The desk seems to have the highest chance of writing. Exposit later.

Definitely search the desk.

You’ve been trying not to think about it, but ever since you stepped into the portal you’ve been feeling your life burning away at an unprecedented rate, and already there’s almost nothing left. Normally you’d only feel the burn every few months, at most, but that was back when you did your very best to remain dully average and inconspicuous. Coming here was probably not the best move for short-term survival - long-term, it’s still your only real option.

You carefully make your mind go blank, focusing only on the writing desk. A few steps through the ash - a simple affair reminiscent of wading through snow, requiring no major descriptions - and you’re already tugging on the drawers, trying to find some point of entrance. The thing is halfway melted, of course, but future-era technology is tough; it responds to your clumsy attempts, firing tiny explosives to break open compartments when you tug hard enough.

It takes you a little while to search them, panic growing as you realize you have literally no time left. Most contain either ash, or weird knick-knacks of no obvious purpose, but you persevere - safe in the knowledge that most of the search will probably be skipped over. Finally, in a compartment that’s bizarrely hidden away on the back of the writing table, you find a few tablets of long-hand prose on some futuristic variant of the Kindle. The hardware’s dead, you suppose, but they seems to work well enough as tokens; the moment you touch them, you feel life flooding you. More life than you’ve ever had before, enough for centuries for both you and..

With an abrupt effort, you wrench your mind away from the entirely hypothetical person whose life you were most definitely not about to risk.

Anyway, you have a lot more than two people to save.

179 paragraphs gained
2 tablets of unknown verbiage gained
177 paragraphs remaining
[ ] Flashback?
[ ] Consider the author
[ ] Consider where to go from here

This is a good spot to explain some of the rules:

- Just because I forget to add an "..?" option doesn't mean you can't do write-ins. In fact, I encourage it.

That will be all.

Flashback and exposition, please. Be nice to understand this situation, what you are, and why prose seems to sustain you.

What is your name?

Avoid all flashback or exposition; our existences are not yet concrete, the life of those you are linked to will drain too much, too quickly!

Continue searching, the other drawers should contain something else to feed your narrative lifeline.

>>526135
Consider the author. We have time to think about the target, and without the target we have no mission.

[x] Limit exposition

Thinking about the situation remains necessary, but you make a mental note to avoid picking over plans you’ve already made. Besides, it’s common wisdom that plans only work if they’re noticed at most once. Putting one in action seems almost guaranteed to do that, so if you also think about them now, they’ll fail.

You’re not terribly worried about exposition in general; you’ve cultivated a kind of dull, boring impulsiveness just to ensure neither your actions nor your thoughts are very interesting.

[x] Search the other drawers

Your sudden abundance of verbosity ought to have been enough for at least decades, certainly enough to finish this quest of yours. Yeah, sure. Judging by the near-continuous burn, it seems like just about every single train of thought you’ve had is being noticed - including this one. At this rate, you’ll be lucky to last the day with what you’ve got.

Keeping that in mind, you spend some time going over the writing desk again. Earlier you were deliberately only opening compartments that were similar enough to reasonably be described in a single sentence, but there’s actually a lot more to it than that.

For instance, the top of the desk contains an embedded computer screen. There are no apparent hinges, but it has a kind of edge that suggests it wasn’t always stuck to the desk. It’s pretty thoroughly melted, of course; whatever nanocircuitry it once had has long since denatured, and there’s no response of any kind when you try to move it. You fail to see anything resembling a keyboard, but it may only have existed on-demand.

It’s really a pity the city is already destroyed, because you’re sure there are people who’d enjoy figuring out how all this was supposed to work. If you survive, you’ll have to point a few graphologists in this direction. Maybe even theoretical scientists.

Well, you do see why the Author might have set up here for a while.

Abandoning that line of thought, you look around the left side of the writing desk. There are a few holders there, the primitive sheet-metal kind you could find in almost any world, looking as if they have been bolted on as an afterthought. This kind of thing shows up everywhere there are traces of the Author; it used to cause serious academic conflict, some people claiming the clear differences between fantasy and non-fantasy proves the latter type of worlds are all based on the Author’s reality, others claiming artifacts such as these prove future-tech is just a subtler form of fantasy.

Personally, you’re of the opinion that they’re all smoking crack. There’s no reason to assume the Author exists in some form of super-reality, and plenty of reason to doubt the notion. At the very least it violates Occam’s razor, but it would also lead to an infinite regression of super-Authors.

..focus, focus. You’ve never been noticed for this long in one go, before, and it seems there are some long-term effects. For instance, you’ve suddenly acquired a definite tendency to go off on mental tangents. Damned exposition.

