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/puts hands to cheeks/ THIS IS AMAZING AND YOU ARE AMAZING!

(That's fine! That's the thing with words - even when we try otherwise, they're always open to interpretation... :>)

For whatever happens on the Gathering that I would otherwise be swearing eternal vengeance over (it's me, you know there'll be something). Look, now I don't have to! SCIENCE!

hS

Photobucket, you and I are officially not talking anymore.



Imgur is my new bestie. >:(

(I was deliberately tweaking the answers so they could span a range of numbers. Not proposing that these be the One True Options or anything, they were just off the top of my head.)

hS

Don't suppose you heard about its hotlinking issues? Apparently you'd have to upgrade and pay a ridiculous amount of money in order to link things to third-party websites.

Anyway, this sure is useful! ^^ Thanks for the advice!

(Also, this is a wording issue on my part, but I'd intended the 'with my friends' one to mean 'alongside.' ;) )

...for what the newspaper should be called, I'm all ears. (And that's open for everyone, not just you.)

Thanks for the comments. ^-^

Starting off the post with that subject line made me think I'd done something awful with the mission! Ugh. :P

And yeah, this is honestly a big enough problem it ended up getting it's own CAHQ card... somehow. Personally, I've been using Charlix, but Ixilotl has been growing on me for some time...

Yeah, as soon as I came across this one on the Circle, I pretty much had to drop everything to mission it. It was just too perfect to pass up. And I'm glad to know it was easy enough to follow, too.

'cause on the one hand, it's hilarious to reference the singer and use the ship name Ixielott. But on the geekier hand, I can't help but feel there's a lot of mileage in riffing off axolotls. Ixilotl? Only that works better spoken than written. It's a terrible dilemma.

Oh, yeah, there was a story there, too, right? ;) Two things I particularly liked were a) that I could jump in and figure out what was going on in the agents' lives without having to track down every previous mission, and b) the idea of an agent running into a Suvian who claims exactly the same problems as them, so allowing for a direct contrast of the two. Nicely done.

hS

It looks like you're expecting to have 12 options for each question, which sounds excessive. ;) Possibly a better way would be to plot all the celebrants on a 3-D graph (ie, give them 'scores' on three independent scales). You then assign values for some or all of the scales to each answer, and find the celebrant closest to the final averaged result.

Example: one axis would be how likely they are to be swayed by the Lone One's temptations. You'd place the Untouched at 0, the Undecided at, say, 5, and the Betrayed at 10. The Lone One Itself would be down at 15. Not sure about the Master Shark, you'd have to think about how he feels about death.

Then, for each question, you'd say how it affects that score. Taking what I think is the most interesting of your questions so far:

How do you relate 'friends' and 'fighting'?
-I fight for my friends. (2)
-I fight with my friends. (10)
-I fight about my friends. (5)
-I fight to control my friends. (12)

Other scales might include power, friendliness, how active a role they take... assuming those four, a statement like 'I fight to control my friends' might come out as (12 susceptability, -- power [ie, no value listed, ignore], 0 friendliness, 7 active).

You'd then average out the four scales after all the questions are answered, and see which celebrant comes closest to matching. How you did that would depend on what you were running it on, though...

On a related note: I shared this with the Board a year or two back, but I'm not sure you were around: I made Kaitlyn a Song of the Twelve scroll.

Image

It includes all the text from the book (along with a header and footer you'll probably recognise ^_~). I was quite pleased with how it turned out.

hS

Would any Agents be interested in investigating the "Event Horizon of Suedom" (picturing the impressions Suefluence leaves on the canon to be similar to how everything in reality leaves an impression on the fabric of the universe via gravity)? How many typos does it take to warp a Word World - taking them more from just irritants to Agents to malformations for Word Worlds to play with?

On another note, what happens if a Sue is de-Sueified within the fic? Are there any documented cases of such?

huinesoron at hotmail dot com. I am super old-school.

Also I have no idea what you're saying with the clicks thing?

hS

That bit about the newspaper provided a nice bit of comedy, though I didn't mind the angst.

Ix and Charlotte continue to be wonderful.

Also loved the explanation for empty compartments! And the worldbuilding re: Madam Pince jinxing the books.

As always, thank you for writing! \o

(Guys, this is awesome, let's keep up the trend of giving people stuff to read!)

Ix and Charlotte face what must be their worst Sue yet: a Marauders-era werewolf who wants to be an Auror.

And just as a heads-up, since I know some of you guys are sick of my angsty stuff, this one is heavy on the angst. Enjoy?

And if that doesn't work, it's

here.

But only because I just got it last week. Not sure the other two clicks have expired.

Otherwise, I think it's $10.

Kaitlyn mentioned the ordeals were available, but is that 'freely' or 'for a price'?

hS

Leaves me imagining a Powers vs Flowers situation...

In other news, I do have one idea so far (not finished reading everything yet): given certain species similarities, how would Laduquac fare if he ever met Mamvish?

(Er, it doesn't get detailed until her On Ordeal section, but it's definitely canon. ^^; )

She goes into it a little in her paper, as it happens. I'm not sure if it's going to go anywhere, but I have a feeling the Flowers' precautions may, ah, show a certain lack of understanding of the subject.

hS

... But I'm enjoying this very much already!

(Also: an encounter with a Manual? Do tell. ;) )

I may be back later with ideas for questions.

