The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Was it intentional trolling, or an attempt to interact with the community without knowing how it works? Shame we'll prolly never know, but it's interesting food for thought.

Yes, yes you are old :p

That's a second official success for me (I have no idea what happened in 2021, I wrote 50,000 words in November but it seems to have not registered as a success. Oh well)

Nova

As the website was delighted to tell me, this was my ninth NaNo win. Am... am I old? :O

I've never written a story which so clearly told me about its second draft. I have character notes, plot notes, and a full outline for the second version of the book - a very different outline, I'm moving stuff around massively. NaNo was probably good for this one, because it forced me to keep writing the plot I was in; if I hadn't been chasing 50K I'd probably have kept revising what was already there and never finishing it.

hS

I've just rolled it back, problem solved.

hS

Which I discovered by going to Agent Kaguya's page. I don't know if I should be scared or be happy that something I wrote is vandalized for the first time XDDD

The page for Luxury is vandalized and every single revision of it is overwritten, so I can't revert the change. The question is how did this happen? How can someone just retcon the entire history of a page?

Corolla turned towards Tomash and shrugged. "You'll get used to it. Feel free to hit me on voice call any time you have questions!"

She summoned a holographic window, and tapped a few commands in it. The two constructs flanking her dissolved, leaving only a handful of pixels behind. "And I don't think I need those for now, the firewalls still seem to be doing their thing well enough."

Corolla then floated towards one end of the corridor. "This way, probably. By the way, Ghostie, I do know you've been a great help! I don't want to unravel all your mysteries, of course, but one particular instance of that is exactly why I wanted to be able to meet you face-to-face."

Corolla opened yet another window. "On December 14th 2012 at 0932 hours and 57 seconds, we received on our console a mission assignment, badfic ID FFW300913. Thing is, it was dispatched two whole hours earlier, so the console should've pinged just as we were about to go to Zim's as Sergio and Nikki really needed to stock up on bullets and grenades. That mission then led straight into the Blank Sprite Incident, meaning we would've really been in trouble if we did indeed get it when we should've."

She crossed her arms behind her head. "I discovered it by chance, but I gave it a bit of investigation and here I am. So... I'm not sure if it was just out of selflessness or a necessary thing for the Big Picture or something, but I really owe you one, Ghostie, but I didn't felt like leaving a thank you note around was proper. It's the kind of thank you that needs to be done in person."

[And here's Corolla's canon reason for chasing after Ghostie being turned on its head! She just wanted to say thanks. On why the Ghost did this? It's up to Huinesoron to decide exactly what part of the Ghost's shenanigans this can fall into, but I'm up to either a simple "losing three universes to Vera was something that the Ghost didn't feel like letting happening" up even to "Ghost knows that the Unravel timeline is a thing and in that one we need Sergio, Nikki and Corolla alive to rescue Captain Dandy and thus ensure the PPC is still a thing in that universe"]

Also, do note that tengu are typically prideful (the Japanese idiom "to become a tengu" means "to get cocky") and malicious creatures. I definitely characterize Oshimo as an unpleasant person, though not out-and-out evil.

Dang, Oshimo sending the agents on this fetch quest is rude enough; she had to give them a scroll that shocks them when they find a wrong ingredient? So cruel! I do like how the ingredients are a metaphor for the flower itself. I hadn’t caught on to that on my own . . .

Heh. Kaguya would end up looking like a Disney princess as a merman, wouldn’t he?

—doctorlit would prefer the turtle disguise over the merman one

We open on a very eventful birthday party!

Warning for some secondhand embarrassment re: Draco's outfit, PTSD flashbacks, vomiting, and Lucius insulting Muggle sex workers.

Yeah, I think Pius Thicknesse was always a bit blood supremacist (or you know, centre-traditionalist, or something) because people would've pinged the Imperius if he suddenly did such a drastic about-face in policy. Hence me thinking he'd be the ~law and order~ candidate. The candidate field isn't fantastic, yeah. Silverstream is status quo, Thicknesse is too focused on policing criminality, and Gaunt is straight up a genocidal maniac. But you'll see in year 5 if the field changes....

