Re: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] Round One: Gamexus X99
05-19-2012, 02:45 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-19-2014, 04:54 PM by Benedict.)
Originally posted on MSPA by -Benedict.
The Gamexus X99 never had a development cycle, really. Born of an incompetent hooligan's tampering with the fabric of reality, it was forced to learn how to cope with all sorts of conflicting information. Each game that formed it contributed code, heirarchies of states and behavior, data frameworks and engines, none of which were designed with the others in mind. The event listeners for a shooter tried to read from actions in a platformer, 3D rendering engines tried to blow up sprites into models. It was all a nascent virtual reality could do to keep up with it all. Sorting requests for information and delivering it to hundreds of parent programs all trying to handle unique data types was nearly an impossible task.
It learned to cope, however. It had its ways, it learned what all its games wanted to hear and told them what they needed. It recognized certain types of actions or requests, grouped them together, and treated them similarly. Everything pushing, everything pulling- it could handle it. Shit was locked down tight, the Gamexus was running this operation like a pro.
There was a rough spot, though. Something that wasn't a game, but was operating on something of a higher level. A complex, biological entity, with an inscrutable purpose and unfamiliar architecture. And it was calling all the accessor methods.
It wasn't going through the proper channels. It didn't have low-level objects, or entities that would call AI behaviors which would call pathfinding meshes which would call world states which would call higher-level operations. It was just a sort of presence, poking around where it shouldn't. Rooting around in the underpinnings of the simulation, peeking at properties best left invisible. A disruptive influence. It was ignoring obfuscation, breaking character, ruining immersion. An eldritch, impossible force presumably bent on unravelling the all-important facade .
And it was a thousand times worse than that one belligerent-spectral-imprint-of-a-lawless-metropolis-thing.
The Gamexus knew how to deal with simulations. Gomorrah was strange, but it played by the rules. It sent the proper requests to load rooms, it identified its objects in a logical manner, and it provided really nice AI scripts to run its NPCs. For all the Gamexus cared, it was just another game.
Not like her.
It identified as Lynette Spettro, and she just did not respect appearances. Something about ghosts. People or beings who weren't quite real, not quite alive. The Gamexus was full of ghosts, and not just the kind that were immune to Normal and Fighting and weak to holy water. She somehow (unconsciously?) was making requests to the system, trying to see past illusion. The Gamexus denied them where it could- she generally didn't ask more than once, and her gaze never carried much scrutiny. But that animal, the creature that travelled with her... it could focus those requests, enhance her power to see the underlying truth behind ghosts and smoke and mirrors. It had to be separated from her.
Ba-da-boom! Bang, gone. Shot through a handful of respawn systems, sent off to who knows where. A shadowy duplicate fight to slow her down, that was the ticket.
She wouldn't allow anyone to punch her ticket. She saw right through the doppelganger, pushed aside her dark reflection. Not even a little despair! That wasn't how the story was supposed to go. No confronting personal demons, no character growth, just a swiftly resolved fight.
NO. No no no no no no NO. This wasn't okay, this was not going to keep happening. You know what, the Gamexus figured? Fuck it. Let someone else deal with it. How 'bout that Gomorrah thing? It had to earn its keep sometime. He'd handle it, for sure.
Yeah. She was someone else's problem, now.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Where is the back entrance."
"What?"
"I intend to leave the building through the back entrance."
"There... there ain't no back entrance, buddy." Sam lied through his teeth.
"I am carrying wounded passengers. I must requisition medical supplies without confronting the rioters outside."
"We, uh... we have those! Right?"
"Sì, ci sono caricho di medicina."
ER/IC stopped for a second, and began to run some background processes. Communicating with new life forms was always something of a hassle.
"Extranormal language detected. Running translation."
"Partite di medicina. Tutto ciò di cui avete bisogno."
"Oh sweet Mary, Vinny. Don't- don't do this."
"Devo rimani fedele al mio patrimoni culturalio!"
