SingingMosaic

I'm dead now, Ene kiiiilled meeee.

Yay!  Thanks. And no problem, it's just their file names that display to me, so you can tilt a virtual bookcase full of images into the thread and I'll probably be least bothered by it lol.

Yay this exists!

I'm agender and pansexual/panromantic because life already confuses me enough without adding all that extra complication, at least that's why I feel like I am. I've tried to do things related to the gender I was raised as, but it was just as confusing when I voluntarily participated and tried to relate to it as it was when I was being raised that way, so I gave up. The same went for sexuality, I was attracted to who I was attracted to and how they were physically configured had nothing to do with it. The only exception was once I dated someone shorter than me and it was weird, and I thought it was odd that, if my brain hadn't gotten hung up on any other major detail, it would finally get hung up on height of all things.

Sadly won't be able to participate as much as I'd like, unless someone wants to do image descriptions, that would be cool.

@Delightful

I wonder if the fact that those senses come from the brain understanding input from specific parts of a magic system would stop this, or make it difficult/more chancy. But maybe not, maybe you could do it.

This did get me thinking about other senses though. If you can store the basic five in a tinmind, could you store your other more passive senses that work all the time? Could you get a thug's sense of balance temporarily just by storing your own and tapping it quickly? If I were storing senses, I'd store every sense I could reasonably get away with storing, rotating one out so I wasn't completely vulnerable. Not just the main ones.

Dalinar? I wouldn't necessarily call them close at the end but it seemed like they were at one point.

For

@AonEne

andd

@Gears

if they're still interested. Speaking of which do you have a preferred set of pronouns? I can't remember if I saw that anywhere or not.

I can only put tags each on their own lines for some reason known only to the depth of the Shard's code, sorry guys. Occasionally I can put text after a tag on the same line but sometimes that gets weird.

Spoilered for length.

Dot lapsed into silence while the other two talked, noting the keys and thanking Aln before she left, as he turned over this new piece of information.

Everest didn't know where it could have come from. Aln wasn't as surprised as she should be, or he was misreading her. Some people didn't startle easily but still... He stretched his senses out, reaching for hordelings he'd left in other places, places harder to come and go from. And it seemed that, even with the curious unease and conflict to make this place strange, Alleycity was as ripe with hidden information as it always had been. He wandered toward the shelves Aln had indicated earlier. Current events and recent history would be good to catch up on, and most places didn't have easily available information about other worlds. Some people would know some of it in some of them, but those same people guarded their information and were smart enough to keep a lookout for any kind of lifeform. Having permission to be where you were did sometimes make things easier.

Setting a couple books on top of a stack of newspapers on a table next to a chair in a corner, he went to get his key. He went out, retrieving a few things to leave in his room--a bag of sturdy clothing, miscellaneous useful everyday tools, a little money--before settling in with his books. If someone went in there they would find the life of a man who lived only a lightly material life. Closer to poor than rich, with no sentimental belongings.

It was rare that he told people who he really was. But it might be an advantage, both for future collaboration and for each other, to tell some of these people. He would wait and see, and if he were discovered sooner, he would deal with that when he came to it. All the centuries of human reactions to what they feared, hated, or didn't know at all meant that now it was an extremely rare event which could convince him to show himself quickly.

OOC: The time skip is fine. He'll probably still be there in the morning. The way he's built this body it does need to rest, depending on what parts of it need the rest, but not often. When vital functions do need to rest it's more like a dolphin sleeping than a human sleeping. I might be taking some liberties here but Brandonmakes them seem so configurable to the needs and whims of each of them that I might not be.

Dot smiled at Aln but otherwise remained quiet as she and Everest conversed. He had to be careful with smiling, but knew that many humans were unnerved by someone who never smiled. Creating toothlike structures had once presented a challenge, but now he could manage them for the most part. His experiments in creating a realistic mouth, however, were still in progress. Most of it he had down, but he'd never quite gotten a natural looking human gumline. He glanced down at the paper and carefully signed it.

I, the undersigned, hereby pledge myself to the Guild of Scholars, and promise to strive to gather and spread knowledge throughout the Alleyverse and corresponding worlds.
Signed, Dot

On the signature line he carefully drew his old name, a dense glyph of interlocking lines. Even it wasn't the original, as that had never been made for ink and paper. No one would recognize it anymore, few in the Alleycity had ever seen it. And they were long dead probably old now long dead no still alive undying--

Stop!

It had been a very long time since the various elements he'd tasked his hordelings to had disagreed this completely about something. Not since he was young, and discovering how to interface with different sensory systems.

He set the paper down lightly on a tabletop close to Aln and looked up at Everest. "It is good to see people interested in learning," he said. "It always gives me a little more faith in the future." He paused, her last words sinking in. "Atium!" he exclaimed quietly. "Now there is a material one does not see often, even when it was common. If you don't mind my asking, what did he look like? Did he have other spikes?" The only person he knew of in possession of any amount of atium wasn't likely to be running around, rashly making atium spikes with his lifespan. But every now and again a bead would turn up. Secreted away elsewhere? Stolen from Marsh somehow? He had never known Marsh well, but then again, no one did. Not to mention their interactions had mainly consisted of both of them watching each other until he could get offworld. And no one was quite certain what had happened to all of the atium that hadn't been used up, if they were, they were certainly quiet about it. He'd had the misfortune of getting himself stranded on Scadrial during what had thankfully not been its death throes. To lose a world, and one with so much potential, would have been devastating.

