Original Questant - Interactive Fiction - Exploring a Non-Euclidean Reflection, Traipse your way to the SafeRoom

[Meridian]

Hey there, as I warned at the start of the quest things will periodically slow down. I wanted to get the next prologue and update out before this last weekend, but my process wasn't conducive to the writing or art I expected it to be.
so
I'm finally gonna start posting my sketches / do an author's note thing, because beyond communicating a light delay, I need to get used to posting my art. here's where stuff's at

Spoiler: Roadmap - Fifth Of February 2024

• Prologue 3 is mostly finished in terms of background assets. I have some hallucinatory text to draft, other rough drafts to resolve, and then formatting it, but it's just about done.
• Next Mainline Upd8..
  • I'm just about done with the cognion design (aka the sprite. it's faster if my chibi walksprite is concept art at times I find)
  • working over the rough draft's script. The writing is mostly done, with an editing pass and finishing some parts.. which means I'll be onto panel assembly.
  • concept drafting stage went interestingly. I'm kind of excited about it.. I'm gonna try at some animated gifs. We're not talking an Flash (tho I do want to do one later on), but it's still a scope creep that I'm reigning in.
    • I have a tendency to think of 'a grand vision', and these days Im learning to scale things backwards, BUT giving myself enough of a challenge that I'll learn something new usually.
    • It's been years since I used the Blender suite and I've wanted to return to it for a while, so I'm going to try a (simple as i can make it) blender animation.
    • Scope feels managable, I know the fundamental parts to what I'll be doing with this piece, but it's still gonna take time collating reference guides and troubleshooting.
• The 4th prologue update has been fairly outlined and concepted for a while.
  It's where this art quest / comic has, finally, 🎉A Third Character🎉.
  • Ey has eyr own section to this extra extra read-all-about-it update.
  • I have a couple easy to work on backgrounds, and after asset creation that'll happen this week will be composed into the panels you're used to mixed with implementing the psychedelic visual elements.

Aiming for Prologue 3 on thursday, Cognion Ritual in the few days following, and prologue 4 around voting close.
After that, this project moves to an Exploration Phase with a relatively 'nearby' (as few as 4 Turn updates. There'll be a narrative puzzle, resource scavenging, and mon capturing opportunities.
After that? First 'town', Act 1 begins baybee.

---

Lumsketch is being added to the credits for designing the element system outlined originally in this tumblr post. This was then updated to the following chart with additions by members of a scifi discord. I asked to make usage of this system, and Lum said they were cool with that.

Spoiler: diagram

Lum runs the blog Lumsketch on Tumblr, where their art is featured. They're also running a webcomic called Foreach, which is amazing. Here's an excerpt from the about page.

Jasper Mundy is a young exorcist who feels beaten down by the pressures of life, friends and family. When the going gets to be just too much to bear, Jasper likes to sit down and play a mysterious videogame called LOVE BOMB, about a young man named Jiro...​

Foreach is a comic about cycles, parenthood, power, friendship, escapism, and videogames.​

Updates on Sundays!
Content warnings for: blood, violence, themes of trauma and depression, reference to suicide
Foreach is best enjoyed with any webpage color or format changing extensions disabled​

This update is the first time I'm going to formally be rolling dice.

Dice rolls are more for introducing a rng element to progression of actions. This quest ideally will be kept out from having too much crunch, largely rewarding experimentation, so-on. If you read, dont worry too much about any vote having a wrong answer, even a puzzle going awry takes you somewhere.
There are no true consequences here just bonuses to give Klevas / the starting Party of this art quest resources to work from.

This comes into play because the noeme of [ Music ] is what could result from the ritual being infused with an instrumentalist's song, would be represented as doing [ Rupture ] damage.
So, I'm leaving that to a dice roll. The results of which will likely include a new choice for Klevas to make. The method used is sufficient velocity's dice rolling mechanic, which happens after I send a post (and then edit to roll the dice in the post). The roll threshholds felt "yeah this should work".

DICE ROLLS

VOID FILLS THE GAP: [Holographic] Check (> 65 +5 from Klevas particpating)
- if passed, Klevas will better understand the [Holographic] noeme on an enhanced level. this increases all interactions with the noeme.
VOID FILLS THE GAP: [Glazed] Check (> 65 +5 from Klevas participating)
- if passed, Klevas will better understand the [Glazed] noeme on an enhanced level. this increases all interactions with the noeme.
CREATIVE PARTICIPATION: Check (> 30 + 15 from Klevas' instrument affinity ; roll twice, taking the higher result)
- if passed choose (1) of (2) abilities.
CREATIVE PARTICIPATION: Check (> 65 +15 from Klevas' instrument affinity, roll twice take highest)
- if passed a noeme of [ Music ] coalesces within the cognion, and will attune with time towards it.
- These results will not manifest until the cognion has lived the breadth of at least a day (Rolled per aspect. 1/3 chance after Day 1, 1/2 after Day 2, 2/3 after Day 3, 4/5 after Day 4).
- Further consequences are likely as time passes.

VFTG Holographic: 12, a fail

VFTG Glazed: 58, a fail

Creative Participation Ability: 86, a success. Choice of (1) between two abilities will occur in cognion ritual update.

• Ability: Simple Song ; This cognion has found a way to make music, and uses it to make a simple song. At the very least it is cute. Can be used for a variety of purposes. As an attack it can deal low Rupture damage.
• Ability: Basic Mimicry ; This cognion is capable of mimicking what it's been trained to repeat. It may be anywhere from spot-on to uncanny.

Creative Participation Music Noeme: 65... I'm counting it, that's a 50+15, and I didnt have more than or equal to. I'm curving the grade to D
Wahoo, this'll be a fun cognion keeping aspect to run

---

Design Work Preview for Questant, and other projects like NERrium and worldbuilding preview.​

I got a bit distracted this last week with prepping for another forumventure I want to run, so have a preview of some a couple cognions that'll appear a few updates into it.

In the dungeon drawing exosphere toy, the forumventure narrative will work similar to something like Dungeon Core, in that the shape of the NER (like a mystery dungeon they randomly generate ex nihilo) will flow as a result of updates. Random chance events will happen, and organisms populating it will forage, hunt, and form relationships with the surreal patchwork realities they inhabit.

With this sketch I wanted to capture a feeling of encountering Cognions in an adventure game / 'travel sim', as inspired by indie rpgs, point and click games (hivesim for instance), and experimental animator YourLocalBreadman's Purgaliminal concept series. It was life-changing seeing the concepts I'd been curious about explored and executed as they were, and would definitely point to their work. I want to make the lifesim approach a level like the Creatures game series for NER ecologies. Different segpocks connect like different metarooms.

With this sketch I wanted to try and show a cognion battle lot for a practice spar. I decided to use cognions I was drafting for a later update of the forumventure side project I'm gonna launch soon. I'd say I was inspired by casette beasts, and that combat ui / visual styles are gonna shift with any work I do. I didnt feel ready to use walksprites for a cognion conflict mockup..
but the combat mechanics and elemental system are gonna make things interesting.

Spoiler: Whimsy Client Cognion Option Preview

The Nakashima Cube​

The Nakashima cube is an animated stim toy, a cube that can repeatedly fold itself over. They come in all sorts of colors and styles.

• the arrangement of eyes and patterns on a cube cognion is extensive, and breeding them is a hobby of some cognion keepers
• countless strains and breed families of cube cognion are called different names, but often will still be of human origin
• there are countless stim toy cognions out there, across sophontic species and cultures too

The Fauxnosaur / Ydawopod​

you remember that toy dinosuar you loved the colors and spikes on, but later learned it might never have walked like that? damn.

• This species of cognion is known for being the dinosaurs the books wont tell you about. Some humans might remember reading about them too.
• Herbivorous beaks on apex predators, robotic components, garish colors, this cognion can do it all
• A worthwhile starter to choose due to their evolutionary capabilities, and adaptability to cognion conflicts.

The cachelithe and cairnlithe alike were domestic fauna of the loineur worlds.
The Loineur species and it's cultures tamed countless creatures and brought them to convergent and biotechnical states in cohabitance on their folded world. Among it's cultures is the free and open cultural association of the Loi-Floios. This is the culture to which Baird, a starting party member in a planned forum quest I didnt launch from about 2 years ago, ascribes to.

Spoiler: Baird, an OC

Frequently handles area denial, defensive measures, overwatch, etc and is otherwise a capable generalist.He is able to adapt to needed roles within a party, a literal-figurative skill monkey. He is a cognion tamer, and has two cognions in his roster, one of which is a trade project with his party member. Competent and casual, Baird is likely to be cryptic and snarky alike as it hangs around the party.
Could be a mentor, but do you want someone who casually admits to getting their jacket off a dead body ("didnt need it anymore after getting hit by a pursuer I expect") to be your mentorfriend in the void? Syder, the seer and explorator of the party, wants to learn the way of radical bodily autonomy through changes to one's form and psyche alike.
To become alien to your past selves, to become unfettered and likenable to feythings. This is xenofeying, a simple portmanteau and umbrella term of the voidtraipsing voidfolk like Baird, Caestellau, and many others. With all the time in the world and surrealist magic at your fingertips, what would you seek to start changing about your reality?
His head is a hologram being projected by a chassis headcase. His real head is resting within his inner world, and is a backup should the chassis get damaged in a fight. It's not uncommon for object head species to have a separate 'original' or 'extra' head.
I may give him and his party a cameo in Rememaudlin

Baird is a member of the Loineur species, that bred the cachelithes from the megafauna cairnlithes. The cachelithe is a commonly seen starter cognion for their frequency to inherit and inventory core or to spontaneously generate it during their lifespan.

I've alluded to em a few times so far in the narrative, but this is Caestellau. I'm gonna be finalizing eyr design in the next couple days, as ey debuts in Prologue Part 4 🎉(tada emoji).
Caestellau is a stalwarte who acts frequently as a First Party Member type of aid as an adventurer and tank. Ey willl be here for as long as you'll have em, or at such a point that ey feels Klevas is self-sufficient (and will make it a conversation sequence).
Ey is a member of the Loi-Floios through birth + raising, and has a connection with eyr loi-orault heritage (those that tamed the cairnlith), and kilonnese heritage, but only maintains so much with the mantaean diaspora.

Ey and Korite were the first two characters sketched specifically for Questant. They differ a little bit from sketches, like I wanted to use shibori print textures in robes for their work outfit, but I decided "big serpent with gem underbelly" would be fine for the zoomed out, and I'll draw robe outfit for off-the-clock Korite.
Caestellau... eyr design isnt finalized... such as that ey has a tail, a big ol peacock-like sigil tail.