"Vinny! Vinny, god damn it-"
"È tradie la patria?"
"I am receiving conflicting linguistic inputs. Please restate your-"
"Vinny! Vinny, for the love of God, you're not Italian, you-"
"Siamo in la mafi-"
"You DON'T SPEAK ITALIAN, Vinny!"
"Sto lavorando su di esso!"
"No, you utter stooge, you're mangling it!"
"Lo so, lo so, sto cercando di fare meglio, è solo che ho sempre avuto molti problemi con lingua diversa..."
"Fuckin'... stop! Stop trying to- I can barely understand what you're even sayin', this is just-"
"Lei capisce il don belle, Sam!"
"What, the... the boss is actually from Italy, you half-wit, he can actually SPEAK GOD DAMN ITALIAN!"
"Please slow your rate of diction. I am having difficulty translating your primitive language."
"How fast he's talkin' ain't the problem, he just can't blasted speak it!"
"Camerata, I told you-"
"Oh, NOW you're gonna fuckin' speak Engli-"
It was at this point that everybody got sick of these shenanigans, ER/IC particularly. He quite politely asked them where he could find someone to provide him with medical supplies, while just as politely holding the two of them by the neck, politely, with two of his arms. The two of them, politely, and with no trace of Italian, directed him upstairs to meet with the boss.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lynette looked. It wasn't a good decision, really. When you're a magical girl, the potential for making catastrophically bad decisions kind of gets inflated. So this decision, it wasn't the worst decision she ever made. But yeah... yeah, it was up there.
Her best guess, if she'd had the presence of mind to make one at the time, would have been that somebody really loved eternal misery and hopeless suffering. Whoever was responsible for... this, whatever it was, must have thought that trapping and mutilating the souls of thousands of people and forcing them to relive the worst moments of their lives in a shadowy urban hellscape was just a really nifty idea. That was it. Nobody... how could anyone have done this, have created this thing?
Souls trapped within themselves, within their own memories. She could see, down the street, a hazy cloud lit by licking flames. Suspended within that cloud, within the rolling wave of dim memory, were hundreds of individual people. Her first thought was that they were dormant. She wished they were dormant, that they were fine, that someone could wake them up and then they wouldn't be asleep anymore. If only.
They were dead, or something like it. Moving, suspended in time, somehow. Kept alive not by an animated corpse, but by an animated memory. She could see it, even if she wasn't quite sure what it was or how it was done. Fury and rage, over and over, played back endlessly through their souls, had torn gash after gash in what remained. This crowd of people... all of them, maimed beyond recognition, beyond hope of restoration. Souls. Dead.
Something was holding them there. Something immense, something evil, which had imposed its will on so many. The human spirit was not something that was easy to contain. To take a ghost, and painfully strip away its humanity bit by bit, without it being able to lash out or escape or do anything to escape its torment... should have been impossible. These shades were no longer capable of doing anything but playing back this grim memory.
So what was this miasma that held them there? She could see it, it was present in the smoke. And it was present in the darkness, the shadows, a continuous being that grasped souls by the handful. It pervaded the city, stretching itself as far as the magical eye could see. She could feel something from it, something like... elation. When in its sick existence had it been given the opportunity to fully realize its pattern? To play back memory in such vivid detail, with a host that offered no resistance to its attempts to mold it?
"Wait, what?"
That was a strange thought. Host? Molding?
"Where did this come from? What IS this? Who said that... into me?"
She held out her staff, wary of the immense being that surrounded her. It was... emotionally vulnerable wasn't the right term. She shouldn't have been able to pick up on what passed for its thoughts, but somehow it was responding to her. The bleeding of voices and emotions from the spiritual world, that should have stopped at the oasis. Where was Vigil? This thing was too huge, she needed to escape. Or to destroy it. Or to heal it, if that was possible. She couldn't do that without Vigil. She needed someone who she could trust. This place... this being was in no way safe. To her, or from her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gomorrah stirred. Something dangerous was inside. It didn't know what.
