badgernet_multiversal | First Quest (Video, username 'westandreamcatcher')

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First Quest (Video, username 'westandreamcatcher')

[So.

The camera picks up an idyllic looking sandy Mediterranean beach, near a patch of grass and forest. It shakes a fair bit, like a cell phone cam in an unsteady - or nervous - hand.]

This is... this is uh. Deedee. ...'s player. Don't... if you know my real name from before the Badgernet crash don't throw it around.

I uh.

I'm on the fucking Shores of Awakening. I'm on fucking Mundus.

And taller and y'all hear how high my voice is. I can feel my tails.

I woke up alone face-down on the sand here. Felt it burn. I uh.

Please advise.

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[Congrats and have some of Dr Durante in full Thorne cosplay. She is looking very stressed out.]

Okay. Fuck. That's another mind-machine connection failure, on top of all the others that have already been called in. Okay. Shit.

Edited 2021-08-12 19:58 (UTC)

It's nice to know someone knows what's going on.

More than I do.

I.

Shit.

Can't log out. ...sendjewel works a little, I'm using it to connect, I'll try to see who's here. I'm uh, first level and my gear is crappy starter stuff.

... Wait. Planar kidnapping... Mundus, that was the setting of that video game you brought up a time or two, right?!

[Pidonus considers how to do this research fast...]

You've been planar-pulled into a game somehow. You can feel the tails, so your body's been transformed or is under a very powerful illusion effect - more likely the former.

I've been planar-napped before, but the transformation with it, that's new to me. I think.

... wait, what?

That's. Fuck. That's not supposed to be happening. I mean, okay, I was kind of wondering why the fuck you were back on one of the Shores of Awakening, but I dunno, maybe you'd been on a boat?

[She draws a hand down her face.]

Okay. You can't log out because something's fucked up with the neurohelm and instead of leaving part of your mind where it should be, in your body, so you can tell when you need to use the bathroom or hear the fire alarm or whatever, all of it is in Mundus. That's why everything seems so immediate and real and shit.

You've got a roommate, right? Can you PM me their phone number? They need to know to get you to a hospital and on life-support, until we can fix this-- [She turns her head, suddenly, and mutes the audio for a minute, before turning back to the screen and unmuting.] Okay. Shit. This seems to be happening all over the Chimaera server, not just you. We've already been notified about another good hundred equipment failures, just like this one.

Nate thinks it's a cyberattack. I'm starting to think he's right. This kind of thing will happen every now and then--that's why there's warning stickers on the neurohelms telling people not to remove them if the users go catatonic and to call the toll-free number to report it immediately--but this is fucking ridiculous. Hundreds of neurohelms shouldn't be crapping out all at once!

[Dr Durante groans.] No, no, that's not what's happened. I've seen this happen before. There's been a problem with the mind-machine hook-up in his neurohelm and he's gone catatonic IRL. Instead of a fraction of his consciousness still inhabiting his body on Earth for safety reasons, it's all on Mundus, piloting his player character.

... Wait. Waitwaitwait.

Okay, that's. There's some implications there that I need to work through a lot. Not that I am likely to be much help, but...

First thing is - how does that work with people's souls? Normally where I'm from, soul and body are a duality, so is it like their soul's somehow been pulled into this game?

Oh how many Devil assholes would love to abuse THAT I'm sure...

[From what Pidonus has shared before, she's from what would broadly be called a high-fantasy setting. Also, she's specifically a demon, and where she's from that means really REALLY hating devils.

Also it means she's used to a specific way of how souls work - and will probably be thrown for a loop by different world's different understandings thereof.]

Hang on I -

Okay. Don't bother calling my roommate. In fact you have permission to break down the door if you need to from me.

[She starts walking.]

All of this happening at once is uh, yeah no. I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening to the expansion with not!China in it. I don't blame you, I just.

...I just heard a scream.

[She starts running.]

Yeah uh I made this body. This is my game character, Deedee.

Funny, I didn't hear a truck crash through my wall to land on top of me, killing me instantly.

I mean, I've always believed that souls are a function of consciousness, so I assume that his soul is with his mind. Mundus isn't in a different universe or anything, so he's still in the same plane of existence as he always was. It's just that his body is, well, currently empty. Like I've said, I've seen this before. I used to work for DARPA.

[We're not saying this is bringing up old trauma, but. Boy is it bringing up old trauma.]

... Wait, is that a common cause of planar kidnapping on your world???

[Pidonus' story training does not yet appear to include that particular trope of isekai fiction. Being from a world that doesn't have truck-kuns yet, that's probably why...]

