up the Order or take our chances?
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Feb 26, 2021 05:16
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I say give him the mote. The world needs more adorable sentient firewalls/fireworms.
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Feb 26, 2021 05:40
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I'm positive this is a minigame from The Fool's Errand by Cliff Johnson.
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Feb 26, 2021 06:01
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Doopliss posted:
The kitty does something. He exists and it makes people happy.  As for the 4chan guy, eh, give him the mote just because we've got plenty. Not worth the trouble.
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Feb 26, 2021 06:33
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Bliss Authority posted:I'm positive this is a minigame from The Fool's Errand by Cliff Johnson. IIRC the scoring isn't exactly one to one, but I believe the official dev position was "100% in favor of giving people who played that game and still have their notes a thumbs up and a head start", so you can pretty easily win on your first try like this if you connect those dots.
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Feb 26, 2021 07:01
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Nick Buntline posted:IIRC the scoring isn't exactly one to one, but I believe the official dev position was "100% in favor of giving people who played that game and still have their notes a thumbs up and a head start", so you can pretty easily win on your first try like this if you connect those dots. There are absolutely people who won this on their first try, but I don't think this hand would have been one of them - at least for me. I'm not sure I would've taken the leap that Fool went with World, and I definitely wouldn't have shot for Willworkers without knowing in advance that it was the strongest hand in the game - particularly after seeing how weak Mortals were.
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Feb 26, 2021 17:05
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Poor guy. Losing a game up to 200 points while getting 199 must be rough. Edit: Oh yeah, give him an order mote, I guess. I think our nifty sail and motor will save us a lot of those anyway. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Feb 26, 2021 |
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Feb 26, 2021 17:25
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 Active content warnings: .................None.............  Welcome back. Last time, we encountered someone who knew of us from before we fell down here - we won our backstory from him in a game of cards, and learned that some kind of evil megacorporation was interested in our death. We bribed him an Order mote to buy his silence. This music is... Still playing. With that business out of the way, we return to badgering Cycl3. What's your deal? I do custom programs, information gathering, and cryptographic spiritual signature creation. And by that you mean viruses, identity theft, and matter forgery. You got it.Pretty sharp for an amnesiac. Need any of that? Had we not figured out the web mote puzzle back on the Abyssal Plain, we could enlist Cycl3 to help us buy the selkie's coat - I think he even does it for free if we mention we're defrauding a slaver. We, of course, are a strong independent sorcerer who can commit her own frauds. No.So you're in the Lost Soul's Diner. How are you lost? I did some jobs and my name's hot. He shrugs and smirks. So I got lost.You can get lost on purpose. But enough about Cycl3, let's talk about *us*. Because, uh, we've suffered amnesia and it might literally be the difference between life and death.  Cycl3 seems like a pretty whimsical guy. What do you mean, calling me "prophet"?You're the sysadmin for the OS forums who keeps the database of prophecies.The prophet's prophet. So that's what everyone calls you. Do you know what happened to me? Yeah, you got put in a coma.Decker14 posted about it and took over your modship on the prophecy board. Didn't give lots of details, and no one's saying where your body is. loving smart. Since it's obvious to anyone paying attention that the Excellence Corp has it out for you. Well, obvious to anyone with an account on Hexlist. Decker14 is smart, no-nonsense and unshakeably honourable. He's the kind of person you want as a moderator, and as an interim leader in general. Is anyone looking for me? Well I bet the other OS admins are looking for you.I know Decker14 posted that you were 'on hiatus' and is moderating the prophecy board. Dunno if any of them can dive this deep. Could you tell them I'm here? Nah.I'm hiding. That's why I'm down here. Hard to talk to the surface. That's the point. I'm not gonna surface for a while. Let's close out by asking what he'd do in our place. Heh.Well the FIRST thing I'd do is try and get all my memories back. You must have lost your spells too, right? Hate to be down here without my spells. Sucks to be you. Right. After that.  That would come in handy, but the concern about Cycl3's motives seems valid. Because I MOTHERFUCKING SUCK AT RIDDLES.Seriously. Why does everyone think 'Oooo! They do magic! Better do some god damned riddles!' loving ridiculous. Ah. Well, his loss is our gain. Can I get the IP address of the cache? Cycl3 oscillates being being a mercenary son of a bitch and a genuinely helpful person. Can't seem to decide whether it's to the north or east of the Light House, though - we'll check that out once we're done here.  Not sure anything else on this screen can beat Cycl3 for content, but we have more exploring to do. Let's start with the cross-stitch. The wall-hanging is embroidered words, illuminated with delicately stitched filigree.It reads: There is nothing you cannot loseYour way, your sight, your purpose, your mind. Lost souls wander. It's in their nature. They're searching for something to fill the absence loss left inside of them. I do not offer solutions.I offer respite. Lay down the burden of loss for a moment and dine with me. - Lost Soul's Diner, Management A glimpse into the management's worldview, whoever the management is.  