MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap]

Oh yeah, and final prediction: when that cell door opens, either Alycia won’t be there or she’ll use Jason as her escape plan.

author: Bill G.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6044913

Bill G. said:

  • Assume our description of Hecate’s powers are accurate & she’s in contact with parallel selves. She has prior knowledge of Sepia!Byron’s activities. Aria/Pneuma would be in a good position to evaluate this claim in character, once someone talks to her.

Well, that also raises the question of whether what Byron meant was that Prime!Chin is working with Sepia!Hecate (not Prime!Hecate, which was my first assumption). Which would also be really bad, esp. if the connection between Hecates is real.

  • Assume Sepia!Byron and Sepia!Chin are gone, and Prime!Byron and Prime!Chin are now in the Sepiaverse - Hecate, any Hecate, will probably want one or both gone. She would therefore ally with Prime!Chin to get rid of Prime!Byron, then kill Prime!Chin as well if possible.

That goes right with my thought of Chin/Hecate exploiting each other.

  • If so, she may see Alycia and Jason as useful pawns here and make a play for them.

That will have to be a hell of a play to get Jason to go along with, unless it’s a lot more subtle than that sounds.

Alycia doesn’t seem like she’d play along, either, but if I’m wrong that would be a nasty combination.

author: *** Dave H.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6044918

Bill G. said:

  • Assume our description of Hecate’s powers are accurate & she’s in contact with parallel selves. She has prior knowledge of Sepia!Byron’s activities. Aria/Pneuma would be in a good position to evaluate this claim in character, once someone talks to her.

Well, that also raises the question of whether what Byron meant was that Prime!Chin is working with Sepia!Hecate (not Prime!Hecate, which was my first assumption). Which would also be really bad, esp. if the connection between Hecates is real.

  • Assume Sepia!Byron and Sepia!Chin are gone, and Prime!Byron and Prime!Chin are now in the Sepiaverse - Hecate, any Hecate, will probably want one or both gone. She would therefore ally with Prime!Chin to get rid of Prime!Byron, then kill Prime!Chin as well if possible.

That goes right with my thought of Chin/Hecate exploiting each other.

  • If so, she may see Alycia and Jason as useful pawns here and make a play for them.

That will have to be a hell of a play to get Jason to go along with, unless it’s a lot more subtle than that sounds.

Alycia doesn’t seem like she’d play along, either, but if I’m wrong that would be a nasty combination.

author: *** Dave H.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6044918

A couple of other notes:

1. The Quill/Chin falling out over in the Sepiaverse is completely predictable, esp. if they were trying to reestablish society/civilization here. Mutual cooperation to stop the end of the world? Sure. Mutual cooperation to create a new world political order? Not too many people’s relationships, even the best of them, would survive that.

2. I’m fascinated by the destruction of the world coming from one little conversation never having happened.

author: *** Dave H.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6044921

Sepia!Hecate’s play:

What do both Jason and Alycia want? To get their fathers back. Neither seem likely to move to the Sepiaverse permanently for that (but who knows?). What could she do?

  1. Intercept both kids on their way home. The brute force approach, lacks finesse, but probably doable. Now she has hostages, anyone can figure out where this goes next. She mostly has to worry about Rusty going in to assassinate her.
  2. Hecate’s already demonstrated the ability to put a whammy on Jason’s mind. Convince Jason & Alycia that the whole “if we go back the world goes boom” thing is either bullshit or solvable with her help. She puts on a light show, brainwashes the kids, tells them both to hug daddy, and steps out of the blast radius.
  3. Tell Chin that Byron has his daughter captive and let him loose. I get the feeling that she’s keeping Chin around as a trump card if Byron gets out of control again, anyway. We have a repeat of the earlier scenario, only with more localized explosions.

author: Bill G.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6044924

I can’t question any of that, except the idea that Rusty needs any additional motivation to assassinate Hecate.

author: *** Dave H.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6044933

*** Dave H. said:

I can’t question any of that, except the idea that Rusty needs any additional motivation to assassinate Hecate.