@turtle

@Rushu42

I keep getting distracted writing him and the posts keep not getting shorter! Let me know if it's an issue

Block quotes still not behaving for me.

Dot wandered a little farther into the room, careful not to collide with the woman who'd entered in front of him. "I'm an independent scholar, perhaps best called a lifelong student. I study Investiture and magical systems, I've been to places inside and out of the Cosmere. My fascination though has always been with people, with how different types of communities function, and with the interactions of large scale systems. I'm called Dot these days. My name is long and difficult to say, and I've rarely tried to translate it into different writing systems. I'm from Roshar, though I haven't been there in a while." He paused for a moment as he continued looking around. "When are good times for me to be here? I assume you probably wouldn't want any materials taken out of the building."

@Rushu42

Were you always a multiplicity?
For as long as we can remember, yeah.
Are you happy?
I am. If anyone else isn't, they haven't said anything about that. Though I'm not worried about it. A lot of trust has gone into making this work. I think we would tell each other if something were wrong.
Do any members of the system identity as the "original"?
No, not really, but that's complicated. We live in a mental environment that is kind of sentient, and it identifies itself as the original home.
Do you consider yourself to ne multiple entities in one body or a single entity with many forms of expression?
We're a system of about twelve different people. Of those, three are people who have multiple facets, who consider themselves as each one person with more than one expression. So the other nine are purely individuals. I'm one I have fourteen, Nymyyrriq is another, he has sixteen, and the third has six. The three of us have expressions we prefer over others though, so many of those aren't seen for long stretches of time.
If you could be a singular person without a system, would you?
Not at this point.
Do you like being yourself?
I do. Living my life is complicated, but I figure living anyone's life is complicated for different reasons.

Sure go ahead.

If we should do it elsewhere that's OK, don't wanna derail the thread unless no one minds.

@Gears

@AonEne

24 minutes ago, Rushu42 said:

Aln began to formulate a list of questions to ask this unusual Epic, but before she could begin asking them, a light flashed on her wrist. It was her fabrial, alerting her that the door to the guild had just bee opened. It flashed a second time a moment later. Aln stood, torn, and looked at Dr. Gears. "Could you find out everything you can about how Deadspot came to be a statue buried in an Alley? Some people just came in."

@Invocation @Gears

She pushed through the door into the main library, and saw two figures, one standing in the middle of the room and the other peering through the doorway. "Hello," she called, trying to disguise her weariness. "Welcome to the Scholar's Guild. How may I help you?

@SingingMosaic @turtle

Dot slipped in quietly past the other who had just entered and stood peering around. Empty lamps placed around the room. No wicks in any of them, so Stormlight or, for some reason, electric lamps with the lights stripped out of them. Either way, curious. Books everywhere!

Across the room he could see a small woman, most likely human, barely an inch or two taller than he was, dressed practically. She looked a little worn around the edges.

"I haven't been in the city in a long time," he said, "and there's much here that wasn't here when I last was..." He paused for a second, taking control back from mental resources that had tried to seize on that conundrum again. "I'm an explorer and a scientist." Among other things. "Are there books here on what's been going on in the past... ten years?" Something wrong with that. It had been longer, hadn't it? "And possibly to join you, to learn, share, and discover, or at least to start that process, but if you're too busy I can wait." Eh, why not? This was all too strange to sit on the boundaries, watching and cataloguing, he had an urge to get into the thick of things again. He didn't expect to be able to keep his secret in a city like this one, but he'd deal with that when it came to it. And everyone had more than one.

OOC: For recent events points to books reads books later or something like that is OK, because I know them out of character for the most part, I mainly need a reason for him to have known them. He's been back in the city for what he thinks is two days and is actually something more like eight hours.

Humans can be amazingly community oriented when they're broken out of all of this conditioning, but they have to keep at it and getting them to do that is the hard part.

This one is a mixed origin system, with systems nested inside of it, so it's complex to navigate. All in all there aren't very many individuals, but more than one of them is a person who is, in tendency and instinct, different people at different times, a sort of median system. Think Singer forms and you'd be reasonably close to the idea. It takes a lot of communication and sometimes there are multiple people present, but they're present at varying levels of attention and in different ways. I'm usually the one who types on the Shard, I'm Feather. I play Nnimm in the AV. I bring this up because another headmate, Nymyyrriq, plays Dot in the AV, who was adapted from his Numenera character, who then became a sort of accidental tulpa, who thinks it's amusing that a character of him exists, so sometimes he plays himself? Actual Dot isn't a Sleepless though. He's a human... er, if we're defining human very loosely. This isn't the first time it's happened either, the system can do something I think of as budding. In the mental space it occupies, a sort of tightly closed blossom can sometimes be found, and you can feel what I can only describe as raw potential from it. Eventually it opens and someone new is there. None of us have found a way to initiate the process at will. So there aren't really tulpas, in the technical sense of the word here. There's no core, host etc. The environment itself is host, sentient in a quieter way, we just have an agreement with it that we can call it home.

