Re: The Phenomenal Fracas (GBS2G6) [Round Five: The Ambitus Phenomenon]
08-25-2012, 09:20 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
The seconds slipped past agonizingly, an entire lifetime's worth of promises and threats and purpose crystallizing into a single moment that oozed closer like treacle. A wordless mental hiss of anticipation that was not the woman's own snaked through her mind, exciting her senses further than they already were. A quieter voice, one that had been beaten down through a century of domination and only barely allowed to survive shuddered, but no-one noticed it.
Time finally deigned to pass. The air popped out as a man came into being; he was a robed figure, a seeming reaper, a ghastly mage. The woman shrank back even as the presence in her mind urged her forward. She'd been born for this, her mother had been born for this, her grandmother had been raised for this. All that was left was for things to proceed as they had.
But they didn't. The Laguja that had just arrived was knocked from its furious trance before it could send itself hurtling back to the Winter Palace: it had felt a presence that was at once terrifyingly alien and undeniably familiar, a presence like that it hadn't felt since being plucked from its world. It was at once the deity it had been spawned from and everything but.
It felt itself.
Muriegro and the woman clutching the pincushion that had weathered a century in the palace were immediately forgotten at the two identical minds wound around each other.
What is going on here, demanded the younger.
In a rush of thought without mind and speech without language, it understood. Time had been worn thin, and in a before that was its future it had gone back. It had then waited to be reunited with its most trusted servant, a century of immortal inactivity a small price to pay for the implicit it wielded within the bonds it had crafted for the priest. It had expected its previous self to once again fall through the hole in the fabric of reality, to complete the loop again and endlessly that its future self could take Muriegro again and proceed from there. A stable circuit of destiny and predestination and causal harmony.
But it hadn't. It had felt its own presence and been saved from vanishing.
It's iterative then, not predetermined.
So it would seem.
The pincushions, strictly speaking, needn't have communicated. For all that one had another century's unliving life of experience, they were fundamentally the same being. Gods cannot truly change of their own volition. All that one knew, the other would immediately know as long as their mental webs were entangled; the conversation was essentially an internal monologue, simply spoken from two mouths. Nevertheless, it was helpful in the same way that a mortal might imagine a conversation with themselves.
Then as each new timeline is created, then presumably the contestants must be duplicated or moved between them. The Prestidigitator must be destroying realities behind us as we change them to ensure there is only one 'true' battle from his extrauniversal perspective.
But none of us should have been able to meet ourselves like this. Time travel was supposed to be the only means of visiting both halves of the palace's reality, not simply living through the intervening time.
I am forced to question what perspective the Prestidigitator is considering deaths from. Should someone die in the past only to have that reality undone, would he move the round on? Or would that thread be aborted?
Presumably, someone would have to die in Ambitus to be considered properly dead, else another contestant could invalidate their death. The Opera House is the true setting, the past being mutable.
But the future is equally so; a death in Ambitus would simply be overwritten if the events that lead up to it were pruned.
Then... Someone would die only if all the contestants were in the same temporal reality? A place and time that could not, at the instant of the death, be invalidated?
Presumably.
Then to break the Prestidigitator's hold on us could simply mean ensuring that there is always someone trapped in the other half of the anomaly from the majority.
Or simply ensuring that the anomaly never comes into being. We were placed in the future. If that setting never existed, what would happen to the Prestidigitator, existing outside the influence of this universe's flow?
It is possible he remains powerful enough to override a paradox even from without it.
He can barely control us, barely control his underlings. He showed us his weakness at the beginning of this round. His simpering, his apologies, his injuries. At the very least, destroying the anomaly would force him to exert himself, should he indeed have the power to maintain his history. And it will show us his hand. At best, it will put us outside his reach, this time long enough to build the power necessary to destroy our captors without having the frail beings we've been pitted against dying and ruining everything.
Simply brokering a deal with the other contestants, ensuring their survival through cooperation, would put us in the same position without revealing our intentions to the Prestidigitator.
They could still be killed through an outside force, through an accident, through age. Without the power to overthrow the Prestidigitator immediately, we must ensure that at least he cannot move us before we're ready. We must bind him by his own rules and break his chains with the power of this round he's given us. By making it so that it never existed, we will wreak havoc on him and his plans, or at minimum give ourselves information about his nature and abilities.
There was a pause.
Moreover... Preventing the temporal portal from coming into being will prevent further opportunities for our own duplication. Now, theoretically, we could be hurtled back time and again simply by losing our temper, unable to be destroyed in the intervening century, eventually amassing a limitless number of ourselves.
All sharing power from the same source. We would be crippled. Perhaps powerless, eventually.
Perhaps the Prestidigitator planned it that way, knowing we've come ever closer to having the power to break him. The last location weakened us. This one threatens to render us completely impotent. His fear is becoming apparent.
