wheeze

I don't understand what's funny.

It's just - just that I, Lyvina Mayyad, imagined what "Olivia Mallard" might have heard there, instead of a proper explanation.

Well played.

You sly devil, I commend you.

...Thanks.

"I think this is the step in the dance where I say 'I'm not crazy! I'm NOT crazy!' in the most unhinged voice I can manage while waving a knife around menacingly."

I don't think you're crazy.

...Haven't you been trying to talk me into realizing that the Gamemaster is a figment of my imagination? 

I don't think the Gamemaster is a figment of your imagination.

Wait.

But I think the Gamemaster is a figment of my imagination. 

Or at least, I'm not certain that they aren't!

 Let's examine the facts.

Last night and this morning, there were fifty attacks by shadows with greater than 500 causalities. 

We're given to believe that it was caused by a coalition of deities, led by or working with the Rough Beast in His Dead Vault.

This did not happen a week ago. Nor will it yet begin a week from now.

Yesterday's Golarion was the result of a balance of power which no longer holds. 

I'm not sure that we'll ever know why the balance changed - the gods divide their powers and attention across many worlds and planes.

But something changed.

Living in Korvosa, as of last night, dwelt one Lyvina Mayyad, Arch Megapope Olin Mull, Hasagi Choryon, and Altronus.

Each of them survived the attack.

They met and immediately got along.

They had the mien of experienced adventurers, but it was like they'd gotten their experience delving dungeons in the Maelstrom or First World.

It was made clear to those paying attention that there's clearly something very weird going on with your group.

Now I learn that all four of them had, seemingly independently of each other, imagined a world called Earth.

And independently imagined Players to their Characters, and those Players knew each other. 

And that was why they behaved in all ways like old allies and friends.

To these strange coincidences, we add our knowledge of the Acadamae apprentice Lyvina Mayyad and Altronus the free ranging mercenary. 

Altronus can calculate how far an object in the sky can be seen from, and how much light from it would reach the ground as a proportion of the sun's intensity. 

I'm sure that comes up in his day-to-day.

Lyvina has either previously studied lift-to-drag ratios in different birds and gliders, invented air screws, found a way to turn an opening cabinet drawer into rotational force, and has been sitting on those ideas... or else comes from a world where they're commonplace.

Come on.

Earth is real, somewhere out there in Creation.

Either that, or it's a phantasm heavily inspired by somewhere that is.

Now, what I'm skeptical of, is that your occasionalist Gamemaster is who they appear to be.

Do you think that the Gamemaster had something to do with the shadows, because of the coincidence in timing?

Not necessarily. 

It's possible that they were just spurred by the shadows to pull the trigger on a work they'd had in progress.

It's even possible that they're broadly aligned with us. 

When I asked you what your long term goals were, you said 

I need a moment to digest this, and figure out what I think.

> be me
> be Lyvina Mayyad, samsaran wizard, who enrolled at the Acadamae despite its ferocious reputation
> because she wanted the power to oppose the world's evil
> and everything else written in my backstory
> be by nature a different person than Olivia Mallard - more willing to take calculated risks, less likely to take uncalculated risks, a little older, a little wiser, but - less clever. 
> Able to spend more time making worse plans, and able to believe that those are the best plans that she can generate. 
> More likely to take a supporting role, because she's more likely to think that other people's plans are adequate.
> and, importantly, less knowledgeable than Olivia Mallard is in the realm of Earth-lore
> and less of a munchkin
> have an imaginary setting called "Earth" kicking around 
> flesh out the details over the course of decades
> at some point wind up with Olivia as a constant mental companion
> and now Lyvina does whatever Olivia says that she should. Why? Well, maybe Olivia gives at the worst at least as good ideas as Lyvina could have
> implied by this is that Lyvina could do something different if she chose to, but that she won't choose to
> or perhaps from Lyvina's perspective the lines between Lyvina and Olivia have blurred so much that it wouldn't be that simple to make a decision independent of Olivia's input
> Olivia knows things that Lyvina doesn't but has a similar motivation structure
> but that's not quite true, is it?
> because Olivia didn't think of Golarion as a real place, didn't deeply care about the well-being of the people in it
> Still doesn't deeply care about the well-being of the people in it. 
> That's something that Lyvina is likely upset by.
> and so Olivia never put her mind to tearing Golarion apart and remaking it in her image, as she would if she actually lived there
> Lyvina never realized that Earth was a real place, otherwise she would have said that to Kroft. As it hadn't occurred to her that both Golarion and Earth could both be real (possibly because she's been imagining Earth since the days when it was much less detailed and/or true-to-life, and had the subjective experience of coming up with those details, like a frog being boiled) and Golarion felt more real.
> Since it came out that the other three player's characters had the same experience as her, she's been trying to make sense of things. Her Olivia headmate didn't help, because Olivia found it hard to suspend disbelief about the setting and wasn't engaging with it on that level
> But Kroft's theory makes sense from Lyvina's point of view, and is easily-enough tested in-setting.
> It would also be easy to check whether Olivia is real in-setting.
> What does Lyvina expect to find there? 
> Nothing. Olivia is too similar to her. Even her name is based off of Lyvina's (lel). 
> Which means that Lyvina hasn't directly experienced Earth; she's had details about it whispered into her mind and then filled in more details from her own imagination, and also invented her own OC.
> And within-setting the game doesn't exist.
> Within-setting it might be a mindscape. 
> And there's someone behind it.
> They have a scheme.
> And... this is an awesome plot. It isn't stupid. I'm not sure that it would have worked as well if the GM told us about it up front.
> I shouldn't be trying not to poke at the weirdnesses that are the player characters, because they have an in-universe explanation, and figuring out what that is is part of the campaign. 
> Unfortunately, there *are* still lines I shouldn't cross without ruining the GM's experience, and because the GM is doing something so strange it's hard to see where they are.
> Probably cracking the setting like an egg in my hand and forcing them to make up reasons why that hasn't happened before is still across the line.
> My imaginary Lyvina Mayyad is shaking me by the collar
> She's trying to think of some way to suborn me and make me point my brain in the setting-breaking direction
> but unfortunately for her I'm not dumb enough to imagine exactly how she's trying to do that.

