Eventide Again

[salientStrategist]

==> Ruminate on the nature of your quadrants.


Your quadrants are in a sad state of non-existence. The only quadrant that was anywhere close to being filled was the caliginous one: there was this troll who kept killing off all the game at the very edge of your hunting grounds (nearly a day’s walk away). Not much hope there though, he killed himself trying to hunt a shadowcat. Fool. He should have known better than to go after it with an alloy, the things can smell iron a mile away.

It really isn’t in your nature to hate or to pity. Hate is a wasteful emotion; hate wastes energy that could be used doing something useful. Pity is too transient for you. No one is below you to the degree that you pity them all the time, as all people are capable of unique things. You think you read that somewhere, but it is true enough.

---

That was unhelpful. Next.

[Quakerlol]

==> Examine your hive or bedroom or BOTH!

[salientStrategist]

==> Examine your bedroom and hive.


You lean back in your chair. Assuming a position of relaxation, you gaze around your respiteblock. It really is quite a good way to sum up your life: on almost every wall was a scar from some sort of weapon. There, on the south wall, were a whole bunch of puncture marks from that time you experimented with the little sharp pointy things that are shaped like stars. You forget what they are called. You stopped using them because you were worried you would step on one.

And in the northeast corner was your recuperacoon: it was recessed into the floor and didn’t take up a lot of space. It wasn’t very big, but that was ok because you didn’t roll around much when you slept. On the northern wall was your dresser and a small pile of broken things. Among those were two broken staffs, a broken light-bulb, a bent butter knife, and maybe a t-shirt. You can’t really remember. You are waiting until you have time to take them all the way to the recycling place almost a night and a half’s journey away.

On the western wall was your computer. It was a rather sleek thing, if you said so yourself. It was top-of-the-line about a sweep ago, which is when you’d bartered for it. Though, you wouldn’t have bought it just because it was pretty: it just so happened that the more expensive a computer was, the lighter and smaller it was. Go figure. There were two windows in your respiteblock: one on the east wall and one on the south wall.

The south and east walls were covered in bookshelves, except for the windows. The only non-natural source of lighting in the room was a mobile lamp next to the computer desk.

Not bad, all in all, you suppose. Wow, that was a really detailed explanation. You will make it up by only using a sentence on your hive. There are five rooms, and three levels: the respiteblock and the bathroom on the top, the front room and porch in the middle, and your lusus’s den at the bottom. There, succinct and nice. You check your computer’s time- still early.

---

What now?

[Quakerlol]

==> So where'd you find that ancestral journal, anyways?

[salientStrategist]

==> So where'd you find that ancestral journal, anyways?


That is a very good question. The Catalyst’s journal has been a mystery to you since you’d found it. It was a bright night the day the journal fell from the sky. Both moons were up, casting dynamic greenish and purplish shadows all around. There was a meteor shower, which was not unusual. What was a little unusual was the meteor that actually made it all the way down: that would make it a meteorite, if you got technical. Eager to see what had fallen, and if it might be worth anything, you scrambled off to find it.

Truly, it was lucky that the meteorite hit only tree branches on its descent; otherwise it may have started a fire. You peered into the deep hole in the soft earth. Instead of finding a rock, your sweeps-younger self found a capsule! It was blinking with a calming green light. You waited patiently for it to cool, touching it occasionally with a stick until the stated stick did not spontaneously combust on contact with the hot metal. When this milestone was reached, you waited a bit more. Finally deciding that it was cool enough to handle, you picked it up from the ground and inspected it more closely.

It was ovally, with a slight fissure around the smallest circumference from which was emitted the green light. Turning it around in your hands, you discovered a small circle on the fissure that emitted the most of the light. Quite suddenly, it began speaking to you. The exact words are not important: what is important is that it asked you for your full name, for a military rank (you kept trying to tell it ‘none,’ apparently that wouldn’t compute, but ‘civilian’ worked just fine), and for you to draw your sign on the little circle. And then, anticlimactically, it fell silent.