It's a very, very old magic wolf, Doc, obviously!

Wait no longer, fifth year is here!!

So the Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials are in progress, beginning with Saturday's The Star Beast. If you like the Russel T. Davies era of Who, then you are in luck: this episode is a textbook example. Stakes are raised, twists are turned, references are made, subtlety is a myth, solutions are pulled literally out of nowhere. Also, "What? What? What?!" is said over and over and over.

What was obvious is that David Tennant was having so much fun. I'm specifically thinking of the scene in the white room, but he spent the whole episode Doctoring up to, er... 14, I guess! We were very pleased with his companion (who's in all the trailers but I know people don't necessarily see those); a well-deserved appearance. And we can't fault the ending.

In conclusion, simultaneously spoiler-free and stuffed with them:

hS

He relaxed now that everyone didn't seem to be up for shooting each other. He certainly wasn't interested in the first thing he found out about his new substrate being if he could die here.

"So," he asked, stepping around Corolla and her friends, "we just head in a direction and figure we'll run into the pub - or at least somewhere that's got access to it - eventually?"

(( And I think that'd leave Sergio in a position to write the scene transition unless anyone has objections ))

His gun rose up, aiming towards Corolla; but before it reached firing position, it fizzled into a shower of green light and vanished. "Recombination complete," the Ghost's voice said. His lips didn't move.

For a moment - the barest sliver of a second, so fast it was almost imaginary - the unkempt man in stained fatigues flickered out of existence, revealing a view down into trillions upon trillions of nanoscopic digital life-forms. Every one of them seemed to be looking back.

Then the Ghost was looking at Corolla with a sardonic tilt to his head. "Don't you know it's rude to read people's mail?" he asked. "No, I'm not going to destroy the PPC. You have no idea what I've done for this place." He turned and nodded at Tomash. "Apologies for the interruption. Did you say there was a pub around here somewhere?"

Holo-Acacia raised a hand. "I might know how to find that," she said. "See, in the real PPC, they say 'it's a bit of a maze, unless you hadn't noticed'..."

(And on a screen somewhere in physical reality, where Agent Corolla was busy accessing the networks, a wire-frame animation of a human head appeared on a screen. It looked nothing like the Ghost in the Machine, said nothing, was unseen by anybody, and vanished a second later. So it probably wasn't anything to worry about.)

((Obviously I was never going to attack Corolla! The Ghost has now re-integrated his military and personality code, which is part of why he was frozen so long; the Gun is now what I said it was initially, just a sensor apparatus. He was also busy reading everything he could find about Corolla so that the non-miltech side of him could make an informed decision.

And he could really do with a drink. ^_^))

Many of them are being merged into single posts, or entries with less parts.

(( Supposing Tomash did need a weapon ))

Tomash wasn't too great a construct artist, but he did have some skill at pulling concepts into existence - he'd needed it to get into his line of work. In this place where the death of digitized people was possible, he needed a weapon, and so he set out to create one.

Daggers popped into his outstretched paw and vanished soon after. In and out, in and out, varying as Tomash iterated on his designs. Some of the more useful failures lingered in the air near him as ghosts for later reference.

Near the end of this process, the physical appearance of the dagger was unchanged, but the aura it exuded (whether this was something Tomash could control because he was in a place more powered by stories or whether he always could have done that, he didn't know) was being fine-tuned.

Tomash's dagger was black, with swirls of poisonous green working their way into the blade. Its grip was unadorned and bone-white. The blade seemed to smoke around the edges, as if it was threatening to dissolve away.

This was Tomash's vision of the instance-crashing virus he knew from home. There, the weapon had to be tailored to one's target, to the point that its use was always "assassination", never "murder". The general form of the virus had long been theorized but never, thank any applicable gods, brought into reality. (Those who tried tended to find themselves ostracized at best and disappeared at worst). Here, though, where weapons effective against digital minds were expected, it was all too possible to create that most loathsome of objects.

And it was a loathsome object which knew itself to be such. The existence of this weapon was, to Tomash and many of his fellows, an abominable thing, an unholy thing. As one of the earliest comments on the bug it exploited had noted, such crashes were "anathema to this end of endings".

