aftr_stories | [MU] - DECEMBER STORYTELLING / MEMORY SHARE

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[MU] - DECEMBER STORYTELLING / MEMORY SHARE

Something is wrong.

This may not very well be obvious, at first. The Storyteller is not present to put forth yet another diatribe, informative or apologetic, and the backdrop of guttering flame and sandy campfire is as present as ever...albeit briefly.

Those who tell their stories will start to notice something...odd taking place. Indeed, no matter how they intend to begin their tale, the land of Mu will immediately start to warp to accommodate it, or something utterly unlike it, until storytellers and listeners alike may find themselves in an exact recreation of a seemingly random memory, in the most stark and painstaking of detail. There is no altering the memory, nor is there any preventing it once it's begun to play - you will simply have to witness memories that are not your own this go around.

Furthermore, stories that take place in worlds other than LifeAftr will be, frankly, inevitable. Those memories, too, will be recreated, to be relived by the teller and lived by the listener.

It is time, once more, for you to tell a story...with a slight twist! This is, in fact, our first player plot, as provided by Dragon! The initial setting will be familiar for oldcomers, and newcomers will recognize it from the introduction they received in their dreams.

Yet for this Storytelling only, people can imagine whatever stories they wish, from both their homes and their time on LifeAftr, as long as they don't mind the fact that others will be reliving those stories in the form of an impromptu memory share.

Even those who prefer not to voice their stories aloud are not safe this time around. If the memory is recalled in essence, Mu will shift to accommodate it in full.

There is, however, a benefit to this: those who venture memories to be relived will receive both a befuddled apology from the Storyteller, who will assert that this was most definitely not meant to happen (they're the Storyteller, not the Rememberer!), as well as a tired promise that the relived memories will be worth two offerings each, as if in compensation.

Not that it counts for much, probably.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It had been a gladiatorial match. It had been a battle Roy really had no intent of entering – the original plan had always been to escape when the time was right and resume their quest. If it had been anyone besides Thog, Roy would have fought his way through the guards and been well on his way to rejoining the others. He’d made a mistake in fighting Thog, clearly, though he’d made the best decision he thought he could at the time, and he had definitely paid for that mistake. Dying hadn’t hurt this much – literally dying. But up until that moment, this had been a sport fight. A damn show. Something he could have tapped out of.

Thog had made it life-or-death. Now Roy had to get serious.

His fingers closed around one of the spent crossbow bolts that the guards had left behind from putting an end to earlier matches, and before Thog could get another shot in, Roy sat up and stabbed him clean through the thigh. Then he took off at a run before Thog could wrench the bolt free of his leg, scrambling past the guards who had formed lines to stop prisoner escape as he desperately struggled to catch his breath. A faint flicker of light from far up above caught his eye, and he looked up to see precisely what he’d feared: Vaarsuvius locked in arcane combat with the Linear Guild’s wizard. “Ah, crap. It really IS a crazy ambush scenario. Belkar! BELKAR! Are you down there?”

The arena’s architects had left low windows in the slave cells that opened onto the battlefield, the better for the prisoners to watch the sport they would soon be a part of. As Roy scrambled over to the one he knew well, the familiar hateful little face of Belkar Bitterleaf looked back up at him, as if this were just another Sunday. Which, honestly, it was. “Belkar, can you bust out of here on your own?”

“Does Durkon need to bathe more?” Belkar answered, because he was incapable of even answering a simple question without being a jackass.

“Then do it. The Linear Guild is attacking, probably in the lobby or just outside the arena.” How to phrase this to make Belkar do what he wanted. ”I want you to find them and kick their asses.”

Belkar scowled. “Boooorrrring. No thanks.”

Well, when Diplomacy failed, resort to Intimidate. “Belkar!”

“Oh, right, I mean, “Yes, sir, Mr. Leader, sir!” Because I’m a good team member.” Belkar rolled his eyes. Roy had no idea what had gotten into him recently, but honestly only having to snap once at him was such an upgrade Roy didn’t want to question it. “ eet me over there, or you wanna come with?”

Roy shot a glance back over his shoulder. Thog was still trying to wrestle the bolt out of his leg, his barbarian strength and damage reduction actually working against him. As he’d known from the moment Thog had bashed him, Roy knew there was only one course of action. And it really, really didn’t sound like the course of action someone who claimed to be intelligent would take. “Neither, much to the displeasure of my internal organs.” To put it mildly. Roy had to wonder at what point Cure stopped working and one needed Regenerate to repair the majority of one’s gastrointestinal tract. “Now that I know that Nale’s lackeys are attacking, I need to stay here and put on a good show for General Elan’s Daddy until they’re all beaten. I don’t want to raise a bunch of uncomfortable questions about why we’re really here by turning a simple prize fight into a brother vs. brother team grudge match right in front of his eyes. Plus…” Admitting his error to Belkar, of all people, made his pride sting all the worse, but he couldn’t deny the truth. “I think Nale might know about the Gates. If he wants to keep this under wraps from his significantly-more-competent father, I’m inclined to agree with him for once. Now go on and—NNNH!”