Since hS's latest post - and an email correspondence with Tomash - reminded me that I am far from alone in remembering Deep Wizardry fondly:
The Song of the Twelve, a Personality Quiz planning document

^I give you this. Most of the writing already in the doc is mine, but okforthey set up the doc in the first place.
Any help is appreciated, from new questions to more (relevant) information on the Celebrants, and anything inbetween YOU think would help!
Dai Stiho, Cousins, and thanks in advance!

Very interesting and well thought out! I'll admit, this came as a huge surprise to me, but it's a nice addition to the PPC. Having the new department be based in DMSE&R is a nice way of tying it back into the pre-existing (insofar as we have that) PPC canon, and I'm interested to see what else might come of this new department.

(I liked the Suvian Cladogram and inorganic cookbook pieces the best, though Laduquac's reactions to the Suvian meatstuffs had me simultaneously giggling and grossed out.)

Unfortunately, not being very scientifically inclined myself, I'm not really able to think of any questions that would make for a very good prompt, so I'll have to think on that for... probably a good long while.

All in all, though, I enjoyed this even though I didn't understand all of it and hope you'll do more with it in the future.

I still need to read past the first chapter, but this is super interesting.

All giggling at puns aside, this is interesting! Reading the first issue now.

I don't have enough of a Potterverse 'feel' to know if Hermione is quite that, uh... I don't even know what the word is. But it definitely feels like something someone with her basic character would do.

hS

It's long been a bugbear of mine that there are no true mad scientists in HQ. We had DoSAT, but they're engineers (though suitably mad). We had the DMSE&R, but they were extremely specialised and Not Relevant To My Interests^TM. We had the Medical Research Division, but they seemed to actually want to do their job sensibly. And of late we had the Division of Applied-and-theoretical Multiversal Physics, but they only had one document to their name, and I hadn't even decided which department they were a division of.

Note the past tense above.

It is with great pleasure and not a little trepidation that I introduce a brand shiny new PPC department, designed specifically to deal with all those nagging little scientific questions you never knew needed asking: the Department of Analytical Science (DAS).

Formed from the merger of the DMSE&R and the DAMP, the Thistle and Flowering Leek have branched out into more than half a dozen fields, from chemistry and physics to geology and archaeology. With a large and eclectic collection of agents, DAS stands ready to solve all the scientific problems you care to name - or at least, to reword them in such complicated language that you don't feel bad about not understanding it.

And with even greater pleasure and trepidation, I would like to present the very first work of the new-formed department: the Journal of Investigating Veracity by Experimentation.

DAS-JIVE, Issue 1: "To Think, They Called Us Mad"

Comprising eleven scientific papers on diverse fields by the staff of DAS, along with a foreword by the joint department heads, and biographies of the scientists themselves. The subjects range from an attempt to construct an evolutionary tree of Mary-Sues (Agent Yasmeen, DAS-SWEAR, aka the former DMSE&R), to an archaeological exploration of OFUM's universe (Agents Joan and Durand, DAS-AWAY), by way of narrativium (Alembic and Sunniva, DAS-VOID), generic surface (Mandy and Wei-ting, DAS-MAD), and cooking (Huinesoron & Atlas, DAS-DIG).

Naturally, given the diversity of the agents of DAS, their papers don't even attempt to conform to the same style. I recommend sticking your head into all of them, even if you don't read to the end - you never know what you might be missing.

~

I've put a whole heap of work into this, so it would be very nice to hear some opinions on it. But reviews aren't the only thing I want (though I definitely do; knowing people are reading your work is half of what keeps writers going, so it's always kind to comment when you read something). There are plans for a DAS-JIVE Issue 2, and for that to happen there's two things I'd like from you:

1/ Ideas! I've got a couple (though most of the 'another paper is needed/research is ongoing' comments from Issue 1 won't be followed up), but there's lots of agents who need something to do. I don't promise to use them, but if you've got a scientific question about anything in the multiverse(s), ask it and I'll see if any of the agents want it.

2/ Letters! I really wanted a Letters to the Editor section, but couldn't come up with anything to put into it. So if any of your agents have an interest in science (or you want to pick up any NPCs who do), go ahead and have them write in. I'm sure there'll be a great many responses.

~

A note on agents: in merging the DMSE&R into DAS, I've re-adopted Agent Niamh away from Lily Winterwood. Along the way, I've resolved the question of why she's sometimes shown as a stern blonde Irishwoman, and sometimes a cheerful Vietnamese. Answer: it's both, and she won't tell anyone why. (Okay, I know, not really 'resolved'...)

I've also kept Agent Penny, who has long been in the DMSE&R, and who I adopted years ago. She's in DAS-SQUEE now, the biology unit.

I deliberately haven't mentioned the other named DMSE&R agents. They may be working in DAS-SWEAR or DAS-SQUEE; they may have retired long ago; they may have moved to a completely different field. Not my agents, not my choice, but I'm not closing the door on them.

Norlossë has been mentioned once before, here; she was always intended to be a member of DAMP.

Oh, and Agent Huinesoron is doing double-duty as an agent of DOGA and DAS-DIG. He also helps out DAS-AWAY occasionally, and has a reserve position with SIELU. He's a busy bee; serves him right.

Other than that, all the DAS agents are new creations. At some point some of them will probably go free-to-use, but for now, please give them a warm welcome.

hS