Dot wove through streets cluttered from the night's festivities wrapped in a coat that seemed to threaten to swallow his small, compact frame whole, driven forward by a mix of curiosity and unease. He'd kept eyes and ears out all night, wandering, picking up tidbits about the city's state. But something felt terribly wrong about it, a detached sense that nothing made any sense which he couldn't pin on anything specific. It wasn't political or social, no--that was almost *too* normal, actually. And there it was, too, that thought. Why should this city be any stranger than it always had been?

And everyone had gone on, as if nothing was strange. Was he imagining this unease? He wondered briefly if this was what it was like to have a nightmare which did not seem like a nightmare, something that members of some races occasionally mentioned having. But he didn't dream. Didn't really have a name many left alive could say, for that matter. Wasn't really a person the way the people he imitated thought of one. So there was no knowing.

No, he'd investigate. In his experience you couldn't just walk into a place and demand it tell you why it is odd. You have to go in and talk to it, all its moving parts, listen to a living ecosystem of minds and events and chemicals knowing what many individuals forgot--that the whole has as much to tell you as anyone does.

He'd discovered the location of the Scholar's Guild relatively easily, conversation flowed freely this night, and decided it was as likely a start as any. Perhaps he could learn from them, perhaps join them. It had been a long time since he'd been involved with something.

Glancing up at the building as he approached it, he found it unlikely anyone would be here at the moment, but if they weren't, he could come back some other when. This whole city had always been rich with interesting information, and simultaneously so easy and so difficult to get into.

He stepped up to the door, turned the handle and tugged on it lightly. He could get in there, but there was a certain perspective you couldn't get unless you were interacting, involved in a situation. And going in expecting something could sometimes be so restricting.

I was figuring that if it's unlocked, it opens, and there's Dot in the doorway, peering in. If there was meant to be a sign on the door and I missed that, I can edit this. He passes for human to an extent, but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. Faintly uneven skin, the structure of his eye sockets visibly strange, hands a little too jointed, hair an unusual texture. His flying eye is currently hidden beneath the collar of his coat, so it's not impossible to get a glimpse of, but the angle would matter. Hi guys and apologies for length, this is my first Dot post.

Considering that everyone currently seems to be in a different room I leave this up to you. Wonder what he does if he opens the door onto an empty room. Haven't thought of that yet...

Yay this exists!

The whole system isn't nonbinary but I am so *waves*

Aww yay someone has a cat. This makes me happy, I don't have one, so I just have to think about petting cats and other people petting cats.

I'm here for anarchy. I have this whole idea of how an anarchist world might look that's been growing in my head for a while. It wouldn't be utterly without social structure, which implies guidelines at least if not rules, because I don't think humans, as social creatures, could actually manage that but it would be as close as we could get it.

-Feather

Oh I can see that, going to go check it out now.

You know what handpans are, I'm so happy! I love handpans and anyway I'll quit before I get off topic.

I can see handpans in part of Stormlight. Did you have any impressions that made you think of them in Mistborn, anything you were thinking of when you thought of that? I'm curious.

I don't have one. It has been a source of my sadness for a long time.

Kiss Raodan, on the cheek so Sarene doesn't kill me, marry Elend for his books, kill Adolin.

Oops Adolin isn't dead and I'm in seven pieces.

Oh well.

Kmk Arclow, the Stump and Yeden.

I'll go through this list, too, because it seems like we have fairly similar tastes in books.

Also, admittedly, I'm a little glad I'm not entirely alone. When I did my introduction, I posted a massive list of songs--either things that almost made it onto my Spotify Stormlight playlist, or things that I resonated with.

Welcome and I hope you have fun here.

Oooo. I hope you enjoy the books, but I'm also sad that you too shall join us in waiting and gnawing on the bits of information Brandon drops. Sad not because it isn't fun, but because waiting for Stormlight 4 is killing me.

Anyway I hope you have fun here.

Kiss Jasnah (she probably wouldn't let me), marry Renarin and sorry Adolin, you'll kill me before I can kill you, if your cousin didn't get there first. lol

Ais, Rlain and Ashweather Cett. Just to throw some really unlikely people together.

Edit: oops. lol

Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks.

For some reason, my post count won't change. I don't know if this is because early posts are vanishing (that would be a bit difficult to find out) or if it's just stuck.

Unless old content is vanishing, it doesn't seem to be interfering with anything else. I figured I would let you know and see if anyone else is having that problem.

Edit: It did just go up when I posted that, but it hasn't been going up for a while before? Strange.

Kiss Wax, couldn't be that bad, marry Lightsong, because that relationship would be mostly a technicality anyway and he would probably be cool about it, kill Wyndle, not because I don't like him, but because I can't, so it's fine.

Eshonai, Wayne, and Glys.

It's fine if we have repeats right? This would die pretty fast without them and I'm pretty sure I've been seeing them.