Post by eunomiczenith on Dec 14, 2016 1:04:34 GMT
Hello, eunomicZenith here, native Guide of Time. If you, like me, are a Sburb player, then you've probably heard the word "daemon" once or twice, at least by reading grindinglyGodliest's renowned FAQ. However, due to the timetrav encryption issues that have affected said guide, the chapters that actually talk about some of the more exotic stuff aren't available - or maybe there was never anything to read, especially considering just how hard this info is to come by. Well, I'm in luck, since I happen to know a couple of benevolent Void-dweller friends in the form of Lillian and Fred. This means you are in luck as well, since you now get to read this chapter which is me babbling about some stuff most players don't know about.
First off, let's clear up one big cause of confusion. In some older texts, including GG's guide, you'll find the term "daemon" used referring to a particular class of extremely dangerous beings. The term currently in use as of this timestamp for those entities is "Skippers".
I'm just going to write a few lines on Skippers. They're definitely the creatures in Paradox Space we know the least about. They are typically endowed with stupidly big amounts of aspect power, enough to make an encounter with one of them generally a death sentence for anything that gets attacked. Their origins are unclear. Possibly there is no one single way they're born. They all have in common one thing: Sburb is often found using Skippers to wreak havoc on any attempts from players to escape from the game's trauma factory (which btw epinephrineElectrified excellently describes here). Players that manage to live in the Furthest Ring (especially if more than one at a given place) attract them. Exceedingly clustered dream bubbles with nice, lively communities of ghosts are also too good to be true and thus targeted.
Either way, nowadays the term "daemon" is used to generically refer to a sleeveful of various entities that are in some sense intruders in the Sburban world. They're not players, nor normal Sburb constructs like sprites, consorts, carapacians and denizens.
The list includes:
*Angels ARE generated by the game in the Underworlds of lands, but a widespread theory nowadays is that they're intruders that managed to somehow become symbiotic with the game. I mean, this would explain why they're so heavily gifted with gamebreaking potential and corruptive like the Others.
I originally wanted to write a guide on all the different types of daemons, but then I realized that little is known about Skippers and there are better guides than I could ever write on Others, Angels and Saccharine Doppelgangers. So this guide is, aside from this introduction session, dedicated on the topic of Elementals.
Lillian herself, one of the major info sources this document is based on, is a player-friendly Elemental, or as she likes to call herself, a "goddess of Rain and Mist". Elementals are entities that are sometimes pretty much spontaneously born amidst the empty spaces of the Furthest Ring, and they're pretty much made of raw Aspect stuff.
To understand Elementals better, it's a good idea to delve a bit deeper into the mechanism behind their birth. This will be... slightly complicated, and I'm already simplifying this down considerably from the simplified explanation that Lils gave me. Long story short, this is a messy subject that tends to straddle the limits of what human minds can grasp, so my explanation here is the equivalent of trying to explain quantum computing to a six-year-old. ... Except, the supersimplified version IS essentially Sburban quantum mechanics. You're welcome.
Either way, if your brainitude value is too low to science, feel free to skip the next four paragraphs to spare yourself the brunt of the sciencey talk.
In the mainstream physics theory that was common on consensus Earth, it was taught that vacuum wasn't really "absolute empty", but rather made of different "fields" (electron field, for example), bubbling with tiny-ass particles and antiparticles that pop into existence in pairs, then meet each other and annihilate themselves out of existence. Well, it turns out that Sburb space works in a similar way.
The field of the universe as we know it is simply the Space-Time field, and it keeps every other field pretty subdued, making sure that (unless Aspect powers are being used) the only forces that matter in reality are those we're accustomed to. Sure, Sburb royally fucked our understanding of even classical physics into submission with its flagrant ad-hoc physics (like the reverse gravity in the Underworld, just to name one), but at least it fucked them over in a relatively consistent manner. Barring game-made exceptions, glitches and aspect-force interferences, the spacetime in your session is nicely coherent, with linear time and the cartesian axes of space neatly perpendicular and all that. Things are not always so, though.
Anyone who has ever probed the Furthest Ring will tell you that spacetime there is a mess. Time is completely nonlinear, space topology is something out of a severely non-euclidean nightmare, and the laws of physics do sometimes go out for a picnic. All this weirdness is because the Space-Time field in the Furthest Ring is thin and therefore can't properly enforce the neat and orderly laws of physics you're used to. This means that, to cross the Furthest Ring, you need some means to linearize time and iron out space, or else you're going nowhere.
