Ouroboros Retrograde - plot role info

[powersthatbe]

If you are not a plot infiltrator or someone with IC reasons to share knowledge available to plot infiltrators, please do not read the comments of this post.

If you ARE a plot infiltrator, please comment under your toplevel to let us know you've read it; please also popover here to announce your plotroleishness to the game at large. We prefer that you do any confidential plotting with other plot-important folks in the comments here, rather than on plurk, and please comment no later than January 13th, 21st, 29th & February 6th, 14th & 22nd with a brief (as brief as 1 sentence; as long as you like) summary of your activity during the week & plans for next week. These comments will help the mods shape mingles and plot events to keep the story dynamic and player actions important to the outcome. Likewise, comment at any time with any questions you may have, and a mod will get back to you within 36 hours at the outside.

Comments

Adversary/Oracle of Resonance - Ringabel

[powersthatbe]

You weren’t Champion of Resonance very long before going Adversary. With your archetype, you were always the sidekick - amplifying the hero’s powers while your own cares and quests took a backseat. For someone young and hopeful and itching to take action, it was intolerable. As Adversary of Resonance, you could shake things apart - musical instruments, glasses, mountains, plans - and that rush and capability were great. You had a knack for picking just the right moment to interfere so that things went your way, and your goal was nothing less than to shake apart the complacent traditionalism of the society you grew up in - it was going to take a lot.

When you became Oracle of Resonance (Dark Oracle, at first), suddenly you could see all the second-order consequences and ramifications of your actions, and it was no longer enough to shake the uncaring world apart - you had the need to build something, to make a greater harmony that would overwhelm those old stale notes.

But your future self sees your past self as short-sighted and destructive, and your past self sees your future self as a sell-out content to go back to being a boring side character, and there’s not much you can do about that mutual resentment.

But both past and future selves share one realization - this is a resonance point. You’re not quite the only one here twice, but your future self is the only one with a certain memory that this is not going the same way it went last time, when you saw it from the other side, and your past self is the only one to realize right away that the entire Starquake future timeline can be erased if you take the right actions at the right time to avert it - and you have the instinct to find that place.

The past and future are equally in flux at this moment. If the two of you can find harmony - whether to build it or destroy it - you can accomplish almost anything.

Thread Expectation: Four threads per week (at least two with each version of the character).

Plot Skill: Conversion Trick. Once a week, you can use your Adversary trickery to alter a single element in any Oracle’s vision (or similar information-gathering power) or use your Oracle power to turn one element of a vision into tangible, usable magic (for example, if you foresee the need to fight a werewolf, you may immediately conjure a silver bullet).

Re: Adversary/Oracle of Resonance - Ringabel

[bigbookofd]

Ohoho fantastic, exactly the sort of shenanigans I was hoping for.

I will probably slap Spiritualist and Dark Knight icons on this account, with the DKN as Adversary and the SPI as the Oracle.

As discussed, he will be an Elf. Please excuse me while I roughly translate the other Bravely Default names into dog-Quenya so he can properly stew about getting swept up into Agnes' legend.

Misplaced Champion - Usagi

[powersthatbe]

You’re a soul embodied in the wrong era. Whether you have science fictional dreams of the future or historical fantasies of the past, in your speech, mannerisms, and dress, you try to emulate what you believe the era you hope for is like. You research, learn, practice - this other time was so much better and truer than where you’re stuck now with wrong-thinking people. You’re sort of an immersive, really method cosplayer.

This skill at immersion helps you understand and interact with other Champions - when one suffers from a Nightmare, you’ve learned how to emulate them and dive into their dreams, tracking down the psychological root of the problem in a form you can fight. This ability to move between levels of dreaming may have other applications, your Oracle-senpai says, but you have yet to find them.

Thread expectation: three threads per week, at least one with your own era and at least one with the era you’re obsessed with. Please consult the appropriate Council of Senpai member or the mods for more details on the time period.

Plot Skill: Dreamjump. once per week in Jaunt, or once per month afterwards, leap from the level of dream you’re in deeper into the metaphorical, entering another’s mind to confront their demons or see their ideas take shape. This ability to jump between consensus reality and interior metaphor may have other uses for a creative player.