He hasn’t done it so far. If she has established some kind of settlement and protects it, that stability makes her a necessary evil. That changes if she takes hostages or otherwise makes a move. Chin’s attitude and ability is an unknown there, but he went to her, not vice versa, as I heard it described.

author: Bill G.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

*** Dave H. said:

On the presumption that this constitutes an issue, we should have an end-of-session thang.

Unless the Infodump that Doyce promised radically changes things, Jason “grows into his image of himself,” having confronted his father. (Danger +1, Savior -1)

Absolutely counts as an issue, and the same thing is true for Charlotte.

Side note: At SOME point in there, I really really meant to have Jason Take a Powerful Blow, but in the drive to get at least SOME of the reveals out inside our window, I just… forgot.

Maybe it all hits him later that night? I dunno.

author: Doyce T.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

Somewhere in the discussion with Dad, Jason needs to mention, “Oh, by the way, I’ve had to give up a lot to get to you here. Like a piece of my mind, because these nanobots aren’t working properly and are slowly robbing my of my memory and cognitive-body connection, even beyond your design parameters to f-screw with my memories.” (He won’t mention Li’lycia yet, because he’s still not clear what’s going on there, and/or is in denial about it.)

Byron will be aghast - moreso when it occurs to him that the buffer overflow error might in fact be caused by the ‘airbrush out these particular memories’ hack he basically dropped in at the last minute.

[ByronPrime reminds me more than a little of Harrison Wells of Earth2, from the Flash.]

He… does not have the resources here to even attempt a fix. At all.

“It’s a very good sign that some of those memories have come back, because it means the code is eroding, or you or the bots are figuring out how to circumvent it - like someone learning how to walk by using different parts of the brain to control motor functions, when that portion of the brain is damaged.” He glances at you, then clears his throat. “It might mostly erode over time, but that’s cold comfort if it takes too long… You need some way of overwhelming the thing all at once - some sort of mnemonic bolus would burn it out, but for that you’d need to somehow merge in original memories of those missing times, and some means of doing…” he waves his hands in the air, as if trying to snag the word he needs, “… memetic … programming. Which doesn’t even exist, as I just made the term up, so…”

(Cell door slams open) “You. Your dad is alive. He’s here on this world, but can’t return to our Earth without destroying it. He’s not working to fix this planet, but is instead working remotely with Hecate, who’s the worst person on our planet ever. Get over it, stop smirking, I’m getting you out of here.”

We’ll play this out, for sure, and the speech may be slightly different once I get through the info dump.

Speaking of the Infodump

  • No no, not your Hecate, this world’s Hecate. (Though there’s some indication the two are in communication, some how… or were in the past - this Hecate knows things about us…)

I’m fascinated by the destruction of the world coming from one little conversation never having happened.

  • Thanks. I was pretty happy with that.
  • Not the destruction of the world. This world/reality is/was pretty well and truly screwed already - the Chin/Quill war only destroyed the Atlantic coast, Manila, Hawaii, and most of South Asia.
  • The war killed - almost incidentally - the (few) meta-powered individuals this world had. Hecate was one of the only that survived, and she did not, by all accounts, do so unscathed.

**Sepiaverse
**

  • “Sepiaverse? Fine… works as well as anything.”
  • This world - reality - is, for lack of better terminology, dying. Has been, for a very long time.
  • If you want to get into particulars, this dimension has been leached of Possibility.
    • If you look at an open field in our home world, you can imagine hundreds of things - thousands - that can be done with it. Build a house. Build a store. Build a soccer field. Leave it alone. Make it a refuge. Plant a forest. Whatever. Truly, whatever you can imagine, those are options on the table.
    • In the Sepiaverse, those potentials are infinitely fewer, and the options are, at best, poor. In a probabilities sense, the world is played out.
    • It is not that way around D.C., because when Byron and Chin and Rusty were pulled here, so was their captured Keynome, and that thing has given them both the means to ward off Hecate (who seems very intent on enforcing a “no Byron Quills” rule for her world), and actually give this part of the world a chance. (Well, technically, chanc_es_. Potential.) They’ve been doing what they can with that.
    • [GM partly tongue-in-cheek comment he can’t quite resist.] “Hopefully, the loss of that potential energy and the Keynome has not caused any significant damage to positive potential in your Washington - one would think the potentials stored in the rest of the world would balance things out. How’s it going there, in the last few years?”
    • In a way, it’s a small, quite pared-down version of what was intended by the Family - take all the potential in an ‘energized’ reality, collapse that into their almost-dead reality, so that the resultant single version possesses some of that stolen potential (some of it - a huge amount would have just been lost). This would have destroyed the Prime or… collapsed it into the other? Something like that.
    • The end result would have been… far less than the prime, but far more than secondary. Probably hopelessly mundane, but still quite sound.
    • “It’s a terrible idea, unless you really, truly have no better options. But that is the very definition of this world: No better options.”