The metal holder is open to what’s left of the air, and on the outside of the desk, so anything inside it should probably have been flash-fried. Indeed, you can see a kind of reverse shadow cutting diagonally across the inside, where the nuclear detonation was partially shielded by the rest of the writing desk. Luck is with you, though. The Author is not a neat stacker, and some of the loose paper that was originally stacked vertically has slid down to lie on the bottom of the holder, shielded from the blast by both the holder itself and the topmost paper.

It occurs to you that any less-advanced world probably would not be able to make “paper” that can withstand point-blank nuclear detonations, but then again such a world would probably not use nukes to demolish single rooms. No matter how justifiably hated the occupant is.

At any rate the sheets were definitely penned by the Author, and pretty much full. As usual you try to get a quick look at whatever was written on them, and as usual the process of absorption easily outpaces your gaze. You’d have liked to take them with you, but despite their apparent lack of flammability they’ve gone too brittle to carry.

+43 paragraphs

[x] Consider the Author

The Author used to be just a hypothesis.

You were born the second child of an aggressively mediocre family, in an aggressively boring country. The country had some natural advantages over the more interesting ones - for instance, it had no neighbours.

That is not to say it was the sole country on its planet. This being a fairly typical country, there was simply nothing outside its borders. Even the sun and moon, which any book of science you could find would claim existed at some vast distance, had long since been understood to be arbitrary sources of illumination. They didn’t exist on some heavenly dome; the light was simply created, in-flight, immediately above the first surface it struck.

Still, life was good. There were no storybook romances, but there were ordinary ones, and you had time for exactly two - a safe number - during the later years of your education, in which you received average grades and spent a comfortable amount of time with your perfectly normal friends.

This comfortable existence ended abruptly when your government ran seriously low on stored verbiage.

The stockpiles dated back to the creation of your country. Three graphologists would have five different opinions on where it came from, but it was a comfortably large supply that those same graphologists - making themselves useful by creating linking books - had allowed you to trade with other worlds, gaining luxuries and anachronistic items in return for time.

That trade had gradually petered out over the last few decades, but if anyone suspected the truth, they kept it to themselves. Of course the officials knew, but - perhaps intuiting that the public’s reaction would make stockpiles drop even faster - they had suppressed the situation until their hands were forced by the brute force of graphology. By that time the central depot had simply run empty, and the regional depots had only a few months’ worth at normal usage rates.

The results were as inevitable as they were catastrophic, and took less than a single month.

The use of past tense here is a clue, although one you would very much prefer not to think about. So long as it isn’t noticed, there’s still a chance of altering events.

You also try not to think about what the hell was going on in that last paragraph, chalking it up to an unexpected side-effect of chasing the Author.

That’s the sum total of your plan, after all. You left your home shortly before the conclusion, the graphologists at your local library having pooled their resources to write a descriptive book that would send a single one of them - you - not to a particular known world, but to “The place where the Author currently is”, hoping against hope that the current situation might be interesting enough to give such a request more of a chance than usual.

The Author was always more theory than fact; it is simply your term for the being that created the worlds and endowed them with verbiage. Since it’s a well-known fact among graphologists that the creation of worlds requires massively more verbiage than the resulting world will contain, such a being would require the ability to create words from nothing. That some being like that exists at all seems proven by the simple existence of your own world.

That you found such a stash here without any of you having expired in the process of creating them at least guarantees that this place is real; it’s not your colleagues’ shared delusion, so you’re probably not chasing mirages.

That the Author is not, in fact, in the room with you.. guarantees your aim was still off.

The city outside your window looks bigger than the capital of your country, and is on fire. If the Author is still here, you won’t find him unless he’s really close. You’ve been unaffected by the conditions so far, but the longer you stay here the more this world’s physics will start to notice you, and it’s already starting to feel uncomfortably hot; you’ve got maybe an hour, less if you want to play it safe.

You could try searching the room for clues, but anything useful was probably inside the electronics of the now-useless writing desk.

You brought writing supplies, of course, but no linking books. Jumping here without a way to get back made the process cheaper - just cheap enough to be doable, and if you hadn’t found some verbiage here it wouldn’t have mattered either way. You wish you could have brought some of your colleagues, because you suck at writing. No imagination.

Oh, and there’s a door in the wall behind you, but it’s pretty much melted shut. You’d need to get creative to open it, but there’s really nothing to get creative with here.

190 paragraphs remaining
[ ] ..?

Writing a descriptive book: 200 paragraphs or one tablet, unless you're being ridiculous.

