wanders around while the others set up their campsite. He may not have spent much time outside his private world of tomes and thoughts, but he’s studied how to build a campsite before, and he figures he could swing it if absolutely necessary. But such mundane thoughts can wait, he decides, when there’s a completely new world wholly unknown to the Samudrans for him to observe, study, and record. “Besides, while many hands lighten the load, there can also be too many cooks in the kitchen,” he mutters to himself under his breath, clearly searching for any excuse to satisfy his long-denied curiosity. He may not have gotten to spend much time in the Sanctuary, nor on the Obsidian Road, but he’s determined to bring knowledge - real, definite knowledge - back with him in some form or another.
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- Aurelius
- The Awoken
Scene Archives
← Active ScenesAlmachadta - Near the Campsite
Careful not to stray too far from the clearing and into the wilderness beyond the tree line, he stops and crouches to consider the plants that make up the foliage here, careful not to make contact. He looks for any signs of animal life and observes which plants the animals gravitate towards and which, if any, they give a wide berth to.
What would be an appropriate roll for this line of inquiry?
ꙮ That would be a Flourishing Gnosis at DC 4 to gain a gestalt understanding of the relevant ecosystem. (Recall the existence of Quick Study - it is applicable here.)
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The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 3.
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The Archivist/Archie used their techné Quick Study (Use Blue instead of Green when your instincts have been informed by observation and analysis.)
- The Archivist/Archie spent 1 Arete and now has 1 remaining.
ꙮ [Success] As you study the flora and fauna, something in particular jumps out at you as interesting, in comparison with your memories - sometimes fleeting, sometimes remarkably specific - of Samudra and its ecosystem. Samudra is a -hungry- world - you recall flashes of swimming among the near-surface kelp-forests with (???) and, afterwards, comparing notes about what each of you had learned; you remember, at the Academy, working on ways to increase crop yields, you remember being up late enough that (???) brandishing a daikon and yelling ‘every single radish matters’ brought you both to tears with laughter - you recall that Samudra is a hungry world. ⁂
ꙮ Almachadta… is not. You feel like you might look for hours, or days, or weeks, or months, before finding a plant that is not being eaten, or does not show signs of recently having been gnawed on; the trees flower and attract insects, give bounties of fruit. Almost nothing is -avoided-. 🙧
stares at the teeming bounty of life and begins to well up with quiet emotion. How different would Samudra be if it were more like this? How much conflict could be avoided, how many lives could be nurtured, how many restful nights could be basked in, if mere survival did not require such extremes of thought, attentiveness, and resourcefulness? He takes a moment to consider such a thing, but decides rather abruptly to distract himself by committing to memory some of the nearby plants - the colors, the shapes of their leaves, any seeming analogues from back in the hydroponics farms. Would that he had some paper to write things down on, but he woke up in the Sanctuary nearly devoid of all possessions, and he had hardly found time to procure replacements. ⁂
Sanctuary. Just the thought of it put a chill down his spine. He had spent his whole life prior to waking up on that slab dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, turning his mind into a repository for information of all kinds. Having it shattered and fragmented, rendered inaccessible except in brief flashes… But he has no choice but to rely on it again now, for wont of better options, fragile and frail as it had proven to be. He takes a single leaf from each of a few nearby plants, gently but firmly pressing them between his palms to accelerate their drying, delicately tucking them into a pocket of his jacket. “At least the Architect had the decency to let me keep my clothes,” he thinks to himself, and the thought brings him a brief flash of a smile at his own joke. ⁂
Seemingly satisfied with his exploration of the local ecosystem, he heads back to the river, dropping in a stone to roughly assess its depth and to check for any especially large moving shadows. [X]
I don't know if this requires a roll necessarily, but it's more or less the same thing I was doing with the more forested area - would this be Flourishing/Pellucid again?
ꙮ Flourishing Gnosis, DC 2/8, Quick Study applies.
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The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 1.