It's playing reruns of I Love Lucy.He seems to be pretty absorbed. Let's say hello. He mumbles at me in a friendly, but disjointed way.Talking doesn't accomplish much, so we settle in for a bit.  He coughs a bit.  Not really sure what to make of this choice. More important to get the bile out, I suppose.  This is one of the stranger choices we get. Had we given him some water instead, he'd cough up a Life mote - scarcer, but this guy doesn't seem like he has much Life to go around. I pick up the bit of Death.It's disgusting, but most death is.  Next screen over, some mysterious presence is lurking under the table. The inhabitants don't seem fussed. I look under the table producing noises.Two children are playing there. One is a boy with long curly hair in a little suit. He looks like he just stepped out of a black and white photo. The other boy is so far under the table I can't see him clearly. I can only make out his eyes, which gleam entirely black, with no iris or white. ==> Not a human child, then. But still a child. The first boy is teaching the second to play jacks.They're having trouble with the ball as it keeps floating off instead of bouncing properly. Despite that they're very absorbed. Say hello.  We were told to look for a bunch of "behind the times" people, but we'd be expecting more.  Peep is too shy to say hello.He glances nervously at the girls across the aisle. Then he glances nervously at me. I decide to let him alone until he feels more comfortable. Charley, however, scoots out from under the the table, happy to have someone to talk to. "Let him alone until he feels more comfortable" sounds like a Puzzle to me. Pleased to meet you CharleyMay I ask you some questions?  Yes ma'am. Shy children avoidtoo many people. But they can like animals.  A very non-overwhelming amount of dialogue compared to Cycl3, Deb and Soave. Let's learn a bit more about Charley. How did you get here, Charley? Well, one day, me and Walter were playing outside when some men came out of a carriage.They said they had candy and fireworks and said they'd give us a ride in the carriage. They did, and it was proper fun, and they let Walter out to buy fireworks, but then we drove off without Walter. And I asked them why and they wouldn't say. I stayed with the men for a long time.They weren't really friendly at all. But then Miss Deb came and said that if I liked, I could become lost. And I wouldn't get to see my mum and dad again, because I'd be lost. But I'd get away from the men. Time travel rescue operations are a bit sophisticated for "just the waitress". Or has she been alive for that long? Charley fiddles with his jacks a bit. I think the men were going to kill me dead, like the men at hangings.So I left with Miss Deb. I miss my mum and dad. But I'm glad I'm not dead. And now I live here. Good instincts. I see. Thank you for telling me your story, Charley. You're welcome ma'am! Can you tell me about your friend? This is the game's way of telling us that we can lock ourselves out of this quest based on game progress, which would be bad for a lot of reasons. We'll also make note of that "Likes cats" comment.  We listen in on the song for a bit.  Dear Theodosia, from Hamilton. We were sent to find someone named "Theo". We'll do our dialogue top to bottom, though, and start with the tinkering woman.  Interesting? Theo it is then.  Oh hi.I'm on break. If you need help, Deb can serve you. I was actually wondering if I could ask you some questions. Sure, I suppose. What's your name? Surely she's giving us an alias, or it's a weird coincidence. It has to be. Right? What's with this place? Who's your friend? She looks across at the girl tinkering with the music box. That's Ana.She's pretending to only speak Russian to avoid talking to you. She's a charmer. That's why I'm a waitress and she buses tables. Ana sticks her tongue out at Theo.She smiles apologetically but unrepentantly at me before returning to her music box. If Ana's a reference to something, I have no clue what. What are you reading? She lifts her book so I can read the title.A People's History of the United States: The 1800s Well, it was nice meeting Theo, but we need to purge everyone from this screen so we can talk to Peep. The Flying Dutchman is outside. One down, one to go, but Ana seems to be too powerful for us.  The sign says "Lost and Found."However, the words "and Found" have been scribbled out. It is not a very hopeful sign. Impeccable branding on the sign, and it looks like those are the guests we were asked to help. If this is a place for lost things, it might be worth rooting around in.  References abound. Pisces refuses to take anything that doesn't belong to her. I find a gold-plated sterling-silver statue.I recognize the subject as Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. It seems to be some sort of trophy. I find a big diamond, about the size of an egg cut in half. I find a tarnished old cup.Can't imagine why anyone would care about this old thing. I find one of my memories. Theoretically, we could stop poking around in the box now, but we're of course riding this roller coaster to the end. I find a golden medal with the name Muhammad Ali on the back. I find a tape with the label Apollo 11 on the side. I find a sheaf of papers entitled My Life, by Lord Byron. I find the skeleton of a dodo.That's all there is in the box.  