Comic 1160 - Test the "leak"
Posted on 6th Jan 2019, 4:37 PM
in Like a Bullet from Behind
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Author Notes:
You step back into your mindscape, and feel the air near the crack in the wall.
You no longer feel the suction, nor do you hear the hissing.
It seems that maintaining an open portal does, in fact, start to drain you after a while.
You return to Bunker A, and relay this information. You also bring up the prospect of trading up tinfoil hats to help combat the Many's effects. Even if tinfoil itself might not actually provide a defense (you're still... somewhat uncertain on that), maybe the tradesmen will pick up on the intention.
"They need to definitely look like hats when we trade 'em, then," Michelle replies. "Or they might just give us... I dunno, a fridge or somethin'."
Talking with Edison might help, as well--you could figure out more about how she did... well, all the things she did. Understanding the attack could help to formulate a defense.
"We still good on Plan B?," Michelle asks, chuckling. "Things go south, we just flood the place?"
"It should work," Fuse replies. "I can't think of any way they'd fight it. ...Which worries me, 'cuz I can usually figure out how anything could go wrong. Oh, and I've got some gadgets rigged up to cut off Carpenter's signals--that oughta help deal with his robots, anyway. I remember that coming up the last couple times, and having to throw EMP bombs together to fight the worm kinda rushed the production along. Anyway, I'm going to bed before I pass out."
Fuse shuffles off, leaving you, Michelle, Caius, and Liz.
Caius grins after Fuse leaves. "Rigged up some gadgets. Man, it's too cool to be us sometimes."
"Yeah," Michelle says with a smile. "Every once in a while, anyway. Looks like most of our plans are all for tomorrow, so... y'know. Busy day. I guess I'm hittin' the hay, too."
You all end up going to bed, a very packed list of activities and an unknown time limit awaiting you the following day.
How will you kick off tomorrow?
Edit: Wait I’m dumb. I just understood the comment. I’m sure we can find something haha.
Also, maybe throw in a joking question about what she thought of our spiffy aluminium hats.
Trading cat magazines.
The worst case: We get alien magazines with the cutest cats in the universe.
The best case: We GET the cutest cat in the universe.
The only possible downside: addictive cuteness.
or would it end up being a lotus-eater-machine, that simulates the perfect kitten-pile-experience?
For starters today, I suggest the traditional morning ritual of meditation and breakfast, followed by a chat with the ghost girls about imprints, sense of self, dress-up (as a sense of self, imprint exercise thing) and specifically with Edison, astral and psychic combat.
I'm putting down a bet at a... 40% chance that Edison want's to join us in storming Carpenters base.Info ritual -> Ask Edison -> Bunker X
as we do questions, it's probably a good idea to have our friends head off and buy some tin foil and make them into hats to trade up
First, we start by putting some objects in the red that the passage of time effects in an obvious way, like clocks, or some grain and yeast. We stay outside the red and observe them and our mental state as we attempt to accelerate the passage of time relative to the outside world. Once we feel we've gotten the hang of it, we can try accelerating ourselves inside the red. As we've already seen, knowing when to exit the red can be hard, and exiting before or significantly after we enter could have devastating consequences. Knowing that, we will need a way to ensure this does not happen.
Mom's Red told us that exiting the red where there wasn't blood was a bad idea, as was exiting where there was or would be. Exiting the red where there is blood hasn't been hard, so I feel like it would be more difficult to leave at a place where there wasn't blood at any point in the timeline. We can construct a simple test for this without using time travel: push a little on a spot, place blood, try again, wipe up blood, try again. If that's the case, then we can be fairly safe by constructing a portal on a surface just before we enter, and having someone erase it after a set period of time.
However, this method still has issues, as it ventures into the Bill & Ted style of time travel where you do something because you remembered to at a later date, so we shouldn't rely on it unless we absolutely have to. Ideally, we would have a way to identify the time we should leave solely by what we can observe within the red. We can achieve this by putting an object into a state where it is only partially inside the red, and relying on our observations of it inside the red. Here's how I suggest we accomplish this, and what I think should be our primary safeguard for preventing time-related mishaps:
Stick a broom or something halfway into the red when we enter, and after a set time, someone else pulls it out. As long as we don't observe anything outside the red, we should be good to correct our temporal position if needed. Then you just have to make sure you exit while the broom is there. You also need some way to identify the broom for a given red journey, so either we need to change locations, or we need to put a unique identifier on the broom each time. I think the cleanest way to do this is to attach a label to the broom with timestamps for when we will put it in and remove it.
A- Pet the cats. It's known to reduce stress scientifically.
B- Explore the "hello/hell" door.
C- Reunite with the rabbit, see what kind of world is there. It could be another dimension where we could unload the red to test some stuff out. If it is only another world, we could shut the portal off before the red reached Earth.
D- Talk to the ghost girls.
E- Find out Fuse's eye colour.
F- Do more bunker X levels.
G- Trade some level to get more super level. We need it.
H- Ask tradesmen important questions.
I- Trade for better gear.
J- See if all of this magic stuff is negatively affecting any of the animals. (I had a dream where Willard was depressed because his other labrat friend was crushed)
K- Explore the mineshaft on Mars.
L- Talk to the protojuries.
M- Get a billboard.
And frankly, something I've wanted to do since the very beginning:
N- Ask the tradesmen how their day has been. Being a neutral party must be tough sometimes. They might not be able to help us more then they are, but everyone deserves a bit of politeness.
The Red is a psychic space that cannot die, and Nil's entire existence operates by piggybacking on the conceptual echoes of psychic death, i.e. speaking in words made from bits of silence, communicating concepts telepathically by deleting their conceptual shape, or for Nil itself, by creating a static-filled bit of space where observation fails in a manner that produces a visual of Nil.