Writing a linking book: 50 paragraphs. You can at any time use these to go back to where and when it was written, but the book itself won't come with you.

Absorbing one tablet: You'll gain 50+d300 paragraphs.

This may go on the wiki later; I'm waiting for an account.

Lastly..

Appearances to the contrary, you're not playing Myst.

remove a drawer that has a lip on an edge and use it as a makeshift crowbar, it should be stronger then the door, and thus pop it open.

Hmm. So what's your objective here? Simple survival? Trying to save or revive your world? Or revenge?

>>526375
Good plan.

>>526386
Easy on the exposition, there.

>>526450
i agree, we don't need to know like.. any of that right now, it's unimportant. in fact, knowing less about it would be better. the less we know about the old world the easier it will be to fix since it has less facts and thus less things that need to be worked around.

Yeah, no exposition that would shred light upon the state of our world. Reread the quest. The protaganist's been carefully avoiding that for the reasons stated in >>526487. And right now we just need to focus on finding the Author. Let's tackle the door. >>526375 has a good suggestion for that.

[x]Open the door, using table parts for a wrench

An Author that uses a writing desk might be human enough that he’ll also want to use doors, rather than jumping out the window of a very tall building. Assuming, of course, that he didn’t make his own exit to somewhere outside the world.

Examining the door closely, you find that it isn’t completely melted; the nuclear fire simply spot-welded it in place. Trying to push through by pretending you’re a ghost accomplishes nothing save using up more of your limited time, though it does confirm that you’re slowly becoming part of this world.

As far as you can tell, the door opens outwards. Trying to body-slam it open might get you partially embedded, and there are probably too many weld spots anyway, but..

You eye the writing desk speculatively.

The writing desk’s storage compartments are clearly not supposed to detach. They’re not drawers, as such. Nevertheless, fifteen minutes later the door is surrounded by the wreckage of several compartments.

Treating the renewed notice as a sign that you’ve cleared enough of the spot-welds to force the door, you finally lift a large chunk of what may once have been a computer screen for use as an improvised battering ram. Once, twice you slam it into the door to no apparent effect. Then, with the third strike, the door gives a final moan of despair and slams into the ground, throwing up a cloud of dust as it does.

You carefully look outside. Save for the dust, there’s nothing. It’s a perfectly normal-looking corridor.

183 paragraphs remaining

“Two bottles of beer on the waa~all.. *hic*”

Not that you’re going to drink them yet, thirsty or not. The room is already swimming in front of your eyes.

Three weeks you’ve been locked up in here, as the world tore itself apart around you. Two weeks you’ve had nothing but some random dead guy’s stash of beer to drink. If your civilian bio-mods hadn’t kicked into emergency mode, you’d probably be dead from alcohol poisoning. Instead you get to die of thirst.

<<Warning, radiation exposure critical. Systemic collapse..>>

You hit the override again. Yeah, you probably won’t actually have time to die of thirst, but it sounds nicer than what’s really going on. You don’t want to know the details.

“Damn dad anyway, leaving me here like this. Couldn’t you at least have picked a room with some damn decor? A pen? A notebook or two?”

Using a leprous-looking hand, you amuse yourself by trying (and failing) to stack the two remaining cans of beer on top of each other. You look like a rotting corpse, but you’re long past caring about that, as well.

Your name is Lilith. It’s not your real name, but it’s the one you prefer. Your fifteenth birthday - your last birthday - was the day the world went to hell.

You’re locked up in a small but intact apartment, on the tenth floor of a skyscraper, at the edge of the capital city of Oceania. Near as you can tell, there isn’t even any oxygen outside your apartment, so you’ll die pretty quickly if you leave.

Not that it matters.

You may be the last living human on the planet, and you’re dying.

[ ] Drink some more beer.
[ ] Make one last circuit of the room.
[ ] Try to hallucinate a nice story. Maybe something with birds.

Make a last circuit of the room, then we can see about some hallucinations.

>>526872
Drink some more beer and stop wasting all these paragraphs.

gather all your writing supplies together, trust us.

>>526879
She's a native of this world, not one of the author's escaped constructs. I wouldn't think she shares the same need for verbiage.

Maybe she's still burning paragraphs of the meta-story, or maybe, the longer we focus on her, the less time our original narrator is 'noticed'. That frees him to act without our observation weighing on him and apparently increasing his rate of consumption.

>>526884
all worlds are creations of the author. she is probably running off of this world's native stash though. like an underground vault in the middle of town has thousands of paragraphs. and natives all share access.

>>526885
We don't know that. The protagonist of viewpoint one even rejected the notion, reasoning that would require an infinite regression of meta-authors.

