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help i'm trapped in a poll i don't know why i'm here i'm so scared someone please help

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Total Members Voted: 50

[flabort]

I have a feeling we're going to be wasting a lot of time reminding trollsthose out of tune with the blorble who slog is.

[Vgray]

Slog is the mandatory joke character. Who we keep around because he's so cute. And because we need the inventory space.

[EmeraldWind]

Everyone in the Warrens is destined to lose Soul Charge right? Turning them into an (w)Illborn.

What if the only reason Al isn't an Illborn is because he kept killing violent Silents(there had to be at least a few that were probably strictly violent-murderspree)
What if we are the only reason he is not an Illborn!

Illborn are described as those that have no Soul Charge. It was also hinted early on when we wanted to smash the Influx into an enemy and during the sinister talk panels prior to Riltia's transformation that causing harm to the Soul Star has an effect on the owner.

Riltia didn't have her Soul Star on hand. So I imagine that a Willborn is an Illborn that still has its Soul Star. This might be what allows the Spirit duel to take place. Ciro mentioned they were fighting inside a corrupted Soul. Ciro said a Spirit Duel was the only way to handle them because she had tried before. Furthermore, from some of the information given I would assume that Riltia was actually just an Illborn... powerful, but still lacking a Soul Star.

While thinking of this I realize why Riltia attempted to go after Cherish. Cherish is still normal and had a sudden burst of Soul Charge due to... well... pretty much everything that happened leading into the next chapter. Al killing Wilford. Riltia dying. Riltia undying. Cherish was probably positively glowing with Soul Charge at that moment.

Back to Yaos. I don't think everyone is going to lose their Soul Charge because they entered the Warrens, but because they ARE IN the Warrens. I'm starting to think that the Warrens is like a farm. Get people to come in. Have adventures. Go through hardships. Get strong and then finally be defeated at the hands of the Guardians (Siblings). Ciro though seems to be the main crop though. So perhaps part of the point is to get people to follow Ciro to give Ciro something to lose. Yaos is unique that we seen because of the nature of his Soul Star. It was giving him "free" stuff, but was the stuff truly free.

The red numbers were a debt. Naturally this debt was being taken from his Soul Charge. Think of the items and SP as a loan from a bank. You do not need to pay right away. Towards the end I got the idea that if items were coming out of the Star perhaps there was a way to put them back in or at least put something back in like HP or SP. Sort of like, the red number represented what was supposed to be paid, but if you defaulted it took away the obvious thing. Sort of like when someone loses a car for not making a car payment.

Which takes us back to the bleeding. Perhaps its a sign when Soul Charge is being taken forcefully from a character.

Yaos for whatever reason simply had a Soul Star with a power that was detrimental to his survival in the Warrens. Perhaps the reasoning behind the Soul Stars powers with reveal why later on. I mean so far we've had Astral Influx which seems to deal with Astral projection in a broad sense and has the ability to change the course of events. Illborn Exchange deals with recruiting Illborn. And the Orange Star (Asynchrony Catalyst) has teleporation abilities (if we're correct about that). As we find out more about the Soul Stars and their owners there might be a reason for what their Stars do. I would guess somewhat by Yaos and his attitude towards his end of paying debt he felt he owed due to being a Prodigy might be a first major hint toward this. It sounded like it was something that bothered him longer than just in the Warrens.

Also just to point out. Yaos didn't leave behind a Soul Star after the Spirit Duel. I think he's more than simply dead.

edit: ninjis... ninjis in the trees.

[javierpwn]

We "purified" his soul.
Pretty sure that means we annihilated his Soul, completely leaving him without a trace.

I have the feeling Willborn are people who willingly give themselves up to abandoning Soul Charge; Yaos willfully just gave up after his revelation of trespassing, and wanting to pay back his debt.

[monk12]

It will be interesting to see what kind of Soul Charge Cherish currently has (assuming it shows up in the next update, now that she's a willing member of the party. If it doesn't, we really need to figure out why her and Al's Soul Charge's aren't listed in our little readout.)

[javierpwn]

Probably because Cherish became the active "owner" of the Illborn Exchange. Now that she is (hopeully) in oh active party, we can see her Charge!(unless she is Illborn)

[IronyOwl]

Here's the thing, how likely would we have been to try if we didn't recruit Al into the Active Party to begin with? We don't even know if we can switch perspective to somebody not in the party (though it seems likely, given how many time FFS prompted us about "do you really want to bash Betweenford with the Astral Influx?")

Considering FFS had to ask us if we really wanted to bash someone upside the head with the damned thing? Fairly likely, I'd say. Adventurers in general and Ciro in particular are known for doing strange things.

Hell, we had some support for switching to Slog. Now that would have been a strange cycle.

More importantly, though, I think the defining split is that A) We died right after switching characters and B) The character we switched to was Al, who has so much frustration and resentment penned up from his time in the Warrens he went and killed Riltia and Wilford. Switching to Al was where it started, but everything that happened after that is what escalated the situation.

I don't really see the connection or the mechanism here. Do we have any tangible reason to suspect switching to Al was different than Al doing Al things on his own? Different to us doesn't necessarily mean different in any practical aspect.