Flotillans like Korite have a multiversal history with Mantaeans, and vice-versus. Caestellau has no hangups about that sort of stuff, whereas Korite on meeting remotely or not will want to be deferential to Caestellau and assist em in eyr survival out of a sense of custodial obligation. They just work here, and are skilled at suppressing stress reactions in client facing interactions, but wow this sure is a call to have picked up for.

---

Lastly, the other thing I got sidetracked with: I worked on coloring the walksprites from species select, and worked with my cognion designs over the last couple years to make a size lineup. My style is all over the place, but I'm kind of happy with that
The third cognion species is among the members of the lineup, what what stands out to you?

Lastly I'm gonna be trying to make some changes to how the first page is arranged.
My intent is to have the option to read chronologically, or from the first Questant image edit I made. Once this prologue wraps up I'll have a summary for new readers to jump in via.

 

[Meridian]

The update isn't today either as I had hoped.
Currently working on it in Blender today.

Late last week I hyperfixated for several hours and made a simple website.
It collects some social medias, and lays out my projects and where they update, or will update. I'll be updating it over the next few months and learning HTML and CSS when I can, but it's a lower priority for at least this year.

Here's the webpage for Voidtraipser which'll be a sort of overview of my creative projects and participation in online creative spheres.
I haven't had much of an art or writing blog before, and I think I'd like to have a website incase tumblr and elsewhere dies.

---

I made this website because I wanted to infodump about my old aliens, as I plan to use them in this setting project.

Many were originally made for Fortuna, and by extension as articles on The Cosmosdex. They're all stuff that folks making fantuna projects or ocs of are already welcome to make.
The Cosmosdex is a fictional encyclopedia, which anyone can submit to when articles are open so long as they follow submission guidelines, and also hosts it's own Art Quest called Fortuna. It's been around since the mspaforums and has a mspfa mirror even, and it's about aliens on suicide mission roadtrips. Some of it's origins tracing to ftl roleplays can be seen in a bit of the vibe and in-game playstyle otpions.
Both media are a big influence on my style as you'll see over the next year or so.. and with the Capture Creature system it's part of what inspires cognions as well.

There is some creative commons content on the cosmosdex as it is, so n the near future I'm planning on submitting an edit of all articles to be contributed to creative commons in some capacity, but I need to do a review of that so far. I'm down for someone to play around and put their own spins on my concept, and I've likewise used public domain media enough that I'd like to contribute something yknow?

This should be every article I made for the cosmosdex over the last 10 years. This doesn't count submissions in items or traits (of which there are a few.. many..), but hey I'd rather you just explore those sections since they're not articles.

• Enmasque - The life of any party. They can be your angle or your devil. Wins costume contests, and needs to take off their true self now and again to relax.
• Eoijal - A compassionate mercantile diaspora that welcomes the weary. "Straight up wack aliens from a 60s comic book called CAPTAIN ZAPPO" indeed.
• Isment - The grand precursors were actually a frightened prey species that developed a clever passive mind control by way of memory erasure. They do like conspiracies tho.
• Sepsim Zeta - The homeworld of the precursors. Bask in their glory and grain silos. The dominant population of this planet is archaeologists.
• Ghoulog Fleet - The actual present homeworld of the Isments. A migrant fleet of interwoven ships that hides in the plain sight of a stellar void.
• Mxr Crescendi - A secret agent? Sure, but enough of a local loser that torture isnt worth the time.
• Heredoggo - Not what you were expecting from a species with "doggo" in its name was it?
• Mortembrosias - Their homeworld. Dug Too Deep = New And Delicious Things To Farm.
• Unidolencia - If you make it big kid you can convert to being a member of this species and never die.. so long as you've got the clout to back up the next clone voucher.
• Ubertopia - THE Premier Theme Park, and the other 30 premier theme parks owned by entertainment giant and elective species for the famous.
• Zhiliatt - A know-it-all who really, truly, would like to leave home. Is considering unplugging for the rest of their life.
• Gladstore - Your local [ STORE ]. Wonder what type it is? Could you tell me?
• Ivfrid - Some creatures like the aphid are born pregnant. What if there was a rodent mon like that? Terrible starters for a space dictator homeworld to give to children that need to learn a lesson about being efficient zoologists.
• Karaden - Sleep Paralysis Parrot.
• Morblod - Free Sky Meatloafs
• Senspray - What if depression was tasty to a parasitic pet? Old Yeller Reinvented for mask-wearing children of a space dictatorship.
• Space Peanut Bush - Hope you dont have food allergies. This plant abuses food allergies like a potter wasp.

A few months from now I'll be working on art and writing submissions to the cosmosdex again. I've had articles on the backburners a while.

---

I dont have much in the way of sketches I'm prepared to show this time around, but I've got a mockup I did early this week while experimenting with blender sculpting to familiarize myself with the program's layout.
I made a rough gemheaded head, and sketched a 'displayed' face over it. I then gradient mapped things a bit iirc.

This character is presently unnamed, and is meant to be a post-isment of sorts. Ze's an odds and ends patronne trader. They're going to be attending the public swap market of Rememaudlin in Act 1. The currency system of this setting is a little abstract as being a creative material as well as a trade material. It'll be called Essencia as a loose energy term.

I'll probably redraw them, but they're intended to be a character that'll show up in the Safehouse when Klevas reaches it.

The Shop UI style is something from the fortuna and fantuna style, as the UI just works and I've enjoyed it as a great way to keep it simple.

---

Poll Time​

From here on out each time I do one of these I'm down for votes on the next subject.
I'd like to try and get some form of thread update out every friday. Ideally a mainline update, but if not it'll have to be a Make-Up post, or alternatively a Prologue Post, but I prefer those to either prelude an update in the days leading up or for them to come before voting ends as a thread bump.

[] Cognion 101

I'll put out a worldbuilding update on them if this is selected. This will cover where cognions come from, and little things like that.
It'll include sketches I've done in the past of cognions.
This will cover some info about my next project, NERrium. Expositing on a mechanic or two centered around cognions and how they pertain to the ecosystem sim.
Ending it will be a way to vote on what the next cognion update would be centered on, and the topic would be what species from the list I'll give for me to sketch and outline a couple cognions for.

[] NER 101

I'll be putting out a worldbuilding update on NERs if this is selected. This will cover the nature of a NER, and further exposit on the dynamics of what composes a NER and even an inner world: the segpock.
I'll be posting some old photo edits, and showing off a segpock or two that'll be coming up either in the forumventure or a mainline update.
This will cover some info about NERrium as well. Expositing on mechanics centered on segpocks and the ecosystem sim. I'll be previewing a couple segpocks that'll be in the first NERrium update.
Ending it will be a vote on whether to focus on worldbuilding or characters within the setting. This one will require me to do minimal artwork, so I'll probably focus it on setting up a part of my website to contain either lore or feature characters from the toyhouse.

Feel free to tack on your vote to whenever you get around to voting next.
Thank you for your time reading this update, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend

 

[Meridian]

Hello to SM, I'd meant to respond to your review (I'd been hyped for it, wasn't sure how much or little you'd read, I know this is a bit hard to gauge scope for as a work), but also wanted to get my update out on-time as I could.

I'm gonna spoiler my responses by update

Spoiler: Initial Vignette

I was originally planning on reading up to the most recent post, but… uh, there was a lot to get through, so I opted to go up to The Scrapbook for my review since things turned out a bit denser than expected for a read in spite of the low “on paper” wordcount.

yeahhhh, unfortunately Image Description text, and Spoiler Box text, both aren't typically counted in the wordcount due to how xenforo works, whether we're talking about me posting to SV or TR, so things seem lighter than they are...
I was hoping to ask whoever got rolled to just read the new update, because I wanted to see if that would mean an extra command submitted for the update, but I couldn't get the update out before the signup deadline. I felt bad in hindsight for how confusing it probably was for Canis and you alike.
Next time I'll probably ask folks to just read 'The Prologue - 1' update, as it's a little more coherently written and provides some leadup to where the protagonist is by Update 1.. which was a whole spontaneous process itself as I'll say in a bit.

- Ah yes, a lamp store. Definitely quite the lightshow to kick things off on

This is actually a local vintage store in my metro! I got this photo when I was stopping in to see the new location (after the original burned down due to some... not great practices, sadly). At least I'm pretty sure this was from after the fire, rather than before (I did take photos from a visit beforehand, but I dont think I have those anymore).

- Wait, so were the ‘Investigate’ and ‘Introspect’ options pre-selected? Or else how was it determined to choose these two actions out of the four possibilities provided?

This all started as a mock-up vignette piece I'd made to prototype storytelling stuff for this type of narrative, which I posted with the accompanying descriptive text to a discord server I'm in. It was meant to just be a warmup sketch, and I did it on september 1st 2023
The title for this update comes from an ill-advised choice... because woops... friends responded selecting the hypothetical Commands.. and I felt encouraged

A couple friends selected introspect and Investigate, the former of which was easy for me to do, as it only took the rest of the week to get around to finishing it.
Investigate...
Well, for that I had to sketch out Korite, and then I had to actually draw them in CSP, and then draw all the assets, texture, palette, write out all their dialogue, setup the ui, do the background image or two...
So it took until October 3rd for me to be done with that, and October 7th is when I posted the thread on SV.

it went from "this is just a sketch, feel free to play along" to "oh, people are playing along, this is the demo that'll get me to start a project seriously for once"
...because I've been prototyping this sort of mystery dungeon narrative in a few different forms 4 or 5 times up to then I think?

I'll get to the main review later, but, suffice to say.. pretty much the bulk majority of issues with the first few updates, are the result of me doing my first serious project in years, with only a couple under my belt, and how up until I was actually working on the other parts of the first 'update', I didnt have anything concrete on the characters. Eschate, the 'deity', was one I'd cobbled together from what came to mind relevantly from the segpock itself. Frankly, when it comes to the 'weirdcore' and 'dreamcore' aesthetics as inspo sources, a deity who's specialized in the conceptual sphere of nostalgia is... well let's just say it's a bit generic. I still have characterization to work on for them, but only because that'll inform motivations / daily lives of those associated with them.

Implying that there’s neurally-based communication in this setting? We’re definitely living in quite the wild future if so

a [ Profile ], huh? Are we in cyberspace at the moment?

Not quite! I could go tongue in cheek by saying "you are the cyberspace" or "cyberspace is you", but the exact cosmological stuff shifts about now and again in the background.

I could also say "The mind is the soul is the body is the mind", because the boundary lines between mind and neurology and 'soul' and consciousness and so-on are only so tangible / real in a work like this.

