So, I'm thinkign about that whole Tsunami as Yog-sothoth idea, and how it appeals to me, and I'm thinking about one of the major issues inherent in it - to whit, if she's one of the primal forces in the universe, then how are the Acc'ultani (or however their apostrophized) supposed to represent even a remote threat to those she loves?
And now I'm thinking about that whole Nyarlehotep multiple incarnations idea, and wondering why it has to be limited to him. So here's my thought.
So wayyyy back in prehistory, this particular universe gets formed, and its incarnations/aspects of Shub, Yog, Nyarle and Azzie get extruded into it. Yoggie starts setting down the laws of physics, and ensuring that they'll be followed. He spawns the big bang and oes from there. He incarnates as the universal Ley Line partway through, in a mostly successful attempt to make his life easier. Shubbie-chan starts pumping out life and intelligent races, and Azathoth starts consuming, incarnating into that Eternal Devourer that we all know and love.
So, time passes and the GOOs start their whole tying into the ley-lines thing. The hyperbeings are seriously skeeved, and attempt to create an AI control for the ULL. They fail. They think that they succeed. What they actually end up doing is giving good old yoggie an interfact that they can understand, and that can interact with them. This is big. It's the first time that any of the Three have communicated directly with lesser beings at all. Well, Yoggie isn't about to be compelled by simple hyperbeings, but at the same time, the SAHyBs were definately *not* on the blueprints for the universe that *he* set out, and this whole tying into him and leeching off his power full-time thing is starting to piss him off. He doesn't like it when people casually fondle the nukes, especially not when he's playing the part of the nukes. They tell him to smack the SAHyBs down, and he is more than happy to do so, especially since obeying their orders keeps them feeling safe enough to chat with him about all these bizarre new concepts they have. (He's especially fascinated by logic. Who'd have thunk it?) On the other hand,he can't beat them up inhyper without seriously hurting himself, and the interface's ability to affect the sidereal without Breaking The Rules is limited. (Yog-sothoth wrote The Rules. Yog-sothoth is The Rules. Imagine a religion about which you are fanatic that you made yourself, in which you are both high priest and the worshipped deity. imagine that this religion has certain laws that you follow fervently. That's about how Yog-Sothoth is with the laws of physics.) His solution is simple - to lock them away in a reality bubble (which he can do from hyper) and never have to deal with them ever again.
So Yog-sothoth and Shub-niggurath exchange info (they are eternally linked) and Shubbie-chan gets curious about the idea of having an incarnation that can interact with all those creatures that she gives birth to. She doesn't do anything about it yet (and anyway, directly incarnating all by herself would be against the Rules, and while she probably *could* get it past Yoggie, she doesn't want to bother.) but she keeps it in mind.
So the Tar-Aym show up, and they have the quite literal hubris to shackle a God. Yog (as the ley line AI) gets pissed, and calls in his old pal Azathoth, who is plenty content to do his gibbering on top of them, rather than any other random place. Alternatively, Yog manipulates the laws of physics so that's where Azzie ends up. At Azzie's level of absentience, they amount to the same thing. Yog figured that that would be enough of a punishment right there, consuming most of their empire, but they flip out and use the Krang to force him to attack Azathoth. He makes a very precise blow, doing the cosmic equivalent of cutting Azzie's hair, and in so doing manages to obliterate the Tar-Aym root and branch, without breaking any of his own precious rules. This has a good side and a bad side. On the good side, it punishes the Tar-Aym better than he couuld have hoped. On the bad side, the Krang is still out there, and the entire process ended up breaking loose a bit of his control on the GOOs, and he can't reseal them without a) a direct command or b) breaking character. He starts looking for a more permanent solution. He also realizes that he needs stress-testers for reality, so that he can find and fix these sorts of things before interstellar empires get ahold of them.
hrmmm...running out of creative juices. Stuff that follows:
Yoggie starts experimenting with copying planets. Shubby develops a fondness for human beings. Yoggie invests Washuu with some of his power, and fills her with eternal curiousity, in an attempt to stress-test the System. The founder of Jyuraii unintentionally gives Shubby-chan an opportunity too good to resist and she partially incarnates into Tsunami (connection to the outer Awareness, but thought more on a human level, and only a small fraction of the available power. Becomes more human as time goes on.) Treeships weren't originally intended to be sentient. Mihoshi ends up being a lesser incarnation of Nyarlehotep, the only being in the universe permitted to consistently *break* the rules. Every court needs a jester.
Basically, the connection to their respective Powers ends up explaining how they do what we've seenthem do already. It shouldn't give any of them any more or different powers. Washuu gets hyper-intelligence, and an amazing intuitive grasp of the laws of reality. The rest is due to her upgrading herself over time. Tsunami (originally a treeship) gets intelligence, her amazing control over the powers of life, and most of her psi powers. These pass on to her saplings as appropriate. Mihoshi gets hyper-luck and the ability to mess up Washuu by warping the laws of reality around her subtly. The whole unintelligence thing was Nyarlehotep's idea of a joke, as was the idea of throwing yet another suitor at poor Tenchi.
random thoughts:
- perhaps Nyarle is merely that part of Azathoth with actual intelligence?
- Mihoshi *could* also be an avater of Azathoth. It works either way, but I think Nyarlehotep makes more sense.
- I'd like to come up with a reason under this story why all the girls fell for Tenchi. Specifically, I'd like to come up with a better reason than "Nyarlehotep thought it would be funny."
Right. done. I'll write more later if I come up with in. In the meantime, thoughts? praise? criticisms? modifications? additions? ect?
