[LP CYOA] Epic

[Baltika9]

This is what Existence under Dio's bootheel will be like:

 

[Esquilax]

As the energy subsides, while I can barely see through my half open eyes, I can hear Mikey and Rory’s puzzled voices.

“Did you dial down the setting?”

“No, I had it set on instant incineration. My Vajra is working fine. Perhaps it’s yours?”

Ah, so their machinery is imperfect.

As for Dio:

“If you are confident of taking on Iae by yourself. Whereas that might have been possible when it was a passive existence, your contact with Iae has changed it, as much as it has changed you. Even if you manage to subdue it, there is no guarantee you will be able to successfully recover every piece of information that we delete. Do you want to chance that your loved ones might be among some of the lost? There is information that is more… fragile than most… shall we say?” The old man cackles, and instantly I know that he is talking about Kyrie. Even if she is here, right now, she is still information belonging to my universe. I never succeeded in transferring the victims of the Gray Death into another reality; if the universe is destroyed right now, she will go along with it… and with things as they are there is a high chance a lot of the information from the destroyed universe would be corrupted irrevocably.

“Once you become the new god, Senya, you can manipulate almost everything as you see fit. It would be a trivial matter to erase us while keeping your universe safe then. Of course, I’m not even going to pretend that I’ll be helping you. That sort of pretense insults both of us. No, I will fight you every step of the way for my own goals, Senya. Do you know why?”

He drops his grin, his face suddenly serious.

“You are as flawed as the Great Idea, being an offshoot of it. Allowing you to be the new god would only lock you into the same limitations that it has. We would only be postponing our doom, and I, Diogenes Camna, cannot allow that.”

Diogenes Camna’s shrivelled fingers clasp around my wrist. His grip is strong. The grin returns, mocking, probing, jeering.

“So, how about it? The only safe way to destroy me is to open the way for us. One final showdown for the divine throne, once we have cast down its occupant. Are you willing to take that gamble, Hoshikawa Senya, or will you kill me right here and now?”

Dio knows how to deal with the Great Idea, and by extension, Senya. Once we get the Observer out of the way, he'll know how to handle us.

I'd like to point out that at the end of Ean's saga, we had the choice of either going to Olympus with the Yellowstreaks or Crete, where we ended up devouring the Gieloth tree. Now, an interesting bit of metagaming here is that if we chose to go to Olympus, we would have been offered the choice of whether to trust Dio in order to defeat Naram-Master (which would have paved the way for his apotheosis), or to kill the motherfucker, which would have ended with Naram-Master completing his ascension and turning the world into his own sphere.

My point here is that Dio's whole game is putting us in these impossible predicaments, betting on the fact that we are less of an asshole than him in that we don't want to see the world end. Since nobody is a bigger asshole than Dio, he tends to win these sort of bets. Now, this analogy isn't perfect because it doesn't take into account Ean's actions in the universe could end up thwarting Dio and averting a catastrophe, but I just find the parallels interesting.

 

[Stygian Lurker]

C for Ean
B for Senya

 

[Baltika9]

My point here is that Dio's whole game is putting us in these impossible predicaments, betting on the fact that we are less of an asshole than him in that we don't want to see the world end. Since nobody is a bigger asshole than Dio, he tends to win these sort of bets.

Only in this case, he doesn't want existence to end, so we're more or less on equal ground here.

I wonder if Senya hadn't deduced how to kill IAE by himself yet?

 

[treave]

@treave, why was Senya the only one that survived exposure to the Great Idea? Some inherent quality or just dumb luck?

Perfect combination of being weak enough to be affected by the ritual but strong enough to shrug it off. There's an element of luck involved but the cult was breeding for a child towards this end anyway, they just didn't know they succeeded and he didn't look like the strong, healthy Messiah they expected.

 

[treave]

Since you guys opted to cannibalize the bomb for parts I can't tell you whether it'll work anymore. Ean'll head for the Vajra with a 'elite' squad, Adrahasis will try to hang back with the fleet and only retreat if absolutely necessary.