The 'reality' experienced by characters is inherently abstract, and 'not real'. I've called it by varying terms, narrative unreality, narrative reality, so-on.
There's a lot of ways it happens, but the setting is an idea of "where do dreams go when you forget them? where do we go when we dream? what if you rode by accident a bus line that had been discontinued before you had been born? where do black holes go? what lies beyond death? how do you defy entropy? what is the nature of the dark forests of the universe?" type of answers.
'folded' reality or 'material' reality as I and in-universe characters call it, refers to "hard-sci" realities like our irl one or that of certain narrative fiction, but it also just refers to the "default" state of universes before things go awry.
This going awry is referred to as "unfolding", the way that reality breaks down and becomes surrealized, becomes other, becomes free from the constraint of physics to the point at which thermodynamics is a consensus reality hallucination that operates so long as you have not freed yourself from it. A part of the implication I have is that all worlds, all species, all their alternate future timelines, all inevitably converge on an ascension beyond their material reality whether they chose to embrace it, or things had to be initiated by force due to mutually assured destruction being done by those on the planet with power.

There's only so much I intend to play with of the potential the setting has at any given time, but the answer is Beeg Implications in the background.

- And alium has a name: Korite, duly noted

Onion AU Korite is now a mental image in my head.
(about an hour later)

I can't blame you for this, but I also can't blame just myself for this.
I'd link to a tumblr post about "our friend the allium" but I cannot find it anymore because apparently there's a DSMP member who's named that as well.

Spoiler: Initial Vignette 2!!

Oh, so the profile is essentially character creation. That’s a clever way of handling things

ty! a part of it is that for many Quests have Character Sheets.

Some play with what shape it takes, whether it's diagetic or not, so-on. This means that it exists within the narrative's reality as well as it does for the audience.
ex 'diegetic music' is the common example, where the music being played as part of the soundtrack is being played and heard by the characters, whether this is them at a concert, or if it's gonna get played for laughs.
A lot of the 'game abstractions' in this setting are diegetic in nature, and facts of daily life for many inhabitants of the void.

A part of this comes from that one of the big format inspiration sources, Fortuna, has Character Stat Screens regularly throughout the comic, and at the start of each 'run' of the in-comic videogame the reader-avatar (named "You" if not named anything else) character creation is done with the starting characters.

There's a lot of ways I could have a narrative like Questant start, and I could probably talk about this for a bit too long, but I want to try and have some balance between premade and audience made characters.
...unfortunately for an environment like SV, some takes from veteran questers advise against having any character creation, as that makes a huge-ass Potential range of narrative routes, and only so much of your audience, typically those that voted for the winning result(s), will stick around.

Profiles in this setting are intended to be, to some degree, diegetic in nature.
Characters can interact with their profile, overhaul the design, and check if not innately sense that of others.
I have a bit in the prologue where the POV feels the invasive sensation of Caestellau's name and pronouns on meeting em for the first time, which if I'd known I'd be writing that I could've incorporated it into meeting Korite.

So the PC has some degree of pre-existing characterization based off their interaction with Korite. Duly noted for the future.

Technically spoilers: Only to so much of an extent!

Spoiler: woops

They were literally 'born' 'today' in-narrative, about ~1 hour(s) before vae reaches the shrine, and only after character creation is done does vae have a true 'physical' form to speak of 83c

The audience is still at this point of the narrative encouraged to influence characterization through their commands, whether projecting onto Klevas or not.
Vae only has 3/4 personality trait slots I have as the default amount, at present, so this could go a fair number of directions for what vaer final characterization will amount to.

You also have a missing newline at the "You called at a shrine, so beyond the obvious.” line

Ripperoni in pisseroni, guess I gotta go fix that on both sites.
Oh... Hm, I think that was intentional? I thought the sentence / paragraph structure felt cluttered? Sometimes I make idiosyncratic choices that are non-standard, and I think that was probably one of them. I could probably just fix it, that'll probably flow better.

Ah yes, there’s a Bubsy meme for this.

Please, ping me whenever you find it

I admittedly wasn’t expecting that given the vaporwave aesthetic,

I'm not terribly surprised seeing vaporwave. The two big influences for this setting, due to the timing of the pandora's lasagna and all the stuff I've been into in the 10 years leading up to it, were the Weirdcore (oddcore, strangecore, are synonyms more or less) and Dreamcore aesthetics
A lot of the nature of the aesthetics is that beyond thematics, the visual motifs are fairly fluid for the comic.
Different Demiplanes will have different grounding themes or visuals, different characters will have different personal senses of style, so-on.
I really need to work on establishing how I present a style each time I design a character, because my intent is for a [ Party ] of characters to be able to range HEAVILY in visual vibe the way "gays at brunch" memes would.

When you have radical bodily autonomy, and other forms of radical autonomy, you get to do some interesting things to yourself... and that means visuals too.

...I'll also admit that 'Cleric' is one of the less well-defined 'ways of being' (classes) for the setting, as divinity ends up being a fair bit more likenable to something like ENA or Kill Six Billion Demons, or various other settings out there, where "sufficient magic is indistinguishable from divinity" could be how things are phrased.
Cultivation of power and how one plays with the conceptual structure of reality, what concepts you imbue into yourself, so-on.

Deiformes tend to be like demiurges, they are the Djed of the demiplane they play host to, unless they've established additional anchors / pillars / support structures (something Rememaudlin is currently working on establishing a second of), which'll be something visually apparent when I get to the animation
Unsure if I'll coin a neologism, or just lift Djed for the metaphysics. I'm fond of synonyms!

it sounds like they’re meant to be Familiars

That's one way of thinking about it, yeah!
I'm running Questant here as well as SV, because Cognions are a staple for this setting.
They're the collectable mons of the setting.

Cognion, as I think I tried to put in the dialogue, are any 'creature'. A dog and a dragon are both equally viable cognions, and so too would be your typical Alien (the horror series) 'alien'.
Don't tell anyone I told you this, but pursuers are viable cognions as well~ though I think I'd compare them to a psuedolegendary in terms of 'power scaling' (which I overall try to avoid if I can help it?)

- Aaaand Cognions are apparently not above trying to get nibbles from the people they’re bonded with. That’s certainly reassuring.

"Should a stray cognion seek to satiate itself with your ichor, your own can be called forth to safeguard you. Once distracted, you escape."

Close! In theory some sophonts probably are letting their cognions bite a chunk out of them as part of the cognion's diet, since plenty of people are probably tearing off chunks of their cognion for their own daily culinary habits (for instance, Klevas's starter could break a piece of itself off, that would be Just Plain Edible)

The quote in question was about stray cognions, such as the wild ones you can encounter in a NER, or in the rare case a wild one wandering an inhabited environment (though such behavioral problems would be handled more readily by the public / local governance, the way a feral dog trying to hunt a human would be handled, potentially).
Not all mountain lions are gonna see a human and go "yeah, I could take that down, this'll be easy", but now and again, especially if they've managed it before, they just might try...
That sort of logic is what informs some of my views on The Pokemon World and why it'd be important for casual trainers to have a journey to the next town over to pick up a relative's pharmacy prescription as a rite of passage. Get used to having the family poochyena fend off pidgeys or an ariados that thinks it can have a stray childe as a meal.. and that sort of headcanon stuff is what informed cognions as a concept when I started working on them

- On the one hand, I get that you don’t want a giant wall of exposition for all these highlighted terms, but I do wonder if there ought to have been more context cues provided, since [innerscape] kinda meant a whole lot of nothing to me

Yeahhh, I figured some ideas would be self-evident enough, but I really should have gone for the infodumps I wanted.
I liked Homestuck a lot as a kid for just constantly dumping worldbuilding concepts on me.
Only later did I learn that a lot of what I liked about homestuck was Hussie purposefully breaking 'golden' writing rules as part of the theory behind how homestuck was made, such as the bonkers act formatting.

Soooo I've tried to err on the side of caution and Just Get Shit Done, and assume that if readers dont understand the concept, they'd
[]Ask Korite About: (thing they dont understand).
The problem is that how I also handled the usage of bracketed speech changes to be more worldbuilding accurate... which meant I also wanted to be more sparing with invoking it.
The idea with bracketed speech is that it bypasses linguistic communication by directly translating the schema and composite concepts into the other party's brain, to prevent miscommunications or misunderstandings. Somewhat subjective in nature, but enough to let someone know what a [dog] is to a human.

I also was on a weird timer with my anxiety and "when am I ever going to show anyone but my friends in dm's or a server or two this setting", along with how I was much more sluggish with my writing and artwork.
I'm still on a bit of a timer, which is what makes going back and reworking things hard, but this tempts me. I'm hoping to do weekly updates so that there's some consistency and reliability to me as a QM / writer, and thus have a reliable audience responding to posts, and doing a batch of revisions could... mean delaying any new updates for at least a week or two maybe? There's enough I'm trying to juggle as much as this review reminds me I should smooth out the mainline opening.

...that and SV has a 20 image per post maximum for free accounts. Forum-supporting subscription accounts at $5 usd can do 30, and $10 at 50.
And then for every image I want to put in the thread, I have to either draw new assets, live with a messy sketch, but overall have to setup the dialogue and the panel itself.

- >I'm talking about that scrapbook of yours. Small typo here

aagh, idiosyncratic misspellings once again show up. ty for pointing out typos, I've only had so many of these pointed out by friends or readers so far.

- Oh, so the hologram allows Korite to do more than just see us. I think. I wonder why the PC wasn’t experiencing senses other than just sight and audio for Korite in that case

Less the hologram, and more the shrine itself!

Korite essentially works as a customer service representative / adventurer dispatch / npc who gives quest rewards for dungeon crawlers..
So they're fairly experienced with using the Shrine (which, I keep thinking you mean the shrine when you say "pc" because that's what it is in essence lol)..

I'd phrase it as like, they work from an office cubicle, and their arms (detached and floating behind the FOV that records Korite, which is why I dont draw them with arms so far) are working on the various interfaces that are projected in front of them.
They're not like, a 'high tier' esper or anything like that, but they've gotten used to working with the psiware the office of Eschate has available for the Communications Department. So they're pretty used to the whole suite of tools available to them when answering a shrine questant's call.

Normal calls amount to people who (typically) have worked with Eschate's office before, and are doing either fetch quests (gathering reagents from the NER, catching cognions, doing scouting missions, etc), or they're a first-timer to making contact with Eschate's demiplane and those who work there.
Klevas, our PC, is not by any means a standard questant caller. Vaer call is more like an Emergency Services call having been placed.