>>526883
There are no writing supplies of any kind in this apartment. There used to be some nail polish, but you used it. To write. On the floor of the bathroom, because there's no paper here either.

You've spent a lot of the last three weeks trying to find something, anything to use as a pen, and you've pretty much exhausted the usefulness of common household chemical etching, knife-blade rune writing, lipstick drawing and any other possible form of writing.

You might have tried writing with blood, but you don't think you have a lot left, and you're not actively suicidal; the bio-mods do a great job filtering out what is no doubt supposed to be extreme agony.

do you know where you could get materials if you could leave the apartment?

>>526889
No, he said that anyone OTHER than an omnipotent Writer creating worlds would be impossible, because worlds never contain more verbage than is required to make them. The universe exists, thus someone has infinite verbage, thus everyone other than the Writer needs verbage to survive.

>>526890
Do a circuit of the room, then.

>>526891
In Valhalla, maybe.

This is an apartment building, so you're sure there will be useful tools in some of the other apartments, but either the door indicators are broken - unlikely - or there's no oxygen in the corridor outside your apartment. Opening the door would breach the seal, flooding your apartment with unbreathable gas.

At your best, you might have held your breath for a good fifteen minutes. As you are now.. well, your nanites are burning a lot of power just keeping you alive; you'd probably run out within a few minutes. You don't know for sure, and don't care to check.

can you quick charge? like, stick your finger in a socket and charge up. if not then yeah sure imagine a a story before you die.

[x] Make one last circuit of the room

Well, you guess this is it. Your final hours. It wasn’t a long life, but you suppose it’s been longer than anyone else’s.

You cried your tears long ago. You’ve done your very best to survive. All that’s left, now, is to choose your ending.

There’s the beer, you suppose. You could turn down the alcohol filtration, let the end pass in a haze. Some of your classmates spent hours and hours plotting how to manage that, and you get it for free. All they needed to fool the system was to get fatally wounded.

You could lie back on the bed, close your eyes and daydream. Think of better times, or think about the friends you made in your imagination. Try figuring out how to end the plot of your last couple of stories, without spending more than a chapter on each. You never were any good with endings. That’s actually pretty tempting; you could tell your mods to cut the nerve feeds, and just lie there in the darkness. You might not even notice when you die.

…

No, screw that. All the best writers have been through tragedy, and they didn’t deaden themselves with drugs or turn away from reality to survive it. Well, most of them didn’t. If you’re going to die you’ll go down kicking and screaming, fighting to the last for survival, and right now that means doing one last pass over the apartment.

It takes you a minute, but you manage to roll over on your stomach, then dangle your legs over the side of the bed. Then comes the tricky bit.. you have to get your feet on the ground, then sort of fall sideways against the wall, placing your center of gravity above said feet. You figured this maneuver out about a week ago, when you realized you no longer had the muscles left to stand up normally.

You navigate the maneuver well enough. The worst part is when, in the middle, you have to look closely at what you’re doing. That is to say, at your own legs.

Your nanites are the only reason you’re still alive, but they’re a double-edged sword. As a civilian, their only legal source of energy is through burning the stuff in your blood, same as any other cell. As a result you’ve been losing weight at a scary rate, and your legs are cadaverously thin, in addition to being blue-black and scabby. You suppose it beats the alternative, but you don’t like to look at yourself anymore.

Your feet are sort of crinkling on the floor; you suppose you’re probably leaving behind fragments of skin, but the nanites will stop any actual bleeding.

It doesn’t matter.

Suitably ambulatory, you mentally review your standard reconnaisance plan.

The apartment is pretty much square, but divided into four oddly shaped rooms that have been connected in a circle. Southwest is the bedroom, which is where you are now; it has a single bed, some wardrobes, the usual. Northwest is the living room. It is the only room with two doors, as it also contains the hallway entrance. Northeast is the kitchen, and southeast is the bathroom.

The kitchen and bathroom are pretty small, the bedroom just large enough for the (king size) bed you’ve spent most of the last week on, and the living room is unusually large, larger than your own. Overall the apartment is probably smaller than your own, though.

You’ll do this counter-clockwise, as is your habit. Once upon a time you’d spend time poking into cupboards, climbing benches and generally searching, but that was back when you had some measure of health left. This time you guess you’ll just.. shamble.

“Maybe if any ghosts show up I can pass for a zombie”, you mutter.

The bathroom door is on the other side of the bed, so around you go, occasionally supporting yourself with the iron bedframe. Then through the door, which slides open at your approach.