The fact that you've been pulled in as your character... That's a new one for me too, honestly.

From what I'm getting, though...

Dang it, if I had a way to do planar teleportation, I could actually get in range to help somehow, I think, but.

... Okay, 'believe' versus 'know', that means possibly different soul mechanics. I guess that'd make sense on a lower-magic world, which Jake's said as much before.

... So, wait, Mundus is on the same plane? I was thinking it existing as a computer game meant functionally interplanar, kinda. I'm not in intellectual territory I'm quite prepared for, am I.

[Pidonus can kinda tell that, and is trying to use her own confusion as a bit of distraction.]

Oh Jesus fucking Christ, why would they-- we had sensitivity readers go through the update! From Taiwan and mainland China! We always have fucking sensitivity readers!

[She groans.]

Are we sure it's not, fuck, corporate espionage? I mean, if it's equipment failure, it could just as easily having been fucking Miles Sterling baking some goddamn fucking planned obsolescence into the parts the manufacturers got from him, that would be just like that piece of shit. Wouldn't even necessarily be a cyberattack in that case, just a stupid greedy pendejo who doesn't care who he endangers as long as he gets paid for the replacement parts.

Except, fuck, that would be happening for other games too, wouldn't it? [She turns her head to the side and pitches her voice towards someone not in the camera's viewpoint.] Nate, can you call the neurohelm people and see if anyone else's games are having this problem?

Fuck. We need to get Io on this, see if they can break everyone's connections on the rest of the server before more machines crap out.

Not in this case. The game is inside our universe. He's in our universe. He's just not inside his original body.

He's in Deedee's.

And if we don't get him onto life support in time, if anyone tries to remove the neurohelm while he's still wholly on Mundus, he won't have a living body to go back to. Trust me on this.

[Yeah, she's definitely reliving some trauma here.]

Damn it. This just adds even more case to 'I really wish I knew how to do interplanar moving'.

... The Ethereal plane doesn't count for this purpose.

[And from the trauma in the doctor's tone, she'd probably seen this happen.]

Right now, at least we have one thing - this network lets us bring communication between the worlds. That's. A lot of help, actually? At least potentially.

But you mentioned this is happening everywhere... That makes me think the connections themselves were somehow disrupted. Presumably, the normal failstate would be to kick the entire consciousness back to the original body, so whatever did it did so hard enough that your system couldn't manage that...

Yeah, that's the thing. Io's supposed to be doing that. We built that failsafe specifically for this scenario, after what happened during--

Well, it doesn't matter when it happened. The point is that Io's supposed to have this in hand. One of my co-founders, Kate, she's trying to get in touch with them to see what fucking happened.

Io being...?

[She's referring to Io as a person. That just adds more terrifying possibilities.]

...oh dear. Are you hurt? [Professional concern comes first, even if there's not much Neriel can do about it.]

Adjusting to a new corporation can take some time, and this sounds... at least a little similar, in that respect. Be gentle with yourself until you're more used to the balance and proportions, unless - can you modify this form at this point? If not, I may be out of useful advice.

Not without an extremely expensive Potion of Glamour.

Center of gravity's weird. I'm not hurt.

I'm talking about the ones upset that China's intruding on their castles and dragons at... never mind.

Look, uh, I'm not... I can't help with inside baseball so I'm just gonna... help whoever screamed, and find my guild. Good luck.

And I'm sure you have better things to spend your money on.

Not hurt is a good start. It's much easier to figure out why something happened when you're not addressing a physical crisis.

Oh, right, fuck. Those shitheads. Yeah, I could see that. Well, fuck them. The world's bigger than just Europe and so's Mundus. If they're pissed off now, they're not going to be in much better shape after the next couple planned updates--once we get to opening up the New World they can kiss my brown ass.

But yeah, shit. Go do that. I might PM you in a minute, but.

[Screaming person more important than being someone for her to bounce theories off of.]

Io.tcai. One of the post-singularity Turing-Capable AIs that run the game. Their job, among other thing, is maintaining mind-machine hook-ups and enacting the failsafes so this didn't happen again.

So either they chose to stop for some reason... Or something prevented them from doing so.

Trapped in game. I see. My advice. Understand situation thoroughly. Information first priority. After survival.

Saw you talking. To someone working on situation from outside. Good. But value in information from inside.

Yeah. Uh. It maybe looks like it was the second. Kate and Claire are on trying to talk to them.

Edited 2021-08-13 00:41 (UTC)

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First Quest (Video, username 'westandreamcatcher')

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