⇨ New Location: THE ATHENAEUM

[ringleaders]

PREPARATION↴ On Day 47, the carnival will find itself merged with the new location, the grounds moved from their usually dimension right into the middle of the Athenaeum. This mean everyone will be waking up to a carnival surrounded by bookshelves instead of trees - the major things being left behind are the forest, lake, and menagerie, which can be accessed through a convenient tree portal made by the Ringmaster. Otherwise, it's book time now, welcome to book city. SETTING↴ The Athenaeum is a city sized library realm comprised of absolutely nothing but hall after hall of books. Some rooms are well organized, vast and carefully categorized, while others are simply enormous piles of tomes with no rhyme or reason to their contents. Many cannot be read at all. The ones you can read, however, are a sampling of literature and history from all over the multiverse, in quantities beyond your comprehension. The catch? The only true way to find what you're looking for is to trust in fate. Literally. The books are cared for by a pair of celestial beings called the Curator and the Scribe. The Curator focuses on collecting and sorting books, both fiction and non-fiction, from all over the multiverse. Their idea of organization is esoteric to say the least, so finding your way around can be more than difficult. The Scribe, in contrast, is primarily a writer - they have penned millions of volumes of true stories from the multiverse, covering a random array of subjects from the beginning of time to the daily anecdotes of mortals in backwater galaxies. In fact, there are almost certain a few stories about you. The real challenge is finding them. You could spend and eternity here without finding what you are looking for. Magic meant to find specific items is non-functional, and brute forcing the process is impossible. All you can do is follow the whimsy of the Athenaeum's stores and find what you were meant to find. PATRONS↴ ► THE CURATOR: The more serious and reasonable of the beings, and prides themself on the idea of having the most expansive collection in the multiverse. They don't normally have a physical form, but they will occasionally take one for the convenience of visitors. Despite being willing to allow select groups to tour the Athenaeum, the Curator does not actually give away or lend out books without receiving something in return. Trying to take or destroy anything without permission will get you in a boat load of trouble. Thankfully, though, the Curator is open to trades - they are always interested in acquiring new or unique books, including stories written by your characters, and will sometimes trade them for volumes of other things they see as being easier to reacquire. They have to actually be some sort of quality, though - the Curator has standards. ► THE SCRIBE: The 'creative type' of the pair, the Scribe is gifted with spontaneous visions of events taking place all over the multiverse. These visions can be of the past, present, and even occasionally the future - the Scribe considers them all to be of great import, and diligently records all of them as they arrive, filling what is probably billions of manuscripts with stories and illustrations. These manuscripts have no real order or narrative purpose - each fragment of story can range from a single sentence to a few pages in length. While trading away these original manuscripts is unthinkable by the Scribe, they are happy to allow visitors to browse and record copies of their works. They may even remember you from one of their stories! They won't, however, remember where they put the book you feature in. ► FICTIONAL CHARACTERS: The nature of the Athenaeum's realm is such that sometimes the being and things from inside of the stories it contains come to life. This can include fictional characters from the Curator's vast collection, or even spectral copies of real people from the Scribe's manuscripts. None of these beings truly have a will outside of role in their own story's structure, but they can be convincing doppelgangers at first glance. These book ghosts are the creatures that the carnival will be performing for - the Scribe is under the impression that visitors make the books happy. In exchange, the carnival may have access to the Athenaeum's resources. DANGERS↴ ► FICTIONAL CHARACTERS: While many of the specters are perfectly innocuous, there is nothing dividing them from the evil and dangerous things in fiction, and within the Scribe's recorded history. It's entirely possible that certain characters or imagined beings may threaten carnival visitors - the best way to fight back against them is to improvise a story back at them, and to play by their stories rules while turning events so that you come out as the winner. Suffice to say, it will be difficult if you aren't a creative type. ► NON-FICTIONAL CHARACTERS: You'll have to wait to see which ones. REWARDS↴ So, it's pretty obvious that the bulk of what you're going to find here is information - which is good, because it's exactly what the Ringmaster chose this location for! If anywhere would have a record of the Queen's Miracles, it'd be this place... the only trouble is actually finding it. Characters will be able to help search for relevant metaplot information and also personal gain, with key information being dealt out based on RNG sign ups. The only catch is that if you sign up for metaplot clues, your character must be willing to share. Sitting on or hiding important plot info won't be allowed long term. Characters will also be able to find Scribe-written stories about the past or future of their own canon, as well as other people's canons, but only with the permission of everyone involved. All Scribe stories will be written as if they are a fairy tale or legend, meaning they will not have much in the way of character introspection or details. The Scribes writing is more like a collection of disjointed fables than anything with a coherent narrative structure - in fact, many of the events they describe have no real point or context in the format they are written. They are all true, however, though the wording may be unintentionally confusing or misleading. Some are accompanied by drawings. You do not need mod permission to play around with information about your own character, but you can't find info about other characters or canons without getting their approval. There will be a place where players can submit pre-written tales based on their character that are open to be found by anyone who wants to, or you can just plan private discoveries among your CR. CHANGES↴ Changes may possibly result from getting wound up in the reality of certain legends and stories. The specifics of this will vary from case to case, however, and will be explained in more depth later. Beyond that, this is a PLOTTING POST, which means you can use it to make plans! The game chat is also a great place to discuss plots, so we welcome you to pop on in if you haven't already! The calendar has been updated with event timing.

