rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
OK, here we go.
Zero guarantees of ANYTHING here. But it's been a rough year, I've had the energy, I know I' no the only one, and I want to at least say I TRIED.
So.
The year is 2071.
Trumpism, global warming, and pandemics all did their damage, but we're finally seeing our way past them.
Now there are other problems.
Kids are playing with their genes like 1970s kids played with payphones. Smartphones reside in your forebrain and tap into 11th-dimensional geometry. A second wave of Bad Memetics is about to hit, the biggest since the Internets of old. And an obscure physics paper has just provided the first solid explanation for the exploitable glitches we've recently found in reality.
It's OK. The Artemus Corporation is way ahead of it all. And they're our descendants, so it'll be fine... right?
The psionics renaissance started ten years ago. Just like everything else, weird gay furries wandered in and did it better, taking the work of mere neurohackers and turning it into a bulldozer for superstrings. Nobody's good at it yet, but there's absolutely no doubt: magic happens and it all happens in Dimension 11*.
*registered trademark of the Artemus Corporation
Unfortunately, furries are only human. Now they're the power structure. The Artemis Corporation is what happened when they sold out. Now they're the fastest-growing neurotheological corporation in America, selling transcendent identity change and a share in the cosmic lottery.
You were a perfectly content resident of Terra's recovering biomes, eating and/or avoiding being eaten as you found appropriate. Now, thanks to the Artemus Corporation and its fervent quest for the psionic Holy Grail, you've got a forebrain, *neat* little opposable thumbs, and opinions about economic policy.
You live in a twelve-story office complex on the US West Coast. You spend a lot of your time hooked up to machines. The humans in charge spend a lot of time staring intensely into flashing screens, injecting things into themselves and you, and fucking each other. Thus far, you have not been invited, though you have had some fascinating conversations about why. You fear they may be some value of "insane." You also fear that they, and you, might be on the verge of a terrifying power. You do not understand this power, and it's becoming painfully clear that they don't either.
You suspect that all the information about the outside world, in that little squeaktoy version of the Internet they've given you, is a great big lie.
You recently learned what demons are and are seriously afraid they might be trying to put one in you.
This is an RPG about a "psychotronic" retro-horror future where psionics are real, leftists were right about damn near everything, and furry has spawned a genuinely dangerous Scientology-like cult that is on the forefront of terrifying reality-breaking technology.
Pitch me a character. Feel absolutely free to invent new details of this world, as long as they fit the above reasonably well. You are a captive of the Artemus Corporation. Animal-brain architecture is the hot new frontier; you are an genetically "uplifted," brain-grafted animal captive with a human intellect. They intent to use you to study psionic technology; they are convinced you are their path to godhood. They throw swinging parties but they scare the fuck out of you. You're starting to see things that aren't there.
Influences: John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Altered States, Stranger Things, Upstream Color, A Cure For Wellness, Suspiria, This House Has People In It, Us, Children of the Mirror, The Prisoner, They Live, Buckaroo Banzai, Liquid Sky, In The Mouth of Madness, Cabin in the Woods, The Shining, Beyond the Black Rainbow
Please assign your character 30 points in the following traits: Lust, Avarice, Greed, Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth, Pride.
Be warned that EVERY POSSIBLE content warning applies to the potential content and its replies. This, if it goes anywhere at all, will be a psychedelic horror story.
rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
(The sick/hilarious character twist that would be an eventual reveal is that the 'Cryptologically' portion of her name isn't just a backronym. It turns out that some of the Artemus scientists working on the future-sight technology program figured out that, if they can bring back data from the future, they can use that technology to bring back Cryptocurrency from the future.)
(They use Cassie to mine CacheCoin, and an assortment of other digital currencies, from the multiple future versions of her and send it back through her brain.)
rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
@zebratron2084 please use the neologism portmanteau I coined in 1998..."gengineered"
re: rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
@eredien Oh great, now I'm gonna up on a multi-hour research crawl on sci-fi slang philology, thanks a LOT. ;p 'Cause I could have sworn I'd seen same portmanteau earlier than that, but I think I'd actually seen "geneered" which is not half as good...
(No, seriously, thanks a lot. <3 )
re: rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
@zx3 *listens too* Oh, yeah, you obviously got where I'm going here. I also recommend the following:
Broadcast (esp. the Berbarian Sound Studio soundtrack)
Demdike Stare
Belbury Poly
The Advisory Circle
The Soundcarriers
Pye Corner Audio
Goblin
BoC's Geogaddi of course
Locust Toybox
General Mumble's "Moonmadness"
Burial
The United States of America
and just for shits and giggles Hans Reichel
re: rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
@zx3 Also I must say that I'm very impressed that you understood the importance of voyvening the GLAYVEN!
rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
Nezlee
Species: squirrel
Lust: 3
Avarice: 7
Greed: 6
Wrath: 2
Gluttony: 4
Sloth: 1
Pride: 7
Nezlee is working perfectly. Pay no attention to the way light does not reflect correctly off of their bodies. You are mistaken in thinking that details are flattened out when nezzie is awake. Nezlee has awakened to this multiple times. Nezlee is not permanently caught in a horrible shoal of dimension 11 where magic happens to grab a hold of consciousness and will not let go. Nezlee always awakens, to sleep. Nezlee does look perfectly normal while asleep, every thing is fine.
