Late second entry
It is not midnight, and technically I can still hope that someone else shows up. Otherwise have fun with what I can do with demon centipedes.
Bounty: Ⅱ, Ⅳ and Ⅴ.
Fighting Monsters and Language since 2016.
Kingdoms Folly / Discussion
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I fail to find words as to how good this is.1 Definitely in my top 3 on here, and the best of your individual corpus, Meta. Gives of a nice, mid-2010s vibe in just being a strange, hostile realm at odds with conventional logic withotu retreading the vices vintage of the time usually has.
There is just so much detail to get hung up on and wonder what the true story behind this might be. Enough of a hint of what might be going on without ever getting explicit or appearing like a random assortment. Usually references (like the very obvious callback to the Fractal Music Box' worms, or the radiation from the Demons Gate) can get pretty intrusive, but they're executed flawlessly here — a reader without prior knowledge will not loose any enjoyment, and in fact have more when returning later after having glimpsed further in the lore, suddenly able to draw conclusions.
Further things:
- Why only two shock collars? Third dude just has to hope his friends slap him periodically?
- Not sure on the significance to the " tactics to hunt creatures resembling cars", but I like to imagine that the Satire Truck just managed to piss of whatever is behind this so throroughly they declared war on all automobiles.
- There is actually little reason to not have people running this thing 24/7. Yes, much of the output is probably useless, but when it comes to knowledge of the anomalous, a 20% chance for accurate true information is better odds than most other means. This is also a good introductory task for new recruits. The anomaly hasn't done anything worse than a particulary nasty schoolyard bully and you can learn alot about how people react to local reality having a … detached relationship to the laws of physics.
Footnotes
1. At least in concept, the execution could use an additonal pass for orthography and some cleaning of the tables.
Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.
- The third dude was supposed to get to the deep state and look for things the others can not comprehend in 15 minutes. I don't know why that is not written down. I could just make it three collars to not edit to deep.
- I actually was not making references, but in the description I somehow not mentioned that all the civilization this shows had collapsed. Hunting cars might have been a reference to self-driving cars, implying some "Horizon Zero Dawn", "Pixar's Cars" and "Jurassic Park" situation. I do not recall.
- If we could, we would. I compare magic a little bit to parachuting. I got the following quote from somewhere, but I do not recall which context:
If you are completely of the mark you might sprain an ankle jumping of a chair, if you are completely on the mark you have a save and fun experience, if you are right enough to get high up, but wrong enough to not stick the landing you are dead.
- I gave the thing the "Interactive" tag so others could contribute to the logs. There is more to tell, but I might just go clean up what is already there.
Fighting Monsters and Language since 2016.
- So essentially the slapping was spot-on. Noted.
- Welp, I appreciate every motive that isn't "black sludge" yet again1.
- Then I guess "Reported Anomaly: swarm" is an oversight instead of an intentional throwback to the FMB? I read that and assumed those buggers (sorry not sorry for the pun) are just so ubiquitous that "What's wrong with it?" can be answered with a monsyllabic "Swarm" by now.
- Well, we already live in a timeline where people hunt autonomous cars. And it never stops being funny.
- Need I remind you that we're not called the "Chaos Insurgency" because we're famous for reasonable approaches for dealing with the inexplicable?
- I might actually contribute, but what I meant is mostly that headers that read "Presentation" or "Circumstance" aren't exactly expressive. I'd like an descriptive paragraph or two so I don't have to piece together what each row is supposed to exactly tell me.
Footnotes
1. Proclaims the one who always writes anomalous places.
Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.
- You are right, there is to little black sludge around here. *humming* Where have I put my barrels?
- It is a swarm. Multiple insect-like beings that act together. If we want to be specific it might be a hive, but that seems to imply bees.
- The only other thing that references FMB is something about how Meta meet the worm and the worm ended up becoming part of an English gentleman club in 1900. Not sure where I wrote that one down.
- Causing the end of the universe is bad for business. The universe is where we keep our stuff. Funny thing that I have something in the works that contradicts me. MAD as a strategy works for anomalous warfare.
- Should I just go in and fix it up? The "aftermath contest" never closed and I would count that as "substantial edits after the submission". Yes this is about me winning only if both my pieces are in the contest. I do not want to lose on a technicality. I counted on the day the voting period closed. Getting disqualified now would be the only way to lose as I read the rules. If we can not determine a better source for who won I would settle for a tie, but lose?
Fighting Monsters and Language since 2016.
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