#cogitativemistake

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Read This If You Want To Live in memory of Tristan Lazarov (tigertailChains) 12 session veteran / Sylph of Law Press “esc” to skip to main menu.

If this is your first time picking up a signal from the void between worlds, you’ll probably want to go straight to the walkthrough section of this server; it will explain why this is here, give you critical information, and assist you with finding other Replayers and launching your own Ring servers.

Sending no further commands, or interrupting this and then sending the command “> all”, will cause this server to send you its entire contents. This is recommended if your connection to this server is not circumstantially stabilized; if you don’t know what that means, it probably isn’t. A Time player can temporarily connect a “handle” to this server to ensure linearity for the duration of these transmissions. For more information, see the Time FAQ provided under the “Aspect” directory, if available.

If this connection is linearized or otherwise stabilized, you may choose to browse the file tree and download only the files you want; this uses the standard SNT (Skaianet Terminal) protocol and commands.

Waiting for input…..

[ESC]

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RingServerLite v. 3.9, installed/maintained by [cogitativeMistake] Please input command.

> login cogitativeMistake

Password required.

> ************************

Welcome, cogitativeMistake.

> sync content \--recursive

Checking for changed files… [100%] 2 of 115 files need to be uploaded. 0 of 115 files need to be downloaded. Uploading… [100%] 2 files successfully uploaded.

> quit

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> ./find.sh \--closest 2

Scanning for server… server found.

Connecting… connected.

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Read This If You Want To Live Press “esc” to skip to main menu.

If this is your first time picking up a signal from the void between worlds, y[ESC]

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RingServerLite v. 2.1, installed/maintained by [lizardLogic] Please input command.

> read info

Hello world! Replace this with your own text if desired.

> read vitals

Current Arc: Otherworldly (Spiritual) 2

Basic quest: Work and Study/Purple ("Now shut up"): You are good at cutting through arguments and deflating people's egos. After you demonstrate this, you will indicate it with a "Now shut up". (This does not always make people shut up. After that the best you can say is that you tried, and walk away.)

Bonus XP emotion: Putting My Faith In You ("Don't wish me luck. Wish me sense.")

Skills:

Sburban Survival 3 (As an idiosyncratic use of this skill you possess a large amount of theoretical knowledge about how Sburb works.)

Programming 2

Writing (With Parentheses) 2

Psychology 1

Inherent:

Bond (2): [Give me a few minutes to think and I will come up with a Plan.]

Affliction (0): [I always see the underlying motivations of people who disagree with each other.]

Perks:

Bond (2): [I am pledged to always defend freedom of choice.]

"It's A Living": 1/chapter, you can ask the HG to narrate what's been going on with your role as Pits moderator.

"Well-Liked by Coders" (0MP/1-2/scene, 1MP/3+/scene): This is "Well-Liked in (Region)" from page 401 of the corebook: applied to an NPC that also has some skill or interest in programming, you can get a two-way hit of empathy and a bit of knowledge of what they've been doing for the past scene/hour.

Arcs:

Become Somebody 2

Truth: You're very practical.

Failing: You're a representative of the status quo, and as such obligated to be a stick in the mud and dismissive of fringe ideas.

Role: Moderator of PrototypeTowers

The Wages of Sin (Miraculous Action, 0MP): You can see when other people are too stuck in their dogma.

Shared Experience (Miraculous Action/temporary Affliction at Arc level, 0MP): You can see whether other people are using Pits - a few seconds glancing over them and you'll just know whether they're upholding order and justice and reason, or whether they would be happy to watch moderators like you burn.

Your Truth (Auctoritas, n/a): The truth of these statements is protected by an Auctoritas at arc level (currently 2):

I am a moderator of PrototypeTowers.

I am practical.

Adaptable (Special/temporary Affliction at Arc level, 1MP): You can sustain an action to acquire an Affliction of "I belong here." This works pretty much anywhere. You could go to the littlest and strangest of Internet communities and, after watching carefully for a bit, join right in.

Unstoppable (Special/Auctoritas and Obstacle, 2MP): If you are expressing your Role in the presence of others, you can acquire an Auctoritas and Obstacle of Arc level (currently 2) in the way of other people trying to impede that.

Commanding Aura (Special): While using Unstoppable, you can make other people fit your Role; you're essentially inflicting a nonphysical wound on them. You consciously cast yourself as First Among Equals. The targets of this power become good citizens of their Internet communities, following your definition of that (which might not be the same as their definition of that!)

...But you are a good Mind player, one who defends freedom of choice, so unless you can rationalize it to yourself as serving the greater good, you won't.