This thinness also makes the Furthest Ring by far the easiest place to outright poke a hole in the Space-Time field. Cracks in spacetime can be created by stuff like Cataclysms of Wastes/Graces of Space/Time/sometimes even Rain or Sand, or by Skippers. But whatever the source of the damage, the effect is the same: gaps are tore open in the fabric itself of spacetime, showing an abstract non-spatiotemporal stringy void behind, and then there's no more inhibiting effect on the rest of the fields. The Blood/Breath, Coins/Dust etc. etc. etc. fields, they all show through and bleed through the crack. You remember how before I talked about particles and antiparticles popping in and out of reality? Well, the Space-Time field is what makes sure that whatever pops in also pops out. But with a crack in it, it can't do its job, so yeah, charges of an aspect and its opposite will pop into reality and then not destroy each other.
So yay, we've reached the part where random aspect charges come to exist and float around in the Furthest Ring, and this is where Elementals come in. Elementals are what happens when these aspect forces that are lying around manage to aggregate to the point they reach conciousness, a bit like how stars are what happens when matter aggregates enough to reach the temperature for nuclear fusion.
Now, truth be told I've only met two Elementals, Lillian and glacialWatcher, and I should consider myself lucky considering just how damn rare Elementals are, not to mention fully sentient ones. However, thankfully, Lillian and Fred (who, for those who don't know him, is a player-friendly Other) have been basically living in the Furthest Ring and going around the endless expanses of the place for God knows how long, so they've luckily managed to meet a few Elementals. Unfortunately, none of them was even comparable to the likes of Lillian, generally lacking sentience beyond the realm of obsessive thought. Still, that's at least some data, and offers us the chance to formulate some decent hypotheses, especially when we take into account what we already know about aspects and apply a bit of good ol' logic.
First off... Elementals, depending on how aggregated they are and by what aspects they're made of, can be:
Up next: it's very likely that some aspects have greater capability towards forming bodies or granting sentience than others. For example, the only two Elementals I've met are both Mist-containing; this is to be expected because Mist happens to likely be the single best candidate for body formation due to its substantiating properties, and is a good sentience-giving aspect due to its capability to mimic existing sentient beings.
But Mist may not be the only thing that can form corporeal bodies or grant sentience; Life is another aspect that is thought to be pretty good at it because, making life, you know? Other aspects with a tendency to "hold things together" like Blood, Might and Stars or creation potential like Dreams are also probably better than average at body formation. On the other hand, aspects heavily implied in the concept of thinking and personality - which pretty much means "Heart and Mind" - are good candidates for granting sentience. (On that note, I'd personally like to flip the bird to the flock of dumb af sheep that GW managed to link himself to, thus ruining potentially excellent live data on Mind elementals. Seriously, fuck 'em.) For the same principle, other aspects such as Sand and Breath are probably bad candidates because if you want to make yourself a body or a mind then disunifying, weakening, shredding and destroying are the last things you want to do.
I also think some aspects may be directly linked to Elementals being benevolent or malevolent. Think about it: Lillian being kinda psycho and having chaotic, murder-inclined tendencies is possibly a direct consequence of her containing Rain, the aspect of madness. On the other hand it's easy to see how added Life may make an Elemental more nurturing and value human lives more, because that's kinda the actual lesson of the aspect. And then we get to Sand and Breath, two aspects that love ripping things to shreds, oppose bonding, and, in the former's case, promote trickery and dishonesty. If Life sounds like it could be nice, those two sound majorly dangerous and kinda malevolent to me.
This is where I noticed a pattern: the aspects I speculate to be good at forming bodies and/or sentience seem to be pretty benevolent or neutral at worst in intent. Meanwhile Sand and Breath are... not good at forming that stuff, and they're probably pretty nasty. This makes me think there could be an implicit bias in the formation of more benevolent-neutral Elementals rather than malevolent ones.
Also, we think Void Elementals probably do not exist. And there's a simple reason why. Void kinda tends to erase whatever it touches. This also makes additional sense when you think that it's the opposite of Mist, aka the best at forming Elementals.
Part 1: What Are Daemons?
First off, let's clear up one big cause of confusion. In some older texts, including GG's guide, you'll find the term "daemon" used referring to a particular class of extremely dangerous beings. The term currently in use as of this timestamp for those entities is "Skippers".
I'm just going to write a few lines on Skippers. They're definitely the creatures in Paradox Space we know the least about. They are typically endowed with stupidly big amounts of aspect power, enough to make an encounter with one of them generally a death sentence for anything that gets attacked. Their origins are unclear. Possibly there is no one single way they're born. They all have in common one thing: Sburb is often found using Skippers to wreak havoc on any attempts from players to escape from the game's trauma factory (which btw epinephrineElectrified excellently describes here). Players that manage to live in the Furthest Ring (especially if more than one at a given place) attract them. Exceedingly clustered dream bubbles with nice, lively communities of ghosts are also too good to be true and thus targeted.
