Heaven's Duality: Interface

BGM >>​

The crystal plummeted to the ground with a crash, cracking it through its core and sending shards of red crystal flying through the air. The impact was enough to leave a massive crater befitting the crystal’s great size, creating tremors in the ground nearby. The roar of a giant serpentine dragon sounded from above, the sapphire creature circling above the wreckage before moving on to another, more distant crystal.

A head poked out from some dying brush, wide alien eyes searching the crystal and feathery antennae perked up. The carapaced creature emerged from its hiding spot, approaching cautiously, before startling and running back to the sparse plant life as something stirred among the broken crystal shards and scraps of human civilization.

Survivors.​

I’d like to think it was a fluke that we lived, but doing so would be an insult to how far we’ve come in the last Era.

Calemvir took down the Zantrica Southern Red crystal, our home, as expected. Frankly it’s a miracle that our forcefield held as well as it did in the seconds before impact, since Calemvir’s attack cut right through it. Even more of a miracle that so many people survived, but more than half of us didn’t. What it means though is that we didn’t have time to warn our neighbors, the Southern Blue, before Calemvir brought them down as well. I watched the crystal fall- a terrifyingly morbid yet somehow beautiful sight. It doesn’t look like the people on Southern Blue have brought it back up again yet.

Our efforts are going well. We’ve had a few shards rise back into the air, so the Core shouldn’t be much longer. And once we get the Core flying again, it should attract the other shards with enough of a delay that we can take our Striders and hitch a ride back onto our crystal. In the meantime, we’re counting and recording our casualties and keeping an eye on our storm-riddled skies for dragons and Kiccaroq.

The Atchi’taii have been nothing but helpful to us, as well. I think both of our groups were surprised at the encounter- we tried making contact with the tribe we found, but they shied and scattered away from us at first. It wasn’t until we used our more advanced technology to drive away a Greater Kiccaroq looking for an easy meal that they were comfortable enough to interface with us.

We’ve sent a small team of diplomats and scientists to meet with the tribe for the betterment of both of our kind. Our rebreathers won’t last forever down on the surface, and if we can figure out how the Taii can breathe the toxins down here then we can make great leaps in exploration in the next Era. Some of them have come back now and then to fetch rations, and they have the most intriguing things to say about the Taii! From venomous quills to the intricacies of their culture, our surface neighbors are fascinating creatures.

We have had more… strange reports, however. Clearly a separate culture from ours, the Taii observe different gods than we do. That much we already knew to be the case, and we’re perfectly willing to accept this. After all, most of their gods are just Dreivadr and Saaldyr with different names.

But there’s one in particular they seem to observe, which some members of the team are very animated and enthusiastic when talking about it. Some local god of the tribe, it seems, as none of us have heard of it before; it seems to be some deity of wind or some such concept. It can be a little difficult to derive the exact meaning from an Atchi’tai’s telepathy sometimes.

But the issue we face here is that the people who are so enthusiastic about this deity are absolutely convinced that it’s part of our main pantheon. Sure, Dreivadr is widely known as a god of storms, but his domain is quite different from what we’re hearing described. The individuals in question insist that we’ve always observed this god, and become quite agitated at our confusion and skepticism. I usually send them back to the research team before there’s any risk of them getting violent.

I don’t have the time to be dealing with crises of faith right now. The Core of our crystal is nearly repaired, and we can figure out what’s going on when we’re all back safely in the sky.


Until the next report,

Maeck Karzen, Recovery Team Administrator
9th of Fjoru, 7E0001

​

---

Whew, this one has been in the works for a while now.

While I promised myself that the actual roleplay would be up after KeM's first chapter was done, I'm getting the int check up now to give people time to figure out profiles before we start.

Interface is a Manaverse statplay, as the thread prefix suggests, so along with the summary of the premise I should give some context to the setting.


First, the context.

This roleplay takes place on Vindrgard, a pseudojovian planet based in Norse and some Japanese mythology. The only playable species in this roleplay will be humans.