Since shrines are one of the easiest 'civilized' resources to encounter in a NER, working Comms / Shrine Maintenance essentially comes with the assumption that now and again you're going to hop onto a call and it'll be "hey, uh... I dont know where I am? this statue spoke into my head that I could use it? what's going on??"
Korite is just experienced enough with this assignment schedule that they've done this type of call once or twice before.
Typically, someone who Just Works Here might escalate the call.
Korite, relatively confident this wouldn't be too big of a problem to resolve, decided to handle the call and not escalate it.

Anyway, the shrine is a remote access point for the systems Korite is making use of from their end.
It's not a very high-quality one, it's essentially the base tier of shrine that they could've created and then installed into the NER.
Given all that was done with it, I want to say that it's probably a little better than bare bones, but it's like beginning a skype call from a windows XP computer, and someone on the other end is using a much more modern system to receive and moderate the call from.
Or, I guess for the call center analogy, Klevas is calling from a landline, and Korite is answering vaem from a desktop computer at the call center.

The hologram is audio-visual, and technically a portal through which iirc smell can travel for the incense / the incense is being projected through the connection into the other space because it's 'easy' to transmit, same with Korite's psionic influence pushing through, BUT all Klevas can get is base stuff.
Korite can do a lot more though.
I'd probably put it at that Korite can see The Whole Segpock from a 3rd person perspective, investigate it, and snoop on anything within it. There's like, various particulars I could probably spend some time hashing out, but Korite knows how to use the tools accessible to them, and even the barebones shrines would still give them a good window into what's going on in the caller's immediate surroundings.
As I went for in the latest update, Korite can also sense a fair bit about someone's emotional state or thoughts, due to the fairly direct connection between Klevas's consciousness and Korite's via the interface.

Klevas is at best a latent psychic, and can maybe get phantom qualia from the connection throughout the call, but otherwise...
If the average person opens the front door to their home, and finds a completely dismantled car within their living room, with countless automotive tools also within the room.. they might be hopeless at trying to figure out how to put it all together without external help and a bit of time going into it? Not the best analogy I suppose.

- “sophont” is apparently a term for beings with roughly equivalent or greater capacity for reason than humans, TIL

yeah, I have some issue with "human being" and "person" and "personhood" and "people" as default terms when it comes to trying to write non-humans?
humanocentrism, I guess would be the phrase, is something I want to try and avoid in a casual sense, as much as I'm going to be limited in my ability to write xenofic, but it bugs me now and again when I see non-humans say "I'm a real human being too" when humans dont exist in the setting at all, if that makes sense.
Soooo instead of "sapient" or "sentient" as terms analogous to 'person', I opted for Sophont due to it being a comparative rarity, sounding nice, and just working for both it's literal definition and how I can use it in an abstract sense with an unfamiliar audience.

Unfortunately, I should probably explain the more jargon-y psychology and parapsychology terms I use in my writing, even if some of the intent is the mystique.
ah! that's something I wanted to get to for the overall review, but some of the intent is like playing a game in a setting you've never checked out, where terms are flying by you, and if there isn't an in-universe encyclopedia, you kind of have to get from context clues and make headcanons.

- Ah, I see that you opened another batch of choices. Based off the next threadmark, I’m guessing the “Ask About the Cognion Ritual” option was the winner.

close!
my updates shift a bit, but I do want to entertain "so long as multiple options have been chosen, every option could be used someday" as a thought for Questant.

Spoiler: cognirit unitiat

Also, mind your newlines

Oh those are def intentional I think? I believe they were formatted for ease of reading / not feeling like a monotonous paragraph.

That’s quite the sigil at the shrine basin. I wonder if that pattern is based off anything in particular or not

You aren't alone in wondering. Nonakin's speculation was Crafting Grid like minecraft, which was sort of the intent.
Loosely based off the max number of reagents and then the result in the center, but also partly "I am using the symmetry tool, time for an asemic alchemical / ritual circle design"

Kilon sounds like it’s a lovely™ place to be. Or at least I think the implication is that it’s a place

Nope, that's the name of one of the alien species.
Kilonnese homeworlds are a *throws dart at a fantasy kitchen sink* "oh hey it landed on middle-earth this time!" deal.
The Kilon, like a number of species, doesn't have a single fixed timeline, or single fixed 'home universe', similar to how humans in the voidverse are.
Kilon as a species almost always come into existing on mid to high fantasy setting's planet where there are at least 3 to 7 (or more) other species.

- There’s an idea of a “starter” for Cognions, huh? Do we also get to pick out three from a lineup?

Not in this Quest, because I decided to make everything harder on myself 8))))
This is another layer to "I made the audience do character creation and bogged down my Quest" as an issue.

My recipe for a voidverse narrative typically amounts to "oh no, you somehow aren't in your home reality anymore... well, you gotta survive somehow I guess, and this stranger is offering to give you a pet specifically to help you survive", and then they do in-fact present you a lineup of three (or more) to choose from.
The hypothetical 'game' (or really, games) that could exist in-setting mirror this, with the 3 being either randomly generated, or selected from a preset list.

'Starter' cognions are defined by a single capability: An Inventory System.
Any cognion with an 'inventory core' installed, or having an innate inventory system, is considered acceptable in many demiplanes and traditions as what you could give to a stranger or a child who has never had a cognion.

The point is so that they are given an easily accessible schema for how to interact with and understand the world around them, among other reasonings like "you wont tire out hiking for miles on end as easily if you aren't having to carry around 40 to 50 kilos (somewhere around 100 lbs) of gear with you to stay alive.

You dont need a cognion to use an inventory system, as Caestellau in the prologue exemplifies, so think of this, and Klevas's scrapbook, like training wheels.

- You have a moment where your transcript for Korite talking about the Klion way is both in the spoiler box and duplicated outside of it right afterwards

Sobs. I have no idea how or why this one happened. well, that's on the pile. Gonna have to set up a doc for corrections to make when I can.

- Wait, ‘still-folded worlds’? What do unfolded ones look like, then? Though I wonder how much of this the player character is meant to know, or if this is all supposed to be new to them much like it is for us

What happens to the contents of a world (whether country, planet, solar system, or galaxy, or cosmology for those that dont have planets) varies!
You could end up with demiplanes, or segpocks.
Both are by essence videogame level skyboxes, to make it simplest as possible.
I also have "the space around you is constantly shifting and will not stabilize for long in the shape it is presently" as an idea for procedurally generated game setups, where backtracking is a pipedream. Just like the idea of dreams as a constantly shifting tapestry.
I also have the sort of cosmology that's the result of Feel Good Inc being my fav music video for a month or two as a kid, where a planet is shattered into sky islands, and the 'surface' is now a hellish craggy magma and tenebrous crust.

Unfolded is the state of all things in the void. It's a casual dichotomy to refer to "pre-void places and peoples" and "post-cataclysm worlds".
There's sweeping generalizations I can make with a lot of things about the setting, but the project is at times meant as the sort of sandbox where the answer really is:

what do you think they look like? what should they look like?​

The Player Character is not meant to know anything Korite is talking about outside of what Caestellau already explained to them, and just about all of it is meant to be new on a level of "you are a 18 year old who walked into the wrong classroom and have been sitting in on a graduate studies course for 30 minutes now, and you understand very little" I think? Unfortunately, that's not something I know how to write too well, at least immersively.

- I see more new terms with ‘NER’ and ‘demiplane’ there.

If it's not sufficiently explained
- NER: this is the setting's answer to Mystery Dungeons, The Backrooms, silent hill's 'otherworld', mon game routes, dungeons, so-on, to some degree. they're technically a form of colonial organism, and the cells of it's body are the segpocks (levels, pocket dimensions, memories as spaces, so-on) that comrpise them
- demiplane: like a NER, it's a pocket dimension that is itself a collection of interwoven pocket dimensions. these tend to be analogous to a person's personal minecraft server, but usually much smaller in scope. One human demiplane example I can give that I recently drafted is "VerdanDeLyon", which is an alternate history version of the french city of Lyon, which is post-unfolding as well. The whole cityscape and possible some of the outerlying spaces of it's metro whether suburbs or outskirts, is probably One Big Space, if not a series of Large Spaces which fluidly interweave.

Have this music video that may or may not help visualize how segpocks come into play as a concept with both NERs and Demiplanes.
I'm hopefully gonna have more than those two things worked out as concepts, but I lack names for what other routes do exist for how things 'exist' cosmologically =w=;;

- Wait, there are other people here aside from just Korite?

Oh, Korite isn't in the NER at all.
They're in Rememaudlin, which I would phrase as "if the mystery dungeon is in the PMD world on the sky continent, (Korite) is in Lavender Town in GSC", due to the whole nature of 'parallel dimension' theory being mangled the way I use it.
This NER itself isn't 'physically' connected to any demiplanes or places.

There are other sophonts within the NER:

• Caestellau, the stalwarte (class) hybrid (species) who assisted [ You ] get to the Shrine before having the party split during the prologue (those updates are not yet out)
• A shopkeeper NPC who doesn't know anything is currently 'going wrong' while Caestellau is scouting the NER, who I sketched in a mockup in an extra

And there is (1) sophont who will be within the NER later:

• the Cleric who'll be in the NER in (indeterminate amount of updates) in order to rendezvous with Klevas and get them escorted to Rememaudlin, and shown around

- You have another “your’s” that should be “yours” in the third paragraph under ‘Ask about Korite’s Cognion’ section

pain, suffering even.

- Huh. That’s more than I was expecting from an inventory for waking up in a weird place without a firm idea of what’s going on. I take it that we’ll be needing this in short order

Yeah, this inventory setup was one I devised in the planning stages for "what random items could've been scavenged en-route to the shrine", and show up early in the prologue updates.

- Trippy scrapbook is trippy

Im so glad it came across sufficiently.
This is the result of playing around with CSP assets.

Boy, I hope someone meditated on the tunnel pic, since that one looks wild.

You'll probably find out from reading the scrapbook, but theoretically they're all pre-mediated, so to say!

Aha, so we’re getting a traveling bard for our Cognion / Familiar. Always a solid choice for a wandering adventurer

Ah, close but no cigar, that's just the random cognion keeper from the example (which was intended to be like the opening intro to a pokemon game where you see the professor and A Pokemon ; but I wanted to show 3 aliens and 3 mons).
This was just an excuse to show off Meluch as being Some Random Dweeb who also has more than one cognion they keep around.
Meluch is probably recruitable, as it's not like he has any huge reason to keep hanging around Rememaudlin after his divorce.