The bathroom is as you left it. Mad scribbles on the floor and walls - you think you were delirious for some of that - but not the mirrors, which pretty much clinches it; if you were in your right mind, you could never have resisted following the cliche. You carefully avoid looking into the mirrors. Shelves open, contents strewn all over the floor. Toilet, still full of bloody vomit. Oh yeah, and a rotting corpse in the bathtub.

You imagine the former owner of the apartment is getting pretty ripe by now, but fortunately you lost your sense of smell ages ago. Unlike you and your classmates, but like most of humanity, he had no bio-mods of any kind. You were one of the first civilians to get the implants, which had previously been limited to military personnel only.

Considering they were nearly free, you suspect the government had ulterior motives, but that doesn’t matter anymore either. They kept you alive.

Next door.. to the left. Step around the can of hairspray, try not to step on the shards of glass, watch out for the robotic toy dog. Dead robotic toy dog. Hm, maybe you should charge it.. yeah, why not. It’s on the floor, though, can you pick up something that’s on the floor?

You give up before starting, when you realize that the dog is probably heavier than you are now. Two weeks since last you played with it, back when you still hoped someone would rescue you. Then the water stopped, you had to start drinking beer, and the meal fabricator’s reserve feedstock ran out of aminos for making food. You spent the week after that trying to find some way to survive.

Kitchen. Dead meal fabricator, empty cupboards (since before you got here) and an ocean of writing on the floor, this time etched using bleach. You remember writing this; it was a pretty neat idea. Something about a girl, a few years younger than you, her mind shattered by misused losttech but the pieces fighting on. Sounds familiar.

There’s nothing for you here.

You enter the living room, casting an appreciative eye over the huge entertainment system. Of course it didn’t survive the radiation, not being critical hardware and therefore hardened, but you can tell quality when you see it. You wish you’d been able to see it in action.

The guy living here liked both his hobbies and entertainment virtual, though, so there’s little in the way of usable equipment. Maybe, if you’d been that type of nerd, you could have taken some of this stuff apart, though what you’d do with the parts beats you. Maybe you should have paid more attention to Andrea when she came on to you, she could have taught you a lot. Never mind, too late now.

It’s pretty far to the bedroom, but there’s a nice couch right here. On the other hand, the beer is in the bedroom.. on the gripping hand, you probably won’t need it.

Just as you’re thinking that, there’s a loud bang from outside. Then another. Then a third, the sound of moaning metal and shattering diamond, and an almighty crash.

[ ] Listen carefully
[ ] Try shouting for help
[ ] ..?

>Listen carefully, Try shouting for help
Both. It's not as if you have anything to lose at his point. Another living being might mean new options.

(He's not bound to this room- and her writing might be a source of verbiage he can use. Potentially they could help each other. How we get him inside without cracking the room and losing all her air is the tricky part).

listen in, someone else is alive? then shout for help. how long can you last now do you think? especially if you got any amount of energy real quick. like getting help stuffing the dead dude into the fab and having him reconstituted into paste.

>>526930
(Hmm. Our hero has tablets, so he can make a descriptive book to escape with the near-dead girl, along with a linking book to ensure he can return here to search further for the Writer.)
Definitely call for help, if your vocal chords still work. If someone has broken their door, then they must have a plan to survive.

It’s almost beyond belief that anyone would have survived this long, much less remain strong enough to break into one of the other apartments. You’re very sure that’s what happened; even now the sound insulation is nearly perfect, except at the apartment entrances. That someone would not only survive, but happen to survive right next to you, is..

No.. maybe a searcher from outside..

With willpower born of frequent disappointment, you force yourself to stand still and listen. This wouldn’t be the first time shifting rubble has made random crashing noises, and you don’t have the energy to run around willy-nilly.

For a long minute, you hear nothing. Then there’s a kind of shuffling noise, and repeated bangs - this time from slightly further away. It finishes with two extra loud bangs in quick succession, like you imagine a door slamming open might sound.

A warm bubble rises in your chest, followed by panic - they’re leaving!

All rational thought overwhelmed you break into a staggering run, ignoring your implants as they scream warnings in your ear. The door is only six meters away.. four...

Three meters short of the door your right leg, pushed beyond reason, collapses under you as you try to take another step. Even with pain blocked and nerves overridden, there are absolute limits to what your ruined muscles can handle. You crash to the ground with a scream, hitting the ground head-on and shattering your right wrist when you try to catch yourself.

Consciousness fades.

You spend only a few seconds examining the corridor before deciding where to search. The building is more intact to your left, and certainly that way seems more likely to have anything useful, but that would require you to be able to open the doors. It only takes a few half-hearted attempts before you realize that that won’t happen. Some of them still have power, but they all seem to want identification of some kind, which you can’t provide. Other than dust and some rubble, the corridor itself is practically a geometrical cuboid. There’s no decoration of any kind.

