Irregular Pulse

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A retrospective
This went off the rails quick, huh?

I'm not sure what I expected Irregular Pulse to be. I had written the short story about Mid in advance-- at least, the first section of it. But I didn't quite know that it would be the key player in this story, and I absolutely didn't know that Mid would become Memoria. I didn't anticipate the sheer mania of the responses-- and credit to you all, they fed the off-the-rails fun that this was! Arcanuse really stole the show with some choice responses, to be sure, and the RBS-00005 to RBS-012844 logs were actually me and Arcanuse, but despite how enjoyable the chaos was, it... I don't know.

The pacing felt wrong. I'm not good at making messes like this coherent given so little time. There are some extremely cool concepts being heaved around in this one, but unlike Ghostwriter, there's barely enough time to even catch a glimpse at what's making them, them.

I like the story that we've told collaboratively. But I'm going to be thinking up a way to make it more digestible for the future. Two pages of complete chaos is tough to fully parse. And, truthfully, it comes partly from my lack of explanation for what to input. This was initially going to be much slower, a story about a few friends asking Mid how to proceed with a strange project, and the slow reconnecting that they would do within. But the inputs... well, just led to more confusion.

I don't know. There's nothing more painful than the pang of regret when you realize a story you just finished is, probably, too messy to piece together. I know that part of the fun is constructing the story out of the pieces, and for that reason, I'm leaving them all scattered where they are right now. But in case that's not really helpful...

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Some tip-offs

A kinda dumb diagram I sketched up for a friend

- RBS-012844 is someone we've seen before, but a much different version of triv.
- RBS-000005 is someone who has inputted before.
- Salty is related to two people we've seen before.
- Civvie didn't escape before the quake, and was reset. Retained some memories, but...
- If Civvie escaped before the quake, there just might be two of them running around.
- Mid becoming Memoria is a closed time loop. If Memoria didn't exist, Mid could not have become Memoria.
- Mid's species is akin to this universe's deities-- starts with all its energy, and expends it either in a steady stream or as a burst.
- Mid expends all its energy working before and after the quake-- nothing changes that. But Mid gains enough energy to become Memoria. How?
- Memoria escapes into the imaginary friends' nickel, causing an infinite cycle. This is somehow essential.
- The 'ship' may be more metaphor than reality.