27 KiB
[RT][WIP] Worth the Candle, ch 63 (The Chemical History of a Candle)
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Author: u/Rygatts *
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URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11478249/chapters/29451471
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Score: 131
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Created: 2017-12-02T19:38:45
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+25] (an hour later)
[deleted]
u/nytelios [+13] (3 hours later)
We were on point!
u/Noumero [+12] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (5 hours later)
Can confirm. I called Essentialism being programming, and u/nytelios expected it to be soul magic. Granted, it turned out we were both correct, which at least I didn't expect, while u/FudgeOff independently (?) made a completely correct guess, but thon did it only last chapter, while our discussion took place several months ago.
... Yes, we'll take those Bayes points, thank you, thank you.
u/Watchful1 [+2] (2 hours later)
I'm sure it's incidental touch. But Juniper will likely quickly get proficient enough to detect any changes, if not able to prevent them.
And we already know it's not mind control. He couldn't touch you and just instantly make you do what he wants.
u/serge_cell [+1] (3 days later)
I think it's more like database management. Another interesting question - will Joon be able to edit Null dtatasheet, or reconnect it to existing soul, like druid soul.
PS If Joon would be able to do Drop Table and SQL injection...
u/None [+24] (7 hours later)
I'm getting a hostile AI vibe from the elf guy, in the sense that he's a foe that the party will assuredly lose to if they engage with him for long enough.
He appears to have (maybe literally?) dialed his Insight up to like a hundred, and seemingly keeps pulling way too much info out of Juniper's tiny misstatements: several times in the last few chapters he's caught a slip up, queried Jun about it, then watched for a reaction while letting the massive Insight-Poise mismatch do some major body language/mind reading work. (e.g. the "residual" statment/Matrix implication cluing him in that Jun is dream-skewered, thus revealing a weakness that can be uniquely targeted by via soul magic?) I just get the feeling that he's mining a ton of info from the smallest of clues and using it to build a way too accurate model of Jun's situation.
All we really know about the guy is that his goal - above escaping the prison/personal freedom, his centuries-long experimentation, or even his immediate personal safety - is to gather information on Juniper. Which makes me think that his curiosity on the subject may go hand in hand with him being able achieve all of the aforementioned, in addition to in him being able to beat the party in a fight. (And given his supremely twisted set of morals betrayal seems kind of inevitable...I know Jun isn't your standard lawful good protagonist, but I can't see him unleashing this psycho on the world to go around casually reprogramming people's minds. And the elf guy almost assuredly knows that Mary was lying through her teeth about him ever getting a pardon/freedom to use soul magic, so now everyone involved knows that one side is ultimately going to end up dead/enthralled.)
If so, then maybe the elf guy's win condition revolves around gathering enough info on Jun's condition to customize a method of attack that is inherently "unblockable" due to the party's unfamiliarity with soul magic, or perhaps Jun's particular weakness to it. (If he's already grasped the entirety of the situation then I could easily see his goal being as basic as rewriting Jun to have access to the superweapon on par with King Arthur.) And Jun wins by ferreting out enough soul magic training to be able to ditch his almost certainly more intelligent tutor (since being hundreds of years old should translate directly to a high Knowledge stat?). This doesn't really bode well.
It's like the soul mage is tailor made as an enemy to counter Juniper: the party is forced to treat with him rather than just kill him, they're playing an infosec game governed by social stats ("dump" stats...), and there's inherent time pressure that forces Jun to engage in such a losing game in the first place.
Even the null counter demon puppet person seems like a challenge deliberately concocted by the DM, with this one subverting the whole "companions are safe" expectation. Like a stage magician the elf guy kept burning potential trap card after trap card, forcing the party to worry about threats like numbers disparity and soul-link mechanics, while quietly sliding the null into the group without much of a fuss. (Apparently she's such a nonthreat she can be countered with a "punch to the mouth"? Really guy?) It could be argued that he left her behind with his rage mutants to die, but assuming he's an enemy that's cleverer than the party he could have by that point modeled Jun accurately enough to have predicted his penchant for "heroism"/avoiding the cowardice debuff.