You tried many things to open it (for you had an idea that opened by the fissure). Brute force was ineffective, various audible codes did not work, and throwing it against a tree did not work. It was a few sweeps until you discovered how to open it. One day, it was sitting near your desk as you pestered someone. Idly, you tapped your staff against the capsule. Oh, this went on for a few minutes, until you reached the correct tempo and accidentally entered the open code (you later went through all this and devised the open code from what you remembered of doing to the capsule). Inside, anticlimactically, was a piece of something which looked vaguely translucent and yet also reflective.

Yadda, yadda, yadda, this was a nearly unbreakable code, blah, blah, you couldn’t figure it out, etc. In essence of time, the way in which the logs (for logs they were, of battles) were read was to shine a bright light through the device, showing a coded sequence of letters and numbers. Once these had been decrypted through a simple Troll Caesarian Cipher, they read as reports of the unofficial battles that the Catalyst was a part of. Of course, there were a few logs that had been encrypted multiple times; when you weren’t using it for other things, you let your computer try to unencrypt them. Several of the logs after that were written in a slightly more journalistic style, and referenced an ‘unnamable event’ and a ‘terrible deed’ and other such vague yet fear-inducing epithets.

The short version is that a cool piece of tech fell from the sky one day, encoding (most of) the exploits of one Kyachril, the Catalyst, who was generally pretty awesome. You still have not decoded the most interesting part.

---

This time, try not to choose something that makes me want to write a novel.

---

[{You ==> Notice how eloquent I get when I talk about things about the Catalyst, I think we are totally <> for life.}]

[Quakerlol]

==> This time, try not to choose something that makes me want to write a novel.

Why would I EVER want to do that?

==> Expound upon why the staff is your weapon of choice.

[Radiodragon]

==> Look at the sky.

[salientStrategist]

==> Expound upon why the staff is your weapon of choice.


Ah, the staff. The wielding of the staff is an ancient and proud art, which draws its power from the very soul of… its baloney. Really, you love the staff because you can never accidentally cut yourself on it. Selfish, but true. Oh, you experimented with knives, and star things, and even got yourself a crappy sword-kind abstractus, which you never used. When you switched to blunt weapons, you tried the sticks-n-chain (which is officially the name for the weapon in Troll), also a club (which you made yourself, and burned later), before half-heartedly switching to a staff. Surprisingly, it worked rather well! You ordered a couple staffs off the Internet, they all broke within a week, and so you decided to make your own. So you used the axe you use to chop firewood to cut down an entire tree. Ok, so it was a smallish tree. Still. You fashioned your staff from the heartwood of a young tree that was not quite like the others: you suspected it was an off-world species. Well, the wood you garnered was curiously light-colored and difficult to shape. You know, the average superior-quality wood. You decided not to spoil its lightness with stain, so you left it alone and suffered a few splinters for it. Oddly, the oil in your hands finished the wood for you, leaving the weapon with faint sheen.

Yeah, its cool. No, you can’t touch it—its not really that shiny hey stop it I said STOP stop touching the staff omigod what are you doing to it…. Anyway.


==> Look at the sky.


That’s a good idea! You’ve been sitting in your room long enough. Eyeing the computer critically, you decide to physically carry it down to the front porch rather than captchalogue it: its relative strategic important to you would cause it to be difficult to retrieve from your RISK modus system. The thing was always interesting, but it can sometimes get annoying.

So you stalk down the stairs and onto the porch. You set your computer down on one of the two chairs, and pick up you staff. Having nothing better to do, you practice a form. This process culminates in messing up your hair and leaving a dent in the soft wood of the floor. Fixing your hair and ignoring the floor, you settle into the other chair and idly wait for something to happen. Only Clytemnestra was up, casting lovely violet light over everything. Oh, what was that? A firefly? No, wrong time of the year. And there it was again! You got a pretty good look at it: you think it was a meteor. Pretty uncommon time for meteors. Seeing nothing else to do, you relax back into the chair and wait for something else to happen.

---

Or, maybe you don’t. It’s up to you.

[Quakerlol]

==> Get your butt onto Trollian, young lady, there are files to be shared!

[salientStrategist]

==> Get your butt onto Trollian, young lady; there are files to be shared!