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The Archivist/Archie used their techné Quick Study (Use Blue instead of Green when your instincts have been informed by observation and analysis.)
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I'll accept the failure on this one on the assumption that it's too late to take half and succeed on the lower DC
- The Archivist/Archie has gained 1 Arete, and now has 2.
ꙮ The river is pleasant - it’s certainly more well-behaved than water you know you’ve swum about in, on any number of occasions; wide enough to be a river and not a creek, but only just. There IS a bottom to it, which does immediately strike you as a little bit strange, depths that CAN be fathomed - not really a technique you’ve had the chance to practice, all things considered, but the water’s clear enough that you can get a visual on enough of it to feel confident it doesn’t get surprisingly treacherous depth-wise. It is, however, outside of your normal experience of water, in fascinating and distracting ways.
cautiously takes off one shoe and then the other, setting them to the side as he begins to wade in the water, eyes peeled for anything that could be described as a “maw eel”. Immediately, the sensation of his feet slowly submerging in water begins to set him at ease, and he dives fully in, leaving on the rest of his (water-resistant, naturally) clothes on, relishing the mix of the comfortingly familiar and the awesomely novel. Satisfied that he’s far enough away from the others to not immediately be seen but close enough to be within shouting distance, he allows himself to engage in an activity which could only be described as frolicking, diving down to the bottom of the river and back up again, faster and faster, in joyful and triumphant loops before finally settling to float on his back on the surface and look up towards the Centrelight. ⁂
The intensity of the light still feels blinding to behold, even though from what the others described, this isn’t the height of its power. Looking up and seeing half of the world looking back still dizzies him slightly, but here in the water, he feels a little more sure of himself, a little safer. He begins to scan the horizon, looking to see if there are distinctive biomes or structures or if this whole world looks lush and dense in the same way the local surroundings do. 🙧
ꙮ Give me either a Pellucid or Liminal, DC 3?
- The Archivist/Archie invoked their 🌌liminal gnosis [d4] -> 2.
- The Archivist/Archie spent 1 Arete and now has 1 remaining.
ꙮ You observe, and then you observe, and then you observe . You look towards the Centrelight- so very different from the shafts of light that would occasionally pierce through Samudra’s clouds, or the uniform azure of Samudra’s cloudless sky, and your eyes acclimate to it - trained at a level that surpasses the conscious to look at gnosis and see its workings, see the patterns of gnosis playing out across the entirety of the biosphere. It is very nearly uniform - a fractal net of paths and branches and roots, all shaped like itself - more mountainous regions here, forests there, no clear -structure- or hierarchy, all lush with life, regular (except where it isn’t. Here and there, regions where the gnosis curls in on itself, dense and tangled, disorganised.) There is, also, a density function that suggests itself - the closer to the umbilical to the Centrelight, the more complexly the gnosis ramifies.
files this knowledge away, making a mental note to bring up his own observations with the local residents in general and with Wolf in particular. He closes his eyes for a few brief minutes, doing everything he can to center himself before coming back out of the water, allowing it to simply slide off of him and his clothes, donning his shoes and heading back to rejoin the others at camp. 🙧
And, scene! That's all I had in mind in terms of things I wanted to accomplish here. Thank you so much for running this for me!
ꙮ As you’re on the way out of the water, you notice… that which was lurking in the depths, that you must have missed, before… having snuck up on you, while you were frolicking, unaware of its existence…! ⁂
ꙮ …it’s on one of your pant-legs, looking rather confused as to why it’s not getting what it wanted out of this entire experience - a tiny, wiggling little thing with a scrunched-up mouth, having mercifully failed to get any purchase whatsoever with any of its ENTIRELY too many incredibly tiny teeth, it slips off the pant-leg as you shake the water off yourself and goes flying back into the river with a lil plop . Better hunting next time, I guess? 🙧
yelps in confusion and astonishment before straightening himself back up. “Dignified.”
ꙮ Truly.