I asked. [ Which would be surprising, if he wasn't ensuring their survival with it. ] Right now, there isn't anything that we can do besides following the rules. If things get worse, we'll have to prepare for a few possibilities, but they're hypothetical and ideally not going to happen.
At the very least, I'm not interested in them happening.
[ But he waits for him to count on his fingers, before giving him an answer to the last two. ]
It may be that the participants are punished, but because our team hasn't broken that many rules we just haven't seen it. But we can see the effects of the leaders' punishments. [ huff ] Swan and I were going to test it, with the knowledge of what team Shima was on, but the moment I said it? They put a halt on that exchange. If it's true, the consequences will go straight to Shima's leader - even if he's dead, even though I was talking to my leader, and not another participant.
We need to find a way to talk around it, the same way Swan has been giving you hints about our team.
So we need to protect Shima's leader as much as possible right now. If that information's circulating around, it could really hurt them. And it means in the future it could hurt the others, including Swan, if one of ours does something like this.
...we'll figure something out. If we're supposed to pick a team during the vote, we have to find a way to be able to discuss it. It generates more nova and that's the whole point.
[...no, sorry, he's looping back to the first part.]
Even if the possibilities are hypothetical, what are they? I just want to know, just in case.
Shima's leader was, after all, visibly affected. [ His eyebrows twitch up - hint, hint. ] So, for now, spread the information that we need to stop talking quite so much about teams other people are on unless it's been mutually shared. As much as I'm always prepared to break a stupid rule, our lives apparently hinge on following this one.
Obviously our hints don't necessarily have to be outlandish, since Swan themself gave you fairly straightforward ones. Code. Phrase. We'll think of something.
[ But - he expected this part. There is something dark and wry behind his words, in his emotions, as he speaks verbatim. ]
"Either our nova and memories would vanish, turning us into husks of ourselves... or this place could end up unable to sustain people at all, and we'd die before we could lose ourselves entirely."
...got it. [yes he got the hint! everything is fine! but also, haha. god.] ...I'm going to try to see them tomorrow, maybe. Give them time to rest. I want to try and see if I can understand what happened. Until then I can definitely tell people to stop sharing. Most of us don't want to actually hurt them.
[there's a nod though.] You're probably better with hints than me or Swan, actually. Maybe I'll leave that to you.
[he frowns then, and he seems to be thinking.]
Husks. That's the word Shima used, too, when I talked to him last night. He said that if we didn't keep the splintering in check it could effect everybody and turn us into husks. If that's true, then it makes even less sense why the leaders aren't talking to each other about what's going on.
[ Everything is fine, except for where it's not! Ha ha! ] En, I told them to go rest. They can't do anything for us if they lose their strength, so it lies on us now to ensure that we don't change that. See what you can learn, tomorrow, and we'll go from there.
[ hum ] I'll think over it, in the meantime, and get back to you. It won't take much, but it needs to be enough to get past the rules in place - you have to think when it's said, even if it doesn't take long to get. That seems to be a requirement.
[ Otherwise, Sora wouldn't be able to get it - while he said he was smart, it's a sort of selective intelligence, so. ]
Swan said they'd heard about the nova splintering, but from people here. It sounded like they hadn't heard it from the leaders, so that would explain why, if they're not talking to each other. [ how frustrating ] Apparently Virid implied that someone told him, too, but Swan wasn't able to say more than that because Virid never said who.
But it isn't the Realm telling them, that much Swan could confirm.
Right. I'll do what I can. I have people from the other winning teams I want to compare notes with, too, to see what I can find out about the nova distribution and everything.
If we could come up with a code or something even that might work. But it's really going to be up to everybody else to remember what the words mean and read into them while we're kind of in a crisis.
[people dying! bad! people fighting in trials! also bad! hua cheng isn't wrong in the slightest though and sora seems to agree.]