Re: Misplaced Champion - Usagi

[starshaper]

Yes hello, I'm here and read through all this and I think we'll go with historical fantasies of the past for her.

Freedom Fighter - Allura

[powersthatbe]

People think of Champions as bright exemplars, and Adversaries (new as they are to your generation) as dark and desperate. If that was all there was to it, you’d be an Adversary for sure. Even later generations, who understand Adversaries are about Agency, might think someone as focused on Freedom as you are would become an Adversary easily.

Here’s why they’re wrong: Adversaries look out for themselves. You will always be Champion of Freedom, because your cause is emancipation of all people, in all times, a cause so ambitious and so much bigger than you are that you have almost no thought for yourself.

Yes, in waking life you’re a slave on the Diabolin Throneworld. Yes, those conditions are miserable and desperate, and any day you might die doing the dangerous industrial work you’re set to in the Diabolin weapon-foundries. But you, and your circumstances, aren’t important. What’s important is the dream of freedom. You will crush every nightmare, every despair, take any chance, any bargain, to make sure that everyone you encounter knows freedom is possible and fights as hard as they can to achieve it. Rebellions are built on hope.

Thread Expectation: Three+ threads/mingle with different characters!

Plot skill: Shacklebreaker. This gravity-warping melee weapon was built both in dreams and the Waking World - though you have to hide it there - and the dreams it’s forged of mean that in dreams it can, at least temporarily, shatter any chain, literal or metaphorical, that it strikes.

Re: Freedom Fighter - Allura

[reallymean]

Would it be possible to change the archetype very slightly to Liberation, in order to avoid doubling up with a Champion archetype another player's already chosen?

[reallymean]

Would something like a Sanction be considered a chain that could be shattered?

Also, regarding the "in dreams" functionality of Shacklebreaker - outside the Jaunt, does that mean I'd have to find a way to take a lucid dreaming skill for Allura for it to be used, or is there more flexibility once the Jaunt is over, similar to the Archetypal [X] Magic skills being usable while a Traveler's awake?

Week 1 check in

[reallymean]

Allura's spent most of Week 1 meeting people from the various other timelines and attempting to get a sense of who might be able and/or willing to help the rebels' cause. She's asked Phillip to bring a request for aid to the other Travelers, and is attempting to get some information on the future out of Ringabel and information on future explosives tech from Malik; other threads are still in early stages.

For Week 2, she's probably going to continue sounding out potential allies or sources of information, and trying to work out whether the magic that allows the Travelers to zip around between universes might allow them to, say, move directly from Questing Country into her waking world.

Speaking of the waking world, how large are the weapon-foundries? What sort of weapons do they forge, aside from the obvious gravity weapons? How tight is security, and oversight of the slaves? I'm thinking that in the waking world, she's working on a plan to either sieze or cripple one or more of them, but I'm not sure what's really feasible in that regard.

Week 3 Check-in

[reallymean]

After helping with the Glatisant in the Rise Era, Allura's spent most of the week gathering allies for an attempt to take over the foundry in the Waking World, culminating in a meeting here to discuss strategy. Most of the conspirators are accounted for here, but we've also got Bayek and Tachibana, and Matthew Swift as transport.

Main plan for her in Week 4 is actually putting the plan to take over the foundry into action, for good or for ill. I'm tentatively planning to get her killed in the course of the revolt, as a part of her character arc and because it seems like a good narrative fit, but I can put that on hold if she's needed for plot reasons in the finale mingle.

Week 4 Check-in

[reallymean]

Allura's main activity this week was leading a small revolt on the Diabolin Throneworld. The specifics of the revolt are still being threaded here, OOC plan is here and in comments to this post.

Allura died during the revolt, so she's going to be Dame Not Appearing In This Mingle for the upcoming week. She did charge Sara with taking up Shacklebreaker should both she and Thae die in the fighting (which they did), so she could do what she can to help the Adversaries while the Travelers are still around and then hand it off to some watery tart sink it in the Dreaming Pools to create Elfscalibur. Or find a sufficient ideological match to be Allura's successor.