Shouldn’t have looked away. Thog had paused in his snarling fury long enough to pitch another massive shard of stone at him. Right into his head, too.

“Greenhilt, don’t be a fool!” Ian Starshine said, his head popping up in the window besides Belkar’s. “That half-orc is going to kill you if you stay in there!”

“Yeah, probably.” He couldn’t even muster up the energy to be indignant about what was, after all, the simple truth. He was far, far closer to death than he cared to think about – he was pretty certain one eye was going blind, and one more shot to the head would probably crack it clean open. Let alone his ribs and chest. But… “If someone has to die for this, though, I choose me.” Though after a moment of thought, he added, “Actually, I choose him, but if that’s not an option, better me than someone else. Now get going, Belkar! I’ll draw this out as long as I can.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m going.” Belkar hopped down, and for a moment Roy thought Ian had stepped away too – but he’d just ducked down to dig up something from some hidden spot Roy couldn’t see.

“You’ve got gumption, kid, I’ll say that much,” Ian said as he came up, offering Roy what was unmistakably a magic potion. “Here—I’ve been hiding this for just such a day.

That was, honestly, pretty impressive. It wouldn’t keep him alive in the long run, but in the short – maybe it could make the difference between life and death for his friends, and keeping the Gates out of a tyrant’s clutches. “Thanks, Ian.” The magic took effect the moment the liquid touched his tongue; Roy could practically feel his body reshape itself, bones knitting, pains fading, skull twitching back together with a pop. “This ought to keep me going for a bit longer.”

“Don’t worry about the cost,” Ian said with a grin. “You can pay me later. I offer very reasonable interest rates.”

Maybe it wasn’t really funny, but Roy couldn’t help smiling nonetheless. It sounded so much like something his daughter would say. “Heh. Guess you really are Haley’s—“

Roy was abruptly reacquainted with pain as Thog plowed into him. For a mercy, or simply because he was prepared, only his head smashed through the wall instead of his entire body this time. Practically a tickle compared to the beatdown Thog had been putting on him. And Roy was done fighting fair.

He slammed the empty potion bottle into Thog’s face, directly between the eyes.

The half-orc’s roar of frustrated pain was music to Roy’s ears, as he took advantage of Thog’s agony to break into a run. “Hey, Thog, let’s play Tag. You’re “It.”

This might not be the best idea, Roy though, as chunks of rubble shot past him, but it would certainly draw it out. He’d keep his distance, force Thog to chase him, and – a boulder clipped him right in the boot, bowling his feet out from under him. So much for that plan, he thought, as he hurriedly grabbed the boulder and used it to smash the chunk of wall out of Thog’s hands right before the half-orc could bring it down on him. Both of them had the same idea at the same time, grabbing at each other so that their hands locked together. Thog leaned into the scrum, trying to force Roy back…

But Roy was done playing. Roy was done treating this as some mindless gladiatorial match. Never mind that Thog was raging, that his natural orcish strength had been augmented even more by the bloodlust coursing through his veins. Roy was done playing. He got his foot under him, pushed himself to his feet so he could stare down the other warrior, teeth clenched and fury on both their faces, while their bodies trembled with exertion and sweat poured off of them in a flood. Roy was done playing.

One little twitch, and the balance shifted. Now Roy was the one pushing down on Thog, and through that maniacal frenzy, real alarm and shock shone through on Thog’s face. One more push. One. More. Push –

A wolf flew into the arena, and collapsed next to then, unconscious.

“TALKY MAN HURT PUPPY!!” Thog slammed Roy to the ground, his advantage gone in an instant. “THOG KILL TALKY MAN!!”

What, Roy wondered as he flung a handful of sand into Thog’s already wounded eyes, had he done to deserve this?

If there was a small mercy, it was that rather than flinging him into a wall AGAIN, Thog blindly threw Roy away with so much height that he went sailing clean into the stands. All things considered, the pain from hitting the elevated ramps was downright manageable. With a low groan, he picked himself up. Not even a moment to spare…

“Wow!” said one of the fans, half-turned in his seat to watch Roy. “This is the best fight of the season!”