They told me they can watch us whenever they want. Any of us on our team, I mean. So they probably heard it from those of us talking about it with other people. But that makes even less sense. If the Leaders don't actually know, then why are they asking people to kill?
...Swan guessed it was Virid's Leader the day after it happened because I asked. But if they're not even sure...[he hums.] Somebody else brought up a theory to me. That there could be, like, an imposter among the Leaders. But that sounds even crazier.
[ A nod - he knows a few people now, as well, that he's going to take information to, just to check what overlaps and what puts a new perspective on everything they already know. He can trust Sora to do the same. ]
We'll go over it as many times as we need to, to ensure that we commit to to memory. [ ( axel voice ) got it memorized? ] If it's effective in our own team, we can start to dispense it to the others that are trusted. Swan could even benefit from it, I think - they dislike not having answers as much as we do.
[ With this, though, he goes quiet, turning it over in his head, his brow furrowing.
hm. dislike. That hits upon a concern that he expressed to Swan, and Hua Cheng pulls out his PHS. ]
Swan has seen this. Don't share it with anyone else, just yet.
Yeah...it bothers them not to know what's going on, so I try to update them when I can. They're just as in the dark as we are. All of them. But with a good system we can start to break everything down.
[...but he blinks in surprise and looks at the phs in hua cheng's hand.]
Okay. What is it? [like. he does not think hua cheng means "don't share the phs with anyone else" since they all have one, but color him curious.]
[ While the Leaders can see their teams, and gain knowledge through them, Hua Cheng figures they'll be able to do something as a whole. It might take time, but they'll have to figure out a way to expedite it. This theory...
Does not instill confidence in him. It implies sabotage. Cheating.
He lowers his PHS, since everyone is so much smaller. And that's it! It's just his PHS! Neat!
It isn't, he pulls up his notes app. It's empty, save for one, plain colored note. The censoring is done wish dashes, as it's been copied from a source. ]
I asked Swan, not long after I was shown this, if a leader could be cheating to give their team an advantage. It's impossible for them to break the rules, and we can see now that rules are structure to the Realm. But if there's an imposter... would the rules apply?
Swan was sure this wasn't Goat or Tiger, and it isn't theirs. They'd heard of it, but hadn't seen it, and aren't keeping reports. To me, reports like this imply that information is going somewhere, or will be. A report like this implies there are more of them.
[the expression on sora's face is mostly like :o because he's reading and nodding along.]
Won told me about this. It was a report they found when they disappeared from the town, too, at the same time as me and the others. I told Swan myself...I think. [...he talks to swan so much he does not remember what he has and has not told them tbh.]
If there's an imposter, they might be working with their own set of rules. If we think back to when Virid killed Hajime, the Realm had to bend to the will of whoever asked him to do it. Otherwise we wouldn't have fallen asleep and we wouldn't have been locked in. But none of the others seemed to know about it until after the fact.
You think maybe this report was supposed to go to somebody else and it got lost instead?
That doesn't shock me. [ He turns off the PHS screen and pockets it again. ] Won wasn't the one who showed me, but you being the one to talk to Swan about it is - the least surprising thing I've heard this week.
[ It's not like Sora can't guess who showed him, but he moves on and focuses more on the theories they're bouncing back and forth. ]
Speaking hypothetically...
All of the leaders came here before we did, by a week. If there's an imposter, it was enough time for them to get adjusted to what plans were being put in place, especially given they were a damn mess at the start. [ Swan he likes you now but y'all sucked ] But by not discussing it with each other, that gives them all the more ease to bury themselves deeper into a disguise. Especially if the Realm responded to them, and to Virid, and is doing so still.
None of it explains why there are killers from different teams, unless something else is in play. But if there's something, anything, that can point us to an explanation, we'll find it.
Perhaps if we can find more pages of this report. Report implies reporting to someone, or the intent to. Why write it in such a way, if it were just a journal? Why title it like this? It's strange, as are the contents.