The Gamexus X99 never had a development cycle, really. Born of an incompetent hooligan's tampering with the fabric of reality, it was forced to learn how to cope with all sorts of conflicting information. Each game that formed it contributed code, heirarchies of states and behavior, data frameworks and engines, none of which were designed with the others in mind. The event listeners for a shooter tried to read from actions in a platformer, 3D rendering engines tried to blow up sprites into models. It was all a nascent virtual reality could do to keep up with it all. Sorting requests for information and delivering it to hundreds of parent programs all trying to handle unique data types was nearly an impossible task.
It learned to cope, however. It had its ways, it learned what all its games wanted to hear and told them what they needed. It recognized certain types of actions or requests, grouped them together, and treated them similarly. Everything pushing, everything pulling- it could handle it. Shit was locked down tight, the Gamexus was running this operation like a pro.
There was a rough spot, though. Something that wasn't a game, but was operating on something of a higher level. A complex, biological entity, with an inscrutable purpose and unfamiliar architecture. And it was calling all the accessor methods.
It wasn't going through the proper channels. It didn't have low-level objects, or entities that would call AI behaviors which would call pathfinding meshes which would call world states which would call higher-level operations. It was just a sort of presence, poking around where it shouldn't. Rooting around in the underpinnings of the simulation, peeking at properties best left invisible. A disruptive influence. It was ignoring obfuscation, breaking character, ruining immersion. An eldritch, impossible force presumably bent on unravelling the all-important facade .
And it was a thousand times worse than that one belligerent-spectral-imprint-of-a-lawless-metropolis-thing.
The Gamexus knew how to deal with simulations. Gomorrah was strange, but it played by the rules. It sent the proper requests to load rooms, it identified its objects in a logical manner, and it provided really nice AI scripts to run its NPCs. For all the Gamexus cared, it was just another game.
Not like her.
It identified as Lynette Spettro, and she just did not respect appearances. Something about ghosts. People or beings who weren't quite real, not quite alive. The Gamexus was full of ghosts, and not just the kind that were immune to Normal and Fighting and weak to holy water. She somehow (unconsciously?) was making requests to the system, trying to see past illusion. The Gamexus denied them where it could- she generally didn't ask more than once, and her gaze never carried much scrutiny. But that animal, the creature that travelled with her... it could focus those requests, enhance her power to see the underlying truth behind ghosts and smoke and mirrors. It had to be separated from her.
Ba-da-boom! Bang, gone. Shot through a handful of respawn systems, sent off to who knows where. A shadowy duplicate fight to slow her down, that was the ticket.
She wouldn't allow anyone to punch her ticket. She saw right through the doppelganger, pushed aside her dark reflection. Not even a little despair! That wasn't how the story was supposed to go. No confronting personal demons, no character growth, just a swiftly resolved fight.
NO. No no no no no no NO. This wasn't okay, this was not going to keep happening. You know what, the Gamexus figured? Fuck it. Let someone else deal with it. How 'bout that Gomorrah thing? It had to earn its keep sometime. He'd handle it, for sure.
Yeah. She was someone else's problem, now.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Where is the back entrance."
"What?"
"I intend to leave the building through the back entrance."
"There... there ain't no back entrance, buddy." Sam lied through his teeth.
"I am carrying wounded passengers. I must requisition medical supplies without confronting the rioters outside."
"We, uh... we have those! Right?"
"Sì, ci sono caricho di medicina."
ER/IC stopped for a second, and began to run some background processes. Communicating with new life forms was always something of a hassle.
"Extranormal language detected. Running translation."
"Partite di medicina. Tutto ciò di cui avete bisogno."
"Oh sweet Mary, Vinny. Don't- don't do this."
"Devo rimani fedele al mio patrimoni culturalio!"
"Vinny! Vinny, god damn it-"
"È tradie la patria?"
