Get on the Down With Fish bus

[arrowace]

WHO: Lilybells, House Wardens, Azdaja, others??
WHERE: Lily War Room
WHEN: Day 71 morning

[ After a few different discussion, Lily and Bluebell have invited some allies to discuss a problem and make some plans. They've probably put out like. Berries and water. Mute and Ananke stand at the front of the room, them speaking and him providing large illusions of the presentation. ]

Lights please. Ananke.






This is Eph'meris. It is not my home but . . . where I was most recently before . . . arriving in the Meadow. Next.








This is Meris. Meris was once the primordial . . . sea goddess that formed Eph'meris and its people. Now she is a . . . festering mass of malice, squatting in the astral sea and longing only . . . to drag all life she encounters with her into the abyss. Next.








This is the Merisian Pillar Array, which turns one or several individuals into the "Pillar" of Eph'meris. It allows the bulk of Meris's hatred, necrotic power, and general "evil bullshit" to be visited on . . . that one or several persons rather than . . . reality itself. It also fortifies those individuals' . . . bodies to bear this malice without being destroyed. It also . . . kills them. Next.









This is a small piece of the Merisian Pillar Array, that we are . . . currently calling the "Gate". It's purpose is to . . . ensure that the energy exerted by Meris upon reality is directed at the selected Pillar, but also that . . . some of this energy may be siphoned off to the Merisian power grid. I am told . . . this is "like electricity but worse" but I don't . . . actually know what electricity is. Next.









I believe these diagrams speak for themselves. Next.









Next.








This concludes the . . . background briefing. Everything should be clear now.

Comments

[arrowace]

Scarab can provide you with . . . high definition schematics.

[finalbows]

[ swanning over there immediately ]

1/2

[spinebuddyandme]

Oh — yeah, hang on.

[ plz hold while Ananke swaps out of the driver's seat. Outwardly, it looks like he has frozen perfectly still for about a second ]

[spinebuddyandme]

[ And he's Scarab's back, peering up at him ]

How many "print outs" do you require?

[finalbows]

When the space between lines gets smaller than this, [ he pinches his fingers together to show a tiny bit of space ] there's too much ambiguity in the image. Think you can work with that?

[arrowace]

[ that’s so many lines. Surely not all the lines are important. If they were important they would be big lines. God wizardry is stupid. ]

[spinebuddyandme]

Easily.

[ There's a stack of posterboard or something around for this. Still maintaining the illusion of the arrays for everyone else, Scarab unfurls one arm of the super suit and hold a hand above the posterboard, using the brightly lit fingerpads of his glove to laser print a zoomed in copy of the array onto posterboard in sections, even adding a small number key on the back of each one to indicate the order they fit together in.

it is a lot of panels, but details IS important ]

[finalbows]

How opposed are you to me taking a stack of these with me.

[ already almost nose deep in one of the new laser-prints. ]

_{...the things THAT would do to your metabolism...}

[spinebuddyandme]

I have no objection so long as Mute does not either. I can prepare more should additional individuals desire research copies.

[secondbornsun]

[ actually ]

Pass me one.

[ thanks ]

[spinebuddyandme]

[ Gets right to printing out another stack of copies ]

Your assistance in analysis is greatly appreciated.

[secondbornsun]

Hmmh.

[ not like, flippantly but still fairly dismissive in the neutral, 'i have acknowledged this verbal pleasantry but neither of us care about adhering to social performances do we' kind of way. watches him print the stack because that's more interesting than going through his P's and Q's and W's ]

[finalbows]

Tart~, if you're also at it, I'm marking the ones I think need the most looking over. How about we see if we're in agreement.

[ he's doing it with star ratings, it looks like. 1-5 star ranks for each panel of array... ]

[secondbornsun]

Why, ain't like ya need the ego boost.

[ but if angel devil is close enough he'll look over the ratings anyway ]

[finalbows]

Because if we're in agreement, we can follow one another's judgement.
But if you think one is profoundly simple that I find flummoxing, that's evidence there's something to have a conversation about.

[secondbornsun]

[ huff . . . ]

. . . If ya wanna clean this up to a neater spell, ya might as well just do the whole thing over again.

[ picking out one of the five starred sections to tap on it ]

Whole thing ain't even activated, they ain't got the right bits for it.

1/2

[finalbows]

[ under his breath, ]

_{..."the right bits"...}

[ very goddamn specific ]

2/2

[finalbows]

Do the whole thing over again, you first need to know what all it's even doing, in the first place.

Now, I see what you mean, but look here. When you line it up with these...

[ produces two papers to line up with the Five Star. ]

I think it's actually going to get flooded enough it'll force a bridge... here, when it's activated. Now I'm not saying that's ideal. But I am saying what it actually may be doing, instead of nothing at all, is repeatedly going on and off just long enough to do...

Something.
Definitely not what it LOOKS like it does, but something.

[finalbows]

[ already marking his up with a pencil he got from ??? somewhere ]

[arrowace]

Take what you want. They're not my . . . state secrets.

[ STATES THAT WANT THEIR SECRETS NOT SPILLED SHOULDN'T INSCRIBE THEM ON RANDOM ORPHANS' SOULS, THAT'S WHAT MUTE THINKS ]

[finalbows]

...But they are someone's, hn?
Now I'm actually going to have fun.

[arrowace]

[ you know what? they are mad enough in specifically this moment to allow a Sicko Faces to slide ]

For a millennium it was the carefully . . . guarded secret of the Solesian Academy. But then they . . . put it on me.

[finalbows]

[ look at both y'all icons and tell him you are not making the SAME sicko face, he asks you ]

So we're looking at the result of prolonged academic collaboration. That means... Hn.

Do you have references of any other arrays they produced? I don't care what they do, I care about trying to see if some of these quirks are stylistic, or the result of some dependency somewhere I haven't noticed yet.

Or both.

[arrowace]

[ how dare you sir ]

Hmm.

[ pulls out their Crystal Bullshit Cellphone and starts flipping through it ]

[finalbows]

[ don't get distracted looking at the cellphone don't get distracted looking at the-- ]

What powers THAT.