Also, just how aberrant is this cycle? We keep talking about how everything's gone off the rails, but I'm having a hard time remembering where anyone said that's the case other than some intercepted chatter suggesting anomalies.

I mean, near as I can tell, the only truly strange things would be:

Ciro oversouling to save Riltia
Cherish running off to join Proxxy

The first required Ciro to care about Riltia, but shouldn't have needed anything else except for Riltia to die or die in a certain manner. The voice even suggested she would have "learned this trick" or similar in a few levels anyway, so possibly not even that.

The second might be relatively unique because Proxxy told Cain it didn't make sense for him to have been wondering about her minion "for a while," though that could just mean she hadn't acquired any help this cycle. But in either case, I can't really see the massive, reality-warping significance of Proxxy having a goon with soul charge.

The one that was about as useful as a flea that carried our stuff and took hits for us. Rather cute though.

Just think of the joy at seeing him returned as a chance to gain soul charge.

Plus, he works for free. If all we have to do is run around a bunch to get him gibbed instead of us, I'd consider that time well spent.

Riltia didn't have her Soul Star on hand. So I imagine that a Willborn is an Illborn that still has its Soul Star. This might be what allows the Spirit duel to take place. Ciro mentioned they were fighting inside a corrupted Soul. Ciro said a Spirit Duel was the only way to handle them because she had tried before. Furthermore, from some of the information given I would assume that Riltia was actually just an Illborn... powerful, but still lacking a Soul Star.

This seems pretty excessive to me, considering that there's nothing particularly impressive about Illborn, and indeed nothing that impressive about someone with a Soul Star. The notion that the difference between being a monster (or just a guy; remember, some villagers are Illborn) and a full-on boss battle is whether you're carrying your star around when you run out of juice seems odd to me.

While thinking of this I realize why Riltia attempted to go after Cherish. Cherish is still normal and had a sudden burst of Soul Charge due to... well... pretty much everything that happened leading into the next chapter. Al killing Wilford. Riltia dying. Riltia undying. Cherish was probably positively glowing with Soul Charge at that moment.

Oh yeah. I'd assumed it was just because new Riltia loved Cherish already!

Which raises an interesting question: If Riltia had succeeded in killing Al or Cherish, what would have happened to her? Would she have returned to normal? Transformed in some other way? Been totally unaffected because there was a lot more going on than "she's Illborn now?"

Back to Yaos. I don't think everyone is going to lose their Soul Charge because they entered the Warrens, but because they ARE IN the Warrens. I'm starting to think that the Warrens is like a farm. Get people to come in. Have adventures. Go through hardships. Get strong and then finally be defeated at the hands of the Guardians (Siblings). Ciro though seems to be the main crop though. So perhaps part of the point is to get people to follow Ciro to give Ciro something to lose. Yaos is unique that we seen because of the nature of his Soul Star. It was giving him "free" stuff, but was the stuff truly free.

The red numbers were a debt. Naturally this debt was being taken from his Soul Charge. Think of the items and SP as a loan from a bank. You do not need to pay right away. Towards the end I got the idea that if items were coming out of the Star perhaps there was a way to put them back in or at least put something back in like HP or SP. Sort of like, the red number represented what was supposed to be paid, but if you defaulted it took away the obvious thing. Sort of like when someone loses a car for not making a car payment.

This totally ignores the conversation(s) Ciro and Yaos had, though. They were saying it was the penalty for him coming into the Warrens or possibly the cost of his power, not the cost of getting something for nothing but only because he was in the Warrens and that's not the point in the Warrens.

They were also saying coming into the Warrens isn't something you can just do, which is rather counterproductive if it only exists for people to come on in and then die.

Yaos for whatever reason simply had a Soul Star with a power that was detrimental to his survival in the Warrens. Perhaps the reasoning behind the Soul Stars powers with reveal why later on. I mean so far we've had Astral Influx which seems to deal with Astral projection in a broad sense and has the ability to change the course of events. Illborn Exchange deals with recruiting Illborn. And the Orange Star (Asynchrony Catalyst) has teleporation abilities (if we're correct about that). As we find out more about the Soul Stars and their owners there might be a reason for what their Stars do. I would guess somewhat by Yaos and his attitude towards his end of paying debt he felt he owed due to being a Prodigy might be a first major hint toward this. It sounded like it was something that bothered him longer than just in the Warrens.

I don't entirely buy that, but it's true that he mentioned always feeling like he was destined to die young in exchange for the power he wielded.

Speaking of which, we never actually found out why he entered the Warrens, did we?

[Corai]

Yaos said he came to the Warrens to learn about and acquire new and powerful weapons and armor I think.

[IronyOwl]

Yaos said he came to the Warrens to learn about and acquire new and powerful weapons and armor I think.

That does sound right, actually. A bit mundane, but I suppose everyone needs hobbies.

[miauw62]

Next time we go Oversoul, we could use it to revive Slog, obviously!

[GreatWyrmGold]

Fair enough, though worst case we've established that Al can't have been down here for longer than 8-9 years; if he came in after Cherish, he couldn't well do that before she was born.

...Where was it said that Al came in after Cherish?

