Cracks in the Wall

I can't pretend to understand.  But his thoughts were my thoughts.

And as the other mentioned, in many ways, we are all the same.

Is there really such a thing as the elite?

Luck and fortune huh...

No tears. Just emptiness. Watching a once-bright candle in the dark go out.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology

SORCERERS - These are the pioneers, the genii, who do things in ways they themselves cannot really explain. They are the ones who first harness the basic “forces” inherent to the system. It all seems obvious and instinctive to them, but few others actually grasp what they are doing. Usually misunderstood and if their book has no obvious use, mocked.

WIZARDS - The first who understand sorcerers - they take the work of the pioneers are go "I can do this" or "oh, I get it" and break it down into parts, make it reliable, understandable and useable by others (well, other wizards at least). Using this knowledge they begin to build systems and functions from the ground up. Pioneers in that they take an otherwise useless function and make it relevant.

 SHAMANS - Whether by chance or design, these people will look at the functions built by wizards - and enhance them. While they themselves do not fully understand how the functions work, they know what each function does, and how to use and link them together. They can tell when a function is corrupt, sometimes where its corrupt and also how to fix it. Note that they do not know how to build a function from the ground up - but can repair, restore or combine functions by comparing it with another. They are key in translating the operation of functions into certain methodologies for "communication"

PRIESTS - They popularize the functions. At this point, the priests have little to no knowledge of the underlying functions - just the methodologies involved. They are really good at identifying, simplifying and spreading use of these methodologies though. Cannot repair, let alone create functions, unless aided by an existing function designed to do so in the first place. Cannot create their own methodologies.

SOLDIERS- The end result. They take the Holy Sword of +2 and swing. Five hundred thousand of them can take down a dragon. And possibly do other important stuff, like banking.

Drabble

"Behold, the beasts of the world." There were dragons and demons. Leviathans that shook the earth. Creatures possessing a thousand teeth and fifty arms, and others with a thousand more. Beings of lightning and fire, wind and noise - that whirled with elemental fury and untamed might. All were hungry. All did feast. They ate the ground, or so I thought. "No quite," spoke my guide, and so we moved further. And the ground was not a ground, but rather the hide of a far greater beast, one that dwarfed the rest a thousand fold. Its skin was as rock but fluid as the sea. At once it seemed to be a single entity, yet many joined as one. The others tore into it with reckless abandon, ripping great shreds of its hide and flesh to chew. And yet the Great beast paid them no mind, simply continuing as it were on the simple feat of existing. It bled and shook and spilled but slowly regrew, so massive was it that none could dent it. Then, a leviathan roared. With the aid of the elementals it burrowed deep into the flesh of the massive beast. In it they gorged a massive hole, one far larger than any before. And in that hole I did glimpse at once both horrors left untold and beauty beyond perfection. The Great Beast screamed. All around, its flesh churned and writhed, sprouting teeth and fangs and eyes. A nightmarish assembly that swallowed the leviathan and the thunder, that tamed the untameable and consumed the ever-hungry. For a second its surface swarm with the bones of its prey, then all was silent save the endless chewing of the remaining beasts. A single entity of many parts. One that ate and was eaten, that was passive yet supremely dangerous, that cared not for itself yet was all that mattered; "What is it?" I asked my guide. "That," came the answer, tinged with laughter, "that is Humanity." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- My mind thinks of weird things when I'm in the toilet. Wrote this in 5 minutes, so please excuse the lack of QC. Meh.

Hotel State

Its an rather accurate analogy or model, don't you think? Its a hotel state, and we are the staff. Effectively, they are like guests enjoying the facilities in exchange for money, while the rest of us are the staff. The ones who run the place, but don't actually get to enjoy it. You've got the technicians, the room service, the security guards...(well, technically everyone's required a bit of training as a security guard). Not actually a bad economic model, for earning money and such. Naturally, despite the wealth that flows into the hotel, the staff aren't really paid much. Most of it goes to the management and the owners. Naturally, the staff can't rent the rooms in the hotel itself, nor afford some of the more exclusive facilities despite being the ones who clean them. I suppose the important thing here is not to tell the staff that they are guests, lest they become deluded and forget their place.

Dream Diary 1: Inflitration

The four of us waited in the shadows as the vehicle came rumbling past. A massive brown mobile fortress, the only access to the inside was via the top hatches. Our goal was to disable the guards so that the retrieval teams could get in. Atop it the guards patroled the area, white-cloaked people with KKK styled hoods carrying pendulums in their hands. They walked about the slowly rumbling top, peering at the ground.

Then Xi Min made his move.

As one we lept off our hiding place and landed softly on the surface of the fortress. Without delay Xi Min removed his own pendulum and started swinging it as well to counteract the detection systems of the guards. White-cloaked figures walked past as with nary a reaction. The two other generic friends went to their designated jobs. I slowly made my way forward, then jumped to the side as the vehicle jerked and a white-cloaked guard nearly crashed into me!

I nearly rolled off the fortress, but saved myself by grasping the sides with both hands. In this position I slid myself slowly towards the hatches, pausing every so now and then when a guard walked too near. I didn't know how far Xi Min's sphere of negation extended. I kept this up for a while, until reached the corner hatch. And there I saw a wonderful sight.