It could be I'm making the guy out too be way more hyper competent than he actually is, but like I said he just comes across as a threat they'd never have gotten close to if it weren't for their current desperation. Which kind of puts the ball firmly in the bad guy's court here.
u/serge_cell [+7] (2 days later)
It could be but it's too cliche. It could be much more interseting if Fallatehr actually have strong moral or at least non-socipathic/non-egotistic goals, but his goals/moral code don't fit into contemporary society. Analog could be early-modern surgeons digging up corpses and doing dissection on them, action abhorrent and immoral for their contemporaries. The moral problems of Soul Magic are not dissimilar to problems of invasive brain-computer interface reserach, wich is forbidden for healthy patients in most of (or all) western countries. This total ban could be seen as barbaric from some point in the future.
u/SoylentRox [+2] (8 hours later)
A well written post. My only comment is that the game clearly doesn't want to kill Jun. Which fits with your hypothesis well, since a loss to this boss would be being stuck as a puppet with a quest to get free.
u/GaBeRockKing [+20] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (23 minutes later)
Every chapter, I wish I could give kudos more than once.
u/nytelios [+15] (3 hours later)
You know what's even better than kudos? Word of mouth recommendations! And by proxy, votes on topwebfiction.
u/Cifems [+18] (41 minutes later)
JuniperWill Smith: So that's it, huh? We're some kind of... Candle of Worth?
u/mp3max [+10] (an hour later)
Nah, that's reaching too far. Juniper already did a titledrop quite some time ago. Something along the lines of this story - his current life, from his pov - better be worth the candle.
u/XxChronOblivionxX [+14] (2 hours later)
Welp, Null is hitting a lot of my sympathy buttons. Really picturing Irisviel for her.
u/Kishoto [+5] (21 hours later)
Wow. I felt the feelings associated with what I felt towards Irisviel (and Illya too) but I didn't realize the connection until you pointed it out. T_T
Love those homonculi
u/Makin- [+13] homestuck ratfic, you can do it (26 minutes later)
Ah, it had been months since the last time a cliffhanger caused me physical pain...
u/mojojo46 [+13] (3 hours later)
Hey /u/cthulhuraejepsen, I'm really enjoying this story. It's better written than it has any right to be.
Do you mind if I ask you why you're writing it? Apologies if you've already answered this in a previous thread.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+31] Fruit flies like a banana (10 hours later)
Do you mind if I ask you why you're writing it?
That's a weird question. Not bad weird, but ... there's a set of all the stories that I want to write, and out of that set, which is enormous, I've chosen this one, and I don't know that I can boil the "why" down to something sensible.
I guess when I decide to write a story, I have three big criteria:
- I like to write the sorts of stories that I like to read, because after a few years I'll have forgotten enough of the details that I can come in somewhat fresh to it and have the incredible experience of reading something written exactly to my tastes.
- I like to write things that are fun to write. What makes a story fun to write varies, but worldbuilding is a big part of it, and little flashes of insight when I've figured something out are another.
- Given the above, I would much rather go for something that's in low supply, particularly if it's something that I have high demand for (i.e. works that fill holes specific to me).
So this story has a lot of things in it that I haven't seen done in other places, and the high-school-friend-group thing is modeled (almost unethically) closely on actual people, which gives associated therapy/catharsis/nostalgia for me.
But I'm not sure that answers the question, because there are other stories that I could have written that would have filled those same needs and wants for me, and the next thing that I write will have those same three criteria as above, but I don't think that I will be able to say "I needed to write Worth the Candle before this other thing". I'll hopefully be a better writer by the end of this, and hopefully have changed somewhat in the process of spending hundreds of hours writing and thinking, but I don't think it's a prerequisite for those other things that I'll write, nor do I think that I'm writing this because of an honest sit-down consideration of what was most important (or highest utility) for me to write.
u/None [+20] (8 hours later)
Along the same vein, /u/cthulhuraejepsen, I just wanted to say that from your writing you seem like an awesome person. I really like how you treat social issues without being preachy, the story itself is fantastic and the technical quality is really good. This may not mean anything from a random internet stranger but you seem like a really cool person and you're a great writer :)
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+36] Godric Gryffindor (2 hours later)
Gosh, well that doesn't sound at all DANGEROUS.
u/mp3max [+9] (an hour later)
Oh no! A cliffhanger like that is just pure cruelty! Curse you /u/cthulhuraejepsen !