So you decide to move right, where the damage gets progressively worse. Maybe, if you can’t open doors the proper way, you can break another one down. The old adage about searching for your keys under the streetlight seems to apply here.

The first door you try actually falls off its hinges when you try it, but only stays down for a second before it tumbles to its death. You take an involuntary step back, retreating from the sight - the room ends in a sheer drop-off, less than a metre inside.

You move to the next one. This one creaks when you push it, but stays put.

..the air is getting harder to breathe, but your increasing solidity makes it easier to batter the door open, letting you get away with less of a running start. That’s just as well, because the other side of the door is a vertical cliff immediately past the threshold. You don’t windmill on the edge; if you had, you would have been treated to eight floors of nothing whatsoever and two of sharp-looking wreckage at the bottom.

You’re getting increasingly uncertain that there’s any point in trying this tactic. You’re burning time, too.

While you’re reconsidering your tactics, there’s a muffled, bubbling sort of scream from behind you, followed by a loud thud. You twist around, instantly alert - that didn’t sound like anything human.

Seconds pass.

Nothing happens.

It takes a bit of thought, but you decide it probably came from the door immediately across from the room you started at. You’re not sure you want to know what caused it, but.. it’s the first living thing you’ve heard in this world, it might be an important clue.

You walk over, taking care to note the position of all the nearby rubble in case you end up having to fight whatever that was.

Your first problem presents itself immediately This particular door appears to be perfectly intact, meaning you can’t get in. Not that you aren’t willing to try breaking it down, but so far everything around here has turned out to be ridiculously sturdy. You simply don’t think you can break down nuke-proof doors with a rock.

Experimentally, you knock on the door.

A horrific noise replies. Bubbling, changing pitch, sounding like a demon of some kind.. it almost scares you off, and even after you realize it’s meant to be a voice it takes you several tries to parse. Even then, it takes all of your inconsiderable bravery to stay put. If this is what the people of this world sound like, you feel like you might prefer to keep a solid door between you. Something that ugly just has to be evil, that’s how it works.

When you finally arrive at some kind of comprehension, the banality of it is almost as shocking as the style.

“Ugh.. my head... hey, is someone there?”

You gulp, but decide to answer. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“..maybe?”

There’s a short pause, then the thing starts talking very quickly. “You came! Oh god, you came. Please, please get me out of here, I don’t want to die! Please.. please...” It trails off, then you hear muted sobbing.

You’ve heard about things like this, evil beings trapped in seals or bound to contracts, willing to do anything and promise anything to get out. Not recently, to be fair, but many worlds have seen such things in the past, and you’re in terra incognita here. But you’re a graphologist; you’ve studied such things, so you won’t be fooled like so many others.

The only question is how to get the most out of your encounter.

162 paragraphs remaining

“Please,” you sob, almost inaudibly. “Please get me out of here..”

You’re lying curled up on the floor, about two meters short of the door. Unless you get help, you don’t think you’ll be leaving this spot. That last spurt seems to have broken something fundamental, and you no longer have any feeling below your hips.

“Well, um,” you hear the parchment-dry voice of your saviour say. “Let’s say I do. I’m not used to dealing with your kind, so I’ll be straightforward: What’s in it for me?”

You pause, incredulous. Did you hear that right?

[ ] What the hell?

>What’s in it for me?
>What the hell?
...insane laughter and ranting is the only appropriate response here.

Help finally comes and it wants something from you? You don't have anything! You're locked in a room running out of air, starving for lack of food, with everything outside dead! All you've got in here are floors and walls covered in desperate crazed writing. Hehe. Hahaha!

(...which gives us the appropriate emotional response from her, without forcing her to rely on OOC knowledge, and maybe a reason for him to help. She can write. If you can get in there without killing her, you've got a renewable source of verbiage!)

"my kind? you mean humans? what are you then?"

>>527479
You should warn him that you've only been kept alive so far by your nanites so you look like a corpse. You just need some food water and rest and you'll look a lot better, you swear! Tell him your skills. I know you can write, what else can you do? Also tell him you're willing to learn, do anything he wants, just help, please.

Try crawling to the door with your arms. If there's someone out there, they have to have air to breath. There's no way they'll just leave you when they see the state you're in.

If beauty equals heroism, and boring, well-dressed grey equals people who actually get stuff done without dying prematurely for lack of verbiage, then the sickening gargle from the other side of this door can only be a monster.