A fellow soldier (a junior I recognized from BB), covered in dirt and cameo cream, dressed in dirty rags climbed out and stood there, looking at me. He gave a smile, said something along the lines of "wooot! Thanks man!" and jumped off into the waiting arms of my comrades below. One prisoner saved. More started pouring out, and I carefully arranged myself to watch the area. The retrieval team had been successful! They had entered the giant prison and broken the cages holding our friends. My only regret was that I didn't play a greater role.

Then something stepped on my hand. I yelled. Looking up, I saw a pendulum-holding guard with one foot planted squaring on my fingers. It turned and looked down, straight at me. Alarm bells started going off in my head. I panicked, tried to swing away and...

The alarm bells grew louder and louder until they turned into the sound of my (actual) phone ringing. So I woke up. Damnit!

The Nerdy Side

To quote myself and all the gaming geeks out there:

"If I substitute three levels from my wizard/fighter/bard with two levels of warlock and one level of sorcerer, I should be able to increase my average damage output per round by approximately 1.45 points per swing"

Now substitute all the gaming terms with resistors and electronic jargon and you have yourself an engineer.

A Certain Creative Fanwork

Code Name: SHUFFLE
Gender: FEMALE
Power: KEYED COORDINATE EXCHANGE
Level: 3

She can "key" an object to one of her ten fingers, and exchange their positions by touching the correponding finger to the other. Teleported objects retain their momentum and direction. If the original object is heavily modified or damaged since time of 'keying', the teleportation will become unrealiable. Works on Organic and Inorganic, though the latter is prefarable due to lower variance.

She combines this power with throwing knives attached to ropes to effectively "jump-fly". She can also teleport keyed foes into horrible traps, or into a prison itself. Besides this she is a skilled acrobat and gymnast and a frighteningly skiled card-shark.

Her power, due to the simplicity of using "keyed" objects, consumes very little power and requires less concentration. Shuffle mostly relies on tricks, traps, and tranquilisers (poisons) in battle to defeat foes.

She has some training with a elephant gun for shooting foes from afar.

Code Name: CANDYMAN
Gender: MALE
Power: OBJECT-LINKED CLAIRVOYANCE (REFLECTIVE SURFACES)
Level: 3
SPOILER: His power is actually magic-based

He can 'link' two reflective or see through surfaces (usually glass) together as light-only portals. This translate into the ability to use any looking glass as a camera, linked to things like his glasses, his watch, the screen of his phone...etc.

Strength of link affects clarity of image and is limited by distance. At high levels of clarity it is possible for his image to appear in the glass being viewed through. To 'acquire' a surface he needs to have at least visual sight of it, though touch works better. Once acquired to touch he can look through it without trouble. It is not unusual for him to "sight hop" by using multiple reflective surfaces to gain visual of a normally closed off area.

He is not much of a front-line, usually supports his team with intel via comm links.

Code Name: RICOCHET
Gender: FEMALE
Power: PERFECT COLLISION
Level: 4

She can create a "field" around a particular object which results in "perfectly elastic" or "perfectly inelastic" collisions with all objects. Usually she employs this with metal balls to create barriers, injure opponents, or perform complex long range maestro-type attacks. She encloses a ball in a "perfectly elastic" field and drops the field millimetres from impact. To increase power she uses a specially modified ping-pong racket. She can also use the "perfectly elastic" field on her shoes for mobility, or a "perfectly inelastic" field to perform stunts like bullet catching (all energy is split between her and the bullet, so while she gets knocked back no penetration occurs. Blunt damage will still have an effect due to shock of impact, so if done improperly her bones will break)

She's the team's main power muscle and defense. While not the most tactically sound she is good at improvising on the battlefield.

Code Name: BLACKBOX
Gender: MALE
Power: HISTORY DRIVE (PSYCHOSCOPY)
Level: 3

He employs psychoscopy to download the entire "history" of an object. Effectively, this allows him to extract data from secured disks or thumbdrives as he needs simply find a point in the object's history when it was accessed or unsecured to "read" its contents. Doing so allows him to download information from almost anything, such as video feeds from a camera, or data from a computer. A major disadvantage of his power is that it is very time consuming to sort through an object's history. To overcome this, he can "download" information and "store" it for later reading. This consumes a lot of memory and energy, which is why he "forgets" all unneccessary information once the relevant data is found.

He can overclock this ability in a short time to temporarily gain complete knowledge and understanding of an object's history, the way it was used and its limitations. Doing so lets him use almost any device, weapon or tool with the skill of its previous owners. However as this knowledge is foreign to his mind the strain of utilizing this information to the max strains his mental stamina, and can be employed to a maximum of 10 minutes.

He uses a lesser version of this in his everyday life to speed read, pick up various skills and languages. As such he is a jack of all trades, and has skills in multiple kinds of fire arms and martial arts.

A negative side effect of his power is that he always seems somewhat distracted due to the mass of information clamouring inside his brain.

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Just some ideas running through my head from watching too much of a certain popular anime. I'll clean it up later.