Chin

  • Chin was fine while we were just trying to survive, but once it became clear Byron was ‘just establishing yet another new world order in his image’ - what he calls it when survivors and refugees flock to the one point of light in a sea of misery - then he reverted to form.
  • Tried to steal the Keynome. Twice.
  • They found out he’d allied with Hecate when the two of them and some other forces lured them down to the ruins of Mercury Bay about a month ago. Chin and Hecate planned to capture them in the Block (Kill Devil Prison, on your world), but they managed to escape.
  • As they got away, Byron picked up a strange energy signature, and traced it to a Mask (Mercury, ironically), standing in the ruins of Mercury Bay. It was the first indication they’d had that anyone from your world had had any success in crossing the dimensional barrier. They couldn’t decide if that was good or bad news, at the time.

In any case, Chin is probably still working with Hecate, who is … very pointedly *not* ruling the locale surrounding the other Keynome that was pulled into this world. (It turns out Icelanders don’t like being ruled by a sorceress from another dimension.) Chin may dream he can weld that chaotic situation into some kind of anarchist communal utopia? Byron shrugs at that - he’s never seen a solvable equation for Chin’s political theories.)

Dread Queen

  • Byron and Rusty know next to nothing about Vyortovia - aside from whatever the locals knew. They never actually dealt with them or faced them directly, since they swapped worlds at the same time.
  • If people don’t explode when they touch Vyortovians, that’s… indicative… of… something.
  • It’s possible Sepia!Hecate is coordinating in some way with the Dread Queen. It seems obvious the Vyortovians are still looking for ways to collapse the dimensional barrier and complete the … tesseract of worlds.
  • Chin originally fought the Family’s plan two years ago, but the longer he’s in this world, the more his options dwindle, literally. He may have come to believe the only way to break away from the governments he despises is via the total chaos resulting of two collapsed dimensional probability clouds.

Okay… that’s what I can think of right now, as well as stuff Byron would have said during this. If there are questions, I’m sure they will remind me of other things.

author: Doyce T.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

Bill G. said:

*** Dave H. said:

I can’t question any of that, except the idea that Rusty needs any additional motivation to assassinate Hecate.

He hasn’t done it so far. If she has established some kind of settlement and protects it, that stability makes her a necessary evil. That changes if she takes hostages or otherwise makes a move. Chin’s attitude and ability is an unknown there, but he went to her, not vice versa, as I heard it described.

Well, that gets back to which Hecate we’re talking about (I certainly lept to his cooperating with Prime!Hecate, but that’s by no means clear in retrospect).

But, yes, Rusty has held off on such an action so far. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s suggested it before, even if half in jest.

UPDATE: So, yes, it’s Sepia!Hecate we’re talking about here, even if they are perhaps in collaboration.

author: *** Dave H.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

[ByronPrime reminds me more than a little of Harrison Wells of Earth2, from the Flash.]

As long as we don’t end up with a Council of Quills …

(Flash on five Byrons shouting “Language, young man,” and a sixth, with long hair and bell bottoms muttering, “Yeah, that language was pretty shitty.”)

Earth2!Wells does have that weariness about him that fits with how you’ve described Byron!Prime. It’s just, well, I like Earth2!Wells (actually, I like all the Wells, even Thawne!Wells, but that’s another story).