Fibula
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What don't you like about it? I'm happy to discuss the thing on its merits, but I'm a bit too fond of the idea to give it up without being convinced of its flaws.
Fibula
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1) It's Lovecraft. I've stated my problems/objections in most vocal ways elsewhere, so we'll move on.
2) Anthropomorphization. One of the dreaded pitfalls in creating serious alien characters is in making them Just Like Us In Funny Bodies. YS, A & SN are, by definition, *alien beyond our comprehension,* and yet your writeup gives them motivations and emotional - emotional! - responses like.. well, like almost every other goddamn anime character in existence.
3) The Tenchi connection. Of all the things I've done here, I'm starting to really regret making that fucking crack about treeships and Dark Young.
4) Nyarly. Similar to #1 above, but with the addendum that I *really fucking hate* Nyarly and wouldn't mind seeing him *not show up at all* in SS. Nyarly is Distilled Essence of Munchkin, and munchkins piss me off beyond all reason.
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Mr. Fnord
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http://fnord.sandwich.net/
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1. Right. I would point out that under this one, HPL's mythos is not, in fact, consuming reality as we know it, but rather being integrated in along with everything else. If you changed the names, most folks wouldn't even recognize the references.
2. Not so. My writeup gives them shard aspects, limited in power, specifically designed to interact with humanity. Even so, Tsunami only managed to get as human as she is by dint of centuries of hard work, the ULL AI was more or less designed by hyperbeings before being taken over from the back-end, and Azathoth is still incomprehensible and gibbering. The basic core of each of them remains unattainable, incomprehensible, and nigh-infinite. I describe them as having emotions because that's how I can best explain things to me. No, the basic entities do not have anything like human emotions. They are motivated in some incomprehensibly alien fashion that I wot not of. The emotions described are merely my (very, very rough) first-order approximations, and the best I can do. On the other hand, I admit up front that I'm altering their natures severely. They aren't nearly as evil/wrong/toxic as the originals. I just don't think I'm getting into anthro abuse.
3. Could you explain the problem here further? I'm not saying there aren't any number of valid issues that you might have with a Tenchi/Cthulu fusion, I just want to know specifically what it is about this part of the situation that bothers you.
4. Well, I don't agree with your assessment. If some player came to me wanting to play Nyarly, then I'd say that that player was amazingly munchkin, but as the Fourth of the Three, he's pretty clearly an NPC. Apparently I fail my grok check. Regardless, I don't really have anything to say on this point - I can't argue productively with deep-seated loathing, and I won't try. For what it's worth, he could be edited out pretty easily - it's just that I tend to see him as a trickster-god, and I find him amusing.
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>1. Right. I would point out that under this one,
>HPL's mythos is not, in fact, consuming reality as we
>know it, but rather being integrated in along with
>everything else. If you changed the names, most folks
>wouldn't even recognize the references.
Which sort of defeats the point of even *having* the references in the first place. If they don't line up with the originals, you can't call them the originals, or even a close likeness thereof.
So what, exactly, is the point of all this if we could easily call these characters by other names?
>3. Could you explain the problem here further? I'm
>not saying there aren't any number of valid issues
>that you might have with a Tenchi/Cthulu fusion, I
>just want to know specifically what it is about this
>part of the situation that bothers you.
Well... first of all, the comment that started this whole thing wasn't meant to be serious. When I was revising Eric's cosmology ideas, I didn't have a decent idea on what to do with Shub-Niggurath, so I made an offhand suggestion that I expected to get shot down along with the rest of it.
IT WAS A JOKE. Instead, for reasons that are beyond my ken, you seemed to have latched onto it. Personally, I think the concept of a Tenchi/Mythos fusion cheapens both source elements - it adds pointlesly dark overtones to Tenchi and it warps the Mythos elements out of recognition.
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Mr. Fnord
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http://fnord.sandwich.net/
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I just spent, like, half an hour writing up some nice, formal, LEish pronouncements on the course of events.
Then fucking IE fucking DELETES IT.
JM;LZSKD!!!!!!!
Okay, here goes, AGAIN.
The DV is a thin shell of Azzie power around a big sphere of Azzie Wierdness. It's so big that it seems pretty diffuse at a scale of single digit lightyears. It's not the real prison of Tentacle Face and Friends, just connected to it by a sort of sympathetic magic thingie.
Vorlons are the Culture, are not from Yth, and have nothing to do with Shoggoths. They have a destructive meme in their society which acts as a block to progress similar to organized religion on earth - it acts like a really sick and twisted sense of humor.
The Leyline is pulling puppetstrings to try and destroy the Cthulu & Co.
It was also used to take a whack at Azzie (at the behest of the Krang) and the backlash wiped out the Tar-Aiym. The DV proper - the shell of -real-bad-stuff- was created later.
The three sisters are high-level multi-band-hyperbeings and have been experimenting with the sidereal in an attempt to gain sufficient power to fight Cthulu. Tsunami's done the best job, but not even -she- can project useful power over more than about a hundred lightyears without a treeship as an on-site amplifier.
Tsu-chan -is- a SAHB. The elder SAHBs are a lot more mentally alien than she is, and it shows in the way they manifest in the physical. Looking at them will break your brain. Looking at her might creep you out, if you were perceptive, but it won't do more than that, because she doesn't -want- it to do more than that.
Questions, comments, things I missed, things you disagree with? Say it now, folks.
Blessed be.
-cle
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The concept of a Tenchi/Cthulu fusion suddenly brought to mind how, exactly, Tenchi could deal with so many women... which in turn lead to the ouch (I think this has to do with the throw-away ref to 'His H-ness' in an earlier thread).
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Scuse me, I need to go wash out my brain"
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