Likewise, it doesn't surprise me you heard it from Xie Lian.
From what I've heard, they all woke up separately and with their masks and gowns. They've never even seen each other. If there's an imposter it's possible the real Leader is hidden somewhere in the castle. Or they managed to sneak in some other way.
There might be. I'm not totally sure yet. [there is and he will just have to tell hc in their thread a week later when he learns, wow!]
I've been wondering that, too. It can't be a report to the Realm itself, can it? That doesn't make a tone of sense.
Stories love even numbers, and so does the universe. Perhaps there were originally only intended to be five leaders, but an imposter brought the count up to six. How would they even know, if they didn't know one another until they converged?
[ Wow, predictive backtagging! I'm in anticipation. ]
Reporting to the Realm when it's a place of power rather than a thinking entity is... [ a slight snort ] No, I don't think that's it. You're right that it doesn't make much sense.
They wouldn't. That's exactly the problem. I don't want to believe that's going on, but I also don't want to ignore it in case we're onto something here. I just think we should keep it in mind to watch out for.
I still don't know if I buy it doesn't have its own thoughts. Everybody keeps saying it doesn't need to think or feel in order to respond to us and change its rules, but then how would it even know what to do? Wouldn't that mean somebody else is, like, I don't know. Programming it?
Let's put it in our peripheral, then. Keep an eye out for signs of it, whether in the leaders' behaviors or in evidence we find, like the report. We have to find the right questions to ask, the right things to look for, and pinpoint what leaders can be relied upon without looking over our shoulders. For now, Swan is the only leader that I'll put any trust in. [ And that is a tentative, new thing. ]
I think it's a place shaped by what we've experienced, and what we're experiencing. There's a place in Zhongguo like that. Resentful energy shaped it and continues to shape it, and it almost does seem to have a mind of its own, especially when it's at the height of power. But it's very - reactionary. I wonder if the Realm is like that. [ though, a pause ] Programming?
[ He's an ancient wuxia, Sora, try a different word. ]
...I trust all of them right now. And I'm gonna keep trusting them until they prove they can't be trusted. It's not gonna help our cause if we automatically distrust and don't even try. But otherwise? You're right.
If it's so reactionary maybe we just need to react better to make it unlearn its bad habits. [...don't? ask him? he doesn't know how computers work, uh.] Programming is like...telling it to do a certain thing by commanding it a certain way? Like writing it so it can't disobey the orders it's told to do. I think. Something like that.
En, I understand. [ Heroes... but he's a little fond, in a way, he supposes. ] I won't outright distrust them, but I'm going to take what they say and cross-check it, to ensure that we have proper information rather than misinformation.
[ Why is Sora Kingdom Hearts who is chronically bad at computers having to explain the concept of programming, I'm crying, ] ... I imagine that's close enough to what it is, at least enough that I can understand the gist. If we can figure out a way to change how the Realm is, ah, programmed, it will take a great deal of effort to keep it from snapping back into what's been ingrained into it these past few weeks.
Perhaps a group effort, unless we can pinpoint a specific "core" to change.
Cross-check against what, each other? They might not know what each other leader is saying. Just a warning.
[also me, i wish to know this as well.] It'll be effort but it's not like we're doing it by ourselves. That's why I'm trying to get people to stay positive even when everything's starting to fall apart. There's still a chance the Realm will listen to us.
I didn't really think about a core though. That's a good point.
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At the very least, I'm not interested in them happening.
[ But he waits for him to count on his fingers, before giving him an answer to the last two. ]
It may be that the participants are punished, but because our team hasn't broken that many rules we just haven't seen it. But we can see the effects of the leaders' punishments. [ huff ] Swan and I were going to test it, with the knowledge of what team Shima was on, but the moment I said it? They put a halt on that exchange. If it's true, the consequences will go straight to Shima's leader - even if he's dead, even though I was talking to my leader, and not another participant.
