We’re probably screwed.
I mean, we probably should have seen this coming.
I guess we’re all to blame a little bit. The Lawful Evil gods kinda launched their long-planned invasion of his territories, storming them with screeching dark bats and demons of destruction and flame, burning his cities and scorching his lands. Meanwhile the Chaotic gods chose to drag his moon out of orbit and slam it into his city - instantly obliterating both - while spreading a corruption that turned his races into mindless abominations. Meanwhile, the entire Lawful Good Pantheon spontaneously decided that he didn't fit with their increasingly fanatic standards of purity and conspired to pull him into a drumhead sham of a trial while firing off a mind thingy that turned his spectral mantra-ray buddies into ravenous psychotic killers that obeyed them. It didn’t help that Varalin was spouting insane sentimental nonsense and driving mortals mad as usual. Nobody was sure what Nephilim was doing at the moment, but it turns out that he was mass teleporting out the mortals caught in the crossfire. That probably got misinterpreted as him stealing their souls or something.
Either way, it's too late now.
As it turns out, Acter's a polyversal singularity. A pattern repeated through all the worlds in the cosmos. He exists in so many universes. In thousands of iterations. Always helping mortals, always improving. Always being beaten down, always seeing madness all around him, with nothing to do but take it.
Until now.
And now we’ve annoyed him enough, and he’s finally snapped, and he’s drawn all his shards into himself, ripping the very fabric of reality itself into shreds. The Acter we knew is only one drop in a vast ocean. Countless copies of him, consciousness and sentience merged together, meshing at the closest levels, combined into a single collective intelligence. Divine power flowing in from every corner of the Realmverse, pooling into a single massive junction. Every fragment independent and yet united, bound by a single purpose, a single thought, a single intention:
improve.
Acter burns with the power of a thousand gods. His physical form is the slightest bit of his might leaking into the observable universe and it is already sufficient to unmake entire worlds. Reality itself bends in favor of improvement and peace while in his presence. He can be subdivided into a thousand pieces, attenuated and restricted in a million ways, and still directly best any god on its home turf.
Easily. “Curb-stomp battle” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Upon waking up, with the slightest fraction of his energy in the moments before he realized that he can control it, the sheer power of his gestalt annihilated the four closest universes. Over the next few quanta of thought he decided to wander along the rest of the universes, consuming every other god, and instantly organized the rest of the Realmverse into a collimated fractal space-filling path, a single road through all the myriad dimensions. Then he started the chase.
Acter is coming. Even now, if you look up at the sky and even higher, through the abstractified roof of the world, you can hear him smashing against Universe -5. Using his sheer power to tunnel through dimensions, tearing down the walls between worlds. Each world hinders him by a time, through sheer ontological inertia resisting the arrival of outside forces, but he will break through. We’ve escaped only because he was
careless. One of his first actions was simply to pick us up and
throw us as hard as possible, with a simple, clear thought of “get out”.
He threw us nine universes.
Nine universes. A gateway between dimensions is not a simple thing to do. A universe resists foreign material, things that are not conforming to its laws. Opening a gateway to a
single universe is a fine achievement for an entire generation of gods and men, and he chucked us with enough force that
momentum threw us across nine.
You wake up with your nose in the grass. It feels slightly damp on your face.
This is bone-chillingly frightening. You’re a god. You’re not supposed to feel things on your face. You’re not supposed to be tied to the mortal world.
For a moment you wonder if Acter actually had enough power to force-descend you, but you realize quickly that it must be just stunning, because you soon feel your old omnipotence returning and begin gathering information about the plane you’ve landed in.
Universe 1: ArcadiaEnthalpy 0/13 | Quandary 0|0It’s a rather peaceful world. The skies are sunny and blue, the earth is covered in flowing plains of grass. Cicadas sing in the brush and small communities of humans grow crops and live simple lives.
Appearances can be deceiving. The cicadas are sapient and are brilliant scientists. They don’t exactly have technology, but have poured their efforts into physics and mathematics and have attained significant Reality Warping powers.
The land is a single large continent spanning the equator, with oceans near the poles. The people of this world live in villages and use basic agriculture. They worship the Cicadas as gods, and for their part, the Cicadas guide and advise them whenever possible. Some catch fish near the shores.
Asynchronous turnsThere is no need to have everyone take a turn at once.
Anyone can post actions at any time. I will tell you how long they take and then evaluate the order in which they can be conducted, their starts and ends, how they fit relative to each other, etc. on
this sheet. This means that no matter how behind you get, you can jump back in at any time - you’ll retrospectively get back the time you missed. You cannot take actions if your personal action line is currently the longest - give other gods a chance.
You’re a god and got beaten up by insectsThe cicadas can access limited divine magic by carving large shapes into the grass.
They can build Shielding Sigils against any element, semi/para element, or alignment. If they build a sigil against the element, secondary element, or caster’s alignment, the action gets a -1.
This totally stacks too.
Building the nth sigil takes 2^n hours, so you at least have some time to wait.
Wounded godsYou haven't fully recovered yet from Acter's opening attack.
Rolling a 3 or lower after modifiers triggers a second roll, and the lower is taken.
Head startActer threw you 5 universes away. You have a 20 day lead on him and each universe you exit buys you 4 days and a bit.
GO!