Good chapter by the way, can't wait to see the real character sheet.
u/SoylentRox [+12] (an hour later)
I'm guessing the author will only convey snippets of it because it sounds like a true game state file that is very, very large.
Our hero will need very high intelligence to parse it. In these kind of games you end up just boosting your INT stat all game long if you're playing a caster, because you need every point you can get. This seems to be the same way, though for a different reason*.
*in the games, all the big enemies are 'resistant' to getting hit with magic and you have a better chance the higher your int stat is. And, of course, the bosses are outright immune to any really 'save or lose' spell, which is why it's generally better to invest in direct damage spells despite them not being very good against mook level enemies...
And many games try to bring in magic immune enemies, making it where the best role of a caster is buffing your companions, since game developers can't really make enemies immune to physical attacks - that would make warrior and archer characters completely useless.
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+2] (19 hours later)
that would make warrior and archer characters completely useless.
Unless the warrior/archer characters have support skills, like healing arrows or something.
u/SoylentRox [+1] (23 hours later)
Sure. This is a meta-strategy anyway, it just assumes the game designer is not going to do something that makes a character class totally worthless in a given situation. Since warriors and archers have less options and all their skills are generally based around using their weapon, that weapon must work no matter the enemy they encounter.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (7 days later)
Give them some magical fire dam for example?
u/SoylentRox [+1] (7 days later)
Sure. +4 magical swords are definitely one way. But this is generally why enemies that have broad spectrum immunities like "immunity : melee attacks" are lame and annoying.
u/JusticeBeak [+1] (2 days later)
... that would make warrior and archer characters completely useless.
Then again, Joon did make a point early on about warriors'/physical strength growing linearly while casters'/magical strength growing exponentially, so this game may be light on magic immunity (or maybe that's the reason magic immunity exists in the first place :P).
u/nytelios [+9] (3 hours later)
“We’ll need specialty texts to figure out where it’s safe to bring her, or at the very least, better restraints, and ideally tight earmuffs.”
Earmuffs because (NSFL audio warning) demonic scream or because demons are walking talking memetic/cognito/infohazards?
u/SprinklerTesselation [+11] (8 hours later)
I'm thinking tight earmuffs to be worn by the nonanima, because they don't want demons listening in on them.
u/Bramble-Thorn [+6] (3 hours later)
From last chapter
The kinds of devils that can reach up to puppet her won’t be clever enough to be convincing, and if Fallatehr is smart, he’ll have his people punch her in the mouth if she tries to convince anyone.
Sounds like you don't want to be listening to demons. Probably because with 9,000 afterlives, all being Hells and no known Heaven, all it gets you is possibly suicidally depressed. Or manipulated and then betrayed.
u/nytelios [+5] (6 hours later)
clever enough to be convincing
So, if the devils are like gaolers who are increasingly clever and insidious with their psychological warfare as you get lower in the hells, then it's possible they've tortured all the dirty laundry out of all the dead people you know. The question is what would they try to convince you of. That all your loved ones are suffering in the worst ways and you should join them out of commiseration? What's their end-game - propagating misery? Or like you say, getting the suicidally depressed as more fodder for the hells?
u/xamueljones [+7] My arch-enemy is entropy (6 hours later)
Well it looks like you, Joon, shouldn't have been treating social as a dump stat! I predict that the game rewards a generalist over specialist build and that Join will need to use all skills on the sheet in one way or another.
A further prediction is that Essentialism is the skill to interface with or manipulate the soul while reading/understanding the soul will require the skill Library Magic or Language.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+6] Fruit flies like a banana (2 minutes later)
Typos here, please.
u/Jello_Raptor [+6] The Last Tool User (8 hours later)
Not exactly a typo but your definition of a null pointer error could be misread.
the program tries to go look up what some variable is, and finds out that there’s a null (empty) value where that variable was supposed to be.
This would be more accurate as
the program tries to go look up where some variable is, and finds out that there’s a null (empty) value where that variable's address was supposed to be.