Spoiler: Character Creation

- I wonder if it might make sense to do some sort of recap of the choices available to the participants at the end of each post, since I admittedly got thrown in a loop by this opening choice here since I forgot it was presented as a first set of choices about halfway through the prior update

Yeahhh, I realized after this or another update that it was probably confusing.
I'd seen quests on SV do it like that, but frankly... those were textventure style quests, rather than Art Quests, so I really should have grouped my options towards the end... but then the problem is the images and prose...
Mm, yeah that's why a recap would be best.

- Actually, I just realized, but how was this selection chosen anyways? Since the only vote on TR for that question chose a different option.

I'll explain this in the response to main review, but a fair bit of the early updates were Majority Choice voting.
This means that while Negrek's vote was the only one on TR, there were 3 separate votes on SV.
One chose for the first option, and two voted for the second option. That makes it 1, 2, 1, and thus that the option that was chosen won the vote.

I could've had Korite exposite on each of their three cognions... but I'd have to draw three cognions, write out three sections of dialogue, and then write out any dialogue or exposition that results from them, and then assemble all the dialogue into the panels that would need to go into the update, and then I'd need to format everything for the post.

When Act 1 happens, Klevas will have the option to hangout with Korite during freetime events, and would get the opportunity to either meet the cognions, and/or battle them (battles will be called "cognion conflicts" because heehee alliteration and conflict resolution wordplay)

So at least some Cognions are capable of symbiotic behavior. I wonder if that means that there’s some sort of ‘fusion’ mechanic for Cognions in this game

- Yup, based on Korite’s dialogue we got our confirmation on there being Cognion fusion. It’ll be fun to see that one get unlocked

In theory all cognions are capable of symbiosis and-or fusion

idk about 'unlocking', that's a cognioneering skill Klevas would need to work up towards if not having someone else do it for vaem (cognioneer ; think pokemon professor, as a mad scientist, as a pokemon breeder, so-on)
that said, yes there's a lot of cognion-centric mechanics to play with

I wonder what ‘Zrom’ means in this setting given that it was specifically chosen as a default

oh, nah, 'zrom' is a result of the profile cracking and obtaining a gap, causing the void to fill it.
There's theoretically no real meaning to it, just a name that came to me.

If the audience didn’t choose ‘Spooper’, I’m going to be so disappointed.

Since this update was close to halloween I decided to add them in since I already had carte-blanche from Nonakin to use his cosmosdex species.
I really expected them to get picked, lol! None of the spooper options voted for won the majority vote sadly, and Nonakin's chriilth'tyn design won the majority vote.

The hilarity was that I expected the audience to walk into the brick wall of "you chose the vriska palette"
I didn't expect it to be one of Nonakin's submissions.
He didn't realize until I dm'd him, and I expect it's because I used two different vriska palettes that aren't immediately clear either, the one that got picked was slightly edited. (It's her Land Palette, and then her classpect / godtier palette with green added in).

You can see why some people just drop from reading a quest at the start... because their fav character creation options didn't get picked.
I pay attention to that risk a bit too much I think, and I don't think it's a guarantee as that's not how I personally read things... but some people do apparently. I imagine it's more of a factor if say "hey look at this multiverse narrative I have, who's the character and what's the setting"
because it's on a forum where a ton of Worm and W40K fans alike are, those options if given by the QM, are likely to get chosen now and again.
Some people refuse to read Worm fanfic at all, and I do relate to "oh, the main character will be from media I avoid, okay bye"

including defaults of the five species that are selectable.

I initially intended just four! and then it was really close to halloween!! I did this to myself!!!

I honestly wonder how on earth you handled voting for this, since you’d think that almost every player would propose something completely different from the next one.

Majority Voting =w=
A lot of Quest readers (or Players / Questers / Voters) will vote for other people's ideas, because Plan Voting generally requires Most Popular Wins
I was really tempted to go for "submit one option" so that we'd get a Make An OC type of result, but I wasn't sure that'd be enjoyable or cohesive in the end =w=;;

Spoiler: scrapbook

Oh, so we’re getting more backstory behind each of those photos in the scrapbook last update. Neat.

Essentially this is the cliffnotes version of meditating on a memory in-full.
I wanted to give snippets and ideas of what the results would be like.

- So ‘Zrom’ apparently was a gamer, or at least that’s what I’m getting from the pond photo
- And he went to conventions back in the day. Did they play competitive Melee, too?
- Oh, well that tunnel fluff text sounds ominous there.

Are there any inconsistencies you're noticing 83c

- Oh, there’s more pages here. I wonder if first-time readers are meant to look at this or not. If not, it probably makes sense to have some way of noting things for readers to skip it until they reach a certain point

They in theory aren't meant to, but the problem about Quests is that...
Character Sheets update
how many different updated character sheet posts do you want to scroll through to get to the latest one, if it updates nearly every update, and it updates weekly and runs for 2 or 3 years.

The alternative is having one post that you update over time, but this means new readers will see Present Day Spoilers, rather than what it looked like at update 1
Sufficient Velocity has more BBCode formatting to be able to do 'tabs' on a post, but TR only has about half as many formatting options.

For things like profiles for each party member and then their cognions? I'm gonna have to make an info page that says "hi, do you want the info? go to SV" due to that.

I tried to say don't read if you aren't caught up, in a fasion

As soon as you recalled yourself another page was able to turn and depict two pages of memories..

this indicates that character creation was finished, and it even has a date stamped onto the spoiler box.

I made a bad assumption that new readers were paying attention to the date updates were posted, as that's my usual reading habit for Forum Quests =w=;;

- >’so many creches to find a trinket within’ … is that a typo? Or is that a deliberate word choice that there’s groups of babies of… something in this forest?

..I think so yes. I believe it was meant to be cache, so I'm not sure how the fuck that got corrected to creche??
Chriilth'tyns dont nurse their young on the surface due to them being a subterranean species, so I don't think I'd meant for that to be creche by any means...

- Huh, whoever built this underground place looks like they had a thing for Classical architecture

It's among the public domain photos I pulled 83c

- >‘Zrom’ is a furry. Well that answer the question of what sorts of conventions they went to

Im so glad vaem being a furry came across.. but I'm unsure whether the convention(s) were furry ones. The memory doesn't specify, hm...
You could always try and prompt the PC to try and recall more, or project that theory onto vaem.

- ‘Depthscraper’, huh? Are these just vertical shafts with floors dug into the hollow, or is this something like the Geofront from Evangelion? Though ‘Zrom’ apparently was once an underground dweller

woops, originally wrote the following for the classical architecture because I forgot which came first

Spoiler: frankie and the witch fingers ; roof ; BIG IMAGE

Close! it's a music venue in Portland Oregon.
I took the photo on halloween when I went to see Frankie & The Witch Fingers with my bf, his wife (my metamour), and the wife's gf (metamour by proxy). they're a psychedelic punk band I recommend to folks if they already like Gizzard Wizard.
This was from the rooftop, I have sensory overload, so I had to take a break or two, and when I was trying to go downstairs to get back to the show I accidentally ended up on the roof because oops, it didn't go back to ground level that elevator, and I wanted interesting photos lately anyway.

anyway, the answer is yes! it's a corruption of the speculative architectural term 'earthscraper', which is a proposed architectural method for ecological preservation, adapting to climate change, and avoiding tectonic disruptions to cityscapes.
in the case of the chriilth'tyn, the species article for the cosmosdex doesn't say too much on their homeworld (due to it being a 'not important' planet, it doesn't have an article, and many of the old articles are shorter, and Nonakin's style isn't one for excessive detail), so I hashed out a number of questions with Nonakin in DMs for how I could approach writing and worldbuilding with the species.
Due to my own penchant for enjoying subterranea and earth shelters alike, I embraced the idea that they dont build surface structures, not permanent ones at least, because their cities and societies are all largely subterannean anyway in nature.

A 'depthscraper' is, as I've wanted to define it, an arcological settlement. We're talking metropolitan areas of 250k upwards to millions of inhabitants. The Big City, built into cavern systems and carved out and reinforced.
I wanted to try and capture the idea of looking out at a cityscape horizon, and then shift it to be an approximation of a cavernscape.

- Creepy store looks creepy

Glad it did, I found it via openverse like the other public domain photos. It's a Spirit Halloween in the process of closing / was abandoned sometime in the late 00s.
Huh, apparently I didn't set up the alt text like I thought I had, but the question I have I guess will be saved for when you get to the cognion ritual.

- I can’t tell if these sticky notes are meant to have happened before the start of the game, or if these are from later posts, but either way, ‘Zrom’ has certainly been running around quite a bit. Probably screaming, too.

The narrative starts in-media-res due to wanting to try out starting a story "in the middle" for a while... though in practice it's just in the middle of the prologue dungeon crawl sequence anyway.
The sticky notes are all representative of different segpocks within the NER.
I didn't write them as screaming, in part because my biases filter into how I write characters a little, and because I write NERs and this setting as being fairly forgiving a fair bit of the time.

I dont know if I'd have had the heart to run this straight from the start, just because "well you died, gg no re" wouldn't be very nice to the character or the audience.

and the stairwell we hung out in

Some segpocks are gonna reprise due to the NER's layout shifting, and the present update included the first reoccurence of a segpock.

---

Recap Review Response​

Spoiler: surskit A

Thus far, it’s been doing a pretty good job at feeling alive as a setting even if we’re still more or less stuck in the backroom of a lamp shop at the moment.

yeahhhh when I started this out I told myself I'd have a tight character creation, encourage people to experiment, and get the first few updates done with through the course of two or so months.
and then I burnt out and took a month or two hiatus, and had to take the next month or two to work on the rest of that sequence!
I only just got us out of the lamp shop!
I told myself I wouldn't let it drag on forever, and that's sort of what happened anyway.
On some level this is why I curbed what exposition I was already flying into (and sharing way too much of the setting all at once), because the wordcount could be 3 times as much as it is at present easily, and all that just from one character's personal perspective and take on how the world works!

I also noticed that you dropped a lot of terms without much context to figure out what they are.

Yeahhh, I realized a few updates in, and since I wasn't getting this sort of feedback I wasn't preoccupied with fixing that issue.
The problem with this sort of medium is that rewriting your first wonky updates... isn't done a lot?
It has the exact same issue as rewriting the first 3 chapters of your long-running fanfic in that you could alienate old readers who liked it that way, and then you'll have higher quality that runs right into "oh, wow this is rough" after that retcon is over.

That might have been a deliberate choice on your part if the player character is meant to be getting thrown into things and learning as they go, but if so, you might want to emphasize the character’s thoughts finding different concepts unfamiliar and going “oh, that’s what that meant” a bit more in others.