Either way, nowadays the term "daemon" is used to generically refer to a sleeveful of various entities that are in some sense intruders in the Sburban world. They're not players, nor normal Sburb constructs like sprites, consorts, carapacians and denizens.
The list includes:
- Elementals
- Others / Horrorterrors
- Angels*
- Saccharine doppelgangers
- Skippers
*Angels ARE generated by the game in the Underworlds of lands, but a widespread theory nowadays is that they're intruders that managed to somehow become symbiotic with the game. I mean, this would explain why they're so heavily gifted with gamebreaking potential and corruptive like the Others.
I originally wanted to write a guide on all the different types of daemons, but then I realized that little is known about Skippers and there are better guides than I could ever write on Others, Angels and Saccharine Doppelgangers. So this guide is, aside from this introduction session, dedicated on the topic of Elementals.
Part 2: Elementals' birth and the Aspect Field Theory
Lillian herself, one of the major info sources this document is based on, is a player-friendly Elemental, or as she likes to call herself, a "goddess of Rain and Mist". Elementals are entities that are sometimes pretty much spontaneously born amidst the empty spaces of the Furthest Ring, and they're pretty much made of raw Aspect stuff.
To understand Elementals better, it's a good idea to delve a bit deeper into the mechanism behind their birth. This will be... slightly complicated, and I'm already simplifying this down considerably from the simplified explanation that Lils gave me. Long story short, this is a messy subject that tends to straddle the limits of what human minds can grasp, so my explanation here is the equivalent of trying to explain quantum computing to a six-year-old. ... Except, the supersimplified version IS essentially Sburban quantum mechanics. You're welcome.
Either way, if your brainitude value is too low to science, feel free to skip the next four paragraphs to spare yourself the brunt of the sciencey talk.
In the mainstream physics theory that was common on consensus Earth, it was taught that vacuum wasn't really "absolute empty", but rather made of different "fields" (electron field, for example), bubbling with tiny-ass particles and antiparticles that pop into existence in pairs, then meet each other and annihilate themselves out of existence. Well, it turns out that Sburb space works in a similar way.
The field of the universe as we know it is simply the Space-Time field, and it keeps every other field pretty subdued, making sure that (unless Aspect powers are being used) the only forces that matter in reality are those we're accustomed to. Sure, Sburb royally fucked our understanding of even classical physics into submission with its flagrant ad-hoc physics (like the reverse gravity in the Underworld, just to name one), but at least it fucked them over in a relatively consistent manner. Barring game-made exceptions, glitches and aspect-force interferences, the spacetime in your session is nicely coherent, with linear time and the cartesian axes of space neatly perpendicular and all that. Things are not always so, though.
Anyone who has ever probed the Furthest Ring will tell you that spacetime there is a mess. Time is completely nonlinear, space topology is something out of a severely non-euclidean nightmare, and the laws of physics do sometimes go out for a picnic. All this weirdness is because the Space-Time field in the Furthest Ring is thin and therefore can't properly enforce the neat and orderly laws of physics you're used to. This means that, to cross the Furthest Ring, you need some means to linearize time and iron out space, or else you're going nowhere.
This thinness also makes the Furthest Ring by far the easiest place to outright poke a hole in the Space-Time field. Cracks in spacetime can be created by stuff like Cataclysms of Wastes/Graces of Space/Time/sometimes even Rain or Sand, or by Skippers. But whatever the source of the damage, the effect is the same: gaps are tore open in the fabric itself of spacetime, showing an abstract non-spatiotemporal stringy void behind, and then there's no more inhibiting effect on the rest of the fields. The Blood/Breath, Coins/Dust etc. etc. etc. fields, they all show through and bleed through the crack. You remember how before I talked about particles and antiparticles popping in and out of reality? Well, the Space-Time field is what makes sure that whatever pops in also pops out. But with a crack in it, it can't do its job, so yeah, charges of an aspect and its opposite will pop into reality and then not destroy each other.
So yay, we've reached the part where random aspect charges come to exist and float around in the Furthest Ring, and this is where Elementals come in. Elementals are what happens when these aspect forces that are lying around manage to aggregate to the point they reach conciousness, a bit like how stars are what happens when matter aggregates enough to reach the temperature for nuclear fusion.