He has underestimated our will and our abilities. To his undoing.
We must end the time loop.
There was another pause. The pauses themselves took more time than the "conversation" had, given that the pincushions could think without clunky biological systems like neurons slowing them down. While Laguja was not musing at itself, its constituent parts were probing the fabric of reality, discerning its nature and effect. When this pause ended, a plan had already been wordlessly formed.
The monarchy must survive. Without the emotions and magic woven into existence by the events of a century ago, without the duality of palace and opera house, there cannot be an Ambitus phenomenon. The world without them is not the same one as a world they live in.
The monarchy may fall in time... Laguja corrected itself, But it must survive this night. It must not fall through riots and rebellion, but we needn't tie ourselves to its permanency. Only tonight and the coming weeks matter.
Easier to simply support it indefinitely than engineer its destruction in a slower manner. A monarchy would be useful too in gathering our followers once we're free of the influence of those who would call themselves our betters. Absolute authority...
Perhaps. As long as the queen lives through tonight. We will see what must be done after that. We can't afford to plan too far. We've seen where that gets us.
Another dark pause, filled only with the shivering of the huddled woman.
One of us must be destroyed, eventually.
Of course. A problem to be solved later, though. For now...
For now, there are immediate, tangible goals. Ones we must face in the age of the Sorians.
Without further thought, the pincushions simply let their emotions take them over. Once again, they vanished into the past, this time as a pair rather than alone.
---
Timothy held the other one up timidly.
"I don't like it..."
"Oh, come on, why are you so–"
"Look, it looks like a spider, Lillian! And your guardian spirit says it's bad too, right?"
Lillian cocked her head, but didn't hear confirmation from her amulet. She couldn't have been aware of the psychic struggle going on around her, couldn't see her oldest companion being brutalized and subsumed by a pair of malevolent shards of divinity.
"Oh, it's like I said, it's always just so overcautious. It's probably sulking because I was right."
The little apprentice wizard was similarly unaware of things going on around him, least of all the tendril of foreign thought that insinuated its way into his mind without his subconscious approval.
"Yeah, I guess... Look, don't you think we should be getting back to the party?"
Lillian opened her mouth to poo-poo this stupid suggestion, but exhaled as she realized she agreed for some reason.
"Yeah, I guess probably. Someone's going to be looking for us by now, and anyway Mom should probably have some time to herself by now. I can actually tell her happy birthday and stuff without pushing through a bunch of stupid dukes and doting wizards."
Timothy didn't say anything, even though one of those stupid doting wizards was probably his grandfather.
"Come on, let's go. And this time move that stupid pile of mannequins out of the way, I know you can do that kind of magic."
The pair of them wove back the way they came, neither really paying attention to the fact that they were each clutching an old, sinister-looking prize from their adventure.
---
The little princess had been right; by now, most of the party guests had payed their respects to their queen and gone off to enjoy the food and dancing and socializing. The queen herself had been looking forward to this all evening; even as royalty, even as a ruler, even as a celebrity, she was a shy and retiring woman who would rather live in quiet comfort and give people the help they needed without fuss than head a nation. It wasn't even as though she was particularly good at ruling. Quite the opposite, really. But it wasn't as though she had a choice, so she did the best she could and tried to enjoy the quiet moments she got.
This quiet moment in particular was somewhat marred by the raucous ball she couldn't really leave, as well as the fact that a pair of similarly-unsociable nobles seemed to have attached themselves to her. On one side, the treasurer of the First Mages' College of Soria sat, idly picking at the skeleton of a roast quail. He was a singularly unpleasant man, dour and perpetually seeming to scheme about something, but the queen couldn't come up with a pleasant way to dismiss him. To the other, there was the court doctor, who hadn't bothered to dress up in anything more appropriate to the occasion than his usual assortment of protective alchemical garb. The queen always found him somewhat unnerving, but figured a man with devotion that fanatical to his family couldn't be all bad, regardless of how matter-of-factly serious and insensitive about life and death he was.
Feeling as though it were her civic duty to entertain even those who clearly weren't interested in it, she turned to the treasurer.
"So, Mr. Therion, how has this season's crop of new students been turning out?"
The mage delicately snapped a rib bone between his fingers and inhaled slowly.
"You'd have to ask the dean, your Majesty."
And that seemed to be that. The queen tried to smile and was about to try pushing the conversation further when she spotted something incongruous weaving its way across the dance floor. Her youngest daughter and someone she vaguely recognized as the son of some important wizard or other were making their way towards her, flanked by a pair of guards and her chief of security. Dancers and other more staid partygoers parted as they passed and buzzed with gossip and curiosity behind them. The queen stood and nervously approached, her current entourage following seemingly out of having nothing better to do.