Reject (Special/Auctoritas and Obstacle, 4MP): You can exile things from your Role, like the opposite of Commanding Aura: make it harder for things to fit into your role in society. For example, you can decide that you don't like someone's notion of what being a good citizen is like - maybe they keep fawning over you and following your every word as law, and you can't have a nice spirited argument with them - so you Reject them.

Touchstone (Special/Auctoritas, Obstacle, and Connection, 4MP): You can bind yourself to something and fake a deep connection - you have a level 4 connection to that thing, and anyone who wants to disrupt that will be facing an Auctoritas and Obstacle at Arc level (currently 2).

Spiritual 1

Estate: Freedom of Choice

Elemental Warning (Miraculous Action + (Arc) Strike, 0MP/reflexive): You get warned if something bad is happening to your Element. You can automatically figure out if, say, someone has released a virus that eats away people's free will!

Illusions (Miraculous Action, 0MP/once/hours, 1MP/2+/hours), invoking a sense of the element being present: makes people feel and act more agenty. (They may not make better choices, but they certainly make more choices and different choices than they would otherwise.)

Spirit-Sense (Miraculous Action, 1MP): just by looking, you can glance at your element and get a feel for how it works: Seeing choice. Uh... basically this means that you can see precisely what decision someone is trying to make, or how someone else's decision-making is affected by circumstances. (If someone is overly cautious because of bad experiences, or reckless because they've been drinking, or whatever.) For tangential uses (figuring out which choice someone would actually use, for example), this is still worth +1 or +2 Tool.

Spirit-Speaker (Special): Asking the 'spirit of Choice', such as it exists, for favors, once you've got Spirit-Sense on. Reinforce a decision someone already made, or make them have doubts about it, or change the mind of someone who happens to be 'on the fence'. To a limited extent, you can also find out information - i.e. the guy who's being blackmailed just happens to be mulling over the problem so you can sorta overhear his thought process psychically. (This does not require speaking. Walking up to someone and flat-out asking them what choices they happen to be making is mundane.)

Spirit Boost (Miraculous Action, 2MP/once/chapter, 4MP/2+/chapter): miraculously strengthening your element: You can make people really, seriously reconsider their path in life and the choices they've made. Basically, you can cause an instant midlife crisis - possibly on many people at once. This includes working on non-humans who still make "choices", such as hounds suddenly deciding that peeing on trees is a better idea than chasing you. (This won't work so much for people who have Truths or Afflictions; the Auctoritas of those would need to be broken before people reconsider them. Oh, and PCs and important NPCs can take Wounds if necessary.)

After that - well, the Seer Network abused the fact that they could scry other people without being noticed. They did not notify the members of Sburb.org that they would be scried on at all times for often no reason at all (for example, one member literally had a voyeurism kink, and it was thusly indulged). Oh, sure, there was a clickwrap thing with a generic "information gathered through your use of this Service may be aggregated for research purposes" clause, but that isn't anywhere near informed consent.

According to the accounts of those in the Seer Network, the way everyone else got strong-armed into accepting this involved abusive behavior on the part of the Seer of Rage. Rage-aspected, miraculous-level abusive behavior. The Seers learned that they could do no wrong. That they were the only ones who would understand each other. That everyone had blackmail material on everyone else, so if any of them tried to leave they'd be smeared across paradox space.

Unsurprisingly this did not end well for anyone involved.

Meanwhile, while this brainwashing was happening, the Seer Network was actually doing some genuinely good work: doing research into the incidences of various classpects that couldn't be biased by survey-participation rates, infiltrating the Azurites and surreptitiously sowing discord, doing some interesting research on alternate methods of treating Corruption, providing reliable information and leads for gamebreaking groups to investigate, and so on. And since much of this was facilitated via the selfsame, unethical dongle scrying, we're not going to get an opportunity like this ever again.

Honestly while Elizabeth thinks the Seer Network was unambiguously horrible I don't think of it that way. It's... a bit like unethical research, you know? Human experimentation is horrible but since it already happened we may as well use the information, and as someone who thinks about this kind of stuff I can't help but wonder what we could've gotten from more of the same.

Here's some important names you might encounter in the Seer Network:

Kaya, auctoritasAuspex, Seer of Rage. She was vicious and perfectly willing to use her (frequently rerolled) Rage powers to beat other people into submission. In Chuubo's terms this is probably the Commanding Aura ability of the Become Somebody arc.

Vitt, genesisArtificer, Seer of Space. He'll get a bit more of a profile in the Sburb.org article; his role in the Seer Network was to facilitate its existence by letting it have a place in Sburb.org's infrastructure.