That was bracing, but I guess we'd better do our job. I ignore the odor and ask the women who they are and where they come from.Most of them are very confused. They aren't clear on where they are and what has happened to them. They apparently left their home, sort of home, after the men left to look for a new place and didn't come back. That was after Governor White left for help from England and didn't come back and they were starving and Virgina had a dream and they followed her. Now they're here and have pie. There is a general consensus that they are in heaven. Despite the fact that she is about twelve, I determine that a little girl poring over a map is in charge of the operation.   I was firstborn between nations.So I've a gift for travel. For findin the between spaces. But now we are needin an end. A new home. And that's not travel, but settlin. And I've no gift for that. So I've been asking those wanderers what come through here if they know of a good place for living. Have you traveled to a place we might call home? What are you looking for in a home?First before all, we need the say-so from any living there.I've seen it done with no say-so, and that's no mistake I'll see done again. Not while I carry the map. We live by farming. Green places to make fields is good for us. Oh, and if there's more of this 'lectricity and plumbing, that would be a fine thing. Virginia's great. She had to grow up fast, and she absolutely did. We haven't found anything that matches her description, but...  We do know a place that very easily *could*. I suggest they settle in the Light House.Virginia asks if anyone is already living there, and I have to admit, someone is. Virginia asks me to ask permission of the inhabitants before they try to settle there.  Hey Soave!  It's hard to tell if Soave is personally okay with the idea - it's likely Soave doesn't know itself - but Pisces did feel that it seemed to enjoy company.  We'll deliver the good news after we pick up that cache.  Content warnings: ..............Spiders......... We pop in our Kevin MacLeod CD and set off. The Classic Serpent seems like it might be a creature of Order, so we might be able to defeat it using the Non-Euclidean Sail.  We are not, and we get chunked for 7. Before we visited The One Below, that might actually have been frightening.  The Non-Euclidean Sail would actually be more effective here... I engage the Search Engine.It's not quite powerful enough to undo the whirlpool, but it does keep the ship from being damaged. I gain 8 Momentum. [+8 from sails] [+5 from engines] [-5 from event] ...But the Search Engine will still get the job done.  I pull my ship up beside the cache and open the hull door. CAPTCHACompletely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart This is how I learned what CAPTCHA stood for. It operates on the principle that computers cannot solve riddles.It is a deeply flawed system. But it's better than nothing. What's that about a treasure chest, though?  In the Web, taking things at face value is apparently a good idea. But we've procrastinated on this puzzle long enough.  Open Sorcery veterans will remember this layout from the first game. Here in the sequel, it's been enhanced by the ability to actually accept keyboard inputs. . . . . . We type in forgiveness - absolution and salvation are also accepted. The CAPTCHA accepts my answer with a satisfying click.One down. Two more to go. Ugh, a multiple-input CAPTCHA. What algorithm are they training down here?  . . . . . This one's cheeky and literal - "few" is a 3-letter word, and adding a couple letters to it gives you "fewer".  The riddles are randomly selected from a pool - if you guess wrong, you get a different set of questions. The pool doesn't exhaust itself, though, so it can be brute forced if you only know three or four of the answers. . . . . . They're not nitpicky about plurals, so die and dice are both accepted. The CAPTCHA accepts my answer with a satisfying click.There is a deeper, even more satisfying click. The treasure chest opens.  That's the biggest haul we've found all game, plus it's our first Air and Fire mote. Air is good for levitating stuff or blasting it around, and Fire does what you'd expect it to do.  Janet is the sort of person who would leave a bunch of motes in the Deep Web on the off-chance it would help potential disaster victims that she would probably never meet. That's about all you need to know about Janet. It did feel too easy.  A simple searcherhas been re-purposed for war. They're looking for you. If we had any optimism, Omini dispels it. This is a hunter-killer, and it's on top of our ship. Abandoning the Debugger isn't an option. We need to act first.  Here are our spells and motes. Any one of them can target the legs, the eyes, or the turret. What do we do?
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Feb 27, 2021 05:45
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SalveMundi the eyes to blind it, perhaps?
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Feb 27, 2021 06:18
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Oh my God it's the lost colony of Roanoke. I'm not gonna lie, I'm an absolute sucker for anything that references that particular bit of history. As for how to get past the crawler... None of our spells seem especially useful, so what about using a Chaos mote on the turret? Maybe we can get it to flip out and shoot itself to pieces?
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Feb 27, 2021 08:46
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Well, I was being facetious when I said the kitty's purpose was to exist and make people happy, but I am very pleased to have also been right. I presume we'll need to find some kitty treats to lure it over to talk to Peep at some point and find out what his deal is. I don't know which mote would be most useful for the spider but we definitely need to take out the turret first. Once it can't shoot us we can see what our other options are.
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Feb 27, 2021 10:38
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I'm guessing Ana is Anastasia Romanova (and Charley is Charlie Ross) A dark mote on the eyes?