We need to find a way to talk around it, the same way Swan has been giving you hints about our team.
no subject
So we need to protect Shima's leader as much as possible right now. If that information's circulating around, it could really hurt them. And it means in the future it could hurt the others, including Swan, if one of ours does something like this.
...we'll figure something out. If we're supposed to pick a team during the vote, we have to find a way to be able to discuss it. It generates more nova and that's the whole point.
[...no, sorry, he's looping back to the first part.]
Even if the possibilities are hypothetical, what are they? I just want to know, just in case.
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Obviously our hints don't necessarily have to be outlandish, since Swan themself gave you fairly straightforward ones. Code. Phrase. We'll think of something.
[ But - he expected this part. There is something dark and wry behind his words, in his emotions, as he speaks verbatim. ]
"Either our nova and memories would vanish, turning us into husks of ourselves... or this place could end up unable to sustain people at all, and we'd die before we could lose ourselves entirely."
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[there's a nod though.] You're probably better with hints than me or Swan, actually. Maybe I'll leave that to you.
[he frowns then, and he seems to be thinking.]
Husks. That's the word Shima used, too, when I talked to him last night. He said that if we didn't keep the splintering in check it could effect everybody and turn us into husks. If that's true, then it makes even less sense why the leaders aren't talking to each other about what's going on.
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[ hum ] I'll think over it, in the meantime, and get back to you. It won't take much, but it needs to be enough to get past the rules in place - you have to think when it's said, even if it doesn't take long to get. That seems to be a requirement.
[ Otherwise, Sora wouldn't be able to get it - while he said he was smart, it's a sort of selective intelligence, so. ]
Swan said they'd heard about the nova splintering, but from people here. It sounded like they hadn't heard it from the leaders, so that would explain why, if they're not talking to each other. [ how frustrating ] Apparently Virid implied that someone told him, too, but Swan wasn't able to say more than that because Virid never said who.
But it isn't the Realm telling them, that much Swan could confirm.
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If we could come up with a code or something even that might work. But it's really going to be up to everybody else to remember what the words mean and read into them while we're kind of in a crisis.
[people dying! bad! people fighting in trials! also bad! hua cheng isn't wrong in the slightest though and sora seems to agree.]
They told me they can watch us whenever they want. Any of us on our team, I mean. So they probably heard it from those of us talking about it with other people. But that makes even less sense. If the Leaders don't actually know, then why are they asking people to kill?
...Swan guessed it was Virid's Leader the day after it happened because I asked. But if they're not even sure...[he hums.] Somebody else brought up a theory to me. That there could be, like, an imposter among the Leaders. But that sounds even crazier.
[and yet.]
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We'll go over it as many times as we need to, to ensure that we commit to to memory. [ ( axel voice ) got it memorized? ] If it's effective in our own team, we can start to dispense it to the others that are trusted. Swan could even benefit from it, I think - they dislike not having answers as much as we do.
[ With this, though, he goes quiet, turning it over in his head, his brow furrowing.
hm. dislike. That hits upon a concern that he expressed to Swan, and Hua Cheng pulls out his PHS. ]
Swan has seen this. Don't share it with anyone else, just yet.
no subject
[...but he blinks in surprise and looks at the phs in hua cheng's hand.]
Okay. What is it? [like. he does not think hua cheng means "don't share the phs with anyone else" since they all have one, but color him curious.]
no subject
Does not instill confidence in him. It implies sabotage. Cheating.
He lowers his PHS, since everyone is so much smaller. And that's it! It's just his PHS! Neat!
It isn't, he pulls up his notes app. It's empty, save for one, plain colored note. The censoring is done wish dashes, as it's been copied from a source. ]
I asked Swan, not long after I was shown this, if a leader could be cheating to give their team an advantage. It's impossible for them to break the rules, and we can see now that rules are structure to the Realm. But if there's an imposter... would the rules apply?