Fine?
Fine.
Nezlee just needs to keep a hold of that happens. Keep, happens, hold. Nezlee? 11? 5,4,2? 1,1,2,3,4.
rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
Anyway just to elaborate on this a little less crypticly, was thinking that they are a group of squirrels that they tried to connect up to dimension 11 running the experiment in parallel to save time. Didn't really work. No useful magic, but a whole lot of "that's not right" has kind of a constant blur effect when you look at them, and their shadows and highlights are wrong. More specifically they're for the wrong nezlee, like you're trying to look at the one in the break room, and seeing light sourcing that matches what should be on the one in the mail room.
Their minds are all sort of just mooshed together, not a useful hive mind just remembering bits and pieces of each other without realizing which one it was that an event happened to. Like for an extreme example one might start explaining how they lost their arm and getting really worked up about it in spite of being one with two arms. While the one with one arm at the same moment might freak out if you point out their missing arm, because the memory of losing it is inaccessible because it is in use by another.
rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
I have the schtick figured out... I'm just needing to figure out the balancing...
The being does not rest. Is not able to rest. Is not able to stop and sit, because their body simply won't allow it and in the process of sitting, they stumble through the chair/couch/bed/whathaveyou and end up invariably staggering and continuing ahead. Falling fails, and they somehow manage to continue into a neurotic-tic gait, stuttering and stammering through the burden of years of never being able to be at rest.
The mind is coherent enough to seem functional, but they freqvently devolve into alternate tangent lines, occasionally in foreign tongues, unable to stop the conversation, but able to turn down the volume enough to find something resembling pauses.
The most odd thing, really, is that in their perpetual shuffling, they often just end up meandering out of the room, just casually opening a door and heading into the next corridor and continuing on.
... which would be fine...
... but... there wasn't a door there, before... and it isn't there, now, now that I think about it...
... but they'll be back in a bit, I'm sure...
re: rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
@zebratron2084 this is fantastic stuff. as usual I feel underqualified to participate and I'm embarrassingly unfamiliar with almost all of the influences (I wonder if we could have a movie night sometime where you help me start to fix that)...
buuuut I have some ideas that I'll try to gaff tape together this evening, impostor syndrome be damned
re: rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
@zx3 added to master document <3 only had time to skim but fuck yeah <3
rpg experiment/creative writing prompt; yes i named the bad guys after my cat friend
@zebratron2084
Name: CASSIE (Cryptologically Augmented Second Sight Integrated Entity)
Species: Uplifted Lagomorph (Genetically and cybernetically augmented)
Stats:
Lust: 10
Avarice: 1
Greed: 2
Wrath: 5
Gluttony: 5
Sloth: 1
Pride: 3
Concept: Cassie is the latest result of the Artemus Corportation's investigations into intermixing of both magic at Dimension 11* (Registered trademark of the Artemus Corporation) and quantum entanglement intended for long distance, faster than light communication. One night, a very drunk Artemus engineer reasoned that it wasn't possible to see the future - But it was possible to look forward along branching paths of the various multiple universes and send the information backward in time via a neat little trick that had been discovered where you buffer underflow the return time-stamp of the entangled information you're sending back. Interpretation of the data obtained from these experiments proved so overwhelming via sheer mass of information that some OTHER genius figured a biological interface was the solution.
So Cassie's grey matter was conceived of.
Cassie is a normalish rabbit. She's slight of build, shy, and not particularly aggressive. She looks as standard as any uplifted mammal might. But inside her head is a machine grafted to her spine, that bombards her with each and every possible future that could ever be traveled. She never knows exactly which branch is going to be taken, but she can tell you exactly what will happen for each choice made. It comes to her in flashes and fits at inopportune moments. The information even overwhelms her. There's just so much of it that her vision, while prescient, can be off in critical ways. She is beginning to think that something or someone she can't see is fucking with her in ways she can't understand.
She also sees herself dying. A lot. Something about Cassie's neurochemistry, the magical entanglement of her cybernetics and her biology, and just the environment in which she exists leads her to repeatedly see visions of her own demise, over and over and over. She can't stop them, and at this point she finds it almost more agonizing when the visions don't come true.
It's possible to keep those particular visions slightly at bay with specialized chem stims that the scientists administer to her, but not only do these dampen her predictive power, they also are in short supply and wear off quickly.
Given that she's high-strung, constantly afraid of dying, and seeing hot glimpses of the future, she's pretty much always running an alarming heartrate and living on adrenaline. Which means she's pretty much always hungry, and full of pent-up energy.