You feel nervous. The notion of treating with something like that is.. well, you’re as learned as anyone about the early history of your world, but the heroes are long gone. All that’s left is competence, and need, neither of which is proof against the wiles of a being like this. You’re quite sure about that; it wasn’t more than ten years ago that a vile thing came crawling out of the swamp in..

A lot depends on the monster, but the stories make a few things clear. First, the kind that talks can often be very helpful; second, rarely does the hero escape unscathed, and you’re not even a hero.

Even so, you must treat. First, if you don’t there’s a very good chance it will track you down, likely at the worst possible time. Second, you need the help it may provide.

It seems like you’ve wandered into a fairy-tale; you can only hope you won’t be victim of today’s lesson. It asked you to let it out.

“Well, um”, you say, thinking desperately. Letting the thing out is the last thing you’d like to do, but honestly you don’t see how it can help you if you don’t open the door. If only you could remember how others have handled this scenario! “Let’s say I do. I’m not used to dealing with your kind, so I’ll be straightforward: What’s in it for me?”

Your thoughts spin wildly as you second-guess yourself, but it’s done. Now let’s see how it responds.

What’s in it for him?

We’re probably the only two people left alive, if your condition can be called “alive”, and he wants to know what’s in it for him?

Ha.. ha ha..

You actually rattle out a short laugh, the question is so absurd. That turns into a coughing fit; weakened as you are, you fail to bring anything up, but you’re starting to have trouble breathing. Not because the air is bad.. the air here is still fine. It’s just, your lungs are not.

“Luckily”, you’ll be able to survive a minimum of five minutes after your breathing fails entirely.

Gasping, trying your best to live just a little longer, you answer the question. Or rant about the question. One or the other.

You flinch backwards, as your question provokes terrible noises and a burst of the most awful laughter. There’s a gaping pit in your stomach.. you’re not sure you can handle this, dealing with monsters is not a good idea.

Before you can lose your nerve, the thing starts talking. You’re forced to step closer to properly understand what it’s saying.

“You.. cough. You want something from me? I don’t have anything! All that’s in here is a dead guy, my mad scribblings, and my nanite-zombified corpse!” There’s a sound like a beast throwing up its innards, before it speaks again. “And I’m starving to death! You suck! Get me out of here!”

Well, it doesn’t sound like any kind of monster you’ve ever heard of. Did it say it was a zombie? No, zombies can’t talk, but.. if it’s some new kind of zombie... You have to be careful, it could easily be infectious.

For a thing that doesn’t have anything, it sure had no trouble zeroing in on the exact kind of thing you’d like to have. It’s odd, though; even monsters need verbiage, probably more than most. You have to consider the possibility that it’s merely trying to fool you.

Still, you can’t let this chance pass. “So I can have the verbiage, then?”

There’s a moment of silence.

“The.. verbiage? What, you mean my scribblings?” The monster is a lot quieter now, and harder to make out. “Sure, whatever, knock yourself out. Just help me out of here. You’re mad, you know that?”

You nod to yourself. It’ll probably try to betray you, but it’s a sealed beast. Perhaps it’s been weakened enough by starvation - you hope it was telling the truth about that - that it’s no threat to you, separated from physics as you are.

“I’ll open the door, then,” you tell it. It doesn’t respond.

You look at the door. It does have a handle, but judging by the indicator lights.. you try it out, and as you thought, the door fails to open. It’s quite locked. This is a problem; you have yet to come across anything like keys, nor does the door in fact have a keyhole. The monster might know.

“Ah.. the door is locked. Do you know how to open it?”

It responds, after a short delay. “I thought you had a master key. You can’t open it from the outside without one.. cough. Look, I can open it from in here.” It pauses. “You do have an extra suit or breather, right?”

“Breather? No, nothing like that. Why would you need..” It makes a horrible coughing noise, making you stop talking.

“Are you an idiot, or what? There’s no air out there, I can’t survive without air! Well, not for more than a few minutes. Look, I can probably borrow your own breather, if you have the respirocytes, and since you’re still alive I guess you do. How far is your base camp?”

You feel perspiration on your forehead. You.. don’t understand. This conversation isn’t going at all like you expected, and the monster is talking like it’s the same flesh and blood as you, though you don’t understand the reference to.. “respirocytes”, was it?

You don’t have what it’s asking for, and you’re starting to think it might not be a good idea to let it die without understanding the situation fully, even if it would be really easy to fool it into asphyxiating. Come to think of it, didn’t it say it could survive a few minutes even without air? That might be enough to kill you, if you betray it...

The only base camp you might be said to have is in another world. You can’t take it there, but maybe you could make up a new one.