It sort of was! The idea was that either through the audience asking questions, or through reptition, things would become more clear.
Unfortunately, I ran into the gamedev pitfall of imagining the type of player who picks up the game, rather than tailoring to waht gamers are actually like, I guess?
I also think this writer bias came into play: I'm not great at imagining misconceptions I don't have? I may be phrasing this wrong, but when I play a pokemon gym that is a math puzzle, I don't fail it on purpose even though that means I'll get more battles, because I dont want to get wrong answers!
It's not exactly realistic to have the character Just Understand Things, and I think this is overall a gap in my ability to write.. learning? I'm not quite sure what I could be doing better to show a process growing that way, and I'm not sure I want to have a lot of my wordcount be that when things need establishing to get through them, but god it'd work better if I did.
I think another analogy is that... I was not as confused about how SBURB worked or the other gaming abstractions worked as the homestuck characters were on my first readthrough, even if the exposition and writing was illustrative and helped me understand them, I think those moments pulled me out? I don't like when games force me to get wrong answers for story's sake when I can understand the riddle or puzzle plainly (I love you Twewy, but, also, I am in pain during every new day's New Puzzle).

A part of the problem is also that I intended [ You, the PC ] to be a 'blank slate' for the audience to project on.
The closest I got to that was Nonakin's own projection of his own con experiences via the entrafresh object, and I think I could've telegraphed things better, though I also have wanted to play out a mystery pretty badly with the PC background.
I'm showing a bit more of my hand than I want to be, but at this point it's been months and the existential breakdown Klevas could've had isn't something I want to play out either.

If you want to have the curtain pulled back, here you go for a whole chunk of why the narrative is a little wonkier than it needs to be:

Spoiler: the big spoiler

They're Today Years Old, and born with a mostly mature consciousness, and An Approximate Knowledge Of Many Things. vaer amnesia is an assumption vae made, and was then reinforced, that vae thinks is the true state of reality. It isn't, because vae spawned into existence at the start of the prologue. All vaer memories did not exist as memories belonging originally to vaem, at least when we're talking about the main scrapbook memories.
Those memories, aren't even from all the same person. The halloween store is a spooper's memory of a spoopermarket, or a random alien visiting the spooper homeworld visiting one!

I also consider vaem to be a sponge for info, to a degree, but also psionically sensitive to [bracketed] info, though that's something I wont have revealable until Act 1.

I also noticed that you seem to be drawing feedback from multiple sites beyond just TR,

Quite literally only Sufficient Velocity is the other host location for the Quest, and the only other place commands come from.
TR has a lower member count and is not familiar with Quests, so I expected the audience here to be at a disadvantage.
This, from veteran questers, isn't a recommended practice, sort of due to that factor.
It kinda sucks, but I was worried SV wouldn't interact with the narrative enough, in-part because I wasn't getting new feedback on discord for the demo, and SV only had sparse commands to submit due to pre-made majority voting being the most common, and problem sleuth style Anything Goes being relatively uncommon (to where people could consider it an experimental risk, I expect, when it's part of the fundamental history of forum quests to me =w=;; but alas, it's a medium that has existed in different ecosystems and aged over two decades or so now, and I only got into it a decade into it's existence online, as mspaforums was a newcomer back then)

I wonder if there’s a way for TR readers to be more clued in on what those other forks of this interactive quest are contributing, since it was admittedly a bit jarring at a couple points to see players submit answers to certain prompts and then the narrative choose something completely different.

I do literally include an author's note on the first tow updates indicating that this quest is mirrored and that TR is not the only source of commands or votes.

This Quest is being run and mirrored on Sufficient Velocity in this thread. I intend to mirror to MSPFA too.
My priority here will be mirroring updates every so often.
I can take votes / commands from this thread, BUT an update's posting may be delayed a week or more (for instance this is being posted in whole so far two weeks after the first SV update). Informational slash worldbuilding or similar posts will be delayed, but the SV thread is threadmarked.

Quests are a form of interactive fiction where you as the audience get to decide character actions, tactical plans, and other things in a narrative. There are two other quests, aka forumventures or Forum Adventures, in the text adventure style. As an Art Quest that means there's a bit of a hybrid style going on here.
I'd meant to make a thread explaining the concept of quests about a year back, and may do it still. I still intend to run a pokemon sandbox quest on here when I get back to it. In the meantime SV has an (albeit old) thread on this.

OK and that's the update folks. This took me a week longer than I'd meant for it to as a result of having a busy week, and the one ahead is it's own. I'll probably close voting around halloween. It doesn't help that I added a fifth species to the lineup due to seasonal and "lol, skeleton field for each species" reasons.
Character creation is taking place on both forums. Feel free to vote in favor of what's submitted there, and vice versus.

I do encourage those who are on both forums and reading (literally just Nonakin, who I asked to join SV due to being a brainstorm collaborator interested in when I finally ran things) to mirror their commands, and he does that most of the time in later updates.
For the character creation command, I do also link to his post on SV.

Like the votes are votes, but I feel like there’s something missing for being able to see how different choices were ultimately settled on in the present version of the game.

Yeah, and I wasn't using Quotes as much for the old updates.
I could go back, but here's a problem:

Cross-site Quotations don't work.​

BBCode for quotations on most forums is "user (on this forum) in post (on this forum) said: this".
The formatting for the user, the post link, and those details is forum-specific.
I quite literally cannot get the field that says "Spiteful Murkrow" to link to your post if I mirror it to SV, at least to my knowledge. I want to say I could maybe have it set up as [bbcode for hyperlinking, url, your name as the hyperlinked text] as the "(string)", but I'm not sure if by default xenforo sanitizes things, and the quote would just read as "longass bbcode instead of just the name as a hyperlink".
When I try to use a name for the quote, rather than just an empty non-attributed quote, it tries to link to a nonexistent post by a nonexistent user, even if the name specified was the same as a user on the forum, because there is no post to link to (the number, if I supplied it, might link to a post on this forum only)
I have my concern that if I try this out, I'll just end up with an erroneous link to a random post on the forum.

SV and TR might handle this differently too, because SV has a lot of custom BBCode.

One of the problems with this format of narrative is that just because you voted doesn't mean your vote will win.
In an "anything goes" quest, it also doesn't mean among 30 votes (a number I'm not likely to hit for a while, but I've seen dexworks on SV reach around that level), it doesn't mean any of your commands specifically will get used. Some quests are more accomodating, some are less.
Whether for my desire to have an engaged audience or 'feeling charitable', I want to make sure I incorporate any and all commands.

wrt the discord demo, the best I can probably do would be "command from discord demo" as the name of a quote. this would differentiate them from the Example Commands / Autonomous Commands I wrote for the prologue leadup to the 'start' of the quest.

[X] Chat with Korite about incense

While I may have closed voting on which of Korite's cognions will be in the next update (I'm working on posting to SV rn), I am marking this one down in my notes for the next one, ty!

otherwise, Negrek's un-used command I expect you're referring to does get used...
just not in the immediate following update.
it gets used in the update after that, which is after the cutoff for your reading session.

whiiiiich *rolls hands* I alluded to commands sometimes getting used in later updates if they aren't chosen, but I understand how that might be jarring.

I’m not really sure how applicable or not this feedback will be to an interactive work,

dw, just about everything is applicable, and this liveblog review is honestly the most feedback I think I've had so far?
I'm considering mirroring it to SV just because "hey, I got a review that I responded to in detail, which may clarify some things in the quest, or just be a fun read"... and Allium!Korite.
I hope I'm not too rude or pointed in this response, because AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I wasn't sure there'd be a review from catnip at all. Next time I'm gonna have to specify a cutoff point (I'll probably put to CoRi - UnIt), tho the parts I want feedback / interaction on most are later updates, which... frankly I expect is a problem for catnip fics, asking for someone to read later chapters means a lack of context.

Thank you for your patience, I know this is a bit experimental, and atypical, for fiction on the forum, so it means a lot to have someone read along and make the amount of comments you did.
It's been fairly helpful to have Negrek cheering in my corner, and it's likewise nice to have another person's eyes on this.

"why did this take all day", well word counter is saying it's 10k... though beyond bbcode formatting and quotes from Murkrow, hopefully its closer to 5k?
Frankly, dont worry about reading this all at once, I got what I needed from the review (which was a lot! ty so much! fuck!!)

 

[Meridian]

Upd8 Voting Results​

the following is largely copied and pasted from the prior update.
unfortunately some BBCode content is unable to be properly mirrored aside from screenshots. I may try that at some point.. but the text wouldn't be able to be copy-pasted.
I'll try and post some of it in quote boxes.

[X]Zippi: Attempt to climb the rest stop​

Klevas will attempt to give Zippi a boost up the side of the rest stop so that they can put the sign directly into the inventory.

Success requires a 65 or higher on a d100. Failures under 25 result in an injury for Zippi, and will disadvantage them in combat.​

50, < 65

😔​

Zippi fails.
Woops, did a second roll in setup (^=<>=^);;

[X]Inventory Additions​

- [x]Klevas: Collect buttons
- [x]Klevas: Collect fallen sign (+TR)
- [x]Klevas: Pick flowers
- - [X]Klevas: Pick Flowers (Thousand Roads)

Automatic Success.
Roll 1d6+2 for stacks of buttons taken.
Klevas puts (roll 1d3+2) picked flower rolls into vaer bag. ​

Both pockets will by default be filled with a handful or two of buttons.
1d6 = 3 ; +2
Klevas now has 5 scoops-worth of buttons from the Desertified Button Stairway.

Klevas picked flower stacks comprise 3-4 sprigs of the blue flowers found in the Pink Desert Segpock of this NER.
Klevas picks flowers from around the Rest Stop and Segpock.
1d3= 1 +1 = 2 Rolls of Blue Flower Sprigs.
Klevas puts them in vaer messenger bag.

Klevas retrieved The Fallen Sign and put it in vaer inventory.

Two Sections Omitted, Check This Post​

due to heavy BBcode. I just dont feel like trying to edit all the bbcode out of this one.

This is a fun one, as I've had the answer to this sort of idea set since a few months or so back.
If folks get to experimenting, well yup your starter is a portal to the Inner World and exploring those memories with ease.
Just, yknow, turns out it is risky doing that in the middle of a random place.

Since the plan involves "remove self" realtively easily, I'll be accepting that..

Still, since I rolled accidentally, yknow what I'm gonna be setting that as the result for rolling if anything goes wrong while inside.
This is because each turn that someone explores their innerscape / inventory while in an unstable location like a NER, or in a space that lacks privacy, this roll is to check is something happens to either the host environment or if there is a disruption.