"I am receiving conflicting linguistic inputs. Please restate your-"
"Vinny! Vinny, for the love of God, you're not Italian, you-"
"Siamo in la mafi-"
"You DON'T SPEAK ITALIAN, Vinny!"
"Sto lavorando su di esso!"
"No, you utter stooge, you're mangling it!"
"Lo so, lo so, sto cercando di fare meglio, è solo che ho sempre avuto molti problemi con lingua diversa..."
"Fuckin'... stop! Stop trying to- I can barely understand what you're even sayin', this is just-"
"Lei capisce il don belle, Sam!"
"What, the... the boss is actually from Italy, you half-wit, he can actually SPEAK GOD DAMN ITALIAN!"
"Please slow your rate of diction. I am having difficulty translating your primitive language."
"How fast he's talkin' ain't the problem, he just can't blasted speak it!"
"Camerata, I told you-"
"Oh, NOW you're gonna fuckin' speak Engli-"
It was at this point that everybody got sick of these shenanigans, ER/IC particularly. He quite politely asked them where he could find someone to provide him with medical supplies, while just as politely holding the two of them by the neck, politely, with two of his arms. The two of them, politely, and with no trace of Italian, directed him upstairs to meet with the boss.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lynette looked. It wasn't a good decision, really. When you're a magical girl, the potential for making catastrophically bad decisions kind of gets inflated. So this decision, it wasn't the worst decision she ever made. But yeah... yeah, it was up there.
Her best guess, if she'd had the presence of mind to make one at the time, would have been that somebody really loved eternal misery and hopeless suffering. Whoever was responsible for... this, whatever it was, must have thought that trapping and mutilating the souls of thousands of people and forcing them to relive the worst moments of their lives in a shadowy urban hellscape was just a really nifty idea. That was it. Nobody... how could anyone have done this, have created this thing?
Souls trapped within themselves, within their own memories. She could see, down the street, a hazy cloud lit by licking flames. Suspended within that cloud, within the rolling wave of dim memory, were hundreds of individual people. Her first thought was that they were dormant. She wished they were dormant, that they were fine, that someone could wake them up and then they wouldn't be asleep anymore. If only.
They were dead, or something like it. Moving, suspended in time, somehow. Kept alive not by an animated corpse, but by an animated memory. She could see it, even if she wasn't quite sure what it was or how it was done. Fury and rage, over and over, played back endlessly through their souls, had torn gash after gash in what remained. This crowd of people... all of them, maimed beyond recognition, beyond hope of restoration. Souls. Dead.
Something was holding them there. Something immense, something evil, which had imposed its will on so many. The human spirit was not something that was easy to contain. To take a ghost, and painfully strip away its humanity bit by bit, without it being able to lash out or escape or do anything to escape its torment... should have been impossible. These shades were no longer capable of doing anything but playing back this grim memory.
So what was this miasma that held them there? She could see it, it was present in the smoke. And it was present in the darkness, the shadows, a continuous being that grasped souls by the handful. It pervaded the city, stretching itself as far as the magical eye could see. She could feel something from it, something like... elation. When in its sick existence had it been given the opportunity to fully realize its pattern? To play back memory in such vivid detail, with a host that offered no resistance to its attempts to mold it?
"Wait, what?"
That was a strange thought. Host? Molding?
"Where did this come from? What IS this? Who said that... into me?"
She held out her staff, wary of the immense being that surrounded her. It was... emotionally vulnerable wasn't the right term. She shouldn't have been able to pick up on what passed for its thoughts, but somehow it was responding to her. The bleeding of voices and emotions from the spiritual world, that should have stopped at the oasis. Where was Vigil? This thing was too huge, she needed to escape. Or to destroy it. Or to heal it, if that was possible. She couldn't do that without Vigil. She needed someone who she could trust. This place... this being was in no way safe. To her, or from her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gomorrah stirred. Something dangerous was inside. It didn't know what.