And Senya is facing four Masters.

...The dog is a Master.

 

[Baltika9]

...The dog is a Master.

After all we've seen in this LP, this is by far the weirdest thing. How...is it even sentient? Is it a polymorphed Master?
WhatisthisIdon'teven...

 

[Esquilax]

Since you guys opted to cannibalize the bomb for parts I can't tell you whether it'll work anymore. Ean'll head for the Vajra with a 'elite' squad, Adrahasis will try to hang back with the fleet and only retreat if absolutely necessary.

And Senya is facing four Masters.

...The dog is a Master.

Of course. The only ones who served the creation of the Great Idea were the thirteen entities closest to it. Nobody said they had to all be people. I guess one of the scientists responsible for the project brought their dog to work that day.

@treave, has the dog ever been an avatar? This seriously should have been a plotline. We would have Naram worshipping an interdimensional god who periodically humps his leg and runs after tennis balls. God works in mysterious ways.

The Masters are all loaded with Vajras (EVEN THE DOG!!). Vajra can cut anything and it can't be cut. Senya is now powerful enough to defeat Vajras (BUT HE CAN'T CUT THEM, FOR NOW AT LEAST), but what about Ean? Those Vajras aren't weak-ass fragments, they ARE the true ultimate Vajras. Not all the eleven masters are fighting Senya now, Senya is fighting three of them (Rory, Stella, Mikey), one is dead (Cooper) and the remaining seven are somewhere, at large, and who knows what they can do?

2. Can Senya stop Dio? With Ean and the gang (possibly including Shulgi) he would have better odds. But the fastest option to get there is A, which is also very risky. B and C take more time, but C is much more risky. B gets us much less firepower to fight the Masters (just a elite crew, a entire big-ass ship and the Jupiter bomb). They got Vajras and who knows what beyond the turrets.

3. Do we want Ean to have a Vajra again? Cooper took it from Ean once, but he did that in a dimension created by Cooper in our universe, they are more limited in their own world but they still control their tech. Also Ean is a ton more powerful and experienced now. We might need it fight the Masters' Vajras and perhaps take them for Ean.

1) They're planning on overloading Vajra Shula to create a rift. They are really trying to milk as potential out of that piece as possible, but perhaps Ean can harness that in some way. As for the Masters themselves, they die like any normal human - why do you think the prospect of Marduk creating a gateway had them scared shitless? Vajra itself is just a piece of technology, it's like a gun or a computer. Sure, having a gun might make me more dangerous and having a computer might allow me to do certain things that I can't, but my human form is still full of the same weaknesses.

2) I brought up the metagaming from Chapter 8 because I saw parallels. However, the analogy is inexact because unlike Olympus, here we have Ean and Senya working concurrently, so there's a good chance that Ean's actions could end up influencing things in our favour if we let Dio live.

3) Yes, we want him to control Vajra. Hopefully in order to create a rift into the Master's dimension as well. When Cooper took Vajra from Ean, he was in the void, and he probably had a deeper understanding of the tech than Ean did. Yeah, they're weapons are a problem, but Ean is still the most powerful entity in the universe right now - I doubt their toys are going to stop him so easily.

 

[treave]

Esquilax is correct about the dog. As for being an avatar, no, but it would have been fun if Naram summoned the dog into him and started trying to lick his own balls.

 

[Baltika9]

Does Ean's rocket-surfing strike team include Mere, by any chance?

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

If Ean does fall into the void and the universe does get deleted, is there a chance we could somehow save the lost souls through him? I mean, does he have some sort of connection to them still? I also don't get how the lost souls are supposed to be fragile according to Dio. Wouldn't they be the most stable given their formless state? Also, just how did the Gieloth survive the last reset? Is that known?

 

[treave]

Mere might be there, might not be. Does it matter? She's unlikely to be able to do any harm. The lost souls are technically in limbo, so to speak. They'll be the first to go if any reset happens as their link to reality is tenuous. No one knows what happened with the last cycle except for the Masters. Perhaps Senya can sit them all down for a nice chat and feed the dog or something.