Eidolon of Shadows - Asa

[powersthatbe]

A shrouded figure with no memory and the power to make people see images in any shadow, shade, or dim lighting, you struggle to understand who and what you are and what you’re doing here, not to mention why you don’t fit in with the clearly understood archetypes of the world.

The truth, which you do not have any means of guessing, is that you’re a Diabolin - one who suffered a head injury sufficient to render you comatose. This has made you the first and only Diabolin dreamer. Discovering this will not be easy, not least because the people of your generation universally revile Diabolin as monstrous, which you are… not. Confused, curious, and yes, hopeful that you can understand yourself and the strange world around you.

But physically as well as metaphysically, Diabolin are not meant to dream, and the fact that one is is not necessarily a good thing - not for you, your people, or Questing Country itself. Because now, there’s a door open between Questing Country and the collective unconscious of the Diabolin people…

Thread expectation: two+ threads/mingle with different characters!

Plot Skill: Shadow ‘Flection. In dim light, you can make one target see images, illusions, visions, or ideas in the shadows. If their own frame of mind is dark when this happens, any ideas or visions stay with them like an infection until they’re subject to some form of mental healing or dreamcatching.

[galvanizer]

Considering Asa looks diabolin mostly to start with, yaaaay.

Quick question - is Asa visibly diabolin in QC or would she be using an illusion by accident to hide her true appearance for a while?

Council of Senpai, Rise-Era - Stone

[powersthatbe]

Your Champions are scared. It’s a dark time in Questing Country. The Diabolin are the only race in the Known Worlds who are starfarers, and they’re conquering planet after planet - even though most of the races in Questing Country have yet to encounter them directly, the fear of the Other, the Demons, the Aliens is pervasive, the root of the era’s nightmares - you thought. The appearance of these new exemplars - Adversaries - is a nightmare on a foundation of nightmares. How can Champions turn against their Spirit Companions and Oracles, abusing their powers for themselves? How can the future be trusted when they’re so complacent about the presence of the Fallen in their ranks?

You are an Oracle, and you know that the answers are out there - and perhaps not what you suspect. While you neither trust Adversaries nor those who accept them, neither will you countenance Champion to turn against Champion. You’re here to seek answers together.

Thread expectation: five threads in week one, and three threads every week thereafter. Please ask the mods for ANY information you or ANY character is curious about that pertains to your era - we’ll supply it OOC, & you can supply it IC. We’d like at least five questions in Week One. We’ll answer ASAP.

Plot Skill: Know Motivation. Whenever your Dreamcatcher is full, you may expend the power in it to know what the emotional motivation of any single target you look at is - a sure way to tell Oracle from Champion, Adversary from Pillar. However, the psychological insights granted are not limited to that.

[scarsolderthanyou]

I am here, and I am pleased!

Also, first question... since Adversaries are so new and untrusted, is the role if Pillar more accepted as "part of the journey" and as having useful skills to support other people (monsters avoiding them, stopping magical battles, etc), or is it still a thing nobody wants anyone to ever be?

[uzoda]

Don't think you can tell this guy what to do, sempai. >:|

[scarsolderthanyou]

Question for you all... how often do Retrograde-type events, timeline convergences, happen? Would anyone in any of the timelines remember another one happening, or would there be something the Oracle of Age could "know" about it, them being time-related? (And, for that matter, are they all time related, or could there be space-related or character-related events as well?)

Council of Senpai, Double Valence-Era - Lupa

[powersthatbe]

You had no idea there was an era before Adversaries - most Oracles in Questing Country are still fairly young, and the complete turnover of all institutional memory is rarely longer than a full generation (fifteen to a hundred years). It isn’t just that Questing Country’s geography changes and few libraries or archives last - it’s a truth of Questing Country that almost half of all Champions die before adulthood, and three quarters of Oracles die, burn out, or cease dreaming before middle age. It’s not something you talk about because it sounds discouraging - but all dreamers are willing to surrender longevity for a life of meaning. The things you accomplish in the minds of all dreaming beings are their own kind of immortality.