This would range from the NER realigning itself and causing the innerscape exit to be a different segpock, or worse with the innerscape becoming unmoored from the segpock entirely.
This would range from a wild cognion wandering into the core memory, a predatory cognion trying to hunt Zippi or enter the innerscape.. and in a demiplane or similar space others might pass by, the risk of sophonts entering your core memory and possibly messing with things or ambushing a party member.

At 43, the roll isn't bad, so I'll be using it to do something I was already planning for.
This means I'll be rolling for where in the NER the [ Pursuer ] ended up after chasing Caestellau and your Party Lead.
( Secret Dice Roll = PASS )
Dont worry it's a merciful roll, I just can't share where I placed them down.
Every other turn I'll be rolling for the Pursuer's movement from here on out.

What do you think of the prototyped inventory formatting I'm working on?

There won't be a vote for 2.5, as it'll be dialogue / worldbuilding followed by the actual update with the inventory contents.
While Zippi fails to climb the rest stop, I will be having Klevas still attempt to do the inventory fuckery. Since Zippi was not injured, this won't have any penalties or further issues.

For a look at what I've been working on for 2.5

Spoiler: wipperoni and a shitpost

And this shitpost in response to a review given on Thousand Roads, which I may mirror due to the worldbuilding content of it

"alium" reminded me of the tumblr post meme, Our Friend The Allium, and the idea popped into my head of "Korite if the deiforme spheres were just slightly different"

---

no 2.5 update, or 3 I guess. at least not yet. I'll probably roll them into one.

things are delayed until next week anyway, probably. I have appointments during both tuesday and thursday, both some of my bigger workdays. if there is an update this week it may be sunday, as I've got plans saturday.


I haven't been able to get much of any serious work done for most of the last week, for one reason or another. Most days have amounted to "hm, really wish I hadn't bothered with taking my adderall" because I would've rather taken a tolerance break if I'd known it would play out this way.

I'll probably have another empty update at the end of this, whether I try a makeup update or not, just because I should really do a tolerance break.

drabbles for the anniversary will either get their own thread or be posted here. we'll find out tomorrow if I finish the third.

 

[Meridian]

This oneshot involves a loose pov of experiencing delusions brought on by psionic causes.
All three are gonna of these are gonna be along the lines of horror theme-wise, and I'm doing my best to tag them appropriately.
Feel free to let me know if something else would have been a better tag

🛑 Content Warning 🛑
Oneshot contains themes of unreality, parasitism, and ideation of self-harm to resolve the parasitism. Some bodyhorror too.
🛑Content Warning 🛑

---

The dentist's office was a bust.. okay maybe not a total bust because there were still a bunch of dental tools, and more than expected with the traffic the NER supposedly had seen lately. The other voidtraipsers were probably just taking instances that spawned rather than fucking up the noemes of the segpock, so it isn't like the place would be empty... and yet someone had looted the fancy chairs.

Lila swung their leg out against the side of a chair in the waiting room in frustration, and groaned out "Who the fuck loots the chair?"

The whole point of the trip to this NER was the rumor that despite it being an [ Abandoned ] dental office segpock shit was mostly intact right? The trashed exam room they expected to find a broken chair, and yeah it was wrecked. That room reeked of memorial traces and everything pointed to the original owner of this memory being the sophont who trashed the worse parts of the office.

Ultimately? That's all fine, as it isn't like they'd run into some sort of irritant while checking out the store room where they kept the laughing gas. They felt more riled up as they'd gotten closer to the boundary to the segpock they'd originally came from, and knowing there wasn't anywhere left to check was pissing them off! This whole detour ends in knowing they either need to queue up another search process for a segpock with what they want, or they have to go and hunt down either someone dealing in an obscure piece of furniture, or a demiere that can weave one together from their memories.

Their focus had wavered on whether to try and chill out, or whether to scream to let off the tension of knowing they'd have to fork over more essencia to get everything right. They'd miss the look of the waiting room.. whoever had the idea to model a waiting room off the internal view of their species' maw? Sick, iconic behavior to pull off, and a shame whatever happened that made them leave the place abandoned like this..

Passing through the gap in the replica of some alien's maw.. the need to itch themselves was worse.

Before? Okay, sure it was enough to try and ignore. It'd gotten a little more annoying as they were packing up, but now?

It was a lot worse.

It was like someone had slipped them something special. Just a little treat to have some ants under your skin seeing what their new home would be like in the long-term. Just a little open house for every arthropest in the demiplane to live it up and pretend they could afford the down-payment for one night.

Leaning against the wall they rolled a sleeve up in the hopes that everything was normal...

There was a vein that looked like it was writhing underneath their skin. It wasn't off to the side minding it's business, oh no, it was out of place and bulging just enough to raise the skin.. and it was too soon to tell if that was just inflammation fucking around and finding out or if there really was something inside them.

If they went back into the dentist's office and set everything back up.. maybe they could get a better look, and maybe get it out...

If it was getting bad like this then it probably couldn't wait until the safehouse..

They had to be sure pressing a finger to the skin, and the shift underneath as they applied pressure was like that of an animal in distress as it'd been caught. They didn't wanna claw it open, but they had to know..

And then it was gone.

At least from that vein on that arm..

But it was gone.

No inflammation. Nothing trying to get away from their grip. The vein was where it should've been to begin with..

They should be relieved, but they can only feel themselves closer to panicking. The sensation wasn't gone from elsewhere on their body.

If it wasn't something in a dirty closet they'd inhaled, and it wasn't a self-reproducing concept that had wormed itself into their memories..

This was probably an aura then.. and that meant the [ Pursuer ] of the NER was nearby..

They bolted.

One exit, three exits, two exits.

They knew the way they came and it didn't.

This should be easy, but that didn't mean they had time.

The mossy hallway had been caved in further down, and as they stomped through the grass dotted with flowers in that eternal sunsetting warmth they could feel their veins coursing with the sensation of life that new their warmth.

A single prick had become several, and several had become a couple dozen overheating love bites.

The maintenance hatch was still open, and it still lead to the back-stage of a dance floor.

The distant sound of the slot machines pinged off, and those live bites bloomed into dozens more reminders of what sustenance they could provide to the needy.

The nagging feeling that a past party member was right played itself out as they tried to creep over to the dj booth for a better view of things, as the need to cry out was one they struggled to suppress. This pain wasn't real, and they knew that on an academic level.

They'd also been told that for most species only physiological pain actually existed, and that the conscious experience of pain was a cognitive matter.

So really it didn't matter if the pain was real in origin.

They didn't need to know what it was like to actually be made a host with fervor, or to be buried in a nest of angry eusocial fuckers.

The [ Pursuer ] provided all they needed to know.

They only needed one peek over the booth to know it was standing on the threshold of the path they needed to cross to get into the main area of the casino.

Its shape was like that of a biped, but the outline had been filled in with a shitty looped image of swarming maggots. Everytime one would dive back into the shifting mass to avoid a predator another would push forth from the swarm to take its place... and the sound of the slot machines was joined by the dull drone like that of the maggot's future filling the air.

The sound of a swarm without one flying about was just another layer to this aura... and the last thing they needed to know was how bad it'd get from triggering the pursuer.

They ducked down and began to try and think a route around it.. but this may as well be a dead-end.

Could it hear? If they threw something they could misdirect it and sneak by the other way around the dance floor...

They reached into their bag in hopes of finding something that'd make enough noise and make sure it wasn't something they needed to go back for.

🛑
Oneshot contains themes of unreality, parasitism, and ideation of self-harm to resolve the parasitism. Some bodyhorror too.
🛑

 

[Meridian]

This oneshot involves a loose pov of experiencing delusions brought on by psionic causes.
All three are gonna of these are gonna be along the lines of horror theme-wise, and I'm doing my best to tag them appropriately.
Feel free to let me know if something else would have been a better tag

🛑 Content Warning 🛑
Mild xenophobia, murder ideation
🛑 Content Warning 🛑

It had been a pretty good cook all things considered when they'd made camp. He could down some pretty big cognions caught grazing while on a traipse, but cooking? Being stranded out in the void had some ways of reminding him of his homeplanet.. as he always needed someone else on a hunting trip to cook what he caught without burning the best parts.

Only problem with it was that he was still adjusting to.. well just about everything about it.

VerdanDeLyon wasn't a monospecial demiplane in makeup, but he could easily be accused of being a stranger to the myriad species of the void. It had been what.. a couple weeks? That slime chick who'd been showing him around had found someone who could play "navigeer" for the newfound trio while she was doing the 'seer' shit, and as it turned out it was pretty good at the role of a trail quartermaster as well.

What bothered him was that it just didn't fit in.

At least to him, he thought as they trudged through the marshes. The water was tinged red like blood, but the air smelled sweet.. he wouldn't be surprised if when they got back and he touched his boots they'd be sticky. The shit looked less the consistency of blood (and wasn't warm from what he could feel through the boots), and more like what results when you try and make fake blood at home.

That was probably what it was from the smell... but that's... that's a lot of fake blood since it's as far as he could see around him.

What she'd said a couple weeks back was "If you were in a videogame I'd just say that" when he'd asked about shit like this.

So sure, maybe it did fit in with all the weird shit he found himself putting up with... but this 'new friend' shined like it had a carapace along its body... and he knew from how it shined back that it was definitely made of metal... but it ate.

Always asked him to look the other way or let it do that in private, and sure he'd let go, but that wasn't normal.

The whole time he'd known it... he'd never seen its head connect to its neck. Always floating just out of reach, but it clearly was supposed to connect. Sure it tapered but that was a fucking neck, animals have necks.

The slime chick was an amoeboid colony or something right, or she'd somehow turned her (probably human, he hadn't asked, who knows maybe she was an elf first) body into that slime gunk.

He was a primate.

And this thing? Aliens didn't have to fit into taxonomies, and he knew this.

It still annoyed him.

Same went for the magnetic field power shit it tried to explain away what questions he had for it to answer... at least until it looked uncomfortable.

It always seemed afraid of actually getting into a fight.

As it lead the way the moonlight caught the edges along it's pentagonal pyramid body, and he could swear there was a gap.

If it couldn't stop him, the thought came, he could just rush it. Bowl it over, unsheathe his hunting knife, and pry open the seams to see how it worked on the inside.

Learning about any animal was done through dissection sooner or later, and all of us were animals when it came down to it-

It had turned around.. for the least part, but also what mattered. Its body was still facing their route, but its head had spun about to face him, and was saying something from the way it's head flapped open and close...

"Are you hearing me?" It said, clank-clanks happening as it's hinged jaws closed back again, "Declan, do you feel alright?"