It actually sounds (without having read the infodump, and very limited exposure) that life in the Sepiaverse has perhaps grounded Byron a bit. Fewer super-science adventure distractions, more opportunities to have the real world needs rubbed in his face. Also, knowing that is Sepiaversion Byron was part of the destruction of this world has to have been a Powerful Blow to Take (maybe multiple times), driving down his Freak and Superior and pegging up his Mundane and Savior. I doubt Jason will be in the Sepiaverse to appreciate that; he’s still got a serious cold mad-on finally seeing him again, but it will likely lead to some thinking later on.

author: *** Dave H.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

“It might mostly erode over time, but that’s cold comfort if it takes too long… You need some way of overwhelming the thing all at once - some sort of mnemonic bolus would burn it out, but for that you’d need to somehow merge in original memories of those missing times, and some means of doing…” he waves his hands in the air, as if trying to snag the word he needs, “… memetic … programming. Which doesn’t even exist, as I just made the term up, so…”

Yes, a shame that such a thing doesn’t even exist.

author: *** Dave H.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

If you want to get into particulars, this dimension has been leached of Possibility.

So the Keynomes are embodiments of possibility, the cosmic collection of memes. If the Vyortovian mages of this world (just to pick a party) overused those tools in some fashion – domination, defense, whatever – digging grooves into the cosmic record – then “possibility” gets exhausted, or, rather, ground into a single path, leading to one of the spiffiest fictional interdimensional “differences” I’ve run across.

author: *** Dave H.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

*** Dave H. said:

“It might mostly erode over time, but that’s cold comfort if it takes too long… You need some way of overwhelming the thing all at once - some sort of mnemonic bolus would burn it out, but for that you’d need to somehow merge in original memories of those missing times, and some means of doing…” he waves his hands in the air, as if trying to snag the word he needs, “… memetic … programming. Which doesn’t even exist, as I just made the term up, so…”

Yes, a shame that such a thing doesn’t even exist.

Now if only you knew someone who had memories of all those missing moments with Alycia, and a way to merge memories.

author: Doyce T.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

Chin was fine while we were just trying to survive, but once it became clear Byron was ‘just establishing yet another new world order in his image’ - what he calls it when survivors and refugees flock to the one point of light in a sea of misery - then he reverted to form.

Yes, I can imagine, too, how that conversation sounds from Chin’s perspective. Even a “kinder, gentler, more humanitarian” Byron Quill would doubtless impose “rational” limits on personal freedom “for the greater good,” and while probably not reveling in it, hasn’t seen fit to quash the cult of personality about himself, and probably (again, logically using all tools in the kid) exploits it to get necessary things done, back by an army trained and led by his close associate.

author: *** Dave H.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6046165

Doyce T. said:

*** Dave H. said:

“It might mostly erode over time, but that’s cold comfort if it takes too long… You need some way of overwhelming the thing all at once - some sort of mnemonic bolus would burn it out, but for that you’d need to somehow merge in original memories of those missing times, and some means of doing…” he waves his hands in the air, as if trying to snag the word he needs, “… memetic … programming. Which doesn’t even exist, as I just made the term up, so…”

Yes, a shame that such a thing doesn’t even exist.

Now if you knew someone who had memories of all those missing moments with Alycia, and a way to merge memories.

You mean, like Alycia Chin down in the dungeon and someone who’s done extensive research into zipper merges? Yeah, shame about that, too.

(Flashing on the similar process in Young Justice episode “Bereft” …)

That opens up a whole other set of questions. A zipper merge between Pneuma and Numina was pretty straightforward at the time. This is finding bits of her memory to match with his deleted memories, How much will Jason trust a process that pastes sections of Alycia’s memory into his own. Even if that’s the only stuff brought over, can facts be separated from emotions? How will that color his attitudes about things? Is the damage in Jason’s mind that distinctly identifiable? Let alone what anyone else’s reaction to this might be.

The plot thickens …

author: *** Dave H.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

Chin originally fought the Family’s plan two years ago, but the longer he’s in this world, the more his options dwindle, literally. He may have come to believe the only way to break away from the governments he despises is via the total chaos resulting of two collapsed dimensional probability clouds.

That’s a fascinating thought, in terms of the Keynome’s effects (or It’s lack and the effects of that) on him.

Can Alycia convince him otherwise. Would she want to? How much does she know of the situation here, and given her apparent satisfaction in being captured (that smirk!), what’s her plan?

author: *** Dave H.
url: Community Forums: MASKS #24 - INTO THE SEPIAVERSE! [Recap] | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop

In fact, this is the type of merge we’ve seen done twice in this game, the Victory Merge. Rossum did something like this to introduce data into Pneuma’s mind, and then Leo reversed it by using Numina as a source of truth for the gap.