Part 3: Categorization and Composition of Elementals
Now, truth be told I've only met two Elementals, Lillian and glacialWatcher, and I should consider myself lucky considering just how damn rare Elementals are, not to mention fully sentient ones. However, thankfully, Lillian and Fred (who, for those who don't know him, is a player-friendly Other) have been basically living in the Furthest Ring and going around the endless expanses of the place for God knows how long, so they've luckily managed to meet a few Elementals. Unfortunately, none of them was even comparable to the likes of Lillian, generally lacking sentience beyond the realm of obsessive thought. Still, that's at least some data, and offers us the chance to formulate some decent hypotheses, especially when we take into account what we already know about aspects and apply a bit of good ol' logic.
First off... Elementals, depending on how aggregated they are and by what aspects they're made of, can be:
- Cloud-like or corporeal (or anywhere in-between). Despite lacking a body, cloud-like Elementals of good enough intelligence may still be able to operate a computer device if they stumble upon an appropriately equipped one.
- Anywhere from nearly non-sentient to extremely human-like or even super-intelligent (as would probably be the case for a hypothetical Mind Elemental).
- Benevolent to malevolent. Aka from "would intervene to help out players", like how GW did saving us from death by invincible Black King, to "is pretty murderous and chaos-oriented" which is Lillian. Better or worse ones may exist; we don't know.
Up next: it's very likely that some aspects have greater capability towards forming bodies or granting sentience than others. For example, the only two Elementals I've met are both Mist-containing; this is to be expected because Mist happens to likely be the single best candidate for body formation due to its substantiating properties, and is a good sentience-giving aspect due to its capability to mimic existing sentient beings.
But Mist may not be the only thing that can form corporeal bodies or grant sentience; Life is another aspect that is thought to be pretty good at it because, making life, you know? Other aspects with a tendency to "hold things together" like Blood, Might and Stars or creation potential like Dreams are also probably better than average at body formation. On the other hand, aspects heavily implied in the concept of thinking and personality - which pretty much means "Heart and Mind" - are good candidates for granting sentience. (On that note, I'd personally like to flip the bird to the flock of dumb af sheep that GW managed to link himself to, thus ruining potentially excellent live data on Mind elementals. Seriously, fuck 'em.) For the same principle, other aspects such as Sand and Breath are probably bad candidates because if you want to make yourself a body or a mind then disunifying, weakening, shredding and destroying are the last things you want to do.
I also think some aspects may be directly linked to Elementals being benevolent or malevolent. Think about it: Lillian being kinda psycho and having chaotic, murder-inclined tendencies is possibly a direct consequence of her containing Rain, the aspect of madness. On the other hand it's easy to see how added Life may make an Elemental more nurturing and value human lives more, because that's kinda the actual lesson of the aspect. And then we get to Sand and Breath, two aspects that love ripping things to shreds, oppose bonding, and, in the former's case, promote trickery and dishonesty. If Life sounds like it could be nice, those two sound majorly dangerous and kinda malevolent to me.
This is where I noticed a pattern: the aspects I speculate to be good at forming bodies and/or sentience seem to be pretty benevolent or neutral at worst in intent. Meanwhile Sand and Breath are... not good at forming that stuff, and they're probably pretty nasty. This makes me think there could be an implicit bias in the formation of more benevolent-neutral Elementals rather than malevolent ones.
For those who were wondering, Space and Time, when emitted by the cracks in reality, are mostly used to heal it over long periods of time. The small remaining part may end up in Elementals, maybe, where it could help with being more "real" and less "pure concept", more spatiotemporally sensed and less incomprehensibly eldritch, but Space and Time are essentially inert sentience-ways and morality-ways so they probably wouldn't affect the Elemental beyond stabilizing them spatiotemporally or granting them Space/Time powers, obviously.
Also, we think Void Elementals probably do not exist. And there's a simple reason why. Void kinda tends to erase whatever it touches. This also makes additional sense when you think that it's the opposite of Mist, aka the best at forming Elementals.
Part 4: Mind Elemental Speculation
To conclude, I had one final flight of imagination, this one way more off-the-rails and lacking in logical deductions or data to be based upon, regarding Mind Elementals. First off, I assume they could easily be fuckall super-intelligent, as I said before, because it's Mind. If you've ever met a first-time Mind player then chances are you noticed a pretty unsettling difference between their intelligence level at the start of a session and at the end of it, because by the end they're all wrapped up in the Path and that provides a damn big Brainitude buff, the ability to visualize alternate scenarios with superhuman lucidity and make astonishingly well-thought-out plans/reasonings/choices, etcetera. And that is a *person* imbued with Mind. For all I know, Mind Elementals, being made of the damn raw stuff, could get some hundreds of IQ like nothing, and that's the point where they could become able to play like a fiddle any other given sentient being who isn't as brainy. Essentially, it's part of the same concerns that high-end Artificial Superhuman Intelligence (ASI) raises, except in a Sburban format.