Tomash's dagger radiated its creator's revulsion at its necessity. Those who saw it saw a thing that should be destroyed. That must not exist. That is contrary to all that is good and right and proper and which should be escorted to a volcano with all due haste.

Tomash, much more quickly, summoned a belt around his waist and sheathed his creation. "There. Done. Here's to never needing to use it."

"Sim list says I can't just step over there because something something routing tables." He chucked the issue away with a paw. "Eh, that's future me's problem."

"I think we need to wander around until we find a spot we can get to Rudi's from, if we want to go there."

(( In side notes, Delta and I started (but haven't finished because holidays, hence why I haven't tried to collate this for the Board) a different version of this RP that started in digital!Rudi's with Tomash running into Wix, the Tron-like avatar of a wiki archival program that Delta's pulled out for a few RPs way back when but hasn't used for much else that I know of. In case it's interesting, said Rudi's is, per Delta, at least sometimes bartended by [temporal/spatial anomaly] ))

Corolla howled in frustration, "Here I am, trying to be nice and all, and Ghostie's gun half tells him to neutralize me. Not thatt's gonna work, mind you, and if you did manage to do any damage to me you'd have two of the PPC's best former Spec.Ops virtualized and on the hunt in no time. Though I suppose I should be proud of the mighty Ghost in the Machine thinking of me as such a high threat,. I'll take that as a compliment."

She floated even closer to him, and flicked his forehead. "Ghostie? Put that thing away. I'm here to have a chat, possibly in front of a nice cup of the if there's a virtual Rudy's in this virtual HQ, from which I just want to gather whether or not you want to destroy the PPC - I'm betting on no, since you're still hanging around, but I would so like to have proof so people stop asking me to boobystrap HQ's network like a Looney Tunes cartoon."

[Corolla is Corolla. Whether she zoomed in the data feed in his eyes, or she intercepted the data stream between Gun and Body, I haven't decided yet. But, as I said, Corolla is Corolla. She finds a way.

And goes without saying that if the Ghost managed to put Corolla out of commission there would be a very angry Sergio and a very angry Nikki out to make mincemeat of his coding. That's an escalation we don't want to happen.]

(( Clade-eyes only means clade-eyrs only, dang it ))

(( This isn't strictly defined by canon, since the exact parameters of systech powers never needed to be staked out ... but, extrapolating sensibly, Tomash can't bust in on individual communications ))

(( At best, he can send rather high priority messages, but that'd give our touchy military AI a shot of adrenaline so ... doable if no one's got better ideas ))

(( - Tomash, not actually tagging ))

Holo-Acacia kept one eye on Corolla as she walked around the Ghost. "I don't know why you're on about bows, everyone in the arena got hatchets whenever they wanted them... you, confused canine." She pointed at Tomash. "You said he was communicating with someone? But the Ghost doesn't have any friends, and the enemy isn't accessible right now... I wonder."

She bent down, peering at the Gun. "He told me once, part of him used to be military software running on a weapon like this," she said. "Advising his user on how best to secure the situation, eliminate hostiles, et cetera. Then the rest of him was some sort of economic planning AI. I'm just wondering if this changed world might have..." She grasped at the digital air, as if trying to pull inspiration from it. "Maybe separated them? So the military part is in the Gun, and the rest is maybe checking how to deal with this threat scenario?"

((Is anyone equipped to read what the Gun is saying to the Ghost? HAcy may not be exactly right, but she's pretty close. It might be useful, particularly since the advice the Ghost is currently working through is:

Latest arrivals consist of remote/subordinate units reporting to coordinating entity "Corolla". Recommend immediate action against base instance of "Corolla" in Actual Reality to reduce effectiveness of subordinate units. Primary approach: disable uplink capability in vicinity of "Corolla". Secondary/backup approach: neutralize "Corolla".

If he was all in one piece he would have acted on that pretty much instantly, because military AI facing existential threat. As it is, the separation of the Gun has slowed him down - but he'll be up to speed soon. ~hS))

In which they're in for one hell of a scene change.