powersthatbe | Conversation Space: The Ultimax

"A chance, perhaps, but some of us remember that you guys are individuals like we are." Well, maybe not a one-to-one correlation, but still.

"Besides, I've never been much of one for rules. What is it you wanted?"

Raidou nods, acknowledging that.

"Partially to see how you were, both in general and after the Jaunt. Although I'm not going to deny I have questions in general." Whether she'll be in the mood to answer them, however...

"After the jaunt, well, I've had worse losses. That was enough within my idiom that I'm fine, and it opens some other opportunities. In general..."

For a moment, her perpetual smile drops. "In general, it's never good when one of us is taken out of the game in that fashion. If there's one comfort, it's that being attacked was more in Abaddon's idiom than what happened last time."

It'll get set right at the end. Probably.

"I might be in the mood for a few questions. But as usual, I reserve the right not to answer."

Her answer, and her reservation of the right not to answer future questions, gets another nod of acknowledgement from him. "I wouldn't expect anything different," he says. Really, he wouldn't expect any Arcanum to answer all his questions.

"Other opportunities?" He pauses. "That's probably not something you can answer, is it?" He'd be very surprised if it was, honestly.

He's quiet for a moment as she talks about Tower - Abaddon. (It's hard to think of Tower with that name, however much it might fit it, given the associations he already has with the name, but Abaddon is not King Abaddon... although now he wonders what the one would have made of the other.) "I suppose it was, at that." He lapses into silence again. Then: "How badly is his death liable to affect him after the fact, once he's brought back?" If he's brought back, but he can't see whoever wins not doing so, aside from maybe Death.

Edited 2019-03-08 03:33 (UTC)

"More that I decline to ruin the surprise. This one, I want to be as sure as I can on before I place my bets." And there's some other groundwork that might need laying first.

"...Depends on who gets the World, probably. But at the same time, not at all, because it'll be a different World no matter what."

Raidou wonders if they should be worried. "So we'll be finding out for ourselves soon enough?" They only have so much time before Synodiporia ends, after all.

He considers for a moment. "What does winning the World do? I know you can have different haecceities - is that something that changes with each game?"

"Probably." She doesn't see things not working out, but it's a gamble. (Her favorite.)

"It depends. They can, but they don't always."

"I was going to ask what you'd planned to do if you won Synodiporia again," he admits, "but now I'm wondering if I shouldn't hold off."

He doesn't think she'll necessarily try to cheat her way back in - he imagines even her propensity for loopholes has limits - but... he wonders.

"Are the World's changes retroactive?"

"My best idea either required me to win everything or lose now. It would've been nice to be the first of us to win two, especially in a row, but I'll take what I can get."

That question gets a blank look. "It's a new cycle."

Raidou considers that. "Is that something you've shared with any of the other Arcana?"

The blank look wonders if he's fundamentally misunderstanding something, or if it's a product of their existences being so different. Although in retrospect, it probably hadn't been a very good question to begin with. "Will anyone outside of the Arcana notice the differences?" For that matter, are they noticing differences now that Tower is dead?

Even as he asks, though, he suspects it's another useless question; from what he understands of her, Fortune's still getting used to the idea of them as people, and it might not have occurred to her to take notice of the mortals affected by the game.

She just smiles.

"It trickles down eventually. Consider how, in a lot of places, breaking away from absolute monarchy was the hot new trend. My World is very much not Hakan's."

Your average mortal isn't going to know the root cause, but they may notice the effects, sooner or later.

...He probably should have expected that non-response.

Raidou's knowledge of world history is not as strong as that of many of his fellow Travelers (or those from Earth, anyway). His grasp on Western history in particular is a bit shaky, and of course his own country is still very much ruled by the Emperor. Still, he's osmosed at least some of it by now. "I don't think that's quite gotten to my country yet, or at least not by my time. But I think I understand the example."

"I was more surprised than any of the others that I managed to win on Hakan's idea of good rules. No wiggle room whatsoever, that one."

"I can imagine." He's met Hakan, after all. "And it does seem like a bit of an extreme shift. Does that tend to happen with the games?"

"It depends. If you want more details on the potential variations, you're probably better off asking Mort - maybe Ix, but his idiom is more linear time than cyclical variations. Even for me the cycles get fuzzy the further back you go, other than the first one, and that's mostly so we don't make the same mistake again."

"Was the first one the one where you didn't take mortal aging into account, or was that a different one?"

"That's the one. None of us thought it would matter."

But it did, and even at their least understanding of mortals, they knew they couldn't damn well play the game with no pieces.

"Did you think the game would halt our aging, or was aging not something you had a concept of at that point?" Magician had said that at first the Arcana hadn't thought they were real...

"We barely had any idea what we were doing. How it might impact anything else hadn't crossed any of our minds yet, and I don't think it did for a while afterward, other than limiting the scope of things a little more."

"How did the game come about in the first place? Is that something you're allowed to mention, or has the memory of that been mostly lost?"

"I think we were bored. And I know the kinds of power struggles we were having anyway were even worse. That was several iterations of archetypes ago, though."

By now, it's habit as much as anything.

"...Power struggles?"

"We already knew we could exert influence on a large scale, and there was nothing to stop us from trying. The game gave us a framework to do that in."

"What sorts of things happen when you're not playing?"

"Now, it depends on who won. Then... it got messy."

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