Remind me, what happened a fraction of a turn before we died?
We switched the perspective to Al.
I'm not sure what this did, in-character; maybe it let some of Ciro's vital essence seep inside Al to keep his spirit tethered to the world and stop it from reincarnating?

I'm really thinking that this is the thing we did different from every previous cycle. The branching point from which all other discrepancies arise.

Why do I keep feeling like pointing out that these things seem obvious?
Of course, depending on how long the Cycles have been going on...

Well, yes, to an extent I'm just restating what everyone else has already concluded. In part I do it because it's worth remembering what our base assumptions are for other theories (in case new information breaks them and everything resting on them,) and in part because if we want this cycle to turn out different than the previous cycles, we should probably pay close attention to what makes this cycle unique. At this point, that means the recruitment of Al (who seems to be a wildcard in the broader context of the Warrens) and all the consequences of what happened in Chapter 2.

True.
Although I imagine knowledge of how it USUALLY works won't be much good or very accurate, given how chaos theory says that the smallest of changes have bigger effects as they bounce around and snowball.

Here's a question- when Riltia fell in the acid, Oric/Betweenford went all Deus Ex Machina to keep her alive in order to perpetuate the cycle. So why didn't they act when Ciro died before that? Were they unable (as he possessed his own Soul Star) or unwilling (they really do want him dead-dead) or were they trying but just offscreen? That whole bomb in the mailbox really could have been intended solely to get Al and Ciro's body out of Underside and into the Greens, where he could be revived. Implying they don't know about Al and his vampire revival that was already going to happen.

Or maybe there was something in the acid that acted as a catalyst, causing the mutation or letting it happen?
Did any other non-Illborn fall in? Maybe we should toss Milli's corpse in the acid pool (when our lives aren't currently in much peril and we feel like remedying that while performing science)?

Part of my is against desecrating the dead, but mostly we can't do it because we don't have Mili's corpse anymore.

What happened to it?

Wilford fell in. On the one hand, his method of entry was the same as Al's, which might have protected him from becoming an Illborn. On the other hand, we know Al gets attacked all the time because he isn't Illborn, and Wilford didn't have that problem. Either his Soul Charge is too low to matter, or he's Illborn.

My head hurts. Figuratively. So, it doesn't hurt at all.
I also forgot that Wilford fell in. Alright, one less bit of potentially-lethal-or-omnicidal science to do.

I'm really thinking that this is the thing we did different from every previous cycle. The branching point from which all other discrepancies arise.

Could that be the case, though? It's not like we knew what we were doing with that thing, and we would probably have had it pretty often in these cycles, right? I guess this cycle or that occurence could be strange, not unique, but it seems strange that this would have been the very first time ever we pressed the shiny star and ended up as someone else.

Here's the thing, how likely would we have been to try if we didn't recruit Al into the Active Party to begin with? We don't even know if we can switch perspective to somebody not in the party (though it seems likely, given how many time FFS prompted us about "do you really want to bash Betweenford with the Astral Influx?") More importantly, though, I think the defining split is that A) We died right after switching characters and B) The character we switched to was Al, who has so much frustration and resentment penned up from his time in the Warrens he went and killed Riltia and Wilford. Switching to Al was where it started, but everything that happened after that is what escalated the situation.

The changes caused changes when they hit unchanged things, the changed changes caused more changes, and it all just got worse from there. Or at least differenter.

The one that was about as useful as a flea that carried our stuff and took hits for us. Rather cute though.

You left out how he wasted SP during combat on pretty lights which weren't being used to set enemies on fire.

Next time we go Oversoul, we could use it to revive Slog, obviously!

AFTER making the time-travel thingy.

-----

Re: "Hitting Betweenford on the Head":
That could have had a lot of effects, from angering Betweenford ("Did you just hit me with your Soul Star?" "My what?") to destroying the Astral Influx ("Everyone knows Soul Stars are fragile!" "What are fragile?").

Re: "Changes":
How about when Al brought us back to life? Or Riltia turning into an Illborn? Or recruiting an upper minion of a Sibling? Or Yaos?...
And when the people in charge are noting anomalies, something weird is going on...

Re: "RIlltia":
To figure out why she was as monstrous as she is would probably require us understanding why she became an Illborn at all.
If it was a deliberate act, the intent was presumably to allow RIlltia to escape the pool of acid.

[Harbingerjm]

And when the people in charge are noting anomalies, something weird is going on...

That may well happen every cycle.

[javierpwn]

Yaos said he came to the Warrens to learn about and acquire new and powerful weapons and armor I think.

he came to the Warrens to look for A powerful weapon.

He came for Oversoul; which was described as a weapon sought after by kings.

A power sought out by evil rulers and corrupt dictators for millenea. One time-wrought eye gives life, another takes it. Total control. Total domination. Total and complete power.

This translation also says that a life must be given, in order for another to take it.

[miauw62]

Seriously, diesdoes nobody remember Ciro mentioning Willborn during the Yaos soul fight?

[javierpwn]

"That doesn't sound good. What is going on here anyway?"

This is what happens when you read the thread 8 times over for THEORYCRAFTING; you remember every little detail