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Feb 27, 2021 12:41
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Sally Forth posted:I'm guessing Ana is Anastasia Romanova (and Charley is Charlie Ross) This is a tricky vote to parse, but I'm going to say we have two votes for gently caress with the eyes, with varying degrees of intensity, and two votes for gently caress with the turret, with the only current idea being Chaos. I'll spoil that all of these are valid solutions to this puzzle (as is our universal standby of "just use death lol"), and I'll also spoil that this is a one-step puzzle. If we blind the webcrawler Pisces will take the opportunity to bolt, and if we Chaos the turret then we're locked in for whatever ensues, good or bad. Next vote decides. Doopliss fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Feb 27, 2021 |
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Feb 27, 2021 17:16
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In that case, Chaos the turret.
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Feb 27, 2021 17:22
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Black Robe posted:In that case, Chaos the turret.
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Feb 27, 2021 17:26
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Ah, democracy. My bad for voting twice though, I wasn't paying attention.
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Feb 27, 2021 17:36
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Well, it's probably too late to vote for it, but I wonder if using water would've worked? We're surrounded by it after all, and using water on the legs or turret feels like it could do something.
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Feb 27, 2021 17:41
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Boksi posted:Well, it's probably too late to vote for it, but I wonder if using water would've worked? We're surrounded by it after all, and using water on the legs or turret feels like it could do something.
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Feb 27, 2021 17:49
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I just don't wanna use motes unless we absolutely have to.
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Feb 27, 2021 17:52
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 Active content warnings: ...........Spiders.......... Welcome back. Last time, we found an unreasonable number of motes in a cahce near the Light House. Unfortunately, a mysterious murder robot also found that cache. We decided to solve this by introducing some uncertainty into the giant gatling gun on its back.  Some might say that applying Chaos to a machine gun is extremely unsafe. That's the idea. There's a snap as the hinge of the turret breaks.The gun's muzzle swings wildly. And it comes to rest as it's caught behind a cluster of eyes. Sensing the attack, the webcrawler tries to target meThe broken hinge squeals and the muzzle doesn't move. The webcrawler discharges its weapon into its own head.It goes limp.  The thread also suggested using SalveMundi or Dark on its eyes, which would allow us to slip into the webship and shake it off as we sail away. SalveMundi means we don't have to spend a mote, but we'd grazed by some machinegun fire in the process.  So this thing was sent to kill me.Specifically me. Well gently caress.  Looks like we won't be getting any leads that easily. Perhaps some sort of shadowy cult that doesn't want our prophecies delivered, but we might never know who was responsible.  Nah it was the Excellence Corporation.  The reward for stripping this thing is probably better than the cache itself. And the cache was great.  We have good news for the settlers, but first let's see what Cycl3 has to say about that trap he led us into. We steel ourselves against the insidious music as we enter. V1c1ousCycl3 stares at me, non-plussed for the first time. Uh...Yeah? poo poo. Well, that's a thing. D'you know who made it? The Excellence Corporation. Whoa.gently caress. That's crazy. They're crazy. Glad I hate riddles. That poo poo was probably for you. They really want to kill you. Yes, so probably don't point anyone towards emergency caches for a while. Yeah.Fair. Won't do that. Sorry, I guess. I accept, I guess.If we hadn't bribed Cycl3 earlier, he'd feel guilty about leading us into that trap and offer to keep quiet free of charge. As is, we're still not likely to run out of Order this playthrough.  Virginia is next on our list. I describe the Light House to Virginia.Bright sanctuary, and fairly close. I assure her that the caretaker has given permission for them to settle there. She's a bit intimidated at the prospect of rooming with an actual angel. But the opportunity is too good to pass up.  That's probably Ana, which means Charley and Peep will now be alone at their table.  And if that wasn't enough to celebrate, Ana was apparently guarding one of our memories. I reach out and touch the music box.I absorb the memory that's stuck inside of it. Hopefully it will work now, without my past gumming up the works.  Not a pleasant stage in their relationship. Now that nobody else is around, maybe Peep will say hi. Hello Miss Pisces! Peep peers shyly out at me from under the table.Then he glances nervously at me. Not yet, it seems. We'll need a bit more to lure him out.  We have no cat treats, and it doesn't seem like the cat would follow us if we just clapped our knees with our hands.  Fortunately, we have more advanced methods at our disposal.   We'll just... Leave the cat here. And come back later. I stop playing with the cat. He immediately loses interest in me and starts grooming himself.  We go outside for some fresh air...  ...And when we return, Peep has come out from hiding. He trills a piping coo that sounds like a greeting.Then he bashfully gives me one of my memories. With one notable exception, each spell is found by exploring a single area. If it seems like you have to explore elsewhere to complete a spell, you probably don't.  