002 ↯ text/action

[feathery]

Who: Davesprite and whoever!
Broadcast: Fleetwide.
Action: The Wonderballduck or stations, if u want.
When: Nowish.

real talk
is there a fucking secret to getting an update around here
i dont mean atromas nonupdate bs that might as well be equatable to a feral child smearing his own diarrhea hullside in a crude reenactment of an already crude neolithic cave painting
but like picking up radio signals or tv stations from our own realities
maybe tuning into whatever godawful shenanigans your posse has gotten up to in your absence
or nonabsence
lets not panic unnecessarily here you all probably know the drill by now there is no fire
so yeah i guess this is a poll
what misfortune has to befall someone before they get firsthand experience with what happens in their timeline
i need specs on these close encounters of the fourth dimensional kind
is it inevitably "whoops i went to sleep or hit my head and now its 20 minutes into the future" or do we have options
asking specifically for people who cant just concuss themselves and receive download options for chill time with obama
or
you know
whatevers going on where youre from

[And, tacked on as an afterthought:]

p.s. if you find feathers clogging anything shipboard it wasnt me

[Aboard the Wonderduck, the resident crowkid can be found at a computer terminal, fucking around with something between bouts of annoyed wing-scratching. He is molting, albeit a little later than usual. It sucks and there are probably black feathers lodged in odd places. As for the stations, well. He's still molting, just at a picnic table. He's perched right in its center, legs crossed beneath him, and sure is making an unnecessary amount of noise with a chip bag. In fact, he's surrounded by a downright implausible number of chip bags, some popped and some not, and some with an unusual orange-glowing property to them.

He may or may not ask if anyone wants to take some of these glowing chips. It's for science.]

Comments

[experiencepoints]

Then what does happen?

[feathery]

huh well
time always keeps moving you cant really keep it from inevitably rolling onward
kind of a thing you got to accept as part of "mastering time travel"
bullshit as those words together are because mastering time travel is an exercise in futility if there ever was one
so when you get fished out of the cosmic pond its not so much it freezes over until you get tossed back
but more that you can go back to the exact point in time you disappeared and pick up where you left off with no one any wiser
hypothetically you could drop back in anywhere in your timeline if thats an option
because thats where you needed to be
but thats a whole other minefield of terrible ideas

[experiencepoints]

Okay, so functionally the same thing.

[feathery]

yeah thats why theres not a whole lot of reason to get pedantic about it
you wouldnt believe the bs i been subjected to by these time lords though
at least i think thats what theyre called its been a while
same dude with half a dozen different faces and he wouldnt stand for it when i explained in laymans terms
made me update my guide and everything

[experiencepoints]

Sounds like a pain in the ass.
Kind of glad I don't have any time magic spells now, though.

[feathery]

its a huge pain in the ass
and kind of a waste to learn when the whole point seems to be learning not to use it in the first place
but so is magic a normal thing for you then
did you go to wizard school

[experiencepoints]

Magic's normal, yeah. I'm a mage, my best friend back home is a healer.
I'm not a wizard, wizards don't really have specific schools? I went to a normal school. Graduated high school, dropped out of college.

[feathery]

so youre like
legitimately 100% grownup then
damn
i never even made it to high school
though maybe it was sort of lacking anyway if magic was never a regular part of the curriculum

[experiencepoints]

I'm... at least 21, yeah?
But 'grownup' might be pushing it.
High school sucked anyway.
Junior high was worse, though. I had a teacher who made even magic boring as shit.

[feathery]

dude you too?
dimension hopping is the worst fucker of them all when it comes to keeping track of your age
im beginning to seriously doubt anyone here actually knows how old they are
but my education was pretty unorthodox in hindsight so i cant throw no shade
though making magic boring has got to be something you train professionally for
might as well make a feat like that a marketable skill

[experiencepoints]

Try dimension hopping and amnesia together.
It's a pain in the ass.
Plus my home uses a completely different calendar to this place.
I don't know how he did it, either. He was supposedly an amazing mage, but he was so boring.

[feathery]

yeah ill gladly pass on the amnesia its weird enough knowing i was already doing my fourth round at asgard and dont remember shit of those
they used a different calendar there too
like years were only six months and weeks didnt exist
how do you even begin to tally that up

[experiencepoints]

How many days in a month there?

[feathery]

30ish give or take
they didnt really use months much either honestly and just resorted to counting from specific events as far as i could tell
which was a stupidly inconvenient way of doing things but hey if it worked for them

[experiencepoints]

Huh.
Yeah... At my home, the calendar was way different.
Six days in a week, six weeks in a month, ten months in a year.
Trying to adjust to this one is driving me insane.

[feathery]

huh
its almost the same length total at least
360 days in a year for you right
unless your hours or minutes or seconds are different thats a whole other round of bullshit calendarisms
the dates they use here are the same ones i grew up with though so i got to miss out on readapting
even if it might not mean much in space

[experiencepoints]

They feel close.
The problem is, without a clock or something from my own home, it's pretty much entirely subjective if I can get what exactly one second or one minute feels like.
So I'm not stressing on that part too much.

[feathery]

yeah people are always saying time is relative anyway
but you were talking about time spells earlier
is that the usual fantasy fare of accelerating time or slowing it down
or is there more to it

[experiencepoints]

Speed up, slow down. Stop time on one target if you're really good at it.
The really high-level time mages can do things like layer time on itself, allowing one person to take two or three actions at the same time.
I've never seen that myself, but I understand it looks fucking weird.

[feathery]

ha
i bet it fucking does
so no time travel or any extreme possibly dimension damaging shit for you guys then

[experiencepoints]

... I can't say 'none'.
At least, at our current best guess, save points seem to interact with time somehow.
And it's possible some things like rituals might be able to do it.
They would be incredibly complicated, though.
But I don't want to say 'impossible'- There was apparently someone who used some kind of displacement ritual to teleport himself to one of the moons.
I never trained in that branch of magic, though.

[feathery]

wait hang on what do you mean by save points
like
video game save points

[His NPC game construct senses are tingling.]

[experiencepoints]

My world is not a game.
We had save points, yes.
When someone dies, they're brought back there, a bit weaker than when they saved.
But don't compare my life to a game.

[feathery]

sorry
i mean
my life WAS a game
not like the stuff you talked about in castleland but
an actual fucking video game
so thats why i was asking

[experiencepoints]

Oh.
Sorry.
It's... kind of a sore subject for me.
A lot of people before have started comparing my world to a video game and being huge assholes about it.
My world does have things like save points, and HP and MP, and classes, and all of that.
But it wasn't a game.