Comments

[prazerbutterfly]

Trying not to throw the Noah goal out there as that would ruin a lot of CR, as it always does, but if you want a good one I could let him find out something on a major killing. There was this time he hunted down a group of exorcists because they were on his 'delete' list and one of them really didn't want to die and begged for mercy.

Instead of killing him, he implanted a Tease inside of his chest. He then told him he wouldn't kill him if he gave him the location of everyone on his 'delete' list. The frightened Exorcist named Suman Dark did so and on that day 105 Finders and Exorcists died as a result by his hand or the information he received that led to it. Sure, it's a war and that was his enemy but it's still 105 deaths in one day.

[spaghettimonster]

I'll need to think about how to work that! The appeal of Noah is, it's relevant and also less bad than the Void version, and Papyrus is a rare instance of "...well the important thing is you're not killing people right now" and meaning it. But I get you, it could be tricky to have him keep it himself, and if it spreads, there goes a lot of other cr.

This story is pretty good - he listened to the call for mercy, gave an opportunity for it... but used it as a tool to find a litt of others to kill. And it's unclear from that if any of the 105 also asked for mercy... Definitely a cause for concern, and confusion given Tyki doesn't seem very murdery.

[prazerbutterfly]

Yeaaaaah, like I would love to give it to you OOCly and also because I think it would be kind of fun to sort of throw that out there given how Harbingers were and how Noah are a little different in terms of not destroying to just destroy. They are doing it to destroy and renew the world again. But, I know better than to let hype overule that. Past experience has shown this is a bad idea. Sometimes he ends up an outcast and throwing that out there technically let's Tyki off his self leash. If everyone knows then why pretend anymore, ya know?

In the end, Tyki doesn't kill him but because he betrayed his Innocence by trying to leave and not kill the Noah, it turns on him, turning into a "Fallen One", a giant monster with no head or arms or legs that. He dies to a bunch of Tease breeding inside of him and exploding outwards at once. Suman became a shell of a man, the body remained intact but the soul was now gone. So the Tease ate him.

I'll leave it up to you how much Pap wants to read of that.

[spaghettimonster]

Oohh, I'd forgotten that, but now that you say it I remember you mentioning the self-leash idea before; that Tyki's behaving partly because nobody knows and so he can do so w/o suspicion. A kind of novelty and vacation from his usual things. Remind me to go check out some of Allen's threads, I want to see what manner of truce they arrived at. :3c

NGL that's more troubling (to me ooc, probably also to Papyrus) than the overall Noah goal, part because of the specific vs statistic scale, part just because those are some awful details.

I'll drop some of those details and go more metaphorical. The thing of Tyki sparing the guy who begged for mercy - in exchange for using him as a tool to find his allies and kill a lot more people, that's good villainy stuff. The part of the guy's own powers turning on him as a result, that's good tragic stuff. The details after that... It might be best to brush over that with metaphor like "his powers turned him into an egg, and the egg hatched"...

[justresetalready]

His whole role, even at home, is appearing to be that Victorian Noble Gentleman that many adore. Once that's compromised, there is hardly any point in continuing. If his public face is already ruined he'll be too lazy to keep it up. He'll be more open than he already is about the idea of killing and etc. It's just how he is. Not much mannerisms wise might change as he'll still seek out friendship and etc. Just a good handful also will be wary around him and he enjoys the comfortable standpoints he has with people.

Hmm, yeah that works. I'm good to go with all of this.

[spaghettimonster]

More nodding, wanting to make sure your character's playable in a way that doesn't mess up all the cr dynamics while we're still a good ways from the end game, that makes sense.

Awesome! First idea coming to mind for how to go forward, I can hit up your top-level with a thread about this, so Papyrus could be reading it as he walks, it seems like Tyki's cat-stalking anybody who finds anything from his home. Yea, Nay, or a somewhat changed idea?

...Also I was very startled by suddenly Flowey in my inbox, I'd forgotten this was your account for him!

[prazerbutterfly]

That works. Tyki is in fact cat stalking a lot of people right now to ensure no one finds anything from home but unfortunately he cannot stop those that have been already reading it. Not to mention depending on how sensitive the information is he might try to steal it. Thankfully this is not incredibly sensitive info but could be damaging.

Sorry xD LJ Jogger shoved that up there before I noticed that was the journal it defaulted to.