See my reflection in the water and meditate about myself and my place in the universe
4
You realise that you're next to a lake.
+1 understanding attempt to break the environmentalist's neck
2
+1You can't tell where she is, being in a canyon and all. But you try to levitate out.
You concentrate hard, and feel yourself floating off the ground. When you're about halfway up, reality notices that someone's playing silly buggers, and deposits you into a fissure in the rock.
Continue not thinking. Only by maintaining a state of mindlessness can true enlightenment be achieved
1
You attempt to clear your head, but you start to notice every detail of your surroundings. Once all sensory stimulus has been removed, you find yourself calculating the result of the US presidential elections in your head, as well as listing the titles of every song ever written with the word "cod" in it. You start to discover new facts about the universe without observing it.
-1 Beasthood+1 Understanding Meditate and move one of the boulders with my mind.
4
You attempt to move the boulder psychically, but lack sufficient understanding. But you do spend a really long time thinking about boulders. So long you start to get faint from lack of sleep or water.
+1 Understanding+1 Geology rollsBreathe in the fumes, imbibe the fumes, embrace the fumes.
1
You place your lips around the exhaust and breathe in hard. You begin to understand more and more about the nature of a bus exhaust, and soon experience yourself as floating out of the engine to mingle with the air, get breathed in by people or move through the leaves of plants to form glucose... you come off your high exhilerated. But with power comes dependence.
+1 Understanding
+1 Spirit Walking
State gained: Addicted to Carbon Monoxide fumes> Meditate on the true essence of enlightenment.
4
You conclude that the true essence of enlightenment is Cucumber extract. Your calculations are looking a bit dodgy, but you learnt a lot about the universe.
+1 UnderstandingDamit! how many times do I have to say this: Blood is not equal to water! And frankly, murdoc tasted terrible anyway. Vomit it all back up, and go find some REAL food and water.
3
You cleanse your stomach. You then look about for a source of easily digested, warm, soft, wet food. Oh look, there's something that fits all those criteria. You eat the delicious vomit-soup off the floor.
+1 Beasthood
I go into the depths of the Wild and survive only through my wits and strength.
2
Days later, you crawl out of the depths of the wild, having subsisted on inedible mushrooms, nasty river water and wood for a week. You stumble into the nearest McDonalds, who have a special on for anyone with more than fifteen snakebites on their torso.
Crawl to the summit- I shall never give up.
5
You crawl onwards, then stumble onwards, having splinted your ankle, then stride onwards as it heals, then ride onwards as you catch and domesticate a herd of mountain goats. The snow stops above the clouds, but the peak is still miles above you, stretching out of Earth's atmosphere and into vacuum.
Seal myself into my apartment and get naked.
Then start a mail-order business.
5
Following in the footsteps of thousands of american entrepreneurs, you strip and, with only a chequebook, paper, stamps and pencils, create the beginnings of a financial empire, as well as a great deal of currencey. The nudist lifestyle suits you, working long hours keeps you slim and the balcony is ideal for sunbathing.
Now to Meditate
1
Given that you have lost any pretensions of self-control or humanity, it does not go well. You retreat into your mind. When you emerge after a period of intense contemplation, you find your body having carnal relations with a bear.
+1 Beasthood+1 Mortification of the Flesh: you no longer care about the state of your body, but remain entirely detached. You no longer feel pain or disgust.
Reincarnate as a bear.
3
You suceed in the worst possible way. See above post for details.
Use the pain to ascend!
4
You force yourself to focus on the pain, like a thousand elephants dancing on your scalp. You slowly realise that the pain your body feels is entirely apart from the pain your mind thinks it experiences. Also, waterfalls just have these totally buddhist vibes, you know? Really psychs you up. Anyway, you realise some pretty deep shit man. It's totally out there.
You levitate thirty feet into the sky with the shock of the realisations.
Sarrak has attained transcendence.Abilities gained: Spirit Walking, Levitation, Mortification of the Flesh, Telekinesis+2 to all Hermit rollsCompare humanity to divinity
5
Humanity's better. Nah, divinity. Actually humanity. Wait, no, that's wrong... what if they're the same?
The theological problem boosts your mind onto a new level.
+1 Understanding"Oh! Oh! OHHHHHH! OH, BABY! I FEEL AN EPIPHANY COMING ON!"
Tighten my grip on the wheel, press down the accelerator with my spare hand and close my eyes to better focus on the underlying lessons to be learned from this strange, cosmically unlikely, highly dangerous-yet-comedic situation. Concentrate on Putting Things In Perspective.
6
The camera pans in for a really extreme closeup of your eye, and everything goes still. You blink, and your eye changes colour each time, like that bit in
2001: A Space Odyssey. You feel aware of the guy grabbing your foot and the wing mirror, the hermit getting high on the engine fumes somehow, your tenuous grip on the wheel, the fifteen fences and one llama stuck to the battered front of the bus, the small child with the pet alpaca who you traumatised for life several miles back, the position and occupation of every bus on the continent, the boredom of every bus driver in the world, the sweat on the moustache of the first man ever to drive a collection of people somewhere in an automobile for money, the celestial bus drivers that will take humanity to the stars in precisely one thousand and thirteen years time, the movement of the continents with their passengers of living organisms that were the first true bus drivers on the planet, the snails that carry tiny plankton on their shells from current to current in their millions under the unending seas, and the individual atoms of every large motor vehicle carrying passengers by road in all of history.
+2 Everything bus-relatedFind other hermits and unite them with a message of peace among crabs.
4
You make an alliance with the other hermit crabs, and set up communal food storage facilities with guards and organisers. Peace offers to the Fiddler crabs are tentatively considered.
Poobah, Andres, Sosoku234, Demonic Spoon VishdaFish, NDRL, I Writer and zizzo have attained
understanding.Sarrak has attained
transcendance.Dustan Hache, Demonic Spoon and crazyabe have attained
mindlessness.Ardent Debater, crazyabe and Dustan Hache have attained
beasthood.
Yoink has attained
bus-related enlightenment.