I’ll let Summer explain the theory and predict the outcome:

“Memories are chains of associations, moments in time strung together and cemented by how we perceived them. Human memory is amazingly subjective like that. For example, ask Leo about the time he beat the Afterburner arcade game on 3 quarters. He’ll tell you about how exciting it was, how he was bored that day, he’d just bought a bag of Doritos and didn’t have anything else to do. He’ll recall furiously pulling and pushing on the joystick to dodge enemy rocket fire, how he leaned his whole body into evading, how he knows it didn’t do anything but still felt he had to at the time, how he was astonished when his jet finally landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier and the game was over.”

“Leo didn’t beat Afterburner. Another kid did, and Leo watched it happen. I remember it that way, but he doesn’t, even though we weren’t distinct when the memory was formed. Leo was so engrossed in the action, so interested in the game itself, that he internalized the experience of play and made it his own. But my mind is not Leo. When the Heart Factory made me, it took those pearls of memory and shook them all out, like making your bed and snapping the covers over it, then folding out the wrinkles. The raw material of memory is still there - Afterburner, 3 quarters, Doritos - but my consciousness threads through that memory at a different angle.”

“Post-merge, Jason’s mind would interpret the memories fresh. If those memories depend on other memories to be consistent and comprehensible, he’ll get those - and if he didn’t have them before, he’ll fit them into his life narrative somehow. The brain does that, in self-defense: edits memories, incorporates them, rationalizes them. To save itself, he will do something with them that’s meaningful. And even Leo was never able to predict just how it would turn out. Like Otto and Pneuma, he knew only that a new person would be the result. He never knew exactly who it would be.”

“But. The Summer that came to this world, and the Summer that will leave, won’t be precisely the same person. New memories, new attitudes. Even a few very uh, intense and stressful weeks, separates Summer from Aria. We’re always becoming new people, because we’re always gaining new memories. It falls to our friends to keep us safe and on course when that happens.”

author: Bill G.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6046316

Still seems a bit … troubling to replace his (edited) memories of events with Alyicia with internalized versions of Alycia’s memories of them. His brain will process them, but memory is also subjective, emotional links of symbols of particular things, enough of those symbols to usually keep the memory distinct (but not always, which is why we sometimes merge details of different events).* Merging Alycia’s symbology references with Jason’s in a way that’s analogous is doable, but might have interesting results (“Why does the Monkey with the Hat remind me now of burritos?”), and the idea that it’s Alycia’s 1st person perspective of not just events with Jason but of Jason himself (and of Alycia herself) is … complicated. The brain will do a lot of the work, but the outcome will not be the same as the originals, which in turn might color things in interesting ways.

Which doesn’t say Jason won’t do it, it just won’t be as simple as the YJ episode made it out to be, and he’ll be more worried about it than maybe he should.

------

* I can remember driving in the UK. Did it a lot on a couple of vacations there. But when I do, unless I really concentrate on it, my memories (including visual) are of driving on the right-hand side of the road. Which, I hasten to point out, I didn’t (except, briefly, on a couple of fortunately rural occasions), but the symbolic shorthand UK and driving and vacation tend to drift to the much more common symbol for driving that is on the right side of the road, because the brain is lazy. The memories also sometimes criss-cross as to which seat in the car I was driving from. It’s amusingly weird, but points out to me how goofy memory is and how it’s not like a tape recording that can be edited. Except in cases where super-scientists can (and have) done it.

author: *** Dave H.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6046643

Summer would not predict that Jason would remember things from Alycia’s perspective - she has a whole lifetime of synthetic memories from Leo, where she’s watching him or near him, and that’s the result of her mind rationalizing those experiences. And yeah, it would not be a 1:1 replacement for his old memories, and she is of the opinion that it’s almost better if it’s not. “You lost your memory. You got replacements. They are not the old memories. But that loss and recollection is also part of your life history.” She is hopefully one of the best people to shepherd Jason through this process, should he choose to engage in it.

author: Bill G.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6046672