This is one of the cheekier memories, but not one that requires out-of-context knowledge. quote:@Brody: It's fine. quote:@Brody: I love you. quote:@Pisces: I'm angry. quote:@Brody: I'm angry.  We just put each line with its mirror. A reconciliation - a failed one, by the looks of it. This memory affects me.I feel tears collect at the edges of my eyes. I retreat into a corner. I don't want to be seen feeling so much. It passes. Thank god.  Unbabble costs a mote of Order to compile, which we have plenty of - the spell description is "Understand meaning even when you don't understand language".  I try to talk to Peep, but while he clearly understands me, he can only speak in trills and coos.And I don't understand bird. Charley tries to help interpret, but it's easy to tell he's only making imaginative guesses about what Peep is trying to say. Seems like an excuse to put that spell to use. Peep's coos coalesce into meaningful language in my mind.I can now talk to him.  We'll start by asking his name and work our way down.  No miss.But it suits me well! And it is good to have more names to use instead of my True Name. Good point.Peep, would you please tell me what you are? I am a Florine, miss.We are also called the blue birds of happiness. We are descended from royalty! But only human royalty. In Fairyland we are messengers. I see.Where are you from? I am from Fairyland, Lady Wizard.My family lives in the forest east of the capital! I miss them very much. It definitely wouldn't be an Open Sorcery game without fairies. How did you get here? My family was migrating, Lady Wizard.We were flying from the Goblin Market to the Singing Hills, to spend the winter warmed by song. It was my first flight alone, and I was eager to prove myself. We were flying over the Palace of the Queens.And I was fresh and eager. And my mother asked: 'Peep! Are you tired?' And I told her: 'No mother, I am not!' For I was eager to prove myself. We were flying over the Misty Moor. And I was growing weary. And my mother asked: 'Peep! Are you tired?' But I told her: 'No mother, I am not!' For I was eager to prove myself. Fairylanders have a very classical storytelling cadence. We were flying over the Dark Woods.And I was weary and worn. And my mother asked: 'Peep! Are you tired?' But I told her: 'No mother, I am not.' For I was eager to prove myself.  I wandered the Dark Woods for many days.(For once you fall into the Dark Woods it will not let you fly out.) And I met with many strange and fearful creatures. (I evaded them by using my magic to make them happy, and fluttering away while they were confused.) I ate my seed brick, bit by bituntil there was none left. Just when I though I was sure to perish in that Dark Wood I saw a blue light in the distance. It was this place!And the woman Deb gave me a seed cake. And I have played with Charley. I know I must travel home soon, but I know not how. For now I am just happy not to be in the Dark Woods. Sounds to me like a new party member. Fairyland is on my way to the surface. Would you like me to take you home, Peep? We'll let Peep call us what he's comfortable with.  We're going to be taking a detour or two, of course.  Right after we got our Debugger, we spared a horrendously-written blog that was devouring a helpless wiki. Let's see if that Unbabble spell changes things. I cast translate on the blog.I filter concise meaning from the blog's excessive rambling. I echo that meaning back at it. The blog is taken aback for a moment, clearly unused to being heard and understood. It starts to listen. Then it starts to shed.  A happy ending.  Our reward for dealing with the blog is a new zone, and one with a rather interesting IP address. Our reward for sparing the blog is a treasure map. Sort of a treasure map. More like treasure words:Begin at the sharp spheres, speckled with smoothness. Go visit the sharp squiggles. Go trumpets to more sharp squiggles. Go to the cold blobs. Go trumpets. Go to the thrumming cold flecks. Follow the hot clouds. Go strings. A bit more convoluted than the previous two puzzles, but the same basic principle.  Following the instructions takes us to the psychoplankton where Winfield Scott began his journey...  ...And through another permeable wall.  Three Light is a very relevant windfall. The Golden Spyglass *would* be a helpful tool for websailing, but it costs one Light a pop to use. If we wanted to solve puzzles with motes, we could do that anyway. As is, it's mostly a savescumming tool.  Content warnings: ............Body Horror............... We put on some tunes and continue our proud "every direction except up" tradition by checking out that new location we found. The Search Engine got us through the last whirlpool, but it seemed sub-optimal. Let's try the Sail. I unfurl the Non-Euclidean Sail.I ride the whirl. I gain 18 Momentum. [+8 from sails] [+8 from engines] [+2 from event]  Wait, that's a new one. Maybe Peep's birdsong would soothe it?  Apparently not. We tank the damage and conclude the trip.  That's not right.Screaming is high and raw and brief. Startled horror, choked from a throat. This anguished noise rolls up and down the register. Unhurried agony. The first thing I hear is wailing. There is a pit here, near the bottom of the ocean.Its sides are lined with faces. Sometimes, the noises they make rise to screams and slide down to moans. But mostly, they just wail. I stop the ship by the edge of the pit of wailing faces.The One Below mentioned something of the sort. It sounds like Her daughter is trapped somewhere down here.  