Your original read as if the program did the lookup first and found a null where the pointer was pointing, rather than the pointer itself being null.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+2] Fruit flies like a banana (a day later)
This is one of those mistakes that I'd normally be fine with, since it's an understandable mistake in-character, especially given that Juniper's skill/knowledge in programming is meant to be equivalent to my own when I was 17, and I made the mistake because I didn't look up anything up when writing that.
But it's also a mistake that doesn't serve a plot purpose and so only serves to annoy people with imprecision, and I would only deliberately include something like that if I were a stickler for verisimilitude, which I'm (mostly) not.
u/Threesan [+1] (21 hours later)
To be fair, "This is all by way of saying that yeah, I was pretty fucking good at programming."
u/CannotThinkOfAThing [+3] (a day later)
Given that this sentence follows a paragraph describing how poor his programming experience is, it's clearly tongue in cheek.
u/Rygatts [+3] (7 minutes later)
I hope you don't mind me posting the chapter, I saw you still had 2 days before posting another.
“How far as cosmological mapping advanced in the last few hundred years?” - has
the former on his head and the latter on her the bare skin of her chest.
weighed and measured in dizzying arrays that wouldn’t necessarily even by coherent because people had biases - be
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+5] Fruit flies like a banana (25 minutes later)
Fixed all those, thanks!
I don't care who posts the chapters, I usually don't have much to say, and if I do, it's easy enough to just post to the thread.
u/fiirofa [+3] (28 minutes later)
“Scenario five,” I called back. New companion, but not Fallatehr.
vs
“Scenario four,” I said to Amaryllis.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+3] Fruit flies like a banana (32 minutes later)
Fixed, thanks, I think I had two references one way and another two references another way.
u/nytelios [+2] (3 hours later)
62
It was twenty feet to the ground
when werewhere? I was63
my grades had never been stellar
possible ch 36 inconsistency Joon should be smartish? “I’m in class with you, you’re like a 15 at best,” said Craig. He held up a finger. “Which is still really good, that’s like a standard deviation above normal.”
the game thus far
hashad a lot of really dumb
Most of the time I didn’t ask and let it roll by, but we had time, and
incomplete sentence
I most wanted to ask her
wasabout her thoughts
What is
thatthe? soul?”
u/ZeCatox [+3] (6 hours later)
my grades had never been stellar
possible ch 36 inconsistency Joon should be smartish?
Grades don't always match one's intelligence, for all sorts of reasons :)
u/nytelios [+2] (7 hours later)
Of course. But highly correlated! I thought the juxtaposition of 'class' and '15' suggests that it's academically applied.
u/ZeCatox [+1] (8 hours later)
ha, yes, that makes sense indeed
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+3] Fruit flies like a banana (10 hours later)
Fixed all that, thank you.
Joon is smartish, but has little interest in academics (or extracurriculars) and doesn't apply himself very much, preferring to spend his time and effort on his mildly antisocial hobbies. What Arthur said was more supposed to point to "I've seen how quickly you pick up on new information and solve problems relative to others".
(I probably won't ever do a full edit this thing, because it's already as long as a doorstopper fantasy epic, but one of the things that I would probably do is add in a few more hints in that direction.)
u/GeeJo [+1] Custom Flair (18 hours later)
Very minor one:
“That’s ... “
ends with the 'opening' speech mark instead of closing.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+1] Fruit flies like a banana (a day later)
Fixed that. I can't normally see the difference between the two, it must have happened because of how Google Docs interprets which one to put down.
u/None [+1] (21 hours later)
[deleted]
u/Threesan [+2] (22 hours later)
[C-v] To be fair, "This is all by way of saying that yeah, I was pretty fucking good at programming."
u/Quetzhal [+1] (a day later)
To further elaborate on what the others said:
A pointer is exactly what it says on the tin: it's an address that points to a variable. In order to access what's inside the address - or rather, to access the variable itself - you dereference the pointer. It's a very useful tool in programming, but comes with a set of problems:
A given program only has access to certain parts of memory. If you dereference some part of memory that you don't have access to, the program crashes.
You could potentially dereference some random accessible part of memory that was never initialized. This means that the "variable" you access will be whatever was in that part of the memory at the time, which is difficult to debug because you don't have any idea why you're getting weird numbers or letters.