A map of Vindrgard with continents marked out can be found here. The normal map can be found here.

Vindrgard undergoes what is known as the Renewal Cycle every Era, which means roughly every 1000 years (though it can vary 25-50 years more or less). This event entails a dragon designated as the Nidhoggr- a creature thought to be an inescapable law of nature manifesting as a dragon- going into a rage and destroying as much of civilization as possible before its soul and all the power it collected during its rampage going into a single final attack. This cycle is meant to cull humanity so that only the most resourceful survive to continue civilization.

Vindrgard's main notable features are the toxic air on the surface of the planet, the giant floating crystals called the Crystal Network where humans live, and the virtual reality internet-like telepathic system known as AeroComm, which comes from the Crystal Network. I don't mean VR like, for example, the Occulus Rift, I mean that as far as you can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste, you are actually *in* the world you see in AeroComm. It's primarily used for communication across crystals, but again, it's like the internet- a culture has evolved around multiplayer games not much different from games like Overwatch, Elder Scrolls Online, World of Warcraft, Doom, etc.

The crystals are known to be at least pseudosentient and aware of events in the world around them, and will usually kick AeroComm users out in the event of an emergency such as a bad storm or a dragon attack. Crystals are referred to by location and color; continent (Casabaia and Zantrica are the only continents to have crystals), cardinal directional location (North South East West), and color in that order, examples in the admin's report above- Zantrica Southern Red and Zantrica Southern Blue.

AeroComm has very specific slang sometimes, like so:

Electric Sleep: The phenomenon of AeroComm not allowing a user to exit the system.

Interface: Can mean a few things. Most common meaning is user-to-user communication, but can also mean communicating with AeroComm itself (like a server) or a sort of mental "menu" where you can control what you see around you and whether you want to exit the system.

Key Name: What we would know as a username. These tend to be one-word concepts and are how users refer to each other in AeroComm. Examples of Key Names used by established characters are Collusion, Risk, Strike, and Cyclone.

Key in: Another way of saying "log in" for us; connecting to AeroComm. Reverse: Key out.


Now, premise.

It is shortly after the turn of the Era- a few years or so. Your home crystal has long since been rebuilt (due to the nature of the RP, it doesn't have to be Zantrica Southern Red) and you've moved on with your life (barring any backstory you wish to do). You're safe from dragon attacks for the rest of your life, as are the next several generations.

You've been contacted by another user on AeroComm. Calling himself Collusion, he reaches out to you for help in cracking a conspiracy theory he's developed that you might have noticed outside of AeroComm- talks of something like a new god, that you'd never heard of otherwise, at least not in AeroComm itself. Collusion seems to think there's something up, and according to him you're one of the few people he's interfaced with to not be "delusional", as he puts it. You're not the only one he's contacted, but he says he can use all the help he can get.

There's a catch, however. Whether you're a gamer or not, it seems that he wants to test how skilled you theoretically are in one of the many multiplayer games in AeroComm. When asked why, he seems to not want to tell you everything, but does explain that you might need to be able to fight should they run into trouble along the way. This strikes you as odd- it's just a game, right? But Collusion appears to think that any fighting skill developed in the game will be helpful in general. You are acting in AeroComm, after all.


Due to the nature of the roleplay you will be spending 90% of your time in AeroComm. Your skills don't actually use Mana (we're using MP for convenience I suppose) and Magic, Soul Phantasms, and Domains are not applicable mechanically. Character progression is your actual character in-game, not the character you as a player are, well, playing. KO and similar things result in character death, which you will (usually) be able to respawn from. Permadeath is not a feature.

Interface will have a very cyberpunk-y vibe to it. We're still sci-fantasy, but more on the sci-fi side of things. Think of Shadowrun.

We're not actually starting up the roleplay until KeM reaches the end of Chapter 1.5, but I'm putting up the Interest Check now so people have time to sign up and make profiles. I'm taking a maximum of four people.

 

Yup! Standard system, unlike KeM.