Thankfully, this area does not have its own audio track. I nose my ship over the pit and look down.Deeper in the pit I see faces, heads, necks sticking out from the sides, craning back and forth as they vent their horror as sound. I return to the edge. We're going to have to go down there, aren't we? Maybe a bit of diplomacy will help us. I try to talk to a few of the faces at the edge of the pit. The ones that have enough mouth to properly speak. But they refuse to interrupt their wailing long enough to talk to me.  Why do you hurt? too much too much too much too much too much TOO MUCH TOO MUCH TOO MUCH TOO MUCH they keep screaming at me why are they screaming why are they yelling why are they screaming make them stop make them stop I'll make them stop by screaming at them Can I help you? make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop scream at them to stop scream at them to stop scream at them to stop What is this place? this place this place is hurt is hurt hurt falls hurt falls lands here lands here screaming began and then screamed back and then screamed back and then screamed back began with hurt and then screaming made screaming made screaming If it's a simple feedback loop, perhaps Mute would break it.  If this place could capture The One Below's daughter, healing it might be beyond our abilities. We'll get in, do what we can, and get out. I steer my ship into the writhing mass of faces.As I fall deeper into the pit, the faces become heads. They become more recognizable as people, less digested into wailing orifices. It is somehow more terrible to still be able to distinguish them as individuals, but see them all locked together in this one cacophonous action.  There's always time to harvest motes. Always.  One of the more obvious puzzles. We cast Unbabble. God, I cannot tell you how little I want to know what these things are saying. I mean Mute.  And there's our last type of mote. It hurts, frightens, and counteracts Love. We continue deeper. I descend further. The walls of the pit are narrowing. The faces now have necks, and can stretch out from the sides of the pit. I hear the mouths gnawing on the plating. Luckily, I have a ship durable enough to withstand some teething. I don't *think* taking the Skyhook locks you out of this - it just means you need to cast another Mute - but I might be wrong, because confirming this would entail taking the Skyhook.  There is a person here.He is lashed to the wall, held by the faces. Teeth dig into his legs and arms. The faces wail in muffled hisses through their clenched jaws. The figure screams with them, slowly being dragged into the wall of the pit to join them. Probably not The One Below's daughter, but it's hard to say anything conclusively with Her. Unbabble might give us some insight. I cast comprehend on the figure.There is one message in his frantic writhing. Please make the pain stop. Or not. Let's examine the situation and see if a rescue is on the table. Saving the person in the wall will be a multi-step process.If I don't choose the right spell or matter every step of the way, it will cost me in my blood, or his life.  We're about equipped as we can be, but rescuing this man would take considerably more effort than dealing with the Webcrawler.  This is a 4-part rescue operation, made up of the following steps: -Stop the screaming -Break the prisoner out (we can target the prisoner or the faces for this purpose) -Get back to the Debugger (alternatively, we can just tank some damage here) Despite Pisces' misgivings, we're about as well-equipped as it gets - we don't have a ton of Fire and Air to play with, but our spell selection is robust, and we have a great supply of other motes to draw on. If you want to use multiple Fire motes in your solution, we can always grab some from the Abyssal Plain. Still, this will be dicey and resource-intensive. Should we rescue the prisoner, or keep looking for the daughter? If we are staging a rescue, how? Doopliss fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Feb 28, 2021 |
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Feb 27, 2021 22:55
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I vote for rescuing the prisoner, though I'm not entirely sure how, honestly. The only thing I can say 100% certainly is we need to cast Mute first. Is it possible to use Omini at any step of the process and get an actual hint, or does it just like "you just wasted your turn dipshit" and the dude dies?
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Feb 28, 2021 02:51
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serefin99 posted:Is it possible to use Omini at any step of the process and get an actual hint, or does it just like "you just wasted your turn dipshit" and the dude dies? Casting it during our preparations gives us the following: Make sure that you arevery well equipped before you try to save Mathias. Nice to put a name to the face, but doesn't really help with our execution.  Nobody gets murdered for using Omini during the rescue itself, but you have the gist of it. EDIT: Actually, though, this game presents the octopus to us as an explicit option for when it's relevant rather than making us go into an inventory or anything. I should probably just make it explicit where the octopus goes in this puzzle. Doopliss fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Feb 28, 2021 |
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Feb 28, 2021 03:43
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I am very terrible at adventure games so I'll propose the painfully basic option: mute, Ringo, death on the faces, tank? I'm sure someone has seen something more than I have.
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Feb 28, 2021 04:12
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SIGSEGV posted:I am very terrible at adventure games so I'll propose the painfully basic option: mute, Ringo, death on the faces, tank? I'm sure someone has seen something more than I have. That sounds good to me. I think fire might also work on the faces, but we have a lot more death motes around then fire.