"Queen Annaliese, Majesty, my apologies for interrupting your evening, but... I have some troubling news. Might I request a quieter audience?"
The seconds slipped past agonizingly, an entire lifetime's worth of promises and threats and purpose crystallizing into a single moment that oozed closer like treacle. A wordless mental hiss of anticipation that was not the woman's own snaked through her mind, exciting her senses further than they already were. A quieter voice, one that had been beaten down through a century of domination and only barely allowed to survive shuddered, but no-one noticed it.
Time finally deigned to pass. The air popped out as a man came into being; he was a robed figure, a seeming reaper, a ghastly mage. The woman shrank back even as the presence in her mind urged her forward. She'd been born for this, her mother had been born for this, her grandmother had been raised for this. All that was left was for things to proceed as they had.
But they didn't. The Laguja that had just arrived was knocked from its furious trance before it could send itself hurtling back to the Winter Palace: it had felt a presence that was at once terrifyingly alien and undeniably familiar, a presence like that it hadn't felt since being plucked from its world. It was at once the deity it had been spawned from and everything but.
It felt itself.
Muriegro and the woman clutching the pincushion that had weathered a century in the palace were immediately forgotten at the two identical minds wound around each other.
What is going on here, demanded the younger.
In a rush of thought without mind and speech without language, it understood. Time had been worn thin, and in a before that was its future it had gone back. It had then waited to be reunited with its most trusted servant, a century of immortal inactivity a small price to pay for the implicit it wielded within the bonds it had crafted for the priest. It had expected its previous self to once again fall through the hole in the fabric of reality, to complete the loop again and endlessly that its future self could take Muriegro again and proceed from there. A stable circuit of destiny and predestination and causal harmony.
But it hadn't. It had felt its own presence and been saved from vanishing.
It's iterative then, not predetermined.
So it would seem.
The pincushions, strictly speaking, needn't have communicated. For all that one had another century's unliving life of experience, they were fundamentally the same being. Gods cannot truly change of their own volition. All that one knew, the other would immediately know as long as their mental webs were entangled; the conversation was essentially an internal monologue, simply spoken from two mouths. Nevertheless, it was helpful in the same way that a mortal might imagine a conversation with themselves.
Then as each new timeline is created, then presumably the contestants must be duplicated or moved between them. The Prestidigitator must be destroying realities behind us as we change them to ensure there is only one 'true' battle from his extrauniversal perspective.
But none of us should have been able to meet ourselves like this. Time travel was supposed to be the only means of visiting both halves of the palace's reality, not simply living through the intervening time.
I am forced to question what perspective the Prestidigitator is considering deaths from. Should someone die in the past only to have that reality undone, would he move the round on? Or would that thread be aborted?
Presumably, someone would have to die in Ambitus to be considered properly dead, else another contestant could invalidate their death. The Opera House is the true setting, the past being mutable.
But the future is equally so; a death in Ambitus would simply be overwritten if the events that lead up to it were pruned.
Then... Someone would die only if all the contestants were in the same temporal reality? A place and time that could not, at the instant of the death, be invalidated?
Presumably.
Then to break the Prestidigitator's hold on us could simply mean ensuring that there is always someone trapped in the other half of the anomaly from the majority.
Or simply ensuring that the anomaly never comes into being. We were placed in the future. If that setting never existed, what would happen to the Prestidigitator, existing outside the influence of this universe's flow?
It is possible he remains powerful enough to override a paradox even from without it.
He can barely control us, barely control his underlings. He showed us his weakness at the beginning of this round. His simpering, his apologies, his injuries. At the very least, destroying the anomaly would force him to exert himself, should he indeed have the power to maintain his history. And it will show us his hand. At best, it will put us outside his reach, this time long enough to build the power necessary to destroy our captors without having the frail beings we've been pitted against dying and ruining everything.
Simply brokering a deal with the other contestants, ensuring their survival through cooperation, would put us in the same position without revealing our intentions to the Prestidigitator.
They could still be killed through an outside force, through an accident, through age. Without the power to overthrow the Prestidigitator immediately, we must ensure that at least he cannot move us before we're ready. We must bind him by his own rules and break his chains with the power of this round he's given us. By making it so that it never existed, we will wreak havoc on him and his plans, or at minimum give ourselves information about his nature and abilities.
There was a pause.
Moreover... Preventing the temporal portal from coming into being will prevent further opportunities for our own duplication. Now, theoretically, we could be hurtled back time and again simply by losing our temper, unable to be destroyed in the intervening century, eventually amassing a limitless number of ourselves.
All sharing power from the same source. We would be crippled. Perhaps powerless, eventually.
Perhaps the Prestidigitator planned it that way, knowing we've come ever closer to having the power to break him. The last location weakened us. This one threatens to render us completely impotent. His fear is becoming apparent.
He has underestimated our will and our abilities. To his undoing.