You and other Oracles of your generation know that the Travelers are reality-jumping wanderers conscripted by powerful and dangerous Spirits. These Spirits terrify Familiars to think of. You strongly suspect the challenge of your time is not to reverse this Fintan Retrograde, but to help free the Travelers from their Spirits. It’s your job to welcome them, introduce them to the other eras as friends from afar, to learn about them and help them.

You do not know about Infiltration.

Thread expectation: five threads in week one, and three threads every week thereafter. Please ask the mods for ANY information you or ANY character is curious about that pertains to your era - we’ll supply it OOC, & you can supply it IC. We’d like at least five questions in Week One. We’ll answer ASAP.

Plot Skill: Calm Companion. When your Dreamcatcher is full, you may expend the power in it to make any Familiar, Spirit Companion, Doppleganger, Volksgeist or other bonded companion creature of any kind become calm and complacent for the remainder of one encounter with them.

Re: Council of Senpai, Double Valence-Era - Lupa

[papacerberus]

I am excited!

Okay, question about the skill: post-jaunt, does it also work on other critters that share a bond with folks (Pogemon, dragons, etc)?

Also, because I'm sure it will come up: Does an infiltrator's will read any differently at all than a native's? Presumably an Infiltrator Persona's will does read differently, so how? How about Travelers, do their Marks ever show any effect on their wills?

How likely will things horribly backfire if Lupa tries to read the will of a Harbinger?

Council of Senpai, Starquake-Era - Right

[powersthatbe]

An Oracle’s calling is to shepherd the hopes of your Champions. You do not know what the Starquakes, the Transformed Lands, or the Harbingers are, but you do know something you will only tell other Oracles in strict confidence: if a whole generation of Champions loses their hope at once, they may be the last generation of Champions. These Starquakes, if they threaten the hope of all Champions to make meaningful change, can destroy the social order of Questing Country as you have always known it.

This means - and you’re sorry for it - that you may need to lie to and deceive your Champions. That’s the action of a Dark Oracle, but so be it, if it saves a generation of Dreamers. You have to not only end the Starquakes, but find something dramatic and meaningful your Champions can succeed at, to rekindle their belief in themselves. You only hope that you can find a Nightmare or the force behind the Starquakes to take the fall - because otherwise the Travelers or the misguided, Adversary-fearing Oracles of the past may have to serve as your ‘rivals’ to defeat, and that would break your heart.

Thread expectation: five threads in week one, and three threads every week thereafter. Please ask the mods for ANY information you or ANY character is curious about that pertains to your era - we’ll supply it OOC, & you can supply it IC. We’d like at least five questions in Week One. We’ll answer ASAP.

Plot Skill: Open The Way. Whenever your Dreamcatcher is full, you may expend the power in it to create a narrow path between dream-islands to a specified destination of your choice. When used in the Waking World, there’s a one-day delay, after which people forget to lock doors, check tickets, or in other ways prevent travel to a given destination. This does not make reaching the destination certain or easy - only possible.

[lunchleader]

Ooooo, excellent! And I know the precise arcetype that he would've evolved to from his younger days as a Champion of Imagination, too - a fitting one for the role, tbh. As soon as I'm not so brain-dead from work, I will go update that on the Who is What post for the archetype list.

First Question!

[lunchleader]

How did the Oracles not of the Double Valence era figure out what the Travelers are? Were they informed by Lupa and his group about them?

Second Question!

[lunchleader]

How long as the Starquake era been dealing with portions of their Questing Country turning into fire/light or cold/static? Just a few months or a full earth year?

Same question regarding the complete vanishing of floating continents, per the Jaunt info in the main OOC info post.

Third question!

[lunchleader]

This is a Just In Case one and I apologize for it being late - what is the current status of 22nd Century Earth? I presume that there's no World War or Intergalatic War going on - pretty sure that would've been notated on the main Jaunt info. But is it more peaceful than the 21st century/Modern Earth? Or does it have the normal amounts of conflicts?