You are on Trollian. You have your computer right next to you. You are simply too passive to actually do anything, and besides, you have pretty much already talked to everyone you care to speak to. Also, this unexpected meteor shower is pretty fun to watch. So far there have only been small ones, thin and quick pencil lines across the sky. You didn’t expect such a shower here. Idly, you check the internet for any graphs of when meteor showers are supposed to occur. After a few minutes, you find a handy graph: but supposedly there wasn’t supposed to be any on the entire planet tonight. Odd, someone must have figured the relative orbital velocities wrong; it was kind of a rookie mistake.

Startled from your reverie by a melodious noise issuing from your computer, you behold a new message incoming from Lerena.

herobound.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=pester&action=display&thread=33

Well that was interesting. You would have loved to discuss the probability of a meteor actually becoming a meteorite with Lerena (the reason you know about orbital velocities and such is because of the journal capsule), you figured she wouldn’t have listened. Also, she said you would speak to your lusus again? Your lusus was right here, fiddling with his huge pile of tree-nuts. He had a tendency to knock them off the porch with his tail when he turned around, so…. Yep. He did it again. And he was off to find more of the dratted things. Not like you wanted to talk to him anyway.

The good news was that the game was starting, even if it did require a bit more of an effort than you had anticipated; you’d expected to be given a login and password for some online thing. Though, it was rather a lot more awesome this way you supposed.

So Aruale was already in the game. You had a mind to pester her and ask her what sort of stuff she had to do, so that you could be prepared. You knew that all games have their own currency, and you might as well find a way to get it faster. And besides, you might find a cheat code somewhere or something, not that you would ever use it. Cheats will destabilize a game, making it more likely to crash. It is good to be prepared.

---

What will you do?

[Quakerlol]

==> Alrighty then, pester Aruale.

[salientStrategist]

==> Alrighty then, pester Aruale.


You will do that, you think. You reach for the key to initiate a chat—but are intercepted by Stebia. Good thing you didn’t quite make it to pestering Aruale, you don’t think you type fast enough to handle two chats at once.

herobound.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=pester&action=display&thread=36&page=1

VICTORYY. You have found the name of the Mystery Troll! His name is Kratus. Apparently he is quiet, but also thoughtful, as you are. Interesting. He is also, regrettably, still mysterious, even to Stebia. You did not quite understand her move to include him in the game, but you suppose you will have to wait and see if he brings any skills to the table. Perhaps he is skilled with his weapon, as you are. In any case, it is useless to speculate, since you are not likely to find any more information.

You also hope Stebia is safe while she searches for Kratus in her cave system. Apparently the meteor shower is actually impacting near her hive.

And that brings you to Lerena. You feel a little bad about not believing her. After a moment’s consideration, you decide that you were in the right in not believing her, since a large body of evidence stood against her, but that didn’t stop her from being right. You think that you will give her a bit more leeway next time she says something that makes no sense.

---

Maybe you should troll Aruale since you are done trolling Stebia.

[Quakerlol]

==> Okay, now you can troll Aruale.

[Radiodragon]

==> Yes you should probably troll Aruale.

[salientStrategist]

==> You should probably troll Aruale.


Alright, you will. Congrats for initiating contact with someone for the first time today! It’s really a milestone.

herobound.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=pester&action=display&thread=37

What? Her lusus died? That’s a tragedy. You hope she won’t be culled after the game. She said she was dealing with it ok, but you don’t really go through something like that without some serious issues later. Though she did sound kind of excited about something near the end, possibly involving the swirly thing? You don’t really know.

And, plurality of small rodents, you didn’t get the information you were looking for to begin with! Apparently she hasn’t yet encountered a monster. That’s too bad. But hey, you did find a walkthrough for a game called Sburb, which had been suggested when you typed in ‘walkthrough for sgrub.’ You were determined to read as little of it as possible, only going straight to the part about a kernelsprite, which was described similarly to the supposed red swirly thing. Really, you’d hoped to find what the most common currency of the game was so you could find a way to cheat. It was often an obstacle for low-level players, that they did not have the ample reserves of money that higher-level players did in order to get the best stuff. Ordinarily, one would have to grind for hours to get enough money, and you did not intend to do that.

---

So, that was that. What’s next? Those meteor streaks are getting ominously bigger, but you don’t think they’ll strike for another half-hour or more.