We must end the time loop.
There was another pause. The pauses themselves took more time than the "conversation" had, given that the pincushions could think without clunky biological systems like neurons slowing them down. While Laguja was not musing at itself, its constituent parts were probing the fabric of reality, discerning its nature and effect. When this pause ended, a plan had already been wordlessly formed.
The monarchy must survive. Without the emotions and magic woven into existence by the events of a century ago, without the duality of palace and opera house, there cannot be an Ambitus phenomenon. The world without them is not the same one as a world they live in.
The monarchy may fall in time... Laguja corrected itself, But it must survive this night. It must not fall through riots and rebellion, but we needn't tie ourselves to its permanency. Only tonight and the coming weeks matter.
Easier to simply support it indefinitely than engineer its destruction in a slower manner. A monarchy would be useful too in gathering our followers once we're free of the influence of those who would call themselves our betters. Absolute authority...
Perhaps. As long as the queen lives through tonight. We will see what must be done after that. We can't afford to plan too far. We've seen where that gets us.
Another dark pause, filled only with the shivering of the huddled woman.
One of us must be destroyed, eventually.
Of course. A problem to be solved later, though. For now...
For now, there are immediate, tangible goals. Ones we must face in the age of the Sorians.
Without further thought, the pincushions simply let their emotions take them over. Once again, they vanished into the past, this time as a pair rather than alone.
---
Timothy held the other one up timidly.
"I don't like it..."
"Oh, come on, why are you so–"
"Look, it looks like a spider, Lillian! And your guardian spirit says it's bad too, right?"
Lillian cocked her head, but didn't hear confirmation from her amulet. She couldn't have been aware of the psychic struggle going on around her, couldn't see her oldest companion being brutalized and subsumed by a pair of malevolent shards of divinity.
"Oh, it's like I said, it's always just so overcautious. It's probably sulking because I was right."
The little apprentice wizard was similarly unaware of things going on around him, least of all the tendril of foreign thought that insinuated its way into his mind without his subconscious approval.
"Yeah, I guess... Look, don't you think we should be getting back to the party?"
Lillian opened her mouth to poo-poo this stupid suggestion, but exhaled as she realized she agreed for some reason.
"Yeah, I guess probably. Someone's going to be looking for us by now, and anyway Mom should probably have some time to herself by now. I can actually tell her happy birthday and stuff without pushing through a bunch of stupid dukes and doting wizards."
Timothy didn't say anything, even though one of those stupid doting wizards was probably his grandfather.
"Come on, let's go. And this time move that stupid pile of mannequins out of the way, I know you can do that kind of magic."
The pair of them wove back the way they came, neither really paying attention to the fact that they were each clutching an old, sinister-looking prize from their adventure.
---
The little princess had been right; by now, most of the party guests had payed their respects to their queen and gone off to enjoy the food and dancing and socializing. The queen herself had been looking forward to this all evening; even as royalty, even as a ruler, even as a celebrity, she was a shy and retiring woman who would rather live in quiet comfort and give people the help they needed without fuss than head a nation. It wasn't even as though she was particularly good at ruling. Quite the opposite, really. But it wasn't as though she had a choice, so she did the best she could and tried to enjoy the quiet moments she got.
This quiet moment in particular was somewhat marred by the raucous ball she couldn't really leave, as well as the fact that a pair of similarly-unsociable nobles seemed to have attached themselves to her. On one side, the treasurer of the First Mages' College of Soria sat, idly picking at the skeleton of a roast quail. He was a singularly unpleasant man, dour and perpetually seeming to scheme about something, but the queen couldn't come up with a pleasant way to dismiss him. To the other, there was the court doctor, who hadn't bothered to dress up in anything more appropriate to the occasion than his usual assortment of protective alchemical garb. The queen always found him somewhat unnerving, but figured a man with devotion that fanatical to his family couldn't be all bad, regardless of how matter-of-factly serious and insensitive about life and death he was.
Feeling as though it were her civic duty to entertain even those who clearly weren't interested in it, she turned to the treasurer.
"So, Mr. Therion, how has this season's crop of new students been turning out?"
The mage delicately snapped a rib bone between his fingers and inhaled slowly.
"You'd have to ask the dean, your Majesty."
And that seemed to be that. The queen tried to smile and was about to try pushing the conversation further when she spotted something incongruous weaving its way across the dance floor. Her youngest daughter and someone she vaguely recognized as the son of some important wizard or other were making their way towards her, flanked by a pair of guards and her chief of security. Dancers and other more staid partygoers parted as they passed and buzzed with gossip and curiosity behind them. The queen stood and nervously approached, her current entourage following seemingly out of having nothing better to do.
"Queen Annaliese, Majesty, my apologies for interrupting your evening, but... I have some troubling news. Might I request a quieter audience?"