13 KiB
[RT][WIP] Worth the Candle, ch 17-19
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Author: u/cthulhuraejepsen Fruit flies like a banana*
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URL: http://archiveofourown.org/works/11478249/chapters/26623638
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Score: 51
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Created: 2017-08-14T20:43:18
Post:
Comments:
u/Escapement [+22] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (an hour later)
cthulhuraejepsen is taken by a fey mood!
u/reaper7876 [+10] (3 hours later)
Forge frenzy definitely reminds me of strange moods. Which isn't a bad thing--it's a cool idea, and the creation of magical effects differs from what DF is currently capable of.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+13] Fruit flies like a banana (7 hours later)
Huh, I've never played Dwarf Fortress. I thought I was being somewhat derivative of the tinker trance from Worm, though I didn't realize that until after I'd been running a D&D campaign with it for a few months. That mechanic is basically a way to circumvent the "why don't people just reverse-engineer it" problem and the "why don't they just mass produce it" problem in one fell swoop.
u/Calsem [+1] (13 days later)
Wow, that's a super wierd coincidence. As soon as I read the forge frenzy I thought for sure that you were referencing dwarf fortress.
I like your story, BTW.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+16] Fruit flies like a banana (4 minutes later)
Worth the Candle is a self-insert litRPG portal fantasy, loosely based on my personal experience of falling into a portal to another world and discovering that I had a character sheet attached to my soul.
If you haven't read any of this, here's the link to the full thing.
I am back from my week away, here are the three chapters I wrote while I was without reliable internet. These chapters are somewhat slower and more character/worldbuildy in preparation for the meat/action of Book II.
Thanks to everyone who has helped to make the numbers for this story become larger numbers, and to all the people who have responded to me on the weekly worldbuilding posts, on the /r/rational discord, etc.
u/SkeevePlowse [+8] (5 hours later)
So, uh... did anyone else read the intro to the bath scene, and Fenn's concerns, and Juniper raising his Flirting/Romance skills, and think, "Incoming harem ending"? Or was that just me?
In case it's not clear, that's very much not a criticism; I'm rather enjoying the read so far.
u/Noumero [+10] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (15 hours later)
You're only thinking it now?
This is a self-insert litRPG portal fantasy, and I would have made it a Groundhog Day loop if I thought I could fit that in. — The Author
I.e., he deliberately took a bunch of clichés and tried to deconstruct/rationalize them while writing an engaging story. The moment it became apparent Fenn could become a companion, I started suspecting he plans to do the same with the harem cliché. /u/cthulhuraejepsen, am I right?^1
^(1. Perhaps you shouldn't answer that.)
u/JanusTheDoorman [+8] (a day later)
Maybe, but Amaryllis' general attitude toward Juniper seems to be more one of cultivating an asset to be used in her own larger plans. She's distinctly manipulative and guarded with information, seeming to see it as leverage, or a means of influencing Juniper by controlling the picture he builds of Aerb.
This might all just be a deconstruction of tsundere's, but I really haven't picked up on any hint of Amaryllis being attracted to Juniper.
u/Noumero [+13] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (a day later)
Loyalty 5? Granted, we don't really know how this "loyalty" works. The game couldn't be tricked, exactly, but it certainly could "play along" with any sufficiently competent or dramatic manipulations or betrayals in the making. Among other evidence could be her lines about Juniper being "a very decent person" and apologies for leaving him, but obviously it's even easier to fake than loyalty.
That said, it's mostly irrelevant. We know Juniper is attracted to her, which means she counts. This is an advanced RPG we're talking about, why wouldn't there be optional romantic subplots for every companion?
Oh, by the way, I'm reasonably confident that her beauty is abnormal. Reread the relevant paragraph from chapter 2:
Imagine that someone spent a few years studying your likes and dislikes, running through video of your every private moment, somehow surreptitiously hooking up EKGs to measure your physiological responses without you know. Then imagine that they sat down with that data and the best photo manipulation artists in the world and made the absolute perfect picture to cause your heart rate to spike, a jolt to run up your spine, butterflies in your stomach, and a cold sweat on your palms. Then imagine that they did this again, over and over in slight variations, until they had a full 4K 60fps 3D movie to show you. That was what it was like watching her.
It's not normal, it's either some glamour magic, or the DM-entity deliberately putting Juniper's dream girl in front of him; neither implies good things about this whole arrangement.
Oh, and the term's kuudere.
u/i6i [+7] (a day later)
loyalty 5/9999
u/Noumero [+9] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (a day later)
Ha. Well, it's certainly the case with Deception.
Skill increased: Deception lvl 6!
“You are just the most atrocious liar I have ever met in my entire life,” said Fenn.
u/None [+11] (2 days later)
if you look at it as skill levels being a roll modifier, then even deception level 6 doesn't save you from rolling a 1-5/20 on a deception check. I think that's the most plausible explanation right now between the gap of his skill levels and inconsistent moment-to-moment results (i.e. low level rifle skills, shooting a sniper behind cover in the head from a moving vehicle). That doesn't address the apparent lack of interaction his real abilities have with the system stat display though (knowledge, prior experience with guns, etc.).