“Oh, well, as long as you're enjoying it, I guess it's all worth while.” Roy caught his breath just in time to see Thog barreling down the middle of the area, pointed towards him like an arrow and without about as much impersonal, unintelligent killing power. This wasn’t a show fight. Thog wasn’t going to stop. “HEY!” he said, whirling around to address the fans. “What are you slack-jawed morons doing sitting around?? He's coming! Get out of here or you'll get hurt!”

Thog definitely wasn’t going to stop,

“Go! Run away!” Roy frantically flailed his arms at the crowd, doing his best to sound angry and scary instead of panicked. “Get everyone out of this section! I'm a big scary gladiator with permissive ideas about individual rights! BOO!” They were almost all gone by now. “Save…”

The shadow on the ramp was all the warning he got, but it was all the warning he needed. “—yourself,” he concluded, and mentally braced himself for yet another delightful round of pain.

Several hundred pounds of raging barbarian slammed into Roy from he didn’t know how high, with enough brutal force to drive the pair of them clean through the elevated ramp. Beneath it was nothing worse than a fall, thirty feet or so down to the ground floor of the coliseum, which Roy just barely managed to take on his back and shoulders instead of his face. He took Thog’s boots to his face instead, as the half-orc stomped him into the ground, then tumbled off.

For a moment, Roy could do nothing more than lie there and try to cope with how much he hurt, while three guards ran through his field of view with the tied-up wizard from the Linear Guild in tow. V had won his part of the fight – and the shadows of the arches gave him an idea.

This was going to suck.

“Hey! Thog!” Roy sprang to his feet, scrambling to one side as the half-orc turned to orient on him once more. “I hate puppies! I think they're dumb!”

With an incoherent yell, Thog launched himself forward, driving his shoulder into Roy’s gut in a mindless tackle that hurled them both into a pillar. The stone gave way beneath Roy’s back, and he could feel the tremble of tension in it as he ripped himself free, shoving away Thog’s glass-spike face as he dove past him. “I like stealing their food! And making them feel bad about themselves!”

Thog didn’t even yell this time. Was he just that mad, or was he that determined to make Roy hurt for his words? He definitely achieved the latter, as he grabbed Roy to smash him clean through the column. Had Roy’s ribs cracked again? He thought he might be bleeding internally, but he couldn’t tell. He just had to – crawl three more feet…”And I think... your broken tooth... Nnh!” Almost there… “ ...makes you look like a girl!

This one was the most brutal of the three. Thog grabbed Roy’s head and rammed it through the third column like he was trying to smash open a watermelon on the ground. Roy’s only saving grace was that his head was stronger than a watermelon. Barely.

“THOG HATE YOU, TALKY MAN! THOG HATE YOU! THOG—” The energy slowly bled out of Thog’s voice as his expression lightened, the quivering tension draining out of his muscles, and the deeper green out of his skin. “—hate——thog hate...?”

His rage had finally, finally, come to an end. Roy slowly picked himself up, pushing himself to his feet as Thog blinked in the aftermath of his berserker rampage. “what was thog saying? thog confused, where is thog—“

Roy kicked him in the gut.

“Stop talking.”

For the first time, Thog’s back slammed into a column instead. Not really hard. But hard enough, as he bounced off it to tumble to the ground, and Roy scambled to put distance between them.

As Thog sat up, one little pebble dropped from the ceiling onto his head. Roy, figuring Thog was much too stupid to realize the ramifications of that, pointed up – to the shattered ceiling, where a vast spiderweb of cracks grew larger by the second as the broken pillar slowly sheared away from its base.

The collapse sounded apocalyptic, as literal tons of stone crashed downwards towards the two fighters. Roy, prepared, jumped out of the way. Thog…

Well.

Roy’s plan had succeeded, let’s put it that way.

Gasping for breath, Roy picked himself up for what he hoped would be the last time today.

“Cross-class... skill ranks in...,” he gulped in another deep breath, then continued… “Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering)...”

He was exhausted, hurt, out of breath, and in desperate straits. But he wouldn’t be Roy Greenhilt if he couldn’t point at the pile of rubble lying atop Thog and muster up the strength to say, “THAT'S how I use my Intelligence score in combat, DUMBASS!!”

Well. That was intense.

Again, some of the context for the events was missing, leaving everything a bit confusing, but the core of this scene was more straightforward. Roy fighting some kind of person (monster?) who he had a history with. To the death, but she already knew that was part of his job as an adventurer.

No, the part that jumped out at her was the things they were saying, which she couldn't understand.

"...I'm sorry for seeing something I shouldn't have, but would it be all right if I asked some questions about your world?"

"That was nothing you shouldn't have seen. I mean, it's online and we sell the books still." Speaking of things that he was saying that shouldn't be understood... "Sure, ask away."

Where to even start? "Well, to pick one point at random... what's a 'damage roll'?"