It's not like he doesn't have room to negotiate these favours, Dio isn't so insane as to throw away his only remaining leverage and start screaming "NO MORE TEA AND CRUMPETS! THAT'S THE ONLY THING THESE MASTERS DO EVERY DAY, TEA AND CRUMPETS!!!!" just because Senya wants to talk.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Talking to Dio would actually be pretty awesome...

 

[Kipeci]

A. We were willing to let Dio survive to possibly allow Rei to live on, what has changed aside from adding on a lot of insubstantial folks like Kyrie to the possibly losing side?

 

[Baltika9]

Hey, what happened to Broshen?

 

[treave]

I toyed with the idea of having Dio order the Masters to off him after Cooper, in front of you, but decided it was not a necessary scene. It'd only have pissed more people off.

 

[Azira]

 

[Storyfag]

I wonder why do the Masters accept Dio's commands. What power does he have over them, or how did he convince them to become his lackeys. I don't buy the "colleague" stuff.

 

[treave]

Short answer:

Dio is commanding, manipulative, and for all their technological mastery, most of the Masters just aren't the sort of people who have personalities that could resist him.

 

[Storyfag]

The more you tell us about them, the more they seem to be just a kind of "idiot gods" - brought to their thrones by pure chance and not quite fit to wield their powers. I even think we might pity them. But, of course, that impression might be entirely wrong.

Anyhow, I simply *must* learn all the backstory sooner or later. I do hope you'll be willing to run a Q&A session once the LP is over, so that we'll be able to find out all the things we won't learn during our merry game.

Random thought: what if the Spheres were destroyed by the ghostpocalypse, not by the Masters?

 

[Azira]

What if, somehow, the spheres now are the ghostpocalypse? :dramatichamster:

 

[treave]

The upcoming Ean update should address the Gieloth and the connection to the Devourer. Just because it's physically trapped inside a black hole doesn't mean anything when you're in the void.

I mean...

Uh.

Ean C wins.

 

[Esquilax]

I wonder why do the Masters accept Dio's commands. What power does he have over them, or how did he convince them to become his lackeys. I don't buy the "colleague" stuff.

The twelve people and the dog who became the Masters weren't your alpha-male military badass types a la Ean; they were lab geeks. After an eternity of desperately trying to stave off the apocalypse and already not being the sort of people who are comfortable with violently otherthrowing a charismatic leader like Dio, you could see how they'd be desperate enough to see him as their salvation. And then, when confronted by him, why they would be terrified at what he'd be capable of.

The company seemed rather powerful, almost analogous to the ISC which had once dominated the world economy.
...
We pass by the I.A.E building, which the woman glances at – the first building she’s actually looked at on this little walk. I notice that there’s a small badge on her coat that resembles the emblem of the corporation. She sees me looking at her and waves me on.

Which is why I believe that Dio's story that there was a huge crisis is bullshit. If there were a dimensional crisis of some sort, you better believe the military, with all the R&D it has at its beck and call, would be involved in it, secret or no. Senya theorized that the crisis could have been kept secret from the public, but if it was, why would a company known as Innovative Advanced Electronics be in charge of doing this? If it was the crisis that Dio claims it is, the people who survived wouldn't have been twelve lab geeks and a fucking dog. Some of them would be, but not all of them.

No, the Great Idea was never the attempt to resolve a crisis - it was the crisis. A powerful corporation controls everything, then they decide to make an ambitious project without thinking about what could go wrong. These people were arrogant, not paying attention to the consequences, and they flew too close to the sun. We've seen that their technology is imperfect now, and we know that they fucked up big time to make all of this happen.

 

[Azira]

Dun dun dunnn!

 

[Baltika9]

No, the Great Idea was never the attempt to resolve a crisis - it was the crisis. A powerful corporation controls everything, then they decide to make an ambitious project without thinking about what could go wrong. These people were arrogant, not paying attention to the consequences, and they flew too close to the sun. We've seen that their technology is imperfect now, and we know that they fucked up big time to make all of this happen.

Goddammit, Skynet.