"Skully", cessationInvestigator, Seer of Doom. She wasn't a bad person, but she was... sometimes unaware of what other people considered unethical. For example, she's probably the only person who thought that dissecting timeclones (after they were dead) was a perfectly normal thing to do.

"Stag", stagnantAnimus, Seer of Heart. He... should've been the moral center of the Seer Network, but for the fact that he was actually the least experienced Seer in the group at time of its formation and even to the end was the one with one of the least rerolls. So while he did quietly object to most of the things that were happening he wasn't nearly as good as Kaya and thus did not really have the power to fight back. (Plus, in general Heart is more of a self-focused power and Rage is more of an other-focused power; Rage players can command others trivially and it takes Heart players much work to get others to do things, but Heart players are extremely centered and Rage players find it very difficult to keep control of themselves.)

"Null"/"Nulldude" (rudimentaryCipher, Seer of Void), Tocrux (directionlessShooter, Seer of Fate), and "Idiot" (burningJupiter, Seer of Stars) were older than the average Seer Network member when they joined, later on than the first few. Mostly they were really in the Seer Network for the old boys' club aspects of it. They managed to avoid most of the fallout by keeping completely quiet. I even think Null might still be alive.

Flora (fertileFootgear, Seer of Life), "Surfer" (boatswainWhisperer, Seer of Might), "Drums" (rimshotRegularized, Seer of Time), "Lord of the Rings" (unitarianMultitudes, Seer of Mist), "Glassy" (venetianManufacture, Seer of Dreams), and "Duck"/Eric (waterproofWindbreaker, Seer of Hope) were known as the "regulars". They were the most frequent perpetrators of the offenses we have come to know the Seer Network for.

Gwyn/"Tears" (suspiciousLacrimosa, Seer of Law) and Lune/"Quick" (quicksilverTragedian, Seer of Rain) were... not bad people. They had, however, extensive ties with unsavory people, histories of Corruption (Angelic and Otherwise, respectively), and a great deal of dirt on them. While they survived the initial fallout of the Seer Network, they did not survive much longer than that - Tears was personally hunted down by someone who she'd "befriended" and then left (using a discarded pseudonym, while trying to infiltrate the Azurites), and Quick died a Speaker.

Tony (revolutionaryThrombin, Seer of Blood) was ridiculed for being the "worst Seer" on a regular basis, and was quite relieved when the Seer Network was dismantled. Not that it did him any good. He was murdered by Azurites.

"Demoman" (levelHundred, Seer of Breath) was practically a lurker, and frequently in the running for "worst Seer" as well. Notably, however, he was kicked out of the Seer Network after he completely failed to respond to any scrying requests during an entire Seer of Time session. Even after he left he still didn't talk.

Riley/"Epi" (epinephrineElectrified, Seer of Mind) and Alex (octagonalPhanes, Seer of Light) were, of course, the perpetrators of Seergate. However, shortly after Seergate was released, Alex publicly severed ties with Epi and went his own way.

You will note in several of those descriptions that I note that several Seers were killed by Azurites.

The Azurites are a deathcult, which will get their own article, but the gist of it is that they believed that if they showed their worth in the most Darwinian of ways Skaia would eventually recognize said worth and let them through to their Ultimate Reward. suspiciousLacrimosa, the Seer of Law, had been working on infiltrating the Azurites, to see what their organizational structure was like and how best to fight them.

When epinephrineElectrified and octagonalPhanes released the entire archives of the Seer Network forum in a data dump known as Seergate, they did not think to sort through the data. (Epi has stated that he regrets this but that the influence of Kaya meant that if he wanted to dump the data at all he would have to dump it all at once before he got a chance for second thoughts.) Aside from the fact that everyone had blackmail material in the Seer Network, Seergate also exposed certain data that suspiciousLacrimosa had been collating. Data on the realnames and realhandles of many Azurites, data on how to find certain secret Azurite servers, and - probably most offensive to the Azurites themselves - a complete copy of the Azurite's Handbook: a compilation of tips for recruitment and player-killing, mixed in liberally with the founding documents of the Azurite philosophy. (It used to be that possession of the Azurite's Handbook if you were not an Azurite was punishable by death. This is no longer feasible for them to enforce.)

The Azurites responded by declaring a blood vendetta on all Seers, not just those of the Seer Network. Seers in many sessions suddenly turned up dead with their eyes gouged out. On the plus side, the vendetta did expose a great deal of sleeper Azurites. On the minus side, it also resulted in the deaths of a great many Players, including at least four former Seer Network members.