We solve this problem by using the null pointer, which typically has a value of 0. This is technically an address, but it's an address the program can't access, and is therefore guaranteed to cause a program crash if you try to access it. You can catch this by detecting the null pointer and aborting before even trying to dereference it, which helps you detect failure points in your code, failed memory allocation, and so on.
If the pointer had been a valid (accessible) address, but the variable was never initialized, it's completely up in the air what you'll get. In C, strings are null-terminated, which means you read characters byte by byte until you reach a byte with the value of 0. You'll get a string of nonsense or nothing at all, depending on where that 0 is.
Disclaimer: I'm still a pretty new computer science student and my knowledge is limited to C. And assembly.
u/CannotThinkOfAThing [+5] (16 hours later)
So Joon is currently blind, sitting in front of the enemy who can rewrite him with a touch attack? Can't see how this could go badly...
u/PanickedApricott [+5] (a day later)
So if a demon possesses her. Will the null reference exception be replaced with the demons name? Would that mean that the loyalty metric apply to the demon? If the loyalty metric is the same regardless of who is possessing her then that's a lot like binding a demon. Would that make the loyalty metric a form of demonology?
u/ajuc [+4] (a day later)
From programming POV it should. Clearly loyalty is kept externally to the soul of the companion.
u/Veedrac [+3] (18 hours later)
It didn’t do kinging or bubblegum either.
What does "bubblegum" mean? Google wasn't telling.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+8] Fruit flies like a banana (a day later)
This is apparently a very regional term for the ability of a checker to jump more than one piece in sequence. I didn't know how regional it was until I started looking for corroboration that other people actually used it; it might actually just be localized to my small town.
So, apologies for that, because there's no way that you'd be able to get that from the text. (I'm fine with having a little bit of Midwestern cultural artifacts, but that one probably goes too far, given that it's hyperlocal.)
u/WilyCoyotee [+1] (a day later)
I think this, maybe? https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bubblegum
u/Veedrac [+1] (a day later)
I think if there was a reference to an esolang, something more recognisable would have been used.
u/knite [+2] (6 hours later)
WtC gets better with each new chapter!
u/Bramble-Thorn [+1] (3 hours later)
Hey, saw you were answering comments here. I found your story recently and had poster some comments on the AO3 chapter pages.
From chapter 25 https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/26887371?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_135053688 Wondering about skin magic, and the Vampire+Portal session
From last chapter (62) https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/29330487?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_137219745 About inheritance rules, bone magic, and putting skill caps in the hover text on the stat sheet next time it come up.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+6] Fruit flies like a banana (11 hours later)
Ah, you know, I have this horrible habit of reading comments like that when I'm on my phone and thinking that I'll answer them later when I'm at a keyboard, then putting responding to them lower on the list of things to do when I'm at a computer, then sort of forgetting about them because they're not in a place that I normally interface with. So I apologize for that. (I also sometimes do this for reddit comments.)
Re: skin magic, that's a read and find out question (i.e. I can neither confirm nor deny, etc.).
Re: St. Paul's cathedral ... I honestly have no clue, but that's how it happened IRL. Probably because cannons are cooler? Or it might have been one of those cases where someone started doing the math and the quest for alternate solutions stopped.
Re: hovertext, it's a pain in the butt and I'm probably dropping it soon once I have some time (read: desire) to devote to it, mostly because it's non-functional for mobile, tablet, or alternate format users, and thus needs to be spelled out in the text anyway.
Re: partial draining of bones ... read and find out, maybe? I'm not sure that we'll ever go there, but if we do, I'd rather it were a surprise.
Re: leveling up skills, I've been shying away from showing every in-game message, mostly because they can really screw up the flow of a paragraph meant to convey some other information to the reader or set a mood/tone. Joon has re-capped both Blood Magic and Bone Magic by this point, both at 24.
Re: entads, they take some time/effort/bonding to "set", which is when the inheritance rules are established, though some entads simply don't (heirloom entads are a subset of entads). So there's a window where magical items can be sold or given away, before there's a risk of them simply sticking with the person who made them (which does sometimes happen). More on this later ... maybe.