This post has the following content warnings:
Milliways is doing good business today!
Tables and chairs have been moved out of the way to make space for a cushioning pile, which is hosting a bunch of slightly greenish humanoids with clawlike fingernails and dilated pupils. A low table in the middle of the arrangement has some shared snacks and a device playing soft music.
A tiny plant person wearing medieval-looking armor is walking away from the group carrying a box labeled "USED HYPOSPRAYS".
"So, 'divination never works when it'd be convenient' seems like … if I followed that rule and skipped sufficiently useful divinations, my enemies wouldn't even have to spend effort on anti-divination measures? I've done plenty of useful divinations before. And we do get some result from the book. There were readable-ish titles, mostly mentioning 'Rhoswen, the Fellnight Queen' but also mentioning 'The Fellnight Realm of Queen Rhoswen', 'The Fellnight Prison of Queen Rhoswen', 'The Crook of' … indecipherable after that point, 'The Binding of Queen Rhoswen', 'Fellnight Magic', 'Queen Rhoswen's Crook', 'The Fellnight Realm', and 'Queen Rhoswen, Lady of the Fellnight'."
"More like 'you should expect sufficiently useful divination to actually cost you something, and generally that divination will not provide immediate solutions to problems', if I expand the process that generated the sentence out properly."
"That is just … how divination works. Prophecies are often cryptic and almost always take expensive material components, and scrying is… well, would you expect spying on someone for a five-to-twenty-minute period, that's almost certainly badly timed because a scry takes an hour to cast, to focus primarily on details whose relevance is immediately obvious to you? That would be typical of an unrealistic story, no? Anyway, I think our usual use of scrying is checking in on friendlies and maybe sending a teleporting messenger."
She rubs her forehead. "Something in that feels like it's just...somehow been parsed wrong. Can't tell you what, though."
"Anyway, want to predict what the implications of the download result we got were?"
"Obviously she is a sealed evil in a can sort of threat. Probably the source of the Trees That Didn't Know Where They Were. And very probably that you'll have to go to the Fellnight Realm and beat her up, if you don't manage to diplomance your way through this.
"She's indubitably a caster, probably a greater version of the fae you fought earlier, the odd item out might actually be a key to her chains in some way, especially because more effort was expended upon scrubbing out identifying details...
"She's probably the source of the bee-swarm allies whatshisface deployed. ...Tenzekil? I'm horrible with names. Or at least, her realm would be. Which neatly ties up the 'why is there so much beekeeping involved in this plot' if it's true, if there's a bee realm or something just...sealed away in the corner and some of the traditions were preserved.
"And the forest wouldn't forget.
"Which would otherwise be a plothole of 'why are this region's beekeepers a fixture to the trees?'
"Anyway, do continue."
"How confident would say you are that the download failure here is enemy action?"
"85% on 'direct interference by Queen-Rhoswen-et-al.', 10% on 'Actually there's an Even Bigger Fish invested in obscuring this', the remaining 5% is probably divvied up between 'it's a property of alignment' slash 'trying to search an infinite chaos plane is just really fucking hard actually' slash 'archives coincidentally got exploded'. Actually, more like 75-20, there."
"...Actually, break that 75 into like....45-20 on 'enemy action' versus 'doesn't actually exist'. Yes I know that doesn't add up to 75, sorry. 45-20-20 on those plus bigger fish."
"And by 'doesn't actually exist' you mean 'records don't exist, we just got some titles anyway' or what?"
"...Now that you're prompting me to think about that, and there's gods and infinities of bullshit on the table, I'd like to update my estimates to 45-40 enemy action vs. 'error: search target impacted by or causing an XK or CK event'."
"Yeah, my bad, I dropped into SCP-land for a moment.
"40% probability that it's reality that is fucked in some way, whether it's time paradoxes or acausal existence or extraontological intrusion or hostile antimemes or The Glitch," she pronounces With Capital Letters, "or...yeah, I could go on all day."
"Infinities fuck up physics and you mentioned a godswar at some point. So there's plenty of room for such fuckery to linger, e.g. in causally unmoored existences or self-destroying information, or things that are Not that nonetheless want to become or destroy something that Is, or...lots of other things."
"Alright, good work keeping that in mind. I'll tell you the conclusion we reached shortly after this: There's a known phenomenon where data from Old Aiquzall – the world as it was before and during the big godwar – experience 'seal-scrambling', producing a fundamental instability not just in the records but in the information. The download's appearance and behavior matches that. Our lantern archon, on observing this, tells us that there are special sections in libraries for books like that, but you need special training and powers to be able to read them at all."
"So it is time travel, of the 'a very long way forwards' variety. And memetic hazards!"
"SCP stuff. An idea or concept that is, itself, somehow dangerous. Most of this is actually anti-memes, things that can't be known, for whatever reason."
"We start a Planar Inquiry call. I should maybe explain that. Planar Inquiry is a spell that calls over a local-branch celestial, but not with enough call strength that they can fight alongside us. Want to predict anything about that?"
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