But possibly even more dangerous is the fact that Mind is the aspect of free will. Like... Let's be clear, Sburb is NOT a nice place to be a sentient being in. Sburb does its best to riddle you with traumas like the holes of a pasta strainer, forcibly mold your personality into whatever it wants, force you to play along with its designs, deprive you of social contact, and install all sorts of Orwellian-sounding mechanisms like Maturity Quests with effects that weld themselves to your personality, Exiles that issue direct mind commands and forbid suicide, psybuffs that alter your mind's working who knows how, etcetera. And God forbid you try to rebel to Sburb's tyrannical regime: you'll wind up dead due to Knife's Edge or, in the case you manage to get yourself a nice place to stay in the Void somehow, have to still fear a Skipper assault. It's pretty fucking easy to see how the aspect of free will and independent thinking and stuff would not take kindly to this kind of situation. Extra points: Fate is the one aspect that pretty much translates to "trust your instincts, trust the game to guide you". Well, Mind is Fate's radical opposite. Where Fate is blind abandon to instincts, Mind is hyper-lucid awareness and critical thinking and judgement. Mind is exactly the one aspect that would rebel against Sburb. And when a super-intelligent being capable of playing people like fiddles decides it wants to declare war on the omnipotent game we've learned to call our reality, things get fucking dangerous, especially if it convinces people to do gamebreaking stuff.
Only thing even worse than that, while we're thinking catastrophically? Mind AND Sand together. The overwhelming brains AND the deceptiveness and malicious intent to break things apart, create discord, dissolve social groups, etc. But luckily, the chances of that happening are infinitesimal. It's all a bad dream. Not gonna happen. You can sleep tight without worrying about supervillainous mastermind abominations.
In the remote event that the reader may stumble upon an Elemental, I'll be happy to have shed some light on this obscure topic worthy of your attention. Good luck.
To conclude, I had one final flight of imagination, this one way more off-the-rails and lacking in logical deductions or data to be based upon, regarding Mind Elementals. First off, I assume they could easily be fuckall super-intelligent, as I said before, because it's Mind. If you've ever met a first-time Mind player then chances are you noticed a pretty unsettling difference between their intelligence level at the start of a session and at the end of it, because by the end they're all wrapped up in the Path and that provides a damn big Brainitude buff, the ability to visualize alternate scenarios with superhuman lucidity and make astonishingly well-thought-out plans/reasonings/choices, etcetera. And that is a *person* imbued with Mind. For all I know, Mind Elementals, being made of the damn raw stuff, could get some hundreds of IQ like nothing, and that's the point where they could become able to play like a fiddle any other given sentient being who isn't as brainy. Essentially, it's part of the same concerns that high-end Artificial Superhuman Intelligence (ASI) raises, except in a Sburban format.
But possibly even more dangerous is the fact that Mind is the aspect of free will. Like... Let's be clear, Sburb is NOT a nice place to be a sentient being in. Sburb does its best to riddle you with traumas like the holes of a pasta strainer, forcibly mold your personality into whatever it wants, force you to play along with its designs, deprive you of social contact, and install all sorts of Orwellian-sounding mechanisms like Maturity Quests with effects that weld themselves to your personality, Exiles that issue direct mind commands and forbid suicide, psybuffs that alter your mind's working who knows how, etcetera. And God forbid you try to rebel to Sburb's tyrannical regime: you'll wind up dead due to Knife's Edge or, in the case you manage to get yourself a nice place to stay in the Void somehow, have to still fear a Skipper assault. It's pretty fucking easy to see how the aspect of free will and independent thinking and stuff would not take kindly to this kind of situation. Extra points: Fate is the one aspect that pretty much translates to "trust your instincts, trust the game to guide you". Well, Mind is Fate's radical opposite. Where Fate is blind abandon to instincts, Mind is hyper-lucid awareness and critical thinking and judgement. Mind is exactly the one aspect that would rebel against Sburb. And when a super-intelligent being capable of playing people like fiddles decides it wants to declare war on the omnipotent game we've learned to call our reality, things get fucking dangerous, especially if it convinces people to do gamebreaking stuff.
Only thing even worse than that, while we're thinking catastrophically? Mind AND Sand together. The overwhelming brains AND the deceptiveness and malicious intent to break things apart, create discord, dissolve social groups, etc. But luckily, the chances of that happening are infinitesimal. It's all a bad dream. Not gonna happen. You can sleep tight without worrying about supervillainous mastermind abominations.
In the remote event that the reader may stumble upon an Elemental, I'll be happy to have shed some light on this obscure topic worthy of your attention. Good luck.