Arch-Adversary - Kenzaki

[powersthatbe]

Nobody in your era knows enough to explain to you that wanting to make your own choices isn’t wrong. So when your Spirit Companion turned against you, and you turned against them & their agenda of fluffy rainbows and hopes and dreams and lollipops - there was nobody at all to tell you you weren’t evil. Like many teenagers, that’s led you to believe that you are evil - and evil is the right thing to be. Your goals are still lofty - for the children of Questing Country to decide their own fate, achieve their own dreams, not the tempered, righteous compromises Spirit Companions suggest - but because you believe yourself to be the villain, not the hero, you’ll go about your attempts to help everyone save themselves in the most over the top disney villain method you can possibly devise.

Fine. You’ll be the bad guy. You’ll show them - you’ll show them all! You’ll help the Freedom Fighter defeat the Diabolin Menace, and you’ll force the Eidolon of Shadows into situations that will reveal their inner self (whatever that means), and you’ll upset the plans of the Senpai - you’ll prove your way is right, and along the way protect every little Adversary and induct them into your Evil Ways. It’s better to reign in hell than serve in heaven - so cue the creepy bass line and minor-key pipe organ for your big musical number.

Thread expectation: at least three threads per week, at least one with a Rise-era Adversary.

Plot Skill: Cri De Couer. Once per week, when you want attention, you can get it, automatically, riveting the audience to you with a dramatic monologue. The attention you receive as a result of this will always be negative - you can’t persuade others to your side, only strengthen their resolve to oppose you (although you can make them feel sympathetic AS they oppose you).

[uzoda]

Alright! This is going to be great!

Kenzaki's big moment of dramatic turnover that I've got in mind is set to be the aftermath of his three other dreamer friends following the advice of their Spirit Companions and winding up heroically sacrificing themselves. He takes this poorly and that sets the whole thing off.

He's going to be hitting up every adversary that he can. And he's going to be fascinated that there are more and more people like him in the future. It's just going to make him dig his heels in on it all. Meanwhile, his Spirit Companion is going to be panicking, and doing his best to send nice reasonable Champions and Oracles in his direction to try and talk him down/befriend him/give him a hug, surely a hug will fix this.

(One thing: the plot skill should probably be spelled "Cri De Coeur", Coeur being the correct spelling of heart in French.)

Harbinger of Storms - Malik

[powersthatbe]

You were the Champion of Storms - still are, most days - because you found hope in disaster. The colony you live in (a colony world if you’re of a starfaring species; a new frontier on an empty continent otherwise) is in the middle of volatile ecological disaster and drought. While the storms are fearsome, they bring water, and plant life, and hope. You dream of ecological solutions to your people’s problems - and then, there was a storm in Questing Country.

That first storm was an aurora full of lightning raging above a cold front, and while other Champions scattered, you ran laughing into the wind. From your Oracle-senpai, you’d learned how to use your Dreamcatcher to Merge, and you wanted to understand what this storm was - of it might be an answer to your dreams. Your last memory is being suspended in a web of turquoise lightning coursing through the Dreamcatcher, while your Spirit Companion tried to pry the Dreamcatcher from your hands.

When you woke, your companion and dreamcatcher were one: a little blue star whose light showed the energy flowing behind all the matter in Questing Country. When you become the Harbinger, you still feel you may understand the storm and whether it’s the answer you want - but you no longer understand yourself, and you can’t grasp or explain that sense of understanding.

Other Harbingers are terrified of their transformation, desperate to turn back, to make it stop. It’s true that you’re afraid, that you can feel your Champion-ness slipping as you learn how little of your dreams you can really control. But you want that answer, and you’re ready to dive deeper on this strange, alien journey you’re on - to really see how deep the rabbit-hole goes, and what’s on the other side.

Thread expectation: two threads per mingle. A minimum of one Harbinger thread every other mingle.

Plot Skill: Submerge. Once every two weeks in Jaunt, or once a Jaunt afterward, upon encountering any strange phenomenon you do not understand - matter, energy, or information - you may dive into it, dissolving the boundary between the self and the phenomenon, in hopes of emerging with a greater understanding of it. You will always gain information this way, but may be (usually temporarily) mentally altered in the process of becoming what you understand.

Re: Harbinger of Storms - Malik

[loyalrebel]

Excellent! (Cue horrible laughing)

you guys thought Malik was bad with Interface

Question: will I be able to transition him to Oracle of Paths or is this intended to go Full Harbringer? I'm cool either way!