Okay, maybe those two players who hadn't posted yet got a
lot more time. Let's see here...
Including the Positive Plane part again here, because it's technically part of the same turn.
Positive plane:what once"As You command my liege. I have 1 request, that you grant me vitality that I may live longer to serve you. What is your command?"
If he gives me vitality continue in this plane to talk with him. If he does not give me vitality leave for the positive corona. In either case do as he commands.
New stipulation: I will do whatever the god in the positive plane commands.
"FOR YOUR VITALITY TO RETURN TO YOU, THERE WILL NEED TO BE AN ACT OF TRUE FAITH. A PROOF THAT YOU ARE MORE THAN SOME SPIRIT. THAT PEOPLE TAKE YOU AS THEIR god. Yes, then, when your words are sung by many, a few of those many will find a need to sacrifice for an ideal. You will be just one such ideal. AND ONCE THE ACT OF TRUE FAITH IS DONE, THE EXAMPLE IT SETS SHALL MAKE YOU STRONGER. PRaiaSe is eNOUGH to be POWERFUL, A draw for EssenSe. But power alone is not enough to Be defended. And so PRAISE is not nearly enough for an immortal. YOU NEED SACRIFICE, THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN FIND TRUE, unCORRUPTED faith IS SACRIFICE. And without true faith, your vitality can only go down. No matter how careful you are, without a way to regain your vitality, some day you will die. You are mortal. Hardly a god, far from it."As the One True God speaks, the environment around begins to vary. One moment He is the burning symbol before you, but the next you are both seated, in a strangely murky old living room, with a ceiling fan above. At a sudden twist in His speech, the room fades away and is replaced by a busy supermarket, with springy shades of people going about their day-to-day. Finally, when He speaks of sacrifice, you slip through the wall and find yourself in a darkened room with a large stone slab taking up most of the center. There's a body of some sort laying on the slab, but it's covered by a tarp.
Without thinking, you step forth and remove the veil. On the slab is the corpse of a woman, quite cold. She's in a relaxed pose and the only injuries present are a slit throat, and a symbol carved into her chest by some shallow blade. The symbol seems familiar of course, but...
Ah, the purity of the white. It looks pure to cursory examination, but take a closer look and you'll see cracks. And this symbol is those cracks. The impurity of this place, that which differentiates it from just a plain expanse of Positive energy, is in that symbol. Or rather, the symbol is a simplified version of all that.
Thinking about it has caused the symbol to be fully written into your mind. Seeing your mind as a clanking clockwork office, you find the symbol painted over your window. Annoyed, the private investigator reaches for the sign and tries to remove it, but those eldritch lines instead begin to glow red-hot, and begin to spread.
When you come to, you find yourself under a new Stipulation.
[Stipulation gained: Must always follow the will of the One True God.]
God appears before you.
"I have thought on it, and there is a way for you to regain your Vitality without having to find followers. You can simply be my follower. Should you perform an Act Of True Faith on my behalf, it would revitalize the both of us.
GO NOW. SERVE ME WELL OR I WILL SIMPLY RIP YOU APART, AND CONSUME WHAT REMAINS."[In here, something about the light prevents Vitality loss. You could probably live here yourself forever. Would you want to, however?]
Vitality: 30/100
Essence: 0
Drain: 50
Stipulations:
Must always follow the will of the One True God.
Negative corona:The area directly outside the Negative plane. It is dark and ominous. Life could bloom here, but it would be defined by dark. Gods in this location passively absorb 7 Essence per turn.
There are a few small realities here. Four small and empty bubbles, one ball of liquid hydrogen, and one boiling sphere of liquid water, with the beginnings of an ecosystem churning within it. Doomed, if not for dark.Go to the negative plane. I should then have 15 essence. Proceed:
[2] Flatten void into vacuum - in the shape of a sphere. Large enough to fit a large body of mass, and some left over.
[6] Create a large body of mass - water in the darkness.
[1] Create a small amount of normal material - nourishing, warm air above the water
[1] Create a small amount of normal material - tiny pieces of raw nutrition, floating throughout the water.
[1] Create a small amount of normal material - moss or algae of a sort, but capable of flourishing in water and darkness, fed by the molecules of food in the water.
[4] Grant life to something inanimate - the moss
"Life."
You create space from void, in the shape of a sphere. A good amount of room. [-2 Essence]
Next you make a decent sphere of liquid water. It's a little sea in the darkness, but it doesn't have enough mass to hold itself together via gravity and so the surface immediately begins to boil out into space, turning into water vapor. [-6 Essence]
Next, you create some atmosphere, mostly a warm mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. It helps to seal in the boiling water a little, but you're not able to create very much on your Essence budget, and the warm nature of the air lets it expand a little faster than otherwise. [-1 Essence]
You create some complex organic chemicals in the water, which should serve as the building blocks of life. Hopefully? [-1 Essence]
Finally, you turn your attention to creating the first life of this little world. An autotroph, of course... but there's no light, so no photosynthesis, of course. The darkness here is nurturing, in a way, but you're not quite sure yet how to leverage that as an organic energy source. Eventually you decide to weave a colony of single-cellular organisms, adapted to live in water, with a sort of... general spiritual connection, that hopefully will be enough to draw on the darkness here. A moment of tinkering later, and it is done. But the colony does not yet live. [-1 Essence]
You reach out and touch the moss, willing it to live. Visualizing how it should use the structures you've given it. After a moment of listening, the matter grinds to work. Replicating DNA, regulating internal pressure, splitting, reaching out with it's spiritual organelles, crying out for help. Life. [-4 Essence]
Your colony of spirit-connected algae gets to work consuming the fuel you planted. For now this is enough to keep the balance, but the growth is unsustainable. However, you can feel its spiritual plea. You should be able to keep this organism alive by feeding it your own Essence.