"Presuming a weapon, spell, or other source of injury inflicts a variable amount of damage, you have to determine what the actual result is based on the parameters of that variance. Or in other words, if I clocked someone with my sword, in addition to the reliable and steady damage inflicted by my strength and the weapon's enchantment, a roll would be necessary to see what the sword itself did. The general idea is that such variance represents arbitrary factors outside the attacker's control."

"A 'roll'... you mean, like a roll of a die, or something?" There's something strange about all this.

"Yes, that's right." Roy had come to learn that most people didn't understand the general underlying rules of reality, so the question wasn't so insane as it once might have been to him. "Dice are generally the primary adjudicator of randomness."

"Is that just how things work in your world? Whenever anyone tries to do something, some sort of abstract dice roll happens to determine what happens?"

This sounds bizarre, but it's also sort of fascinating.

Roy arched an eyebrow. Maybe this was a good opportunity for a teaching lesson.

"How does it work anywhere else?"

"That's, uh..."

This is a surprisingly hard question to answer. She takes a second to gather her thoughts.

"I guess... nothing is really entirely 'random', so there isn't anything like a die roll. If I tried to throw a punch, whether or not I hit would just depend on the angle of the punch, the speed, my footing, my condition, the other person's reaction speed, the atmosphere..."

Or does it actually get random when you reach the level of subatomic particles? Her science classes hadn't gone this deep.

"...When there's enough factors, it can seem random, but the outcome is always the exact result of the actions taken and the conditions surrounding them."

Roy spread his hands slightly. "When you have so many factors as to be functionally infinite and literally unknowable, to the extent that knowing them would alter them, what's the difference between that and randomness?"

"That's, uh..."

That's actually a good point. It made sense in her head, but maybe life IS just a series of dice rolls when you get down to it.

"...maybe it's not that different. If I was understanding what I saw in that memory, though, it seemed like everyone knew what dice were being rolled, and what numbers were affecting them. We don't get that kind of insight into anything."

"Just because you haven't learned it doesn't mean you don't have it. After all, when you try to hit someone, you generally have an idea of whether or not you succeeded, and how lucky you were in the doing, don't you?"

"I... this is more complicated than I thought. Maybe it's just a cultural difference..."

Does... DOES she have attack and damage modifiers? If she fought Roy, could they calculate them out?

"If I was fighting a monster, I wouldn't think about it in terms of attack bonuses or damage rolls. I'd just think, I'm fairly strong but not as strong as Kyouko, if I hit it here or there, I might be able to cause this kind of damage to that part of its body... then, if it works, then the damage might restrict what it can do to fight back, or it might not work and then I'll have to find a different way to attack."

"And that's a perfectly valid way to think of it," Roy said. It was a very straight-laced way of thinking about it as well, and certainly not good for any rules jokes, but that was neither here nor there. "But is knowing you are generally stronger than one person or weaker than another meaningfully different from recognizing you have a +2 Strength modifier? Is estimating your best chance to strike and deal damage, an ability that increases as you gain experience, really functionally different than saying your base attack bonus increases as you advance in level?"

"...I guess it isn't, when you put it that way... just a little harder to quantify." This conversation went in a very different direction than she expected it to.

"What does it mean to have +2 Strength? How's it different from +1?"

"It's the point at which your Strength score has gone up to 14 from 13," Roy said, simply enough. "You have a better chance to hit through an enemy's defense, will deal somewhat more damage, and are that much better at skills like climbing or jumping."

"Wait, maybe that's a difference! Where I'm from, there's no big milestones of strength or skill where you suddenly become more capable like that. It's gradual and incremental, getting a tiny bit better each day as long as you keep practicing hard."

Roy nodded to acknowledge her statement, though he had also been prepared for it. "By what scale?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"You can't have a literally curved progression. So what scale are you using to determine improvement in this case?"

"Well, for example, your best time at running a specific distance, or how many kilograms you can lift? For something like fighting ability, it's a lot more abstract, since all you could really measure it by is what kind of opponents you win or lose against."

"So what's the difference between what I said and what you said? If with time and effort you improve your light encumbrance level from 58 pounds to 66 pounds, isn't that just effectively describing an increase in Strength score from 13 to 14, using a second-order effect rather than the primary mechanic?"

"So... wait." Wait. She almost had this figured out for a minute. "Can you perform certain acts of strength because your strength is X, or is your strength X because you can perform those acts of strength? Wait, is there even a difference between those...?"

"If you missed your foe because you rolled a 2, is it different from saying that a thousand variables, known and unknown, made you miss?" Roy said, building on that question. "They're abstractions, but in the end, they're the rules that govern us... acknowledged or not."

[MU] - DECEMBER STORYTELLING / MEMORY SHARE

1B

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