Swan was sure this wasn't Goat or Tiger, and it isn't theirs. They'd heard of it, but hadn't seen it, and aren't keeping reports. To me, reports like this imply that information is going somewhere, or will be. A report like this implies there are more of them.
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Won told me about this. It was a report they found when they disappeared from the town, too, at the same time as me and the others. I told Swan myself...I think. [...he talks to swan so much he does not remember what he has and has not told them tbh.]
If there's an imposter, they might be working with their own set of rules. If we think back to when Virid killed Hajime, the Realm had to bend to the will of whoever asked him to do it. Otherwise we wouldn't have fallen asleep and we wouldn't have been locked in. But none of the others seemed to know about it until after the fact.
You think maybe this report was supposed to go to somebody else and it got lost instead?
no subject
[ It's not like Sora can't guess who showed him, but he moves on and focuses more on the theories they're bouncing back and forth. ]
Speaking hypothetically...
All of the leaders came here before we did, by a week. If there's an imposter, it was enough time for them to get adjusted to what plans were being put in place, especially given they were a damn mess at the start. [ Swan he likes you now but y'all sucked ] But by not discussing it with each other, that gives them all the more ease to bury themselves deeper into a disguise. Especially if the Realm responded to them, and to Virid, and is doing so still.
None of it explains why there are killers from different teams, unless something else is in play. But if there's something, anything, that can point us to an explanation, we'll find it.
Perhaps if we can find more pages of this report. Report implies reporting to someone, or the intent to. Why write it in such a way, if it were just a journal? Why title it like this? It's strange, as are the contents.
no subject
From what I've heard, they all woke up separately and with their masks and gowns. They've never even seen each other. If there's an imposter it's possible the real Leader is hidden somewhere in the castle. Or they managed to sneak in some other way.
There might be. I'm not totally sure yet. [there is and he will just have to tell hc in their thread a week later when he learns, wow!]
I've been wondering that, too. It can't be a report to the Realm itself, can it? That doesn't make a tone of sense.
no subject
Stories love even numbers, and so does the universe. Perhaps there were originally only intended to be five leaders, but an imposter brought the count up to six. How would they even know, if they didn't know one another until they converged?
[ Wow, predictive backtagging! I'm in anticipation. ]
Reporting to the Realm when it's a place of power rather than a thinking entity is... [ a slight snort ] No, I don't think that's it. You're right that it doesn't make much sense.
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I still don't know if I buy it doesn't have its own thoughts. Everybody keeps saying it doesn't need to think or feel in order to respond to us and change its rules, but then how would it even know what to do? Wouldn't that mean somebody else is, like, I don't know. Programming it?
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I think it's a place shaped by what we've experienced, and what we're experiencing. There's a place in Zhongguo like that. Resentful energy shaped it and continues to shape it, and it almost does seem to have a mind of its own, especially when it's at the height of power. But it's very - reactionary. I wonder if the Realm is like that. [ though, a pause ] Programming?
[ He's an ancient wuxia, Sora, try a different word. ]
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If it's so reactionary maybe we just need to react better to make it unlearn its bad habits. [...don't? ask him? he doesn't know how computers work, uh.] Programming is like...telling it to do a certain thing by commanding it a certain way? Like writing it so it can't disobey the orders it's told to do. I think. Something like that.
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[ Why is Sora Kingdom Hearts who is chronically bad at computers having to explain the concept of programming, I'm crying, ] ... I imagine that's close enough to what it is, at least enough that I can understand the gist. If we can figure out a way to change how the Realm is, ah, programmed, it will take a great deal of effort to keep it from snapping back into what's been ingrained into it these past few weeks.
Perhaps a group effort, unless we can pinpoint a specific "core" to change.
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[also me, i wish to know this as well.] It'll be effort but it's not like we're doing it by ourselves. That's why I'm trying to get people to stay positive even when everything's starting to fall apart. There's still a chance the Realm will listen to us.
I didn't really think about a core though. That's a good point.