136 paragraphs remaining

[ ] Trick the monster, take what it owns for yourself.
[ ] Cooperate, make a new world to bring it to. (cost: 1 tablet)
- [ ] Also spend the verbiage to keep a link back here. (cost: 50 paragraphs)
- [ ] A world with these features:
[ ] ..?


(Aside: You can look up respirocytes on Wikipedia.)

make a new world with food, water, and air in easy supply. as in, you use it and when you look around you see some, like, fruits instantly.

also, don't natives just have direct access to their world's supply? you didn't have to go to a bank every day and pick up some more. get it to draw a map to the storage area, then come back and rush there.

oh yeah, make a link back here. the link to the new place should survive laying here for a bit right? so you can pick it back up.

You're overlooking the obvious. It needs air, right? That means it's a native of this world. From before the atomic disaster hit. You're protected from the damage and lack of air by being out of sync with this world's physics. The creature in there is sustained only by the fact that room is sealed. And barely, it would seem.

The creature assumes you to be another inhabitant of it's own world (a safe assumption, in most cases!). Flesh and blood. That's why it assumes you have a 'breather' or 'respirocytes'. Obviously, whatever they are, they are things that might keep a native alive in these conditions.

>make a new world for it
How long could we sustain such a world? How stable would it be?

Regardless, that seems the best course of action. You cannot rescue the creature in the manner it expects, since you do not have the devices it needs. And making a link is a good idea- this creature may prove useful. If nothing else, a source of information about this world.

>A world with these features:
Something with birds.

In addition to the obvious niceties. Air, land, water, gravity, food. A place to rest, and medical supplies might be good too.

> How long could we sustain such a world? How stable would it be?
That depends on how thoroughly it is described. The cost is 1 tablet (or 200 paragraphs) regardless, but unfortunately your imagination is very bad, so it's going to depend on suggestions.

Incomplete (or inconsistent) worlds will have missing bits filled in at random, and will eventually destabilize.

>>531370
Oh, Geeze. Good thing I asked. Time to start spouting details, then.

...oh much does size matter here? This is a 'world', but how big does it have to be? If I don't describe a whole planet, is all that getting filled in?

Let's place this at the edge of a verdant forest. Temperate climate. The weather is favorable, and birds fly the sky, and occasionally let song loose upon the air. There is a house on the edge of this forest, shaded from the noonday heat, but positions to catch the rays of the rising and setting sun. The home is empty- but well stocked. Stores of food enough to last a for seasons. Clothes, bedding, tools, toiletries, bandages, etc. Everything you would expect in a home in it's place, looking as if it had been tended for and built up with care for years, but curiously, no sign of any caretaker.

No large or dangerous beasts roam the woods. No parasites or vicious insects. There are no signs of other people, or any civilization.

The forest is lush, though. Edible berries, roots, and mushrooms abound. There is a nearby stream of fresh water, flowing into a larger pond. Fish swim the waters, but none dangerous to swimmers.

Snow-capped mountains can be seen in the distance, past the pond, and the forest. There is no indication what lies beyond, or if, indeed, anything does.

The sky is blue at day, and dark at night. The sun is an ordinary yellow, there is but one moon, and many stars. But not a moon or stars known to either protagonist.

...that more stable?

> ...oh much does size matter here? This is a 'world', but how big does it have to be? If I don't describe a whole planet, is all that getting filled in?
Anything you don't describe will get filled in at random. "Filled in" doesn't mean just descriptions of areas, it includes gravity, length of day, shape of the planet (if it is a planet), etc.

Think of it as phrasing a wish. To a GM. Who really enjoys finding loopholes, but is chaotic neutral.

> ...that more stable?
Well, it won't fall apart anytime soon.

gravity, a stately 1G,

length of day, from noon to noon is a normal 24 hours.

can probably describe the "country with no neighbors" effect himself since that is where he lived.

>gravity, a stately 1G,
Presuming, of course, this is what both protagonists are used to moving in. If not, we adjust the new world to meet their standards.

Air composition should be breathable (if the protagonists have different standards, settle for a reasonable middle ground) and not in any danger of becoming less so.

We're not set up on a major tectonic fault line, no volcanoes nearby, the river and pond isn't prone to flooding, there are no impending astronomical events of any dangerous nature, the food available isn't poisonous or going to prompt allergic reactions in either protagonist, we're not in the path of major storms or weather events, the forest isn't dry enough to easily burn down, the house is sturdy, well built, and not filled with hazardous construction materials.

>wish, loopholes
Blessed greased +2 gray dragon scale mail!

>>531403
a G is based on a conceptual standard. a person would think of their home-world as "1G".