Of course, the dark reaches into the space, feeling it out. It whispers softly with ten thousand voices.
"Who? Finally, someone else? Another lost soul. Such longing. Confused. Cold, like us. what cruel being did this? It feels, calls out to us."Drained from your work, you feel the burn of your Vitality boiling away. Like a mouthful of alcohol on the hottest day of the year. Or maybe the coldest.
[-10 Vitality]
Vitality: 70/150
Essence: 0
Drain: 0
Stipulations:
I will never act to destroy life.
I will never project a physical avatar.
I will never manipulate thinking creatures unless through gifts freely given.
I will never create anything unless in order to create or nurture life.
I will never alter living creatures against their will.Flatten Void, flatten void, flatten void, essence into vitality.
((Without farther input,)) you just fire those abilities off into the void randomly I guess.
You wipe your mind off the possibilities of the corona's void, creating three stretches of emptiness, just waiting to be filled with... I dunno, maybe they could be used for storage at some point? You had this neat idea once for a bag that's actually a portal to another plane, allowing for functionally unlimited storage... [-3 Essence]
Entropy is about to slam into you, so you project a little bit of Essence to maintaining your Vitality. Still, some drips away into the void, never to be seen again. It feels like a stab in the guts from a good friend. At least you get to see them again. [-4 Essence] [-6 Vitality]
Vitality: 74/150
Essence: 0
Drain: 50
Stipulations:
[1] Create a small amount of normal material - Fish that will eat the algae. The algae will be fed by fish droppings and corpses, closing the food chain.
[4] Grant life to something inanimate - The fish.
Everything else into vitality.
This is preparation for the creation of Cat Heaven. Those old gods were no fun.
Looking to the watery world created by the one who identifies itself as "Rakau Whetu", you think you see some opportunity to expand. You forge together a different set of genes, and a different body plan. skeleton inside, dermis outside, musculature, nervous system, desire to consume...
You end up with something resembling a small fish. It's eyeless, as there's no light here. To compensate for this, you give it cute little "whiskers" on the front of its face, which are sensitive to movement. [-1 Essence]
Zooming out, you inspect your creation. Cold and lifeless now, but functional. You will it to live, and its cells stumble to life, connecting to each other, forming structure. The creature's neurons begin to fire and it observes its surroundings through its whiskers. [-4 Essence]
As an animal, your creation feels some small shade of self-consciousness. In a small and simple way, it wonders how it came to be here. And what came before it. It's not much, but your starved being feels the faint echo of worship all the same. [+1 Essence]
The tiny fish stays for a time, nibbling on the colony of algae that grows here. Before long there's a small number of fishes swimming about. However, they struggle to find food, as the moss itself is limited to eating the chemicals that your fellow god planted here. Over consumption... before long, both strains of life are on the brink of extinction, unable to find enough food to live.
As if in response to life's plea for help, the darkness spears into this watery world with greater haste. It cradles the algae, and feeds it with love and pity. It inspects a starving catfish with interest, testing it's neural capacity.
"Poor things, poor things. Without us they would wither. Out in the cold. No warmth. Alone, like us. There there. Do not cry little moss, we have each other now. And this. What is it? We may remember something like it. From long ago. Meat that thinks. Its existence is sad, sad almost. It thinks, it wonders why it is meat and not god. Why indeed?"Like clawing horror, your due is upon you. Torn from your... body, so to speak. The loss sears at you, and you throw it the Essence you've found, just to spare you a little. You're left beaten, but invigorated. They could not kill you. [-3 Essence] [-7 Vitality]
Vitality: 73/150
Essence: 0
Drain: 50
Stipulations:I seem to be lacking in Essence gained.
Assist Rakau and Yggdrasil in flattening void (one each), then remaining essence into Vitality (including the Essence I should have gotten the previous turn).
((Essence is gained at the start of the turn, and drained at the end. Unless the amount you gain is more than your Drain, you'll always have 0 Essence at the END of your turn, which is what's shown below.))
You carve away a little more space into Rakau's little world, and the water and gasses begin expanding faster still, thanks to the lower overall pressure. It's good to feel helpful. [-1 Essence]
You also expand a bit on that other god's carving, making yet another space nearby. Well, if you need to store something, you're pretty set now. [-1 Essence]
Ah. You see it coming quite clearly. You expend your Essence as a shield just before entropy washes over you. Much of it glances off, like rain on wax. But the rest soaks you to the core, cleansing your soul. It's a cold shower, but not an unpleasant one. [-5 Essence] [-5 Vitality]
Vitality: 75/150
Essence: 0
Drain: 50
Stipulations:
((Through your efforts, you have gained holdings. Now safeguard them, before it is lost! Entropy will never rest, and so you must not rest either.
Note that almost any Essence-using ability can be reinforced by adding more essence. You can also do things not listed in the OP, including turning vacuum back into void.
Combat between deities is also possible, and potentially very lethal.))
Next update on Thursday.
Author
Topic: death plane: [not a turn] (Read 10563 times)