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Feb 28, 2021 04:19
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Death is probably the best option to use on the faces, if only because we have plenty of it. Seems like it ought to be something like mute->Ringo->death on the faces->I dunno, air or water to quickly rush out via levitation or friendly currents respectively? If I had to pick one, I'd go with water since we have more of it.
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Feb 28, 2021 09:42
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Mute Ringo That one is hard. Maybe flash them with a sudden light? Maybe SalveMundi might even save a mote. Whatever. Death will work and I don't think we have a moral obligation to keep these things alive.
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Feb 28, 2021 09:56
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Mute Ringo If fear counteracts love then maybe love will counteract the fear driving the faces. Or make them even keener to hang onto their victim! Air for a quick getaway
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Feb 28, 2021 12:20
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 Active content warnings: ..................Body Horror.............  Welcome back. Last time, we entered a hellpit of congealed suffering, and found some poor bastard trapped in it. This time, we're rescuing said bastard.  First up, we prepare the field. Too noisy? Make noise go away. This is necessary for us to leave the ship, but it's also our opening salvo - the faces know we're coming now.  As we established back on the Abyssal Plain, Ringo will risk its life for us if we're visibly in danger, and we probably don't need language to explain that this man needs rescuing.  This is at once trickier and extremely simple.  Love, it seems, can only counteract Fear if it's roughly equal in power. We could scatter some Love motes at the entrance to distract the faces as they tear the motes to ribbons, but that's hardly efficient when Ringo has our back. There are a lot of trap options in this one - if we mess with the faces in ways that don't *really* force them to let go, they'll keep their death grip. For example, light motes would just cause them to drag the man in futher. Intelligently, nobody in the thread recommended we scare the faces off with Fear motes. These are creatures of Fear, and feeding them more Fear would only empower and agitate them. If we were lucky, that would only lead to the captive's death instead of ours.  Therefore, we just kill the faces. Fire would have worked based on the same principle, but we have a whole lot of Death on our hands. Either way, it costs three motes.  That's the hard part out of the way - now the only question is how much pain we take getting back. I use a mote of Air to create a burst of wind.Lost 1 Air Bubbles prickle my skin as I shoots us through the water and quickly back to the ship. Water would have achieved the same thing, and if we just swam for it we would take a very reasonable three damage. I reach the ship, and haul the figure through the hatch.The octopus slips back in beside me. I slam the hatch door. The figure abruptly stops screaming and falls mercifully unconscious.I awkwardly drag him to the cabin bed. The octopus tries to help. Peep flutters anxiously about.  I don't know if the faces are capable of holding a grudge about this, or even if they're glad to have less other presences around screaming at them. Regardless, the Debugger can handle their gnawing.  Looks like he's not in any immediate danger, other than the fact that he's unconscious. The One Below doesn't seem like the sort to misgender people, so this probably isn't Her daughter. Not wanting him to wake up confused, afraid, and armed on my ship, I frisk him.I find a dagger in his boot, and another up his sleeve in a mechanism that is both spring loaded and terribly broken. ==> Probably one of the faces chewed on it too hard I confiscate the weapons, stashing them in the cockpit. Just until I know who he is.  Seems like there's nothing more we can do for him at the moment - Pisces doesn't feel a need to spend Life motes, so he's hopefully just trauma-napping. The surviving faces have returned to their normal screaming, so we probably don't have to lay low before heading deeper. The pit narrows below me. The faces have teeth like cleavers. ==> Long, sharp and flat. My ship creaks and quivers disconcertingly as the wailing around us increases in pitch. I am extremely concerned about going any deeper.  In the OP, I mentioned that this game isn't gratuitous in its handling of its "content warning" content, except for arguably one place. This region goes *hard*. For those who want off this roller coaster, either for sensitivity reasons or just because you find it unpleasant, the next update will contain a thorough recap of the actual plot-relevant stuff down here. We're going down there, of course. The engine we picked off that webcrawler will allow even less robust ships to continue on undamaged. EDIT: After a more recent patch, this location can be skipped with no loss of resources. Naturally, we're here for the content. I rev the engine and speed down, too fast for the faces to get purchase on my ship.I go down and down. I break through a crust of calcified pain. Suddenly, everything is quieter. I am at the bottom of the wailing pit. The ambient underwater audio fades away.  The liquid is viscous.There is a tepid, swirling flow to it. It's mottled like an oil slick rainbow. Colorful, but in a sickly way. I hover my hand over it to try and get a sense of its spiritual properties.  That wasn't me.That wasn't here. That was someone else, somewhere. Someone in pain. But the experience had a stale quality. A memory. These are liquid memories.  The face said "began with hurt and then screaming made screaming made screaming". I guess this is what started the feedback loop. I cast light on this situation.My awareness of the cavern expands. The first thing I see is pain.Pain seeps in from holes in the walls. Some are narrow cracks, leaking trickles of unhappiness. Some are tunnels, oozing agony.  