What are the decisions which Lyvina Mayyad has made which make no sense in light of what she knows and which she now needs to correct?

Attending the Acadamae was probably a mistake, because her life is more valuable than she thought.

Or it wasn't a mistake, because it happened in her backstory, and no one ever dies in their backstory?

Was becoming a cleric of Ragathiel a mistake?

Would Lyvina in-setting have gotten another wizard level if she hadn't done that?

If Lyvina is able to optimize both on the Golarion level and the game-table level, she should stop throwing good levels after bad. Losing one level of casting hurt bad enough.

Instead, if she's allowed to choose her own build going forward, she should... I already have Spell Focus, for Augment Summons. She can take Bloatmage Initiate, and then the prestige class, so she can get the capstone, so she can get the arcane sorcerer bloodline capstone.

Either that or find some way to increase my Charisma score so I can take Eldritch Heritage.

Is she allowed to optimize across the Golarion level and the game-table level? 

One test of that is seeing whether Lyvina can convince Olivia not to take another level of cleric.

I'm confused...

If I don't get any more levels in cleric of Ragathiel, in-universe that can't possibly be deliberate - unless it is - but I think it'd be evidence to the person in-universe that she can control some non-deliberate things by convincing the person who exists outside the universe. But from out-of-universe, that isn't the case, because out-of-universe Olivia Mallard has the experience of deciding on her own not to take more cleric levels, and everything that she thinks Lyvina thinks is just something that she came up with. And then Lyvina has access to all the information that Olivia does, including the subjective experience of deciding not to take more cleric levels.

So, is that evidence from Lyvina's point of view that she controls Olivia, even though there's a strictly simpler explanation that isn't that? 

...Okay, I've deconfused myself, Lyvina has to believe that her thoughts are being handed off to Olivia, even if Olivia doesn't believe that. Lyvina doesn't think that Olivia is coincidentally replicating all of her thoughts, she believes in a two-way transfer of communication, which might be two-way all inside her head because she doesn't think Olivia is real.

Yeah, okay, that makes sense.

At some point I need to check in an anti-magic field whether the in-universe explanation for Olivia is magical.

I don't want to rush you, can you tell me when you're available?

Or, to parallelize a little, I'll go fetch Arbiter Zenderholm and the rest of your party while you wait here?

Out of universe the explanation for why Golarion has the same plants and animals and people as Earth is that Earth came first and they were copied from there. In-universe, what's the explanation? I don't buy that they just evolved on both worlds. So, probably they evolved on Earth first and were copied over?

How old is Pharasma's Creation? Is it the full 12 billion years? Kind of odd that it's so underdeveloped if it's had sapients for that long.

Maybe in-universe both Earth and Golarion had their organisms copied over from a third Earth, or an Earth-like world, from outside Creation? Or from before it?

And Earth looks like it's four billion years old in a universe that looks twelve billion years old but it was actually created yesterday in motion?

What do you need Arbiter Zenderholm for?