He answered with a frustration in his voice with little need to think further before he said aloud, "What color comes out when you bleed?"

That trio of eyes tilted back to widen at him, "Something has gone.. awry.."

His hand went to where his knife had been sheathed on his belt, "Yeah.. and I'm wondering if all this is really worth not working retail.."

The knife wouldn't come free, as if held in place, as he heard it say "I'm sure you're wondering a lot right now. That is the problem."

"Like you wouldn't do the same to me-"

"In the right mind I would not." It said, and it spun its head about to sweep, "We are alone, yes, but how long will that last? Do you have any idea what follows when you act on those thoughts?"

His breath hitched as he wondered if it had been reading his thoughts the whole time.

"I won't blame you." It said, all three bead-like eyes locked on him, "We are within the sway of something horrid, and whatever misgivings you may have are that much worse for it.. and I can promise you that you will only feel worse if you succeed." And it raised one of its three legs to take another step across the marsh, "If you can control your impulses long enough for us to break free, I'm sure Lysojenni can explain to you.." it waved its disembodied metal hands about as if to gesture to whatever the fuck it was on about, "Look. Just. Keep moving, and start thinking about why you feel this way."

🛑
Mild xenophobia, murder ideation
🛑

 

[Meridian]

This oneshot involves a loose pov of experiencing delusions brought on by psionic causes.
All three are gonna of these are gonna be along the lines of horror theme-wise, and I'm doing my best to tag them appropriately.
Feel free to let me know if something else would have been a better tag

🛑 Content Warning 🛑
Butcher's Workshop stuff? Borders murder ideation, this one's probably the most tame.
🛑 Content Warning 🛑

She looked around at the bloodsplattered tiles. The space practically spoke to her about how the same beige and dirtied tiles were once white and pristine. "We're in a fucking Nest!" Tess practically hissed out as she received yet more.

"Cmon, I know it looks weird-" One of the other party members, a spooper, said in earnest to reassure her.

"You don't feel the opportunity to skewer one of us on a hook, Gourdie?" She cut them off and gestured to one of the bloodstained hooks hanging from the racks around them, as the segpock spoke to her about how the hooks were cleansed, renewed, and polished.. but only to keep up the appearance of a maintained space for inspections.

"...wtf" another party member, a kilon man who began to reconsider the impulses that had begun to play out, and why he was having them, said. He'd only recently joined.. and of course now would be when she forgets. It had to have started with an 'e' right?

Gourdie shifted from one vine entangled skeletal leg to the other as they replied, "-no? I know I've got some aura resistance but-"

They were too loud for this to be safe.

What would a pumpkin-headed skeleton that celebrates a grisly farce every day of its life think was wrong with this place? She didn't normally have contempt for them.. but this was the exact situation where they'd be blind to what was going on, wouldn't it?

She'd already tried to keep her volume down when she'd first started, but she needed to ensure the point was made, "Please tell me I'm not wrong here." she said, looking to a fourth member of their group, and this time in hopes that someone not running seerage would know what's wrong without the segpock having to tell them how warm the embrace of blood was.

"I.." The fourth started, a hadrophont, she'd been told.. they varied a bit but this one clearly looked to her like an upright parasaurolophus. "I'm.. I'm uh.." She always struggled to get a word in edgewise in a normal situation, but now? Fretting with the bow at her neck with one hand..

"Just fucking say it for once."

"Uh.." She mumbled again, and the hand at her bow swung down to take the other grip of her stave into the free palm she had to spare, "Uh.. I just... I dont..."

"You don't have to be an ass about it-" Gourdie snapped, and reached out to pat the stuttering mahou, "It's okay, we have time.."

Knowing she was beat, and that sure it really doesn't help any to upset someone anxious without a pursuer's miasma clouding the senses, Tess groaned "Can we just leave??"

"I don't.." The mahou continued to stutter, "I dont think she's wrong?"

Tess wanted to shout 'HA' at that. She wanted to.

At times like this it was important to balance that with not pissing off the other people... who probably had been provided the same intuited weight limit for the meat hooks surrounding them.

"Is.. is this.. is this what they're all, y.." she said, and tightened the grip on that stave like her own personal worrystone, "You know, like?" She said, and turned her head back and forth around as though she was sensing the same bullshit.

"Yeah." Tess said.

"Yeah.." The kilonnese man said, "A lot of them are just fucking like this."

"I want to get out of here now." Tess whispered pointedly once more.

"Everything's been fucked up since the shuffle.." Gourdie groaned.

"So we're fucked?" The kilonnese man asked with what Tess wanted to call a displeased look, but she could never be sure when only so much of that intertwined sigil-like head actually had eyes to emote at her with.

All she had to offer was, "Not if we keep moving."

"I'd.." The mahou said, and began to take steps with the combat boots that clashed with the rest of their frilly ensemble, "I'd like that.. I can't stop thinking about.." The hadrophont tipped their staff to drag the back end through a pool of congealing blood, "Uh.. the stains look like they'd taste good, right?"

Gourdie stiffened up and moved pass Tess, "Hallow's sakes.. okay you're right.."

Dangerous as it was, Tess's own face became plastered with a grin.

🛑
Butcher's Workshop stuff? Borders murder ideation, this one's probably the most tame.
🛑

 

[Meridian]

Whether here for Catnip or not, let me give you an idea of 'where to start'​

New readers are encouraged to choose one of three options:

• start with Questant itself
• start with Questant Prologue
• start with some Oneshots in this setting

when I start "act 1", new readers will be invited to start from Act 1's first update!

Remember to pace yourself.
Given the review windows for catnip there's the opportunity to look at the wordcounts and spread your reading out over a day, or even do only one update per day.
whether you binge read or just piecemeal things, I wanna hear what pace you read at.
If this ends up being easy reading, feel free to read more than listed as well.

---

Questant​

Questant started 'in media res' within a tutorial environment.
An individual reaches a safe place to rest for a moment, and has been told that if they seek help from a 'shrine terminal' they will be granted it.
What follows is an extended character creation sequence.

The main route here would be to read at your comfort what comes close to 10k words.

• The Initial Vignette - In Media Res - ~2.5k words​

• Cognion Ritual for the Uninitiated - ~2.25k words​

• Who Are You? - Character Creation ~4k words​

I've blocked out the options so that it's easily divided, as sadly the threadmark index lies due to text elements in panels not being counted (despite the image descriptions being Right there)

Character creation doesn't end until NER Exploration - The Desert - 1.
You could theoretically skip ahead and start reading there if that's more your speed.
You'll miss some worldbuilding passages until I make a proper place to encompass lore, but The Desert Exploration passages near about 10k for 1 through 3 combined.

---

Prologue​

I decided I wanted to run a "here's how to play" prologue of what happened 2 or so hours before Questant's first update.
It's a little bit silly of an idea. Questant's prologue is unfinished at 4/8 updates I have planned out.

You'll want to start with one, but here's the links and wordcounts.

• Prolo 1 - ~1.5k words​

• Prolo 2 - ~1k words​

• Prolo 3 - ~2k words​

Overall under 5 k words.

Due to pacing issues, I won't be doing Prologue Updates again until I'm done with Act 1's opening.

---

Oneshots​

Standalone oneshots within the same setting.
These were written for the TR Fic Bingo. All are under 1.5k words each.
🛑Content warnings are at the start of each entry🛑

• Delusional Parasitosis​

• In-Group Out-Group Bias​

• Abattoir​

Due to lack of images they have an accurate wordcount on the threadmark index.

They each take a lens on an in-universe concept: a [ Pursuer ], a sort of entity that exists and behaves along a series of compulsions and constraints.
In order to safely traipse a [ NER ] one will want to avoid the potential [ Pursuer ] lurking inside.
The horror is intended to not go past pg-13 mild, but I also know each probably focuses on something that might squick a reader enough to pass on reading them.

Characters in these oneshots may reprise as recruitable background non-player characters

---

Other Info​

Questant's origin started as a sketch experiment posted to a discord server to get some commands for the first update. This happened early september 2023, and then I posted the thread in early october 2023.

Update Schedule?
I'd love to do weekly, but you'll probably only see twice monthly updates except for when everything's already drawn and I can get everything done in a timely fashion.
My goal was to have weekly questant updates, and weekly prologue updates... and that quickly went awry.

 

[Meridian]

hey there 💃

I've been busy in real-life and otherwise. The usual "life keeps going faster and faster" trying to keep up with any number of things.
Questant definitely could've been paced better, and the track I'd wanted to get things on by the 1 year anniversary were a bit different than the latest accidental hiatus.

The plan so far is to get 1, maybe 2, very loose updates put out.
They'll be different, however:

• The next couple updates will be 'on-rails', so there wont be any choices.
  • I really wanted to give yall a narrative puzzle, but I designed it assuming I could get all the prologue updates done in-time. I got a bit too in my head about drafting those last four updates, and work on them hasn't happened in a while, so while I may go back to them, the 'prologue' is a perma-hiatus
  • Questant as it stood was meant to be a tutorial dungeon before opening into a sandbox. The tutorial dungeon hasnt panned out as intended, and while I could keep doing sporadic updates, it truly is something I struggle to put my adhd attention into even with medication, caffeination, and a couple supplements intended to work with my adhd meds.
  • All that together? these updates will be messy. they might be 'clip show' with scene skips.
    • "here's that lore talk, some light setup, the puzzle, the puzzle solved" - Klevas takes the shortest route, and gets a new usable item.
    • Caestellau rejoins the party, interaction with The Cleric (talksprite will be... placeholder sketch =w=;;), interaction with Caestellau's friend (may reuse the panel sketch). This one will host the only choice, if I manage it
    • Loose animation prelude to what comes next
  • So that's 1, maybe 2 updates. A lot lower quality on any account for my standards, but this sometimes feels torturously slow of a narrative to run, and I expect for readers it's about the same. This was meant to be gradual, but oh boy weekly updates weren't something I could manage.

What comes after this? New thread. I want a cleaner slate for newer readers to be introduced to, and less of a slow-burn.
If people want the vibes, the backstory, they can check this thread out, but otherwise? I'll have a loose recap.

What creative time I've had has gone into either Bioship's prep (which is nearly done, so that'll resume sometime october / november - I may cancel it, but optimistic right now), and chipping away at how I want to open Act 1
I'm not 100% sure I'll manage it for the oct 1st deadline, but we'll see.

edit: I was in a rush to get these posted before a date night, so oops. "bioship" is a side-project on sufficient velocity that took a bit of my time back in late june through mid august. I may do an Act 1 thread on this forum, but I may keep it in the same thread.