u/i6i [+8] (a day later)
The better question is whether he could avoid it if he tried. The way relationships stats in RPGs work is frankly bizarre. Because of levels you never stop growing closer unless you break off things completely so eventually you're simultaneously fulfilling the role of everyone's soul mate/personal messiah. Persona 5 in particular makes several hints that the protagonist might just be a teeny bit of a psychopath if they can shift gears between what different people want so easily. High level SOC gets into scary territory regarding trust and whether someone you can perfectly control even counts as human any more. That way lay the path to Anasûrimbor Kellhus .
u/eternal-potato [+5] he who vegetates (a day later)
Oh I sure hope so.
u/NotACauldronAgent [+7] Probably (2 hours later)
Juniper's sure got a big job in store for him if he wants to fix this mess. Not the most doomed world for sure, but that's a lot of cultural inertia.
u/BlueSigil [+8] (3 hours later)
This continues to be a fun read. Hexagonal world 10x the size of earth is a new one :)
u/dalitt [+9] (8 hours later)
I wonder how gravity works. Presumably the hexagonal world is made out of some very strong material so it doesn't crumple into a sphere -- but if one is near the eastern edge of the hexagon, does one feel a strong westward gravitational force? Or maybe the hexagon is spinning fast enough to prevent this...
Or maybe the answer is just "magic."
u/eternal-potato [+13] he who vegetates (23 hours later)
The hexagon is tiled, effectively forming an infinite plane, so the gravity would be directed 'down' into the plane at all points. It would also not get any weaker with distance.
But this is all irrelevant, since this is a videogame. The gravity is implemented via constant force 'down', sun is just a circle on the skybox and a directional light source, and coordinate wraparound is not very hard to implement either.
u/Calsem [+2] (13 days later)
But it's not infinite because the world is only 10x the size of earth. Unless you mean something else when you say infinite?
u/eternal-potato [+2] he who vegetates (13 days later)
The single hexagon is 10x the size of Earth.
u/Calsem [+1] (13 days later)
Where do you see that? I found one reference to hexagon in his entire work.
http://archiveofourown.org/works/11478249?view_full_work=true
u/eternal-potato [+2] he who vegetates (13 days later)
This?
Aerb was about ten times larger than Earth, flat instead of a sphere, and shaped like a hexagon. If you went far enough north, you would end up in the south, and it was the same in any direction.
First sentence clearly states that Aerb is hexagonal and is 10 times the size of Earth (I assume by surface area). The second one implies infinite tiling of said hexagon. What is unclear?
u/Calsem [+1] (13 days later)
If it was a infinite plane you could go on north forever, but he says if you go north you end up in the south. Not entirely sure what that's about, but my guess would be some magic thing that returns you to the opposite side so you can't escape the hexagon.
But I guess it could potentially extend forever (or up to a arbitrarily large point) and the magic barrier just limits them to one hexagon.
u/eternal-potato [+2] he who vegetates (13 days later)
You can go on forever in the same direction, while the landscape and everything else will be infinitely repeating. If you could see far enough with your line of sight perpendicular to the edge of the hexagon, you'd see the back of you head. Same way you would on a spherical planet it you could see around the horizon. Except tiled hexagon is the surface of a torus, not a sphere.
You can also think of it as a single hexagon with three pairs of infinitely tall portals, located at opposite edges of the hexagon. Walking into one causes you to walk out of the opposite one, likewise for everything else, including light, which means there is no discontinuity. It isn't even possible to tell where the edge actually is, only that stuff repeats in hexagonal pattern.
u/PositivePeter [+7] (17 hours later)
I assume the answer is magic / "don't read into it". I mean, I can't really think of a way that the sun would be in the same place from all locations on the entire world that isn't magical.
u/dalitt [+7] (17 hours later)
Well it could be e.g. very far away. But yeah, point taken.
u/None [+4] (10 hours later)
If I may ask, how is "Wampeter" pronounced? I've been trying a few different configurations, and I'm not getting anything that sounds "elvish", which leads me to think that that word may tell me something about Aerb's elves I don't know yet.
u/PositivePeter [+9] (17 hours later)
Wampeter and Karass are stolen from Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle), so they're basically references to the manufactured nature of the world by Juniper.
u/None [+5] (17 hours later)
Huh, I've had that book on my "to read" list for the longest time. Thanks for the information.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+5] Fruit flies like a banana (a day later)
/u/PositivePeter is correct, but I did at least check that Elvish had those sounds using this consonant chart. I think the sketchiest bit is probably the [mp] bit, which I think gets more classically Elvish as [mb] or even just [n]. But for Worth the Candle I'm using my own version of Elvish
with blackjack and hookers.(In my head it's wahm-pa-tare with a trilled r.)
u/SeekingImmortality [+6] The Eldest, Apparently (2 days later)
Chapter 20 is up!
u/josephwdye [+3] I love you (a day later)
Enjoying the series, but the charts are a little weird when I listen to the story using text to speech. Keep up the great work!
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+5] Fruit flies like a banana (a day later)
Yeah, the charts kind of suck when the story is read in any other form than straight HTML text, which is part of the reason that I'm trying to use them sparingly. They also don't come out right on the formats AO3 offers for download.
u/None [+4] (2 days later)
[deleted]
u/josephwdye [+8] I love you (2 days later)
I use instapaper to capture stories/articles, than voice dream on the iphone loads those. I can also dirctly open pdfs and epubs to voice dream. My favorite voices are Emma and Joey from Ivona. Voice dream can load content from a lot different sources.
I struggle a lot when reading normally, so long form content I prefer audiobooks and voice to text.
u/gryfft [+3] (6 hours later)
Busy, busy, busy.