ty @lakevida for seeding the best tag game notion of all time. LET'S PLAY: which of the following true things uh explains the most
yikes..
homeschooled
certainly not a concise history of concussions
deeply regrets their mba
none of the above; i have thoughts i could share
Voting ended onJun 20
tagging everybody in on the mortifying ordeal of being known let's ggggggooo @knucklecurve @or-dhuilleag @larkral @thomasmomwell @flightspathfic @whatimages @rozzed @24x81 @demotu @twinkwolf @hothockey and @mintawasalreadytaken. @zielenna and @sbbside you aren't allowed to play due to 'i know you like being mysterious' but i'm watching you
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So The Core is the semi-sentient source of magic in my series Waking Dreamer. Everyone (or at least most people) have a Core Use. The way they manifest that energy and magic. They vary person to person and are (as far you you guys know) completely random. Just little tiny superpowers. Or a big one.
I do have one for you!
Yours is sound wave work. More fun that it sounds (ha, get it? I'm funny). You can reach out with the core and feel through the very essence of the waves. You recognize their patterns and their textures. You can 'hear' (its really more like a physical sensation) any sound - far better than any human, even from miles away, you can recognize the little vibrations in the air. Even if your ears can't hear something (too high or low a pitch), you can feel it.
This also means you can manipulate sounds. You can manifest to reshape any sound into what you want to mimick. You can perfectly temper someone's voice. You can silence your footsteps or a screaming whumpee - they make the sound but it falls dead inches into the air. You can even hover small objects with the force of the wave.
It's a small, almost unnoticeable gift. But that just means no one sees you coming.
so @grumpyoldsnake asked me what core injury and healing looks like, and it was a good opportunity to finally nail down the details and draw a quick demo! Sorry Red, I needed a test subject. More details under the cut.
Their skin is made of either silicone rubber, or a substance very similar to it, so it’s pretty heat resistant (good when your species used to frequently re-enter the planet’s atmosphere after lunch from a nearby asteroid). It's also more resistant to rips and tearing.
Then you have their sensory/nervous system. Inside their body, it’s a semi-liquid black goo, and hardens into a gel outside (like their eyes). Visible here is mostly just the layer below their skin that senses touch, heat, and EM fields, but its present practically everywhere.
The next few layers vary depending on the body part, but usually you’ll have at least some section of material/reserve storage (to use in shapeshifting, healing, and replenishing their generator) that also houses blood pathways and other organs. Speaking of blood, cores only need oxygen as fuel for their furnace stomachs when they are digesting, so they don’t just have blood going everywhere in their body, and the ‘veins’ are also by default closed and empty. They have a little pouch beside their stomach where they keep some oxygenated blood. Their ‘blood’ is also used to help carry additional materials to the needed sites when healing or shapeshifting. It’s clear or light pink in their body, and amber gold when oxygenated.
What is very important to their frame’s upkeep is their electrolyte gel: it’s what moves current and voltage from their core around their body. It’s surrounded by various layers of materials that serve as electrodes and regulators.
Finally, the grey/metallic parts are their frame’s support and movement systems, providing both the actual ‘skeleton’ and the actuators and hydraulics that move it. They’re very similar looking, and cores don’t really have a notion of separate ‘muscles’ and ‘bones’. For flexible things like antennae or grasping limbs/tentacles, hydrostatic semi-liquid metal ‘muscles’ are used.
While all cores technically have the capacity to shapeshift, and all can heal any frame injury with enough time and materials, a core’s personal skill at shapeshifting and energy manipulation will greatly affect healing speed. Red here is an outlier and can heal and shapeshift stupidly fast, growing his head back in a few seconds, provided he has enough resources. Most other cores will have to spend a few hours to a few weeks in a regenerative tank. Doing it this quickly makes him tired though, and doing it 3 or 4 times in a row means he’ll feel exhausted and will have to spend a few hours in the regen tank too.
Simon: “Hiya! So I’m going to be explaining black cores! Sol said earlier there’s a thing called ‘colorless cores’, when a core loses its color and turns black or white. I’m going to talk about the black core because I had one! Or still technically have one? I’LL EXPLAIN WHY!”
Simon: “Right now my core is nice and healthy! Got a few little cracks here and there but I’ll get into that later, but it’s... Purple? Yeah! That’s a color! So that means it’s fine, and I’m thinking straight and not crazy for now. But the only way you get a black core is by... uh... kinda wanting one I guess? A black core means you’ve been mixing a lot of colors. In other words, you’ve been eating a lot of magic. Our cores thrive off magic, and we need it to keep these forms and think and talk and stuff! But when you start taking too much magic, you start to... think and talk less like you.”
Simon: “A black core means our minds are corrupt, we’re only focused on one thing. You start hearing all these voices, and they’re so loud. They just scream for you to take more magic, more cores, more everything. And that’s what you want to do! Because it feels so good to just feel so complete! Nothing else matters, and you don’t care about anything else! There’s so many other screaming voices that it feels like there’s no parts of you that are missing! It feels like you’re actually doing what you’re meant to! JUST TAKING EVERYTHING! You feel like you’re whole!”
Simon: “... b-but you’re not. You’re actually just... more empty than ever. Because you’re not... complete. You’re not even you, just a monster. Your mind plays tricks on you, because your core just starts craving more magic. You let the greed take over. Both Sol and I have our own problems with greed. We’re not sure if it’s because our cores aren’t perfect, we’re just first models after all, but we have trouble stopping ourselves once we start. Sometimes we lose control, and keep eating magic to the point our cores will start leaking. Which is the next thing I was gonna talk about! DID YOU LIKE MY SEGUE?!”
Simon: “Leaking is something that often comes with getting a black core! Because we eat until our cores crack and burst! It’s not good! But at least we don’t feel the pain of our cores cracking BECAUSE WE’RE SO HIGH ON THAT SWEET SWEET MAGIC JUICE! HAHA! Don’t do drugs. BUT THAT’S HOW I GOT THESE CRACKS ON MY CORE THAT I MENTIONED EARLIER!!! I mean the small ones, the bigger one came from a fight but that’s for another day.”
Simon: “Now I’m sure you’re wondering to yourself ‘Wow Simon, you’re very cute and all, but how do you cure someone who has a black core?’ Well let me tell ya! You don’t! There’s no medicine to stop it once it starts. I guess what you got to do is separate the creature from magic, or they gotta figure that out on their own if their strong enough. But it’s better to just get out of the way and just let them run their course until they probably die because when monsters go on a rampage, people kill them. WINK!”
Simon: “So that’s all I got about the black cores! In summary! Black cores are when you eat so much magic it mixes the colors and sends you spiraling into a feasting frenzy that usually results in you not knowing who you are anymore and go through an identity crisis! IT’S GREAT! Except it’s not! Don’t do it! If you got questions JUST ASK! OKAY I LOVE YOU BYE!!!!”