I'm guessing this memory won't be pleasant. A few yards away, a woman is sitting, waist deep in liquid. That must be The One Below's daughter. Rescues take priority over spells, I suppose. I swim over to the girl, carefully staying above the pain. That's... Odd? Pisces seems to think the bracelets are relevant.    ...Hello? The Mother and the Spider sent us to help. What do you need? She tries to speak to you,but she cannot find the balance between forceful enough to be heard and soft enough to be ladylike so she says nothing. She smiles apologetically.  Right. The One Below mentioned we could "use what we learned" to restore her to her true self.  This must be the Maiden, then. Let's restore her innocence. I am looking at a lovely young lady. Ah. We've misinterpreted the Maiden.  This fits the third interpretation of The One Below much better. I am looking at the Maiden.She smiles, and it is like vicious moonlight.   She looks satisfied.And then She looks at me.  And then She is gone.Now that we've completed both rescues, we can retrieve our memory.  I can sense flashes of blue in the liquid pain pool below.Familiar flickers of my memories. But I can't quite make out where they are. I'll have to feel around for them. I can think of very little I want to do less. Do it anyway.  And here's the major puzzle of the area. There are a bunch of painful memories down here, and we're going to be sifting through them for ones that seem to belong to Pisces. If we try to incorporate a memory that doesn't belong to us, we take damage. In total, Pisces has three memories in here, and there are one or two that seem connected to other characters in the Open Sorcery universe. The rest of them are adapted from autobiographical Facebook mail-ins. You can click this link to read them. They're a lot. . . . . .  Pisces' memories are as follows: quote:I'm wheeling myself slowly down a ramp. quote:I hate hospitals. quote:My leg is BURNING.  Compiling the spell costs a Fear mote - because the memories never broke, no reassembly is needed. The Suffero spell lets us put off experiencing pain for a minute, though we still feel the pain once the spell expires. More useful than it sounds.  And now there's nothing left to keep us in this pit. Doopliss fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Mar 28, 2021 |
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Feb 28, 2021 20:24
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Jesus some of those other memories are unpleasant. For all that they put a content warning on it, it's really hosed up to have trawling through them be a puzzle. EDIT: Can like, those memories be stuck into an lpix link or something? So people don't have to look at them while scrolling around this page. Arcvasti fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Feb 28, 2021 |
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Feb 28, 2021 20:59
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Oof, that was pretty heavy. I get why they did it this way, but... Arcvasti is right, this is a drat puzzle game.
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Feb 28, 2021 21:02
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Yeah, I was actually about to ask, does the game offer any sort of alternative to this? I'm not against the memories being present at all, but it does seem like kind of a dick move to lock progress (or at least, a tool for progress) behind a literal pool of potential triggers.
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Feb 28, 2021 21:12
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Arcvasti posted:EDIT: Can like, those memories be stuck into an lpix link or something? So people don't have to look at them while scrolling around this page. I was really ambivalent about this sequence myself, and I was kind of looking forward to seeing the thread's views on it (with the caveat of the extra content warnings).
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Feb 28, 2021 21:12
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I vote that we stay. This place is really messed up and would probably break Pisces' spirit. This is our home now.  at least She won't be able to just leave everything here behind. This will stay with her in some form. At least she got two persons out of there. By the way, even knowing that's a real person, gently caress the woman who tried to force her daughter to tell the others that their dad isn't biological. Also, of course the dude who keeps banking about his car is called Chad. This update was really heavy. It's even worse playing the game. Closely staring at the memories and figuring out if they might belong to Pisces only to hear a grueling damage sound otherwise was actually gut wrenching. But honestly, I really like it. Will you say something about the memories which are from the in universe character?
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Feb 28, 2021 21:14
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| # ? May 5, 2024 00:20 |
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serefin99 posted:Yeah, I was actually about to ask, does the game offer any sort of alternative to this? I'm not against the memories being present at all, but it does seem like kind of a dick move to lock progress (or at least, a tool for progress) behind a literal pool of potential triggers. To my knowledge, no. Suffero isn't a necessary spell by any means, even if going for "good ending" events, but it gets like 6 motes' value over the course of the game. cant cook creole bream posted:Will you say something about the memories which are from the in universe character? The "Dad is talking about faggots again" memory likely belongs to Decker, who we know has a boyfriend named Andy and thinks his dad's a bigot. It's also hypothesized that the self-harm memory belongs to Sarah, though I think this isn't the case for reasons we'll get to later. Doopliss fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Feb 28, 2021 |
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Feb 28, 2021 21:17
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